Farmers will soon be able to benefit from a better selection of online weather and agronomic tools, after an investment by The Western Producer’s parent company, Glacier Media, in WeatherFarm.com.
The network has been bought from the Canadian Wheat Board through a new partnership between Glacier Media and agricultural meteorology firm Weather INnovations Inc., in the form of a new company called Weather INnovations Consulting LP (WIN).
WeatherFarm.com provides near-real-time local weather conditions for more than 800 locations from Manitoba to British Columbia. The detailed site-specific reports give growers information they need to make on-the-fly decisions on operations such as seeding, spraying and harvesting.
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“Our goals in developing WIN Consulting LP and acquiring the WeatherFarm.com service are to enhance the monitoring capabilities and complement it with our other services already offered in Western Canada,” said WIN president Ian Nichols.
The data collected from the network of wireless stations also drives an array of weather-based agronomic models, which can warn farmers in advance of the risk of crop diseases such as fusarium or sclerotinia, or insects such as wheat midge.
WIN operates several networks of weather and environmental monitoring stations across Canada, which provide data to growers, governments, academic researchers and crop insurance corporations.
It also develops and maintains crop-specific weather advisory websites, including WeatherCentral.ca for grain growers in Ontario, MBpotatoes.ca for Manitoba potato farmers and sites for tomato, grape, tender fruit and sugarbeet growers in Eastern Canada and Europe.
Weather information from the WeatherFarm.com network is already carried on Glacier Media agricultural websites, including The Western Producer.
“We know how important local weather information is to farmers, and this partnership ensures that we will be able to grow those services,” said Bob Willcox, president of the Glacier Agriculture group.
