Making the Connection
Sustainability efforts — particularly dealing with water — are an everyday reality for growers in the U.S. and around the world. Grounding those efforts, however, is seldom a simple task. Technology is often presented as the solution, but adopting and integrating new technology tools into existing systems can present all-new challenges.
How is agriculture responding and bringing sustainability efforts around water and technology together in productive ways?
“We’re all facing those needs to reduce inputs, from water and energy to nutrients and labor — while at the same time, continuing to increase crop productivity, yield, and quality, and feed the world,” says Natasha Rankin, CEO of the Irrigation Association.
Technology providers are working hard to understand these issues and introduce new solutions, she says. “I think companies in the irrigation space, especially the manufacturers, really have done quite a lot to help growers and producers better manage their risk and increase their productivity, no matter what type of climate or what type of challenges they are facing.”
Those efforts are critical, as water availability issues become more acute.
“The Ogallala Aquifer took 50 million years to fill up, and in about a century we've largely depleted it on a relative basis. Everyone is becoming more aware we can't just pour water on and hope that there will be a tomorrow there,” says Bruce Moeller, CEO of AquaSpy.
Whether it’s gathering data or implementing new processes, tech advances are helping growers make changes in the way they manage water resources, Moeller says. “Growers now have drones flying over a field and seeing if the colors reflect that it's wet or dryer in certain spots. They have pivots that are doing precision ag in specific polygons instead of just sweeping the pivot around all over the place. There are evapotranspiration techniques, so the grower can see how much of the water they're spraying is evaporating before reaching the crop.”
In-ground truthing sensors that allow the grower to tell how much water is in the soil at various depths are also a useful tool. “The soil has natural nutrients, but the roots can't just go get that without water being the carrier. Growers are realizing that and they're trying to match that supply and demand in order to get the best yield,” Moeller says.
Understanding what’s really happening in the soil at any given time and reacting to that is the future of sustainable water management, Moeller says.
“There's a lot of data being generated now to devise the right formula to help growers decide where and how much they should water. That's a prescriptive thing. But I would posit that with climate change coming at the pace it is, people are dealing with different dynamics now. Those prescriptions are not specific to a particular field, and there's no year or season that's the same as the last one. Everything is changing so rapidly. I think using history as a guide is ever more fraught and will only get worse as time goes on. You're going to have to take data directly from the fields, because that field today is going to be a different field next season or next year.”
Decisions on sustainable water use may involve reducing the amount of water applied to a crop, but then again, they might not.
“I see the industry getting better and better at producing crops using the optimum amount of water,” says John Rowley, Rotator Product Manager, Nelson Irrigation. “When there's a water shortage, we tend to see less acres grown, not less water use per acre, necessarily. Growers are trying to maximize [results] on the optimum amount of water. They don’t want to use too much, but they also don’t want to use too little and hurt themselves financially.”
Matching the crop and growing conditions with the irrigation method can help optimize the results, Rowley says.
“In row crop irrigation, we see solid set sprinklers and drip irrigation. A good uniform, solid set sprinkler system will save water equally as much as a drip system will, depending on the needs of the crop. In tree and vine crops, there are some new technologies out there that are used primarily to grow the optimum crop, but they're certainly saving water as well,” Rowley says.
Growers have used soil-moisture monitoring technologies widely for years, and they are beneficial, he says. “But now we're seeing growers use devices that sense the transpiration of the tree crop. They put a sensor on the tree that will detect the expansion of the trunk and thereby determine the rate of transpiration for the tree. It takes a tree’s root system and makes that your soil-moisture monitoring device.”
Where soil-moisture monitoring has been previously been more of a “snapshot” technology with tools like neutron probes and manually read watermark-type measurement devices, it's now more of a real-time measurement.
“Growers are using probes that base their moisture sensing on electrical conductivity in the soil,” Rowley says. “These probes are providing real-time information, and much of that information now is moved up to the cloud, and it can be seen both historically on a real-time basis.”
Other sustainability-focused tools are becoming more common as well, according to Rowley. New technologies are available to help automate irrigation scheduling in solid set or permanent set irrigation, where valves are turned on automatically, controlled remotely from a phone or from a desktop computer. Variable-frequency drive pumping systems react to the pressure of the system and either reduce the speed of the pumping motor or increase the speed to achieve an optimum operating pressure for even distribution of the water across the field.
He also cites the use of Nelson Irrigation’s R2000WF Rotator sprinkler in conjunction with a check valve to hold water in the pipes in between each irrigation event as a good example of sustainable irrigation technology.
