In an archipelago with no permanent rivers, where every drop used in agriculture is already a contested resource, the municipality of Gáldar has decided to bet on artificial intelligence to solve a problem as old as banana farming itself: how to irrigate enough without wasting water.
The project is called AGALDAT, short for Sustainable Digital Transformation of Gáldar’s Banana Farming Sector, and it secured a 3.2 million euro grant under Red.es’s RedCyTI (Smart Economy) programme, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. Of that amount, 1.3 million euros will go toward installing precision irrigation systems, while 1.17 million euros will fund the data and AI platform tasked with interpreting field data in real time.
The stated goal is ambitious: cut the water used to irrigate banana plants by 60% across eight pilot farms in the municipality. It isn’t a number thrown out for effect, it’s the basis of a precise economic calculation, under which, over the roughly three years the programme runs, the companies owning the participating farms could save between 1.5 and 2.5 million euros in irrigation costs. One detail worth noting: similar efforts, such as the REGADIA project run by ITER’s robotics unit on banana and avocado crops, show that water optimisation in agriculture has become a front several Canary institutions are working on in parallel, a sign the problem is felt as urgent well beyond Gáldar.
The real test comes over the next few months, once the sensors installed in the field start returning enough data to show whether the model holds up at the real scale of a working farm, not just in simulation. But the direction, in a territory where climate change is making the seasons increasingly unpredictable, already looks set: wasting less water has stopped being simply good environmental practice and become a condition for economic survival for those who farm here.
