Farmers have more weather and farm data than ever, but it reduces risk only when it is turned into a practical decision at the right moment, speakers told South African grower meetings, Food for Mzansi reports.

Janet Lawless, marketing manager at the crop input company InteliGro, spoke at the launch of Pessl Instruments' project to install 100,000 weather stations in Africa. "Data on its own does not help you reduce risk; improved decision-making helps you reduce risk. And that is the gap," she said. A grower cannot control the weather, climate, input prices or crop prices, she added, only how decisions around them are made, and data should arrive as clear advice such as whether to spray or not, and why.

Dr Ilse Trautmann, a data-driven farming specialist on the weather station project's advisory board, said the ability to turn the right information into a decision at the right time matters more in a season in which "climate uncertainty, drought and El Niño are limiting room to manoeuvre". Data alone is not enough, she said; people are needed to help farmers understand and apply it.

Local trials were offered as an example. Agronomist Reinhardt Wessels of InteliGro presented the 2025 wheat trials near Moorreesburg, among the Western Cape's long-term field trials, established nine years ago, where five wheat cultivars, five fungicide programmes and an untreated control are compared across 130 blocks.

At the Swartland Show, soil scientist Jan van Zyl explained chemical stratification in minimum-tillage fields: in some Swartland soils calcium, potassium and phosphate collect in the top 2.5 cm, which research finds in about 30 percent of the region's soils, so sampling and knowing the soil profile matter.

Dr Karen Truter, a plant nutrition specialist at InteliGro, said targeted on-farm trials help growers find what works in their own conditions. "The aim is not necessarily to achieve the highest agronomic yield, but to find the best economic return," she said.

Photo: Calum Young / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Source: Food for Mzansi