Orbiting kiwifruit water meters

Satellites passing overhead could assess water in kiwifruit canopy leaves and help identify when irrigation is needed. As councils tighten up on water allocations, keeping track of water use in kiwifruit and other orchards is important andwill become even more so as climate variability increases. This article summarises the results of a Rural Professional Fund project that aimed to see if satellite monitoring of kiwifruit orchard canopies using microwave sensors called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites could more accurately show when irrigation is needed, given the variable soils within an individual orchard, and lead to better water management. All text in this article is licensed for re-use under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). First published in New Ground magazine (Vol. 2), December 2022