Grant: Applied Research Tools and Instruments Grants

Dr. Mike Duncan, the NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges (IRCC) in Precision Agriculture & Environmental Technologies, leads Niagara College Agriculture & Environment Innovation Centre (AEIC). Small or medium-sized (SME) farm businesses of all types are threatened by harmful weather events, particularly events that arrive quickly. Traditional weather hardware is not able to identify these events in time, and provide sufficient warnings to initiate damage prevention. Dr. Duncan has been using and developing wireless sensor technology for use in farm fields since 2006. Previous AEIC experience with large sensor networks has shown that rapid cooling events that kill and damage tender fruit crops can have gradients exceeding 10 degrees Celsius per minute, and are accompanied by rapid vertical fluxes of heat from the ground and crop. Micrometeorology (micromet) is the study of small changes over the course of seconds, and it is specific to a combination of field, terroir, land, and/or microclimate. By using results from the requested micromet hardware that can send data as quickly as once per second, and with air temperature and relative humidity and three height levels (3m, 1m, and 10cm), the AEIC team will develop and program algorithms that will identify oncoming weather threats. The 10 foot towers are designed to capture the structure of these events, for example, we can get vertical profiles and calculate heat/energy fluxes. In order to collect data from farms that represent a range of Ontario's agricultural producers, we plan to install five micromet towers in five different locations in Ontario, including vineyards, grain growing, fruit producers and hazelnut producers. These four producer groups represent over 29,200 SME farming operations in Ontario. The incoming micromet data will be used to develop a web tool, visualizations, analysis and warnings associated with the harmful weather events. The AEIC tools will help prevent significant crop damage and death, while enhancing management practices by providing micromet web tools that will quickly analyze and provide valuable information to the grower.