SMS being used in irrigation investigations for more efficent water usage

It's probably a fair comment to say that when it comes to business' using SMS they most likely to be used for sending appointment reminders, or marketing updates or service alerts - and it's all great and more the diverse our customer become helps improve ourselves as to the level of advice we can give new customers coming on board.

However, one of our customer, the CSIRO, are looking at the effectiveness of SMS for Decision Support Services - basically software solutions that can help advise irrigators on the soil, plants and weather.

Now some people's peepers maybe drawing shut slowly and they think this might be a bit technical and what not - however, according to the initial research paper by Nicholas Carr irrigators in Australia use 60-70% of all water consumed in Australia. Further to that according to previous studies by the CSIRO, these Decision Support Systems, or DSS, showed a reduction in water use by sugar cane farmers from 35-40 mega litres per hectare down to an average of 21 mega litres! That's almost a reduction of 50% on their water usage which benefits everyone in a number of ways.

First off it benefits us from the farmers having lower operating costs that don't need to be passed on so farmed products are cheaper - it also means that as precious as water is as a resource, we are then able to allocate elsewhere helping to relieve some of the pressure points building from a lack of rain and water resources.

But how does SMS come into the picture. A major flaw in using DSS is the fact that farmers just aren't taking up the services the way you would have thought they would - this could be because they're old school and don't really use computers, to only using computers for accounting. Other reasons could be the fact that to get the information from their home to the farm where the work is carried out maybe too difficult, or inconsistent - really there are a whole host of reasons obstructing the farmer from effectively making use of the information available.

So the solution as part of the research was to use SMS for the delivery of the information. it means that the farmers are able to retrieve information quickly and easily on site and able to go back and retrieve the information on a timely basis.

Now at this stage the study only includes water balance, but leans towards a larger scope for use with SMS in both an interactive or non-interactive applications that would vastly improve the use of DSS and the water consumption in Australia.