Mesh Protection
Trial meshes
Dr Dave Rankin, founder of Indigo
Systems and
inventor of the Indigo
mesh network environmental
monitoring system.
Indigo Systems has three vineyard trials underway in 2008, as well as one in a kiwifruit orchard in the Bay of Plenty. The largest trial is in a 350-hectare Marlborough vineyard, which is currently expanding to cover 400 hectares. There are 65 air temperature sensors linked to the same number of radio units mounted on posts at the fruiting wire height throughout the vineyard. The vineyard became involved after the owners met Dr Rankin at the Marlborough Wine Research Centre where he was collecting data for a scientific trial to measure the influence of climatic conditions on the variability of grape quality. The vineyard's owners had previously run their frost-monitoring system manually, taking their temperature sensors into the vineyard to look for cold spots. They would then record the temperature by hand and make a decision whether to turn the water sprinklers on or not, taking into consideration the availability of that water in the dry Marlborough climate.
"They would have to be conservative about that," says Dr Rankin. "One of the things they recognised quite early to their credit was that they wanted real-time data to react to. They have a large property and they wanted information across all of it."
At this time, their Marlborough property was only 200 hectares and employed seven staff on frost-event duty, which included monitoring the temperature, opening valves and turning on the pumps. Now with the property at 350 hectares and growing to 400 hectares, the owners have only three staff on this duty. They have pretty much doubled their area and halved their staff.
They were able to achieve this because the information is much better and collected in real time from all over the vineyard. This allows them to activate their frost control equipment using remote solenoids and gives them much better control over how much water they use in an area where water is restricted. It also means that they do not apply too much water and adversely affect the plant or fruit.
