A forecasting service that shows farmers the spread of possible weather, rather than a single prediction, is being trialled on British arable farms to see whether it leads to better decisions on spraying, drilling and fertiliser, Farmers Weekly reported.
Probcast, developed by Jack Dunning and Dr Will Veness of CatchmentAI, analyses the 18 Met Office model simulations that are usually averaged into one forecast, and gives growers hourly probabilities for rainfall amounts, wind gusts and working windows. "We give probabilities rather than just a single prediction," Veness said. A five-day rain chart, for example, shows the chance of rain exceeding a set amount in six bands, from under 2.5% to 90%.
Northamptonshire arable farmer Stuart Tabernor, who has used it since March, especially values its spray windows. Users set their own limits for average wind speed, gusts, rain in and around the spraying window, and air temperature; a traffic-light display shows green when all conditions are forecast to be met, amber for an 80-100% chance and red below 80%, with a breakdown of which criterion fails. Similar models can be built for fertiliser spreading, drilling and harvest, pulling in soil temperature from farm probes or Met Office modelling. With ordinary apps "it's easy to write a day off because it says there is a 50% chance of a shower all day," he said, while Probcast may show rain in the morning and a dry afternoon.
Tabernor leads a project under Defra's Adopt programme, with Dyson Farming Research and Imperial College, to put a value on better decisions. It aims to recruit 70 growers, each given a free 12-month Probcast licence and paid £350 to log major decisions made with the service and share historical operation records.
For farmers whose spraying and harvest days depend on narrow weather windows, knowing the odds hour by hour rather than a single icon can mean fewer wasted days and fewer jobs done in the wrong conditions.
Photo: Mick from Northamptonshire / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Farmers Weekly
Comments
(0)