South Africa - Cellphone helps reduce irrigation costs

By: Fidelis Zvomuya, AfricaNews reporter in Pretoria, South Africa, photo: Martha Piqueras

Small scale sugar cane farmers in South Africa have managed to potentially reduce their direct irrigation costs by US$300 per hectare thanks to the use of a high cellphone technology system that is providing them with practical, real up to date information about when to irrigate their crops.

The system called My Canesim employs automatic weather stations, the internet and cellular technology that uses a newly formulated concept, dynamic depletion level to manage irrigation on large fields allowing spatial and temporal extrapolation of point simulations to other parts of the field and to future days within an irrigation cycle.

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