Why aren’t farmers using precision viticulture frequently? A case study

Abstract

In the last years, viticulture precision tools have been made available for farmers for different crops. The feeling that these tools are mandatory on an agriculture of the future have been disseminated by commercial entities but also from policy makers. However, the amount of data and the difficulty by farmers to understand it, lead to avoidable expenses and frustration. Maybe driven by past video games, it’s expected that in the future all practices, decision and operations will be done by machines and farmers will only be watch. It’s true that these data could help analysing the plot and, in some case, could provide help on achieving better results, but most of the farmers don’t understand this information and the lack of extension services just brings more difficulty on the establishment of these tools. In addition, some of the models don’t consider different susceptibilities to grapevine varieties, soil type, training method or historical data. In all tools and models, a field validation should always be done to correct and set a better decision support system.

AVIPE is involved in AGRARIAN EU project where precision viticulture tools are tested for irrigation and yield estimation and where validation is crucial on achieving good results. Results have shown a problem on the model to understand grapevine varieties. Moreover, it was a clear a difficulty on relating satellite images and water status data collected by pressure chamber.