Smart controllers, IoT sensors and automated irrigation technology
Most farmers who try soil moisture monitoring start the same way: buy one or two sensors, stick them in the ground, check the readings for a couple weeks, then forget about them. I’ve seen this pattern enough times to know…
Most farmers keep irrigation records the way they’ve done it for decades: glance at a pressure gauge in the morning, make a mental note about which zone ran yesterday, and maybe scribble something in a notebook that hasn’t been opened…
Most irrigation pumps run the same way they did in 1980: on or off. The motor spins at full speed, a pressure switch clicks it off when the tank fills, and the cycle repeats a hundred times a day. It…
Most farms water every acre the same way. Same rate, same schedule, same everything. Walk across a 40-hectare field and you’ll see why that’s a problem. The low spot in the northwest corner holds water like a sponge. The sandy…
Most farmers I talk to irrigate on gut feeling. They walk the field, squeeze a handful of soil, look at the sky, and decide. It works until it doesn’t. A hot week you didn’t catch, a rain that came after…
If you’re running drip irrigation on more than a couple acres, walking out to turn valves by hand gets old fast. By mid-July, when the heat is baking and you’ve got five zones to cycle through twice a day, the…
Here’s something that bugs me every time I walk past a farm at 6 a.m. and hear sprinklers running: most of those systems are running blind. Timers. Same duration, same interval, every day, regardless of whether it rained three hours…
You can drop $2,000 on a set of research-grade soil moisture sensors and still get readings that steer you wrong. A vegetable grower in central California installed six sensors across a 20-acre tomato field, followed the data religiously, and ended…
I walked through a greenhouse in Almería, Spain last year where the grower was still doing everything by hand. He’d walk the rows twice a day with a thermometer, squint at the plants, decide if they looked thirsty, and twist…
A farmer I work with in Kenya waters his two-acre vegetable plot with a battery-powered manual timer he bought for $18 three years ago. It has one knob and two buttons. He sets it once at the start of the…
