Precise & Autonomous Irrigation Control |
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Tevatronic has developed a solution for increasing farmer’s profitability | ||||||
July 15, 2018 | ||||||
The world population grows, increasing demand for food. Decline in agricultural lands availability and water shortage will be the most critical challenges the world will have to address in near future.
The new trend of autonomous irrigation is the future of the precise farming and the best way to save on input resources while increasing yield. From the company start in 2012, Tevatronic founders aim was to develop an innovative solution, avoiding the shortages of existing DSS (decision support systems) in the market. The available DSS systems for farmers use are based either on environment, soil or plant monitoring, overwhelming the user with data and leaving him to take decisions how much to irrigate. These systems sometime initiate irrigation, based on some type of monitoring, but none of them can give a clue how much water to apply in order to satisfy plant demand without preventing percolation. Tevatronic arrived at the conclusion that autonomous irrigation is the ultimate solution to avoid erroneous decisions by the farmer. The autonomous irrigation developed relies oh the plant to initiate the irrigation when it dries the soil occupied by a dense root system near a dripper and turn it off by wetting any desired depth based of a mathematical algorithm developed by the company. Monitoring and initiation of irrigation is based on soil water tension by wireless digital tensiometers re-designed by the company. Data is sent to the autonomous decision making module on a server that control the irrigation valve. Irrigation is executed in real time and can be monitored at any time.
Water tension was chosen for monitoring and control of autonomous irrigation for several reasons: movement of water through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum is governed by tension difference. Measurement of tension by tensiometers is accurate, independent of salinity and readily automated. Finally, water tension is the parameter that controls plant growth, yield, and produce quality. It took Tevatronic 3 years, several versions and pilots in variety of regions and crops to develop a robust, wireless and fully autonomous irrigation control solution. Agricultural researchers, software and hardware engineers, and mathematicians were involved in developing state of the art sensing and irrigation control modules. One of the benefits of the system is the fact that it is wireless, Internet based and it includes a proprietary mathematical algorithm allowing depth irrigation control. The system developed is universal, fit for all plants and soil type and does not need calibration. The successful autonomous precise irrigation system developed was achieved by integrating hardware, software and method of operation.
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