This combination allows farmers to know everything going on in their fields: temperature, transpiration, moisture content in the air and soil, the weather forecast, how much fertilizer has been applied to every plant, how much water each plant has received, and so forth. An unsustainable 70 percent of the water on Earth is now used for growing food. “With precision agriculture,” says Doug Miell, a water management consultant who advises the state of Georgia, “farmers can lower their water use by thirty-five percent to forty percent, and increase their yields by twenty-five percent.”
