Virtual Irrigation Academy’s Irrigation Monitoring Sensors

One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024

Virtual Irrigation Academy’s Irrigation Monitoring Sensors

One of the Top 20 Most Influential Projects of 2024

For helping small farmers better manage water resources to boost crop yields

Region: Global  Sector: Agriculture  UN SDGs: 2, Zero Hunger; 9, Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure; 13, Climate Action; 15, Life on Land

“We’ve tried to create a new language that lets farmers talk about water, and that language is color,” says Simon Dyer, managing director of Virtual Irrigation Academy (VIA), explaining the basic technology of 70,000 individual irrigation monitoring sensors that VIA has deployed in 24 countries. VIA’s sensors are straightforward devices that give small farmers a quick, easy-to-interpret picture of their soil’s water status.

Does the soil have sufficient water? If so, the sensor will display a blue LED light, which signals to the farmer that irrigation isn’t needed at the moment. If, on the other hand, the sensor flashes red, the farmer knows that irrigation is needed. In between these extremes is a green light, which indicates a state of equilibrium, but one that could shift quickly.

“Everyone can understand colors and patterns,” Dyer says. “The tools, the physical products, have taken the stress experienced by a plant in terms of its need for water, and converted it into a color, and in that way a farmer can understand: ‘Do I need to water my crops today, yes or no?’ The sensor is a practical decision-making tool for farmers.” In addition to saving water, especially in areas prone to drought, Dyer points out that the sensors save small farmers time and improve crop yields and income.

In 2023, VIA launched a collaborative project that expanded the organization’s scope from monitoring and learning to governance, collaborating closely with governments in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. The governance piece is key, Dyer says, because the individual farmer rarely has power over when water is available to them, but sharing sensor data with water managers and government entities can result in meaningful improvements in water access for all. The governance collaboration project was part of the reason why VIA was honored with the Water Changemaker Innovation Awards at COP28 in December 2023. The awards recognize “the most promising climate-resilient innovations with the greatest potential for scale, replication, and further investment to support a water-secure world.”

 

A woman standing in a green field

 

“For individual farmers, the sensor certainly helps,” Dyer explains, “but where we really try to play is taking the information that comes back [from the sensors] and getting it to government farming services and project managers who can take these data and use them for wide scale impact.” Sharing large data sets about farm health and irrigation patterns with government entities allows “higher-level players within that irrigation management system to make sure water is being used in the most productive way possible.” It helps the government, and its utilities better manage its water allocation schemes.

“A public irrigation scheme may have 100 or 200 farmers sharing an irrigation source, usually on a calendar system: 20 here get water on Monday, 20 on Tuesday, and so on and so forth,” Dyer says. The government scheme manager, who controls the source, needs the information that our sensors provide, so they can be able to allocate water where and when it is needed across the whole community. This is where the sharing of sensor data comes in.

Dyer explains that this governance project has involved getting buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and that isn’t always easy. The transition from one government administration to another, for example, can undo negotiations, putting VIA back at step one. Plus, there are so many other players in the space — other technology companies and providers, community groups, and farmers themselves — and those competing interests can create obstacles. But the affordability of VIA’s sensors, at about $45 USD each, makes it an attractive, accessible intervention that is scalable, and its ease of use makes it a useful tool for universal application. Aid organizations and international banks understand the importance of stabilizing agriculture to support the living wage of farmers and adequate crop yields to mitigate global hunger. Data collection needs to be part of that aid, says Dyer. “If they’re going to invest millions of dollars into agriculture in a country, put some of that money in an information system so you get a good return on investment.”