N-Drip’s system irrigating a Nebraska soybean field. Photo from N-Drip
N-Drip, an Israeli startup that offers an alternative irrigation method to flood or trench irrigation which allows for significant savings in water, has entered into a deal with food and beverage titan PepsiCo to help farmers around the world achieve greater water efficiency across 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) by 2025. And according to Globes, the partnership could be worth at least $20 million, reaching as much as $50, per year.
This is certainly a big deal for a startup that only just brought in $20 in new funding last November. N-Drip has raised $40 million to date from a mix of strategic and financial investors in the U.S. and Israel. So the PepsiCo partnership could bring in more per year than the startup has even brought in through investments.
Cofounded by chairman and CTO Prof. Uri Shani, Ariel Halperin and CEO Ran Ben-Or and Eran Pollak in 2017, N-Drip boasts that its gravity-powered micro-irrigation system helps farmers irrigate precisely and efficiently, optimizing yields without requiring expensive pumps or pressure-based filters. The system uses low energy, operating and maintenance demands—making it “more accessible to all types of farmers and nearly all types of crops.”
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Farmers using N-Drip, says the company, routinely achieve significant water savings, see larger crop yields, and reduce the need for expensive fertilizers. In addition, by converting from flood irrigation to N-Drip’s drip irrigation system, carbon (CO2) emissions can be reduced by as much as 83 percent and methane emissions by as much as 78 percent. So this is yet another example of a new company coming out of Israel Startup Nation that is helping reduce greenhouse emissions while also coming up with ways to conserve energy in the global fight against climate change.
N-Drip explains that around the world, a countless number of farmers make use of flood, or trench, irrigation to bring water to their crops, which floods the field at regular intervals, losing up to 70 percent of the water used. This technique is still deployed on 85 percent of all irrigated fields worldwide, roughly 600 million acres, even in water-scarce locations. However, alternatives to flood irrigation are too expensive for many farmers to use and prohibit these farmers from selling their low-margin crops at a profit.
PepsiCo alone sources over 25 crops across 60 countries for its businesses. PepsiCo aims to scale N-Drip’s technology to help improve farmer livelihoods with higher yields, reduced water consumption, and reduced CO2 emissions. This effort will contribute to PepsiCo’s pep+ Positive Agriculture goals of improving direct agricultural supply chain water use efficiency by 15% by 2025 (against a 2015 baseline) in areas of high-water-risk, spreading regenerative agriculture practices across 7 million acres of farmland, and strengthening the livelihoods of more than 250,000 people in its agricultural supply chain.
Eran Pollak said, “As PepsiCo sources crops from farms of all types and sizes, N-Drip’s proprietary technology allows our partnership to make precise irrigation accessible to all types of farmers, from those with massive farms to those with one-acre plots.”
