My last post on precision viticulture sparked some interesting discussion in the comments. I thought it was great, and the opinions voiced are certainly indicative of the majority of the industry so I thought I’d highlight them here.
The first comment was by my friend Morgan, who is currently working on building his own new winery in Sonoma, and he suggested that boots on the ground provide enough information to make vineyard management decisions.
I am not convinced man. I can understand the possible need for something like this in a large vineyard with many swoops and swales (i am thinking of beringer’s huge vineyard on the sonoma side of the petaluma gap), but in a small vineyard aren’t most of the functions provided unnecessary and/or simply what a good vineyard person should be able to do and know?
Someone from La Gramiere, founded by a couple of American expats who just released their first vintage (congrats!), also chimed in and suggested essentially the same thing, just in a slightly less friendly way.
Josh, ever consider spending more time walking around your vineyards? 17 acres isn’t that much ground to cover. Human observation can be quite useful, much cheaper and it’s much more pleasant to spend your time in the vineyards than in front of your computer… Just a thought, from a simple grape farmer. I’ll admit I scrolled up to the top of the post to check the date, making sure it this wasn’t another April fools post. I guess we’re just in two different worlds.
Morgan and whomever commented from La Gramiere make a good point. PV can never replace actually being out in the vineyard looking, touching and tasting and I would never suggest that anyone try and manage their vineyard using remote sensing and GIS software to the exclusion of traditional farming. That would be ca-razy!
But I do think that augmenting your farming with some geo-referenced data collection can be of tremendous benefit to folks who already use conventional techniques and best practices.
It is interesting to note that even in Australia, the birthplace of PV, most grape farmers there think along the same lines as Morgan and La Gramiere as evidenced by this survey commissioned by the Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture. In the Executive Summary the authors note that
Despite the fact that all of the grape growers interviewed said that there was variability in grape yield and quality within their vineyards; few growers used PVT in planning the management of this variability. This is because most of the growers were satisfied with the way they were managing this variability using alternative techniques, and they saw little
advantage in managing their vineyards at more detailed level at this stage.
At this point I don’t think that anyone familiar with it doubts that PV is useful. It’s been shown to have a positive ROI by Bramley for instance. So while the reasons for the slow adoption vary, most of it has to do with the costs associated with data collection.
It’s pretty simple: if something costs a lot, even if it delivers great ROI, most folks are going to pass. Most people are risk averse - especially farmers. We specialize in trying to mitigate risks, not introduce new ones into our lives. My post was an attempt to address this high cost problem.
But if cost is no longer an issue ($4500 isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things) what’s the hang up? I suspect it is either A) Folks are happy with their current level of quality or B) Folks are uninformed about the value of PV.
I would argue that we should never stop trying to increase quality, so A doesn’t strike me as a particularly good rationale, especially in our ultra competitive industry. It has to explain part of the slow adoption rate though.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe folks really don’t know that PV can help improve grape quality, especially in vineyards with large variability (like ours). Fortunately that’s easily remedied with some reading and research, but it will take a little effort. And while that might not be quite as easy or fun as taking a stroll in the vineyard, few things worth doing are.
I’m on your side here, Josh.
Anything that allows me (not a farmer) to become a better farmer is a good thing when it comes to grapes. I love walking the vineyard and nuzzling the vines and stroking the buds and caressing the bunches but I don’t have x-ray eyes. Why not use a little technology if makes me a better steward of the land and, by extension, a better grower of grapes. Farmers don’t want risk; they get all the curveballs they can stand from nature. Time to put another ace up the sleeve I say. Can’t have enough friends in your corner.
If I have only 10 bills to pay each month (oh how I wish!) I can do this on paper with a simple register and do a good job. If I have 1000 bills to pay, perhaps bringing a little tech to bear would be a good idea.
Similarly, at 10 acres perhaps I can track my measurements and observations on paper, perhaps by row. AT 1000 acres WOW wouldn’t a GIS be helpful?
In each case there is a inflection point where higher tech is called for. But in all cases, the same effect can be achieved: a balanced account, an excellent vineyard.
And in all cases you have to actually pay attention to the accounts. And pay attention to the vineyard.
Bradley,
Thanks! Nice to have at least one guy in my corner.
Jefe,
I appreciate your point, but it oversimplifies a bit. Not all 10 acre vineyards are created equal.
Even a small 10 acre vineyard can quickly become too complicated for paper *if variation is high*. Now, granted a valley floor block with zero slope doesn’t pose that much of a problem, assuming that soil and water holding capacity are uniform.
