A family’s rice fields, and a better way to water them
The story
KhawTECH grew out of my wife’s family farm. They grow rice across several paddies in Yasothon, in Thailand’s northeast — the region called Isan.
Spending time with them, I saw how much of rice farming depends on walking and guessing. Someone walks out to each paddy, often in the heat, to check the water. When a field needs water, the diesel pump is started by hand, and the fuel is paid for with money that the harvest barely returns. Nobody has the data to decide differently.
I’m a software engineer. Since 2021 I have been building technology to bring the International Rice Research Institute’s Alternate Wetting and Drying method to families like this one, starting with our own.
— Alberto Roura, founder
Timeline
- 2021Started exploring AWD and water-level sensing; first WiFi prototypes.
- 2022–2023Built the NaLog platform: farm registration, sensor integration, AWD automation.
- 2024–2025Developed LoRaWAN sensor nodes and a gateway; deployed NaLog on AWS.
- 2026Built NaLog Agent, which received an honourable mention with a monetary award at an Alibaba Cloud / Qwen hackathon. Created our internal knowledge base.
- NextField deployment in Yasothon.
The team
Alberto Roura, founder and software engineer, has been building KhawTECH since 2021. He writes the platform, the AI assistant and the device firmware, and documents the builds openly on his blog.
The family in Yasothon provides the fields, local knowledge and hands on the ground. As KhawTECH grows, so will the team.
How we work
- The farmer decides. Our software can suggest irrigation, but a pump never switches without the farmer’s approval.
- Research-backed. Our method follows IRRI’s published AWD protocol. See the science.
- Transparent. The code behind our AI assistant is public on GitHub. See open source.