A new Australian Regional Mesonet System (ARMS), formerly the National Mesonet Initiative (NMI) developed by Pairtree, is set to change the way agronomists and grower groups view and use all the data collected on farms by agtech devices.
Agronomists know only too well that their advice on when to plant, spray or harvest is based on years of experience and understanding the balance of technical and practical application of inputs.
It’s part of the trust contract between them and their farmer clients: making the best decisions based on the information at hand for that crop and season, but is it possible to better inform that decision process?
The development of more accurate digital weather stations, soil probes and forecasting technologies has made a huge difference, and these days agtech delivers more data than you can poke a stick at.
Pairtree specialises in turning that data into valuable insights that can be put into action, by centralising data from different sources together, and allowing it to flow to where it needs to get to. Now, our new Australian Regional Mesonet Service (ARMS) takes it to the next level.
A ‘mesonet’ is a network of automated weather stations, much like a ‘mob’ of cattle, a ‘murder’ of crows or a ‘conundrum’ of researchers.
Imagine you’re an agronomist with 50 clients across the district. They all have different brands and types of digital weather stations and soil probes, so there’s lots of weather and soil data out there, but no way to view it all together to more easily see the bigger picture.
ARMS offers agronomists the ability to view all of their clients’ data together at a regional level on one screen, as well as each individual client’s data at a farm level in greater detail. It means they can plan their daily travels more easily, knowing when and where they need to be on farm to support fertiliser timing, fallow spraying, possible disease outbreaks, frost and more.
The Leibe Group in Western Australia’s wheatbelt is a grower group that supports each other to become more profitable and sustainable by sharing information, resources and know-how. They recently developed a network of 13 weather stations & soil probes and 10 rain gauges to help members better understand local climate and growing conditions.
Pairtree built a dashboard so members of the Group can see all the data in as much, or little, detail as they like via a clickable map. Data feeds from WADPIRD weather stations round out the picture.
“Having access to all this data has prompted discussions with the Liebe Group about stored soil water, rainfall patterns across the district – because you can start to see where gets rain and where doesn’t get rain, understanding optimal spraying conditions and understanding more about frost events,” said Rebecca Wallis, Development & Support Officer, and current Vice-Chair.
“The shared weather station network is also particularly useful for growers with more than one property in the district that are spread apart,” Rebecca said. “They might have a weather station on their main farm, but not on their other block, so they can look at data from a neighbouring property that’s closer to help make decisions without having to go there.”
Pairtree now makes it possible for agronomists and other trusted advisers to form their own local weather network using data from all their clients’ weather stations and soil probes, in conjunction with public weather stations and local forecasting from the Open Weather network.
Of course, the owner of the private weather station or soil probe must consent to how their data is used and who can access it, but once they understand the benefits it will be hard to say no. Initially, it might just be the agronomist who can see all the data. In other cases, like the Liebe Group, all members of the grower group can see what’s going on in real time.
Traditional weather data tracking was to read the BOM forecast and look at your own rain gauge. ARMS allows the flow of data, where farmers can share their weather station and soil probe data back into a group or network to fill in the gaps and improve regional views.
ARMS is set to change the way key operational decisions are made forever and forge a new level of digital agronomy capability for Australian agriculture.
To enquire about ARMS and find out more about connected agriculture, please visit Pairtree.co
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