Autumn finally is here together with its rains and falling temperatures! As you know, normally it’s in October when our harvest begins, but we have to say that thanks to the Precision Agriculture that we practice, we have been caring of our olive trees along the year for this moment!
Monitoring the ground, plants and climate of our olive grove is essential for us, to be able to characterize our plantation, from where we will obtain fragrant and excellent olive oils. Each Pago has its unique abiotic factors, such as their land, temperature and humidity that determine and affect the full ecosystem.
For a few years, we have been collaborating in different projects to reduce to minimum the use of a scarce resource such as the water is. For this, one of the tools developed is the Meteogrid system which has a great precision, it’s able to inform us about the climate forecasts exactly in our olive grove. Gathering the climatic information of the last years and from 40 different variables, this METEOGRID program is able to predict the climatic forecasts up to 60 days in advance. In addition, due to its operation throughout the years, this tool will be becoming more and more accurate by providing more weather data.
In our plantation, thanks to our Precision Agriculture, we have 2 climatic stations that allow us to register the evolution of temperatures, humidity, wind speed, intercepted radiation, rainfall and sheet humidity in real time. This is necessary for monitoring the phenological stage of each plantation. In addition, we have a detailed weather forecast until the 10th day and a general forecast for the following 2 months. This is vital for the follow-up of our trees. It allows us to know, for example: the number of hours with relative humidity less than 30% ; the number of hours below or above determined temperatures or the real and accumulated evapotranspiration of our plantation, for example.
All this information is crucial for us to know the evolution of possible pests and/or diseases. In addition and given that we do not use insecticides or pesticides, to be able to carry out corrective NATURAL actions such as the activation of irrigation, giving a foliar nutritional treatment, or to carry out a biological control, for example. This helps us being able to successfully manage our exploitation with an optimisation of all resources.