Minneapolis, Minnesota (Nov 29, 2016)--Hyper-local rainfall and other data from Individual weather stations can drive efficiencies.
Despite how critical too much or too little water is to corn and soybean production, it's an input in precision agriculture that's easy to get wrong on a particular field or part of a field. Ever more volatile weather patterns point to a combination of more on-farm weather stations, more rain gauges, more cooperative sharing of rainfall amounts with neighbors, and more use of modeled rainfall to get more accurate data.
It's ironic that the most limiting input for successful crop production-—water-—is one of the most elusive to precisely measure on the farm. Precision ag tools can measure crop yields accurately (given good calibration) across a whole field as well as zero in on multiple points in that field. Yet, it's often difficult for a farmer to say with certainty how much rain...