Future of Precision Irrigation
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Agricultural technology has become almost futuristic in a lot of ways from robotics to lasers to precision applications. But there are some farm tasks that are still commonly done manually, which requires a lot of extra labor. For this reason, Netafim’s Mike Hemman still sees a lot of opportunity in precision irrigation applications. He reflects on a recent visit to a farmer customer.
Hemman… “ Think about what's changed in all of agriculture. To watch a machine that looks like Star Wars, using a laser to zap weeds is incredible. Then we went out and we looked at another machine that was a cultivator, that had an electric eye on it that would allow it to sense the difference between a weed and a plant. Fantastic. I asked the farmer, how do you control your irrigation? He says, I have a guy that drives out in a pickup truck and turns the valve on manually. Irrigation is not quite where everything else in precision agriculture is at this point right now. But I think we're getting a lot more interest in automating irrigation because of what I said earlier, water scarcity and labor. So I think we are really, really on the front end of this, and there's a tremendous amount of opportunity for farmers to make better irrigation decisions.”
Netafim continues to grow their digital farming solution, GrowSphere to provide an integrated approach to precision irrigation.
