Nearly 830,000 euros to bring the agriculture of the future closer: the Villadangos Canal promotes its water transformation with the PERTE

With one of the largest PERTE investments in the province, the Villadangos Canal Irrigation Community is digitizing 7,000 hectares to achieve maximum efficiency and technological autonomy.

The Villadangos Canal Irrigation Community has launched its comprehensive digitalization project. With 6,000 hectares of corn, cereals, and sugar beets, among other crops, and the involvement of 800 farmers, the Community has attracted key investment for its modernization. The project is financed by grants from the first call (2023) of the PERTE (Special Plan for the Renewal of the Water Cycle) for Digitalization, with support from the European Union's Next Generation funds. The total investment amounts to €829,149.87, a clear indication of the scale of the effort to implement Agriculture 4.0 and achieve maximum efficiency in water management.

The primary objective of this transformation is to empower irrigators to make data-driven decisions. The Villadangos Canal is installing a comprehensive network of devices that capture crucial information about the soil, water, and climate to achieve integrated monitoring. This includes soil moisture probes to determine the precise water needs of crops and meteorological systems that provide essential climate data for irrigation planning. The investment also includes the implementation of water quality and volume monitoring systems for return flows to surface watercourses. This commitment ensures compliance with environmental objectives and the protection of water bodies, guaranteeing the ecological flows established in the hydrological plan. The management of available water is significantly improved by working with real-time information and historical data, resulting in reduced energy consumption and more responsible use of the resource.

One of the strategic pillars of the Villadangos Canal Community, which operates on 7,400 hectares of irrigated land, is to guarantee technological independence and the long-term sustainability of the investment. This is achieved through a data warehouse and SSD storage system to centralize all information, feeding a Decision Support System that transforms raw data into actionable intelligence. This enables more efficient irrigation automation and remote management. Finally, the grant also covers robust administrative digitization and increased transparency in management, including the creation of a website, a complaints channel, electronic processing, and the implementation of a GIS map viewer, thus facilitating transparency in water management and improving communication with agricultural professionals.

With this investment of more than 800,000 euros, the Villadangos Canal not only improves the efficiency of its irrigation, but also establishes itself as a model of comprehensive water management and technological advancement in the agricultural sector of the province.