Intelligent Irrigation System for Low-cost Autonomous Water Control in Small-scale Agriculture

Intel-IrriS is a PRIMA project from Section 2 Multitopic 2020 Thematic Area 1-Water management addressing low cost, lean solutions for enhancing irrigation efficiency of small-scale farms.

Small-scale farming has an enormous contribution to food security and to rural economy. However, smallholders usually face a number of constraints that are impeding their productivity, profitability and contribution to economic growth.

Water resource is one of the major constraints and the situation is foreseen to worsen due to water shortage in relation with current excessive use and climate change. Controlled and improved irrigation can save water while maximising plant growth and yield.

Intel-IrriS will provide the smallholder farmers a more efficient management of its available water by deploying of an open, low-cost and autonomous irrigation control system based on IoT and smart technologies. The irrigation process to decide/suggest how much water is needed to maintain the optimal production potential without water wasting can be adapted (i) for a particular crop, (ii) at a particular moment and (iii) for a given soil type and condition because it will be seconded by algorithms predicting the behaviour of the complex soil/plant/atmosphere system.

Get the PRIMA 2020 booklet where INTEL-IRRIS is presented in pages 90-91.

This project has received funding from PRIMA and the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.