Patte-de-Lion: Smart irrigation for alpine resilience

Project in brief

Dry inner-alpine valleys are very sensitive to droughts. They have a secular history of irrigation, and here at Patte-de-Lion we are helping to technologically update centuries-old watering practices thanks to our smart irrigation solution. Being independent from the irrigation method used, our solution can help any farmer to improve the efficiency of their irrigation without any further infrastructural investment.

Setting up in a steep farmland

A very steep farmland, here in the canton of Valais, is not posing any trouble to our hardware station, which is here being programmed to operate in a fully automatic manner.

In this epic scenario water was traditionally distributed by a channel network called the “bisses”. Nowadays pipes and sprinklers substitute the “bisses”, and the smart irrigation tool driven by the data collected in the field is substituting the bells of the churches in determining when it’s time to irrigate.

Some measures are still taken by hand and fed into the models in a second step. Infiltration measurements are always a good opportunity to meet the farmers and to compare measured data with their own empirical knowledge. 

How much water can infiltrate a soil? This seems like a simple question, but if not answered correctly it can lead to massive over-irrigation of land parcels.

‍