Heat waves can be detrimental to high-value crops like blueberries. Managing irrigation is not just about giving crops more water; it’s a scientific balance that requires growers to precisely 'refill' a plant's water needs. This is only possible with advanced automation systems like FutureOps. Hear from Chris Browne, Irrigation Specialist and Agronimist at Stahlbush Island Farms for over 3 decades, who is at the crossroads of innovation — where science meets real-world applications.
How does Stahlbush Island Farms use automation to optimize their irrigation system?
To adjust irrigation events across one or two blocks manually is feasible — but of course still labor intensive. However, once you begin having five or more blocks, it becomes nearly impossible to monitor and adjust irrigations to meet your actual crop needs. There are just too many blocks to attend to and not enough time. To add to the challenge, in Stahlbush's case, they have a complex hydraulic pumping setup, where it is based on the pressure demands of the fields depending on how may blocks are irrigating at once. Even having a traditional stand-alone irrigation controller or smart irrigation control system would not be able to meet the real-time requirements of a dynamic ET based irrigation scheme.
What High-Performance Irrigation Automation systems do is not only determining the ET adjusted irrigation run times or quantities, but execute the actions on the control side. That means determining how many pumps need to kick-on, which blocks will irrigate and when they will irrigate. On top of all of this, the system is constantly monitoring for any system failures in the irrigation system, such as a irrigation valve that will not close. Stahlbush takes it even further by setting condition thresholds in the system to dynamaially change the irrigation program run-time or quanity based on real-time sensor data, like soil moisture probes, flow rates, temperature and more.
Cost savings and ROI calculations will vary depending on many factors, such as:
In Stahlbush's case, the Return on Investment (ROI) came in several ways:
They immediately were able to optimize labor, irrigating a farm operation of several thousand acres that is spread across county lines with just 3 irrigators. This has them realize immidate labor savings. In additiion, they recognized crop yield improvements, and lowered their electricity costs by precisely irrigating to the actual ET and no longer guessing how much water has been applied in a week, month and even season.
Further, as Chris Browne highlights in the video, they were able to harvest a healthy crop during a 5 day heat dome, where other growers that could not respond precisely to their Blueberry crop needs in that critical weather event had their crop shrivel and ultimately lowered their yield and crop quality. This of course impacts revenue when it is time to harvest their crop.