Wesley Hartmann on Soil Irrigation

The Stanford Daily – ICLE Academic Affiliate Wesley Hartmann was quoted in a story in The Stanford Daily in a story about efforts to improve California farmers’ water usage. You can read full piece here.

Wesley Hartmann, a professor of marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, has recently begun working with the team to integrate their algorithms with soil sensor and drip irrigation technology. He believes that the biggest challenge for scaling such technology is that the majority of drip irrigation in the world is concentrated in California, so expanding the reach of this sustainable irrigation model would mean expanding the use of drip irrigation techniques along with the use of these algorithms worldwide.

“Once we understand a little bit better how the farmers set their drip timers, and what technology they use, we need to find partners to be able to work with it,” Hartmann said.

With his experience in smart irrigation in the residential sector, Hartmann hopes to work with the researchers to integrate their algorithms into current drip irrigation and soil sensor technology.  So far, drip irrigation and soil sensor technology has not been focused on optimizing water use.