Smart Irrigation Collaboration Results in New Watering Technology

With 70% of all freshwater use tied to agriculture, combined with worldwide population growth pressures and the subsequent increase in food demand, sustainable water consumption has become increasingly important to horticulture growers and suppliers.

Growers spend an average of 240 hours per acre to manage and monitor their irrigation systems. This manual process leads to costly crop management, inconsistent yields, or even crop loss.

“For the past three years, Vineland has worked in close collaboration with LetsGrow.com to develop a machine learning algorithm to complement the LetsGrow.com software suite to directly address this challenge,” says Hussam Haroun, Director Automation at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in Canada. “Combined with greenhouse environmental data, this new software innovation is able to learn the grower irrigation strategy and provide decisions to create irrigation consistency, as well as optimize water use and consumption. This can directly help growers by reducing crop loses and demands for labor and highly refine their watering needs.”

“Data-driven decision making is an imperative for growers to optimize their resources and make their operations more sustainable in an increasingly competitive market. Our collaboration with Vineland allows for an important expansion in our platform technology to further collect, refine, and analyze water use data that is crop specific,” says Ton van Dijk, Global Head of Sales and Operations at LetsGrow.com. “This data is collected in real-time and has implications for long-term growing strategies. Overall, we’re empowering growers by leveraging data that can result in a more profitable business strategy.”

This international collaboration serves to advance Vineland’s mandate to facilitate cooperation and create partnerships that expand innovation and commercialization in horticulture both in Canada and abroad.