Verdi technology enables plant- level irrigation control.
A plant’s life depends on the right amount of water. Too much or too little leads to disease, poor fruit quality, and plant death. It’s time to give plants the right amount of water, easily, reliably, and affordably. Irrigation is often the most time-consuming task for growers but with Verdi’s new automation technology, this will change.
Until recently, only the largest growers could afford automated irrigation. Smaller farmers were left manually turning on valves or trusting timers. However, Verdi, a company born out of UBC’s startup incubator HATCH, is changing this narrative. Verdi brings automation to everyone, making this beneficial technology affordable and accessible for all types of growers.
“They use far-out-there ideas; one of them was plant-level irrigation,” Kozak says of Google’s X and why the prototype that led to a contract with E & J Gallo was created. “We have over 1,000 acres in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and California using our systems.”
Automated irrigation was invented decades ago, but very few farms in the Pacific Northwest use it.
“Turning on and off valves and pumps is just one of the four things we do very well,” he says.
In addition to reliable irrigation timing, the Verdi system helps growers create data-based irrigation schedules, detects system leaks and breaks, and delivers data on water use. Data leads to water savings which leads to cost savings.
All this is done without the need to bury wires, install solar panels, or change valves.
“We have ultra-low power and wireless controllers,” he says. “That’s the new technology. We’re cheaper and less complex than existing solutions. This is something growers have never seen before.”
