Smart controllers, IoT sensors and automated irrigation technology
A farmer I know in Kenya runs 2 acres of tomatoes on drip. Every morning at 6 AM, he walks out to the valve manifold and turns a handle. Every evening at 5 PM, same thing. He’s done this for…
The quiet underground bet that’s reshuffling how we irrigate Water use efficiency across irrigation methods — SDI routinely achieves 90-95% efficiency vs. 45-65% for surface methods. In 2018, a Kansas corn farmer named Dwane Roth did something that made his…
A farmer in central California told me last year that he spent $4,200 on soil moisture sensors for his almond orchard and saved $11,000 in water costs within the first season. That’s a return most investments can’t touch. But I’ve…
Agriculture drinks 70% of the world’s freshwater while 1.8 billion people face absolute water scarcity. Subsurface drip irrigation promises to stretch every drop further — but the math isn’t as simple as the sales pitch. How much water are we…
Here’s a number that should make you uncomfortable: in Kansas, 85% of all water diverted from ground and surface supplies goes to irrigation. That water sits on just 14% of the state’s cropland. In return, those irrigated acres crank out…
The invisible problem with surface drip Here’s a number that keeps me up: American farms pulled 47 percent of the nation’s total freshwater withdrawals between 2010 and 2020, according to the USDA. That’s nearly half of all the fresh water…
Buried Money: What Subsurface Drip Irrigation Actually Costs and Saves A corn farmer in western Kansas pulling from the Ogallala Aquifer puts about 48 inches of water on his field every season. The crop uses maybe 22 of them. The…
Smart Irrigation Controllers: Do They Really Save Water? Here’s What the Numbers Say I’ve been installing irrigation systems for years, and I’ll be honest: I was skeptical about smart controllers at first. Another gadget promising to solve everything. But the…
You’ve heard the pitch. Soil moisture sensors, automated valves, smartphone-controlled watering schedules. The sales reps make it sound like you plug it in and your water bill cuts in half. But when you’re running a 5-hectare vegetable farm, every dollar…
Roughly 70% of the world’s freshwater goes to agriculture. And depending on the method, up to half of that never touches a root. It evaporates. It runs off. It sinks past the root zone into groundwater that nobody pumps back…
