Making smart irrigation smarter

We already have a weather forecast-based irrigation and crop advisory system serving more than 100,000 farmers in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh since 2016 and saving about 3km3 of groundwater and improving crop yield. This system sends SMS text messages and the system is independently owned and operated by the government stakeholder agency of each country. My team played the role of capacity building and co-designing of the solution (e.g. see http://www.i-pani.com or http://pani.hmrcweb.com) .  However there is a cost to maintaining the SMS service, which  is about 10,000 USD per year/agency. Because of this cost, the service is unable to spread to all the millions of farmers in a financially sustainable.  Our solution is therefore to identify through GRACE satellite, regions that are experiencing excessive irrigation and help agencies target farmers each growing season in those areas. That way, the already smart irrigation system can be smarter.

We are solving the problem of unsustainable groundwater withdrawal due to excessive irrigation that is causing reduced crop yield and declining groundwater stocks in South Asia. We are approaching this as a problem of changing mindsets of farmers (behavioral change to irrigate based on on need and not intuition) through a solution that is cheap, sustainable and can be independently owned by each country of South Asia. The main factor that is at the root of the problem of excessive irrigation is that farming knowledge/practice is handed down from one generation to another (when we think of scale) and therefore need-based irrigation using weather forecasts/satellites first has to overcome the mental inertia of farmers to adopt a new solution due to the generational mindset that if crops will get destroyed if they are not flooded with water all the time.

It is an SMS-based advisory system where farmer gets a text message on current/future weather conditions (in their lay language) with advisory on how much to irrigate in coming weeks (based on future weather conditions and factor of safety). This service uses a lot of satellite data, numerical weather prediction model (and now GRACE for this solution) and farmer crop/land database with sowing patterns (that are maintained by stakeholder agencies of each South Asian country). The backend of the system computes crop's water demand (evapo-transpiration) as well as crop's water supply (rainfall/soil moisture) to perform a demand-supply assessment. Farmers are told to irrigate when demand> supply and vice versa asked to go easy when supply> demand. Every farmer has a flip or smartphone. Once they get the SMS, they can irrigate accordingly. Our quantitative impact since 2016 has shown that the usage rate (where action is triggered) is 80%, 85% and 78% in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, respectively. Yield has also increased. The system is particularly useful during anamolous weather events such as cyclones during dry seasons when rain is not expected.

Currently the solution serves farmers, mostly marginal farmers in the countries of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. In the latter two countries, it is still in pilot stage. The annual income of these farmers range from 600 to 1200 USD. We have a basic solution that is a service provided by stakeholder agencies for large land-holding farmers and a sensor-based (IoT) solution for small land-holding (marginal) farmers. The sensor based solution is called PANI (provision for advisory on necessary irrigation) and costs about 5 dollars per farmer per year for the set up of the system in a 1 sq km region. Because I am South Asia myself, who grew up in all those countries and speak the local language, and my father was a farmer, I have a much deeper appreciation of the challenges of livelihood faced by these farmers, excellent relationship with government agencies (who look at me as their own) and a PR/outreach/education apparatus (see http://www.saswe.net/cinematography).  We have already mapped what solutions will work and what won't and how they would need to be designed to make it palatable and socially acceptable to farmers.

Our smart irrigation service is already sustainably adopted by at least one government of South Asia. We also know it is working effectively in countries of South Asia, saving approximately about 3km3 of groundwater, increasing yield and anectodally increasing farmer income. But due to SMS costs, we are not able to get the maximum bang for the buck. In this case, the bang is 'sustainable use of groundwater to prevent mining so irrigation can flourish' and the buck is 'SMS cost'. By bringing GRACE satellite, we can now do more targetted messaging of farmers to make smart irrigation even smarter.

The solution is about making smart irrigation smarter and changing farmers' mindset that they do not need to irrigate so much their fields - all by using low hanging fruit and publicly available (free) data and technology

Here the core technology are two items: Satellite and weather models (freely available) to calculate demand for water by crops; and Satellite gravimetry (GRACE) to identify regions that are undergoing excessive irrigation and rapid decline of groundwater table

It is already being used in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and by about 100,000 farmers.

Farmers' mindset about excessive irrigation can only be changed if they are messaged constantly that their crops need a lot less water than they think based on science and weather conditions and that their livelihood is at stake if there is no groundwater left in future.

