The data-to-action gap: How digital tools differ in delivering water savings

As global companies pursue Water Positive targets, we are seeing more investments in the agricultural supply chain. Technology industry leaders like Microsoft and Amazon are increasingly funding the deployment of digital tools from a range of digital agriculture technology providers. For companies, the challenge is discerning the similarities and differences between technologies and then determining which tools may deliver the highest reductions in water use. For the farmers, it’s important to understand which tools will provide them with the greatest improvements to the resiliency of their family farming operations. 

To evaluate the landscape, digital farming can be categorized into three categories that can work alone or together: 

1. Monitoring (The Eyes):Tools such as field-level monitoring platforms and the OpenET platform (a collaboration between NASA and Google) provide the “eyes on the field.” By leveraging in-field weather stations, satellite imagery and evapotranspiration (ET) tracking, these platforms help corporations quantify regional water risk and report stewardship metrics. While essential for transparency and identifying where to save water, monitoring is a diagnostic tool; it identifies the problem but does not execute the solution. This means that the effectiveness still relies on the execution by the irrigator (farmer) to achieve the promised water savings. 
2. Agronomic Intelligence (The Brain):Agronomic platforms like soil- and plant-based agronomic intelligence platforms go deeper, utilizing soil moisture or plant-stress sensors to determine a crop’s exact needs. A standout in this category is the emergence of models verifying on-farm savings to unlock corporate funding for growers. These tools provide the prescription, or the precise knowledge of when and how much to irrigate. Yet the actual water savings still rely on a human being executing the action that the machine recommends without variance. 
3. Automation and Control (The Hands):The most significant water reduction occurs when we “close the loop” between the brain and the hands. This is the frontier for fully integrated management and control platforms. Unlike monitoring and analytics-only software offerings, these systems bridge the “Data-to-Action Gap” by linking crop intelligence directly to the physical irrigation infrastructure. In other words, the integration between the brain and the hands reduces the component of human error. 

Most water is lost in the time it takes to turn data into a physical action. For example, if a sensor indicates that a sudden rain event has negated the need for an irrigation cycle, but a grower cannot reach the pump for twelve hours, that water is wasted. By integrating sensing (monitoring) and analytics (intelligence) into hydraulic control (automation), the system moves from passive advice to active management. When a system can automatically skip a program or adjust run time based on real-time plant feedback with less human intervention, the margin for error disappears. 

For corporate sustainability leaders, the goal is “additionality,” or proving that their funding caused a reduction that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. Monitoring offers executives’ transparency but integrating digital intelligence with automated hardware achieves reliable water savings and prepares farmers for future needs.  The future of the industry belongs to integrated operating systems that ensure every drop is optimized to benefit the farmers, the corporate sponsors, and the environment. 

This article was written with the support of AI. 

Val Fishman is advocacy and development consultant for Orbia Precision Agriculture (Netafim).