Can We Still Use 'Irish Rules' To Forecast Potato Late Blight Epidemics In Ireland? Potato late blight is one of most devastating crop diseases and the most important disease of potatoes and tomatoes globally. It was one of initiators of the Irish Famine and investigations into the cause of the potato crop failure during these years have led to the scientific discipline known today as plant pathology. Since then many scientists have spent their careers investigating how Phytophthora infestans (...

Grazed grass is a cheap source of feed for Irish farm animals, and therefore to maximise profits it is important to have efficient use of grass on farms. A predictive grass growth model would help farmers with their grassland management. However to date, weather forecasts have not been included in Irish grass growth models; only retrospective observations have been used as weather inputs. In this collaboration between Teagasc, Met Éireann and Maynooth University, ECMWF (European Centre for Medi...

Since 1985 the AGMET group have been publishing, reports, books and conference proceedings. When any new agrometeorological research project kicks off, one of the first things that is typically done is to review how the current systems were developed, i.e. what has been done in the past. It is for this reason that it is believed that these old AGMET publications are still of value. To address this, efforts have begun to digitize old hard-copy publications from the AGMET Group and make thes...

Workshop - Agrometeorologists for farmers in hotter, drier, wetter future This workshop will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia 9-10 November 2016. The workshop is organized by Slovenian Environment Agency, Meteorological Office through the budget of the Tromp foundation and is primarily addressed to agrometeorologists of Central and Southern European countries, where agrometeorology bears a significant role in providing guidance for farming and agriculture. The purpose of this workshop is ...

"Using a surface energy balance approach to characterise agro-environmental zones in Ireland in support of on-farm decision making" Background "Farming, particularly pastoral farming, involves the management of biological processes within a specific ecological and weather environment to generate income which in turn is also a function of the costs of inputs used on farm and prices for the outputs of the farm activity. Biological processes exhibit significant spatial and temporal variability wh...

Dear Agrometeorologist Colleagues, With sadness, I am informing you that Prof Kees Stigter passed away on 19 May 2016 at the age of 79, in Indonesia. Prof Stigter was a colleague and friend to many of us. He served as Vice-president (1986 – 1991) and president (1991 – 1999) of the WMO Commission for Agricultural Meteorology and Dutch principal delegate to CAgM (1985 – 2007). He was also the founding President of the International Society for Agricultural Meteorology (INSAM). Prof Stigter was ...

"Development of a ground based automated ‘real time’ grass quality measurement system to enhance grassland management information platforms."   Background "The focus of this project is to develop and enable an intelligent system that will apply precision management to whole farm grassland and grazing systems. To precisely allocate to the cow herd the absolutely correct area of grass, it is necessary to have an accurate ‘real-time’ measure of grass quality as well as quantity. The resea...

The objective of the Summer School is to provide the attendees with a comprehensive overview on agrometeorological applications and crop modeling, basics of numerical weather prediction (NWP) and its application in agrometeorology. The Summer school will take a place at Faculty of Agriculture, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia, from 27th June till 1st July 2016. More details can be found on their Facebook page.

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine advises farmers in relation to the predicted risk of infection in livestock based on the advice received from the Nematodirus Advisory Group. Source: DAFM - Press Release, April 2016 About the disease "Nematodirosis is a severe disease of lambs six to twelve weeks of age, which become infected through ingesting large numbers of infective larvae present on contaminated pasture. The life cycle of the Nematodirus battus worm is unlike that...