The 2021 Irrigation Show and Education Week featured some of today’s most exciting irrigation technology startup companies in its Innovation Row section of the trade show. Irrigation Today caught up with these companies to learn more about them and their new technology innovations.
Atrac manufactures cellular control devices for agricultural irrigation equipment such as pumps, valves, and related pressure or flow meters. Its controllers enable the user to schedule or remotely monitor equipment from their phone. This year the company was acquired by Semios, a precision agriculture service provider of real-time crop data and pest management tools.
The Semios platform has a large footprint in California’s almond industry, which is very sensitive to water efficiency. We are integrating our control devices with the Semios water balance and canopy ET software to modify irrigation schedules based on changing field conditions. – Neil Schultz, Altrac co-founder
Moleaer develops industrial-scale nanobubble technology that delivers improvements in chemical-free water treatment for sustainable crop production and lake management. Nanobubble technology improves water quality and clarity, increases dissolved oxygen, combats algae and acts as a chemical-free oxidant to prevent and remove biofilm from irrigation systems.
Nanobubbles are an innovative and sustainable irrigation technology fueling healthier plant growth through unparalleled oxygenation, pathogen control and improved root development. An oxygen-enriched root zone improves root mass, increases uptake of key nutrients like calcium and potassium, and helps suppress pathogenic growth. – Nick Dyner, Moleaer CEO
Soiltech Wireless provides tools to help optimize irrigation and make sustainable farming practices easy to access and implement. With an industry-first soil-to-storage solution for monitoring moisture, temperature, crop damage, location and humidity, Soiltech offers a rugged and easy-to-use solution for real-life farm challenges and an intuitive software platform that delivers actionable data to help optimize irrigation, increase yields and reduce inputs.
Soiltech’s solution has been designed with farmers from day one to make sure that data is displayed in a way that they need it. And — most importantly — the solution is cost-effective enough that an ROI can be easily achieved. – Ehsan Soltan, Soiltech Wireless founder
Spherag combines self-developed 5G-based autonomous Internet of Things and AWS cloud services (including integrating data from third parties) providing a plug-and-play tool that enables cloud-based intelligent and solar-powered irrigation and fertigation automation.
We want to bring the latest IoT technologies to farmers. There is a great challenge ahead and irrigation needs an important migration into tech and smart agro. We believe Spherag enables an easy access to 5G-based IoT and AWS-based cloud computing, allowing farms to be monitored in real time and smart. – Jesús Ibañez, Spherag CEO
Vinduino intelligent agronomy helps farmers get as much crop as possible from irrigation water while optimizing the use of fertilizer and pesticides. This can help lead to higher fruit quality and more produce, which creates more farm income with lower resource costs. Vinduino hopes that over time this improves the sustainable use of the land passed on to the future generations.
Although people have been farming since the Stone Age, estimating how much water a crop needs is still a work in progress. The Vinduino system learns the accurate plant water use and predicts the need for fertilizer and pest control for best crop results. – Reinier van der Lee, Vinduino CEO and founder
