Revealing the Virtues of Precision Viticulture
As a pioneer of precision technology in the field of viticulture, Terry Bates hears it all the time from data-fearing growers, writes Thomas Skernivitz at Growing Produce.
“I have all of this information and all of these pretty maps sitting on my desk. I don’t know what to do with it.”
In the end, Bates tells growers exactly what they can do with that information to better manage vineyard crop load. But not before he dishes out some cool-looking spatial data of his own. Especially vivid these days are aerial images of one of the research blocks at the Cornell Lake Erie Research and Extension Laboratory (CLEREL), where Bates is the Director.
On May 27, the CLEREL team used variable-rate mechanical shoot thinning to alter the shoot density of select ‘Concord’ vines across the research block. In the process, they designed a visible letter “C” that covers 4 acres of the Portland, NY, property.
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“Instead of a crop circle, we wanted to make a big Cornell ‘C’ in the middle of the field,” Bates says.
Today, the now-harvested block serves as the bigger-than-life trademark of the Efficient Vineyard project that Bates conceived in 2011. The goal of the undertaking, which marked its first harvest in 2016, is to advance the use of precision viticulture in wine, juice, and table grape production across the U.S.
Continue reading at Growing Produce.
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