Joining Lumo: Using Tech to Make Life Easier for Vineyard Managers

I need to be honest with you about something…I had the idea for Lumo ten years ago.

Well, that might be an overstatement. But at some point, I realized the flow meter was key for automation accountability.

In fact, I’d bet you half the vineyard managers in Napa have had that idea at one point or another, because we’ve all found ourselves at the altar of the irrigation gods, praying that nothing is going terribly wrong with that automated timer system we set up a week ago and haven’t had a chance to go back to check on.

And sure, from the outside looking in, you might wonder what would drive a vineyard manager to use a system with no built-in accountability, no remote control, no leak alerts or visibility into how much water you’re applying. Why would you put yourself in that position? It’s obviously not where you want to be.

Of course it’s not. But it’s a tough place to avoid.

The Rock and the Hard Place

You see, when it comes to irrigation, vineyard managers have been stuck between a rock and a hard place for a long time.

The rock is doing it manually, which sucks, not just because it still leaves you with a lack of visibility into how much water you’re putting down, but also just because it takes forever. It’s error prone and inefficient. Especially if it’s a long drive out to the ranch. No one has that kind of time. There’s too much to do and too few hours in the day.

Automation becomes the obvious answer…but that’s the hard place.

Because automated timers don’t provide accountability. You can put in your schedule, but there’s no way to know whether it’s being carried out as intended. You don’t know if a line broke or a valve was left closed. You could come back to a flooded field, or a desert.

So you automate and pray…which is when the idea for Lumo hits you, “Sure would be great if we had a flow meter for accountability!”

It’s frustrating to me that it’s taken agtech so long to solve the irrigation problem.

I don’t work as a vineyard manager any more, but I love the outdoors and being out in the field. I love growing plants and playing a part in the cycle of the seasons. It’s rewarding to be there from the beginning and to get to see your hard work through the season eventually pay off during harvest.

But it was also just a really hard job. 60-hour workweeks. Always on call. I don’t think most people appreciate just how stressful farming can be at times. How much pressure there is to produce.

Over the years, I slowly found my way out of the vineyard and into agtech, mostly because I really do believe that there’s a lot of potential to use the technology we have today to make people’s jobs easier. That’s something I’ve been interested in for a long time.

But there’s also still a disconnect between ag and tech. More often than not agtech companies are still building solutions and then searching for problems, even though that way of doing things tends to produce lots of cool tech and little in the way of practical benefit.

So when my friend Ernie first mentioned Lumo to me, I was a skeptic, wary that it would just be a bunch of tech bros who didn’t really know what problem they were trying to solve.

But then I checked out their website and learned that they were all about smart valves with flow meters for built-in accountability…and immediately thought, “Hey! That’s my idea!”

And then I started talking with Devon, Lumo’s founder and CEO, and Ishan, Lumo’s Senior Product Manager, and it quickly became clear that they actually know what they’re doing and that they actually know what problem they’re solving. In fact, I know Devon won’t be mad about me saying that Lumo was my idea because he would be the first person to tell you that he got the idea by working as an irrigator and speaking with growers directly.

In other words, it was obvious that Lumo wasn’t your typical agtech product, team or company, and I slowly started to believe that this Lumo thing is legit and that I needed to be a part of it.

Lumo is the solution I would’ve wanted as a vineyard manager.

If Lumo had existed when I was still managing vineyards, I don’t know if I would’ve stayed at it longer or not. It’s hard to say.

But I can tell you for certain that it would’ve made my life ten times easier.

I can still remember one time, I’m working at a vineyard management company and have this ranch way out in the middle of nowhere. Now, an important quirk of that system was that they had the water for all their landscaping tied into the vineyard manifold.

Anyway, I didn’t have the time to be driving out there every other day, so I set up some timers to automate the irrigation runs. I knew it wasn’t perfect, but there wasn’t anything better.

So two weeks go by and then I get this frantic call from the winery owner about how he had just put in all this new landscaping and now all his plants were dead because they hadn’t gotten any water in two weeks!

News to me.

It turned out that someone had closed the valve to the main tank and the entire vineyard hadn’t gotten any water for two weeks either. And now here I am, trying to explain to my customer that I did this to try to save him money and avoid having to charge him for all that driving, and instead I’m getting chewed out for his brand new landscaping plants being dead.

It sucked. But that was the situation you were stuck in.

If I had had Lumo at the time, I would’ve received a text saying there was no flow on my very first irrigation and avoided the whole fiasco.

At Lumo, I do get to make vineyard managers’ jobs easier.

Since joining Lumo, I’ve been working as an Account Manager, which does involve some selling, but also a lot of hands-on work in the field supporting our smart valves and ensuring irrigations run smoothly.

And it’s amazing to see the difference in the field. The level of visibility is unreal.

The other morning, a block was recording no flow, so I sent a text to the customer and it turned out a manual valve had been left closed. Customer gets it opened, flow shoots up to normal. Problem solved. That’s what built-in accountability does. That’s the difference having real-time alerts and support can make.

An even cooler example. The other day I was reviewing a customer’s flow data with Ernie and we see a block with lower flow than normal. So we check back and see that a manual irrigation had run a couple hours before. We think, “Huh? Maybe a fertigation? And maybe that fertilizer injection clogged the filter?”

Sure enough, we ask the customer, they confirm that’s exactly what happened, clean the filter, and two minutes later, the flow rate is back to normal.

These are things that you wouldn’t be able to see with any other system. Heck, these are things you wouldn’t be able to see even if you were in the vineyard! It’s hard to tell how much water is dripping from emitters just by eye. Having a flow meter on every block changes the game. You can irrigate automatically, with accountability and a whole new level of precision.

Lumo smart valves help vineyard managers get out of the irrigation pickle that I always found myself in five years ago working as a vineyard manager. It’s a way to get out from between the rock and the hard place, and enter into a world where they can not only automate their irrigation and save a bunch of time, but more importantly, they can see how their system is performing and how much water is being applied to each block. They can control their system from wherever they are and can schedule irrigations at whatever time works best. And they get real-time alerts about all the things that they used to lie awake worrying about at night.

With Lumo, vineyard managers no longer need to pray at the altar of the irrigation gods. And they no longer have to daydream about a system with built-in flow meters.

That system exists. And it’s making the job of vineyard management easier by the day.

That’s why I got into agtech in the first place, and it’s why I’m proud to have joined Lumo.

If you're a vineyard manager looking for a precision irrigation system with built-in accountability, like the kind Andy wish he had years ago, you can request a demo here or contact us at [email protected]