The Internet of Irrigators: California Could Save Water by Networking Everything

​As California's drought pushes through its fourth year and the state takes unprecedented steps to curb urban water use, water conservation is on everyone's mind—especially the farmers', who have begun to use technologies and systems tied to the ever-cheapening Internet of Things (IoT).

Squeezed by less water supply from state and federal sources, growers have been forced let half a million acres of cropland fallow last year, and likely another half million fallow in 2015. Accounting for about 40 p​ercent of the state's overall water use—and about 80 percent of the human use—farms finding more efficient ways to use whatever water is available is necessary future for the state.

The Internet of Things, and the host of hardware and software technologies associated with it, is able to make water management on a farm far more precise than was previously possible. As hardware prices continue to fall, it's become possible to deploy sensors and the communication technology that help farmers conserve vast amounts of water, which can help alleviate drought conditions.

One company, Sustainable Water and Innovative Irrigation Management Systems (SWIIM), recently announced a 40,000 acre pilot project in three California regions. It's been working with the US Department of Agriculture for years to perfect the software and hardware system in Colorado, and has put together a system that's straightforward and affordable to deploy.

The technology works like this. A combination of sensors that capture water flow, wind, rain, soil, moisture and temp, shoot data via radio transmitter to a cellular modem, which acts like a hub. From there the cell modem uploads the data to the cloud, where SWIIM's software goes to work making sense of it all.

Then, SWIIM combines that sensor data with Lands​at 8 imagery, flyovers conducted with manned Cessna aircraft, as well as weather and climate data from a variety of sources—what CEO Kevin France described as "big data." Together, the four data sources provide an incredibly accurate picture of what's happening on a farm.

(France said they've tried using drones for flyovers, but thus far they haven't been practical — either crashing or getting shot at by farmers.)

Once the system gathers up all the data, farmers can use the company's patented algorithm to help them decide what kinds of changes to their water management strategy they'd like to make—whether it's changing their crops, for example, or adopting a new irrigation technique. "It's been very tough to calculate what these kinds of changes in the past [without the baseline data]," France said.

Much of the sensor and modem technology deployed isn't the Latest And Greatest, and that's the point. Even ten years ago the kind of system that SWIIM has develop simply would have been too expensive to deploy on a commercial farming operation. Basically, the Internet of Things is now cheap. "This would be impossible to do without the internet," he said. "Even in the last six to eight years, costs for the components have come down by a factor of ten."

That's critical for his company's pitch to farmers: for a cost of $30 to $75 an acre (France said there are government grants available to defray the costs for the first several years), he suggests that they'll be able to conserve between 5 and 60 percent of their current water consumption—although every farm is a little different, and France says between 20 and 40 percent is optimal. For every 500 acres covered, he said, that translates to an additional $50,000 to $100,000 annually from lease income.

But, it's not as though California's farmers have been sitting idle when it comes to water management—droughts being a feature of the state's environment, the last major one stretching from 1987 until 1992. "Between 1967 and 2010, the total applied water to crops was reduced by five percent, from 31.2 million acre-feet to 29.6 million acre-feet," Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman for the California Department of Water Resources, wrote in an email.

Coupled with the decrease in overall water use was a 57 percent increase in crop yield. That means farmers have improved water-use efficiency enormously without the fancy technology the Internet of Things promises. But, even though more and more farmers are using precision irrigation techniques, at the moment that number is just more than half.

There's still room for improvement, France said, because the techniques farmers now use to measure their water use—often relying on estimates for things like evaporation and ground seepage based on local weather station data—don't provide as a precise an picture of where all their water is going. "With better data, comes better management," he said.

SWIIM is just one of several companies exploring the Internet of Things for water use management. There's also Smart Watering systems, a Canada-based smart irrigation management provider, and Observant Global, an Australia-based company that offers to help clients "set your irrigation schedules, turn pump engines on and off, or control your lateral and pivot system—all from your computer or smartphone." Still others are entering the emerging industry that will likely play a role in California's drought-ridden future.

Even though the drought has had palpable effects on local economies across the state, and now on urban uses, Vogel believes that there's reasons to be optimistic. "We tend to emerge more resilient, and better prepared after every drought," she said. "After the '87-'92 drought, local governments invested billions in local storage. All of that has helped us in this drought. It's only this year that millions of urban residents are feeling the effects. We have a water system that's effectively allowed the state to ignore the drought."

This time around, the ever-cheapening Internet of Things, and these systems may be part of that future.