Greece has more than 20.000 ha of rice fields. Every 1 ha of rice field consumes on average 11.200 m³ of irrigated water. To avoid water waste, improve pesticides and fertilisers efficiency, farmers need to have a better idea on water consumption, thus their paddy water level.

Ex Machina has developed WaterXM, a smart rice paddy solution that enables farmers to monitor remotely, in real-time, multiple parameters on their field, such as water level, water salinity and weather conditions (temperature, humidity, wind, rain, etc). Our solution is complemented with a hyper local weather forecast that improves its accuracy over time, by “learning” the microclimate of the deployed field.

Ex Machina’s WaterXM is utilizing it’s low-cost solar-powered IoT node to connect rice field specific sensors to the cloud, display crop data on user-friendly dashboards and alert farmers when their crop is in danger from raising salinity levels or dropping water levels. This is a major step towards improving irrigation scheduling, water & fertilizer efficiency and also enables protection from rice blast and similar pests.

WaterXM was developed as part of the DIVA EU project.