A Smart Sensor to Help Farmers Save Water in a Drought

A new ag-tech company called CropX says it has part of the answer. The Silicon Valley-based company just raised $9 million from investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors to fix what seems like a fairly obvious problem:

CALIFORNIA’S WATER WOES aren’t easing up, and it’s far from the only state facing severe drought. To make matters worse, the World Resources Institute predicts that we’ll need to grow 60 percent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the planet’s growing population. That means we need to grow more food with less water, and we need to figure out how to do so quickly.

A new ag-tech company called CropX says it has part of the answer. The Silicon Valley-based company just raised $9 million from investors including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors to fix what seems like a fairly obvious problem:

“Land is not uniform. Different amounts of water need to be applied to different parts of the field,” says CEO Isaac Bentwich. “By watering fields uniformly you’re wasting water and poisoning the soil because the chemicals follow the water.”

ropX sells a package of sensors and software designed to help farmers determine precisely how much water to use in different parts of their fields, increasing yields and saving water and other resources by ensuring that no part of the field receives too much or too little water. The idea—called precision agriculture—is nothing new. But CropX is aiming to make it cheaper and easier for farmers to adopt these techniques.

To use the system, farmers can simply stick the CropX sensors in the soil. The sensors transmit data to the cloud, where CropX’s servers crunch the numbers on the topography, soil structure, and moisture of each part of the field. After the data is analyzed, farmers get recommendations via a smartphone app for how much water to devote to each part of the field. CropX claims the process can help farmers can use up to 25 percent less water.

“We want to be the Apple of agriculture, in terms of sleek software and hardware integration,” says Bentwich. “And to be the Google of agriculture in dealing with the massive flow of information that comes from the Internet of Things.”

Personalized Agriculture

CropX’s technology is the result of a somewhat unlikely collaboration between Israeli genomics technology researchers and New Zealand irrigation technology wonks.

Bentwich is a medical doctor by training and founded multiple life science startups in Israel prior to starting CropX. After his previous company, Rosetta Genomics, went public, he decided to travel the world with his family. They settled for a while in New Zealand, where Bentwich passed his time consulting with researchers on ways to commercialize their technology.

When he saw the irrigation technology that the Landcare Research institute was building, he says something clicked. He saw an opportunity to apply the same underlying technologies his genomics company used to provide personalized medicine to create individualized water recommendations for farmers. The common denominator is analyzing more granular data to generate more precisely tailored suggestions. Fields, like people, aren’t all alike.

Bentwich acknowledges that CropX is only one part of the solution to the water crisis. He mentions breakthroughs in materials science to improve pipes and prevent leaks as another part of the puzzle. But he thinks the time has come to bring information technology to irrigation.

“Feeding the world and solving the water crisis is humanity’s biggest challenge ever,” Bentwish says. “Taking techniques that work in life science or other segments and applying that to agriculture amounts to an IT revolution in agriculture. This is all exciting stuff.”