News Release

An innovative daily irrigation advisory service for the whole of the Basque

Business Announcement

Elhuyar Fundazioa

The Basque Country's farmers can as from today onwards avail themselves of a practical tool designed by the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development Neiker Tecnalia and which calculates on a daily basis the need for them to irrigate their land. This is an easy-to-use, online application offering irrigation recommendations for over 50 different crops for any location in the Basque Autonomous Community (region). This online application is available free of charge via the R&D centre's web site:

http://www.avisosneiker.com/c/recomendaciones-de-riego/

The application providing irrigation advice constitutes a significant breakthrough in the matter of advice for the Basque primary sector, since it makes daily irrigation estimates rather than weekly ones, as has been offered until now by the Neiker-Tecnalia Agricultural and Forestry Warning Centre. The application allows the user to calculate the irrigation needed in a flexible, personalised way so that he/she can specify his/her own irrigation strategy according to the type of soil texture on the plots and the crops present on them.

The irrigation recommendations of the Neiker-Tecnalia Agricultural and Forestry Warning Centre have until now been restricted to four areas in Araba-Alava and for the potato and beet crops. From now on, the service has been expanded to the whole of the Basque Autonomous Community (Araba-Alava, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa) and covers crops such as maize, beans, extensive horticultural crops, fruit trees, etc.

This innovative application has in technological terms been developed by Daia Intelligent Solutions and allows the water balance of the crop to be consulted and monitored, and the different variables used in calculating the irrigation recommendations. To calculate the water requirement in the soil across the Basque region, the application has been provided with an algorithm that, depending on the geographical coordinates of the plot, automatically assigns the meteorological station (preferably in the Euskalmet network) that corresponds to it.

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