 The Resilient Environmental and Agricultural Caribbean Habitat Reach project aims at assisting small farmers and their communities in managing and reducing the risks associated with the effects of climate change on the agriculture sector. Part of the project involves the installation of an automatic weather station to collect climatic data, facilitate research, and to assist with predictive measures for pests and diseases. Soil moisture sensors were also installed as a water conservation tool to facilitate precision irrigation as a means of improving the quality of crops that can be grown. National Coordinator for the Reach project, Felix Jarrier explains the weather station measures the number of parameters including wind run, rainfall, leaf wetness, and sunshine. So the aim is, for example, if we look at pest and disease, there is a predictive model that has been developed using the climatic data and could be made specific to the location you are. So based on the data collection, one can ascertain the prevalence of a particular pest and disease at a particular time of the year. So farmers can be proactive in the way they approach things. There's also a component where we want to collect the data so that we can make it available to farmers on a real-time basis so that they know what was the rainfall that fell last night. So they look at the cell phones and they can collect the data from the cell phones and ascertain what is the rainfall. Do I need to irrigate, for example, I don't need to irrigate because it was 5 millimetres of rainfall last night so there's no need to irrigate today. Mr Jarrier informs that the station was strategically placed at the Sarpa Lois Community College to also allow students to utilize the data collected. So it serves the college farm and so the students in their research projects can also make use of the data but it also serves the general community of the entire catchment of denry actually. Can the data is representative for the entire catchment so whatever data is collected here can be utilized across the the the catchment area and probably even beyond but for now we are targeting the catchment area and to use the data to predict for the the catchment area and we find that the college farm is ideal because there are a number of different crops being grown and there are a number of students who come around here so it's multifaceted in terms of its objective. As we collect data, students can learn how to utilize the the data as well as see the instruments and have a better appreciation for the instruments and the data that's been collected. The REACH project continues to work closely with the water resource management agency to increase the resilience of the agriculture sector in St Lucia. From the communications unit of the Department of Agriculture, I am Anicia Antoine reporting.