What if a farmer in Pakistan could tell just how much water she needed to give her field and when? This basic assessment is something they do all over the country every week, if not daily. But even though it would seem that farmers intuitively know what to do because of traditional wisdom, the truth is that they don't always get it right.
The trouble is with trying to tell visually if your plant needs water. Often farmers cause stress by overwatering their crop, or indeed, underwatering it. This happens because they can't tell what is happening at the root, deep inside the soil.
Engineers and agriculture scientists at the multinational food company Nestlé are working on a soil moisture monitoring device to tackle this. The company has a stake in pursuing this line of inquiry. It makes for great PR optics if you spearhead innovation to save water by irrigating only when needed and it can ultimately helps your bottom line to reduce the cost of your inputs. If less water is used, more money is saved.
The water plant
This is not to say that the engineers working on this "Watersense" project are not motivated to find ways to save water beyond the corporate and big business agenda—and it doesn't get much bigger than Nestlé. Sustainable Agri Manager for the company, Mehboob Elahi, and his team, including Dr Allahbaksh, are passionate about their work (they call themselves sons of the soil). They imported one of these soil moisture devices for Rs500,000 to see how they worked. They found that while farmers in other countries may use this technology it was far too expensive to ever catch on in the Global South and especially Pakistan. And so, in response to this financial roadblock, they took apart of the machine and realised that they could successfully make one too. And it cost just 10,000 rupees.
The soil moisture monitor looks like box mounted on a pole that is driven into the ground a maximum of 40cm deep. It stands like a solitary scarecrow in a field of drooping green maize ears, a mechanical oddity in a verdant landscape. Its sensor nodes read the levels of moisture in the soil and transmit the data that is plotted on a graph by the hour and day. "This is a study for now," Mehboob is quick to point out. But he and his team applied for a grant to make the device and test it in an internal company innovation competition and once their pilot project comes through they are extremely hopeful they can take it mainstream.
Soil moisture monitoring devices at a farm near Okara
The device reads the levels of water in deep in the soil at the root. If the crop needs watering, the farmer is told to irrigate. Sometimes farmers feel that their field is dry but there is actually water in the soil. That is when the team tells the farmer to hold off on watering the crop. Too much water can stress a plant just as too little can kill it. As one can imagine, sometimes it is hard for farmers to trust the data.
So far though, the results are looking up. They have found that by using the device they are saving up to 12% of water on 2.5 acres, in the pilot project. Once they are sure that the device is giving the right readings and they are making the right decisions on watering the crop, which the harvest will prove, they can scale it up. They were told that if they could do this successfully with a wheat crop they could save as much water as the Tarbela dam holds.
The idea is for farmers to be able to stick the device in their soil and get readings and hence clear guidelines on whether to water their crop via SMS messaging or even on Facebook. This way a landowner sitting in Lahore can monitor his field in Okara. Remote sensing certainly helps those who do not want to be tied to the land. The team is hoping that this technology will prove sexy enough to lure a young generation of farmers who have abandoned the family business because of a lack of innovation.
Soil moisture data relayed from the field
The team understands that pursuing an experiment to change the way we do irrigation is as much about science as it is about psychology. Farmers are loathe to depart from their old habits and are terrified of machinery and technology. Similarly, there is a snootiness in some young agriculture science students who do not feel that their education should be "wasted" on trying to come up with innovation for "chaara" or fodder for animals. The company happens to be testing the devices on maize right now because it forms the fodder for cows at dairy farms that produce the milk it sells. Contrary to what one would think, a dairy farm's biggest bill is raked up feeding the animals; about 60% is spent on fodder or growing maize and 90% of its water goes into producing it.
If the device works the engineers want it to be used all over Pakistan. "We are keeping it open sourced," says Mehboob. They were approached by some really big names who wanted to patent it, but they refused as they want anyone to be able to access this innovation. "I'm getting emails from [Nestlé] India," says Mehboob. He is keen to have Pakistan shine as an example of innovation that could help farmers the world over.
