Suggested by 
Micki Seibel
over 3 years ago
For irrigated agriculture, there is little automation. Once a decision to irrigate a field is made, it requires labor to criss cross the farm to turn on the controls. The availability of labor (during the day) does not coincide with the optimal energy rate plan for running irrigation pumps (off-peak, usually night time hours). This also means that irrigation is happening during the warmest (or in many cases, the extremely hot) times of the day where evaporation is highest.
Water management needs automation. Shocking, but those of you who are not in agriculture, this has not happened.
The farm labor to do the work is in extreme shortage. It's also time consuming, tedious, and low skill work. Not work that people should be treated as a commodity to do.
A single irrigation pump consumes as much energy as nearly 200 residential homes. For example, ~25% of California's energy grid is dedicated to pumping water for ag irrigation. This means that energy use on farms that grow irrigated crops is extremely costly--especially when it's done during peak energy times.
The ability to automate irrigation opens up opportunities to collect and analyze data about water AND energy consumption--quantifying this energy-water nexus has the potential to find optimizations to improve both water and energy management.
Ag consumes 70-80% of the fresh water (varies depending on region in the world).
Water movement is the largest consumer of energy on the grid: as much as 25% of California's energy, for example.
The tech is now there to do this: IoT + the availability of low-cost satellite networks that provide the connectivity to the farm field (see SpaceX's acquisition of Swarm Technologies). Lack of network in rural farm fields has been a significant barrier to the practicality of anything digital in the field).
The worst drought in 1500 years in the American west is bringing a lot of media, government, academic attention to water and energy.
The energy industry is looking for solutions to optimize grid management with the faster than expected adoption of renewables. Moving large energy consuming devices to off-peak times is essential.
In North America, energy data was standardized by the Department of Energy, so it appears to be a data set that is amenable to ML/AI models as its standardized across the more the 1,200 utility companies in the US and (I believe) Canada.
War in Ukraine has made energy in the EU a front page topic. This provides wind in the sails for such a solution for EU ag.
Are you interested in addressing this Unmet Need?
Are you interested in addressing this Unmet Need?
CEO/Co-Founder @ Rhiz
Lots of info here - https://intellias.com/smart-irrigation-in-agriculture/
And I agree w/r to sensors, lots of water-saving can be done by tying soil moisture/weather forecasting into residential existing systems. I'm sure we've all seen sprinkler systems running in a downpour and thought it wasteful. Many of those systems are already automated so there'd be less friction in adding sensors than a 0-1 farm. Again, not the same scale, but it could be a start.
And for what it's worth, my uncle farms thousands of acres across multiple counties at 82 yrs old with 2 helpers. I can assure you he's not running around in the morning turning on pumps, so perhaps the biggest issue is affordability for smaller farmers and making the sensor-system connection more ubiquitous for residential?
Founder @ Cannected
Micki, one could combine automation for the irrigation with demand respond for energy usage = save water & save on energy cost
CEO | Founder | Managing Partner @ Platform Venture Studio
Do you think a software only solution has value here or does a startup have to solve the physical/hardware problems too?