Ceres AI bundled precision irrigation tools can minimize waste and maximize profitability

Date:11-06-2024

Ceres AI offers customizable solutions that prescribe exactly how much water to apply every week for each irrigation zone. Bundling irrigation optimization tools can increase accuracy, scalability and cost-effectiveness, while ultimately helping to minimize waste and maximize grower profitability.

Irrigation Optimization Tools combine custom crop coefficients derived from aerial imagery with evapotranspiration forecasts to calculate the optimal number of inches of water to use. Data is tailored to specific fields, irrigation zones and local weather forecasts.

Historical water usage can serve as a guide for irrigation, but more dynamic data solutions are now needed amid water scarcity and the changing climate. Sensor companies that offer precision irrigation solutions calculate water requirements based on in-ground measurements, but they don’t capture field variability. So, these solutions may overestimate or underestimate water requirements for parts of the field that vary from the measurement location.

Whether from a bird’s eye view of a field or drilled down to the level of an individual irrigation zone, the combination of these tools can be the custom solution to a successful irrigation program in 2025:

Irrigation Optimization: A closed-loop solution

Irrigation optimization takes a more targeted approach, providing customers with completely customized irrigation recommendations based on the actual water requirements of their plants as measured through Ceres AI water demand maps. 

A data table, weekly plan and field thumbnails are the main components of this Ceres solution:

• The data table presents the evapotranspiration forecast for the coming week, the crop coefficient values from the most recent water demand map flight and a custom total evapotranspiration forecast in inches of water summed over a calendar week.

  
  

• The downloadable weekly plan enables growers to share forecast data easily with their irrigation teams. These reports are also useful when trying to report on water conservation efforts, helping sustainability teams to track, monitor and report on their water usage best practices.

  
  

• The linked water demand maps take growers to the flight overlay so that they can get a deeper understanding of water messes per irrigation zones. These zones can also be customized as per the needs of growers.

The weekly summary of inches of water allows growers to better anticipate irrigation needs when ordering water. The linked water demand map enables growers to target the water needs of plants that are less able to weather parched conditions, which is especially valuable when and where water is scarce. The custom recommendations that Ceres AI Irrigation Optimization delivers are particularly useful in the early season, or for young trees where canopy sizes are smaller because Ceres calculates crop coefficients through a direct measure of fractional cover.

Sensor integrations: Farm data in one place

For the 2025 season, Ceres AI's industry-leading aerial imagery and analytics tools will integrate with other precision irrigation tools, including moisture probes and weather stations.

The ability to see multiple sources of irrigation data in one place makes it easier for busy growers to identify issues, improve uniformity and uncover opportunities to protect farm profits.

″When water is scarce, optimizing irrigation depends on seeing the full picture of variability across operations. Yet, there’s never enough time in the day to have eyes on every plant in the field,″ says Ramsey Masri, Ceres AI CEO. ″With this integration, growers get the full picture of their irrigation performance so they can optimize water use and hit their management goals.″

Customized approach for your crop water needs 

Using Ceres AI Water Stress insights, citrus growers fine-tune their irrigation strategy to improve yield, uniformity, and quality over time.

Growers gain a significant advantage if they know exactly where they can reduce water use with the least impact on crop yields and quality, especially in times of water scarcity.

This type of prioritization is critical to the bottom line for most operations, yet it often comes down to guesswork based on trial and error and estimates informed by crop coefficients. While a valuable starting point, generic Kc values derived from research test plots will not account for the real-world variability present in any individual field.

To address that issue, Ceres AI will offer water demand maps for orchards and vineyards in the 2025 season. Built from scientific-grade aerial imagery and crop-specific data models, water demand maps provide an intuitive, at-a-glance reference to guide irrigation scheduling decisions.

Performance trends and quantification tools

 

Rounding out our irrigation optimization offerings for 2025 are an expanded range of analytics tools, anchored in the plant-level data that sets Ceres AI apart.

Growers can drill down to assess the performance of specific varietals or rootstocks and easily compare crop health between fields and over time. Especially for large operations with lean teams working across multiple locations, the ability to quickly quantify the potential impact of management decisions will change how managers prioritize day-to-day tasks, as well as long-term investments in farm infrastructure.

These irrigation optimization tools will be available to all customers in 2025.