Sustainable Water and Innovative Irrigation Management, or SWIIM, announced that with the assistance of online investment platform, AgFunder, it has closed on a Series A round of fundraising led by goFARM Australia, raising $3 million.
SWIIM offers both farmers and water districts a broad-view approach to water management, providing a complete illustration of the water used by an operation’s crops. This perspective enablies the more efficient use and conservation of water resources, resulting in cost savings and higher revenues for farmers, who can then lease out conserved water.
“We’ve looked all over and can’t seem to find anyone else doing everything that we are doing,” says SWIIM CEO Kevin France. “SWIIM is a package that takes the agronomics side of the business — the planning, cropping and related decision-making process — and looks at it from a water resource management perspective. To do it any other way would be like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together with pieces missing.”
Through the SWIIM platform, which was developed over five years of collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Colorado State University, and Utah State University, farmers can create a specific crop-water plan for their specific piece of land and water resources. The software system includes a database compiled from data from public resources, but also allows farmers to enter their own data to create a custom profile for their acreage and their water supply and usage. Then using a modeling algorithm that was co-developed with the USDA, the software will determine the optimum usage of water and where the farmer can conserve. Since the software is compatible with municipalities, SWIIM’s system also enables farmers to gain credit for their conserved water, and then will lease it through the grid, creating a win-win scenario for both the public and private sides of the water equation.
Commenting upon SWIIM’s partnership with goFARM, Ed Warner, chairman of SWIIM states, “We chose goFARM, in part, due to their extensive knowledge of water scarcity and the many parallels that can be drawn between what Australia went through around changes to water law and what we are seeing in the arid western United States. They are a good group of professionals, and we are pleased to have their support and direction as we take SWIIM to the next level.”
Under the terms of the financing deal, goFARM’s managing director, Liam Lenaghan will join SWIIM’s board.
“Water is one of our most precious and finite resources,” says Lenaghan. “Australia, in response to water being a constant limiting resource, has been a global leader in water market reform and in developing systems and technology to optimize agricultural water use. In comparison, the United States is behind in their water management practices. SWIIM’s technology looks similar to our solution for Australia, so we immediately saw the enormity of the opportunity for it in the U.S. We believe this technology will bring the U.S. up the curve quickly.”