Barring Pakistan (where the system is serving 100,000 farmers), we hope to reach 40,000-50,000 farmers in India and Bang ladesh in one year and 1 million in 5 years.

Our goal is to make this vision of 'access to water information is a fundamental right of all humans and nations' a reality in South Asia which is my ancestral home. We hope to do this in the next year and 5 years by using low hanging fruits of earth observation data, numerical models, satellites, IoT technology and stakeholder engagement by building on my two decade of experience working in the region.

Mostly financial barriers and building on stakeholder engagement so that I can be in the business of getting out of business and the idea still thrives without me. That has already happened in Pakistan and will hopefully happen in India and Bangladesh.

The three most important requirements to any successful research-to-application solution are relationships, relationships and relationships as honest brokers with agencies that will own and operate the co-designed solutions. We will continue to build on our excellent relationship with stakeholder agencies by leveraging our common ancestry, deep rooted knowledge of the culture, social customs and national aspirations of each South Asian country.

University of Washington where I work as a professor

In my team there are 4 members, one each from each country (Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) and a graduate student at UW.

Four are part-time and one is full-time.

Overseas partners are from Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources, IIT-Kanpur, HMRC(Bangladesh) and Bangladesh Water Development Board.

Yes - my group is called the SASWE Research group and we have been working on this for the past 20 years . See http://www.saswe.net 

We are working with the following organizations since 2016:

1) Pakistan Council for Research in Water Resources (www.pcrwr.gov.pk)

2) Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

3) Kritsnam Technologies-India

4) HMRC Bangladesh

5) Bangladesh Water Development Board

6)USAID

7) NASA

8) Several Philanthropic Foundations like Gordon and Betty Moore (for education) and Ivanhoe Foundation (for water education)

We have two business models.

For large land-holding farmers who own more than an acre we have a coarse-resolution system for irrigation advisory that is already operational. We have provided through volunteering the capacity building for agencies to maintain and handle that system on their own. The cost from our side was one time for training and co-development of the solution before the sustainable uptake. So basically, in this service, the agency (such as PCRWR) provides freely the service to farmers from a permanent budget line in their federal government. Currently there is talk with Asian Development Bank on how to bring in private partnership to make this commercially more viable to 3-4 million farmers by partnering with cellular company (Telenor Pakistan).

For small land holding (marginal) farmers - called PANI (based on IoT sensors), farmers pay 5 USD per year to get the higher resolution irrigation advisory service for their small plot. If farmers desire more premium service (with sensors/camera installed in their plot), they have to pay about 25-50 USD per year. We already have Uttar Pradesh Irrigation Department interested in scaling up PANI to about 10 villages and 2 thousand farmers (from our current pilot of 150 farmers near Kanpur).

I believe access to water information is a fundamental right for all humans and nations and right now we have not yet solved the accessibility problem. It is because of this that farmers are over irrigating and using the groundwater in unsustainable ways. To improve farmer's access to latest science and data to make routine irrigation decisions, I am apply to Solve.

We have completed most of the R&D for bringing in GRACE satellite to our existing smart irrigation service. We have quantified the impact 'theoretically' and shown through model analysis the quantitative impact (amount of water we can REALLY save if we target SMS messaging based on GRACE-identified regions of groundwater decline). We now need to implement the targetted SMS messaging in the real world and then monitor the impact and document the lessons learned.

The partners/orgs are the same ones I mentioned earlier (and mostly from South Asia).

As a film maker I am also working on my latest film animation titled "The Silent Route" which is about migration/refugee and education. The Silent Route is based on a universal message woven into a true story of striving to put ourselves in others’ shoes, build empathy – difficult as it may be – as often times that brings out the magic of humanity when we see ourselves as part of a common fabric of the same worries, joys and happiness.

This universal message is woven into a true story set 50 years ago when there was a raging war with helpless refugees burdened with either rape babies or unwanted pregnancies. I had been financing the production of this ambitious film animation for the past 3 years with the goal that it would raise awareness among us, create a kinder world where we listen and try to understand more than we talk inside our own bubble of judgement. This deck of slides explains the current status of The Silent Route and additional funds needed to complete the animation on refugee/migration issues. The funding need is 23,000 USD to complete the animation. The remainder of the funds will go towards engagement and education of farmers who were once refugees or migrated to a different land (such as in Assaam India where the citizenship act is causing a lot of pain).