About Powering Agriculture
Powering Agriculture: An Energy Grand Challenge for Development supports the development and deployment of clean energy innovations that increase agriculture productivity and stimulate low carbon economic growth in the agriculture sector of developing countries to help end extreme poverty and extreme hunger.
Globally, more than 800 million farmers manually lift and haul water to irrigate their farmland. iDE’s Clean Irrigation Solution can run on a variety of power sources—solar steam power, photovoltaic power, and grid-connected AC where available, to access groundwater from deeper depths than conventional pumps, and maintains a slow, steady discharge rate.
iDE has, in recent weeks, installed the first round of pumps in Nepal for field trials. The field-testing is important because it gives farmers a chance to see the technology, understand how it works and provide their feedback.
Over April 13–26, PAEGC visited 11 of iDE’s SunFlower solar pumps installed in five plain regions of Nepal. PAEGC interviewed farmers using the SunFlower pumps for irrigation, as well as various stakeholders in the pump supply chain, including an agricultural cooperative and a future pump retailer.
PAEGC conducted visits to all seven of iDE’s SunFlower pump installation sites in Honduras over June 6–10. PAEGC interviewed the vegetable farmers using iDE’s clean irrigation technology, the Honduras iDE Team and visited the organization’s warehouse.
The first Futurepump jamboree, with the help of iDE, will be both a celebration of Futurepump's progress and a week of field visits, technical assistance, sales, marketing and training. Plus, they'll network with partners and distributors from around the world.