Prairie Farms Digitize Weather Tracking

Wednesday, December 24, 2025

Analytics Boost Disease, Irrigation & Fertilizer Decisions

By Matt Jones

Digital tools are rapidly transforming how Western Canadian farmers monitor and manage their land, and nowhere is this more visible than in the evolution of farm-based analytics and weather monitoring technologies. From affordable, automated weather stations to sophisticated data platforms, Prairie producers now have access to real-time information that can optimize crop decisions, protect yields, and drive on-farm efficiency.

Modern weather stations, sensor networks, and analytics software have become practical, accessible options in recent years, empowering farmers to track everything from rainfall and soil moisture to crop development from the field or the office. As these technologies continue to advance and integrate with farm management, growers find themselves equipped with actionable data – helping them tackle challenges like disease risk, irrigation scheduling, and fertilizer application with precision and confidence.

“(Digital tools) are certainly becoming much more common,” observes professor Steve Shirtliffe of the University of Saskatchewan’s Plant Sciences department. “They’re much less expensive than they used to be. When I started my career, to get any sort of automated weather station, you were looking at well over $10,000, and you had to have knowledge of this arcane programming language to actually use it. Nowadays, they are simple to use and gather data well, and you can economically send data through the cellular network.”

While there are a variety of different analytics programs for farms (and we touch on a few in this article), weather-related analytics in particular (and having a weather station on the farm) can be particularly useful for farmers in their decision-making and planning processes.

“A key thing there is actionable data – everybody wants to know how much rain you have on your field, et cetera,” says Shirtliffe. “But as an agronomist, I’m always thinking through ‘what is the agronomic action that this could inform?’ Obviously, if it’s something like yield potential, it may influence whether there’s a decision to apply a fungicide or something like that.”

Asked whether these types of programs and services would be a benefit to any type of farm or just specific applications, Shirtliffe says that they could have benefits for almost any farm, but he sees particular value for farmers who are concerned about soil moisture.

“They’re doing stuff to measure the soil moisture all the time, because they’re either using a model or directly measuring it in the soil just to schedule the irrigation,” says Shirtliffe. “I think anywhere you’re short of moisture, that part of it will benefit. Some of the ones now also come with cameras on them that allow you to stage the crops. Is your canola blooming yet? You don’t need to drive out there to see that.”

METOS

METOS, developed by Pessl Instruments, is a series of farm-based analytics products including both hardware products (divided between those focused on frost, water management, plant protection, growth, nutrition and work tracking) and software solutions, including the FieldClimate software, which provides quick access to the data from the hardware systems. METOS North America president Marty Cook says that the company’s goal is to bring analytics hardware and software to every aspect of farming.

“With a weather station, for example, measuring all wind, temperature, humidity, we put those on the side of the field, and it measures all of those little factors,” says Cook.

He gives the example of a canola field where measuring leaf wetness and other parameters could give an indication of when a devastating disease like sclerotinia would affect the crops. Cook says that the system’s predictions are very accurate because they use all the factors that are in the field.

“Some of the biggest benefits that we’ve noticed is working with some of the agronomists, they’re using this to advise their farmer customers,” notes Cook. “And the biggest thing is you have to trust the data. That’s going to be the biggest obstacle we’re going to have – convincing people that it works. It’s like any new technology. You’ve got to prove it. And then they use it, and it’s like ‘oh my god, how did I live without this?’ So that’s the phase that we’re in.”

One of METOS’s centrepiece products is the FieldClimate platform, which offers a wide variety of weather-forecast, soil moisture and disease modelling tools as well as work-planning tools and other options all in a single package. They also just introduced a new package called METOS Enhanced, which is a collaboration with Ukko Agro. Cook says these programs will allow farmers to make smart decisions.

“They can make decisions on fertilizer applications,” says Cook. “High humidity could cause flow issues in dry fertilizer, especially those with nitrogen or sulphur. (A farmer who uses the service) is going in the ground and putting on fertilizer at the exact right time. That comes in play with NH3 in the fall. So if you’re doing fall application, you have to make sure the moisture is right in the soil and the temperature’s right outside, or else you could leech off a lot of the applications.”

