association-list

This arti­cle on world­chang­ing, along with some con­ver­sa­tions that I was exposed to on RAGBRAI (where the people that I was riding with were seri­ously into sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture, got me think­ing. So I’m not into the farm­ing thing. I have no affin­ity with the land what­so­ever. How­ever, I’m pretty into com­puter sys­tems, and it dis­ap­points me that there are so few oppor­tu­ni­ties to apply my skills in a socially respon­si­ble manner (or, to be more honest about my level of self­ish­ness, to do so and make a rea­son­able living). Which got me think­ing. It would be pretty inter­est­ing to me to put together some soft­ware to opti­mize drip irri­ga­tion in a few years when solar pow­ered wire­less sen­sors get cheaper. You could even put together an NGO or char­ity around the prod­uct, with opti­mized plans for effec­tively irri­gat­ing ground, dona­tion sub­si­dized kits, vol­un­teer labor (help with putting the sys­tems in place and super­vi­sion for instal­la­tion and repair). The system would work some­thing like this:

• The core: A small, weath­er­proofed system-​​on-​​a-​​board com­puter, pos­si­bly solar pow­ered (or you could just sta­tion it by the pump, where there’s power). Con­tains the con­trol software.

• A vari­able speed com­puter con­trolled pump big enough to push water from the water source to the far­thest edge of the field, or a net­work of them.

• The sen­sors are on stakes, a couple of feet high with solar panels up top. They’re simple soil hygrom­e­ters and some inter­nal diag­nos­tics, and maybe a green/​red led to report health. They’d need to be really cheap, as you’d want to have a fair amount of them.

• Your drip irri­ga­tion equip­ment has some solar pow­ered and wire­lessly con­trolled shunts with caps or bat­ter­ies big enough to actu­ate a couple of times a night if needed, even when there isn’t much sun. They should also be able to report their health. You’d use these for rout­ing water around places where the ground didn’t need to be watered.

That’s pretty much it. You could do a web UI acces­si­ble from a OLPC machine (which could talk to the con­trol center wire­lessly) so the farm­ers could fine tune the system for their crops and local envi­ron­ment, and you could work on a much sim­pler and intu­itive system of con­trol for locales where the level of edu­ca­tion and/​or laptop access is much lower, (but set­ting one person in a vil­lage with one of these lap­tops would likely be enough, as that person could do all of the fine tuning for many farms). The notional orga­ni­za­tion could also have edu­ca­tional ini­tia­tives for improv­ing water use and could also lobby for smarter water use laws around the nation. It could also sub­si­dize itself by offer­ing up a cer­tain (small) per­cent­age of its people (on a rotat­ing basis) as water use con­sul­tants for larger farms (although it’s unclear how desired this ser­vice is). In a world where clean, usable water is grow­ing increas­ingly scarce and hence increas­ingly expen­sive, it seems to me that these sys­tems (espe­cially when sub­si­dized) could pay for them­selves in short order, and would leave more usable excess water in the system for the expan­sion of agri­cul­ture and for use as drink­ing water where it is scarce.