(Continued from Nov. 2, 2020)
FOR LACK of a better term, we could say that the present method of rice farming is “flood irrigation”, meaning to say that the rice crops are surrounded by water from planting time to harvest time. Under that method, programmability and addressability is of no use, because there is no more demand for periodic water delivery.
There is, however, a lesser known alternative to “flood irrigation”, and that is drip irrigation, a method that could use programmability and addressability. This other method has an additional advantage, and that is the addition of liquid fertilizers to the water, hence the term “fertigation”.
In some cases, it would also be possible to add liquid insecticides to the combination of water and fertilizers. All told, there are more savings that could be derived because the delivery of the three ingredients is demand driven.
Looking back, it could be said that Singapore became an intelligent city because it was networked from the very start, as if the entire island was engineered to function like one giant motherboard. That is how it is in Israel. The agricultural areas became intelligent farms because the farm grids were programmed like giant motherboards.
That is how the farms became computerized, therefore automated. From an overall perspective however, it could be said that networking is just one part of the computerization. Putting it another way, the connected network is just one part of the system, because the other parts are the software applications and the data centers.
To cut a long story short, content is still king, because it is data and information that produces the value added, being the bottom line of it all.
As far as I know, the Israelis have databases that contain everything that there is to know about their agricultural areas, among which are soil analyses, wind factors, rainfall density and local temperatures.
Simply put, the Israelis would always have the data and information needed to decide what crops to plant in what farm grid depending on the time of the year, and depending as well on the supply and demand for these crops at the time of the scheduled harvests.
Since moisture data and humidity data are also available to the Israeli farmers at any given time, they would always know which areas of the farm grids would need to be sent water using the programmable and addressable systems.
Before I could be accused of advocating the banning of rice farming, I would like to make it clear that we should encourage rice farming only in areas where the supply of fresh water is not scarce, and is not competing with the other uses of fresh water.
And where we have a supply of fresh water even if it is good, we should still ration it by way of drip irrigation, so that we could save water in the long run. And while we are still at it, let us be aware that it is not only rice that needs fresh water.
Obviously, fruits and vegetable crops need fresh water too, and so do poultry and livestock. We need to balance the supply and demand of fresh water, because we might just end up with a lot of rice with no water to cook it with./PN
