Introduction from USA Country Representative, Brent Sams:    As we get ready to close the book on 2025, I’d like to send you all off with a positive feeling. A few weeks after returning from the ECPA meeting in Barcelona, I received an email from a young precision agriculture practitioner in southern California looking for more information on ISPA and precision agriculture in general. Little did I know, I was about to get a lesson in on farm experimentation and implementing precision practices from a high school student named Vikram Anand. Vikram became interested in precision agriculture, really before he knew there a term for it, and started down a path towards making his farm more productive and efficient. When I suggested he write something for a potential spot in this newsletter, I expected to never hear from him again. Following this introduction, you will find Vikram’s submission detailing exactly how he got started, came to find a potential solution, completed a cost/benefit analysis, and produced results that have already created value on his family’s farm. Happy holidays and enjoy!   Experience with Precision Agriculture on a Temecula Farm as a Teenager Vikram Anand   About 2 years ago, I took a look at the water bill of our 7-acre Temecula farm for the first time. Upon viewing the records for the past year and researching other farms, I was shocked at both how much money and water were spent on farms, even one as small as ours. As I was researching the most common methods of irrigation, I compared them with our farm and found a scary similarity: despite modern advancements, many farms utilize archaic methodologies that were never built for the volume of modern resource consumption. After pondering the implications of this ...more