Early in the 2025 growing season, an Arable Mark 3 station was deployed in an irrigated potato field on EMILI’s Innovation Farms powered by AgExpert.
While the device collected field-level irrigation and crop performance data, a team from EMILI evaluated the benefits of adopting it.
“Working with EMILI on Innovation Farms allows us to understand our impact and how user-friendly we are in real-time on an actual commercial farm.” said Arable Director of Business Development, Water and Strategic Partnerships Patrick Quigly.
“This project focuses on centre pivot irrigated potatoes which is an important segment for us,” he said.
Centre pivot irrigation is a popular practice because it provides consistent, uniform water application, crucial for sensitive potato crops. The farm uses rotating sprinklers that cover large circular areas efficiently to ensure consistent yield and quality.
The chance to test Arable’s technology in a potato field on EMILI’s Innovation Farms helped validate some of the improvements Arable had already begun making to the Mark 3 system. Even as the technology was being installed on EMILI’s Innovation Farms to prepare for the 2025 growing season, updates were being made to how the technology would be deployed on future farms.
One of the biggest improvements is how the Arable’s Mark 3 is deployed. After hearing feedback from farmers not wanting another device in their fields, Arable adapted the technology so it is now deployed on the centre pivot of the irrigation system rather than on the ground in the field as it was on Innovation Farms during the 2025 season.
“The validating side here is that the in-field sensor was not as useful for the grower as our current iteration would be so that reinforces the direction Arable is moving,” said Quigly.
As a crop known to be sensitive to water stress, Quigly says potatoes are a great fit for the Arable Mark 3. The device aims to reduce water use, energy costs, and nitrogen leaching, while improving yield and quality.
A unique feature of the sensor is that it is trained on the sound of rainfall.
“The machine learning model is trained to understand when rainfall is hitting the device and to measure that as accumulated precipitation based upon the sound and measured velocity of the rainfall,” explains Quigly.
While this is not new science, being able to commercialize it accurately on a device is unique.
Another distinct feature is how the Mark 3 measures evapotranspiration to provide detailed insights into a specific crop and location. Plants use and transpire water at different rates depending on factors such as plant type, crop varietal, soil composition, and climate.
The Arable Mark 3 factors in the crop co-efficient along with data from a 22 band spectrometer to measure NDVI to provide a proxy for what stage the plant is at and how much it is transpiring and then knitting all the details together in a way that makes it easy to understand and take action.
“The primary focus of what we’re doing at Arable is irrigation decision support, so helping with irrigation efficiency, and operational visibility across farms,” said Quigly. “It’s a rapid decision-making tool.”
Visit EMILI’s Arable Mark 3 webpage to read EMILI’s 2025 Project Summary and learn more about this technology.