The former Karoo girl who started an agricultural tech firm that has revolutionised access to weather station data
Dr Tara Southey founded and runs TerraClim, a South African agricultural tech firm that has revolutionised access to weather station and terrain data for the country’s farmers and winemakers.
The company launched its operations in Cape Town and initially focused on wine farms in the region. In an interview with Vinimark, she said the firm had big plans to expand nationwide and globally.
“TerraClim started trying to solve problems in the South African wine industry, one of them being climate change, and a big factor was inaccessibility to weather station and terrain data,” she said.
Southey explained that weather and terrain data were two fundamental inputs that drive every biological system.
“We realised more and more that it is needed in every agricultural commodity and sector,” she said. “We are spreading our wings into South Africa and, hopefully, globally in the next few years.”
Southey grew up on a sheep farm in Victoria West, in the Karoo region of the Northern Cape, known for its rich sheep-farming heritage.
Following her schooling, she enrolled to study viticulture and oenology at Stellenbosch University in 2004. She graduated three years later.
Viticulture and oenology both relate to winemaking, with viticulture focusing on grapevine cultivation and oenology on winemaking processes.
After completing her undergraduate degree, Southey started a Master’s degree in viticulture and oenology in 2008.
She told Hortgro that her fascination with the relationship between a crop and its environment led her to enrol in the Master’s course.
Her research focused on the effect of climate and soil water status on Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines in the Swartland region, with special reference to sugar loading and anthocyanin biosynthesis.
Southey completed her Master’s degree in 2010, after which she began working at Stellenbosch University as a technical support specialist.
In the role, she provided technical support to Dr Albert Strevers’ research by assisting with activities such as collecting data on irrigation and source-sink ratios from vineyards.
Lecturing and securing her PhD
Southey remained a technical support specialist until December 2011, when she moved up to the position of a junior lecturer, where she lectured undergraduate viticulture students until December 2013.
During this time, she became a PhD candidate at the university, with her research focusing on viticulture and climate change.
That helped Southey develop her proficiency in geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, open-source tools, and climate analysis.
She enrolled as a PhD candidate at Stellenbosch University in 2012 and received her doctorate in 2016. Between 2014 and late 2015, Southey worked as a junior researcher at the institution.
She focused on project management, research task management, and technical staff management in viticultural research.
Thereafter, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the university between January 2017 and December 2018.
She said her research focused on supporting long- and short-term decision-making in the South African wine industry.
In January 2019, Southey joined the Centre for Geographical Analysis, where she continues her research work.
“Southey’s current focus as a postdoctoral researcher is to better understand the unique climate dynamics in the Western Cape in the context of agricultural production,” her role description said.
“She is involved in building an integrated climate, GIS, remote-sensing, and grapevine database to provide farmers with decision-making tools in the context of climate change and market shifts.”
Launching TerraClim and helping the government
Southey launched TerraClim in January 2022 and serves as the company’s CEO. She explained the system’s benefits in her interview with Vinimark.
“We take weather station points, and we interpolate that, and we create hourly temperature services which we can then complement with remote sensing data,” she said.
“Instead of having one weather station on your farm, you now have a map of temperature on your farm. It correlates with the elevation, distance to the coast, slope aspect, and in some places, solar radiation.”
She said that TerraClim effectively created millions of small virtual weather stations on farms, providing a new temperature value roughly every 40 metres.
Southey explained that the data is better than satellite imagery because it was available every hour, and that hourly data could be aggregated to create temperature thresholds.
Southey’s firm partnered with the Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI) on the South African System of Systems for Agricultural Modernisation (SASSAM) initiative in early 2026.
The initiative, led by TerraClim, was launched in the Eastern Cape. Southey said it would introduce digital agricultural tools and integrated climate-smart technologies to 50 farms across the province.
“We are taking credible knowledge from the ARC, CSIR and government — as well as universities conducting research, field trials and development — and bringing it into a connected system,” she said.
She added that the project’s next phase would expand to include other technology partners and provinces.
“This is a foundational start. Our vision together is how we accelerate modernisation in agriculture in South Africa,” Southey said.
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