I want to tell you about a tank that used to trip the electricity.
At The Sustainability Institute (TSI) in Lynedoch, out in Stellenbosch, there’s a food garden that feeds an entire learning community. Water for that garden comes from one elevated JoJo tank. To fill it, someone had to switch on a pump and wait. There was no gauge, no readout, nothing to tell you when to stop, you just watched, guessed, and hoped.
Most of the time it went fine. Sometimes it didn’t. The tank would overflow, and because the generator room sits directly below it, the water would spill straight down onto the electrics and trip the whole supply. That’s not a small inconvenience on a working farm, it’s a morning lost, equipment at risk, and staff pulled off real work to sort out a problem that a simple float switch and a bit of visibility could have prevented years earlier.
Downstream of the tank, there was a second problem nobody could see either. Pressure through the main irrigation line was too strong for any single garden bed to handle, so the team had to open several sub-lines at once just to bring it down to something usable. Nobody knew what pressure they were actually running, nobody could safely plan around it, and a farm running blind on pressure is one surge away from a burst pipe.
That’s the situation before we got involved, and it’s one I’d guess a lot of farmers reading this will recognise in some form, maybe not the exact same problem, but the same feeling of managing something you can’t see and reacting instead of deciding. The cost of that isn’t always dramatic, sometimes it’s just a slow leak of time, water, and peace of mind.
What changed, and why it matters more than the tech itself
We installed two sensors. One dropped into the tank to measure water level, and one clamped onto the main supply pipe to measure pressure. Both talk over a long-range wireless network back to a gateway, and from there the readings show up on the MBS SmartFarm Platform dashboard (the TSI team can check from a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop). That’s it, two sensors, but here’s the part that actually matters to a farmer, not the hardware, it’s what it let people do differently.
Filling the tank stopped being a guessing game. Staff could watch the level climb in real time and cut the pump before it ever got near the top, and not long after, we helped them go a step further and install a float valve, so now the tank fills itself to a safe level and stops with nobody having to stand there anymore.
The pressure sensor did something we didn’t fully expect. It didn’t just show the team that pressure was too high, it gave them the evidence to understand why they’d been forced into opening multiple sub-lines at once, and the confidence to sequence valves properly instead of guessing. A pressure control valve went in after that, and the whole irrigation system settled into something predictable.
And then the data caught something nobody was looking for. Pressure kept spiking through the day, and water kept leaving the tank overnight, refilling again by morning, on its own, and that’s a leak, one that had been running invisibly, probably for a long time, quietly costing water every single night. It only showed up because someone finally had eyes on the system.
Here’s the quote from the team on the ground, because I think it says more than I can:
“Before this, our guys couldn’t tell where the water was – we’d overfill the tank and it would trip the electricity. Now we see exactly where we are while we fill, so that just doesn’t happen anymore. What surprised us was the data showing water being used after hours – that’s how we picked up a leak we didn’t even know we had.” — TSI Operations, The Sustainability Institute
Why I’m telling you this, farmer to farmer
I didn’t start MyBitSecure to sell sensors. My background is cybersecurity, protecting systems that people depend on and can’t afford to have fail silently, and a farm’s water and irrigation setup is exactly that kind of system. It just doesn’t usually get treated that way, because the failures are quiet, a slow leak doesn’t set off an alarm, a tank overflowing at 6am doesn’t send anyone a notification, and the damage happens before anyone even knows there’s a problem.
What we do at MyBitSecure is give farms that missing visibility, and just as importantly, we stay involved to help make sense of what the data is actually telling you. It’s not a gadget you install and forget, it’s an ongoing view of a part of your operation that’s usually invisible until something goes wrong, plus someone on the other end who understands both the technology and the agricultural reality behind it.
For TSI, two sensors and a dashboard turned two recurring, costly problems into things the team now manages with confidence, and opened the door to automating irrigation entirely. Every farm’s version of this looks a little different, maybe it’s a borehole you’re not sure is running dry, maybe it’s a cold room you can’t monitor overnight, maybe it’s simply not knowing how much water you’re actually using versus how much you think you’re using.
If any part of TSI’s story sounds like your farm, that’s worth a conversation. Not because I want to sell you something, but because I’ve seen what happens when a farm goes from guessing to knowing, and it’s worth having for anyone still running blind.
This project was also featured by Milesight as a global case study, you can see their write-up here.
