On‑farm Weather Stations

Overview

On-Farm Weather Stations are fully solar-powered field-edge meteorological masts that measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction, solar irradiance, leaf wetness and barometric pressure — then push hyper-local readings, ET₀ calculations and 72-hour forecasts to a cloud dashboard and farmer mobile app.

Generic regional forecasts are usually wrong by 3–8 km. A station planted in your block gives you the wind, the dew and the rain on your crop, in real time, so spray windows, frost defence, irrigation timing and harvest logistics stop being a guess.

7+ sensors on a single mast — pyranometer, anemometer + vane, tipping rain gauge, T/RH radiation shield, leaf wetness, barometric pressure
100% solar / battery — no AC power needed, deploy anywhere in the field
Hyper-local 72h forecast — your station data fuses with regional models for block-level accuracy
Spray / frost / irrigation advisories — decision-ready alerts, not raw numbers

How It Works

The diagram above shows the four layers of an On-Farm Weather Station deployment. Hover any module to see the live telemetry it produces.

Solar Weather Mast — a 3 m mast with cup anemometer, wind vane, tipping rain gauge, radiation-shielded T/RH probe, pyranometer and leaf-wetness sensor; LoRa / LTE comm enclosure at base; 20 W solar panel + battery for permanent off-grid operation.
Wind Rose & Forecast — a 24-hour wind rose, live gust readout and 72-hour local forecast fused from your station + regional NWP. Drives the spray-window, frost and ET₀-based irrigation advisories.
Cloud Dashboard — every station across every farm rolls up into a single map with 24h temp / rain charts, growing-degree-day tracking, evapotranspiration model output, CSV/Parquet export and REST/MQTT APIs.
Farmer & Alerts — push and SMS to the farm crew with one-glance status (spray OK, frost watch, rain incoming), plus role-based escalation for managers and agronomists.

A continuous feedback loop pushes calibration corrections, updated forecast models and firmware back to the station — visible as the purple stream along the bottom of the diagram.

Features

FAO-56 ET₀ engine — automatically computes reference evapotranspiration for irrigation scheduling
Spray-window advisor — combines wind, ΔT, humidity, rain to flag legal-safe spray hours (drift & inversion compliant)
Frost forecast — predicts overnight low to ±1 °C, triggers wind machines / sprinkler frost protection
Growing-degree-day (GDD) tracking — pest pressure (codling moth, corn-borer, mildew) and harvest timing
Wind rose & 24h history — see prevailing direction, gust spikes, calm windows
Leaf wetness — disease pressure model (botrytis, downy mildew) tied to wetness duration
Solar-powered & off-grid — 20 W panel + 20 Ah battery, 14 days no-sun reserve
Open data export — REST, MQTT, CSV / Parquet, plus push to John Deere, Climate FieldView, AgWorld, FarmLogs

Use Cases

Vineyards & orchards — frost defence and disease pressure (mildew, botrytis, fire blight)
Row crops — corn / soy / cotton GDD tracking, planting and harvest windows
Spray contractors — drift-compliant spray-window proof for record-keeping
Fruit & vegetable growers — leaf-wetness based fungicide timing, irrigation tuning
Hay / silage — cut-window optimisation around 3-day dry forecast
Insurance & crop forensics — auditable on-site weather record for claims

Specifications

Sensors: air temp (−40 to +60 °C, ±0.2 °C), RH (0–100%, ±2%), rain (0.2 mm tipping bucket), wind speed (0–60 m/s, ±3%), wind direction (1°), solar irradiance (0–1800 W/m², ±5%), leaf wetness, barometric pressure
Mast: 3 m galvanised, tripod base, guy-wire kit for exposed sites, 6 m option
Power: 20 W mono solar + 20 Ah LiFePO₄, 14-day autonomy, lightning arrestor included
Connectivity: LoRaWAN (primary), 4G LTE (cellular variant), satellite uplink option (Iridium / Swarm)
Sampling: 1-minute default, 1-second wind for gust capture
Forecast: 72 h hourly, fused (your station + 1 km NWP), refreshed every 6 h
Environmental: IP66 enclosure, −30 to +70 °C operating
Certifications: WMO / WBGT compliant sensor heads, CE, FCC, RoHS