PRECISION VITICULTURE : THE GROWING ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN VINEYARDS

Intelligent viticulture is all about using the latest advances in technology to provides growers with additional tools in farming their lands with more informed data and doing efficient tasks as growers that previously were unthought of. Using technology in farming has led to the term Precision Agriculture.

The global positioning system (GPS), electronic sensors and other new tools have moved farming even further into a technological wonderland. As amazing as today’s technologies are, they’re just the beginning. Self-driving machinery and flying robots able to automatically survey and treat crops will become commonplace on farms that practice what’s come to be called precision agriculture.

The ultimate purpose of all this high-tech gadgetry is optimization, from both an economic and an environmental standpoint. We only want to apply the optimal amount of any input (water, fertilizer, pesticide, fuel, labor) when and where it’s needed to efficiently produce high crop yields.Agricultural production has come so far in even the past couple decades that it’s hard to imagine what it will look like in a few more. But the pace of high-tech innovations in agriculture is only increasing. Don’t be surprised if, 10 years from now, you drive down a rural highway and see a very small helicopter flying over a field, stopping to descend into the crop, use robotic grippers to manipulate leaves, cameras and machine vision to look for insects, and then rise back above the crop canopy and head toward its next scouting location. All with nary a human being in sight.

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