HORIZON-CL6-2027-02-FARM2FORK-01: When water is produced, not found: farm economics of irrigating with desalinated and recycled water

On many farms, water is no longer only a natural resource to divide up. With desalination and recycled wastewater it is produced, at a cost and at different qualities. That turns farm water into an economic question: which crops to keep and expand over the years, how much to irrigate each one every season, and whether the yield the water brings back is worth more than it costs.

I manage Yatir Farms, a large irrigated farm in the Arad Valley, in the Israeli Negev (about 110 mm of rain a year), growing wine grapes, almonds, apricots and field crops on recycled and fresh water. As part of my PhD with the Volcani Institute (Agricultural Research Organization, Israel) I built an agro-economic model for these decisions: a production function for each crop, linking water to yield, built from eleven years of farm records and published irrigation trials; economic optimization of long-term crop allocation and seasonal irrigation across water sources with different prices and qualities; and testing of the plan against thousands of possible years of prices, yields and water costs, to measure profit, risk and the value of each cubic meter.

Role in the consortium: partner, on the economic side. Added value: a working farm-economics model that turns water, yield, price and cost data into allocation and irrigation decisions, with their profit and risk; years of field experience in managing recycled and desalinated water at farm scale; eleven years of real farm records as a test case; links to Israeli growers and the agricultural water sector.

Looking for: a coordinator or consortium preparing a FARM2FORK-01 proposal; partners in digital tools for irrigation (sensing, remote sensing, digital twins, decision support platforms) that the economic model could be linked to; farms or regions irrigating with desalinated, recycled or saline water, where the model could be tested beyond Israel. Also relevant to CLIMATE-01 (Water Resilience Strategy), GOVERNANCE-01, GOVERNANCE-02 and GOVERNANCE-04.