Intelligent Vineyards
The Internet of Vines
Monitoring of the whole vineyard system over entire seasons offers viticulturists and winemakers powerful insight into the health of their vines.
Viticulture is a complex agricultural practice that requires a complete understanding of the various factors that affect the growth of vines. Up till now the direct monitoring of the vines state has been incomplete because of the lack of commercial-scale technology to measure the plant’s biological responses to water stress, soil moisture, and micro-climatic factors.
Telofarm, an aggrotech software company, has invented a new technology based on semiconductor process to measure the vines sap flow rate with minimum invasiveness to the plant. The sap flow rate represents the plant’s response to its environment, like the blood pressure and heartbeat of a person. This signal is wirelessly collected with soil moisture, and weather data, and integrated into our digital data network and software. We call this comprehensive system the Internet of Plants (IoP).
Microprobe sap flow sensor installed in a grapevine trunk
Microprobe sap flow sensor installed in a grapevine branch
LoRa Gateway and Weather Station installed at a central location
Installation locations in one block
With the IoP system we can precisely monitor and manage the stress level of the vines within a determined window to achieve quality objectives, increase yields, and manage limited resources. It provides real time data directly to your phone tracking and archiving various events such as first rise of water, bud break, frost events, disease pressure (PMI INDEX), water and heat stress. Critical recommendations are provided like irrigation timing and amounts with real time feed back on their effectiveness. Other treatment protocols can be delivered to field managers to assist decision making for frost and heat protection, spray intervals, and picking and pruning dates. The IoP gives the manager an accurate vision of what is occurring in the vineyard reducing time consuming visits to collect and analyze data in the field.
In 2022 the IoP was installed into vineyards in Anderson Valley, California to demonstrate and fine tune its efficacy. We are now expanding our services to vineyards around the world and are collaborating with our partners to further develop and calibrate the IoP to achieve their specific management objectives.
