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.

For instance if you outsource or generate a NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) map yourself, you’ll be able to tell where vigor is high and where it is low with a high degree of precision throughout your vineyard.

In our case, where we find vigor is excessivly high we will continue to sell those grapes to Gloria Ferrer for their sparkling wine program. Where we find vigor to be moderate we can either manage it differently (leave cover crop in just those zones to reduce vigor, for instance) or keep it in the sparkling program. There are many other cool ways to use geo-referenced data collected throughout the year and most of it can aid in overall management, which results in higher quality.

Unfortunately PV is expensive. Very expensive.

To get started you need to get trained up on how to use costly and user-unfriendly GIS software (time and/or tuition costs), and you have to purchase a licence (anywhere from 4K – ~20K).

Once you have the skill and the software, you can access some of the freely available government data including satellite photos, Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), Soil info, and rainfall averages. But to do anything really useful (ie stuff that will actually help you manage your vineyard) you’ll need to cough up anywhere from another 10K to 20K for just one piece of “remote sensing” data (this could be a near infrared arial photo, soil measurements, terrain mapping, etc.). You will need several pieces, over a number of vintages, to really get a handle on things however.

So, for anywhere from 14K up to ~40K you can just start to get in the PV game.

Seeing these numbers you can appreciate why most grape farmers (and virtually all small vineyard owners) look at you like you’re daft when you ask them if they use PV. And I haven’t even mentioned the cost of a nice GPS unit with differential correction and sub-meter precision so that you can collect your own geo-referenced pressure bomb, harvest, and grape chemistry data. That will run you anywhere from $800 to $5000, plus monthly or yearly subscription fees for the GPS signal.

Finally, with all this high resolution spatial data, you’ll probably want to be able to correlate it with high resolution temperature, relative humidity, wind and rain measurements. So that means you’ll want a weather station and data logger instaled at your vineyard. More cash.

What’s a small vineyard owner with a budget and a hankering for PV to do?

Well, I’ve had a long look around and I’ve been able to figure out a way to get most of the benefits of PV, including the ability to generate remote sensing data on my own, multiple times a season if I want to, at an affordable price point. Here’s what I ended up borrowing and/or purchasing to get us set up:

Training/PV Information:

• The best training available for PV is via UC Davis extension. Josh Viers teaches two classes, Fundamentals of GIS for Vineyard Management and Intermediate GIS for Vineyard Management. Both are full 8 hour classes and are now offered on back to back days for total immersion. Highly recommended.
• Precision Viticulture, by Proffitt, Bramley, Lamb and Winter. I’ve only been able to find this for sale through the UC Davis bookstore, which seems to be down right now or I’d prvide a direct link. When it comes back up again, the main bookstore URL is http://bookstore.ucdavis.edu.
• CSIRO has an extensive list of Rob Bramley’s research and PV white papers and brochures. A fantastic free resource, though focused entirely on Australian Viticulture.
• Article on Precision Viticulture by the Carl Sagan of the wine industry, Jamie Goode.
• Generic GIS Tutorials

Software:

• Arc Info – This is the Cadillac of GIS software, and its price reflects that status: somewhere near 20K. Luckily I was able to find a friend who will allow me to work on his computer to analyze our data and generate maps. Cost: $0
• If you aren’t so lucky you can get most of the PV based functionality of Arc Info by buying Arc View and the Spatial Analysis Extension. Together they will set you back $4000.
• There are demos available directly from ESRI that are time crippled so that you can try them out. I’ve also found that you can get ArcView with a free 6 month licence if you buy a book like this one that ships with it.
• There are other cheaper GIS packages as well that I chose not to go with. GRASS is a free open source GIS. Training and tutorials on how to use it are limited however, which is why I passed on GRASS. Manifold is also available for $245. Also, though I don’t recommend it, there are probably copies of Arc View foating around on the various torrent sites.

Remote Sensing:

This is where you can really save some cash. Instead of purchasing an expensive (10K plus) one time arial photo for a small 17 acre vineyard, we purchased a Near Infrared scanner from Ntech for just over 3K.

The RT100 comes in a couple different flavors, with or without a PDA.

I recommend buying without a PDA and saving a couple hundred dollars by grabbing one off of ebay. The model the RT100 was designed for, the iPAQ 2200, is 3 years old at this point and can be purchased used for around $100.

The beauty of the RT100 is that it straps on to your vineyard ATV (or you can hand hold it) and measures the vigor of the vine canopy from the side instead of above. For VSP trained vines like ours this is an huge improvement over arial and satelite solutions, and it comes at a much, much lower cost.

Even better I can run the thing through the vineyard multiple times per season, as well as compare many seasons of data, all for a price that is less than a third of just one arial photo. Highly recommended.

GPS

More great savings can be found on ebay. There isn’t a high demand for Agricutural grade GPS on ebay so prices are pretty low. I was able to pick up a Raven Invicta 115 for $655, and I recently saw a used high end Trimble AgGPS 332 go for half price (~$1500).

The Raven didn’t come with a cable, which I’ll have to purchase for around $65 bucks, but it is still a deal at about 40% off retail.

So all told, including some extras (ATV and GPS mounts, PDA software so that the GPS can talk to the RT100) the total came to around $4500. Still not cheap, but with the built in seasonal flexibility of the RT100 and the overall descriptive power that PV will offer in managing Rebecca’s Vineyard, I think it’s a solid investment that should repay us in quality grapes for years to come.

If you’ve had any experience with some other (relatively) inexpensive PV tools please let me know in the comments.