Posted July 31, 2024 | By: Nutrien Ag Solutions

Senior Meteorologist, Andrew Pritchard sheds light on how the Nutrien Ag Solutions weather team benefits growers and shares the current weather trends that are impacting US growers.

Episode Transcript: 

Nutrien Ag Solutions has Crop Consultants watching out for the agronomy for your acres all across the country. And those consultants are backed by a team of meteorologists. We're talking with Andrew Pritchard today. He's a Senior Meteorologist with Nutrien Ag Solutions. And Andrew, thanks for joining us.

I'm happy to be here. Tell us a little bit about the team that work there for Nutrien.

Absolutely. Yeah. I am just one out of a team of five atmospheric scientists on staff here at Nutrien Ag Solutions. We're all kind of bringing our unique talents to the table to support our Crop Consultants and our farmers out in the field. My particular specialty happens to be severe and high impact weather. So, when the weather is causing problems from the US up into Canada, I am very busy providing alerts ahead of time to try and warn people that we've got bad weather coming in later in the day and they need to kind of plan their operations around that.

I help with the response on the back end as well. Of course, you know, we're a big retail company with a lot of these facilities spread out, so we just want to make sure that people are taken care of, though. They know bad weather is coming and then they've got support when those storms move on out. Now, again, I mentioned I'm just one of five.

Eric Snodgrass is a well-known name in ag weather and he's great at trying to pick out where the pattern is going the next few weeks. We've got other meteorologists on staff who are great at the bigger climate picture, and then we have programmers and data scientists who are helping kind of work behind the scenes and develop these weather models that we use to help build our forecasts here.

So we're doing everything from just warning people, giving them those weather forecasts to creating tools that they can take in the field to help best position their farmers there to weather what's coming.

Well, that's fantastic. Now, Andrew, it has been an active weather season, certainly severe weather wise. As you look forward, are there any trends your team is keeping an eye on right now?

Yeah, when I think about this past growing season, really going back to the flip of the calendar here to 2024, if I were to really summarize things, it's been very active, a lot of flow in the jet stream. And when the jet stream is moving fast, we get storm systems and a lot of precipitation. So that is different compared to the last couple of years here.

So, as I mentioned, we came out of January and February, we brought a lot of Pacific moisture into the western US, California got a lot of badly needed moisture here as they went through their wet season. And then the hope and what we saw happen here was that that pattern would continue as we got into the spring so that meant kind of, you know, navigating some trouble here with the farmers that they started to get into the spring planting season.

We had some early warmth. So, you know, folks had to kind of consider if they wanted to take advantage of that and risk a late season frost event. And then as we got deeper into April and May, that storm system, that storm track really ramped up. And so it became, you know, trying to get the planting done between storms.

We had a lot of rain, some areas that were dealing with a lot of flooding. And then, of course, in late April, May and June, there was, you know, a lot of severe weather coming with those storms systems as well. So it was good that we got the moisture here. But of course, that meant kind of navigating that planting season there and then dealing with some areas where we just had too much moisture.

But as we've come into the summer benefiting from that moisture, as I drive across parts of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, the crops in a lot of areas look very good. You can really see the benefit from a lot of moisture and a lot of heat this summer. It's really been a beneficial growing season, so we hope to see that continue here as we head through the rest of the growing season.

We certainly do, lots to watch when it comes to weather forecasting. Andrew Pritchard, Senior Meteorologist with Nutrien Ag Solutions, thanks for joining us this week. You can learn more online at NutrienAgSolutions.ca or visit them on YouTube for daily weather updates.