Athena Irrigation

Are you always wondering if you’re putting on enough water and you wished the vine could tell you directly that it needs a drink?
Well, what we do is continuously monitor your vine's leaf temperature to see if it has enough water.
In fact, we can save you between 35%-50% off your water bill while keeping the crop size and quality.

In the face of global warming and freshwater scarcities, new solutions are needed to provide farmers an accurate, efficient and cost effective method to optimise the irrigation of their crops to improve crop water use efficiency while improving yield, crop quality and profitability. Many technologies now exist to assist growers in helping them achieve higher yield, better quality crops with less water but, they all have drawbacks that are making their broad uptake in the agriculture community slow:
• The cost of the technology can be prohibitive;
• The method of determining when to irrigate may be a generic and not be optimized to your varietal resulting in decreased water use efficiency and control over yield and quality;
• The output may be detailed and complex data points that must be interpreted to translate that into action;
• The output may only provide indirect information about the environment around the plant like the soil and weather that requires interpretation into the what the plant requires;
• The technologies may require calibration prior to installation and throughout the year;
• Taking readings may be manually intensive requiring farmers to spend time taking measurements and must potentially occur at inconvenient times of the day or night and,
• The technologies may be invasive to the plant.

The Athena Irrigation Transp-IR solution addresses all of these drawbacks by:
• providing the grower with an accurate recommendation into when to water the crop in an easy to digest graphical interface,
• automatically recording data in near realtime throughout the day,
• providing a cost effective solution available to all farmers,
• specific to their varietal.

At Athena, we have always maintained "why look at the dirt or the sky for the answer when you can look directly at the plant and let it talk to you." To understand the plant water status Transp-IR reads every 10 minutes the vital signs of the plant and records them so that it can then calculate if the plant requires water.
Our field sensors take direct readings from the plant through its leaves and combine this with environmental information like humidity and ambient temperature to determine if the plant needs to be irrigated.
The secret is the algorithm in a cloud-based service that converts these data points into a graphical Vine Water Index that when looked at in the scope of the exact plant such as cabernet sauvignon grapes, will tell you where in the range of “well irrigated” to “requires water” and guide the grower towards whether they should irrigate or not.
The key here is that the information is specific to the varietal such as cabernet sauvignon, not just winegrapes, and the graphical user interface removes all requirements for interpretation by experts or sifting through multiple graphs and data points to determine if you should irrigate.