It is the year 2010 and Chris Kucharik, a professor of agronomy and environmental studies at UW–Madison, is talking to a bunch of farmers in rural Wisconsin about a not-so-hot topic: climate change. The town hall meetings are typical Dairyland: brats, beer, and agriculture talk.
At the time, the Midwest was experiencing the wettest decade on record, Kucharik said. The farmers, he added, “knew something was up.”
“More farmers were experiencing more erratic weather, extreme rainfall, lots of flooding. They couldn’t plant fields,” Kucharik explained. As the drought of 2012 underscored, weather had turned into a pendulum: “too wet, too dry, too wet, too dry.”
“The temperatures weren’t really the problem,” he said, “It was the precipitation patterns all of a sudden changing.”
Over a decade later, the problem has only gotten worse.
According to a 2023 paper Kucharik coauthored for the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the climate’s effects on the industry, along with the temperature increases, the average annual precipitation has risen significantly: 4.9 inches between 1979 and 2021. Extreme precipitation events are also on the rise. These shifts translate to an increased chance of crop loss whether it be because of degrading soil health, excessive rain, drought, an increased presence of pests, or a litany of other impacts.
“Weather’s getting weirder,” farmers told Kucharik in 2010. “What should we be doing? Should we be looking at other crops, different management? How do we adapt to this?”
Now, 15 years later, a new project housed within the Wisconsin Energy Institute, called Wisconet, is helping to answer those questions, while strengthening the long-term relationship between UW–Madison and farmers across the state.
A New Way of Connecting Data and Wisconsin Farmers
Wisconet, or Wisconsin’s Environmental Mesonet, is a network of stations around the Dairyland that provides accurate, timely data for resource management, research, and industry decision-making. For farmers, Wisconet helps them answer questions about the day’s irrigation or planting, for example, in real-time. In addition, the data can help identify collaborative solutions to mitigate the broader impacts of agriculture on climate change, which derive from practices related to livestock and crop management that release carbon and other greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere.
In 2022, Wisconet received a $2.3 million grant from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Wisconsin Rural Partnership Institute — a slice of the larger $28 million USDA-funded Institute for Rural Partnerships — and $1 million from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).
Kucharik, who is the director of the program, puts it like this: “People say, ‘I get the weather on my phone,’ and I’d be like, ‘Okay, that’s fine, but does that information easily tailor to your everyday needs?”
For farmers, dozens of real-time observations can help them assess tornadoes, rainfall, temperature, humidity, soil moisture, wind speed, and much more. Having that data every five minutes in each county “that can be easily displayed and downloaded by anybody is unprecedented,” Kucharik said.
As the Wisconet team expands, they are actively listening to farmers and aim to grow from 58 to 80 stations by 2026 — one within 20 miles of any location in Wisconsin.
Looking Towards the Future
In the Door County Peninsula, Wisconsin’s apples and cherries thrive. Dairy, corn, alfalfa, and soybeans may come to mind for the Midwest, but the state ranks fourth in the nation for cherry production.
“Those growers are faced with constant pest and disease pressure on those crops,” Kucharik said. This pressure is further exacerbated by climate change, as the USDA report authored in part by Kucharik shows.
However, the Wisconet modeling tools help the cherry and apple farmers determine if they should spray and track the development of pest disease. The Wisconet team works closely with the University’s Peninsular Ag Research Station (PARS) and Door County to ensure they are providing tools that meet their needs.
Wisconsin is also the cranberry capital of the world, boasting 60% of the global cranberry production.
“They [cranberry farmers] don’t have as many detailed models yet,” Kucharik said, but concerns about climate change and protecting their crops from freezing temperatures during winter has highlighted where data could benefit them. “They want more stations close to where their areas are,” he said.
With Oklahoma being the gold standard for an environmental mesonet, and these networks also existing across other agriculture-heavy states, Wisconsin was a little behind.
In April, Wisconet will launch an enhanced version of the website focused on displaying the data. While Kucharik will likely have retired when the mesonet is finally finished, Kucharik is proud to have participated since the beginning.
“What excites me the most is being able to have set something up that hopefully remains and creates a legacy and that we never go back to the way things were because it was long overdue,” Kucharik said.
When he retires, he said he is grateful to have been a part of “a foundation for long term sustainability.” From farmers, industry, tribal nations, and K-12 science programs, “there’s a lot of people who would benefit from having access to this data.”
“There isn’t a day where these aren’t going to be used.”