Farmers cannot control the weather but Yorke Peninsula-based ag consultant Leighton Wilksch says they can receive more reliable forecasts for their farms.
This will be increasingly important as they grapple with the changing climate.
For the past eight years he has been working with farmers across SA and into the Vic Wimmera.
His Agbyte business distributes ag sensor technology such as automated weather stations and soil moisture probes and helps farmers analyse the data.
He says the collection and extraction of this data is evolving rapidly and the information is becoming available in “near real-time” to assist in on-farm decision-making.
“You could be logged in while you are having your breakfast to decide whether to spray that morning or look at the soil moisture probe to see whether next week you should be applying nitrogen, based on the soil moisture levels,” he said.
Another major driver for farmers to install weather stations has been to determine fire danger index and when conditions are safe to harvest.
With data updated every 15 minutes, decision-making can be rapid to allow for a safer harvesting workplace.
Mr Wilksch says the historical data gathered from ag sensors can also be useful for insurance claims or spray drift issues.
“Being able to demonstrate what we have done and why we have done it will be key to maintaining our social licence to farm, especially next to urban areas.”
Mr Wilksch says ag is on the cusp of exciting “dynamic forecasting” where farmers and their neighbours can work together to share their information.
“There could be 50 weather stations on the YP that we could feed all the data collected from into the model and then sharpen and refine the forecasts for wind speed conditions, frost events and the fire danger index on each farm.”
Many farmers have installed probes along with weather stations to measure available soil moisture and crop water use at different depths in the profile.
This technology has been in use for more than 20 years in viticulture and horticulture but in the past five years Mr Wilksch says it has been increasingly adopted by broadacre farming.
The majority of soil moisture probes are 1.2 metres long with the first measurements collected at 10 centimetres to 15cm below the surface but Mr Wilksch says more 1.6m probes are now being used to track longer term changes in deep soil moisture.
Quantifying available moisture is valuable for farmers to make decisions during the growing season and for next year’s rotations.
“Our crops this year have not grown the biomass during the season to extract the soil moisture with the graphs showing plenty of residual moisture at 90cm and below in many cases,” he said.
“Without the probes we may have thought because it was a dry year there would be nothing left.”
Many farms have only installed one probe so Mr Wilksch says location is key, putting the soil moisture probe in a “median soil type.”
He estimates nearly one quarter of cropping farms in the Mid North and YP have adopted soil moisture probes but hopes the LoRa (Long Range) low power wide area network – a WIFi network for your farm – will be a game-changer, reducing the costs further.
It is being trialled across the country with various providers, including Mr Wilksch, to assess the reliability and range that these networks can operate at.
“By enabling multiple sensors to be plugged into the one (telemetry) site it could reduce the cost of monitoring devices; whether it be soil moisture probes, weather stations or trough and tank level sensors" he said.