The challenge
Boreholes, reservoirs and irrigation blocks are spread across the farm. Every morning a farmhand drives the route to start pumps, check reservoir levels and look for burst lines. When a pump trips at night, nobody knows until the trees show stress.
Pumps run on timers rather than demand, so reservoirs overflow on cool days and run low in heatwaves. Electricity is spent pumping water that isn’t needed, often at peak tariff.
The farm’s water-use licence requires abstraction records, which today are pieced together from meter readings written in a notebook.
Our approach
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Site walk
We map every borehole, reservoir, valve and irrigation block, note where mains power and signal are available, and record each borehole’s safe yield.
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Remote stations
Solar-powered RTUs at each borehole and reservoir read water levels, flow and pump status. Where there’s no cellular signal, licence-free radio links them back to the farm office.
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Automatic control
Borehole pumps run against reservoir level and safe yield, not the clock, with dry-run protection on every pump. Irrigation blocks follow programmes the farm manager adjusts from a phone.
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Records and alerts
Pump trips, low levels and unusual flow raise alerts by SMS or app. Daily abstraction per borehole is logged automatically for the water-use licence.
System architecture
How the layers connect, from the people using the system down to the equipment in the field.
- Farm manager on mobile
- Farm office
- Licence reports
- SCADA with mobile app
- Irrigation programmes
- Abstraction reports
- Licence-free radio or LoRaWAN across the farm
- LTE from the farm office
- Solar-powered RTUs
- Borehole pump controllers
- Irrigation valve controllers
- Borehole level sensors
- Flow meters
- Reservoir level sensors
- Main-line pressure
What we’d deploy
- Solar-powered RTUs at every borehole and reservoir
- Level-based pump control with dry-run protection
- Irrigation programmes adjustable from a phone
- Flow metering on every borehole for abstraction records
- SMS and app alerts for pump trips, low levels and burst lines
- Pumping scheduled away from peak tariff where storage allows
Target outcomes
Targets we would design and report against, not measured results from a named client. Actual results depend on the baseline established in the audit.