In addition to the soil moisture monitor, the engineers are also trying their hand at another technique they feel will save water. At Calci farm, owned by landowner Rana Sohail, an experiment is underway on 10 out of its 75 acres. The land is fed water by the LBD canal but tube wells are also used to pump water out to feed the crop, which is mainly maize for the dairy farm. The farmhands used to flood the field, which was usually flat. There was loss from evaporation, seepage and percolation (where the water goes down the soil). Mehboob and his team wanted to see if they could change this with drip irrigation and furrowing.
The company's backing was needed as the cost of setting drip irrigation up scares small farmers at Rs1.2 million a pop. A major component is solar panels, which even though just a one-time cost, still aren't cheap. "Farmers are scared of machines and can't afford to make mistakes," says Mehboob. If one season goes to waste they cannot repay their debts in many cases.
As its name suggests, drip irrigation is just 'dripping' water instead of flooding. Farm manager Abdul Qayyum points to guava tree that has been cordoned off with a two-inch mud wall. A pipe trickles water into this small oasis around the plant. The water pools around the root. This way much less water needs to be used because you are irrigating individual plants and don't have to flood the entire field. The drip irrigation spares hours of watering as it is automated to a certain extent. It saves on diesel needed to pump the water out of the tube well. The fruit, it turns out, emerges more uniform in size and fewer drop to the ground because of ripening early and thus going to waste.
The drip irrigation works in conjunction with furrow farming in the field for maize. Instead of planting maize on a flat field, the engineers burrowed furrows throughout its length and showed the farmers how to plant the seeds at equal intervals rather than back-to-back. "The plant needs light and air to grown," explains Allahbaksh.
Drip irrigation in a boundary around the plant
They believe that 50% water is saved with drip irrigation. "We are hoping for a lighthouse effect," he adds. And indeed, other farmers from around do grill farm manager Abdul Qayyum about the new technique. It takes more than one good harvest to win over folks who have been farming in the same way for centuries. The problem is not always technological, however. The way farmers think has to change. The Punjab has been a land of abundance, so the farmers tend to think that they will always have access to water. But for men like Mehboob and Allahbaksh who are patient enough to measure drops of water, this is a small price to pay for a sea change.
A healthy amount of skepticism is not unwarranted when it comes to viewing Nestle's work in the fields to save water. It is, after all, Pakistan's largest producer of bottled water. The company is aware of the paradox, which is why it is keen to be seen to be doing what will be perceived as the right thing.
Drip irrigation at a guava orchard
One of the initiatives it is pursuing, as a result, is using as little water as possible at its factories, recycling whatever it can and managing its wastewater. Abrar Ahmed, the manager, at Nestle's 25 hectare Sheikhupura factory is reasonably candid about their operations. He says that their wastewater treatment plant is, for example, the second largest in the country. The first one is at the Karachi airport. "There is no infrastructure to treat [the wastewater] once it leaves the factory," he says. "So [we] try to leave the water usable [by the time we discharge it]. So marine life is not damaged." It also uses reverse osmosis technology and recycles water by using it in its cooling tower instead of putting it down the drain.
But perhaps the most interesting, if not odd, way the factory tries to minimize use is by re-using the water that is evaporated from the fresh milk that it turns into powdered form among other products. Fresh milk is 87% water but after the 'desiccation' process, this goes down to 50%. (The factory produces 220m litres of milk).
A tube well at a farm experimenting with drip irrigation
This overall effort to save water is called Project Zero and the company advertises its powdered milk plant in Lagos de Moreno in Mexico as having done it first. Project Zero means using zero water in the manufacturing process. "The ground-breaking factory, which opened in 2014, extracts water from the milk it processes instead of drawing on an outside supply," says the company website. "By doing so it saves 1.6 million litres of water per year, about 15% of Nestlé's entire water use in Mexico... Two factories in Brazil have gone 'zero water' and four more will come online in the country by 2018. Going forward similar plans are in place for facilities in South Africa, India, Pakistan, China and California."
"By 2020, we will be reducing by 35% our water use," said Dr. Magdi Batato, EVP and Head of Operations Nestlé, referring to Project Zero at their factories. “Water is critical to every part of our value chain, from farm to factory. Being an industry leader people, governments and civil society expect us to play a leadership role in water management. That is why we have identified opportunities to optimize water use in factories, watershed, agriculture and communities.” The idea is to be "water neutral".
