Manually irrigating took hours. Automating with existing controllers meant losing visibility and accountability. When disaster struck, he often wouldn’t know until it was too late. “If it was this hard for me on one acre, what must it be like for other large-scale farms? Those aren’t hobby plots. Those are their livelihoods. It is what we all depend on for food,” Wright said. That moment of realization changed everything. Listening First, Acting Second Wright’s early instinct was that better technology must already exist, so he got a job as an irrigator and started visiting growers across the county. What he found surprised him. “Every single one of them said the same thing: We have almost no visibility into what’s happening in the field,” he said. “On ranches that were using automation products, they had people on ATVs driving around looking for leaks because the technology just couldn’t be trusted.” Wright repeatedly saw irrigation controllers unplugged, shelved or abandoned.
“They told me, half-jokingly, ‘Look, if you can make every valve as smart as one of my irrigators, with the brain, the visibility, the accountability—I’ll buy it. But it’s impossible.'” Solving for that problem became the very blueprint for Lumo. “Right there, I thought: That’s the product,” Wright said. “A smart valve with the brain of an irrigator. If we can do that, farmers will actually use it.” Within three seasons, Lumo had nearly 200 farms on board. A major reason for Lumo’s success is something Wright learned from his earlier startup career: don’t try to build everything for everyone. “Growers irrigate differently depending on the crop,” he said. “Wine grapes deficit irrigate. They take in gallons per vine. Apples take in inches per acre. Berry cooling runs almost all day with completely different flow rates.” If a startup tries to build a generic tool to serve everyone at once, “you either run out of money or build a mediocre product for five different customers instead of a great one for one,” Wright said.
L-R: Walt Duflock, Western Growers; Devon Wright, Lumo; Neill Callis, Turlock Fruit Company
38 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com January – March 2026
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online