As part of the 2019 From the tramlines season, the Irish Farmers Journal will place weather stations on each of the tramline farms. The weather stations will be provided by Sencrop, a French based ag-tech start-up, and the weather data will be available to every reader of the Irish Farmers Journal through our website.

Two stations will be placed on each farm.

The Raincrop station records rainfall, temperature and humidity while the Windcrop station records wind speed, gusts, wind direction, air temperature and humidity.

The stations transmit data wirelessly using the low bandwidth wireless network Sigfox, which has a good level of coverage in Ireland. The data is transmitted every six seconds and the lithium battery on the stations lasts for four years.

The stations are specifically designed for outdoors and will be installed in grower’s fields. They are also equipped with GPS transmitters capable of sending station movement alerts.

Live and historical weather data

All of the weather data will be available to readers through the Irish Farmers Journal website and will also be available to our tramline growers through their smartphone, tablet, or computer. Live data from each station will be beamed directly to our website but readers will also be able to access historical data ranging from six hours to 12 months.

This data will help provide context to readers for our tramline growers’ updates but will also serve as a means of comparing and contrasting weather conditions across all of the station locations.

Over the next week we will be installing the stations on each farm and in the coming weeks, readers will be able to view the data on the weather page in the Irish Farmers Journal Knowledge Hub.

Sencrop

This new initiative is thanks to Sencrop, who have over 3,500 weather stations placed across Europe. Sencrop is an ag-tech start-up founded in 2016.

They design and market agricultural IoT, data collection equipment and agri-environmental data management software for precision farming across Ireland, UK and Europe.

The company has won numerous awards including the SIMA innovation award in 2017 and a SIVAL silver award in 2019 and has recently launched its new Leafcrop sensor which measures leaf wetness, temperature, and humidity in fields. The stations are available in Ireland through the Sencrop website.

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