Web-Based Tools to Assist Growers Manage Cotton Crops.

Crop managers are challenged to become more efficient through better decision-making, as farming is faced with a rapidly changing and highly competitive marketing environment. Computer-assisted decision support systems can be important tools in the decision-making process in farming, as these can assist crop-managers deal with environmental variability and the complex nature of soil-crop-pest-environment interactions. The Crop-Weather Program for South Texas is a Web-based decision support system to assist cotton growers that was launched in March 2000. The Crop Weather Program delivers an online suite of user-friendly and useful analytical tools designed to help farmers deal with environmental variability and the complex nature of soil-crop-pest-environment interactions and make more informed crop management decisions. Since numerical crop simulation models require input of hourly and daily weather data, CWP established a network of 23 automated weather stations to be used as source of weather data, most of which are located in the Coastal Plains of Texas. A completely automated smart system was developed to retrieve, upload, inspect data, and update weather databases. Currently, CWP serves over 1000 registered users.