PepsiCo India and N-Drip, manufacturer of an innovative gravity-powered micro-irrigation system, have announced a partnership, as a lead-up to World Water Day 2022, to help farmers in India adopt game-changing technology in water efficiency. The technology has already been introduced in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan with an aim to improve water efficiency levels across thousands of hectares in the country by 2025.This is part of a global partnership between PepsiCo and N-Drip aimed at increasing water efficiency across 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) around the world by 2025.
Around the world, a countless number of farmers make use of flood, or trench, irrigation to bring water to their crops, which floods the field at regular intervals, losing up to 70 percent of the water used. This technique is still deployed on 85 percent of all irrigated fields worldwide, roughly 600 million acres, even in water-scarce locations. However, alternatives to flood irrigation are too expensive for many farmers to use and prohibit these farmers from selling their low-margin crops at a profit.
A replacement for flood or trench irrigation, Israeli-headquartered N-Drip’s high-efficiency irrigation system is powered by gravity and harnesses the water-saving benefits of high-pressure drip irrigation, but with low energy, operating and maintenance demands—making it more accessible to all types of farmers and nearly all types of crops. Farmers using N-Drip routinely achieve significant water savings,
see larger crop yields, and reduce the need for expensive fertilizers. In addition, by converting from flood irrigation to N-Drip’s drip irrigation system, carbon (CO2) emissions are reduced by as much as 83 percent and methane emissions by as much as 78 percent.
Commenting on the development, Eran Pollak, Chief Executive Officer, N-Drip said, “We’re thrilled to partner with PepsiCo with the goal of removing barriers to access, introducing, and implementing N-Drip technology to farmers in India. As PepsiCo sources crops from farms of all types and sizes, N-Drip’s proprietary technology allows our partnership to make precise irrigation accessible to all types of
farmers, from those with massive farms to those with one-acre plots.”