Barriers to Adopting Irrigaiton Automation

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

The prospect of irrigation automation might seem like a no-brainer to some. Instead of sending an employee out to turn valves off and on, just have the system handle that automatically. But Arthur Chen of Verdi said when he started speaking to growers about this technology. He noticed some roadblocks preventing this it from being adopted.

Chen… “They know that they can save labor, they can save water. They can also have the opportunity to improve yields as well. And these systems have been around for, you know, 20 years. And so the question that we asked was, well, why aren't you adopting? And that's really where we found that, hey, there's actually a lot of friction in the face of adoption for these technologies. Affordability being a major problem. A lot of these systems are cost prohibitive to put in the field. They also tend to be new infrastructure rollouts that growers, farmers need to be able to spend a lot of time putting into the field. And lastly, you know, operating these systems isn't trivial either. Oftentimes they're very technical systems built for, say, a farm manager to use. But at the end of the day, it's your workers, it's your irrigators who have to run these systems and, you know, check that they're working properly. And so there's a bit of a mismatch right now between, you know, what these systems can do and you know how growers wanna actually use them.”

Chen co-founded Verdi to make irrigation automation easier and more affordable for growers.