Pivot irrigation monitoring

At its simplest a pivot, or linear irrigation system, is a pipe, a pump, and some wheels. The bigger your pipe, the bigger your pump and water resource needs to be. Water is heavy. Moving it around a large acreage is not easy. The original pivot systems took mechanical skills already in use on farms and applied them to building water transportation tools. 

The basic principle has remained almost unchanged for 100 years, or more (patent #1150144). Which brings us to the era of IoT, remote management and automation. IoT offers a totally new level of tooling that fits on top of your current pivot or linear run. Most of it is sensible stuff, like flow, volume and speed, but you can do much more. 

You receive notifications if there are issues with particular pivots or nozzles (in the event that you have multiple pivots running at once, this is a real gamechanger). You can add other sensors like weather, crop, or soil monitoring tools. Use the IoT control center to run all this in real-time.

Of course you can set pivot speed, fertigation rates and use the IoT to run predictive maintenance, but the principle behind it all is using less manual labor, while optimising your resources and delivering the right amount of nutrients. The end goal has not changed, but the tools have improved.