Closing The Irrigation Gap
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Irrigation can be tricky. Obviously, job number one is to make sure that water is not the limiting factor to crop development, but how do you know that your system is performing as planned? That’s the question that Devon Wright and his team at Lumo think they have an answer to, and he’s proving it with winegrape growers in Northern California.
Wright… “ And we usually actually run the system for a couple weeks or whatever off just, we just let them do their plan. We just track the data. We say, you irrigate the way you would've irrigated. Have a guy go out with an ATV, manually open it for nine hours, come back and we'll show you what your system was doing versus your plan. And that's usually off by, you know, significant double digit percentages. You know, it's not uncommon for it to be more than 10%, 20%. We often see irrigations that are outside of the plan by 50, 60%.”
Wright says there are a lot of reasons for this, but with this data from Lumo, vineyard managers are able to start making adjustments.
Wright… “ Then we have all these tools where we then we start to run the Lumo program used the scheduling, the volume-based irrigation the AI system for leak detection and, you know, solving problems and faults in the field. Our pump automation, you know, integrating all that. Then we start to close that gap, close that gap, close that gap. And that's when they're like, oh, this is awesome.”
Learn more about this precision irrigation technology at lumo.ag.
