Re: Looking for specialised skills/product/advice (farming)

"Didier Gasser-Morlay" <didiergm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:47282526@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
As anyone around here got extensive-farming experience (as a developer of
course :))

I am asked by a client to come up with a good (of course) planning tool
for a group of up to 50 farms handling 25000 acres each. I could find
several products used to record what has been done after the event, but
nothing on the planning front.


Almost all states have an agricultural agency where you can get past data
about weather. When I worked at A&M, I worked on a project with others that
would project what the weather would "most likely be" by looking through
past years data for that period. It would give the rice farmers a projected
agenda for planting, watering, etc. Of course, it's only a guide because
you can't control outside factors like the weather, problems the farmers
might be having with equipment, etc., but it gave them something they could
work with in most normal cases.

A&M has weather stations all over Texas and we would get the EPROMs
(remember those?) from each station. I would download the weather data from
the EPROM which then got stored in a database. You could then get statistics
on weather from any general area in the state. It wasn't my area, but I'm
fairly certain that A&M published the data somewhere for general use.

That was almost 20 years ago and I used Turbo Pascal to write the programs
so I don't know if there is anything around now that could help you get
started. I haven't done anything more like that since I left there in '93.

Woody (TMW)


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