As concerns over groundwater nitrate levels grow, scientist engineers from the Southern Hemisphere have been exporting a unique nitrate sensing technology globally. Now the company is being spun out from it’s university consultancy origins, in the hope of securing investment and scaling up the operation considerably.
Hydro-Metrics started life as a business unit within Lincoln Agritech, the research and development arm wholly owned by Lincoln University, a leading land-based university in New Zealand. Lincoln Agritech scientists operate at the forefront of regenerative sciences, including areas such as climate change, environmental sustainability, food security, and primary sector productivity.
The HydroMetrics GW50™ sensor leads the Hydro-Metrics product lineup offering a relatively low cost entry point for a wide range of industrial and agricultural users. The slimline optical sensing units are installed in numerous sites worldwide including dairy and fish farms, water reticulation pipelines, open waterways and even domestic wells. Demand has been steady for the equipment which is self-cleaning and can be connected to telemetry systems for real time data export.
Mapping and managing nitrate pollution is a complex and controversial topic in New Zealand however, especially in the company’s home province of Canterbury, where intensive dairy farming has been implicated with elevated nitrate levels in groundwater. But the first step towards developing appropriate solutions undoubtedly involves accurately quantifying the scale and distribution of the problem. Agricultural nitrate runoff has begun to be managed better in recent years. But robust and highly sensitive sensor data will be essential to monitor progress.
Company founders Andy Matheson and Dr Ethan Dale will continue to lead the new entity, with a vision to accelerate its novel nitrate sensing hardware and associated data analytics services to more New Zealand and global clients. Matheson says: “The aim of the new business is to unlock the full potential of real-time measurement and management of elevated freshwater nitrates, a growing worldwide problem impacting our scarce water resources”.
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Image credit: Hydro-Metrics Ltd.
