Water is an invaluable resource everywhere, however, in California, it is of a particular purpose, serving the nearly 40 million residents as well as fueling the state’s strong agriculture industry.
And it’s this strong need for responsible water use that has helped connect agriculture irrigation with emerging technology offerings.
In this “Tip of the Iceberg” podcast episode, James Nichols, a third-generation pistachio grower and president of HotSpot Ag, shares how data and innovative technology can help deploy water where it’s most needed.
Nichols, whose family has been growing in the San Joaquin Valley since the 1980s, said the state’s Mediterranean climate helps create an optimal place for the more than 450 crops grown there. He said growers in the state get a bad reputation for overusing water, and that’s just not the case.
“Most growers under-irrigate as there are negative consequences for over-irrigation from a plant health and production standpoint,” he said. “There’s fairly large and negative consequences for over-irrigation from a plant health and production standpoint.”
Growers will often under-irrigate to avoid the added cost of water, and they don’t want to waste water as they understand the importance of their role in the country’s food production, he said.
Nichols said he started his business to help his family’s farm to control and understand its water use in real-time.
“One of the challenges we had was knowing how much water we were applying per what our [water] plan was,” he said.
It started with measuring the irrigation demand of the crop and then the water supply for that crop, Nichols said. After getting a handle on measurement, he then moved into automating the family farm’s irrigation.
“What we what we primarily focus on at Hotspot is what is giving growers the tools to execute their irrigation plans,” he said. “From my experience, growers have a very good idea of what their crop needs. The problem we’re trying to solve is to help them grow or be able to execute that plan.”
He said this includes saving energy, too, because if a grower can turn off a pump during the most costly part of the day, it could save $5,000 to $25,000 per year.
Nichols said the future of irrigation automation is to help use data to create an optimal schedule, using both the water budget and the soil type to deploy water when its most effective for the plant and most economical for the grower, and to help growers inject liquid fertilizer so the plant gets what it needs delivered to the root system for better uptake.
View the full episode in the video player above.
