With high-flow outlets you can irrigate with shorter runtimes, which reduces waterlogging, deep drainage losses and tailwater losses, so you use less water more productively. The challenge with high-flow is to ensure that irrigation bay gates and valves are opened and closed at precisely the right time. Too soon and crops can suffer from water deficit, too late and even a small delay can eliminate the water saving benefits of high-flow irrigation. Even the best human operators can struggle to manage high flow irrigation manually.
The solution involves installing high-flow BayDrive automated gates along farm distribution channels and at the head of each irrigation bay, or high-flow BladeValves where buried pipe and riser distribution systems are used. Each gate and valve has integrated solar-power, control software and radio communications. The system connects to a cellular network and is managed remotely using web-based software.
Because the software is web-based your data is always online so you can see what’s happening on your farm at anytime from any web-enabled computer or smartphone, and take action if it’s needed.
The Surface Irrigation Automation solution’s remote and automated operation of gates and valves provides the precision control needed to manage high-flow surface irrigation. You can program BayDrives or BladeValves to open and close to a timed schedule and even program multiple irrigation sequences in advance, so you can choose the watering sequence that suits your crops, soil conditions or grazing activity at a particular point in time.
And with comprehensive monitoring and alarming you are kept up-to-date. The software continually monitors system performance and will let you know via SMS text message or email how an irrigation sequence is progressing and if there are any problems, giving you peace of mind and freeing you up to get on with other tasks.
By combining the Surface Irrigation Automation solution with the Crop Monitoring solution you have all the information and control needed for high-performance surface irrigation (also referred to as precision surface irrigation), which can achieve the water efficiencies and productivity gains of an equivalent sprinkler or drip irrigation system without the need to replace existing border-check field layouts and without the energy costs.
By precisely controlling gates and valves you eliminate the water losses that are common with manual surface irrigation. So you can save water for use at another time.
You or your staff don’t need to travel to site or get up at night to open and close gates and valves so you can get on with other tasks, or sleep though the night. You control your irrigation, not the other way around.
Without waterlogging causing prolonged plant growth showdown you grow more and higher quality crops.
The sophisticated alarms in FarmConnect software inform you of irrigation progress via SMS and alert you if anything goes wrong, so you won’t lose sleep at night.
More about this solutions modular FarmConnect components:
The BladeValve is a remotely operated high-flow pipe valve that makes surface irrigation less labor-intensive and more flexible.
The BayDrive is a remotely operated farm channel gate actuator, designed to make surface irrigation less labor-intensive and more flexible so you can improve yields and reduce water use.
Rubicon’s FarmConnect software is the web application you use to monitor your crops and manage irrigation with wireless soil moisture probes, BayDrives and BladeValves in the field.
