- The IOTA Tangle is used by the state farming authority of Hesse within the project “IOTAqua”.
- The aim of the project is to develop a digital and legally compliant water meter system.
As Holger Köther, Head of Partner Management, announced yesterday, the IOTA Foundation is currently working with the state farming authority of Hesse (LLH) within the framework of the “IOTAqua” project to develop a digital and legally compliant water meter system. The aim of the project is to make water consumption in agriculture and horticulture as efficient as possible in order to counteract the ongoing climate change.
Basis of the new water meter system are already existing products: the ultrasonic water meter “Octave” of the company Lorenz, the control valve “1000 Series” of the company Nelson and the LoRa radio module of the company peerOS, as well as the IOTA Tangle, in order to ensure the legal security of the data.
As stated in the announcement published yesterday by the state farming authority of Hesse, the development and construction of the housing of the new system will be done in cooperation with the Lorenz company in order to adapt it to the requirements of agricultural practice in the best possible way. With the support of the company peerOS the water meters are installed at three locations in Hesse: in the association area Griesheim, on a horticultural enterprise in Frankfurt am Main and on the campus of the university Geisenheim.
The advantages of the IOTA based irrigation system
While in existing irrigation systems, the amount of water used is often only estimated over the irrigation period, the newly developed water meter allows the exact amount of water to be recorded in real time. This allows the needs of different crops to be analyzed more precisely, thus making irrigation more targeted.
Furthermore, statements can also be made about the effects of climatic changes. This is one of the reasons why the project is supported by the ‘Integrated Climate Protection Plan Hesse 2025’ (IKSP). As already mentioned, the state farming authority of Hesse is relying on the IOTA Tangle to test secure ways of transmitting and processing sensor data:
In order to guarantee a manipulation-safe and free data transfer, the IOTA data protocol is used within the framework of ‘IOTAqua’ in addition to the energy-efficient radio standard ‘LoRa’. The Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) used by IOTA, which already convinced in the previous project ‘IOTAgrar’, creates a decentralized data interface.
As CNF reported, this is not the first time that the IOTA Foundation has worked with the state farming authority of Hesse. Already in the ‘iotAgrar’ project, both partners are researching the use of tangle technology in horticulture and agriculture.
As Ralph Scheyer, project manager on the part of the LLH emphasized, the complete documentation of the cultivation of sustainably produced food is an important step. IOTA is the core component here in order to be able to realize the unalterable documentation required by the authorities, as Scheyer stated:
The biggest challenge is to guarantee the legal security of the data while at the same time leaving the data sovereignty with the farmer. Since the data from the water meter is also used by the irrigation association for accounting purposes or by the authorities for the documentation of operating resources used, it must not be possible to change it. I think with the DLT data protocol IOTA we have found an interesting possibility to offer a decentralized data interface that can fulfill these criteria.
