Business Opportunity
In 2016, a leading provider of electrical products to the agricultural industry was looking for full-service connectivity for water management applications to farms and ranches throughout America’s heartland. This included aquifer monitoring and irrigation, animal welfare, and all aspects of water management.
Technical Challenge
Due to the remote locations and inaccessibility of cellular service in that area and the need to work with state and local governments, they needed a large and continuously expanding network that would connect farms and other agricultural sites to aid in water management.
They also needed a variety of agricultural and natural resource applications to connect with the state and local governments in charge of managing natural resources such as water.
Solution
We developed a set of solutions that is now providing reporting, real-time visualizations, remote control, pump management, and soil quality monitoring to farms and ranches throughout America’s heartland. The solutions include aquifer monitoring, irrigation, animal welfare, and all aspects of water management. We provide over 99.99% uptime with one of the largest LoRaWAN networks in North America. Using LoRaWAN means we don’t need cellular or satellite networks, which is a good thing, because those either don’t exist or are cost-prohibitive in many parts of the covered multi-state area. The network has scaled continuously over the years. It now supports multiple applications and tens of thousands of connected sensors from a variety of manufacturers.
Impact
The network is constantly growing and now stretches throughout America’s Heartland from Idaho to Iowa and every state in between.
And through strategic partnerships with engineering firms, we’ve developed new sensors that fit the needs of the company’s customers when they were not commercially available.
Using this vast network, customers can remotely monitor and control their reservoir and canal flow gates, deep well water flow and levels, use precision monitoring for irrigation, measure soil moisture, and access everything in one place.
With real-time connectivity, accurate data, and historical data over time, customers have lowered their labor costs and now make better decisions for their agricultural businesses.