Success Stories

When Lee Rain approached Carmen Merlino Jr., President of Oakcrest Farms, in 2011 about implementing Plant-triggered Irrigation methodologies on his Hammonton, NJ blueberry farm, Merlino was initially attracted to the idea mainly as an issue of convenience. Automating irrigation and fertilization in the field furthest from his main facility would save time and effort. For Lee Rain, it was an important opportunity to test and prove its plant-triggered irrigation methodologies could optimize efficiencies and resource use throughout the growing cycle.

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In 2009, Charles Corey, Farm Director for the Irrigation Research Foundation (IRF) in Yuma, Colorado, came together with a research team from Lee Rain for a multi-year study of precision deficit irrigation in corn production. The principle objectives of the study? To discover if analytical plant-triggered irrigation and monitoring of corn crops can improve present day watering regimes and practices and if so, by how much.

For Lee Rain, the study represented a critical test of the firm’s patented Adviroguard™ software, an agricultural data analysis program designed to identify and guide the implementation of improved operational efficiencies. The conventional amount of irrigation water applied in the Yuma region is estimated to be 22.4 acre inches of water (608,815 gallons of water) per acre or more than 76 million gallons of water per pivot. Using a fully automated irrigation system which employed soil profile analysis to trigger irrigation events to meet the ...

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Dr. Gilbert Miller, a horticulturist and researcher at Clemson University’s Edisto Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Blackville, S.C., partnered with the research team from Lee Rain to help solve one of the fundamental challenges facing growers: discovering when to water and how much water should be applied to achieve optimal watermelon yields.

Their research focused on determining the appropriate soil moisture set points for the automation of drip irrigation scheduling in South Carolina’s sandy costal soils. The team installed soil moisture sensors to monitor the water profile of the watermelon crops. More importantly the data gathered from the field would be analyzed utilizing Lee Rain's own patented Adviroguard™ software with the objective of identifying optimal operational efficiencies for watermelon production.

DISCOVERIES
By monitoring and analyzing the plants’ responses to irrigation with the aid of Adviroguard™, the team was able to obtain a detailed picture of how and when the plants were utilizing ...

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