Automated Agro Advisory Service - (TNAU AAS)

Success of monsoon based agriculture depends on the climate that prevailed during the particular cropping season.Providing real time weather information based agro advisory to the farmers could minimize the risk and losses due to extreme climate

In order to improve the accuracy of present weather forecasting, weather information are required at high spatial and temporal resolution. Installation and interlinking of automatic weather stations (AWS) at block level will be helpful to avoid climaterisks and increase the productivity by timely weather based agro advisory.

In this context, Government of Tamil Nadu under National Agricultural Development Project (NADP) has funded Rs. 29.83 crores for establishing Tamil Nadu Agriculture Weather Network (TAWN) by installing 385 AWS, each one per block. During 2007-10, in the first phase 224 AWS were installed with a total outlay of Rs. 16.90 crores and 161 AWS were installed in the second phase during 2011 -16.

Agro Climate Research Centre (ACRC), Directorate of Crop Management, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore in collaboration with Department of Agriculture, Tamil Nadu established the Tamil Nadu Agriculture Weather Network (TAWN). In this network, 10 types of agricultural related weather parameters viz., maximum temperature, minimum temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture, soil temperature, leaf wetness, sunshine hours, solar radiation are collected from 385 AWS at hourly interval and hosted in this public domain www.tawn.tnau.ac.in. The daily, weekly and monthly weather data are also calculated and hosted in this website at block level. The medium range weather forecast at block level is being generated by using these weather parameters is also hosted every day with a lead time of six days.

Response farming is a farming method with advisories received from the technocrats based on local weather information and crop weather simulation models. Success of response farming viz., increased productivity and reduced risk has been already recorded in Tamil Nadu by TNAU and many other states. The main reason for the success of response farming lies with location and time specific technologies. It is the right time to carry forward the success of response farming to entire farming community. In continuation of Tamil Nadu Agricultural Weather Network (TAWN), TNAU scientists have stepped ahead to provide weather based “Automated Agro Advisory Service (AAS)”, directly to the farmers mobile.

In this context, Government of Tamil Nadu under National Agricultural Development Project (NADP) has funded Rs. 3.50 crores to Agro Climate Research Centre, Directorate of Crop Management, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore for developing a software to send weather based agro advisory SMS to farmers. The scientists of ACRC have successfully achieved the robust task by developing 54 weather windows involving past, present and future weather, agro advisory for the developed weather window to each five growth stages of 108 crops. Using the above details, weather based agro advisory will be generated individually to registered farmer’s own crop through the special “AAS software” and disseminated as SMS in local language. This software is the first in India to automate the weather based agro advisory. The farmers can freely register their mobile number in this portal, choose their crop and sowing time.

With the increasing demand on accurate weather information and weather based agro advisory, TNAU’s Tamil Nadu Agriculture Weather Network(TAWN) and Automated Agro Advisory Service(AAs) stands in front to help the farmers to plan, implement and harvest the success in farming.