Netafim, an international pioneer for subsurface irrigation, has a new offering in its GrowSphere operating system. As Mike Hemman, SVP North America for Netafim explains it’s one tool the company is bringing forward to further refine and improve water efficiency and yields.
For the past 50 years, Netafim has developed and improved its subsurface drip irrigation system.
“We are active in pretty much every agricultural market,” Hemann says. “I’d say the low hanging fruit has always been high value crops. There’s a clear return on investment, and generally many of those crops are grown in water scarce areas. However, we do also have a lot of installations in row crop or more broad acre crops.”
Another area he has seen grown is for fertigation. And in some applications, that has been the driving use case—even above the water component.
“It’s like an IV,” he says. “Subsurface drip irrigation gets installed in those applications because it allows the farmer to deliver the exact amount of fertilizer at the exact right time in the crop cycle to be able to achieve what that crop needs at that time. You don’t have to worry about whether you can get a tractor in the field or not.”
The agronomic advances with subsurface drip have led Netafim to invest in modeling the application. Earlier this year, they announced GrowSphere, an operating system which layers its big data approach to agronomic models tapping artificial intelligence.
“This is an all in one digital farming tool,” he says.
Beyond turning off and on irrigation pumps, from the cloud the system enables fully remote control, and if desired automated system parameters.
Hemann adds that on top of the previous years’ data fed into the agronomic models, the ongoing use of the system with its data collected will be used to further refine future insights.
“You have in-depth information from site specific information that you’ve collected on the field. Now, this runs an algorithm in the background and says, you need to irrigate this much, or for this duration, or on these days depending upon the specific phase of the crop, or it needs this much nitrogen, phosphorus—whatever it may be,” he says.
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