By Natasha Rankin, MBA, CAE, IA CEO
July marks the height of the growing season across many regions, making it an ideal time to reflect on the essential role of water in production agriculture. It also marks Smart Irrigation Month, a global awareness initiative that recognizes the people, technologies and practices advancing efficient water management.
Smart irrigation is not a slogan or a trend. It’s a data-driven, results-oriented approach to managing one of agriculture’s most critical inputs.
And it’s already transforming how the sector responds to today’s operational, environmental and economic challenges.
Globally, agriculture accounts for nearly 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawals (Source: 2024 UN World Water Report). This often-cited figure speaks not only to the scale of water use, but to the scale of opportunity. Improving water efficiency in agriculture improves yields, reduces waste, lowers or stabilizes input costs, and strengthens long-term environmental stewardship. It’s one of the few strategies that simultaneously benefits farmers, communities and ecosystems.
Across the world, farmers and irrigation professionals are delivering measurable results. Advances in soil moisture sensing, pressure regulation and weather-informed scheduling are optimizing inputs and improving system performance. Remote monitoring tools allow for real-time adjustments. Even modest upgrades – like replacing a timer-based controller with a smart system or converting a block to drip – can yield significant savings and increase operational resilience.
But the benefits go beyond agronomics. Strategic water management improves regulatory compliance, sharpens resource allocation and enhances a farmer’s ability to compete in increasingly sustainability-driven markets. Many producers are seeing these returns not as future or abstract ideals, but as measurable improvements across operations.
At the Irrigation Association (IA), Smart Irrigation Month is a moment to celebrate those results and the professionals behind them. It’s an opportunity to highlight irrigation as essential infrastructure and to emphasize the growing value of expertise in a sector where precision is key.
That message gains power every time a supplier shows a farmer about the return on investment, every time a consultant recommends improvements that pay off in-season and every time a technician fine-tunes a system to reduce runoff or lower energy costs. Whether on a 40-hectare farm or a 4,000-hectare operation, these actions demonstrate that efficient irrigation is not only possible – it’s practical and profitable.
This July, we encourage you to join us and other stakeholders across agriculture to engage directly in amplifying the value and benefits of irrigation during Smart Irrigation Month. Share your success stories. Participate in our public education efforts or policy conversations. Use
Smart Irrigation Month as a platform to showcase the advancements happening in your operations and communities. We welcome you to take advantage of the outreach templates and engagement tools we have available – including participating in our global Wear Blue Wednesday campaign on July 16. But the most powerful messages will come from the field: local, specific and grounded in the real-world decisions that conserve water and drive results.
Smart irrigation strengthens agriculture’s resilience, especially in the face of intensifying climate variability. It improves productivity, safeguards natural resources, and helps agriculture meet rising global demand while remaining sustainable and competitive. This is not theory – it’s a field-proven strategy already shaping the future of agriculture.
Let’s use this moment to reaffirm the importance of water stewardship and the vital role that irrigation professionals play in delivering it. Innovation and technology are part of the solution, but it’s the people applying them with knowledge, care and purpose who are truly leading the way forward.
Thank you for your commitment to water efficiency and for your continued leadership in building a smarter, more sustainable agriculture future. ●
Peru’s agriculture minister Ángel Manero has committed $24 billion in public-private projects to improve irrigation in the country, as the government looks to expand its farmlands by one million hectares (3,860 square miles).
Manero said the funds would be spent over three to seven years to jumpstart 22 new or stalled projects across Peru's coast, highlands and Amazon, and these would be awarded between 2025 andmid-2026.
The most important project would be the Trasvase Maranon, he said, a project valued at about $7 billion that is set to carry water from the Maranon River to the Pacific coast and irrigate more than 300,000 hectares.
Manero added the package would include the Chinecas project, valued at $3.5 billion, on Peru's northern coast, and Pampas Verdes project in the south, which is expected to cost about $4 billion.
Over 85 percent of the projects would be developed through public-private partnerships, said economy minister Jose Salardi.
According to the latest ministry figures, Peru's agricultural exports – mainly fruits such as blueberries – jumped over 20 percent in 2024 to total $12.8 billion. The Peru government is aiming for $40 billion in exports by 2040, helped by planned shipments of beef and pork to China.
Regarding the effects of new tariff announcements in the U.S., Peru's central bank has stated the impact on the country should be limited as its fruit exports complement supplies that are not available in North America for seasonal reasons.
By 2050, the government aims for agricultural exports to overtake mining as the country's biggest economic driver. Peru is the world's third-largest supplier of copper.
In January, Manero flagged plans for building large-scale irrigation projects along the coast that should add 250,000 hectares of new farmland this year, and plans to add some 500,000 hectares byJune 2026. ●
Israeli ag-tech company Phytech has launched Phytech AI Advisor, an AI-powered irrigation advisor trained on real in-field data from Phytech’s IoT network of tree, fruit, soil and climate sensors.
By learning from each farm’s plants, soil conditions and the grower’s past irrigation decisions, Phytech AI Advisor provides highly accurate, farm-specific irrigation recommendations, helping growers make quicker and better decisions in order to optimize water usage, and enhance sustainability, according to the company.
Phytech AI Advisor integrates real-time data from each farm to provide smart and accurate irrigation recommendations that are actionable and tailored to the grower’s daily practice. Effectively, it eliminates the gap between irrigation monitoring and real-world irrigation execution.
“With Phytech AI Advisor, we’re giving farmers a super-intelligence that grows with their trees,” said Oren Kind, CEO of Phytech. “Farming is a lonely business, where a lot of farm owners or irrigation managers have dozens of critical problems to solve by themselves. We constantly develop our product to give growers an additional pair of eyes – or nervous system – in the field. With Phytech AI Advisor generating a clear summary in natural language of each farm’s unique data points from the trees, the fruits and irrigation system, we’re adding a super-agronomic intelligence, an army of advisors, to help tackle all the tough challenges farmers are facing. They will never grow alone again.”
Phytech AI Advisor provides farmers with precise, real-time recommendations that drive immediate improvements in water efficiency, fertilizer usage, energy consumption, and yield improvement. ●
