Name: Vineyards are using A.I. to battle climate change
Uploaded: 2022-08-23
Duration: 8 min 36 s
Description: Self-driving tractors, drones and mountains of data are changing the Gamble Family Vineyards' approach to farming.

Self-driving tractors, drones and mountains of data are changing the Gamble Family Vineyards' approach to farming.

Vineyards are using A.I. to battle climate change

Monarch's electric tractor in a Napa Valley vineyard.

Tech

Gamble Family Vineyards use A.I. to battle climate change

think of sustainability as a Venn diagram with three circles and you have to think about people, planet and profit. All three of those have to mesh together and harmony is found when you're right in the middle where the circles overlap, Technology benefits all three aspects. Uh technology is going to help maintain the bottom line, it's going to help advance the skills of the people who work for us and it's going to help the environment. I'm a third generation farmer and I farmed directly 200 acres and then my grandfather's legacy piece is leased out uh to a larger wine group. My family's been farming in Napa Valley since 1916. We make bordeaux based wines, sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon and a few variations on that theme. Our goal in the way we farm. Um at least that gamble is to farm. So you have flavorful grapes at lower sugars that result in lower alcohol wines and technology helps us fine tune that. I follow both my grandfather and my father and all those generations whatever was new and cutting edge they used and oftentimes that was more mechanical and now we are using ai to take it to another level as we strive to be ever more sustainable and organic and regenerative in the vineyards, it does mean more tractor work and one of our biggest carbon footprints is going to be trading diesel field tractors for battery and going electric. So monarch tractor is an all electric driver, optional smart tractor. The whole reason that we have done this class of a tractor is, this is the most commonly used tool by farmers around the world on the farmer and farming side, we have to address both sustainability as well as profitability, with that being the case. It was only in the last four That we saw all the technologies come together, the smart technologies, the camera technologies, the Ai were very impressed by the technology and how it's evolved since the first time I've seen it in 2019 and so we're going to be an early adopter. Climate change has made producing food very, very hard and wine happens to be one of the most sensitive crops or food grown worldwide. Wine is the single food crop which impacts today over 35 million families, which makes it the largest crop employer in the world. So any little change in temperature will make lives of 35 million people and more at risk. Anybody who's been in this industry For you know, 15, 20 years at this point has seen pretty dramatic changes in our climate as a whole, Germany is a great example. They had that catastrophic flooding in 2021 and it was just devastating, seeing the vineyards and the wineries that were just wiped out from those torrential storms. Southern France has also seen pretty catastrophic flooding and then Australia is really facing kind of similar problems to California, real lack of water and, and wildfires being very problematic. And so it's just really challenging wherever you go there, there is something that's been impacted by climate change, that something is different in a very severe way. I don't know if I'm worried about climate change, I am resigned to it and I'm not losing sleep over it. I'm thinking about what I can do about it. What the climate models are telling us is that the North coast wine grape growing regions are definitely gonna experience climate change, but it's not gonna be as bad as some other places because of our proximity to the bay and to the pacific ocean. Now, am I gonna hang my hat on that? No, I'm still going to look at soil health, how to improve it naturally and organically. I'm gonna look at how to conserve water every way I can and to plant my vines in more weather resistant fashion. What does essentially is factors the impact that changing climate is having on the crop and utilizes technology to help wine producers make decisions far more frequently in far more better fashion to be able to produce better. To review, helps us see a lot of plant health information, plant leaf water potential and other information in real time. And it also is a platform that can aggregate a lot of these other data collection points any existing infrastructure which is api driven, we integrate with so today in all of europe and most of the United States we integrate with most of the registration for sensors that our customers are using. The biggest impact that we have employed right now or our soil monitoring devices. And that data is fed into a transmitter which goes to our laptops. If you're looking at every day during critical phases, you can adjust any uh irrigation you're going to do and thus by doing so you can reduce your overall deficit irrigation during the rest of the year. Technology is is giving me a greater awareness of what's happening in the environment. If you understand your environment better, you can care for it better and you can respond to its needs better. Well in the past with vineyard planning and vineyard design, a lot of that was kind of you know, guess work. You know, you can obviously, you know, measure the terrain and the apology slope aspect and all that. But as far as what an actual vine count would be room for error would be much greater. Where now with this software you can pretty much know what your vines are going to be. So when you order you're gonna get a lot closer to what's going to be planted in the ground drone technology is something that we've been using to help us redevelop vineyards to get the most out of our land and assure the best row orientation as well. And we can check out our vine health, looking for disease and stress using infrared technology with water being scars and you know, going for, you know, accurate vineyard practices, accurate farming, accurate winemaking, I think you'd want your your uh geospatial strategy to be just as aligned as all your other steps in your process. You're really not thinking sustainably if you're not thinking about technology and how to wisely employ it and that starts with experimentation and then scaling it when you understand how it works, you know, the more technology we have around trying to be predictive of harvest dates and things like that is very, very helpful because it allows us to be more precise and win all these factors aligned new technologies and weather and weather forecasting and things like that. Really really helps inform our harvest decisions And so all of these things kind of put together really helps give us more data and more information to make good decisions off of when you have a family legacy of being on some of the same pieces of land for more than 100 years, you're there because you love the place and if you love something, you want to take care of it and you want to leave it in better shape than you found it for future generations. Just something innate lee that tells you it's the right thing to do