Poly Punch lands $1.23 million USDA grant to cut Delta groundwater use
What's the deal? Precision Flow TechnologiesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the company commercialising the Poly Punch automated hole-punch system, has been awarded $1,230,510 by the US Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). The grant, made in October 2026 through the Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) On-Farm Trials program, funds a three-year project across Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana.
What's the endgame? The trial will place prescription-programmed, pre-punched poly pipe on row crop farms, scaling from 10 farms in year one to 50 by year three. Participating producers — growing corn, soybeans, rice, and cotton under furrow irrigation — will receive cash incentives and pre-punched pipe to replace manual hole punching.
The project targets at least a 15% cut in pumping time on 70% or more of farms. It will measure pump hours, water use, labour, and crop yield against each farm's baseline.
Why now? Furrow irrigation with lay-flat poly pipe covers an estimated 1.5 million irrigated acres in Mississippi alone, yet holes are still typically punched by hand. Irregular, inconsistent holes force excess pumping from the Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer, which is losing an estimated 300,000 acre-feet of water per year.
How it works: Developed by Drew Gholson and Wes Lowe at Mississippi State UniversityDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, the patent-pending system reads Computerized Hole Selection (CHS) prescriptions and punches clean, variable-size holes with no hand labour. Research shows CHS prescriptions can cut water use per acre by about 21%, but manual punching has been the bottleneck.
"Computerized hole selection has already proven it can save water, but hole punching has always been the bottleneck," said Drew Gholson, co-vice president and technical lead at Precision Flow Technologies. "This trial will give producers and NRCS rigorous, multi-farm data on what precise holes do for pump hours, water use and yields."
The bigger pool: The award is one of 34 CIG projects announced on October 23, 2026, as part of a $65 million USDA investment. It sits among 16 selected in the On-Farm Trials category, which pairs partners with producers and offers incentive payments to offset the risk of trying new approaches. CIG is funded through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.
The signal: The grant is meaningful validation and project funding, but not evidence of commercial adoption on its own. For Precision Flow Technologies, the multi-farm data it generates may prove as valuable as the cash — a route to proving precision irrigation hardware can scale across the Mid South.
Read more: madisonjournal.com
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