DAWN Dashboard: A Decision Support Tool for the Corn Belt

March 6, 2025

DAWN Dashboard: A Decision Support Tool for the Corn Belt

PART FIVE OF THE SERIES 'HOW DIGITAL IS AGRICULTURE IN NEBRASKA?'

By Guillermo Balboa - Nutrient Management and Digital Agriculture, Christopher Neale - Director of Research, Water for Food Global Institute

DAWN infographic

As digital agriculture continues to evolve, decision-support tools are becoming essential for farm management. In this latest digital ag series article, we explore an innovative, cost-free online toolkit designed to help Corn Belt farmers make informed water and nutrient management decisions by providing seasonal forecasts, crop progress tracking, and customizable insights to enhance farm efficiency and sustainability.

This is the fifth article of CropWatch's digital agriculture series (DA), “How Digital is Agriculture in Nebraska?” See the links below for more.  

Articles in this Series:

Our Nebraska Digital Ag Survey indicated that digital dashboards have been adopted by three out of 10 farmers. Digital dashboards are considered decision support tools that can guide farmers in the decision-making process in their operations with the goal of increasing efficiency, productivity and sustainability of their farms. Data-driven decisions are a key goal for digital agriculture. In this article, we are highlighting the Dashboard for Agricultural Water and Nutrient Management (DAWN), developed by a team of universities as part of a USDA NIFA grant. 

The DAWN Dashboard applies an innovative forecasting and risk analysis system to provide farmers and water managers across the Corn Belt with the most relevant and reliable information for farm-level decision-making. DAWN is an online toolkit for Corn Belt row crop producers that’s designed to support – and better inform – common water- and nutrient-management decisions. Driven by a state-of-the-art regional forecast system, DAWN empowers farmers to make decisions based on accurate seasonal forecasts rather than historical trends.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is involved in this project and contributes to the development of a new irrigation scheduling tool and with extension efforts to advocate for the use of the dashboard across Nebraska. 

DAWN dashboard screenshot
Figure 1. Landing page of the Dashboard for Agricultural Water and Nutrient Management Dashboard. 

Why Use DAWN?

  • Driven by global forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Corn Belt-specific Climate-Weather Research Forecasting (DAWN-CWRF) forecast model.
  • Seasonal forecasts (one- to six-month outlooks) for strategic planning decisions
  • Interactive and customizable.
  • All data is fully secure and confidential.
  • Cost-free, no ads.
DAWN tool results image
Figure 2. The Operations Tool allows one or more operations/farms across the Corn Belt. These locations will be saved in the account and the user will be able to select any of them to run the DAWN tools. 
DAWN tool results image
Figure 3. Example of the Data Viewer Tool showing the precipitation forecast for York, Nebraska using the DAWN (CWRF) forecast. The white dot within the bars shows the forecast monthly precipitation. The size of the bar shows the historical range. The colors show the probability of occurrence for different intervals. Visit the DAWN website for complete tutorials about each tool. 

Available Tools

  • Data viewer: Gives farmers predicted ranges and associated likelihoods for average monthly temperature and precipitation outlooks.
  • Growing Degree Tool: Gives farmers estimates for predicted maturity dates comparing to previous years based on your location, planting dates and relative maturity values.
  • Crop Progress Tool: Gives farmers predicted dates for important crop growth stages based on your location, planting dates and relative maturity values.
  • Dry Down Calculator: Predicts when your corn will reach a target grain moisture date based on starting moisture and observed maturity date (black layer, R6).
DAWN tool results graph
Figure 4. The crop progress tool showing key phenological stages for three planting dates and two maturity groups for Lincoln, Nebraska. Color bars show probabilities for each stage. Dotted line shows the prediction using normal (historical) weather data. 

Links to DAWN Dashboard and Training Materials

If you are interested in providing feedback or participating in our focus groups regarding these and upcoming Digital Agriculture tools, please send an email to Guillermo Balboa (Subject: DAWN testing).

Stay tuned for our sixth article in the series, focusing on Nebraska farmers' use of digital agriculture tools to manage nitrogen in corn fields across Nebraska.

DAWN is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture, grant number: 2020-68012-31674.

DAWN Project Members 

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References 

Liang, X.-Z., Gower, D., Kennedy, J.A., Kenney, M., Maddox, M.C., Gerst, M., Balboa, G., Becker, T., Cai, X., Elmore, R., Gao, W., He, Y., Liang, K., Lotton, S., Malayil, L., Matthews, M.L., Meadow, A.M., Neale, C.M.U., Newman, G., Sapkota, A.R., Shin, S., Straube, J., Sun, C., Wu, Y., Yang, Y., Zhang, X., 2024. DAWN: Dashboard for Agricultural Water Use and Nutrient Management—A Predictive Decision Support System to Improve Crop Production in a Changing Climate. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc. 105, E432–E441. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0221.1

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