SYSTEM INTEGRATION & AUTOMATION


By Kyle Brown Pivoting to Using center pivots


to sense crop stress could improve


irrigation efficiency.


automation M


aking the best use of water in ag irrigation makes sense for growers, and the science behind it is sound. But often, there’s a time and resource cost that can be difficult to manage, even though growers want to make efforts for conservation.


“The socio-economic reality is that a farmer needs an incentive to really invest


time in conserving water, especially if water is cheap,” says Derek Heeren, PhD, PE, associate professor and irrigation engineer at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska. “I think most producers probably have a stewardship mindset, and in general try to do things to conserve our natural resources, but there is a realty of a time budget.”


Providing that incentive is one of Heeren’s goals in his research, “Towards Pivot Automation With Proximal Sensing for Maize and Soybean in the Great Plains,” funded by the Irrigation Innovation Consortium. From his perspective, more producers might use scientific irrigation scheduling to manage water use if it was automated and reliable. The project is focused on developing processes to automate center pivot irrigation by incorporating multiple types of sensors to reduce the uncertainty associated with recommendations for when and how much to irrigate.


14 Irrigation TODAY | Winter 2022 irrigationtoday.org


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