Ag tool forecasts flood, drought conditions

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This article was published 18/04/2023 (881 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Producers hoping to get ahead of seasonal flood and drought conditions now have the upper hand, thanks to a new forecasting tool from the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association.

Farmers across the Assiniboine River Basin throughout Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and in Manitoba’s Pembina/Plum watersheds of the Red River Basin, will have free and full access to the association’s new Aquanty forecasting tool during the 2023 spring thaw and runoff.

“Offering our forecasting tool to farmers at this time of year is exactly what the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association is all about,” MFGA chairperson and dairy farmer Lawrence Knockaert said. “We believe they are ready to roll.”

The tool will give producers short-term (seven days) and longer-term (32 days) forecasts for soil moisture, ground water and surface water conditions on or near the land they manage. This should help them to address the risks associated with water resources management under increasingly variable climate and weather conditions, said Aquanty’s Amanda Taylor.

The tool will also provide advance warning of both flood and drought conditions.

“In addition to the forecasting abilities, the tool will also allow producers to view recent satellite imagery of their land so that they can monitor all areas of their land in near-real time without requiring on-site visits,” Taylor said.

The association’s forecasting tool was funded by Agriculture and Agrifood Canada through the Canadian Agricultural Partnership. After a series of focus groups, Aquanty, a Waterloo, Ont.-based software company, designed the program.

While work remains to be done on how the MFGA will market the tool in the future — they won’t always be available for free — letting farmers have no-charge access to it this spring just made sense, Knockaert said.

“We are farmer-led and are looking out for the best interests of our farmers and neighbours. It makes no sense to us to have the tool functional and it not being used by farmers during this time of year.”

Allowing farmers free access to the tool means, hopefully, MFGA will receive valuable feedback on how it works in the field, Knockaert said, especially with the rapid spring melt that has been happening in much of the province.

“Now is a real opportunity for people to actually have a look at it for free, and see if it interests them,” he said. “We weren’t at the point of doing subscriptions yet, so we just decided to leave it open and let everyone who’s interested have a chance to work with it.”

But moving forward, MFGA will develop and employ a user-subscription approach to ensure maintenance and upkeep costs of running the forecasting tools are taken care of, Knockaert said. There will be no charges to users until MFGA and Aquanty develop and implement that system.

The new forecasting tool can be found at MFGA.net, where producers can also access a guide on how to use it. A future training webinar is tentatively planned for April 27. MFGA will release more details on the event in the coming days.

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