How TerraClim Seeks To Provide Farmers With Precise Climate And Environmental Insights
How TerraClim Seeks To Provide Farmers With Precise Climate And Environmental Insights. TerraClim is a comprehensive online platform designed for the agriculture industry, providing detailed climate and terrain data at farm and field levels. It’s a powerful tool to support informed decision-making. TerraClim offers precise climate and environmental insights, helping farmers optimise planting, harvesting and resource management. This leads to increased productivity and more sustainable practices.
TerraClim is accessible to farms of all sizes, from small-scale operations to large commercial enterprises. It can be tailored to meet farmers’ specific needs. TerraClim offers over 40 environmental variables, including rainfall, temperature and terrain information. This data empowers farmers with a deep understanding of their land.
“Previously, you had one weather station representing a farm, or 10 weather stations representing a region, we now have a new temperature value every 40m that can help to quantify your environment at hourly resolution. In the Western Cape, no database of this nature exists.” said Dr. Tara Southey, TerraClim Founder.
Climate projections for the future suggest favourable conditions for some agricultural producing regions, but challenging conditions for others. For instance, temperature increases are likely to shift plant phenology, ripening and harvest dates, and potentially affect quality and yield. The commercial value of accurate and up-to-date climate data emerged from feedback received in response to a series of demonstrations to the wine and fruit industries.
TerraClim combines high resolution terrain data with weather station data (sourced from several data providers) to model climatic conditions within an orchard or vineyard. The TerraClim climate database allows for dynamic mapping, statistical interrogation, data mining, machine learning and climate change analysis over time and space.
Seasonal management is possible today with the new decision making tool TerraClim, that provides climate and terrain information to farm and field level to improve long and short term decision making in the context of climate change specific to a region and cultivar specific physiology.