Batato was speaking at an event October 5 in Lahore at which the company announced its water plan and that its Sheikhupura factory had become the first in Pakistan to be awarded the Alliance for Water Stewardship certification, which means using water in a way that is socially equitable, environmentally sustainable. It hopes to certify its three other Pakistan factories by 2019, including the one at Port Qasim in Karachi.
The event to make these announcements and discuss water scarcity was held at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, whose water informatics department has been partnering with the company on creating new technologies.
“Real issues such as water require a cross disciplinary approach," said LUMS VC Sohail Naqvi at the event. "That’s why [we] made the Water Informatics department. The simplest issue is the most technologically challenging. The academics retreat into their ivory tower until their conditions fit the formula." The idea was to bring industry and academia together.
The urgency is quite real as we cannot produce food without water. "In the 1950s [we had] 5,000 cubic meter of fresh water per person," said Nestlé Pakistan’s MD Bruno Olierhoek. "Fast forward to today and that is 1,000 cu meters that is a water-stressed country. If we continue to act this way, this will go down to 500, making it a water-scarce country."
According to Nestle, in Pakistan, 90% of all water used is in the agriculture value chain. The company maintains that more than 50% is wasted. The biggest challenge is perhaps not even how to manage our water, but to change how we think about it.
Dr Abid Suleri of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute framed it this way at the event's panel discussion: "You remember there was a time we said there would be a scarcity of natural gas," he said. "We said we were self sufficient. I was a small child then." People used a gas stove with a pilot burner and kept them running. Gas was cheaper than a 25 paisa matchstick, which people recycled because it was more precious than gas. "We used to have the gas flame on 24/7. And that is how we are using our water now."
It is a sobering thought that when we export our sugar or rice, "we are virtually exporting our water," said Dr Suleri. "Sugar is the most water intensive [crop]," he added. In other countries they have realised how precious water is and they are switching from growing sugarcane to sugar beet. Some countries are doing dry cultivation of rice. "In Pakistan we do it in two feet of standing water."
Thinking about water and agriculture also warrants agro-ecological zoning, which was last done in the 1980s. According to Dr Suleri, the government needs to factor in climate change and rezone the country; this would mean telling farmers that these areas are suitable to grow rice because of water supplies and these are not. This is imperative in the next five to ten years, as 80% of our water comes from glaciers which are melting.
Climate change is also affecting our monsoon rains which are shrinking in frequency but growing in intensity. "Reservoirs and dams are a stigma," said Dr Suleri, stressing them as water storage options. "First we thought dams were for energy. Now need for storage. We need a water storage mechanism."
The third aspect is the human use of water, which is indiscriminately extracted from the soil. "We don’t [actually] have a water use policy," said Dr Suleri. "You need to seek permission. Groundwater extraction is a real problem and we need a policy. We need water testing before extraction." Drinking and saline water in the ground are separated by barriers naturally but when we go down to extract water we unknowingly break that barrier, or rocks that were separating the bad quality water with the good.
Transparency in the use of water is key to changing human behaviour, argued Dr Abubakar Muhammad, the director of the LUMS Centre for Water Informatics and Technology. "We thought information is the key, providing info and reducing that uncertainty [about the availability of water]." He is part of the teams using technology to measure flows in distributary and tertiary canals in Bahawalnagar, Lahore and Kasur with low-powered gadgets. In fact, even drones or UAVs which have been flown over the company's Renala farm are opening up ideas of how water and crop management can be cheaply done.
The good news is that the Government of the Punjab is paying attention to the possibility of using innovation to improve water use. According to Agriculture Secretary Capt (retired) Mohammad Mahmood, they are rolling out a smart agriculture programme in the next five years. This includes as farmer census and soil profile through testing. Climate data will be integrated on GIS and with remote sensing they plan to develop an Ai system to assess crop yields. All this smart data will be brought together to ultimately help assess risk in order to move farmers away from informal credit and to micro finance. They plan to give interest free credit to small farmers and will stress that only those farmers who prove to be water efficient will be eligible.
