Quality control professionals
calibrate SWIIM irrigation monitoring equipment installed on a farm in northern Colorado. (Photo courtesy of SWIIM)
Farmers in the Central Valley of California base their decisions about what to plant each year on a range of factors, including weather forecasts, commodity prices, “and what their neighbors are doing,” says Daniel Munk, farm adviser for the University of California Cooperative Extension Service in Fresno County. “They consider all these variables, but then there’s still a big roll of the dice.”
These days, the most important and the most uncertain of those variables is water. And this year, amid historic drought conditions, a system that brings greater precision to farmers’ use of that valuable commodity is coming to the Golden State. SWIIM System, a Denver-based company, has developed a service that combines proprietary software and advanced monitoring technology to help growers and water managers make the most of available water resources. (SWIIM stands for Sustainable Water and Innovative Irrigation Management.) The service, already in use in Colorado, also makes it easier for farmers to lease unused water allocations.
To roll out its system on an appropriate scale, SWIIM is working regionally through agricultural trade groups and irrigation districts. “One farm doesn’t create mass social impact. We have to be able to aggregate, conserve, and transfer” water across a wide area, says Kevin France, CEO of SWIIM. Through an arrangement with the Western Growers Association, SWIIM expects to implement its system in several regions of California before the end of this year’s growing season. (Site selection was under way in July.) Over the next three years, France says, SWIIM plans to extend its reach to 400,000 acres in several western states.
France came up with the idea for SWIIM when, in a previous role, he was buying water rights from Colorado farmers. Under what are known as “buy and dry” deals, farmers can sell their historic water rights—to thirsty cities, in many cases—and let their fields go fallow. France came to realize that this practice was hurting rural economies. “It isn’t sustainable to keep drying up farms,” he says. To solve that problem, he explains, he set out to create “a technology that keeps water in agriculture and a system that incentivizes farmers to save.”
The first component of the SWIIM system involves planning software that generates a series of water optimization strategies—changing crops, for example, or altering irrigation practices—for farmers to consider. Once farmers have developed a new water use plan and started to implement it, the system uses precipitation sensors, satellite imagery, and other tools to capture weather and water usage data. SWIIM collaborates with regional groups and water authorities to install and manage this infrastructure. Working with those entities, farmers are now able to calculate how much water reaches crops, how much gets lost to evaporation or runoff, and how much (thanks to conservation efforts) may be available to lease out.
That last feature of the system represents one of its critical benefits. Existing water laws have perpetuated a “use it or lose it” mentality among farmers. Under those laws, water rights can degrade if farmers don’t put their allocated water to “beneficial use”—through irrigation, for example. As a result, farmers have tended to use water (even to the point of wasting it) rather than conserve it and lease it to others. But SWIIM, by accounting for every drop of water over which a farmer has rights, counteracts that perverse incentive. The precise monitoring of water use, France says, “assures state regulators that [farmers are] not gaming the system and assures farmers that they’re not degrading their rights.”
Farmers pay $30 to $80 per acre annually for the SWIIM service. But France, citing the experience of customers in Colorado, suggests that growers who use SWIIM can recoup as much as $500 per acre by leasing conserved water.
The recent drought has put a premium on adopting new tools to track and manage water use. “This year will be an important one to see how growers do,” says Munk. Some Central Valley farmers, he notes, have bulldozed fields that they can’t afford to water. Others are borrowing money to invest in new wells. Still others are buying water at a premium to keep their orchards alive. “They have a good sense of their options,” Munk says. “But are they calculating everything to the maximum? Maybe not yet.”
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.