Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Sarapoint Global Ltd. will be collaborating with Niagara Colleges Agriculture & Environment Innovation Centre on an OCE VIP1 and NSERC Engage project. The scope of the project is to develop and test a web system that will gather, analyze and visualize micrometeorology data, and to test a micrometeorology sensor-node proof of concept, to provide tender fruit growers with valuable real-time actionable analytics. Sarapoint will commercialize the results of the project through its Ag- Innovation initiative. Ontarios complex weather, coupled with unique microclimates, make farm management actions and decisions difficult. Shifting and irregular climates in recent years have made measuring and monitoring micrometeorology a required element of good tender fruit growing. The current problem facing tender fruit producers is that the weather data used for decisions is from general sources, such as standard weather reports, industry weather data and/or simple on-site installed temperature tools, with little to no analysis. Sarapoint and Niagara College will collaborate to test the proof of concept for a micrometeorology hardware node called the Agrotelligent MicroMeteorology Node (AMMN) and develop the Agrotelligent Web System (AWS). The AMMN will gather micrometeorology air temperature and relative humidity data at multiple heights. The AWS will collect, analyze, store, and visualize the AMMN micrometeorology data to provide actionable information to growers. This research project involves numerous areas of expertise that the Agriculture & Environment Innovation Centre are able to deploy, including: web system design and development, hardware arrays, data analytics, value-added grower data analysis, collection and processing of large data sets, and precision agriculture solutions. For this work, the team will collaborate with project partner Dr. Amit Monga to refine these tools. Dr. Mike Duncan, the NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges in Precision Agriculture & Environmental Technologies, is the Niagara College research lead for this project and has been working in hardware and analytics for precision agriculture since 2007.