Water conservation companies are finding plenty of opportunities in the South’s aridity conditions

By Jeremy Quittner


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Walking through a soybean field in pastoral Georgia’s Flint River Basin, it’s complying to overlook a blue fabric the size and shape of a police car siren session in the brown-red loamy soil. But thanks to a number of aggressive small companies, that cupola is at the center of rapid change in the Southeast, where entrepreneurs are tackling a drought that’s before-mentioned to be the worst the region has seen in 100 years. Today, areas of serious drought stretch from Tennessee and the Carolinas to Kentucky and Virginia, Alabama and Georgia.

The blue house contains a sensor that measures moisture levels in the blemish. Farmers often be obliged to drive around thousands of acres, visiting dozens of probes, to collect data from them. Gathering and analyzing the data can elect days, by which time it’s often too outdated to subsist of much practice.

But this particular sensor is silently transmitting information away from the thicker settlements to one position at the Stripling Irrigation Research Park in Camilla, Ga. There, entrepreneurs are teaming up with researchers to perfect so-called mutable rate irrigation (VRI), combining the data with GPS technology to bear massive pivoting irrigation arms in farmers’ fields to give supply with water to crops with great precision. So well-nigh, 22 farms in the Flint River Basin, Stripling’s home, use VRI, which has helped save 10 billion gallons of water ago 2003. “This illiberal corner of Georgia makes up about a third of whole Georgia’s agricultural irrigation,” says any of Stripling’s water resource specialists, Rad Yager. Pointing to a map of the area in his office, he says, “It’s kind of the epicenter.”

Paul Gupta, the founder of startup Ilinc, and John Overley, the head of sales and business development for carrier Digitel Wireless, represent just two of about half a dozen small companies that are in operation by researchers at Stripling to develop systems for farmers and others with extensive watering needs, such as the owners of golf courses. The duo’s system transmits real-time data directly from the fields to the Web, so farmers and other customers can lines of rails conditions via laptops or PDAs instead of driving around collecting information. This allows them to deliver water quickly to where it’s needed, and to stop consumption furnish with water in areas that are already saturated.

Gupta, an engineer and specialist in remote data transmission who used to work in the auto industry, figured similar technology could be used in geoponics for water conservation. “I wanted to save our precious, finite means,” he says. His system, FarmLinc, comprises the hardware and software that lets sensors transmit data to the Web. Digitel is building the wireless infrastructure to allow like a thing to happen in country areas. The 85-person, $25 the multitude carrier recently installed a 100-square-mile wireless “cloud” in the Flint River Basin, with radio towers stuck on everything from grain elevators to water towers. The cloud eventually will cover five counties and 2,000 square miles. “I like to assert that which is going forward in husbandry [here] is like what Henry Ford did with the Model T,” says Overley.

Stripling is not the only place entrepreneurs in the South are sad to reinvent the fashion the region uses water. Some 80 small businesses, many of them working on water usage, got their begin at the Center of Innovation for Agriculture, a affair incubator in Tifton, Ga. Bill Boone, a native Georgian who runs the incubator, says the challenge for entrepreneurs is twofold: Not only must they develop innovative products unless they likewise must persuade farmers to use them. “The farmer is a hard person to change,” says Boone. “His daddy strained him to go out and see what the plant looks like, and kick the dirt with his boots and discern how deep the moisture goes.” That’s not stopping entrepreneurs, whether they’re working from Stripling, an incubator, or entirely on their have a title to.

A PARCHED CITY

While agriculture uses roughly two-thirds of altogether water, cities also are suffering. By 2007, Lake Lanier, a reservoir that provides Atlanta with much of its water, had reached critical lows, and in that place was a real possibility the incorporated town might run out of water.

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