Water & irrigation

Why irrigation should be decided with data, not habit

Chile has carried over a decade of water deficit, and in zones like the Valparaíso Region it's water, not land, that caps production. Deciding irrigation by habit —"we always irrigate 3 hours on Mondays"— leaves no trace of how much was applied, or whether the pump that moved it was running reasonably.

The problem isn't a lack of sensors —many farms already have them— but that the data lives scattered: moisture in one app, flow in another, electricity spend only when the bill arrives. Without a single view bringing together the irrigation schedule, field readings and pump consumption, irrigation stays intuition with a spreadsheet.

The real problem (no marketing)

In most Chilean farms, water and energy are managed blind until something fails or the bill arrives. The breaking points repeat season after season:

The underlying cost is twofold: wasted water and over-paid energy, two line items that weigh on per-block costing and are rarely attributed to the right block. Without measuring water or electricity use per sector, irrigation is the most expensive black box on the farm.

How this module solves it

The module replaces habit with a recurring irrigation schedule per sector: you choose the days of the week, the time and the duration for each block, and the system builds the upcoming events on its own. When something changes —rain, an emergency, an extra window— you adjust that one date with an exception (skip, reschedule or add extra) without touching the base rule or losing the history.

1. 01

   Schedule per sector

   You set days, time and duration per block; the system builds the calendar of upcoming events on its own.

2. 02

   Live sensors and pumps

   Moisture, pressure and flow enter the same view, and the low-level threshold you set per reservoir opens an alert when you evaluate the water balance; each pump's drive shows its actual frequency against the setpoint.

3. 03

   Consumption per block

   Every water outflow lands in the ledger with m³, hours and operator, aggregated per block to see where use concentrates.

Irrigation stops living only in the irrigator's habit: it lives in an editable schedule, with field readings and pump consumption right next to it, so adjusting a sector is a decision of minutes, not an argument over memory.

Integration with your current stack

Soil-moisture sensors already exist in many Chilean farms; the module doesn't ask you to replace them, but to bring their data into a single irrigation view.

Irrigation shares block, sector and season as master data with the rest of the platform, so the plant nutrition & health program —especially fertigation— uses the same block and sector, not a separate spreadsheet.

From data to savings in one season

This module's value doesn't show up all at once: it builds over the season, as you adjust each sector's schedule with what you see in the field instead of repeating last year's routine. The module makes that curve visible instead of leaving it to the irrigator's memory.

An inherited schedule —"three hours on Mondays"— doesn't tell a young block from a mature one, or a rainy week from a hot one. With the editable schedule and one-off exceptions, you adjust each sector when the field asks for it, without waiting for next season's redesign.

The other front is the water nobody measures: leaks, sectors over-irrigating from a miscalibrated valve, inherited schedules nobody revisited. Having moisture, pressure and flow in the same view as the schedule is what puts those blind spots in front of whoever reviews them, instead of waiting for the block to show water stress or for the bill to arrive. The low-level threshold you set per reservoir is evaluated when you refresh the water balance —with the panel's "Evaluate alerts" button—, and opens the alert if the reservoir crossed the mark.

At season close, the per-block water ledger —m³, hours, operator— isn't an exercise for the audit: it's the record of which sectors concentrated consumption and which went unreviewed. That season-over-season comparison, exportable to CSV, is the raw base you can bring to your own sustainability report or to a commercial conversation with a customer asking how you use water.

And the effect compounds: every season you adjust a sector with data instead of memory, next year's schedule starts from a better point, not from zero. The knowledge stops living in the irrigator's head —who leaves one day— and stays in the system, where the next person can read it and improve it.

Metrics you'll move

The module moves two metrics that hit the margin directly: water consumption per block (m³ and m³/ha) and each pump's hours of use with its actual frequency. On top of that visibility, you decide where to adjust the schedule — not an algorithm.

Each indicator enables a decision:

That consumption, aggregated per sector, stops being a blurry monthly total and becomes real data in the right block.