Overview
ONpotatoes.ca is provided free of charge to Ontario potato growers by the Ontario Potato Board and Weather INnovations Incorporated, thanks in part to funding for the 2013 season from Farm & Food Care’s Water Resources Adaptation & Management Initiative.
This site will investigate the beneficial impact of integrative weather/sensory technologies on irrigation decisions for Ontario potato producers. The project will merge data from site-specific environmental monitoring with statistical modeling and online data management to provide interactive web-accessed irrigation decision support to a representative potato producer.
Multi-level soil moisture, weather data and water usage data are collected via automated environmental sensors, and then transmitted to WIN’s central database. The ONpotatoes.ca website displays the analyzed data and provides growers with near-real-time soil moisture advisories. The advisories are compared to the standard ET calculators which are driven by the weather sensors alone.
Visit the Remote Monitoring, Weather Analysis and Soil Moisture Analysis to learn more about how each component factors into the decision making process.