Farming is difficult work, and it’s only getting harder. Water and fertilizer costs are up, and margins are thin, especially for family farms. In many places, weather and the environment are harsher and less predictable than before. With that said, the forecast is not all doom and gloom for growers. By adopting a data-minded approach and installing a backbone of in-field monitoring, farmers can use today’s technology to keep up with today’s challenges.
Moving forward, we’ll dive deeper into specific monitoring needs and provide examples of innovative approaches for:
…And recommend sensors and software from our EnviroMonitor line that growers can use to improve operations, increase yields, and protect the bottom line.
Though growers can generally agree on the overarching challenges of farming (costs, resource scarcity, profit margins, etc.), the finer points of optimizing operations can vary greatly depending on location and focus crop(s). An almond orchard in California will have different daily drivers and obstacles to success than a peanut farm in Georgia.
In terms of how different types of farmers need to approach in-field monitoring slightly differently, it can be helpful to break agriculture into three categories: row crops, orchards, and vineyards.
Only amateur growers plant seeds in the ground and hope for the best. Modern professional farmers are constantly ingesting data that helps them know with confidence how their crops are doing and what they can expect at harvest.
Many seeds now come with required growing degree days printed directly on the bag. That simplifies things a great deal for farmers, but they still need a reliable way of tracking their progress towards those GDD targets. Just because the weather report for a given postal code looks like a growing degree day doesn’t mean the crops on a given farm actually experienced it that way.
In-field weather stations provide a reliable, authentic source of temperature data that growers can use to track their progress toward the harvest. Many apps and services, like Mobilize, can take that data and fully automate GDD calculations, reducing the math burden on growers and providing an at-a-glance snapshot of how various crops are tracking towards readiness.
Water management is also crucial for any farm. Over-watering creates additional costs and increases the risk of disease. Under-watering severely reduces the viability of the harvest. That’s why farmers need to be monitoring their soil at all times, especially on farms where a variety of crops that may be drawing water and nutrients in different ways are growing near one another.
Morris Farm in Lonoke County, Arkansas – the oldest rice farm in the state – is a prime example of a family-owned operation with more than a century of tradition that’s made the switch to modern data-powered agriculture in the last few years.
Fifth generation farmer Matt Morris maintains an EnviroMonitor weather station and soil monitoring network to help him understand hyperlocal conditions across a large farm with a variety of microclimates and different agricultural needs. Real-time wind intelligence from his weather station helps crop duster pilots from his local co-op time and target spraying, allowing Morris Farm to maximize the impact of the partnership.
When row crops are harvested, they’re cut or pulled from the ground. Orchards are a different challenge because those trees stay in the same place for generations and must survive each winter.
During the winter and spring, monitoring chill accumulation and frost is key. It’s important for fruit and nut trees to endure some degree of chill in order to grow strong, but a late frost can be devastating to young buds. In-field temperature monitoring makes it easy to track chill throughout the offseason (especially when paired with Mobilize to automate calculations), and accurate forecasting provides ag ops professionals with the intelligence they need to protect the next harvest from frost.
Once the growing season begins, it’s crucial to monitor how much water the orchard is getting. In situations where rainfall is insufficient, farmers need to supplement with irrigation. However, the amount of water involved in irrigating even a small-scale orchard gets expensive quickly when you consider the costs of pumping and staffing.
That’s why it’s important for orchards to understand not just how much water has fallen out of the sky but also how much is in the ground at all times. By focusing on soil moisture, they can ensure that their fruit and nuts develop properly without any costly over-watering.
Four Ridge Orchards in Laurel, Oregon recently made the switch to in-field monitoring to help them conserve water and electricity while farming water-intensive crops, specifically hazelnuts.
Matt Brown, also a fifth-generation farmer, took on monitoring as his first major project as Operations Manager at Four Ridge. Now, through localized soil moisture and temperature monitoring, he’s able to ensure his nut trees get exactly as much water as they need, when they need it, with no waste or shortfalls. Best of all, Matt was able to leverage an NRCS EQIP grant that made his EnviroMonitor system totally free to purchase, install, and maintain.
Like fruit and nut trees, grapevines stay in the ground for a long time, especially in successful vineyards. In fact, the winter cycle of hardening before “waking up” in the spring is even more observable for vines.
That means off-season monitoring in the vineyard is similar to that of an orchard. Grape growers need trustworthy information on how much chill their vines are getting and when they need to intervene to protect them from dangerously frosty temperatures.
At the same time, winemaking is an ancient art that needs to consider even more quirks and unique situations than standard agriculture. Unlike other farmers, winemakers often seek out land with irregular topography that creates microclimates. Therefore, there is often a wide range of weather conditions over a production-scale vineyard.
That means that, during the growing season, grape growers aren’t just managing one operation – they’re overseeing a number of parallel projects that include different grapes with different needs and totally different weather conditions. Pulling that off requires more granular, microclimate-specific weather and soil data.
Rodnick Farm in Monterey County, California boasts six distinct microclimates and over 400 feet of elevation variance across their vineyard. That’s a world of exciting possibilities when it comes to growing artisan wine grapes, but also an additional challenge when it comes to tracking the progress of different vines across the vineyard.
Kurt Gollnick, the farm’s owner, has embraced in-field weather stations and soil monitoring to help him make intelligent decisions around water usage in a region where serious droughts are common. With an EnviroMonitor sensor node gathering soil data for each microclimate, he can provide each sector of the vineyard with the artisanal care that Rodnick is known for.
Even though they’re vastly different operations, the three farms we mentioned above – Rodnick, Morris, and Wellwood Orchards – all have one important thing in common: they all use EnviroMonitor solutions from Davis Instruments to achieve their in-field monitoring goals.
The Davis EnviroMonitor system was designed by and for farmers who want to modernize quickly – not technical masterminds who’ve never spent a day in the field or engineers with impeccably clean fingernails. It’s built to cut the noise and focus on the decision-making intelligence you need to have a good harvest and protect the profitability of your family farm.
The key components of the system include:
| Outside temperature & humidity | Rain rate & accumulation | Wind speed & direction |
| Dew point | Heat index | Solar radiation |
| Temperature | Humidity & temperature | Rainfall | Solar radiation |
| Soil moisture | Soil temperature | Wind | Carbon dioxide |
| Water levels | Flow | Pressure |
Curious to learn more about how the EnviroMonitor system is helping family farmers across the world join the precision agricultural revolution? Download a copy of the Davis Agricultural Weather Solution Buying Guide to get more specifics on our products and approach.