The grape harvester machine is an essential compound of the vineyard equipment. There has been a constant progress in the performance of mechanical harvesting, in terms of quality and respect of the berries. The three main manufacturers have constantly improved the picking head of their respective machines, but the main progress has come from the sorting systems they have implemented on board.
Multispectral imaging systems are widely used in remote sensing and applied to viticulture context for the canopy characterization. Until now, this technique was scarcely used in proximal sensing to characterize vine canopy. Yet the results of field tests led in fixed position have revealed its capacity to estimate the leaf area. The aim of this project is to assess the opportunity to use multispectral imaging system as an embedded sensor for vine canopy characterization.
Frost damage to grapevines is a threat in many wine grape production regions of the world. Improved information regarding frost temperature conditions will help farmers understand current conditions during frost risk nights and select the most appropriate strategies to avoid cold damage to their crops.
Winemaking is a dynamic process where microbiological and chemical effects may strongly diversify the products of the same vineyard and even between wine vats. This high variability causes an increase in work in terms of control and process management. As well as for Precision Viticulture, the winemaking process therefore requires a site-specific approach to optimize cellar practices and quality management, suggesting a new concept of winemaking, identified as Precision Enology.
Computer vision systems are powerful tools to assess canopy status, fruit grading, and yield in agriculture. This work shows the application of machine vision techniques for grapevine phenotyping under laboratory and field conditions. The first approach aimed at determining automatically the number of flowers per inflorescence using a low cost camera under field conditions.
In two recent papers Ducati et al. (2014a,b) reported results on the application of Remote Sensing techniques to vineyard studies. Reflectance data were extracted from satellite images of vineyards in two regions in France : Loire Valley and Burgundy. A Factorial Discriminant Analysis was applied on both data sets.
Yield estimation is an important task for any vine grower to organize logistical operations such as harvest, wine storing and also sell it on the market. Some researches as well as results from vine growers in the central zone of Chile have reported errors about 15 to 40% in yield estimation using classical field manual sampling.
The Directive 2009/128/EC on the sustainable use of the plant protection products in viticulture, has recently been fully implemented in Italy (February 12, 2014) with the requirements laid down by the National Action Plan (NAP). In this perspective, the sustainable use of plant protection products in vine protection, must increasingly conform to the best technologies in the vineyard aimed at reducing risk in respect of operators in the vineyard and the resident population, the preservation of the environment and beauty landscape and protection's request of the economically sustainable grape vine.
In the light of the need to practically improve the environmental performance in viticulture, the overall aim of the present work was to develop a monitoring and decision support system for stakeholders in the viti-vinicultural value chain. This was achieved by adopting a multi-disciplinary approach which included (1) management zone delineation, (2) deployment of sensing and telecommunication infrastructures, and (3) development of an information platform to incorporate and visualize data and assist grape-growers in decision making.
Non-destructive mapping of the leaf nitrogen index (NBI1) at bunch closure was carried out at the ‘Fattoria di Magliano’ winery (South Tuscany, Italy) on two consecutive years, 2013 and 2014, on Vermentino cv. using the Multiplex fluorescence optical sensor. Measurements were performed manually on a 1 ha vineyard using a 15m x 15m grid, detecting leaves with similar age of three adjacent vines on two contiguous rows.
In this study it was measured the gasoil consumption induced by the use of different machines designed to do the same job in the vineyard, but using different technologies. The aim was to identify the most economical way of accomplishing a mechanical task, but also to quantify the fuel savings we can expect with appropriate settings on the tractor and on the machine.
Geographical information systems (GIS) offer an important tool to support grape-growers’ decisions, allowing for visualization in an adequate geographical support of information on the behaviour of his vineyards. However, commercial GIS solutions are usually beyond the reach of the average grape-grower, both because of their cost and because of the training needed to master it.
Remote sensing has been widely used for some time in precision agriculture as well as in viticulture, in many parts of the world, including Europe. However, where small fragmented plots are used to cultivate grapevines, as commonly found in Switzerland and the UK, traditional remote sensing has not been used very often because of the scale problem.
Vine water stress significantly affects wine production. Dynamics of soil water availability during the growing season is a major component of grape quality and wine typicity. In the context of climate change, efficient management of vine water stress is mandatory to produce wines in accordance to market demand.
For grapevines, monitoring canopy architecture is important to assess growth, vigour and light transmission through the canopy to the developing buds and inflorescences, and fruit zone. These parameters, that reflect canopy development, can be correlated to yield, grape quality and productivity.