New technologies are revolutionary but leave some small farmers hamstrung by the mismatch between the problems they face and the solutions being provided by the startup world.
Field D-17 on the Bowles Farming Company’s ranch in California’s Central Valley is dry and unplanted when I visit it with Emery Silberman in the spring. Last year’s watermelon crop was harvested the previous July, and this year’s tomatoes won’t go in the ground for several more months. We check out the array of globular red sand filters that will treat the water for this field, and Silberman shows me the drip irrigation pump and valve assembly nearby that will control that flow. Mounted there, he shows me, is a small piece of equipment from a company called WaterBit that’s designed to provide more granular control of conditions in the field—thus allowing farmers like Cannon Michael, Silberman’s boss, to save on valuable resources like water and fertilizer.
Field D-17 on the Bowles Farming Company’s ranch in California’s Central Valley is dry and unplanted when I visit it with Emery Silberman in the spring. Last year’s watermelon crop was harvested the previous July, and this year’s tomatoes won’t go in the ground for several more months. We check out the array of globular red sand filters that will treat the water for this field, and Silberman shows me the drip irrigation pump and valve assembly nearby that will control that flow. Mounted there, he shows me, is a small piece of equipment from a company called WaterBit that’s designed to provide more granular control of conditions in the field—thus allowing farmers like Cannon Michael, Silberman’s boss, to save on valuable resources like water and fertilizer.
Especially in places where irrigation water is delivered by canal, many farms have access to only a crude understanding of how much water gets to each part of each field. To play it safe, farmers often err on the side of over-watering their crops. “If you back off of irrigation, at some point you’re taking a risk,” says Silberman. “If you over-irrigate, the ground will accept that water,” making over-watering the safer bet.
SELF-WATERING FIELDS?
Sensors like WaterBit’s, which understands how much moisture is reaching plants from not just irrigation but precipitation, could change that equation. “The idea is that a series of probes in the ground reading the soil’s actual moisture can be sending signals to controllers that are actually responding to the needs more like an on-demand system,” says Michael.
In fact, says WaterBit’s CEO, that’s exactly where the company wants to go. “We expect to get to a point where we’re not just implementing the irrigation recommendations of a grower, but assisting them in those recommendations,” Wright says. “And at some point further, we get to the point where we’re completely autonomously irrigating over a broad set of crops.”

It was Rodgers’s interest in winemaking that led him to WaterBit. As a vintner, Rodgers had long been interested in monitoring and adjusting for soil conditions, and one of his “sanity projects” at Cypress had been a prototype to measure moisture in his vineyards. Rodgers was introduced to WaterBit founders Manu Pillai and Leif Chastaine around 2014 and worked with them informally for two years before investing in the company and adding his own technology to the mix. Wright, who had run new product development at Cypress before leaving the company in 2016, joined as CTO and became CEO last year, when the company raised a Series A round.
In recent years, Rodgers has run an experiment in which he lets a WaterBit system make irrigation decisions on alternate rows in one of his vineyards. “Two years ago I got this thing running and showed the quality of the wine was indifferentiable” from wine irrigated manually, he says.
The potential for savings is great. But costs can undercut the value proposition to midsized farms like Bowles. Silberman mentions sensors that can cost close to $1,000 each, with a communications unit of similar cost. “If you think you need two sensors a field, you’re at $3,000 a field,” he says. “Over 147 fields, that’s a pretty steep cost.”
AG-CENTERED DESIGN
Another field-based sensor designed to make farming more efficient is the Arable Mark, from Arable Labs in Princeton, New Jersey. Arable’s sensor collects a range of inputs, including temperature, sunshine, plant health based on a chlorophyll index (i.e., the color of the plant’s leaves), and precipitation, which is measured via a microphone.
“Picture an Alexa for agriculture,” says Adam Wolf, Arable’s founder and chief scientist. “It’s listening to the raindrops. It literally has a microphone in there, and it’s taking all the acoustic spectrum and extracting the individual raindrops out, and using that to estimate rainfall.”
LOOKING TO CALIFORNIA
Like WaterBit, Arable sees promise in its early forays into the market. Arable has installed something like 1,000 devices, across more than 120 customers, including internationally. WaterBit has something like 3,000 devices, on almost 50 farms. While many of these customers are in the farm belt of the American Midwest, many are also in California, and it’s the water situation in that state that may hold the most important lessons for how to navigate an increasingly complex future. “Agriculture uses 80% of the human-used water in California,” says Adrian Covert, vice president of public policy for the Bay Area Council, a San Francisco-based business association that works with local companies and water agencies on a wide range of policy issues.
Agriculture isn’t the only place where there is water to be saved, of course. And partly because water is an issue that is only going to become more pressing as time goes on, entrepreneurs have begun to notice. Scott Bryan, president of ImagineH2O, a nonprofit organization that runs a startup accelerator and other programs aimed at solving water challenges around the globe, says a series of water-related crises—from contamination in Flint, Michigan, to a brush with rationing in Cape Town, droughts in California, and more—have raised the consciousness about some of those challenges to a tipping point. “The big thing that’s changed is, there’s a greater public awareness about water challenges, and thus an interest in what the solutions actually are,” he says.
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