The Cabildo de Tenerife, through the Technological and Renewable Energy Institute (ITER) and in a consortium with the Canarian Institute of Agrarian Research (ICIA) and the University of La Laguna (ULL), develops the project called Regadia, through the which will study the most important regions in which banana and avocado cultivation is carried out on the Island, with the aim of making decisions about the irrigation of the farms under study and anticipating the needs of water supply of these crops in the future of seven days.
Once a sufficiently representative data set is available, work will begin on predictive irrigation models using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.
Bananas are the crop with the highest water demand in Tenerife and represent 60% of the island’s agricultural water consumption. On the other hand, avocado cultivation, which requires a high water supply, has been growing exponentially in recent years.
ITER technicians have visited several of the island’s banana and avocado farms to assess the characteristics of the plots where water meters and humidity sensors will be installed.
ITER is also working on the development of electronic devices that will be installed in the field to collect sensor data and send this data to a cloud storage service that will be installed and available in a supercomputer (HPC) for subsequent exploitation. . In parallel, the ICIA has begun to analyze soil samples from representative farms, with the aim of characterizing the water retention capacity and thus providing valuable information to the predictive models.
The Regadia project will last 36 months and is financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State Research Agency and by the European Union within the framework of the EU Next Generation Recovery Plan and the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience of Spain.
The insular Councilor for Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, Javier Parrilla, points out that the intention “is to help reduce production costs by making higher quality water available to farmers at a better price. For this reason, these projects will always be attractive in an island territory where the value of each cubic meter of water is very high, with which, in addition, a more sustainable use of resources is obtained”.
