Suggested by 
Micki Seibel
over 1 year 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?
Board Member | Advisor | VP Digital @ Unfold Bio
My guess is that your uncle is farming either where irrigation is not used or may be farming commodity grain crops like alfalfa, corn, soy, wheat where pivot irrigation systems are used (and are less labor intensive because of the nature of the crops on which they can be used).
Agriculture uses 75-80% of the fresh water. You can not mitigate climate change and address water efficiency without addressing ag. If you can address ag, the water efficiency at residential won't matter. And, US farms compared to, say Israel or The Netherlands, use A LOT more water to grow the same crops.
If you want to address residential irrigation, you are welcome to post that unmet need. This one here should be to address the ag problem.
In ag, irrigation is a wholly different problem than residential watering. In ag, water is mixed with other nutrients before being pumped into the fields. Irrigation is not a matter of setting a timer for it to happen on a certain day of week. The decision to irrigate or not is a complex one based on what the farmer can measure and observe about the need for water and nutrients on the plants (weather, soil moisture, time of season, labor availability, cost of nutrients, etc.). Additionally, an estimated 50% of our ag land exist in areas that do not have internet connectivity (that is, the fields themselves lack internet...even if the nearby rural town has internet and cell). An additional challenge to this unmet need.
CEO/Co-Founder @ Rhiz
Thanks for this. Yep, soy fields, indeed. You didn't specify commodity v. DTC veg so my apologies. And my point on residential lawn was for adoption and market validation, and that the same tech could be used potentially, not a per se different unmet need. Commodity crops, for what it's worth, make up nearly 60% of farm land use whereas DTC fruit/veg is under 5%.
And I've worked in DTC veg, CSAs, etc (no-till with drip) and it is manual but morning waterings may not be the only thing preventing them from scaling.
Framing this around IoT and lack of internet connectivity may not be helping, as small-scale farmers often have to be on-site anyway be it harvests, pest reduction (if no-spray), weeding, etc.
And unfortunately the Netherlands may not be the best example as their farm lands (3000+ of them) are being seized for fertilizer concerns.
Either way, best of luck. It's certainly a worthwhile endeavor!
Founder @ Cannected
Micki, one could combine automation for the irrigation with demand respond for energy usage = save water & save on energy cost
Board Member | Advisor | VP Digital @ Unfold Bio
Absolutely! The two are intimately tied. What I've seen too is that the growers struggle to really understand how much it costs them to irrigate because they can not easily tie the energy consumption data to the water.
In California the average farmer receives upwards of 25 different bills in month from PG&E because their multiple plots of land are metered separately. Putting that data together and knowing which pump irrigated which amount of water is a fairly straightforward problem for a software engineer but not at all an easy analysis for the grower.
California spends about 25% of its energy grid on the movement of water around the state (and 75% of that water is for ag). Making ag more efficient with water makes us more efficient with the use of electricity too. 1 ag pump = ~200 residential homes in its electricity use.
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?
Board Member | Advisor | VP Digital @ Unfold Bio
I do think they have to control the hardware— automated irrigation valves energy submeter sensors and water flow sensors specifically.
you need to control the hardware in order to have clean consistent normalized data collection. That will be a necessary foundation for an insights or predictive software platform.
however there are ag tech start ups that are providing these Point product solutions. You can partner for it to start. Down the road…acquire, aqui-hire the best in class.