WILLMAR, Minn. — Farmers in southern Minnesota will now have access to more coverage and precise data and weather updates to help them make decisions about irrigating crops or when to add fertilizer and apply pesticides.
Over the past year, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture installed 14 new weather stations on the Minnesota Ag Weather Network, including a dozen across southern Minnesota that previously fell outside the network’s reach, according to a news release from the Ag Department.
The locations of the new stations include Willmar (Kandiyohi County), Murdock (Swift County), Madison (Lac qui Parle County) and Fairfax (Renville County) in west central Minnesota.
The other new station locations are Cologne (Carver County), Eyota (Olmsted County), Geneva (Freeborn County), Godahl (Brown County), Hastings (Dakota County), Kenyon (Goodhue County), Pine Island (Dodge County) and Windom (Jackson County).
These new stations are already collecting data that is publicly available through the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, which works in conjunction with Minnesota’s.
Each weather station is solar-powered and transmits data collected over a cellular network about every five minutes, according to the MAWN page on the Minnesota Department of Agriculture website. The stations can monitor weather conditions up to 33 feet in the air and monitor soil conditions as far as 7.5 feet below the surface. Data shared includes precipitation, relative humidity, soil moisture and temperature.
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In addition, the stations help MAWN and NDAWN offer modeling resources for growers such as daily estimated crop water use, runoff risk predictions and disease risk forecasts.
The weather data each station provides to each agricultural area is considered accurate within a 20-mile radius.
The installation of the new weather stations was made possible with $3 million from Minnesota’s Clean Water Fund, allocated for the purpose of expanding the network’s reach. The funds were received by the Department of Agriculture in 2023, according to the news release, and will support the installation of approximately 40 new stations over three years, developed in collaboration with local partners.
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