Center For Information Outreach

The Weather: Chris Long

I am continually reminded how the weather or more recently coined “the environment” impacts the lives of potato producers. The weather affects every area of your lives, but more specifically your crop yields, quality and profitability. It would be nice to better understand how the weather affects your crops. The fact that the weather influences your potato production is by no means “News”, but what I want to do in this article is expose you to a web based resource that may help you manage your potato crop better in this variable climate we call “The Weather”. Understanding weather events can help you manage your field crops. Better understanding the impacts of these weather events on your potato production may make you a more profitable producer. Weather data, in conjunction with new software programs, is the key to bringing this idea to life.

The development of the Michigan State University (MSU) Enviro-Weather Potato Heat Stress Tool can help potato producers understand environmental stresses that occurred during the growing season and help the grower better manage their crops in storage. This project has been funded by a grant from the Michigan Department of Agriculture. Additional support from the Michigan Potato Industry Commission will allow the continued development of this tool. This funding support will enable MSU to add four new weather stations to the Michigan Automated Weather Network (MAWN) in northern potato production regions and strengthen the Potato Heat Stress Tool. This tool is built upon weather data collected by the MAWN. Each weather station collects air and soil temperatures, rain fall amounts, wind speed, leaf wetness and humidity. All this information goes into the Potato Heat Stress Tool to make it a strong source of information for the grower. The weather stations collect the information and the Potato Heat Stress Tool turns this weather data into useful information.

The Potato Heat Stress Tool was created to help potato producers better understand the impact of seasonal weather events and the resulting abiotic stresses that occur during the production of potatoes. Seasonal weather is the single most influential factor in the potato production system. Helping growers better understand how weather events affect potato production and tuber quality will help the potato producers better manage the production and post-harvest storage of their crop. Annually, 5 to 12 million dollars, (4 to 8 percent) of the potato crop in Michigan is lost due to poor environmental conditions during the growing and harvest seasons which cannot be controlled or managed effectively. This tool will aid growers in visualizing stressful weather events in relation to the crop production cycle. Knowing when these events occur in the production time line will better assist growers in making management decisions that will help them to reduce the effects of abiotic stress, as well as, aid them in post-harvest management decisions. Understanding what environmental stress the crop has undergone during the growing season allows storage managers to better maintain tuber quality in storage which ultimately will yield a greater return to the producer. The information from the Potato Heat Stress Tool can also be combined with third party pre-harvest and post-harvest data to enhance your understanding of the physiological condition of the potato crop you have produced.

I am currently working with Beth Bishop from Enviro-Weather to locate and plan the installation of the new weather stations and begin the process of enhancing the current Potato Heat Stress Tool. The new weather stations will be located in Mecosta, Kalkaska, Antrim and Luce counties in Michigan. Beth Bishop and I have initiated the development of the expanded tool and the programming will begin late 2011, early 2012. We hope to have the beta version of this tool by mid-February 2012. Please visit the MSU Enviroweather website to begin using the current potato heat stress tool atwww.enviroweather.msu.edu. If you have any questions as you implement the Potato Heat Stress Tool in your operation, please call or email me at 517-256-6529 or longch@msu.edu.