Case Study: Maximising production from our limited water resource and unlocking the power of variable rate irrigation INDUSTRY: AGRICULTURE AND IRRIGATION The Need: Reducing the water required to irrigate crops, thereby increasing the land area that can be irrigated from existing water takes, and reducing the nutrient leaching that can result from over irrigation and cause groundwater contamination. The Solution: Lincoln Agritech has been awarded Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment science funding to develop a novel, cost-effective moisture sensor that is capable of remotely sensing soil moisture under pasture at the metre scale, while mounted on an ATV or centre pivot irrigator. Specific challenges include separating the soil surface reflection signal, which indicates the moisture level of the soil, from all the other signals returned to the sensor from various surfaces in the environment. This exciting new technology overcomes the challenge of embedding multiple in-ground soil moisture sensors across paddocks by using fewer remote sensors, which are moved on mobile structures such as centre pivot irrigators. This technology will provide significant benefits to farming systems in the future as a new way of informing variable rate irrigation systems.