Digiscape: The weather and climate solution for Agriculture (#1039)
Weather and Climate information lies at the heart of managing Australian agriculture. Decisions that need to be made on the farm are wide-ranging from hourly spraying conditions to longer term crop choices or stocking management. Beyond the farm gate weather and climate influence shipping strategies and supply chains, insurance premiums and commodity markets. CSIRO has invested in a Future Science Platform known as Digiscape to build the infrastructure common to all these applications. While each domain has specific needs, they all require a bank of weather and climate data that can be manipulated easily and fed to appropriate agronomy models. Here we discuss the value in taking a one-platform approach to delivering to many different agricultural applications and the savings that can bring. Successful examples are given from generating crop yield estimates for farmers and shipping handlers, irrigation decision tools, pasture prediction, and tactical bespoke data feeds for smaller horticultural industries.