For Jan Ballast from Tollebeek (Flevoland) his weather pole is from sencrop especially a handy tool to monitor the weather/rain on his second arable farm. However, he also consults the weather data via the app at least daily for the planning of spraying and other activities.
"I just bought a second weather pole," Ballast laughs. He couldn't show more convincingly that he is very satisfied with his Sencrop weather station. The arable farmer also has (in addition to the house plot) a second production location near Urk, about 9 kilometers away. There, seed potatoes are the main crop (23 hectares). The remaining 44 hectares are occupied by chicory, seed onions, winter wheat and rental for bulb cultivation.
Before buying a weather station, Ballast used other means to monitor precipitation. "For example, I'm in an app group with colleagues in which we share precipitation data with each other. I have also experimented for years with separate rain gauges from the hardware store, but these never last that long." In practice, Ballast usually drove to his company near Urk after the storm to have a look on the spot. "Those are quite expensive kilometers", he quickly concluded.
First weather station
Ballast's first encounter with a weather station was a station from another brand. "It did not have its own precipitation and anemometer, but worked with calculated values. However, I saw that the calculated precipitation sometimes deviated from the old-fashioned rain gauge. That first weather station is still on a separate plot, but the implementation of the Sencrop weather pole still appealed to me more," says Ballast.
His interest was sparked by an advertisement on the internet and during Potato Europe 2017 he visited the Sencrop stand to obtain more information. There he bought his first weather station with a precipitation meter and an anemometer on a separate tripod. "The new weather post will be exactly the same," says Ballast.
Consult daily
Ballast consults its weather station daily during the season. "But when it comes to the planning of the spraying, I often check several times a day. The data is also nicely organized in the new app." Ballast lets his crop protection advisor watch the weather station. "That's a handy option with Sencrop."
The data from the weather station also has value on other fronts. "When there is a downpour at my company near Urk, I see it immediately and I can go there with a shovel. With the weather extremes of recent years, you sometimes have large differences at a small distance. And that will probably happen more and more often. ."