Farmers will soon be able to benefit from a better selection of online weather and agronomic tools.
The WeatherFarm.com network has been bought from CWB through a new partnership between Glacier Media, which owns The Western Producer, 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 to help make on-the-fly decisions on operations such as seeding, spraying and harvesting.
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WIN president Ian Nichols said the organization will be able to use the WeatherFarm data to provide more precise, localized mapping, monitoring and decision support modelling.
“You find a lot of peculiar little things that are happening that if we just had a little extra monitoring in some of these locations, it would tell us so much more,” he said.
The data collected from WIN’s network of monitoring stations supports an array of weather-based agronomic models, which can warn farmers in advance of the risk of crop diseases such as fusarium and sclerotinia and insects such as wheat midge, and measure factors such as crop heat units, leaf wetness and evapotranspiration.
The additional sites enhance monitoring, said Nichols.
“… More density is always better,” he said.
WIN operates several networks of weather and environmental monitoring stations in 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.
Weather information from the WeatherFarm.com network is already carried on Glacier Media agricultural websites, including The Western Producer.
