Powering Real-Time
Agriculture Monitoring

Real-time monitoring and edge computing technologies are now used in almost every industry. But one of the world’s most important sectors has lagged behind when it comes to technology adoption, the agricultural industry.

In 2015, WaterBit set out to “help growers be good stewards of the land through smart agriculture” by developing a monitoring solution that measures soil moisture and executes irrigation remotely with a level of accuracy that has not been possible before. Farms equipped with WaterBit’s technology, have higher crop quality/yields, lower disease rates, reduced soil erosion, and spend less money on water due to optimal delivery methods.

WaterBit began by developing their own in-house system to power their network of smart sensors; but quickly realized that their solution did not have the flexible architecture necessary to quickly setup new rules and track/act on multiple pieces of data at once. Having the agility to quickly and easily respond to development needs was crucial to WaterBit’s success.

By using Vantiq to develop their application, WaterBit was able to have a solution that mirrored what they had previously built (with all of the functionality stated above) in less than seven days. This had previously taken them several months to get to the same spot in the development cycle.

WaterBit and their customers are now able to receive notifications of equipment and crop status in real time. This ability provides benefits in multiple different areas:

Faster diagnosis and repair of malfunctioning equipment

Downtime for sensors can mean the difference between a record yield and losing the entire crop. By developing on Vantiq, WaterBit is able to immediately see when and where a sensor has gone down and send a crew to fix it.

Real-time monitoring of soil moisture increases crop quality & yield

Different crops have different moisture requirements. Allowing farmers to set the optimal moisture levels for different crops leads to better harvests.

Reduced environmental impact

So much of the water we use is wasted, by monitoring and controlling the flow of water we can decrease water usage and its negative environmental effects such as soil erosion, crop disease, and energy use.