Mumbai: To help farmers improve their water use efficiency Isreal-based micro irrigation firm Rivulis Irrigation India has introduced satellite data based irrigation intelligence on smart phone.

Rivulis on Thursday announced the launch of "Manna", a satellite-based software solution to help growers use technology efficiently and improve their irrigation and water management.

The site-specific irrigation solutions launched in India has been developed keeping in mind smaller size of farm plots and to help farmers improve their irrigation and water management efficiencies.

"Currently, Rivulis would focus on markets of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gujarat, UP and parts of Tamil Nadu, before extending its reach in other leading agrarian markets.  It would initially focus on crops like cotton, sugarcane, pomegranate, grapes and tomatoes and would further expand crop portfolio to other in coming months, company said.

The software based solution provides farmers inputs on how much to irrigate and when to irrigate depending on the weather conditions and water evaporation level with more than 90 per cent accuracy in 5 square kilometre area, officials from Rivulis said.

"Farmers are mainly dependent on gut feel when it comes to irrigating their crops. This usually leads to over- or under irrigation and irrigation-led losses. Till now there has not been a scientific approach towards irrigation and there has been skepticism towards requirement of right amount of water and exact time of irrigation. Manna will help the farmers by forecasting their irrigation requirements and help them reduce irrigation losses, save cost and improve yield," said Kaushal Jaiswal, Managing Director, Rivulis.

"Manna leverages data — multi-spectral satellite imagery, hyper-local, virtual-station weather service and crop models and provides growers with crop and site-specific irrigation recommendations i.e. the amount of water to be applied for that week, historical, current and weather conditions forecast at the field level, on a daily basis which includes maximum & minimum temperature, rainfall, ETO — Reference Evapotranspiration as well as extreme weather alerts delivered to their phones," the company said.