Integration of Soil Water Holding Capacity Database

Water is a natural resource used by agriculture, industry, and people. Farmers use more water for irrigating row crops than any other group. Weather based irrigation scheduling using evapotranspiration (ET) is an effective tool to determine the right rate of water to apply at the right time on crops. The University of Missouri has a network of over 40 electronic weather stations located across the state. But, growers have been slow to adopt ET scheduling programs because they were required to manually enter weather data each day. In 2015, the University of Missouri Extension Service released a smart phone program called the Crop Water Use app which was integrated with the weather station network. The objective of this project is to educate farmers on ways to use the app and program new functions to provide more information and make it easier to use.