Frost Protection
Challenge - frost damage due to temperature fluctuations
A concerned farmer was looking for a solution to monitor temperature fluctuations and prevent potential frost damage on his various farm sites. Frost is a significant cause of annual crop loss and traditional monitoring and mitigation measures are often time consuming and expensive. He needed to find a cost-effective solution that would allow him to monitor multiple sites on his property simultaneously.
The grower had noticed what seemed to be distinct temperature variations at his farm’s three cranberry bogs – especially in early spring, when cranberry buds are vulnerable to low temperatures, and in late fall, when colder temperatures return, around the time the berries are harvested. As a result, he was seeking a monitoring system that would alert him to critical conditions at multiple points across the growing area, so he could irrigate the particular bog or bogs that needed to be protected from frost, precisely when needed – and, to save on water costs, irrigate only when necessary.
Solution approach - automated field monitoring and alarming
Onset’s advanced wireless mesh network, the HOBOnet Field Monitoring system, connected to a cellular HOBO RX station, provided the solution the grower was seeking. The wireless HOBOnet sensors can communicate up to 1,500 feet between “hops,” which enabled the grower to extend the monitoring network to his farthest bog, and around terrain features.
The HOBO RX cellular station automatically transmits temperature and weather data from across the entire growing area to Onset’s HOBOlink cloud platform. With regular data updates, the grower can now monitor conditions from the comfort of his home. He also has the additional assurance of receiving automatic text and email alerts from the system if an alarm condition is reached (based on his settings), so he can respond immediately.
The most important features of the solution:
- A strong reliable signal that can communicate through vegetation
- Scalable, with up to 50 wireless sensors transmitting data to a central cellular weather station
- Remote access to data and current conditions with a customizable dashboard for analysis
- Alarm notifications when conditions exceed thresholds
- Data access via the HOBOlink cloud software from Onset
The result - efficient frost protection and cost savings
HOBOnet is a flawless bog-wide wireless monitoring system that encompasses dew points, relative humidity, wind speed and direction, soil moisture, and temperature of the cranberry vines – all done remotely from my phone. And after three years, it remains bulletproof in the salt air.
Since installing the HOBOnet system, the grower has verified that temperature variations across his farm do in fact occur; just one of his bogs can be subjected to the threat of frost, while at the same time the others are not. He confirmed that temperatures generally do run colder at his most distant bog, where in the past he had lost 50 barrels of cranberries to frost. He is now confident that such losses will not occur again in the future, as he relies on the HOBOnet system’s automatic email/text notifications to alert him when conditions exceed user-set thresholds. And he enjoys the added cost savings of reduced water usage at his farm, now that he irrigates to protect the berries from frost only when and where required.