The growth of agricultural technology and the rise of custom-made solutions comes at a critical time when producers face increasing demands for specialized tools tailored to their unique needs.
Here’s Mike Hemman, President of Netafim North America, the precision agriculture arm of Orbia Advance Corporation, joining us to walk through a new option for producers. One being Netafim’s GrowSphere™, a digital farming platform designed to enhance irrigation and fertigation management.
“So the new product that we’re launching is an irrigation controller that was able to control irrigation, but it’s also able to monitor the irrigation and then take the information and make decisions in the cloud to provide essentially autonomous irrigation and fertilizer delivery.”
“There’s control and drip irrigation in a lot of different places. We can run the irrigation system from the field, we can run it remotely off of your phone. So you can be on the other side of the world if you need to be to turn it on and off. But then you couple that with site specific information that’s going to come to you from could be a soil moisture sensor, could be a weather station, you take that site specific information, we can take that and analyze that in the cloud and we can overlay other pieces of information in that, such as maybe a crowdsourced weather model. It could be information about the electricity grid, what the cost of electricity is at a certain time, then that will help you to figure out how to maximize your irrigation scheduling. The other part that helps there as well is we work back through our agronomy team and we’ve developed crop models. So what it does is takes all that information, overlays it in the cloud and then you get a recommendation for irrigation duration and amount by day, by hour. You can tweak that based…on the electrical grid…The other thing you might want to overlay on that is and come up with an overall irrigation schedule that’s specific to the crop, the location and the timing of that crop and its life cycle.”
“You can impact yield, of course, you can impact quality. So you’re essentially getting better yield, higher quality with less water. There’s a sustainability function on this as well. It’s obvious in areas where there’s water scarcity. But think about soil health as well. Think about fertilizer efficiency. Nobody wants to spend more money than they need to on fertilizer. So you’ve got that equation from the cost standpoint. But the other thing you’ve got, as well as nitrates and groundwater, if you’re irrigating efficiently and you’re delivering the right amount of water to the soil and to the plant, it’s taken up in the roots, you’re not going to have that nitrate leaching. The other thing that you can do here, of course, is simplify the farm. So you’ve got remote control monitoring, you’ve got remote decision making. This allows you to reduce your labor cost. And I think farmers will farm differently in the future because of this. In general, I think irrigation needs a little bit more credit in the precision ag side of agriculture.”
For more information about GrowSphere and how it can support farmers, visit NetafimUSA.com.
