Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the Indian River Research and Education Center (IRREC), Sandra Guzmán, received the Netafim Award for Advancements in Microirrigation recently for her lab’s work on the autonomous irrigation management platform IrrigMonitor.
The award seeks to “recognize engineering excellence in the design, development, evaluation, operation, or management of microirrigation systems.” It is administered by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE).
“Receiving the Netafim Award for Advancements in Microirrigation is deeply meaningful to me,” Guzman said. “It recognizes not just my work, but the work of the growers, students, and colleagues who have been part of our research. This award is a reminder that solving real problems — the kind that show up every morning when a farmer has to decide whether to irrigate – are a challenge that the scientific community is willing to address, even if it’s harder than working at research plots.”
For Guzmán, receiving this award was significant given the timing.
“We are at an inflection point in agriculture, where sensors, data, and connectivity exist, yet most irrigation management operations are still being done by feel,” she said. “The gap is not knowledge. It is not willingness. It is the absence of tools that actually work at the farm.”
The issue facing Florida farmers, especially citrus and vegetable growers, is that they are caught in a squeeze from both sides. From above, it is important to be good stewards of our land and freshwater sources, but the cost of doing nothing keeps rising each season.
From below, the tools designed to help them comply are too complex to use at five o’clock in the morning before the workday starts. Soil moisture data are on one platform, while weather data are on another. Weather forecasts are on a third platform, sometimes on paper records. There is no single tool that connects them all together.
This leads to farmers guessing, with the most feasible decision being to over irrigate because the penalty for under-irrigating a stressed crop and a lost harvest is immediate and visible.
That’s where IRREC’s Smart Irrigation and Hydrology lab came up with IrrigMonitor.
“Think of IrrigMonitor like a weather app, but instead of just telling you it’s going to rain, it tells you exactly whether your crops need water today, tomorrow, or whether you can wait because rain is coming on Thursday,” she said. “We have seen water savings of over 30% in a study in collaboration with commercial vegetable growers in central and south Florida. Across our program, that could add up to more than nine million gallons saved every year on Florida farms.”
Florida has a water problem most people don’t see. The aquifers that feed farms and communities are under pressure from population growth, more intense drought cycles, and increasing demand.
Microirrigation is one of the most effective tools to grow more food with less water, but its potential is only realized when farmers can manage it precisely.
“We have proven IrrigMonitor works on commercial fields. Now the question is: how do we make it available to every Florida grower who needs it, regardless of field size, crop type or how comfortable they are with technology? The next chapter is about scale and access because a tool that only works for some farmers isn’t solving the problem,” she said.
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