Digital Platform Solutions for Pest & Disease Management
The MetWatch Platform provides a central source of live weather and disease risk. The platform integrates into the daily process of growers and agronomists to inform decisions and identify high-risk periods to assist with targeting spray applications when they are needed while reducing overall spray use.
The platform is a central point of access for decision support tools and features a full suite of disease risk models and advanced tools to inform management decisions. We are able to customise our disease models and integrations with business operating procedures and additional inputs. We are able to draw up on our expertise in bringing disease risk models to market to build new or advanced models for specific use cases including market compliance and biosecurity.
Partnering with Industry to Deliver Research & Extension
We help industry by reducing the complexity of developing the infrastructure for digital tools by providing a proven and extendable platform that integrates with a range of existing systems for ease of access.
Our platform is a powerful pathway for delivery of research and extension that is accessible to growers in one place.
Our Design Process
Developing a disease model for industry involves undertaking a design process to engage stakeholders and understand the outcomes that are to be achieved. We are able to draw upon our experience and relationships with growers and key experts to bring new disease models to market and to refine and expand existing models.
Case Study: PSA Risk Model for Kiwifruit Industry
The Kiwifruit industry approached HortPlus. PSA had presented a major challenge to the industry and they wanted to implement an interactive PSA Risk Model for growers. We took them through our design process to develop and deliver a digital solution.
The immediate need was to create a PSA risk model for growers. We also identified a need for other tools, including a Chill Unit Calculator and weather forecasting tools to further enable decision making.
We worked with Plant & Food Research and Kiwifruit Vine Health (KVH) to ideate the implementation of the project and build a timeline and roadmap for delivery of the solution, including the installation of new weather stations.
We developed and successfully launched the project, integrating it with existing Industry web tools. We have continued to work with both Plant & Food Research (science) and KVH (industry) to refine and evolve the tools and models.
Disease Risk Modelling
The MetWatch Platform allows growers to predict and manage potential disease outbreaks, enhance day-to-day crop management, and make better decisions to improve crops and overall profit.
Inadequate disease control can result in poor crop health, high crop losses, decreased productivity and quality, and long-term damage to ecosystems. With timely and accurate data, both historic and forecasted, growers can anticipate disease occurrence and be proactive by spraying crops with accuracy and efficiency.
HortPlus has worked with some of New Zealand's top scientists to develop and refine disease risk models & pest phenology models. Our tools, weather data, weather forecast and disease risk modelling combine to support decision making for crop diseases in pipfruit, stonefruit, kiwifruit, grapes, and field crops.
Disease models we have implemented for industry include:
Grapes
- Botrytis (Bacchus)
- Botrytis (Broome)
- Downy Mildew
- Powdery Mildew
Field Crops
- Onion Downy Mildew
- Onion White Rot
- Onion Stemphylium Leaf Blight
Apples
- Asco Spore
- Blackspot (Apple scab)
- Integrated Blackspot Model
- Fire Blight
- Codling Moth
- Elsinoe
Kiwifruit
- PSA-V
Summerfruit
- Brown Rot
- Leaf Curl
- Leaf Rust
For New Research and Disease Model Projects
