The worst thing about many water leaks is that you can't see them and do not know the extent of the leak. Water use is variable depending on the time of year and weather, so what is abnormal?

That had been the issue for Andrew Tobin, the sharemilker in south Taranaki until the farm owner Chris Young arranged to join the trial of the Water to Grows water infrastructure monitoring project in 2024.

Chris and Mary’s farm is 230hA grazing for 600 milking cows. The farm is managed by share farmers, Andrew & Tania, who also have one full-time employee. They consider it to be a low-cost farm, using limited additional feed, and utilising technology to alleviate staff pressures (e.g. herd health ear tags, with 11 sensors around the farm). Minimising water take, and comparing own runoff calculations with those of Fonterra/TRC are priorities from this initiative. 

Chris and Andrew had 5 Water to Grow flow meters installed to measure where water is being used on the farm.

The above is a graph showing water consumption on each part of the farm over the past 6 months. Water usage varies each day depending on weather conditions and demand for stock water. To account for this, the Water to Grow system alerts can be set up to notify unexpected water use at specific times of the day. Allowing for normally low usage at night, a spike in consumption between 11 pm and 4 am indicates a likely leak. As is evident from the graph, water use on the Northern Lines spiked on 17 January.

This prompted the system to send the following alert to Andrew’s iPhone:

Incident

FM 3 - Northern Lines flow rate exceeds high night usage rate of 900 L/hour (15 L/min) at 17/01/2025, 1:39:34 am

Report back from Andrew:

Definitely an incident. I’ve had a water leak for the last several days that I have been unable to locate. I finally found it this morning. Everything should be back to normal now. Thanks, Andrew. Sent from my iPhone

Measuring water consumption increases the awareness of where water is used and provides opportunities to optimise usage. But even more powerful is when the system can alert farmers (as with Andrew's experience) to abnormal patterns which identify issues that would otherwise not be detected quickly. 

Takeaway: Water to Grow allows the timely identification of issues with water use so action can be taken to remediate the cause quickly, reducing costs and the problem escalating into something more serious.