BWSmallBiz -- Innovation December 5, 2008, 5:00PM EST

How to Make the Drought in the South Pay

Water conservation companies are finding plenty of opportunities in the South's drought conditions

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Walking through a soybean field in rural Georgia's Flint River Basin, it's easy to overlook a blue dome the size and shape of a police car siren sitting in the brown-red loamy soil. But thanks to a number of aggressive small companies, that dome is at the center of rapid change in the Southeast, where entrepreneurs are tackling a drought that's said to be the worst the region has seen in 100 years. Today, areas of serious drought stretch from Tennessee and the Carolinas to Kentucky and Virginia, Alabama and Georgia.

The blue dome contains a sensor that measures moisture levels in the soil. Farmers often must drive around thousands of acres, visiting dozens of probes, to collect data from them. Gathering and analyzing the data can take days, by which time it's often too outdated to be of much use.

But this particular sensor is silently transmitting information back to an office at the Stripling Irrigation Research Park in Camilla, Ga. There, entrepreneurs are teaming up with researchers to perfect so-called variable rate irrigation (VRI), combining the data with GPS technology to allow massive pivoting irrigation arms in farmers' fields to water crops with great precision. So far, 22 farms in the Flint River Basin, Stripling's home, use VRI, which has helped save 10 billion gallons of water since 2003. "This little corner of Georgia makes up about a third of all Georgia's agricultural irrigation," says one of Stripling's water resource specialists, Rad Yager. Pointing to a map of the area in his office, he says, "It's kind of the epicenter."

Paul Gupta, the founder of startup Ilinc, and John Overley, the head of sales and business development for carrier Digitel Wireless, represent just two of about half a dozen small companies that are working with researchers at Stripling to develop systems for farmers and others with extensive irrigation needs, such as the owners of golf courses. The duo's system transmits real-time data directly from the fields to the Web, so farmers and other customers can track conditions via laptops or PDAs instead of driving around collecting information. This allows them to deliver water quickly to where it's needed, and to stop wasting water in areas that are already saturated.

Gupta, an engineer and specialist in remote data transmission who used to work in the auto industry, figured similar technology could be used in agriculture for water conservation. "I wanted to save our precious, finite resource," he says. His system, FarmLinc, comprises the hardware and software that lets sensors transmit data to the Web. Digitel is building the wireless infrastructure to allow such a thing to happen in rural areas. The 85-person, $25 million carrier recently installed a 100-square-mile wireless "cloud" in the Flint River Basin, with radio towers stuck on everything from grain elevators to water towers. The cloud eventually will cover five counties and 2,000 square miles. "I like to say that what is going on in farming [here] is like what Henry Ford did with the Model T," says Overley.

Stripling is not the only place entrepreneurs in the South are trying to reinvent the way the region uses water. Some 80 small businesses, many of them working on water usage, got their start at the Center of Innovation for Agriculture, a business incubator in Tifton, Ga. Bill Boone, a native Georgian who runs the incubator, says the challenge for entrepreneurs is twofold: Not only must they develop innovative products but they also must persuade farmers to use them. "The farmer is a hard person to change," says Boone. "His daddy taught him to go out and see what the plant looks like, and kick the dirt with his boots and see how deep the moisture goes." That's not stopping entrepreneurs, whether they're working from Stripling, an incubator, or entirely on their own.

A PARCHED CITY

While agriculture uses roughly two-thirds of all water, cities also are suffering. By 2007, Lake Lanier, a reservoir that provides Atlanta with much of its water, had reached critical lows, and there was a real possibility the city might run out of water.