Towards water sustainability in agriculture through closed-loop irrigation

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Water is essential for our daily life. The challenge of ensuring water and food security has been consistentlyrecognized as one of the most significant global risks by the World Economic Forum over the past decade.Population growth is the primary factor causing the global water supply crisis. The most substantial use offreshwater is in agriculture, which accounts for about 70% of the total freshwater consumption. In Canada,Alberta, BC and Saskatchewan are the top three irrigation water consumers. According to a report of theGovernment of Alberta, the water allocated to irrigation in Alberta is already capped. Any further increase inirrigated acres needs to come primarily from improvements in water efficiency. In the 25 Year SaskatchewanWater Security Plan, efficient use of water is identified as the No. 1 action area to relieve the increasedpressures on water supplies. While agriculture consumes the largest amount of freshwater, the averageagriculture irrigation water efficiency is low (estimated to be around 50% to 60%) due to the open-loop natureof the current irrigation strategy.In the current agricultural irrigation practice, the amount of water to be irrigated and the time to apply theirrigation are essentially determined in advance by the irrigator (the farmer) based on the irrigator's knowledgeand various collected auxiliary field data (e.g., weather information, evapotranspiration (ET) rate, randomlysampled soil moisture) in an open-loop fashion. However, it is well recognized in process control thatopen-loop control is quite imprecise. Namely, open-loop irrigation generally leads to either over-irrigation orunder-irrigation, which implies low water-use efficiency. The goal of this project is to close the irrigationdecision-making process to develop a closed-loop precision irrigation solution to significantly improve thewater-use efficiency in agriculture. This project has a great societal impact and will contribute to watersustainability, national and global food security, and greenhouse gases emission reduction.