IoT Helps Farmers and Government Monitor Water Extraction

Ezitech, a technology consulting company, today announced that it is helping the South African government to monitor the fair extraction of water by the country's agriculture sector. The solution, in partnership with JOAT, uses IoT connectivity provided by u-blox’s Thingstream Communication-as-a-Service platform to ensure that data is passed from tamper-proof electromagnetic flowmeters (magflow meters) to pull all the relevant data into the cloud.

Overseeing the extraction of water to the farming industry in South Africa are regionally based Catch Management Forums whose aim is to ensure that each farm holding keeps within their allocated amount of water extraction. Transparency and openness are key ethe to ensuring everyone receives their fair share of water.

By deploying the JOAT/ Ezitech solution each Catch Management Forum receives live data through a cloud-based platform giving a detailed analysis of each farms’ consumption. Equally, farmers are also able to see their extraction metrics and correlate that to electricity consumption. This when combined with pump variable speed drives enables them to reduce electricity spend and drive efficiency.

JOAT and Ezitech are now deploying a cost-effective water extraction and monitoring solution across South Africa which not only provides reliable transparency to the authorities but also enables the farming industry to significantly reduce their costs of water extraction by up to 40 percent. All data goes through u-blox’s Thingstream communication-as-a-service platform.

• The monitoring solution provided is reliable and returns an ROI in as little as nine months for farmers that implement energy-saving solutions.
• These solutions reduce their electricity bills by up to 40 percent per month. An average farm could be spending 50 thousand Rand per month, so the savings can be significant.
• Catch Management Forums are able to have complete visibility of water extraction from all farms within their jurisdiction.
• Solution uses u-Blox’s Thingstream communication-as-a-service platform for all data transfer from pump to cloud.

Critical to the success of the solution is the ability to connect data to the cloud reliably and cost-effectively. Ezitech uses u-blox’s Thingstream communication-as-a-service platform to provide data transport via an MQTT broker and bridge for cloud-to-cloud integration.

Key advantages of working with u-blox’s Thingstream platform include:

• Low-powered communication methods, easy credential allocation, and a small device resource load allows it to run effectively to collect data from logger attached to the Magflow
• Ingestible data presentation to bespoke Google Cloud based UI
• Unrivalled mobile operator connectivity ensures remote location access
• Bi-directional communications capabilities. With devices spread across a large geographical area, the ability to communicate with each device is crucial

“u-blox’s Thingstream IoT connectivity platform enables us to transport data about water extraction and electricity consumption from remote water pumping stations to the Google Cloud more reliably, and at a fraction of the cost of previous solutions,” says Trevor Hart Jones, Managing Director of Ezitech.

Jones also says, “JOAT provides services to various countries in Southern Africa. u-blox’s Thingstream connectivity platform provides a commercially proven solution, available globally, which reduces data costs by up to 10X and can be deployed cross border without any additional costs nor design change.”