Smart App Tells When To Irrigate

By: Gene Johnston

A new approach to better irrigation management comes from a University of Missouri (MU) smartphone app.

It’s called the Crop Water Use App, and it will estimate for Missouri farmers (and maybe others soon) the best times to irrigate. Go to cropwater.org. After you create an account, download the app for free.

The app creates an interactive website just for you to enroll and manage your fields. You can give it the precise field location coordinates, or do it with a push pin in Google maps, says Gene Stevens of the University of Missouri’s Delta Research Center, where the app was developed.

The beauty of the program is that, once it knows the field location, it automatically taps into pertinent data relating to your irrigation schedule, says Stevens. For instance, the app pulls in rainfall estimates for fields from the National Weather Service (NWS) rainfall grid.