Reducing the Cost of Irrigation Automation

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

Irrigation automation has the promise of saving farmers money in labor costs while simultaneously helping them become more efficient with their water. At least that’s the theory. In practice, the systems can be expensive and complicated. To solve for this, Arthur Chen co-founded Verdi to make irrigation automation easier and more affordable.

Chen… “ So we've developed a patented wireless smart valve that basically retrofits to your existing irrigation equipment. So if you have an existing valve on the farm, for example, we can turn that into a smart valve. If you have a pump, we make it a smart pump. And likewise, for your sensors, and even for individual drip lines that you have in the field as well. Those are all things that we can allow you to automate as well as to monitor remotely. And so because we do this retrofit and because we've developed patented technology around this, we've been able to reduce the cost of irrigation automation by about 80%. We have growers now able to just put this as a lightweight upgrade to their existing equipment without having to spend a lot of time and money replacing these in a field. We also have developed features to really help growers mitigate some of the pain points that they've experienced.”

Chen said one of those features allows growers to verify irrigations and check for problems remotely so they don’t have to send employees out as often to check on the system.