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Agriculture case study, projected

A farm’s irrigation water, watched every five minutes instead of twice a day.

What XPC would be worth to a vegetable farm that treats its irrigation water with chlorine dioxide, worked out over one season from assumptions you can change.

A projection, not a customer result. XPC has no farm customer yet. It runs this same workflow today on chlorine dioxide units at oil-field frac jobs, where it reads the residual, alerts on drift and builds the daily report. Every number below comes from the assumptions on this page.

The farm.

A vegetable farm on drip irrigation draws from a well and a pond. The water goes through a chlorine dioxide unit so the lines stay clean and the water reaching the crop is treated. The grower aims for a small, steady residual at the end of the lines: too little and biofilm and pathogens come back, too much and chemical is wasted and the crop can be stressed.

Today a hand reading is taken twice a day and written on a sheet. Someone in the office types the sheet into the farm’s water records. If the residual drops at 9 a.m., nobody knows until the next reading.

Irrigation season
200 days
Flow through the unit
1,500 gal a minute, 10 hours a day
Hand readings
2 a day, written on a sheet
Readings and records
1.5 hours a day of someone’s time
Upsets a season
6: an empty tank, an air-locked pump, a blocked line
Instruments
Online residual analyser, flow meter and dose pump, wired to a PLC or the XPC AIBox

One upset, two ways.

The same residual drop at 9:10 on a 10-hour irrigation day.

The hand-reading row is one example; on average a problem is found halfway between two readings, which is what the calculator below uses.

Projected value over one season.

Change any assumption. The figures update as you type.

250hours of readings and record-typing a season handed to XPCWorth $7,500 at $30 an hour
2 h 30 minaverage time for a hand reading to find an upset, against 15 min for an XPC alertReadings every 5 hours on a 10-hour day
1,215,000gallons a season that would have gone to the crop below target before anyone knew6 upsets × 2 h 15 min × 1,500 gal a minute

How the figures are worked out

  • Hours: (hours a day on readings and records − hours still spent with XPC) × irrigation days. Someone still walks the unit once a day; XPC takes the readings and writes the record.
  • Time to find: half the gap between hand readings (irrigation hours ÷ readings a day ÷ 2), against 15 minutes for XPC: three readings five minutes apart before one alert.
  • Gallons: upsets × the time saved on each × flow. We don’t put a dollar figure on these gallons: what under-treated water costs a farm depends on the crop, the buyer and the audit.
  • XPC’s own fee is not taken off. Pricing is per site; you get it with your day-45 numbers.

What XPC would do on the farm.

  1. Read

    The residual analyser, the flow meter and the dose pump, every five minutes, plus the irrigator’s sheet if one is still kept. One timeline for the unit.

  2. Watch

    XPC learns the unit’s normal residual with the grower and alerts by text and email when it leaves the band for three readings in a row, not on a single blip.

  3. Report

    A daily water record (residual, flow, gallons treated, every alert and what was done) goes out each morning, ready for the farm’s food-safety file.

Check the projection on your own unit. One chlorine dioxide unit, 45 days, free, with no long-term commitment. At day 45 you have your own numbers in place of ours.

Plan a free 45-day validation