Agricloud

Climate change is causing extreme weather and increased variability in rainfall and temperature impacting agriculture directly and making farmers more vulnerable to yield loss. To adapt to climate change, farmers need to become less dependent on weather condition and therefore need access to timely and reliable weather-related advisories that help them to decide when to take actions (when to plant, when to spray, when to irrigate, when to put the cattle in the shade etcetera).

HydroNET Solution

AgriCloud is an online weather based agricultural advisory system that enriches weather and climate data with agricultural information and data together with local knowledge and models to generate real-time personalised advisories. AgriCloud helps farmers to make well-informed farm management decisions in order to optimise farm inputs, reduce weather and climate related risks and improve food production in a sustainable manner. The backbone of the AgriCloud is the HydroNET platform. The HydroNET platform connects in real-time to weather and agricultural data from partners such as the South African Weather Service and the Agricultural Research Council.

AgriCloud Services automatically translate this data via operational rules/algorithms/formulae into weather based agricultural advisories. The resulting AgriCloud advisories (e.g. a gridded map which shows the suitable areas to plant Maize) are stored in the HydroNET platform so that the HydroNET Portal and Agricloud Mobile App can make these advisories accessible for users and clients.