Date: Dec 12, 2019 Author: Niranjan Balki Source: Tech Week (
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Introduction
Drought Diet Products is a disruptive agricultural technology company that focuses on delivering products and solutions that enhance water-efficiency, thereby helping to alleviate future stress on the world's most precious resource. Their Aquifer Pipe is their trademark product that was created when the team started to witness increasing groundwater stress in California.
The Product
Drought Diet Products' Aquifer Pipe is reinventing the irrigation paradigm for agriculture by conserving more than 50% water usage and 60% energy consumption over current traditional irrigation methods such as sprinklers and drip irrigation. It is a subsurface wicking system creating a virtual water table at the buried depth of the Aquifer Pipe.
By applying water at the roots of the plant, the pipe helps avoid loss of water from evaporation and over-spraying. The system also affects labor, energy/water nexus, and soil conservation, leading to greater yields and faster growth, while cutting down on wasteful surface evaporation and poisonous pesticides.
The company's Do It Yourself (DIY) greywater irrigation equipment for residential and commercial use is marketed under the brand name Grey4Green, which is owned by Drought Diet Products. Recently, the group has expanded its focus to the commercial property market, offering devices that collect condensed water from air conditioners and bathroom sinks and reuse it for landscape irrigation.
The startup has also developed a method called 'Net Zero Water Farming', which refers to practices for improving agriculture water utilization through transpiration only and providing a path for groundwater balancing. A byproduct of this new irrigation system is the way energy is consumed. The system enables users to adopt an energy consumption profile based on a "flexible on-demand load" instead of large multi-day chunks of power, thereby optimizing energy usage based on the actual requirement at a given time.
Drought Diet Products is also working on enhancing corporate supply chain sustainability by moving from traditional conservation to long-term resiliency to mitigate resource crunch resulting from ongoing climate crises. Its renewable energy curtailment prevention services aim to enhance corporate power purchasing agreements (PPAs) by limiting the curtailment period and low pricing production.
Origin and Founding Team
Joseph Gallegos, CEO of Drought Diet Products, has spent the last 4+ years working towards creating cutting-edge products and services based on a new category of irrigation -- the virtual water table management.
He initially built the Aquifer Pipe as a way to keep his home landscape green and fruit trees alive, and soon realized the product's potential for commercial use among farmers and food-growers.
He has been actively working with industry and a distinguished science team to improve agriculture water utilization through the 'Net Zero Water Farming' method.
