Precision irrigation system Lumo recently won the Audience Choice Award during the AgSharks Pitch Competition during the 2025 Western Growers Annual Meeting. Finalists included DriftSense, Mapana and TRIC Robotics.
Steele Roddick, senior digital marketing manager for Lumo, says the recognition came at a good time when the company has expanded beyond winegrapes into citrus, blueberries, apples and avocados.
“Growers are honest. As a general rule, if they’re not interested in your solution, they would let you know,” he says. “We’re very excited ... it’s just another point of confirmation of this core story around accountability, around closing this execution gap, about giving people block-level visibility into the performance of every irrigation. It is just a message that really does resonate with a lot of growers. And we’re excited about this proof point, which really shows that we’re on to something here.”
Roddick says the company’s founder began a quest in 2021 to develop an irrigation system that helped growers understand in real-time the performance and health of irrigation systems. The company, which deploys a wireless smart valve system with a flow sensor and connectivity, gives growers block-level performance. He says as growers began to use the technology, they started to understand the wide variability in the performance of their systems, either through rodent damage, closed valves or old emitters.
“Growers aren’t naive,” Roddick says. “They know maybe their system is operating at 80% or 90% of what they thought, but they don’t realize that sometimes the variation is much larger than they thought it would have been.”
And Roddick says as growers have begun to understand that variability, they’ve been able to improve both irrigation systems on the farm and the way in which they’re deploying the water on the farm.
“We’ve collected this data and seen it across more and more farms,” he says. “There’s a great deal of variation here. Once you can see into it, that really allows you to adjust your schedule, make improvements to your irrigation infrastructure, make adjustments to how you’re operating your irrigation system, and that produces better crop outcomes through precision. And of course, it has this automation piece built in, because you get this real-time data and you can watch flows. Growers get a lot more comfortable with running the system automatically with anyone on site, and that is a great deal of labor savings.”
Roddick says that the Lumo team has learned more as more about the different needs of specialty crop growers. As apple growers in Washington state often use overhead cooling in the summer months to keep orchard temperatures lower, Roddick says growers using Lumo can fine-tune block-by-block scheduling.
“We do want to be a complete precision irrigation platform,” Roddick says. “It’s not just valve automation. You need to do more than that. You need to control pumps and turn them on and off and figure out how to regulate their pressure and so on. So, pump automation is a key part, and a key part of [the] ROI story for lots of different growers, and then adding in soil moisture or other kinds of data. Growers want to see it all in one platform. There’s a ton of tech fatigue, and they want there to be one place to go to do their irrigations, and we want to be that place.”
Roddick says the team at Lumo wants to build out a more robust platform for winegrapes and continue to follow market demand from other specialty crop growers.
“Just from our conversations we have had with apple growers or with citrus growers in California, the core idea here of there’s an irrigation execution gap,” he says. “There’s a difference between your plan and what’s actually happening in the field, and you just don’t have visibility into it. That core story, the more we talk to growers and other crop types, is ‘Yes, we have this problem.‘ We are excited about broadening out the crop types, just in organic demand.”
Roddick says the Lumo team also wants to balance growth with providing the grower with support and product improvements. He says winning the Audience Choice Award during the AgSharks Pitch Competition at Western Grower’s Annual Meeting was a great opportunity to be in front of the biggest growers in California.
“You get good feedback from all these big, well-known ag-tech thinkers and get that sort of feedback on how you’re positioning your product and what you should be thinking about,” he says. “We were tremendously excited by the response. Obviously, winning was a very nice cherry on top of the experience, but our founder walked away very, very happy and excited about the enthusiasm that you see.”
