Characterizing Water Use Along the Agricultural Value Chain Using an Autonomous Environmental Sensing Platform and LoRaWAN Telemetry

Reducing water use in agriculture requires better a more robust characterization of water used in distinct stages of delivering a crop to market. While frameworks exist to characterize water use in terms of green water (i.e., soil moisture regenerated through precipitation) and blue water (i.e., soil moisture regenerated through irrigation), little attention has focused on post-harvest water use, which can be a considerable component of the overall water footprint of producing a vegetable crop to the point of consumption. Here we present an environmental sensing platform consisting of (i) field-based nodes that transmit climatic data, irrigation timings and volumes, and soil moisture dynamics, and (ii) post-harvest nodes that transmit water use related to water volumes used for crop washing and other tasks. The nodes transmit data via LoRaWAN, a low power wide-area network protocol for "Internet of Things" connected devices. In this presentation we will summarize field-based and post-harvest water use at UBC Farm, a diversified organic farm, collected during the 2019 growing season. Future developments for the sensing platform will include a smart-irrigation implementation to evaluate crop performance under data-driven irrigation strategies.