New Weather Tools Aim to Help Florida Growers

It's called the Florida Automated Weather Network, or Fon for short, a collection of 49 weather stations across the state. Every 15 minutes, each station captures a snapshot of real time weather data in its location. This includes temperature, soil moisture, wind speeds, and more. Making this information accessible is project manager Rick Lusher main priority? Everything that we do is available, on our website and it's all public, so there's no subscription. You don't have to give us your email address. On top of current conditions, growers can gather historical data from the website and forecast for the coming days. This gives farms time to prepare ahead, whether it be for droughts, heavy rains or especially cold weather. Grower John Paul's primary farm is based in DeSoto County. He uses data from the Arcadia Farm site when making growing decisions. He says Florida's climate makes it a hotbed for what's called citrus greening disease, which is transferred by bugs with all the humidity and the hot weather. Our trees flush lot and since our trees flush a lot. The silly love that it's like a buffet and Chinese buffet or something, they can just go crazy and they just go in there and drill and and they infect the tree over and over and over. And while there is no cure for the greening itself. Citrus growers like Paul use funds forecasting and irrigation scheduling tools to avoid losing healthy trees. If a cold front is coming through, minimal water usage stops fruit from freezing, and if conditions like temperature and soil moisture are not ideal for citrus, growers can spray magnesium silicate, a growth agent. Monte Zachary uf IFAs, Southwest Florida Multi-county citrus agent, emphasized the need for decision informing tools like Fan in the face of citrus greening, which has reduced Florida's orange production by more than 90% in the past two years. That's according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It declined, really, mainly because of the citrus greening disease, and we had a 24 of 25 years ago, and it destroyed the citrus industry in Florida. So many growers are really out of business, and they are selling their land. And most likely it's not going to be back in citrus. Fun. Is it meant to be a hurricane preparedness tool? But it does provide storm data, including wind speeds and rainfall numbers after the storm. Lusher says it's yet another way the network helps farmers rain or shine. The crop insurance folks are pretty routinely contacting us for our archived data so they can go back and look at our our wind speeds in certain areas to see. For example, if a farmer is, applying for some, relief, some relief from that storm, they can go back and look at our data and confirm, you know, what their, what their reporting happened at their farm. As for what's next for fun, maintaining the existing weather stations is the goal. But if the need arises, Lusher and his team are prepared to build new sites to cover gaps in coverage. For Sky news, I'm Emma Rodriguez.