Bayer CropScience plans to bring its farmer customers, retail outlets and business partners into WeatherBug’s network of local weather monitoring stations across the Canadian Prairies.
WeatherBug, a U.S. weather monitoring firm, announced in August last year that it would work with the Canadian Wheat Board and JRI’s Prairie grain handling subsidiary, Pioneer Grain, to establish a web-linked local-level network of over 600 weather monitoring stations at farms, ag input dealerships and other monitoring points on the Prairies over the next three years.
The project was first devised by the CWB’s weather and crop surveillance department as a way to offer more accurate weather information to Prairie farmers.
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The Maryland company aims to ultimately expand the Canadian network to over 1,000 points across Canada.
“Access to accurate local weather information is vital to growers in managing their business effectively,” Bayer CropScience vice-president Al Driver said in the company’s press release Wednesday.
“Bayer will work closely with our retailer and key customer partners across Western Canada to install weather stations and to complete the grid.”
Data collected from WeatherBug’s network is to be made available through a new online weather command centre. Subscribers would have access to detailed data from any weather station and be able to plot precise, highly localized records of weather elements such as precipitation and winds, as part of this program.
The data will also be used in fusarium and sclerotinia risk models that will be displayed in the command centre along with commodity prices and other information, Bayer said.
The company also invites farmers and others to buy WeatherBug tracking stations for their own property, thus allowing them access to locally-generated online forecasts using their own station’s data. The cost for a personal tracking station is about $900, with annual network access and support costs of about $100.
“Working together with farmers, schools, businesses, media and government agencies, we can transform the way weather information is gathered and disseminated in Canada so that all citizens can benefit from access to WeatherBug’s networking technology,” WeatherBug vice-president John Doherty said in Bayer’s release.
