FIGARO's Precision Irrigation Platform Presents Major Water and Energy Savings

TEL AVIV, Israel, June 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Field tests of the FIGARO new precision agriculture Decision Support System (DSS) carried out in six countries over a period of three years indicate that the FIGARO platform can provide significant water and energy savings while leading to increased production and yield.

The EU-Funded FIGARO project preliminary results were obtained while field testing the application of FIGARO components during the development period. The current fourth season of the project is demonstrating the integrated FIGARO Platform in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Denmark and Israel on tomatoes, maize, citrus and cotton crops.

The tests show that the FIGARO platform offers excellent decision support for managing irrigation and lowers uncertainty for the farmer regarding water use and expected income. By analysing accurate, real-time information about the soil, crop and weather conditions, the system can provide optimum irrigation scheduling.

"The implementation of the FIGARO DSS makes it possible to save water at farm level. This is especially significant in the Mediterranean sites where water savings and reductions of energy consumption were 10-14 percent, with the most extreme water savings recorded at 32%," said project coordinator Lior Doron, director of New Product Development at Netafim, a world leader in drip and micro irrigation.

Over the next four months, FIGARO will host open field days and training workshops to demonstrate the platform, offering farmers and extension workers training as well as hands on experience with the system. FIGARO partners will inform hundreds of end users of the FIGARO Platform benefits and introduce them to the online training programmes.

In June 2016 alone, FIGARO partners are host to the following events:

• Portugal - Hidromod hosted a seminar on the efficient use of water within the framework of the National Agriculture Fair in Santarem on June 9
• Denmark - Aarhus University hosted an open field day at the AU Research center Foulum on June 21
• Spain - The University of Valencia will host an open field day on June 30

About FIGARO 

FIGARO is a Europe-wide research project co-funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development of the European Union.

For more information: http://www.figaro-irrigation.net/

Contact Person:
Bracha Ehrman
[email protected]
+972-54-3041091

SOURCE FIGARO