News Irrigating
Vineland partners with LetsGrow.com for irrigation automation

With 70 per cent of all freshwater withdrawals accountable to agriculture, combined with worldwide population growth pressures and the subsequent increase in food demand, sustainable water consumption has become increasingly important to horticultural growers and suppliers.

Growers spend an average of 240 hours per acre to manage and monitor their irrigation systems. This manual process leads to costly crop management, inconsistent yields or even crop loss. Researchers at Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in Vineland, Ont., have partnered with Netherlands ag data company LetsGrow.com on watering algorithm solution integration.

“For the past three years, Vineland has worked in close collaboration with LetsGrow.com to develop a machine-learning algorithm to complement the LetsGrow.com software suite to directly address this challenge,” says Hussam Haroun, director of automation at Vineland. “Combined with greenhouse environmental data, this new software innovation is able to learn the grower’s irrigation strategy and provide decisions to create irrigation consistency, as well as optimize water usage and consumption. This can directly help growers by reducing crop losses and demands for labour and highly refine their watering needs.”

“Data-driven decision-making is an imperative for growers to optimize their resources and make their operations more sustainable in an increasingly competitive market,” says Ton van Dijk, global head of sales and operations, LetsGrow.com. “Our collaboration with Vineland allows for an important expansion in our platform technology to further collect, refine and analyze water usage data that is crop specific. This data is collected in real-time and has implications for long-term growing strategies. Overall, we’re empowering growers by leveraging data that can result in a more profitable business strategy.”

This international collaboration serves to advance Vineland’s mandate to facilitate co-operation and create partnerships that expand innovation and commercialization in horticulture both in Canada and abroad.

About LetsGrow.com Based in the Netherlands with over 20 years serving the horticultural sector, LetsGrow.com’s world-leading data platform provides growers, crop advisers and suppliers worldwide with real-time insights into their cultivation data, supporting their decisions so they can make the right choices for a lucrative, sustainable crop.