Every wine enthusiast has different preferences, behaviors, and levels of investment in their pursuit of great wine. A few years ago, Wine Intelligence identified six distinct consumer segments in the US market and we wondered “how can we tailor a message of sustainability to align with these differences?”

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

In this Throwback Thursday Marketing Tip, we’re revisiting the six wine consumer segments and giving you tips on how to most effectively share your sustainable story with each one.
 

1. Engaged Explorers

Who are they: Young, adventurist, frequent wine drinkers who love to try wines from different regions and producers.

Talk SIP: Tell them how you improve your soil quality and how the health of your land influences the characteristics of your wine. They’ll love learning how nature impacts a high-quality wine.
 

2. Premium Brand Suburban

Who are they: Mid- to older-aged enthusiasts who know a lot about wine. They may not be big spenders, but they can be die-hard loyalists.

Talk SIP: Get technical! Talk about how fruit quality is measured (Brix, pH, and TA). They’ll love the insight and attention to detail.
 

3. Contended Treaters

Who are they: Mid- to older-aged drinkers who don’t drink often, but when they do, they are willing to spend more. They are knowledgeable and involved, and look for an engaging story to relay to their social circles.

Talk SIP: Give them fun sustainable tidbits to share with their friends, like a specific sustainable practice from your sustainable story worksheet.

Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling
 

4. Social Newbies

Who are they: Young, new to wine, and rely heavily upon recommendations and valued information.

Talk SIP: Stick to the 3 P’s of sustainability: People, Planet, Prosperity. They’ll love this 360° approach and be able to pass it along with confidence.
 

5. Senior Bargain Hunters

Who are they: The largest segment of wine drinkers in USA. They have strong wine knowledge and tend to select from a narrow range of styles and brands to meet their expectations on value.

Talk SIP: Talk value-driven sustainable initiatives like monitoring utility usage and recycling programs.

 

6. Kitchen Casuals

Who are they: Very infrequent wine drinkers who stay close to what they know.

Talk SIP: Stick to the basics of what sustainability is and how drinking sustainable wine is a win for the people and the planet.

We are here to help you tell your customers how your brand protects natural and human resources with the Sustainable Story program.

This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. And it just got better with a new online course.  Go to the show notes, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story to sign up, and start writing your Sustainable Story today!    

Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

Resources:

• *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course ***
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• ReSIProcal February
• Sustainable Story | Print
• Sustainable Story | Electronic
• What's your Sustainable Story?
• Whitney Brownie | Get YOUR Sustainable Story Featured

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Intelligent or sensor-controlled sprayers have the potential to improve pesticides application efficiency, reduce labor, and lessen waste. Brent Warneke, Senior Faculty Research Assistant in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University is testing LiDAR sensors that can sense a plant and adjust the amount of spray based on the coverage area needed. Brent also addresses the best time to use biologicals based on disease pressure, the benefits of drones in farming, and simple ways to improve spray efficiency with an air blast sprayer.

Resources:        

• REGISTER: April 12, 2024 | Tailgate | Fungicide Spraying: Reduce Your Carbon Footprint & Financial Burden
• 2: The Goldilocks Principle & Powdery Mildew Management
• 79: Grapevine Fungal Diseases
• 117: Grapevine Mildew Control with UV Light
• Airblast 101
• Brent Warneke Google Scholar
• Brent Warneke LinkedIn
• How to Do Regular Maintenance on Air Blast Sprayers to Ensure Proper Care for Specialty Crops
• Oregon State Fruit and Ornamental Disease Management Testing Program
• Oregon State University Nackley Lab
• Pesticide Redistribution and Its Implications on Pesticide Efficacy
• Sensor Sprayers for Specialty Crop Production

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

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Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.  

Transcript

Craig Macmillan  0:00 

Our guest today is Brent Warneke. He is senior faculty research assistant in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University. And today we're going to talk about some really cool stuff and agricultural technology. Thanks for being on the podcast, Brent.

 

Brent Warneke  0:11 

Hey, thanks for having me.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:12 

I saw you speak at the 2023 Sustainable Ag Expo in San Luis Obispo. And I was very inspired by your talk, I thought things that you were doing were really interesting. And I thought your message is really, really great, what kinds of things you've been working on.

 

Brent Warneke  0:25 

I've been in this position at Oregon State University for the last five years. And we really started with investigating this sprayer, which we'll get into called the intelligent sprayer, and how it has potential to increase efficiency in terms of pesticide applications, from everything from labor to spray volume to pesticide quantity, and waste. And that's something that we've covered and in a lot of different ways that we'll go into here.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:55 

And so, you know, obviously, this is a viticulture oriented show, but you've done this in other crops as well.

