Climate change has affected crop production at the global level. It has become increasingly difficult for farmers to continue agriculture’s previous practices due to the significant change in climate and unpredictable weather conditions. Increases in temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, extreme weather events, and reductions in water availability may impact agricultural productivity.
Farmers need innovative ways to address the adverse effects of climate change on agriculture and improve yield and crop quality.
Advanced technologies are assisting farmers to become much more productive, and profitable by growing crops efficiently in areas most suitable for agricultural production. Innovation empowers farmers by providing accurate insights and ensures sustainable and environment friendly agriculture best practices.
Openempus is an innovative open-source solution by Agrolly LLC, and is supported by IBM, Call for Code, and the Linux Foundation. It uses machine learning models to predict the weather for agricultural insights to support farmers adapting to climate change. This code can be used to run climate predictions according to their longitude and latitude.
The OpenTempus mission is to provide long-term (annual) weather forecasts for temperature and rainfall in order to help smallholder farmers make better decisions about what to plant and when.
It uses weather data from more than 5 years and utilizes machine learning models to provide insights into weather prediction. It also provides crop information to farmers as per weather prediction to maximize production and yield.
OpenTempus is going to be the first open-source weather forecast engine.
In order to provide more accurate forecasts, the OpenTempus model uses daily historical weather data. NASA weather data is gathered and regression models are run using IBM Watson Studio. To reduce weather-related crop losses, these models enable the development of long-term weather forecasts specifically for the agricultural ecosystem.
Agrolly provides a solution to farmers regarding which crop to plant and when to plant as per their location along with giving optimal weather information to increase yield. OpenTempus is the engine behind the Agrolly weather prediction solution. By open-sourcing its engine, Agrolly has allowed developers to create more innovative solutions to provide accurate weather insights to the farmers.
The Agrolly project was created by a group of Pace University students to help farmers know which crops and plants to grow in different parts of the world and when.
It provides a long-term weather forecast that includes rainfall predictions for the entire year, and real-time weather monitoring for up to 14 days. Additionally, it provides ongoing rainfall predictions for every month of the crop growth timeline, as well as a crop risk assessment matrix to identify potential issues in advance.
With the innovation created on OpenTempus technology, farmers will not depend on traditional crop knowledge passed on through generations and can deploy agriculture.
Farmers can download the application from Google Play Store and use it on their mobile devices. The team has launched regional applications in Brazil, India and Mongolia customized for the local farmers of these countries.
