Our Mission
At RecordFLOW, our mission is simple – develop low-cost tools for managers and users of ditches and canals to protect your water rights and operate your systems efficiently. It may sound simple, but finding the right tool is not always easy. We are laser focused on developing easy-to-use tools to capture data and information vital to protect beneficial water uses, deliver water more efficiently, and easily organize long-term records for future generations of water managers.
As water managers ourselves, we know what it’s like to operate complex water delivery systems.
RecordFLOW exists to help both single-user water rights owners and large-scale irrigation districts organize data and information, make that information easy to access, and help you generate insights when protecting your water rights, valuing your water rights, or optimizing your systems operations.
Our History
From our earliest days as a company, we have always been focused on helping ditch and canal managers, both large and small, map their delivery systems and inventory their assets.
How We Started
Data for Engineers
Our first projects focused on engineering level ditch and canal surveys using drone photogrammetry and 3D elevation models of ditch and canal systems.
While this was a good approach for specific engineering projects, it didn’t really accomplish our mission of providing ditch and canal managers with a platform to document the daily operations of their ditch and canal systems. In most cases, the data we collected was too technical and the software we used was not adequate or user-friendly.
Our New Direction
Data for Water Managers
Our early projects taught us a valuable lesson; we didn’t need to collect the data, we needed to build a platform so you can easily connect, collect and control your own data.
And not the overly-technical type of data you use once and then put in a file, but instead the type of data the helps with daily decision making and improves operational efficiency while also collecting and organizing the data necessary for long-term water rights protection.
Our Staff
We are a small, American-owned business with a passion for helping water managers protect water rights and maximize beneficial uses.
Blake Osborn
Founder & CEO
Blake founded RecordFLOW in 2022 to help water managers, like himself, capture and record information to help make decisions about ditch administration. He saw risk to the ditches and canals he was working with because critical information was not being collected or used to make the organizations more efficient. There were also opportunities to collect simple data that could more fully protect their water rights and support water valuations through a more accurate consumptive use analysis.
He learned that the problems his partners experienced were not uncommon and many ditch and canal systems (from small systems to very large ones) had similar issues. And because of these experiences, RecordFLOW was born.
Blake has a Masters degree in Water Resources from the University of Wyoming (Go ‘Pokes!) and spent almost a decade as a research scientist for the Colorado Water Institute. He’s served on several water-related boards, including for an irrigation company, but nothing has been as satisfying as building tools for water managers. RecordFLOW is a lifelong passion and he’s grateful for the partnerships he’s built within the water community.
