Most activities related to healthy crops and good yields depend on timely availability of weather and soil data. Therefore, wireless weather stations play a major role in disease prevention and precision irrigation. These stations transmit parameters necessary for decision-making to a base station: air temperature and relative humidity, precipitation and leaf wetness (for disease prediction models), solar radiation and wind speed (to calculate evapotranspiration), water deficit stress (WDS) leaf sensors and soil moisture (crucial to irrigation decisions).

Because local micro-climates can vary significantly, such data needs to come from within the crop. Monitoring stations usually transmit data back by terrestrial radio, although occasionally satellite systems are used. Solar power is often employed to make the station independent of the power grid.