Viticulture

Fruit quality and/or yield are the two key drivers for decisions made by any viticulturist. Managing the grapes to produce the desired balance of quality and yield requires intensive management of many factors, with irrigation, canopy cover, sunlight, pest/disease control, and sugar content being some of the most important.

Any remote sensing tool for grape growers must therefore assist in achieving the desired balance of quality versus yield in one or more ways. For example:

• Providing information to aid key decisions, such as current canopy cover
• Saving time walking blocks to assess status
• Automatically alerting issues, such as plant stress or water leakage
• Delivering relative moisture maps across blocks or subsoil moisture maps

Our technology delivers all of the above, and more, and is used by small vineyards and major corporates alike, all of whom find the regular updates invaluable intelligence which drives key scouting and management decisions at the start of each day. Most services we provide are at 10m resolution, as this gives a staggeringly competitive price point combined with the widest set of insights possible, but we can process higher-resolution imagery on-demand. This option is generally more cost-effective than aircraft or drone services.

Our remotely sensed insights therefore allow grape growers to save time, save money and increase quality or yield. Less time scouting, more targeted applications, and intelligence which enables better decisions (e.g. our metric which indicates plant stress, or our metric which assists with beaumay estimation). We also appreciate that any solution must also be easy to order, convenient to use, timely and trustworthy. All have been designed with viticulturalists specifically to meet these needs, and extensively tested and proven by them before reaching market.

Examples of our work with grape growers and winemakers include improving irrigation management, finding water leaks, improving and evening grape quality, day-to-day management through the growing season, and monitoring subsoil moisture across blocks. For more details about our viticulture products and services, please get in touch.