The Weather Channel Interactive and Monsanto Co., have partnered on a new agriculture news and forecast website.
The new section on weather.com is dedicated to weather and farming and can be found at www.weather.com/farming. Within Agriculture News & Forecast, the main feature is the Farmers Forecast, which includes up-to-date weather information that matters most to the agricultural community, such as severe weather alerts affecting crops and detailed data about precipitation, wind, and soil moisture.
The site will offer several components to help growers make decisions before and throughout the season. From the same page, users can easily change locations to keep up with multiple farms or compare sites.
In addition to 36-hour and 10-day forecasts, the new section also includes an almanac that allows users to compare the forecast with typical and historical weather conditions and more than 30 regional and national maps that provide a detailed visual display of drought severity, soil moisture, precipitation forecasts, rainfall estimates, optimal planting schedules, and first and last freeze norms. An interactive map also allows consumers to customize points of interest and specific weather layers such as radar, clouds, dew point, wind speed, temperature and past precipitation.
The section is also a one-stop resource for the latest agriculture news. Users can stay up to date with articles related to the industry while checking out the next day’s forecast. Users can easily bookmark any page within the new section, such as the Farmers Forecast, to return to this practical resource and connect it to social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg. and others.
Along with the new section within the weather.com site, Monsanto will also run an online campaign throughout 2009 featuring many of its brands such as Deltapine, DEKALB, Asgrow, Yieldgard, Roundup Ready, and Roundup PowerMax.
