The problem
More than 70% of the world’s water consumption goes to agriculture, and Jordan ranks among the most water-scarce nations on earth. Yet the irrigation systems on Jordanian farms are mostly imported, expensive, and built without water-saving features — so farmers flood fields by habit while aquifers fall.
How it works
Smart Green, launched in 2020 in Jordan and Canada by engineers Mohammad Zeinati and Salma Amayri, builds an Industry 4.0 irrigation stack: Fertigo, a smart irrigation-and-fertigation controller; Rootrika, a root-sensing sensor; and Taqs Scope, a data-based weather app. The system remotely controls the farm’s irrigation, delivering precise amounts of water and nutrients to plants exactly when needed.
Pain points
Imported controllers with no water-saving logic, fertilizer applied by calendar rather than root need, no Arabic-language interfaces for local growers, and no remote management — a farmer had to be standing in the field to know anything.
Business model
Hardware-plus-software sales: Fertigo units, sensors, and turnkey installations sold to farms and mega-projects, with pilots designed to convert into wider rollouts, monitoring services, and add-ons such as satellite monitoring and water harvesting.
Challenges
Conservative growers adopt technology only after seeing neighbor pilots succeed, so every new region starts with slow trust-building and awareness sessions. Imported incumbents own existing dealer channels, and regional expansion into markets like Saudi Arabia demands fresh capital, partners, and regulatory groundwork.
Funding
- Raised: none publicly disclosed.
- Valuation: none.
Latest — October 2023
In October 2023 Entrepreneur Middle East profiled Smart Green as one of six startups in the second edition of PepsiCo’s Greenhouse Accelerator Program: MENA Sustainability Edition, with Zeinati pointing to the program’s investor access and its $100,000 final prize as transformative for the business.