Chance Of Profits Up For Growers Tuned Into The Weather
January 21, 2016 According to a new University of Florida-led study, Australian wheat farmers can use hypothetical 10-day weather forecasts to increase their annual profits by hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the finding is certainly a positive note for the Aussies, it also can be applied to other parts of the globe.
Senthold Asseng, a UF/IFAS professor of agricultural and biological engineering, says scientists now want to know how a real (imperfect) 10-day weather forecast will affect farmers’ decisions on when to plant and fertilize. They may apply their new findings on a fresh study that would predict crop yield based on 10-day forecasts in the U.S.
Similar to the 10-day forecasts one might find on The Weather Channel, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology projects weather for 10 days at a time. In this study, scientists estimated how much more wheat could have been produced in Western Australia when adjusting management to a 10-day rainfall forecast from 1980 through 2006.
Researchers used a dynamic simulation model to generate grain yields for various sowing dates, nitrogen fertilizer response and non-rust-damaged crops for four soil types in the southwest wheat belt in Western Australia. They also plugged into the model a hypothetical, perfect 10-day weather forecast that included ample rainfall in three days.
Scientists then compared a situation where a farmer doesn’t know predicted rainfall for the next 10 days with a situation where the farmer knows with 100% certainty the rainfall amount and makes planting decisions based on this data, Asseng said.
They then calculated any extra profit from the difference in those two situations.
Scientists studied Western Australia because of its arid climate and because rainfall amounts vary substantially from year to year, Asseng said.
The new study is published in the journal Agricultural and Forest Meteorology.
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