Page 20 - Food & Drink Magazine April 2020

BEVERAGE BUSINESS
A collaboration between industry, research and government is creating a digital platform to ensure the Riverland wine region in South Australia remains internationally competitive. Kim Berry spoke to the executive chair of Riverland Wine Chris Byrne.
Harvesting technology for grape
THE warm climate wine producing Riverland region in South Australia runs 330 kilometres along the Murray River, east of the Barossa Valley. It is the largest wine producing region in Australia, home to 1000 wine grape growers with 20,600 hectares of vines.
Chris Byrne is the executive chair of Riverland Wine, the body representing winegrape growers and wineries in the region. Byrne told Food & Drink Business that the area was, “very very good at growing grapes and probably the best in the world at irrigating” but needed to become more competitive.
“We are very much a global trading business these days and in direct competition with the other southern hemisphere producing nations South Africa, Chile and Argentina. They have a significant competitive advantage over us in terms of their lower labour costs.
“The advantage we have is a much higher standard of living, which means higher labour costs, but we also we have much higher standards of education,
know-how, and capability.
“We took the view that for us
to become more competitive, we could and should undertake the necessary studies to increase competitiveness by reducing our cost of production. In other words, take out some of the costs we’re incurring which we don’t really need.”
The group approached the University of Adelaide, the idea being, the growers knew how to grow good grapes but wanted to see how technology could help them.
“We wanted to get into remote sensing and digital technology, and see where digital platforms, robotics and remote sensing devices could take costs out of production,” Byrne says.
The digital platform that resulted, VitiVisor, came from a $5 million digital technologies fund supporting on-farm decision making for winegrape production. The collaboration includes the University of Adelaide, Riverland Wine and Wine Australia, with support from UniSA and Primary
Industries and Regions SA. It brought together
researchers in viticulture, engineering, remote sensing, farm economics, water accounting, artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics, to work with grapegrowers and their deep knowledge of vineyard production and processes.
Byrne says: “We explained we were nowhere near utilising the digital platforms to the extent they are in other agricultural industries.”
Leading up to vintage, growers take maturitive samples several times a week for four to six weeks to determine the best time for harvesting. For Byrne, that is a simple example of where there could be potential to save costs.
“The questions was, is there technology available that could help us in the sampling and analysis that would remove some of those hours we spend in the vineyards.”
The initial focus for Riverland Wine has been on basic considerations like reducing
water usage, gaining greater understanding of the phenology of the grapevine as it moves through the growing season, soil moisture and nutrients.
BUILDING THE PLATFORM
VitiVisor will collect information direct from the vineyard via cameras and sensors and analyse the large amounts of data produced.
VitiVisor then assesses a vineyard’s performance and, in a first, offers coordinated advice on management practices for irrigation, pruning, fertiliser, fungicide and pesticide applications.
It can measure canopy growth, fruit production, sap flow and soil moisture. The information is displayed as a dashboard, giving growers a quick snapshot of what is happening in their vineyards. It is then a simple process to share information about vineyard performance with advisors.
“It means growers can track and predict how actions like the application of water, fertiliser and herbicides and
20 | Food&Drink business | April 2020 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au