Winegrape growers in the Lodi, CA, crush district can now arrange for weather stations to send them an eMail or text message if there’s a change in the weather. A new system enables growers to sign up for notification when a certain level is reached at any of the 16 weather stations in the district, which extends roughly from the northern California cities of Stockton to Sacramento.
There are a whole host of conditions that a grower — who simply needs a password to sign up and log on with any Web-enabled device — can set up for alerts. Temperature, precipitation, and wind direction and speed are just a few of the conditions for which growers can set up alarms, says Stuart Spencer, the Lodi Winegrape Commission’s program manager. “The grower chooses the parameters,” he says. “As much as you want your phone ringing, you can set it up.”
The commission has contracted with their existing weather forecasting service, Western Weather Group of Chico, CA, to provide the alert feature. With 16 stations, the alert system covers most if not all of the district’s microclimates, says Spencer. “But we’re still looking for holes to see if we need to add any additional stations,” he says.
15-Minute Updates
The stations, most of which are privately owned, though some were purchased by University of California Cooperative Extension, update conditions at least every hour, says Spencer. Those are analog-based, but the majority are digital units and update conditions every 15 minutes. The hourly updates are adequate for the lion’s share of conditions, but it would be nice if they were all digital. “If you’re watching for frost, for instance, the growers get pretty antsy,” he says.
For now, Spencer says he’s just glad they have so many stations available in the district, which has about 100,000 acres of winegrapes spread throughout the region. “We have quite a few microclimates, and they can make a big difference in management,” he says. “Also, a lot of the guys farm in different parts of the viticultural area.”
Spencer expects the temperature to be one of the more popular alerts programmed, in part because of labor management (See “Protecting People”). Another commonly used alert condition, if growers in other areas are any indication, will be wind speed, says the CEO of Western Weather Group, Don Schukraft. He’s been in the business for more than 20 years, and the company provides weather services for both grower groups and large individual growers throughout California and Hawaii. Wind speed and direction are especially critical to the sugarcane growers of Hawaii, who burn their fields. Because of the value of the crop and sensitivity to weather, many of the company’s clients are winegrape producers, with growers in Sonoma, Lake, and Monterey counties among the groups who contract for service.
Stop Spraying
Wind speed is also a key area for winegrape growers because of the many products that can’t be sprayed when winds kick up, says Schukraft. “There could be a restriction on the material that the wind speed must be less than 10 miles per hour,” he says. “You can set it up to get an alert when the wind speed goes over 10 miles per hour, and you can get a text message to your cell phone when you’re on your tractor.”
Schukraft, who says only half of his clients are in agriculture, with the rest in a variety of industries from utilities to oil refineries, thinks the alert system’s chief attraction is simplicity. That’s why many owners of stations will freely volunteer their use, as many a grower does in the Lodi district. “He doesn’t have to worry so much about data collection when he has a mobile alert service,” says Schukraft. “There are a lot of advantages to sharing information to him.”
However, despite the fact that the alert system takes a lot of the worry out of farming, it certainly doesn’t make it a no-brainer, concludes Spencer. “The more information you have, whether it is heat stress-related issues or wind speed, it’s wise to take advantage of these technologies,” he says. “But the bottom line is: What management decisions will you make based on the information you receive?”