A $1.5 million research project hopes to prove the value of a new integrated system being developed for irrigation management.
Farming Smarter is partnering with Ensemble Scientific, an agricultural technology start-up company and LiteFarm, an open-sourced farm management platform, on the three-year project.
According to Lewis Baarda, Farming Smarter’s Field Tested Manager, the project will evaluate an irrigation decision support system being developed by the project partners.
“There is a real opportunity to be more efficient in the way that we irrigate,” he explains. “I think farmers will really appreciate having a sensible, usable tool that's going to help them do a better job irrigating.”
He says the system brings multiple technologies together to improve irrigation management. The system includes sensors in the field to monitor soil moisture in real time and hyper-local forecasts to predict how local weather will affect soil conditions. This is combined with information from the Alberta Irrigation Management Model (A.I.M.M.) which provides detailed data on water usage for common crops in Alberta as they progress through their growing cycle.
Baarda says this software will combine all the provided information to deliver live irrigation recommendations to farmers and improve management of their precious water resources.
“We’re bringing all the pieces together so we can give farmers the information they need to put out the right amount of water, at the right place, at the right time,” he states.
Currently, most producers manage their irrigation by using hand tests or other manual techniques usually conducted on a weekly basis. Baarda says these testing methods can be quite accurate though they don’t consider changes in soils conditions between tests.
Based on their monitoring, farmers then decide when to irrigate based on weather forecasts and crop information.
“Irrigation management is hard work. You have to stay on top of everything that's happening and make some difficult decisions,” says Baarda, who believes the system Farming Smarter is testing has the potential to make irrigation management easier and more accurate.
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| The soil moisture sensor will be placed in the earth at two different depths, where data will be fed into the solar powered hardware before being sent to the farmer. |
Another benefit says Baarda is the potential to use less water which is an important consideration for irrigators who are dealing with a reduced water allocation.
“When you have restraints on water usage you have to be pretty careful with how you use that resource, so having tools that can give you critical information is going to help you make better decisions,” he says.
This research project builds on a previous study that provided proof of the concept. Baarda says this new study will fine-tune the system, ensure it delivers the expected results and move it closer to market availability.
It will also add one more critical component, allowing the system to communicate directly with the control systems for common pivot irrigation systems. This brings complete control of irrigation management to the fingertips of farmers.
Direct communication with the pivots creates the potential for autonomous and semi-autonomous system operation. However, Baarda says farmers will ultimately decide how they utilize it based on their own personal preference.
Farming Smarter’s role in the project will be to install the soil sensors, conduct additional soil testing, monitor system operation and communicate with local farmers involved in field trials. Ensemble Scientific will provide the soil sensors which are manufactured in Edmonton, while LiteFarm will be responsible for the management software.
The system will be tested on a field scale with both Variable Rate Irrigation (VRI) and Uniform Rate Irrigation (URI) operations. Input from farmers involved in the project will be important as well as the advice of experts including Michele Konschuh from the University of Lethbridge who is involved as a consultant.
The project is being funded in part by a $829,825 grant from Results Driven Agriculture Research (RDAR) through the Agriculture Funding Consortium. It will be matched by funding and in-kind contributions by project partners, including Farming Smarter for a total project cost of $1,577,825.
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| The Ensemble Scientific-constructed hardware that could be coming to a field near you! |
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