Weather Resilience Through Precision Irrigation

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

Improving water efficiency is a challenge on the farm, especially when you throw in dramatic temperature swings, droughts, unpredictable weather and water needs that can change across fields. Farmers need immediate access to accurate data, says Reinke’s Rick Hanshew, and the ability to quickly and confidently act on data remotely.

Hanshew… “ What we're able to do now is to give them more data and information to make better decisions on when they may or may not need to irrigate. We can do that with soil moisture monitoring. We can do that with a real ET sensor that's telling you exactly how much water the crops are using at any certain time. And this allows the growers to make that decision. And what we're finding is a lot of times by using like soil moisture monitoring, growers are actually over watering and maybe they don't need to water for another day or two. Or by being able to get weather information, they may find out that it's gonna rain in another day or two and if they held off, mother Nature would help them.”

Hanshew says that proper use of precision irrigation technology can help, to an extent, with drought mitigation and overall weather resilience.