Free · no account · your language

When should you water, and how much?

Tell it your village, what you are growing and when you planted it. It fetches today’s weather forecast for that exact spot and works out the day watering falls due and roughly how much to give.

You can read the answer, or have it read aloud to you, in Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam or English. Fourteen crops, anywhere.

Try it on your own field
Grape vines trained on overhead pandal trellises in the Cumbum valley, Theni district

The tool

Work out when to water

No account needed. Nothing is saved.

  1. Place
    GeoNames
  2. Weather
    Open-Meteo (ECMWF, ERA5)
  3. Crop
    FAO Paper 56
  4. Soil
    SoilGrids · FAO 56
  5. Water plan
    FAO-56 water balance
Where is your land?

Where is your land?

What are you growing?

What are you growing?

For grapes and other vines, the date you last pruned.

What is your soil like?

What is your soil like?

Wet a handful, squeeze it, and roll it between your fingers. Pick whichever description matches. If you are not sure, leave it as it is.

How do you water it?

How do you water it?

days apart

Optional. If you tell us, we will say whether the crop agrees with you.

Optional. Used only to turn the depth into a number of litres.

Choose a place first.

What this is

A research prototype, offered openly

Please read this before you act on anything here

Nothing here has been tested on a real farm yet. The method is a published and widely used one, but it works from typical soil values rather than a test of your own field, and the amount of water it suggests depends directly on those values. Treat every answer as a reason to go and feel the soil yourself, and check with your agriculture officer before spending money on it.

It works for any farmer

Not only for grapes, and not only for one valley. Fourteen crops, any location on earth, from rice in the Thanjavur delta to sugarcane near Coimbatore. The Cumbum valley is the place we study closely, not the limit of what this does.

The weather is live

Every answer is worked out the moment you press the button, from a sixteen-day forecast fetched for your coordinates right then. Nothing is pre-computed and nothing is stored.

It tells you what it does not know

Every answer carries its own assumptions underneath it. A confident forecast that turns out wrong costs a farmer real money, so this one says where it is guessing.

A farmer standing in a field, looking at a mobile phone

How it works

From your field to a watering day

  1. 1

    Your place

    Search your village or town. The weather is fetched for that exact spot.

  2. 2

    The forecast

    Rain and sunshine for the last two weeks and the next sixteen days.

  3. 3

    Crop and soil

    Your crop, planting date and soil decide how fast the soil dries.

  4. 4

    Water on this day

    The day watering falls due, and how much to give.

See where the numbers come from and how they were checked

This research is carried out by MM Rooted Ventures, Theni and Bengaluru. Contact us. Want to help build this? Join the team.