Innovation In Groundwater Management

The Problem of Managing Resources

With no real-time measure of water being pumped, managing critical resources is challenging.

Producers in the state of Nebraska are innovators, working to improve water knowledge. In the past, producers would have a set amount of water available for three to five years. The TPRND, which manages the quality and quantity of groundwater over 320,000 acres in west central Nebraska, would have to manually monitor usage, utilizing more staff hours and insufficient data. The producers, meanwhile, were lacking the reliable, accurate data needed to make strategic, sustainable choices.

The TPNRD lacked real-time water monitoring in the past because:

• There is no affordable, contiguous communications network to transmit the data
• Cellular solutions are costly
• Cellular connectivity is sparse and not reliable in the district
• Up to 20% of wells in the district are powered by diesel, meaning their usage could not be tracked in real time like their electric-powered counterparts
• There was no open source solution on the market
• Scaling a project across 320,000 acres with multiple users was impossible with current technologies due to cost and proprietary solutions

To address these challenges and work toward a solution, the TPNRD partnered with Olsson, a nationally recognized engineering and design firm, and Ethos Connected, North America’s leading LoRaWAN network provider and Internet of Things (IoT) solution company to measure water use and groundwater behaviors.

This scope is far larger than the 20 they planned with a cellular solution. For the TPNRD this innovative network means:

• Decreased expenses of maintaining water supply each year
• Higher reliability and more efficient communication between farmers and the TPNRD
• Access to an accurate, rich data set