Making business decisions based on real-time data from the field, instead of using a gut feeling is imperative for productive and profitable farming. In crop production, this mainly refers to tracking precise and accurate weather conditions. After all, weather determines all life processes in plants and defines the possibility of performing various activities in the field.
The development of Digital Agriculture in recent years provided farmers with multiple advanced technologies for tracking precise weather conditions. By using various weather stations, farmers can track precise conditions for their location, whether they produce in an open field or greenhouse. Moreover, by integrating the weather station with AGRIVI farm management software, farmers can have all valuable information in one place. Since AGRIVI is a cloud-based platform, all production and weather data can be accessed anytime and anywhere. For this reason, there is no need for using multiple tools, and there is no risk of losing some valuable data or information.
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What Farmers Benefit from AGRIVI IoT Meteo?
There are three main benefits that AGRIVI IoT Meteo provides the farmers:
Resource usage optimization
If a farmer performs spraying or fertilization during the high wind, there is a risk of spreading the products on other fields and crops. This can cause contamination of organic crops or even endanger specific plants if it doesn’t tolerate agrochemicals carried by the wind. Similar can be applied to spraying or fertilizing before the rain which can wash all applied products. In both cases, a farmer will waste a specific quantity of products, while the crops and the soil will not get what is needed to achieve good and quality yield. Besides that, farmers will invest in the work hours of workers and machinery for the unsuccessful application of products, thus causing higher production costs.
In the end, to provide the crops and soil with nutrients and to ensure proper pest protection, a farmer will repeat spraying and fertilizing. This will cause additional production costs and provide an additional footprint on the environment.
By using AGRIVI IoT Meteo, farmers can make sure that they perform specific activities and use production resources only when the weather is favorable for that. That way, farmers can minimize unnecessary field trips, thus reducing the usage of fuel, fertilizers, protection products, and other resources. As a result, they will lower production costs and turn to more sustainable production.
Activity timing
In agriculture, proper timing means everything. For example, farmers who are late with pest protection can risk yield loss due to insect pests and diseases between 20 and 40%. On the other hand, to protect the crops on time and to ensure sustainable and cost-effective production, farmers need to carefully track weather and crop conditions to detect first do they need to perform crop protection at all and if they do when the weather conditions will allow spraying. With accurate pest and disease alarms, as well as with AGRIVI IoT Meteo, farmers will know when there is a risk of a specific infection. Weather stations that have leaf wetness sensors can be used as well to detect the possibility of disease development. Furthermore, to detect whether it’s favorable to perform spraying or they should wait for a few more hours, AGRIVI enables farmers to monitor parameters collected from their weather stations such as Delta-T, the relation between temperature and humidity, wind speed, and the possibility of rain.
A similar situation happens with the planning of sowing or planting which requires monitoring specific weather parameters such as soil temperature, the possibility of frost occurrence. After all, every plant has its own requirements in terms of minimal soil temperature. In the case that the soil temperature is below minimum plant requirements, the germination process and plant development will be much slower, and it may lead to stunt growth.
Historical data analysis
Climate is changing and the weather becomes more and more unpredictable. However, tracking weather history is still something that can be of valuable help for analyzing how specific weather parameters affected the yield and crop quality. Besides that, tracking the trends of specific weather conditions such as frost, hail, or drought periods, can help a farmer to prepare better for the upcoming season. For this purpose, AGRIVI provides farmers a possibility of analyzing weather history for their location. Improve your yields and profitability with real-time microclimate insight from your fields.
Visit AGRIVI IoT Meteo solution to get more information about plug & play integration of professional weather stations with AGRIVI.
