With the summer growing season getting closer, now’s the ideal time to re-acquaint yourself with the Summerfruit NZ Weather and Disease Portal.
Developed by HortPlus and offered free to all summerfruit growers, the portal combines weather station data with leading pest and disease models to support on-orchard decision making and planning.
“We’ve worked closely with Summerfruit NZ over the years to enhance the portal and ensure it makes complex info easy to understand and act on,” says HortPlus Director Mike Barley.
Barley says the portal is an ideal place to get weather insights and compare trends, or to get a heads-up on current and forecast risk levels for potentially damaging fruit diseases like botrytis, leaf rust and brown rot.
Email alerts can also be set up to ensure you receive notification of high-risk periods for diseases affecting your fruit, direct to your inbox.
Two new tools were added to the portal last year to make it even more powerful.
The first was a winter chill units calculator, which helps growers and agronomists track how winter chill is progressing and how it compares to previous years.
The second addition was an evapotranspiration tool, developed to support irrigation decision making by making it possible to track the impacts of transpiration on crops and evaporation and rainfall on land.
“If you haven’t already tried the latest version of the portal, it’s worth a look. We’ve had some great feedback from growers, with some telling us they save hours of time each week by getting all the info they need in one place, and others reporting increased yield and reduced crop losses as a result of using it.”
Want to explore the portal or set up email plant disease risk alerts? Log in on the Portal page of our Summerfruit New Zealand website using your login and password. Contact info@summerfruitnz.co.nz if you have any issues logging in.