Giving Weather A PUSH

Giving Weather a PUSH. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report.

As a farmer few things are as inconsistent as the weather. We try and keep on top of things but as soon as think we have it figured, Mother Nature pulls one on us. Using WSU's AgWeatherNet can give you up to the minute reports on conditions in orchards and vineyards but what about when you are not in front of your computer? WSU's Gary Grove says there is something new and exciting.

GROVE: What we're trying to do is actually deliver information directly to the client as opposed to the client being tied to the desktop to get information.

That weather information can be delivered right to your cell phone in the form of a text or voicemail. It's called push technology and is part of a collaborative effort. Les Flue is the VP of Product Development with 4Qtrs who is developing the technology.

FLUE: AgAlerts is in a free public beta right now so people can go to the AgAlerts web site and sign up for free. It currently allows you to monitor any of the current weather information that's available from any of the AgWeatherNet weather stations. You can set up an alert to be notified immediately or once a day when a temperature drops below a certain threshold. Things like that.

They hope to shortly be able to extend that information to disease modeling so you can get a faster jump on spray applications.

GROVE: What we're doing is really adding value to raw weather data that our network gathers and actually now being able to deliver it to people on the go and at this point in time again its utility is cold hardiness, looking for wind say for example

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.