In celebration of its centennial, the Rockefeller Foundation has announced its 2012 Innovation Challenge. The contest, which will award nine finalists up to $100,000 in grants, challenges participants to submit ideas that will solve complex problems in data, irrigation and agriculture for the next 100 years. The Irrigating Efficiency Challenge calls for ideas that will both maintain the improved agricultural yields and food security that irrigation ensures, while also solving the negative side effects of water pollution and depletion that can occur from irrigation.

According to the Rockefeller Challenge, contestants may respond to the challenge from several different approaches:

• Distribution: Market-based solutions for increasing the distribution and accessibility of affordable, quality irrigation products
• Advocacy campaign: Publically promote positive behavioral norms for agricultural water use
• Policy: Identification of institutional structures or regulations that inhibit water use efficiency and the measures that can be taken to change those
  

Learn more about the Rockefeller Foundation Innovation Challenge on the Rockefeller Centennial website and submit your own idea to the Irrigating Efficiency Challenge to help build a solution to improving efficient agricultural water use.