Case Studies – NimblTECH Ltd.

The Customer

TOEV Enippea Farsalon is an organization that provides irrigation water in Thessalia Region, Greece.

The organization operates a total of 165 pumps in boreholes, irrigating crops over an area of 3,000 hectares (30,000 dunams). It plays a crucial role in the local agricultural community, supporting the farmers’ production processes.

Challenges

The organization faced several challenges that hindered its sustainable operation:

Extremely high energy expenses, accounting for 75% of the organization’s costs
Numerous field workers, resulting in high personnel costs
Frequent pump failures, time-consuming and costly repairs
Limited control capabilities:
- Inability to detect water theft
- Farmers often allowed to over-irrigate beyond what was necessary
Accumulation of overdue debts from farmers
- Farmers not inclined to settle their old debts
Increased dissatisfaction among farmers due to:
- High water charges
- Equipment failures that disrupted irrigation
- No rewards for timely payments, with non-compliance or illegal activities going unpunished.

Objectives

The key objectives of the organization were:

Minimize energy consumption
Reduce overdue debts
Lower field personnel costs
Achieve faster fault repairs
Eliminate uncontrolled irrigation
Increase farmer satisfaction.

Solution

The solution we implemented included:

Installation of Irrigrid automation systems in 150 pumps.
Deployment of the Irrigain software platform with the following functionalities:
- Remote control of pumps
- Management of irrigation requests
- Automatic irrigation scheduling based on the area, crop type, and water needs
- Pump operation scheduling to optimize energy consumption
- Monitoring of operations, automatic fault detection, and notifications
- Fault restoration.

Through the project, the operation of 150 pumps in boreholes was automated and they are now remotely controlled, irrigating approximately 2,700 hectares of farmland (27,000 dunams), extracting an estimated 3,000,000 m³ of water annually.

The solution was deployed and operated in 2023 and 2024, in collaboration with the organization.

Benefits

The main benefits achieved were:

Approximately 10% reduction in energy consumption during the 2023 irrigation season.
Reduction of total overdue debts by around €90,000 during the 2023 irrigation season.
Minor overdue debts for active farmers in the 2024 irrigation season.
Nearly eliminated irrigation interruptions, as fault restoration time was reduced from 1-2 working days to just a few hours, and always within the same day.
Reduced field personnel by 71%, from 7 to 2 persons.

Conclusions

Remarkable results achieved, succeeding in all the objectives set. The solution performed excellently, with only one instance of sabotage or an attempt to bypass it.

Farmers accepted the system with only few initial complaints. Active farmers adjusted their payments according to their contractual obligations and comply to the irrigation schedule.

This experience highlighted the importance of technological upgrades in irrigation operations to optimize efficiency and ensure the organization’s sustainability.