Grower Owned Wether Station Network for Improved Water Management in Florida.

Weather-related information is essential to agricultural producers for important water use decisions. The use of evapotranspiration estimates and real-time monitoring of air and wet bulb temperatures is critical for irrigation and cold protection. Since the mid 1990’s, The Florida Automated Weather Network (FAWN), a program of the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), has developed  a variety of weather-related tools that can aid them in making irrigation and cold protection decisions. Growers rely primarily on FAWN weather data and tools to plan for irrigation and freeze protection, and FAWN has been proven very useful in helping growers save both water and dollars – IFAS estimates show use of FAWN tools save billions of gallons of water generating savings of millions of dollars.  However, some farms can be many miles from a FAWN site. Therefore, FAWN may not provide the level of specificity needed to ensure growers are operating their irrigation systems during optimal times.  Differences in measurements between a farm and the closest FAWN site can cause growers to over or under irrigate and operate their systems longer than is actually needed for frost protection, thus misusing large amounts of water and potentially leaching fertilizer. Site specific data from a network of grower owned and maintained weather stations will maximize irrigation efficiency, and substantially reduce the amount of water and fuel or electricity used. Data for the grower weather stations can be viewed from the FAWN web site and used in FAWN tools. With the increasing popularity of smart phones and apps, FAWN also developed an app that allows users to view data on their smart phone in the same way that the data can be viewed on the FAWN website. A pilot project underdevelopment will allow growers to view soil moisture data at the same website.