Great news on NEWA from fruit workers in the Northeast! At the 76th annual meeting of the New England, New York and Canadian Fruit Pest Management Workshop, several people provided reports on how much NEWA’s tools are benefiting the fruit industries in their regions.

NEWA locations are centerpieces for providing Extension team-based integrated pest management (IPM) recommendations on diversified fruit & vegetable farms in Massachusetts. MA-NEWA includes 21 on-farm weather stations, plus 23 National Weather Service airport locations providing fruit & vegetable growers with IPM forecast tools to aid in decision-making for their management of insects & diseases. Their USDA NIFA-funded Extension Implementation Program is providing training in monitoring and management of key pests to 10 mentor growers and 15 partner growers. Mentors worked on 2-3 key IPM issues over 5 months of farm visits and participated in twilight meetings and project guidance. Each partner grower was involved with a research or extension project. Contributed by Jon Clements, Dan Cooley, Arthur Tuttle, Sonia Schloemann, & Elizabeth Garofalo, UMass Extension

Two New Jersey apple growers report the best thinning results ever in 2015 – using NEWA’s apple carbohydrate thinning model. Top of the list of useful tools for NJ growers this year was also the fire blight model—the several growers who failed to take intensive steps to protect their trees from fire blight had extreme tree loss. NJ-NEWA is a combined network that includes mostly weather stations managed by the State Climatologist at Rutgers University. Contributed by Win Cowgill, David Schmitt, & Dean Polk, Rutgers University

New Hampshire to join NEWA statewide with 10 Rainwise weather stations – one in each County! NH-NEWA is building on the success of the NEWA-connected apple grower in NH –  Trevor Hardy, Brookdale Fruit Farm, Inc., Hollis, NH. We are very excited about NH joining NEWA! We always benefit from more people using NEWA and providing ideas for better utilizing forecast tools for agriculture in the Northeast. Contributed by George Hamilton, Alan Eaton, & Cheryl Smith, University of New Hampshire

NEWA fire blight forecasts were dire, showing extreme risk for blossom infection across many station locations in the Northeast – but apple and pear orchards were protected because growers were alerted by the fire blight tool! The extreme risk of fire blight infection did not translate into severe damage from the disease. Fruit workers were split in their reasoning for why little to no fire blight infection occurred. Was it (1) lack of sufficient moisture (rain, dew, wetting) to wash the pathogen into the blossoms or (2) farmer awareness and action to protect their trees with appropriate treatments? The farmer awareness reason is a favorite of those of us who are using NEWA. We will be analyzing the fire blight tool with the plant pathologists to determine if the moisture component needs tweaking.

Do you have a NEWA success story? Contact me and I’ll post it, jec3@cornell.edu.

Many Rainwise stations in the NEWA network have failed to report data beginning sometime around September 15th in the afternoon. A reboot of your IP-100—turn it off and then on—may be required. The disconnect may have occurred during a server migration at Rainwise. You may have received a message from Rainwise, similar to the one below.

** Please Check Your IP-100 / Telemet – Reboot Might Be Required
————————————————————
Dear person’s name,

The server migration is mostly complete. We have noticed that some devices failed to switch over automatically to the new servers. Please check your weather page. If your page is not up to date you may need to power cycle your IP-100. This will unfortunately result in a few hours of lost data. If you have an affected unit we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, we did make every effort to minimize the impact on our users.

Thank you
RainwiseNet Support
==============================================

The concern, at this point, is lost data that may span > 24-hr period and because so many stations in NEWA were affected, sister stations that might normally be called upon by NEWA tools to patch lost data might have no data to use as the patch, leaving the data as missing in the data queries.

Please take a moment to check your weather station data on your weather page on RainwiseNet, https://www.rainwise.net/, to make sure it is reporting to their cloud server and, if not, “power cycle your IP-100” — turn it off and then on.

Nicole Mattoon will be emailing people whose stations may be affected. Nicole just started working with IPM on NEWA, so please join me in welcoming Nicole! Her contact information is (315) 787-2624, nem42@cornell.edu.

At Rainwise, John Stutz, is their new technical support person. His contact information is (800) 762-5723, john.stutz@rainwise.com.

For future reference: Information on troubleshooting Rainwise weather stations is now available via the NEWA website, under About Weather Stations on the main menu, click on Troubleshooting Guide.

Use the late blight DSS (decision support system)!  A discrepancy was found in early August 2015 between the late blight DSS (accurate) and the late blight Simcast tool on NEWA (discrepancy).  We have identified the discrepancy in the NEWA Simcast tool—related to the time of day the spray application is made. Take this opportunity to sign up for an account in the Potato/Tomato Late Blight DSS where you can enter the time of day the spray application is made. Or, access it directly via blight.eas.cornell.edu/blight/.

To use the DSS you’ll need minimal training and an account.  Contact Laura Joseph (lje5@cornell.edu) about setting up an account. Laura recently retired, but she will forward your email to the right person to get you set up.

In the late blight DSS you can set up individual fields or farm locations that have different climate conditions because of elevation or exposure.  Save your information on specific fields or farms for the season, record fungicide applications, and track fungicide weathering along with disease severity.

For the most accurate and site-specific late blight forecasts, sign up for an account with the Late Blight Decision Support System!

The NEWA Simcast tool, accessed from the NEWA main menu by clicking on “Potato Late Blight Later Sprays”, currently doesn’t allow the end user to input the time of day a fungicide spray was applied and assumes the fungicide was applied at 10:00 AM. The discrepancy found between the Late Blight DSS output and the NEWA Simcast tool output was traced to the ability to specify the time of fungicide application in the DSS, but not in NEWA. This discrepancy is a rare event and had not been seen in over two seasons of running these tools simultaneously. Future upgrades to the NEWA Simcast tool will include the ability to enter time of spray application.