It may be difficult to put your trust in pushing a couple of buttons on your smartphone when it comes to something as important as irrigating your crops.

That’s why Clay Smith, a producer from Walcott in Greene County, Ark., checked his fields to make sure a remote on-and-off app was actually turning an irrigation well on or off during a study on his family’s farm in 2021.

Smith and Joe Massey, research agronomist with the USDA-ARS Delta Water Management Research Unit, set up the study to help determine whether different stages of automation can help growers save water and money on irrigation.

“These are all corn fields, planted no-till with a cover crop system,” said Smith, who explained the study during a presentation for the Arkansas Soil and Water Education Conference, which was held online this year. (To see the presentation, visit www.arkswec.com and click on the 24th annual Arkansas Soil and Water Education Conference icon.)

“These fields are on electric wells, and we compared fields A and B and C and D with B and D having the remote on-and-off from the app and A and C being controlled manually,” said Smith, who displayed the fields on a map for the presentation.

Smith noted that Field D was difficult to manage from an irrigation standpoint because the well is located on the back side of the field.

“I would go to the app and turn the wells on B and D on or off depending on what I was doing,” he said. “Then on A and C I went to the wells and manually turned them on or off. On B and D I didn’t have to go out there, but I did the first few times to make sure the app was working.

“It was awesome to be able to use the Crop Link app on my phone and turn those wells on or off after I became confident in the system. The last two or three irrigations I just used my phone when it was time to start or stop the wells.”

Water savings

In the first year of the study in 2021, Smith saved about an acre-inch of water between the manual and remote shutoff regimens for Fields A and B and about two acre-inches of water in the comparisons for Fields C and D. Each well had a flow meter, and the researchers measured the season-long water usage for each field.

“Again, the only difference was whether he had the ability to shut the well off remotely,” said Massey. “In theory, he would cut the remote-controlled fields off sooner although most of his fields are set to run on 12-hour sets. But, as you know, he may not always be able to get to them at the optimal time.”

Another factor is that the Smiths “do a great job with their irrigation,” said Massey. “In fact, they’ve placed in several of the corn and Most Crop Per Drop Irrigation contests. This year’s results are reflecting very efficient water use. So we’re really only talking about shaving maybe an inch or two of water off their very low water use.”

Statistically, the measurements weren’t different at the 95% confidence level, but Massey believes the trend is showing water savings are possible by moving to increasing automation of crop irrigation.