@Indi_food asked me the following question:

Just imagine the gains if flood irrigation changed to drip feeding that only initiated when soil moisture reached xx and evaporation levels went below xx. Is this the kind of thing that arduino can be programmed to do?

Yes! That’s exactly the type of thing arduino could do. Let’s flesh that scenario out more:

Agroduino is hooked into set of pressurized drip irrigation lines running to raised bed vegetables. The vegetables species and varieties are chosen to be drought tolerant (great in a place like New Mexico). A set of sensors are reading soil moisture and growing conditions. Data is sent to a mysql cloud database, then fed out over the internet to a hand-held Android device. Android reads data stream, then alerts you when conditions drop below certain thresholds. The producer monitors closely. A number of factors are taken into consideration:

• Available water, either stored or via irrigation
• Irrigation schedule (important in places where water is shared)
• Drought tolerance of the plants
• Growth stage (need more water after pollination in tomatoes and squash, for example, but not too much to avoid blossom end rot)
• Economic value of crop (some beds may have high value crops, other lower value crops; some may have greater investment put into them)

If the conditions are right, the producer can control how much water the plants receive with precision, all from the handheld device.

The granularity of control really makes it worthwhile. The difficulty right now is the immaturity of the hardware/software stacks. As a producer, you shouldn’t have to learn ac/dc circuits to be able to benefit from this type of system. You don’t have to learn this to use a computer, or a cellphone, why should you for these devices? They should be plug and play with existing digital electronics hardware/software stacks that we are using now. But they are not. Not yet. So the ROI isn’t there yet for a standard producer, many of whom are struggling to keep their heads above water. We’re in the stage right now where people were with home computers 40 years ago…really wonky and geeky, not yet mainstream. Same could be said for 3D printing. But it will go fast, fast now, because we’re all connected and writing open source code and we can produce open hardware dirt cheap in China.

After having been in this space for a long time, I am acutely aware that sustainable agriculture is one of the most promising and underfunded initiatives underway around the world. And because most people who are undertaking it are landless and poor, or land rich and cash poor, there is little actual resource available to invest in acquiring land, much less improving it.

So we have to find another way. We have to accept that the land base we are going to be managing, for the foreseeable future, is going to be small, small, small except for the few rich folks who are into organic and/or support it because it’s the right thing to do. They are the minority. So how much food can we produce on an acre? 10 acres? 100? We need to feed millions in small spaces. That’s not easy, or probably possible, but if we have a shot at it, then we’ll have to use every technological tool at our disposal.