Below is a guest blog from Treebù, a fantastic group growing and planting trees in Italy to boost sustainable and positive environmental impacts.
It has been great to work with them to find a better way to irrigate their saplings, swapping from a diesel water pump to our solar water pumps!
Treebù is a newly established Italian startup that empowers companies to plant trees in Italy, contribute to the development of a more sustainable economy and a carbon positive wood supply chain, while promoting their environmental efforts. All this is possible thanks to the only green investment that pays back in the long run.
Our company name is a wordplay made up of the words tree and tribù, which means tribe in Italian. The reason behind this is easy to grasp: Treebù aims to be at the centre of a network of companies committed to sustainability and successfully reducing their environmental impact.
Giacomo Alberini and Isacco Rossi founded the startup with the goal of giving value to sustainability and finding a way to mix economic profit and respect for the environment.
“We know that planting trees alone will not save the world, but joining Treebù has much more to it. It means investing in a better, greener, and more sustainable future,” says Giacomo Alberini, CEO & Co-Founder.
When we discovered the incredible properties of the Paulownia, we chose to plant selected clones of this species only. It grows incredibly fast and can absorb up to 100 kilos of CO2 in a year. To compensate for local CO2 emissions, we plant exclusively in Italy and we use organic methods for a low environmental impact. Thanks to the wood produced by our little forests, we will create the first carbon positive wood supply chain to generate high-quality sustainable products.
At this point, the recipe towards success was just missing a key ingredient: water! What would be the most efficient and sustainable way to irrigate our field? Here Futurepump came into view. In Futurepump’s solar water pumps we found a low-cost and sustainable solution that fits our needs perfectly.
The flow rate is surprising given the small dimensions of the solar pump (52x53x20cm) averaging 0.5L/sec with peaks of 1L/sec. The energy requirements are limited because the DC motor is powered by 2 solar panels of 60W each, which is a great improvement compared to the average hydraulic pumps that are used in our area (as a reference, before discovering Futurepump we used a pump of about 4.5kW that was fuelled by burning diesel on our testing field).
The pressure is also excellent: with an output of more than 1bar we are able to operate a self-compensating drip irrigation system for a full hectare – more than 1.5km of drip tubing!
Finally, the icing on the cake is the remote monitoring system included in the pump that reports our irrigation events down to the finest detail and helps us to better schedule when and how much to water our beautiful saplings.
We understood we made the right choice in choosing this one-of-a-kind invention as we faced our first big challenge. After planting the first hectare with over 300 trees, a month of drought in Italy’s North East could have resulted in ruined crops and dead saplings, were it not for the solar pump. It kept pumping water from our well to irrigate our field and it let our Agronomist Alessandro sleep soundly even without rain.
Now we are happy to see our plants grow and we look forward to growing and expanding our startup to deploy more Futurepump solar pumps in our fields.
Want to discover more about Futurepump?
Check out how our solar water pumps are also helping grow tree saplings in Kenya or find out how solar irrigation could help irrigation on your farm.
At Futurepump, we are experts in the manufacturing of solar water pumps, with over 9,000 solar pumps sold in more than 20 countries – and counting!
We offer a range of solar water pumps to meet the needs of 1 to 2 acres farmers. All our solar pumps come with a market-leading 10-year warranty promise, so you can be confident that you are getting quality products that will irrigate your farm for years.
You can find out more about which of our solar water pumps is best for you along with details on where to buy at shop.futurepump.com