But when you introduce changing slopes, multiple aspects and different soil types, gophers, virus pressure, fungus, nematodes and weather into the equation I defy anyone to capture the required information onto paper in anything close to an adequate way.
The only thing that can possibly tame the variation I’ve described is time and experience. And I’m thinking *a lot* of time, on the order of decades.
It sucks but I just don’t have the time wait. The baby’s hungry!
Plus I don’t think that conventional methods are anywhere near as accurate as an NDVI map, and research seems to bear this out. If I’m able to differentially manage even 2 tons of grapes from a lower quality tier into a higher quality one, the hassle and cost were more than worth it. And I think the return will be much more than 2 tons.
Not to mention that the sucker is portable so I can use it on strange new vineyards that I’ll /lease/contract out with in the future.
I know talk is cheap though, so I guess I’ll just have to try it to find out for sure. I’ll keep you posted.
Josh, your second to last mini-graph of the previous comment are interesting ones. I have been thinking about this and asking a few viticulturalists about their take on PV and it seems that many of them believe that when PV is used it is often used too late to make a large difference, or is necessary to make up for lack of forethought in vineyard layout. As we all know the costly replanting of high-vigour AXR rootstock (atleast high-vigour until its roots began to be munched on) allowed vineyard owners to replant using new and better rootstocks, clones, and trellising systems, and better adapting a vineyard to its site. That said, often times little is done to research a site effectively prior to planting. The “blocks” are placed down in a vineyard in their normal four sided shapes with little attention paid to soil and temperature difference. The result being that for the life of the vineyard one has to contend more and more with inner-block variation. And though good on the ground time and using such tools as PV aid in abetting inner-block fluctuation it still is a costly pain in the ass. So, if you ever get to do pre-planting contracts (which a lot of Pinot producers are doing these days) PV could really help out lay down the groundwork and make the next fifty years of vineyard maintenance a but easier.
Now, I realize that my earlier comments came across as more luddite than I intended. I, too, am of the feeling that whatever can aid in quality is worth it when one is able to sell grapes for the ultra-premium market. My point was just that many, many, wonderful wines have been made without it. That multiple generations and multiple hundreds of hours spent interracting with a piece of land can tell you as much as you need to know to make intensely enjoyable wine. And that, I believe, is all of our goals.
sorry for the grammatical deviance of the first sentence above. also, let me know when you are free to show me around up at your place.
PV enables you to understand the extent of variability in your vineyard and begin to discover the reasons behind that variability. Walking around your vineyard is necessary but by itself is not sufficient to understand what is going on and why.
Just one component of variability is yield. Within block yield variability is often 4 times or more (ie 2-8 tons). That has been the experience of Bramley in Australia and it was my experience in British Columbia. Knowing what the variability is, what is causing it, and how to manipulate those factors is incredibly important. It is important to quality, costs, and to revenues. People often throw away valuable grapes in the mistaken belief it will improve quality when it may make the quality worse. Or they do some other expensive change or procedure without knowing what is really going on .
It is important to note that quality parameters also vary widely across single blocks.
As far as expense goes, it is cheaper to do it now than it was when I first did it ten years ago. GPS units are much cheaper now and so is software. I used MapInfo and Vertical Mapper which at the time was about $3000. I don’t know what that software would cost now. I know that Manifold software now does far more for less than $400.
I didn’t use satellite images, only baseline air photos. We set up Sentinal Vines throughout the vineyard, geo-located them on the surface of the Earth and then collected information at each location. The data included soil data, slope, variety, clone, soil parameters including macro and micro-nutrients, etc. Then each year we collected growing year data such as pruning wt./meter of trellis, inter-node length, bunches per cane, berries per bunch, bunch wt., berry wt, petiole nutrient data (N, K, P, Cu, Mg, Mn, etc.), pH, T.A., brix, Tons/Acre, etc. The surfaces made from these data points show surprising relationships between various inputs, outputs, and data types. The facts, relationships, opportunities, and conclusions that appear out of the data are not, for the most part observable from walking through the vineyard. And even fewer are that way between vintages. There is simply far too much data for our minds to observe, know, manage, and correlate without using a GIS. It is simply impossible. From my experience without a GIS you couldn’t do it for more than a thousand plants (
Here is a very interesting link FYI.
http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/agric/acpa/people/james/Thesis/PhD_Taylor_2004.pdf