Lumo's Smart Irrigation Technology Featured on CNBC
In September of 2022, Lumo was featured as one of the promising startups that's tackling water scarcity with its smart irrigation technology.
Below is a condensed version that has been cut and edited using footage from the original video. The original, full segment video can be viewed here - https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/09/22/how-these-startups-are-fixing-water-waste-on-farms.html
Lumo Featured on CNBC
Transcription
Narrator
The Western United States is entering dangerous territory afflicted by a mega drought so severe. It is the driest two decades in at least 1200 years.
Emma Newburger
Reservoir levels of plummeted. We've seen worsening wildfires and states like California, Arizona, and Oregon.
Narrator
Devon Wright experienced firsthand the challenges of the water crisis. When he planted an 80 tree orchard on his property, he quickly depleted his groundwater supply.
Devon Wright
I was trying to manually irrigate my crop and sometimes just make mistakes and leave my water running. I'd run my well dry and very quickly realized like, Wow, you can't make a mistake when you're irrigating or else you could quickly run out your water. And that kind of woke me up to the bigger issue. Well, this is happening everywhere.
Lumo is a series of internet connected smart valves, and the system gives growers easy access to irrigation, automation, tracking and reporting so they can quickly and easily access precision irrigation. Most important thing is they can automate those valves. Today a lot of farmers are out there turning them on and off manually. That saves them a lot of cost, and it also allows them to be very precise about the water that they're distributing. It is powered first and foremost by a battery and solar. It has a computer inside that is connected to a valve, as well as some sensors, I think like a flow meter. They stay connected to the cloud. We can allow our farmers to access them through a mobile app or a web app.
Devon Wright
We queue up a a block, so we just do that here by saying, Okay, we want to go, you know, block two, we picked 30 minutes, we queue it, but now it's got a 30 minute run that was, that's, that's it. Hit the schedule and now it's running. And these lines will all fill up. And then we're tracking that flow through here. Total, total
Devon Wright
Remote control, which is a real big benefit. We've saved easily 30% of our water that we were using for, for irrigation simply by removing some of the ma manmade error. We think that's really valuable to the farmer, but we also think that's gonna become really valuable to other stakeholders like communities, governments, water boards, irrigation districts, because they're all asking how much water are we using? And they don't know. They just have to estimate.
Narrator
It's currently testing its second generation model with a small pilot program. One user, Kurt Beitler of Boheme Wines has six valves to water his six acres.
Kurt Beitler
We saw an opportunity to try some of this tech on one of my vineyard blocks, and it's really been wonderful. The biggest improvement with Lumo for my farming operation has been the, the convenience and precision with how we're irrigating. We've safely reduced excess use of our water by at least 20%. It might be as much as 30 or 40%.
Narrator
Boheme has its system program to automatically irrigate at night.
Kurt Beitler
We take great effort to irrigate in the nighttime so we get greater uptake in utilization of the water by the vines.
Narrator
And for specialty growers such as Butler's Vineyard, the precision system offers greater control over the growing conditions
Kurt Beitler
With optimal use of, of water, we're optimizing our, our finished wine quality. So this is one more very valuable tool in the overall project. This kind of technology that in fact will be the solution to potential water crisis or shortage of water. If farmers have access to technology that will help them better utilize the water, we could have a very significant impact as a whole on net usage in the state.
Learn More
To learn more about Lumo's smart irrigation technology, contact us here or email [email protected]