Rainfall charting module?

Hey team,

A friend of mine with an organic dairy farm here in NZ would like to be able to track simple rainfall data gathered in various of his fields to help determine where he should move his stock. Does anybody have a recommendation?

Thanks,

~Micah

1 Like

Hi Micah! @ndr-oftheline

Interesting use case. Assuming this data would be entered into farmOS manually, I think you could create Observation logs and add them to Area(s) and add a Quantity with units/label set for Rainfall. I’m not sure if it would be best to make the units “cm rainfall” or use a “cm” unit and “rainfall” label? Quick example below…

An interesting idea would be to create a Rainfall Charting Module that adds a report graphing the rainfall over time. Once you have enough data in enough fields that might be interesting

1 Like

Hi @ndr-oftheline and @paul121 - there is a farmOS Weather module (optional add-on) available at https://github.com/farmOS/farm_weather which could serve as a starting point for this.

Currently, the module provides a “Quick Form” for recording precipitation events as observations (essentially what @paul121 described).

@jgaehring is actually in the process of thinking through converting that to a “Field Module” in farmOS Field Kit, so that it can be used in the offline/mobile app.

A next step would be to build a report in the farmOS UI that summarizes/visualizes the observations that it collects, like @ndr-oftheline described. That would be great! @paul121 recently built an animal weight report that could be used as an example (and perhaps some of the logic or UI could be generalized/shared between them).

The one thing that the Weather module’s observations do NOT collect yet is location. It just asks for total precipitation, whether it is rain/snow, and has a field for notes. We could potentially just add an area reference field as well, so that you can reference the specific area/location where the measurement was taken. This would be useful for farms that have many fields spread out over a larger area.

3 Likes

Ahh thanks @mstenta ! Good stuff ahead for Weather :+1:

1 Like