Max Moreno
Vice president of water conservation
Harvest Landscape Enterprises
Orange, Calif.
In 2024, irrigation professionals should continue to focus on sustainable practices and innovative technologies. Precision irrigation systems that utilize data analytics, IoT (Internet of Things) sensors and AI-driven solutions are likely to be at the forefront. Water conservation remains a critical concern globally, so methods that optimize water usage while maintaining healthy landscapes will likely dominate the industry trends. Additionally, there might be a push toward integrating renewable energy sources into irrigation systems to reduce their environmental impact.
Paul Schultz
Irrigation resource manager
Cagwin & Dorwand
Petaluma, Calif.
For irrigation professionals, it’s going to continue to be important to ensure your people are educated. Find ways to retain them. How do you keep people, provide a good career path and help ramp up education, especially when new technology just keeps coming? I think the next step is understanding how to utilize training processes that people can tap into on-demand.
Things like two-wire systems have been around for a while, but there’s new tech that can measure inside the wire to tell you the distance down the path itself and where the issue might be. The more that people use two-wire systems or maintain them, it’s going to become a thing where you either know how to work (the tech) or you’re going to scramble. That tech can help troubleshoot a lot of the issues that pop up with those systems. But I think it’s something that people are still behind on.