“Some crops in very hot growing climates have to be watered 2 or 3 times a day, so the system is turned on and off multiple times. If the pipes drain out on the ground 2 or 3 times a day, all that water is lost and put in the wrong place. The check valve has a regulator which regulates the pressure at every single sprinkler, and it holds the water in the line so it doesn't leak out in between Irrigation sets. That's a new technology that provides a very sustainable, water-efficient system for irrigating vegetable row crops,” Rowley says.
The sustainability and production benefits of adopting new irrigation technology might seem obvious. But the real-world reality of incorporating new tools and practices with such high stakes — the health of a crop and the financial stability of the business — can be daunting.
“A lot of incredible innovations have taken place over the last 20 to 25 years. What the industry is really focused on, though, is how to translate those into tools and resources that will not just encourage producers to adopt them, but to ultimately integrate them into their practices,” Rankin says.
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“For the future, I think there will be an equal focus on usability and integrating that user experience to ensure that these solutions are sustainable for and usable by the grower.”
Much of the current focus in innovative water management tools revolves around advanced technologies incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning. But just like all ag tech, the most important and sometimes difficult step is making sure the tech matches grower needs, and that they are willing and able to integrate it into their production programs.
“In order to leverage the technologies — whether it's machine learning or additional automation that is enhanced further by AI — we have to ensure there is awareness and education around that adoption. Developing the next whiz-bang thing isn't necessarily going to make it usable for the grower in the field. I think we're going to see some additional developments around using AI and other learning models for better predicting certain outcomes when it comes to water use and management based on climate or weather as an enhancement to grower decision making,” Rankin says.
Advanced tools like AI offer a lot of promise, but have their limitations as well, Moeller says.
“There's a lot of talk about maybe putting all the information together because AI can do such wonderful things. I would argue that we're a ways away from that. We need to have universal units of measure so people are talking about the same things at the same time,” he says.
“Growing is a combination of nature and nurture. If AI is going to do a good job it has to capture all the variables: growing degree days, how much evaporation is happening, the chemical combination of the seed and the fertilizer, the depth of the roots. All those things will have to be put into a database that is using the AI. One big missing ingredient, though, is growers putting results into the equation. Without yield data, all the work that went into capturing those variables is for naught. If you can't tell me if it was a good yield or a bad yield, AI can't tell me the right formula to bake that cake,” Moeller says.
"Farmers have notoriously been hesitant to share their yields. That's something that they feel is very personal. But as an industry we'll have to get to the point where people share all the data: the inputs, the nature variables, and, most importantly, the yield variables. Then you can start making sense of all those sensing inputs,” he says.
The irrigation industry is taking steps everywhere it can to encourage growers to find ways to integrate new sustainable water management tools into their arsenals, and Moeller says it is making some headway. But it definitely takes a change in mindset.
“Traditionally we have relied on studies to make prescriptive recommendations on how and when to make fertilizer or water applications. Now, I think it's going to have to shift to a real-time, dynamic basis. Instead of relying on USDA and the ag schools tell you prescriptively what you should do to get this kind of yield at that type of location in that crop, I think you have to listen to the crop itself. The crop will tell you through the sensors, ‘I like what I'm getting. I need more of this. I need less of that,’” Moeller says.
“With AquaSpy our focus is exclusively underground: what is happening at 4 inches, 8 inches, 12 inches, 16 inches, and so on, all the way down to 48 inches. Where's the active root? Is it withdrawing nutrients through the water? And is it doing so quickly or is it flattening out? The crop has a behavior, and we watch those behaviors with our algorithm so that we can tell the grower if your crop is happy right now, or if it’s not,” he says.
“It's still very early on, but every year we see higher adoption. I think the entry way for growers is one of influence. If someone you trust has used in-ground sensors, or tried drones, or tried satellites, or tried a different mixture, that has an impact on your willingness to explore these things,” Moeller says.
The Irrigation Association is taking similar steps to provide a bridge to that real-world experience and education.
“The IA is very much a connector to expertise and resources and information that help growers manage their risk, increase their productivity, and improve their stewardship of the land and water. We publish the Irrigation Today magazine, focused on an audience of growers and producers and we cover topics of concern to growers globally. We have technical experts in a number of our certification programs. They are highly trained, highly experienced, and are literally in the field, listening to and responding to the needs of the growers,” Rankin says.
“From the technology side, we have our annual Irrigation Show. We support innovators in the marketplace who are bringing new ideas to the industry, so that we can create a connection for those innovations to potential users. We want to be the advocates for the practical, useful, seamless, simple, automated solutions that help them mitigate risk in a very tumultuous, disruptive time.”
