Smart farming at an affordable price

An Industry Insight feature with i-Linc

Historically, farmers have had to physically inspect crop conditions on the farm to determine if an action is needed to be taken and to assess when to irrigate and for how long. With advanced real-time remote monitoring solutions, the physical inspections can be eliminated as these systems will enable farmers to make intelligent irrigation decisions, says Paul Gupta.

The US Department of Agriculture has identified water management improvements as a primary agricultural policy objective. Water savings of 20 to 30 percent through improved water use efficiency could offset the ever-increasing water demand in the agriculture industry. Evaluating water use through real-time remote monitoring solutions would be a necessary component of any SMART irrigation system. Our research for SMART irrigation solutions over three years ago concluded that the systems available in the marketplace were based on proprietary hardware, software, and communication platforms. In addition, they were expensive and not user friendly. It was evident that these factors were contributing to limited market deployment and acceptance worldwide.

These factors led us to believe that unless a new and uniquely different solution was developed, this very important technology with all its benefits for agriculture would be limited. Similar to the progress and development of Personal Computers (PCs) in the early 1980s, the PCs in the marketplace at that time were based on proprietary technologies, expensive, had small market shares, and were not ready for a bigger market. The success of the IBM PC was based on its open architecture, utilization of off-the-shelf components, and it was targeted to a mass market.

The Solution

i-Linc Technologies (“i-Linc”) innovative solutions, FarmLinc & TurfLinc, have incorporated the latest technologies available today targeted for the agriculture and turf grass (golf course) industries. i-Linc’s real-time, web-based solutions help optimize water used for irrigation, increase crop yields, and improve efficiency and productivity. These secured and easy-to-use solutions allow users to monitor data in real-time from sensors, such as soil moisture, temperature, salinity, etc., and provide ability to better manage resources located in remote farms and golf courses via the internet using a desktop/laptop or a web-enabled phone or PDA at anytime, anywhere in the world.

Features

i-Linc’s solutions are based on open-architecture and designed as modular, flexible, scalable, and globally deployable. That means these solutions have capability to integrate with industry standard hardware or software, offers multiple functional modules, and it can be deployed in multiple farms and multiple languages worldwide. Other key design factor in i-Linc’s solutions was that it had to support the Internet and its ‘ecosystem’, such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and other unlicensed radio frequencies. All these factors make i-Linc’s solutions not so much revolutionary, but evolutionary.

Advantages

Major benefits of i-Linc’s solutions include:

• Up to 50% savings in water, fuel, and labor resources
• Up to 30% improvement in crop yield with better quality
• Major improvement in efficiency and productivity
• A contributution to ongoing efforts to ameliorate the food crisis globally

Conclusion

i-Linc believes that integration of the latest technologies using an open-architecture platform will lead to much broader market acceptance of such solutions globally. With the productivity and crop yield improvements along with savings in water, energy, and labor resources, i-Linc’s real-time solutions will help farmers make better decisions. The bottom-line is that i-Linc’s solutions would help improve the way farmers run their business today, so they can remain competitive or become more competitive in the world.

Paul Gupta, President & CEO i-Linc Technologies, Inc, has over 28 years of experience at GE, GM, Allied Signal, and Hitachi Corporations – managing businesses in the software, automation, and telemetry areas. With FarmLinc & TurfLinc open-architecture products, i-Linc provides the ‘Missing Link’, which will change the way businesses are carried out today in the agriculture industry. For more information, phone (877) 454 6277, email info@iLincTech.com or visit www.ilincwireless.com.