Precision agriculture is a modern farming management concept that uses digital technologies and data-driven insights to optimize agricultural practices. Broadly, it involves collecting and analyzing detailed information about crop, soil, and environmental conditions to make highly targeted decisions for planting, fertilizing, irrigating, and harvesting. By utilizing tools such as GPS, sensors, drones, and sophisticated software, farmers can apply inputs like water, fertilizers, and pesticides with greater accuracy and efficiency. This approach aims to increase crop yields, reduce costs, minimize environmental impact, and improve overall farm productivity by treating each part of a field according to its specific needs rather than applying uniform practices across entire fields. Our lab and other partners at UW-Madison provide several resources for growers, outlined below:
UW Extension AgWeather – agweather.cals.wisc.edu
This site provides easy access to several different types of weather data from our database. Data coverage extends across the upper Midwest, see map right.
- Weather: Min/max daily air temp, precipitation, dew point, vapor pressure, hours of high humidity, and mean temperature during periods of high humidity.
- Solar insolation: A measure of the amount of solar radiation striking the surface of the earth, this data is sourced from the UW Space Science and Engineering Center and is used to compute potential evapotranspiration.
- Evapotranspiration: Useful in irrigation scheduling, these daily values are calculated from air temperature, solar insolation, latitude, and day of year.
- Thermal models: View/calculate degree day models and some disease risk models. Also available is an oak wilt risk model, essential if pruning oaks.
- Email subscriptions: Add sites of your choosing (home, field, etc.) and get optional daily weather updates, forecasts, and degree day models.
- Free API: Retrieve weather data via API for integration with custom software.
Vegetable Disease and Insect Forecasting Network (VDIFN) – agweather.cals.wisc.edu/vdifn
VDIFN uses daily gridded weather data which are fed into various disease risk and insect developmental models and converted into daily disease severity values (or equivalents) or degree-days. These disease severity value and degree-day accumulations are then displayed on the map as color-coded risk scores based on the estimated risk to susceptible crops. Clicking on an individual grid cell brings up the daily history of weather data and disease severity values or degree-days for that location.
When you visit VDIFN you will see the navigation and settings pane on the left, the map and pest severity display in the center, and a legend on the lower right. You can switch between disease, insect, and custom model modes with the buttons across the top of the left panel. Pick a model using the Model Selection section and use the question mark box to get more information on the disease or insect. After selecting a model, note that the date range boxes populate with defaults for each model, but can be adjusted if desired. Click on an individual grid point to bring up more details for that specific location, including a detailed history of weather readings and daily and cumulative disease severity value or degree-days (depending on the model selected).
Irrigation Scheduling Program – wisp.cals.wisc.edu
A complete irrigation scheduling program for your farm, it uses a few simple initial and periodically updated conditions (soil moisture, crop, canopy cover) as well as weather and potential evapotranspiration values (automatically imported but can be manually adjusted). Create a farm, add pivot(s), each pivot can serve one or more fields, and each field can have one crop. Once set up it tracks water balance in the field and predicts soil water levels. It warns when a field crosses below the allowable depletion or experiences deep drainage due to excess water.
Vegetable Pathology – vegpath.plantpath.wisc.edu
The UW Vegetable Pathology website, run by Dr. Amanda Gevens, provides detailed profiles of many common vegetable diseases including their identification and management. In addition, convenient interactive weather charts and risk models for early blight and late blight of potato may be accessed. Dr. Gevens also publishes a weekly newsletter, Vegetable Crop Updates, posted weekly during the summer months.
Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet – wisconet.wisc.edu
The Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet (WiscoNet) is a growing network of weather and soil monitoring stations across Wisconsin, designed to provide high quality data at high spatial and temporal resolutions. There are currently 31 Wisconet stations with plans to expand to around 90 by 2026. Each Wisconet station provides more than one dozen measurements every 5 minutes. From 2017-2023 several of these weather stations were administered by Michigan State EnviroWeather; with the launch of Wisconet these stations will be back under UW management. The web services associated with these stations are still being developed and we plan to add many of our disease and insect models to the station data pages in the future.