Are you irrigating your Vineyard right?
By 2050, climate change is projected to change the world’s key wine-producing regions. The Bordeaux we know and love, the Shiraz we guzzle at the dinner table, and the Champagne we toast with will all become drinks of the past.
The drink of the future? The wine which is grown and fermented right here in India.
From the cascading hills of rural Karnataka to the fertile fields of Maharashtra, the booming business of Indian viticulture should not be underestimated.
Indian viticulture deserves a partner who understands the uniqueness of tropical grape growing. Fundamentally and operationally different from its Mediterranean counterparts, Indian vineyards require site-specific solutions that take into account the various microclimates across the country which influence crop growth.
We at Fasal have developed indigenous technology that is committed to minimizing farmers’ risks while maximizing their commercial promise.
Any viticulturist knows that growing wine grapes is a precision sport, with every drop of water, fertilizer, and pesticide changing the yield and quality of a harvest.
Irrigation, in specific, is fundamental to the vegetative and reproductive development of vines, affecting their physiological and biochemical functioning. The over-irrigation of grape crops affects their sugar content and berry growth, negatively impacting wine quality. It also encourages vegetative growth, inflating the risk of fungal diseases that have the potential to destroy an entire seasons’ harvest.
However, in the years to come, over-irrigation might not be the problem farmers face. As India heads towards a water crisis, grape crops will become increasingly exposed to issues related to water availability and salinity. The under-irrigation of grapevines can reduce berry cell division during early stages of growth while reducing berry growth at later stages. Maximizing water productivity and efficiency is a critical concern for farmers and for Fasal.
Viticulturists are particularly exposed to the threat of over and under-irrigation due to the widespread use of “regular deficit irrigation” in grape growing. Regular deficit irrigation is the purposeful under-irrigation of grapevines, employed by viticulturists to stimulate the growth of small, high-quality grapes with increased levels of flavonoid, sugar, and color. However, this practice is replete with problems. Deficit irrigation creates “dry zones” in the soil below a drip emitter, as the concentrated irrigation of a single site leads to the soil sealing. It is critical to understand the soil moisture levels from these zones to understand broader soil conditions. Without a continuous, spatially comprehensive monitoring of soil moisture and other parameters, viticulturists often over-irrigate their crops and compromise grape quality.
For a crop as volatile as grape, a very precise method of irrigation is not only needed but critical.
Fasal’s precision irrigation technology has the potential to revolutionize the way viticulturists monitor and manage their vineyards. Precision irrigation addresses the natural variability of soils and microclimates by offering time and location-specific recommendations for the management of vineyards.
Fasal’s technology turns irrigation into a science.
In response to the natural variability of viticulture, Fasal’s technology is built upon several stages of iterative learning. Every Fasal sensing hub is equipped with a soil moisture sensors amongst micro-climatic, macro-climatic and below the soil parameters. The soil moisture sensors monitor the changes in soil conditions, uploading the data to Fasal’s cloud platform.
Fasal’s cloud retroactively learns the specifics of each and every farm, including the type of soil present on each plot, how the soil behaves, the crop itself, the stage of the crop and its optimal irrigation requirement and threshold.
The collected data is analyzed, calculating water stress levels and field and crop water loss levels for the vineyard before being inputted into Fasal’s machine learning software. Fasal’s prediction engines combine the collected data and pre-learned knowledge with other climatic parameters, in order to forecast time and volume of irrigation required to reach ideal growth conditions. The processed data and recommendations are made continuously accessible to our clients on any device, notifying viticulturists if soil and moisture conditions change.
Fasal’s technology allows viticulturists to make data-driven decisions at any time, anywhere.
How successful is precision irrigation in reducing costs and increasing output? After a year of working with one of the largest wine producers in India, Fasal’s technology has been able to reduce their cost of irrigation management significantly and improve their control on quality many multi-folds. Our technology helps large and small farms alike, saving one small-scale grape grower 8.5 lakh liters of water per hectare in the last season. Cutting costs while reducing irrigation frequency by as much as 30%, Fasal is revolutionizing Indian viticulture, one vineyard at a time.
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