Smart controllers, IoT sensors and automated irrigation technology
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…
Soil moisture sensors aren’t new. Farmers have been sticking tensiometers in the ground for decades. What’s changed in the last few years is that you can now network a dozen sensors across a 50-hectare farm, check every reading from your…
