This was according to a report by Associated Press (AP), which explained that “new agricultural technology such as AI could help farmers cut back on waste, and run more efficient and sustainable vineyards”.
This was achieved through the monitoring of water usage “and helping to determine when and where to use products such as fertilisers or pest control”.
Farmers surveyed by AP reported that AI-backed tractors and irrigation systems could minimise water usage by analysing soil or vines. It could further helped farmers to manage hectares of vineyards by providing more accurate data on the health of a crop, or what a specific season’s yield would be, the report said.
Tom Gamble, a third-generation farmer in the region, was an early adopter of new technology.
“I don’t see anybody losing their job, because I think that a tractor operator’s skills are going to increase as a result [of AI], and maybe they’re overseeing a small fleet of these machines that are out there, and they’ll be compensated as a result of their increased skill level,” Gamble told AP.
Gamble bought an autonomous tractor and said he was planning to deploy its self-driving feature this coming spring. Currently he was using the tractor’s AI sensor to map out his vineyard. According to him, as the tractor “learns each row, it will know where to go once it is used autonomously”.
Referring to it as “precision farming”, Gamble explained that the AI within the operating system would then process the data collected and help him make better-informed decisions about the crops.
“It’s not going to completely replace the human element of putting your boot into the vineyard, and that’s one of my favourite things to do. But it’s going to be able to allow you to work more smartly, more intelligently and in the end, make better decisions under less fatigue,” he said.
At Redwood Empire Vineyard Management, automating irrigation valves in the vineyards that the company helps manage would send an alert in case of a leak, which would then automatically shut off if they notice an excessive water flow rate.
Tyler Klick, partner in the business, explained that these valves were starting to “learn typical water use”.
“It’ll learn how much water is used before the production starts to fall off,” he said.
Despite a lot of excitement about the use of AI in the wine industry, Angelo A. Camillo, a professor of wine business at Sonoma State University, pointed out that some smaller wine producers were more sceptical about their ability to use the technology.
He said small, family-owned operations, which represented about 80% of the wine industry in the US, were slowly disappearing.
“For small wineries, there’s a question mark, which is the investment. Then there’s the education. Who’s going to work with all of these AI applications? Where is the training?” he said.
Camillo further pointed to the potential challenges when it came to scalability. He explained that drones, for example, could be useful for smaller vineyards to target specific crops that had a problem with insect infestation.
“[But] it would be much harder to operate 100 drones in a 1 000-acre (about 405ha) vineyard while also employing the IT workers who understand the [technology].”
