Precision viticulture coming to fruition
Mists, check. Mellow fruitfulness, check. Maturing sun, – eventually check! In the UK the 2021 growing season has been good but not exceptional. A late spring followed by a warm June and July gave way to a disappointing August with plenty of warm damp days to encourage the development of mildew. It has been fascinating to follow the 2021 Llanerch Precision Viticulture Pilot Study from bud-burst to final harvest. As followers of the study will know, we started in April with the installation of a SensIT microclimate weather station and then made the first BACO multispectral leaf measurements at the end of May. BACO leaf measurements continued approximately every two weeks until harvest was completed on 22nd October.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To Autumn by John Keates (1795-1821)
SensIT and BACO are two of the key components of the Xloora precision viticulture system. SensIT is an IoT (Internet Of Things) weather station measuring %RH, T, wind speed and direction, wet-leaf, rainfall, sunshine and air pressure. Hourly readings are uploaded to the Xloora cloud platform and used to predict the likelihood of disease development. BACO uses seven different wavelengths of light from deep blue to near infrared to take pictures of vine leaves. Ratios of these images can give measures of leaf pigments such as chlorophyll, carotene and anthocyanin. They can also give early indication of disease development, forewarning the farmer of problems before they are obvious to the human eye.
BACO also has GPS so that the locations of vine readings can be associated with blocks of different grape varieties. The web browser user interface shows individual measurements, alerts and reports over longer periods of time.
The grape harvest at Llanerch this year has been tremendous, a great crop achieved with few interventions to control disease. From reichensteiner to solaris, to seyval blanc, phoenix and even the old triomphe d’Alsace, vines have been heavy with bunches of grapes. A great collection of outputs from the vineyard. What about the Pilot Study?
Over the season there were more than 3,500 IoT data uploads and more than 28,000 microclimate records generated. Almost 300 multispectral sets of images were generated by BACO making more than 2,000 leaf images in total.
Detailed analysis of the data, reports and alerts has just started but some interesting results are already clear. At harvest just one block, the reichensteiner, had obvious signs of developing mildew on some of the vines. A time series of representative leaf images from the rows in question shows the progressive change:
It appears by visual inspection that the leaf ratio (normalised difference vegetation index, NDVI) images become much less uniform as the disease burden grows through the year. Finally mildew is evident to the human eye in late October.
SensIT microclimate data from the vineyard at Llanerch was compared with a feed from a commercial weather station in the area. While the temperature and relative humidity values were generally similar, there were notable deviations.
Comparison of both the temperature and Relative Humidity data from the same period in August reveals that the microclimate of the vineyard follows the general trend of the meteo reports but changes are much more pronounced. Presumably this is because the vineyard at Llanerch has an open aspect which warms and cools more quickly than the location of the meteo report sensors (which was not known precisely). Accurate data from the vineyard is likely to be crucial to the success of predicting the start and spread of diseases like downy and powdery mildew.
A more detailed analysis of the Xloora precision viticulture platform results will be carried out over the coming weeks in preparation for extending the trial next year.