A weather station on the farm — your own data instead of a regional forecast

A weather station on the farm turns the season's most common sentence — "they say it's going to rain" — into a concrete number from your own field. A regional forecast describes the county, but decisions are made on a specific block: did yesterday's rain actually water the crops, or did it pass by; does today's wind allow spraying, or will it drift the liquid onto the neighbour's land; will the night be cold enough to keep watch. None of these questions are answered by a measurement taken a dozen or more kilometres away. Below we show what your own station should measure, how its data works in the monitoring platform and which decisions simply become easier thanks to it.

The regional forecast ends at the field boundary

Forecasts and weather bulletins rely on reference stations that can be a dozen or more kilometres from the farm — and measure an entirely different microclimate. Three phenomena make this difference cost real money:

• Rainfall is localised. A summer storm can drench one village thoroughly and miss the next one entirely. A "regional rainfall total" says nothing about how much water your field received — and that decides whether irrigation makes sense at all.
• Wind is local. Terrain, tree lines and buildings change its speed and direction over hundreds of metres. The safe spraying limit has to be referenced to the wind at the crop, not to the forecast average.
• Temperature near the ground lives its own life. On clear, windless nights it gets noticeably colder at the surface than the forecast indicates, and cold air flows down into terrain depressions.

The conclusion is simple: a forecast describes the trend well, but agronomic decisions require a measurement in the place where the plants actually grow.

A weather station on the farm: six parameters from one mast

A well-chosen station collects the full set of data you use throughout the season — without piecing a system together from separate sensors.

Nextriv Weather Pro measures six parameters: temperature (from −40 °C, with ±0.3 °C accuracy), humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and rainfall. Two design elements matter especially on a farm:

• The piezoelectric rain gauge measures precipitation with 0.01 mm resolution using a vibration sensor — without the tipping mechanism that clogs with leaves in classic gauges and needs cleaning. That sensitivity registers even drizzle relevant to crop disease models.
• Ultrasonic wind measurement (up to 60 m/s) has not a single moving part: nothing wears out, ices over or needs annual servicing.

The station is also energy self-sufficient — a 15 W solar panel with buffer batteries provides at least a week of operation without sun — and the measurement module in an aluminium alloy housing endures field work for years, including frosts down to −40 °C without heaters. So the mast goes where the measurement makes sense, not where an extension cord reaches.

From mast to phone: how the data works in the platform

Data from the station flows to the gateway over a long-range radio link — up to about 2 km in built-up areas and about 15 km in open terrain — so the gateway sits in a farm building while the station stands in the middle of the land. After power-up the platform detects the new device automatically within 30–180 seconds; from unboxing to first measurements takes fifteen minutes, not a week-long rollout. That's how the whole platform works, as we described at the launch of Nextriv.

Each of the six parameters enters the system as a separate measurement series with its own alarm thresholds — up to four per metric (two warning and two critical, min/max). Rising wind can therefore first send a warning and, once the critical threshold is crossed — an alarm, through any of six channels: email, SMS, web push, Microsoft Teams, Discord or an audible alarm in the app. Event deduplication makes sure a gusty day doesn't turn into a hundred notifications: each sensor and metric carries one active event, with its own code, status and acknowledgement history. Current conditions are viewed on dashboards built from nearly 20 widget types, from live readings to multi-series charts.

The station itself takes care of record continuity: local memory holding over 19,000 records backfills data after any connectivity outage, so the measurement series has no gaps. And if the device went silent for good, the platform would mark it offline and send a notification about it — you learn about a dead measurement point right away, not after a week.

Three decisions that get simpler

Spraying. You reference the wind speed limit for a treatment to the measurement at the crop, not to the forecast. A warning threshold in the platform tells you when the treatment window is opening, and the measurement history documents that the treatment was carried out within permitted conditions.

Irrigation. The rainfall total from your own field — at 0.01 mm resolution — turns "it probably rained" into a decision: these blocks got water, those need irrigating. With several fields, the differences can be surprisingly large.

Documentation and analytics. Full measurement history, PDF reports and XLSX/CSV exports stay useful longer than the season lasts: as hard data after weather damage for talks with the insurer, as input to disease models and as material for planning future years.

And when spring nights approach zero, the same station becomes the first line of warning: a warning threshold set a few degrees above zero buys time to react before the cold descends to crop level — without getting up at night "just in case".

A weather station is usually the first piece of a bigger puzzle — soil moisture, climate under covers or frost protection. We describe the full set of farm scenarios on the solutions page for agriculture and greenhouses.

Put the mast up in winter, enter the season with data

The off-season is the best moment for installation: a station with a mast bracket plus a gateway is a job of a few dozen minutes, configuration happens by holding your phone to the device (NFC), and from spring the system runs with a ready baseline. The FREE plan covers 10 sensors, one gateway and a year of measurement history — so a farm weather station starts with no subscription at all.

You'll find plan details in the pricing, and if you'd rather see the system on live data — book a short demo: we'll show the weather dashboard and a wind alert all the way from threshold to SMS.