Most farmers I talk to don’t need to be sold on automation. They’ve seen the controller boxes at the trade show. They’ve watched their neighbor check soil moisture from a phone. They get it. What they actually need is someone…
A soil moisture sensor telling you the field is at 35% when it’s actually at 15%. A flow meter reporting 12 GPM through a zone you know pulls 8. A pressure transducer reading 45 PSI at the head of a…
A soil moisture sensor sitting in the ground is about as useful as a thermometer you never look at. The whole point of buying sensors and hooking them up to a controller is that the system makes decisions for you.…
Most farmers I talk to already have drip irrigation in the ground. The tape is laid, the laterals are connected, the filter station is plumbed in. They’re not starting from scratch. What they don’t have is automation. Somebody still has…
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…
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…
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…
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…
