The internet of things (IoT) is destined to touch every aspect of human endeavour; making factories smarter and supply chains intelligent. Now, the IoT is helping farmers save vast amounts of water in their avocado growing.
The avocado trees are monitored around the clock and get irrigated only when needed, enabling a farmer to make dramatic cost savings, as he has reduced water consumption by 75 per cent.
IoT technology pioneer Spirent Communications is breaking new ground with its open eco-system partners such as Oasis Smart Sim through its connectivity and embedded subscription business.
A new initiative from Spirent Communications in bringing about connected avocado farms might just be the perfect solution to make further inroads into lowering spiralling water costs.
Kurt Bantle is a senior solution manager at Spirent Communications and has 900 young avocado trees planted in his “back garden” in Southern California. Within his remit to develop Spirent’s IoT offering, he decided to experiment into how avocados could be grown using less water through soil moist monitoring and automated irrigation.
Bantle divided his farm into 22 irrigation blocks and inserted two soil moisture measurement units into each block. The units contain a LoRa unit for narrow band data communication to a LoRa gateway which has broadband cellular uplink connectivity functionality.
The gateway also contains a Spirent partner Oasis re-programmable SIM which becomes the enabler in remote water provisioning. All soil moisture data is collected from the avocado trees into a cloud and visualised by a presentation layer.
When a tree needs to be watered, the solution turns the sprinklers on automatically to get the correct level of soil moisture for each tree. It then turns them off when the correct moisture levels are reached. The connected trees are monitored constantly day and night.
“The case study showed water usage reduction by 75 per cent, but the usage will climb as the trees get bigger. The goal is to reach a 50 per cent reduction of water usage when fully grown. By keeping the salts in check along with keeping nutrients supplied, stress on the trees is reduced and they are able to have better crop production,” says Bantle.
The downside for Bantle in harnessing the power of IoT to reduce water consumption was that he was placed under state surveillance for meter tampering.
The connectivity solution provided by Spirent together with its IoT ecosystem partners for avocado trees applies to every type of vegetable and fruit farming including almonds, olives, apples, oranges and tomatoes.
