225-8 Web-Based Tools to Assist Growers Manage Cotton Crops.



Tuesday, October 18, 2011: 10:00 AM
Henry Gonzalez Convention Center, Room 212A, Concourse Level

Carlos Fernandez, Juan A. Landivar, Juan C. Correa and Daniel Fromme, Texas AgriLife Research, Corpus Christi, TX
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.
See more from this Division: C03 Crop Ecology, Management & Quality
See more from this Session: General Crop Ecology, Management, and Quality: I