New Project Looks To Help Growers Water Smarter

Farmers don’t want to overwater, and that’s especially true during drought years.

Researchers at University of California, Riverside have developed a new system that maps soil moisture tree by tree, helping growers water only where it’s needed.  The project, led by precision agriculture expert Elia Scudiero, looks to replaces guesswork with detailed data.

She pointed out that current farmers rely on a handful of buried sensors, but those only show moisture in limited spots. 

“The information those sensors provide is very limited,” Scudiero said. “It really only tells you what’s happening in the immediate areas where they’re placed.”

The new approach uses a robot that moves through orchards, measuring soil electrical conductivity, then combines that with sensor data to create a full map of moisture across an entire field.

Scudiero pointed out that soil can vary widely, even within a single orchard, meaning some trees get too much water, others not enough.  Too little water stresses crops. Too much can suffocate roots and wash fertilizer into groundwater. 

“If water becomes limited, farmers have two choices,” Scudiero said. “They can retire orchards, or they can find ways to produce the same crops using less water.

"If you apply only the amount of water the plants actually need, you reduce the risk of washing those nutrients away from the roots of the crops and into the environment,” Scudiero said.

This project has been years in the making. Researchers began developing it in 2019 through collaborations between agricultural scientists and engineers at UC Riverside.  Scudiero added her team is now working to bring the technology from research orchards to real-world farms.

Click Here to learn more about the system.

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