Water is vital.
Yet climate change is exacerbating its growing scarcity in many parts of the world. In some regions, water might be plentiful but not drinkable. In others, it’s already disappearing.
We don’t have to look far for examples of a crisis.
Negligent decision making in Flint, Michigan, contaminated the drinking water beginning in 2014. Now Jackson, Mississippi, doesn’t have clean water due to aging infrastructure that the state hasn’t upgraded in decades.
But nowhere in America is water more on the mind than in California, where persistent droughts are steadily evaporating a year-round supply that was once taken for granted. The state anticipates losing about 10% of its water within two decades and has allocated more than $8 billion for water related investments.
To meet the challenge, an array of Bay Area companies are working on solutions to chip away at the daunting water crisis focusing on industries like farming, where the state’s water problems have grown existential.
The biggest user
Agriculture uses more water than any other industry.
In California, the amount of irrigated farm and ranchland declined by 1 million acres between 2002 and 2017, according to the state’s report, and up to 1 million more acres could be lost by 2040.
Despite the reduction in acreage, demand for water is still high, and farmers and rural communities are already trying to do more with less.
Bowles Farming Co. CEO Cannon Michael is a sixth-generation farmer in California who owns 4,000 acres and manages an additional 7,000 acres in the Central Valley. Although water isn’t the only challenge that farms have to deal with, it’s a big one.
“Every drop of water has to be accounted for,” Michael said.
Bowles Farming has diversified its crops over the years and also installed drip irrigation systems across 75% of the farmland, but reaching 100% is unrealistic, he said, because certain crops like carrots prefer flood irrigation.
Flooding some crops is also beneficial for species that rely on flooded land to drink and eat. It also
replenishes groundwater stores, Michael said. And he uses a relatively simple technology, GPS, to level the fields so water shoots across it uniformly.
“It’s a balancing act,” Michael said.
Around six years ago, he was looking for some new technology to help the farm save even more resources and reduce expenses. He started talking to AgMonitor, a San Mateo-based startup building software to help farmers monitor water and energy usage to lower costs while increasing profitability.
By 2017, Bowles Farming had AgMonitor’s software installed and soon enough it alerted Michael to an abnormal spike from his drip irrigation system, despite no immediately obvious signs as to why.
Then they found a plastic jug that was obstructing some equipment and fixed it.
“The pump was running but it wasn’t able to fully draw properly,” he said. “It helped us uncover something right away.”
AgMonitor CEO Olivier Jerphagnon grew up in Brittany, a rural area in northwestern France. He went through an entrepreneurship program at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1990s and co-founded the company in 2013. In 2015, AgMonitor received a $3 million grant from the California Energy Commission.
“California is always forced to innovate even in agriculture in the mix of crops and technologies,” Jerphagnon said, and over the next couple of years, there will continue to be a transformation in resource usage across the food and agriculture sector as the industry moves away from gas-powered vehicles to electric vehicles.
The company is also working with the University of California, farmers and other partners to create a broader sustainability report about the food and agriculture industry.
Behind the times
Despite the need for innovative solutions, water startups haven’t caught the attention, and pocketbooks, of venture capitalists like other green sectors such as electric vehicles and decarbonization.
“For a long time, water innovation has been set aside as adaption play for the future and not a mitigation play for today,” said Imagine H2O President Scott Bryan. “Look no further than Jackson, Mississippi, or the images from Pakistan. Adaptation solutions are needed now, and we need to start really thinking about resilient infrastructure.”
Imagine H2O is a nonprofit business development organization based in San Francisco that works with companies around the world that are innovating around water. It has a regional hub in Singapore, and also operates a global accelerator, though it doesn’t make direct investments in companies.
Bryan attributes the slow pace of investment in water technologies to several factors, including highly decentralized infrastructure, monetization challenges and complex contracting processes.
He says the newcomers looking to innovate the industry must deal with even more utility companies than with energy.
“It feels like water is often 10 to 15 years behind energy,” Bryan said.
THE THIRST FOR ANSWERS
Here's a quick look at five Bay Area companies tackling the water crisis.
AgMonitor
CEO: Olivier Jerphagnon
Founded: 2013
HQ: San Mateo
Funding: $9 million
What they do: Develops software to help farmers conserve water and energy, reduce expenses and increase profitability.
2ndNature
CEO: Nicole Beck
Founded: 2004
HQ: Santa Cruz
Funding: $7.6 million
What they do: Develops software to make stormwater management more efficient so municipalities can move away from manually inputting data into spreadsheets.
HydroPoint
CEO: Christopher Spain
Founded: 2002
HQ: Petaluma
Funding: $47.3 million
What they do: Provides last-mile water management to reduce water use in agricultural and real estate settings.
Waterplan
CEO: José Galindo
Founded: 2020
HQ: San Francisco
Funding: $9.7 million
What they do: Creates analytics and software to assess water resilience and risk similar to how carbon emissions are monitored.
ForeverPure (formerly Zhou Yuan International Corp.)
CEO: Yun Yan Zhou
Founded: 1993
HQ: Santa Clara
Funding: unknown
What they do: Designs and manufactures desalination equipment.
