CASE STUDY · AGRITECH / PRECISION AGRICULTURE SOFTWARE
A precision irrigation system that cut water usage 30% for a regional co-op.
- 30%Water use down 30% across the pilot fields over one season, with yields unchanged
01 · PROJECT OVERVIEW
The client and the brief.
An anonymised agricultural co-operative. Name withheld under confidentiality.
Soil-moisture and temperature sensors, threshold rules combined with weather forecasts, and an operations dashboard.
- 1Irrigation ran on fixed schedules regardless of soil conditions.
- 2Members watered on set days and for set durations.
- 3A wet week meant fields were watered anyway.
- 4A hot, dry spell meant some fields were under-watered.
- 5Nobody had measured what the soil actually held.
02 · WHAT WENT WRONG
What went wrong, and how we fixed it.
Every engagement hits problems. These were the ones that mattered here, and what we changed so they did not come back.
- PROBLEM 01Midway through the season, readings from several sensors started to drift and then dropped out
The cause was a mix of poor installation in clay-heavy soil, where the sensor had air gaps around it, and moisture getting into one batch of connectors. The system had been treating bad readings as real, and two zones were left on hold longer than they should have been. A farmer noticed first, which is how we knew the override was working.
- PROBLEM 02We re-seated the sensors, replaced the connectors, added drift and dropout checks, and set the system to fall back to the crop-stage schedule and alert the team when a sensor went quiet
- PROBLEM 03A second hurdle was power
Two gateways at the edge of the pilot area ran on small solar panels, and a run of overcast days drained their batteries. We moved to a lower reporting rate when charge was low, sized the panels up and added a battery alert so the team could visit before the unit went dark.
03 · THE PROCESS
How we ran it.
We ran this across one growing season on a set of pilot fields.
- 01Before the season
we walked the fields with farmers, chose sensor positions and agreed the soil-moisture thresholds for each crop type with the co-operative's agronomist.
- 02Installation
we installed sensors and a gateway on each pilot field and checked the readings against hand measurements.
- 03Early season, advisory mode
the system recommended and farmers decided. We compared its recommendations with what they did.
- 04Mid-season onward
farmers who were happy with the advice let the system schedule irrigation, with a manual override always available.
- 05Weekly
a short call with the agronomist and farm leads to review alerts, misses and sensor health.
04 · RESULTS
What changed.
Measured against the way the work ran before the engagement began.
- NOW 01
The co-operative waters by soil condition and forecast, not by calendar.
- NOW 02
Someone on the operations team checks sensor health weekly, and the agronomist adjusts thresholds at the start of each crop stage.
- NOW 03
Members have seen the override history, which has helped build their trust in the system.
- 30%
Water use down 30% across the pilot fields over one season, with yields unchanged
05 · WHAT WE BUILT
How it works.
- Sensors at different depths report to a local gateway, which forwards readings to the cloud when there is signal and stores them when there is not.
- Each reading is checked for plausibility: values outside a physical range, flat lines and sudden jumps are flagged and ignored.
- The irrigation rule compares current moisture with a threshold for the crop and growth stage, then checks the weather forecast.If rain is likely, watering is held back. If heat is forecast, it can be brought forward.
- Farmers and the operations team see zone status, recommended actions and the history of past decisions on a dashboard that works on a phone.
- Any recommendation can be overridden, and overrides are recorded so we can tune the rules.
- Handover
- We trained a member of the co-operative's staff to check sensors, swap parts and change thresholds. We left a field guide with photographs of correct installation and a short list of fault symptoms and their usual causes.
06 · QUICK ANSWERS
The short version.
- What problem did the client have?
- Irrigation ran on fixed schedules regardless of soil conditions.
- What did Brandsmashers build?
- Soil-moisture and temperature sensors, threshold rules combined with weather forecasts, and an operations dashboard.
- How was the work run?
- We ran this across one growing season on a set of pilot fields.
- What were the results?
- Water use down 30% across the pilot fields over one season, with yields unchanged.
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