Frost Forecast Kick Off: the future frost information and warning system for farmers developed by Inria Chile
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Changed on 02/08/2023
In September 2013, a series of frost events occurred in the central part of Chile, which were described as devastating for agriculture, generating an economic damage of around 411 million dollars for producers and the reduction of around 20 thousand jobs in this field. This situation is likely to be repeated, and therefore, the prediction of weather events that may affect production has become one of the growing concerns of the agricultural industry.
Frost Forecast proposes a precision agriculture system that allows visualizing the climatic status of a crop, providing a detailed view of the state of a farm. It uses multiple sources of climate data as inputs for a machine learning engine, which will provide early frost warnings so that farmers can focus on the control efforts.
This project, which is co-financed by Inria and Corfo, through its Crea y Valida instrument, had its kick-off last Friday, November 15, 2019, at the offices of Inria Chile. Part of the team that will be involved in this project met there: Nayat Sánchez Pi, CEO of Inria, who acts as project director; Luis Martí, Roudy Dagher and Alfonso Pola. Also participating in the kick-off -via videoconference- was Thomas Watteyne, researcher at the Inria Paris Centre in the AIO project-team who will work in collaboration with the Inria Chile team.
Frost Forecast will last approximately two years and aims to have a strong impact on agriculture at a national level by delivering a frost prediction system at a micro-predial level, which will allow SMEs, in this case farmers or agricultural technology providers to focus their efforts and reduce production losses due to frost.