Australian tech making more water available around the world | Corowa Free Press

2022-09-02 21:32:54 By : Ms. Cathy He

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Water is undoubtedly one of the world’s most precious resources.

Increasing variability associated with climate, along with factors including population growth, is making it more important than ever to preserve and store this resource for future beneficial use.

Technology provider Rubicon Water has been producing water saving solutions out of its facility in Shepparton for more than two decades.

Its technology is responsible for managing the distribution of water to about 1.5 million hectares of irrigated farmland and has been proven to increase water delivery efficiencies to around 90 per cent.

To date, Rubicon has implemented more than 35,000 water measurement and control devices for irrigation districts in 17 countries, including India, China, Chile, Spain, Uzbekistan and the United States.

Rubicon continues to improve the water management solutions available to farmers with the introduction of its next generation of FarmConnect.

FarmConnect leverages the proven technologies within Rubicon’s irrigation district solutions to deliver automated gate and valve solutions on-farm that enhance irrigators’ operations to provide significant water savings, reduced labour and increased yields.

"We’ve been busy running trials in both Australia and the US and rolling out commercial solutions to early adopters,“ Australia’s FarmConnect manager Kevin Saillard said.

“The outcomes of the next-gen range are impressive — we're seeing significant labour savings, water savings and yield improvements.

"Our development team has dedicated a lot of time into formulating these products and we're extremely proud to introduce the solution to more Australian farmers."

Independent studies have demonstrated that precision surface irrigation solutions can improve application efficiencies to 85 per cent or better, while significantly reducing labour costs and enhancing yields.

Soil moisture, climate inputs, plus communications via IoT-enabled nodes help farmers know when to irrigate their crops and how much water to apply.

Cloud-based software provides farmers with automation tools to remotely control, monitor and schedule irrigations — from any device, anywhere in the world.

This enables the management of on-farm devices via a single platform — freeing their time for other tasks.