Episode 42 - Going with the Flow: How electrical engineering impacted irrigation management with Matt Ryan

In this episode, I had the opportunity to chat with Matt Ryan of Rubicon Water on a tech transfer success story that is rippling through irrigation markets around the world.

Rubicon Water is an ASX listed company that started in 1995 following the consolidation of a number of Victorian rural water boards. Members of the departing staff identified inefficiencies in the movement of water from dam to crop and started to develop products and solutions to meet market needs for efficient water management.

Early trial work led by Matt in the Burdekin River Irrigation Area around Ayr in Far North Queensland gave confirmation of the market need and the testing of early product solutions. Rubicon’s market hypothesis in the late 1990s was that better scheduling and delivery of water from dam to farm would complement (then) application technologies. The value was apparent from the regular drought cycles that affect Australian agriculture. The product required to create value needed to better measure and manage the flows through irrigation channels to match supply with demand.

Matt explained that the Rubicon team didn’t have the internal capacity to undertake the product development R&D. He also shared that Rubicon had a hunch that the challenge could be solved with an electrical engineering, rather than (a more conventional) civil, agriculture or hydraulic engineering approach. This disruptive thinking led to a partnership with Professor Iven Mareels (then) at the University of Melbourne before his current roles as Non-Executive Director at Rubicon and Pro-Vice Chancellor at Federation University. Matt also shares a little of the Australian Research Council funding history that sat alongside the research collaborations.

 The product, now referred to in the Industry as Total Channel Control (TCC)  arising from the hunch was trialled in Far North Queensland and Matt shares with us some of the technical elements needed to bring the product together. This journey included new gate designs (inspired from the aviation sector), telemetry, scheduling software and distributed network control loops (noting that we are still in the late 90s). What was equally fascinating was the industry culture and the challenges in marketing, selling and implementing such a different product offering to market. Matt noted that “the hardest thing is the people”.

We conclude our discussion around the current opportunities for Rubicon, particularly as USA water markets are changing in Arizona and California. We also reflect on the broader set of stakeholders that are part of bringing the technology to market, not just in the USA, including urban and environmental water requirements and recognising the rights and needs of indigenous communities.