Cook notes that the METOS Enhanced system will also have a red-yellow-green light system to show when the best time is to go to the field for planting. However, for farmers who are interested in having access to that data but want to interpret it themselves, there are options available. With the purchase of the weather stations alone, you get the information and graphs, but the interpretation of that data is left to you. The METOS systems are also capable of API (Application Programming Interface) – in other words, METOS’s systems can communicate relatively easily with another company’s software.

One note about METOS’ systems, however, is that they do require wireless communication, which could potentially be a challenge for farmers in remote areas with poor connectivity. Though there are a variety of options for connectivity, such as Wi-Fi, satellite, LTE or LTE-M (SIM cards as seen in smartphones or other devices) or private networks such as LoRa.

Davis Instruments

Chris Sullivan, president of Davis Instruments, notes that the Prairie provinces have been an important market for the company in the past 15 years or so, with a variety of farmers, as well as crop input companies on research farms using their services. Davis offers a variety of weather stations and monitoring options, including apps or their own WeatherLink Console, a tablet-like device to stream live data from the systems.

Sullivan says that one of the company’s aims is to make using their systems – including the EnviroMonitor Gateway, which allows users to create an array of sensors to monitor microclimate conditions – very easy for the farmers.

“The first thing is, where are you going to put your weather station?” says Sullivan. “If you’re going to put it at a place near a facility – a barn or an office – where you have an existing Internet connection, you can use that IP Gateway (another Davis product), which is essentially just going to piggyback on that Internet cloud connection that you already have.”

Davis offers two options for weather stations, the Vantage Vue and Vantage Pro 2. The Vue model updates intervals as fast as 2.5 seconds, measures rain, wind, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure, has NIST Traceable calibration and can be connected wirelessly. The expanded Pro2 model has all those same features, as well as the option of a cabled Internet signal, up to seven additional sensor transmitters, a separable anemometer for improved siting and (with the Vantage Pro2 Plus package) a solar radiation and UV sensor.

“The next thing is, is there any additional information that you need from your farm?” says Sullivan. “That’s where you could add these EnviroMonitor nodes. They’re a mesh network, so that means they communicate node to node back to the Gateway. And once this sensor network gets back to the Gateway, that information gets sent to the cloud. Sensors you could see somebody install on a node would be like a soil moisture sensor – due to variability in rain, you could build a rain gauge network so you’re not getting a full weather station every place, you’re really monitoring how rain might fall across a few dozen hundreds of acres based on how public a network you build.”

Because Davis’s systems are also capable of API, the data can be exported to other software for analysis or any other purposes a farmer requires. That said, Davis does offer some basic analysis as part of their systems, including tracking calculated values such as growing degree days, which will help with forecasting when looking at potential impacts of temperature changes and the like.

For optimal usage, Davis’s systems would also require cellular connectivity to make the most of the real-time data collection. However, there are options for a user to visit the weather stations physically and download data to a local data logger if a wireless signal is not accessible.

“One of the things we’re proud about is that we work in some areas where farmers tried a different piece of hardware that didn’t work,” says Sullivan. “That’s something where how we approach it and how we look at things and how we manage our connectivity seems to be better than most.”

“Farmers don’t want to work with a half-dozen or more apps,” adds Sullivan. “They want to see their dashboard and have somebody who really presents their information for them. In cases where a farmer doesn’t want to work with our software straight up as their primary dashboard because they’re already using some other things, (we focus on) just making that data accessible to them in whatever dashboard they find easiest to use and the one they use on a day-to-day basis.”

Sullivan also recommended that readers could visit their weatherlink.com website to see how extensive their network of weather stations is.

Virtual rain gauge

There are also free options out there, though, as one would expect, they do not contain quite the level of depth that paid programs could provide. One such option is an app that Shirtliffe and his colleagues released recently called the Virtual Rain Gauge.

The app takes data published daily by Environment Canada and uses it to produce a daily updated map predicting rainfall.

“There’s a little bit of latency in the data,” notes Shirtliffe. “There’s a 24-hour latency to get the last of it, but you can click on it and see how much it’s rained in the past week and see how much it’s rained that growing season as well and get an idea of the kind of yield potential and that sort of thing to try and bridge the gap for farmers who don’t have rain gauges.” BF