Project/Research Background
This site was launched as a joint research project between the Ontario Potato Board and Weather INnovations Incorporated.
This project was funded in part through Growing Forward, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative. The Agricultural Adaptation Council assists in the delivery of several Growing Forward programs in Ontario.
This project will investigate the beneficial impact of integrative weather/sensory technologies on irrigation decisions for Ontario potato producers. The project will merge data from site-specific environmental monitoring with statistical modeling and online data management to create an interactive web-accessed irrigation plan for a representative potato producer.
Multi-level soil moisture, weather data and water usage data are collected via automated environmental sensors, and then transmitted to WIN’s central database. The ONpotatoes.ca website displays the analyzed data and provides growers with near-real-time soil moisture advisories. The advisories are compared to the standard ET calculators which are driven by the weather sensors alone.
Automated remote-telemetry monitoring technologies used to collect data for the website include:
Weather stations (temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, solar radiation, wind speed & direction, leaf wetness)
|
Irrigation pivot tracking through digital GPS compass
|
5-level soil moisture profiling
|
Irrigation water usage via pipeline pressure gauging
|