 

Brent Warneke  1:01 

Yes. So I work with specialty crops in general, the kind of main categories that I focus on are wine, grapes, blueberries and nursery crops.

 

Craig Macmillan  1:11 

Cool. What is an intelligent sprayer? Let's start there. What is it? What's it composed of? How does it work? What are the benefits?

 

Brent Warneke  1:19 

Yeah, so the intelligent sprayer is one of a group of sprayers that I termed sensor controlled sprayers. These are sprayers that have sensors mounted on the sprayer, and they're able to sense objects in our in our case plants, and adjust the amount of spray they're applying based on those, what they're seeing. And the intelligent sprayer is is a kind of more advanced sprayer that uses a LIDAR sensor, which is a laser sensor, that's able to scan the plant canopy with millimeter resolution, and adjust is it spray very finely based on the canopy density that it detects.

 

Craig Macmillan  1:59 

Tell me more about the sensing aspect of it. So LiDAR, if I remember correctly, it's the same concept as radar. Only light is the key, the laser, the laser goes out and bounces back. Is that right?

 

Brent Warneke  2:12 

Yep, so a lot of these sensors use what's called time of flight. So they'll emit a beam of light. So in the case of a LiDAR sensor, it's a laser beam. And then it detects the amount of time it takes for that beam to hit off of the object and come back to the sensor. And what's cool about this LiDAR sensor is it scans a 270 degree field of view, it's able to scan basically almost through, you know, fully around the sensor itself. And out up to about 100 feet is the maximum that it can see. But you're able to set the various widths and areas that you want the sensor to focus on, for doing your precision spraying.

 

Craig Macmillan  2:55 

Is that 270 degrees? Is that vertical or horizontal? I mean, is it scanning up to capture canopy? Or is it going side to side to make a map, how's it work?

 

Brent Warneke  3:02 

if 270 degrees would be kind of three quarters of a circle, and the blind spot of the sensor would be kind of pointed at the ground. So if you can picture an arc going kind of from each side of the sprayer up and around, so it can see vertically above and also horizontally out up to about 100 feet from the sensor.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:25 

It's reading a plane?

 

Brent Warneke  3:26 

Yes it is.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:27 

And then it's telling the computer, there's something there, there's something not there. And then the computer adjusts how much spray or is not coming out of the nozzle then?

 

Brent Warneke  3:35 

Correct. So this sensor itself is a two dimensional sensor. So it scans that plane, That's 270 degrees field of view. But then as the sprayer moves through the field, it kind of creates that, that third dimension, and it's able to construct 3d representations of the canopy. And then that's what it uses to adjust the spray volume in real time.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:59 

How is that controlled, there must be some valves and involved in the third thing.

 

Brent Warneke  4:03 

Yeah, kind of where the the eyes meet the the actual controllers of the system are individual solenoid valves at each nozzle. And you can actually set the field of view or the area that each of those nozzles will focus on. You can actually tell each nozzles to only focus on a certain width of the canopy that has some a lot of different capabilities even besides what I just mentioned, there's other settings that you can use to make sure that you're kind of only targeting what you want to target.

 

Craig Macmillan  4:38 

Oh, okay, so does that mean that as I go along, it'll say okay, there's something above but there's nothing below so I'm gonna open the valves above not open the valves below. Or the opposite say, hey, there's less above than there is below. I'm gonna change my rate based on that so it can do it both directions and everything as you're going along.

 

Brent Warneke  4:55 

Yeah, exactly. A common thing is there's weeds that are below or the vines and we don't want to spray those, they're not relevant to us. So we can tell the sprayer to not regard anything that's 18 inches and below, or you can tell it to only focus on, you know, the actual grape canopy itself. So there's different settings and within the system itself, you can make different configurations for different crops or different size canopies, depending on what you're working with.

 

Craig Macmillan  5:26 

So something I was thinking about, as I was preparing for this interview, we've I've done a number of interviews recently around things like hyperspectral, imaging, and also just regular light. So this is a little bit different, because those things are based on color, or based on certain reflectances. This is just based on the physical presence of a leaf or shoot or branch or something like that. So it doesn't matter what color it is?

 

Brent Warneke  5:49 

It does not so this technology actually does not sense any colors. I mean, there is potential for that. But it just says his presence or absence. So it sprays you know, if there's a post there, or something in the canopy that's not green material, it'll spray that because it'll it'll detect that it's there

 

Craig Macmillan  6:07 

wouldn't be advantages to using this kind of technology?

 

Brent Warneke  6:11 

The advantages of these sensor controlled sprayers kind of form a cascade. So because you're using the sensors to detect canopy they apply usually lower volume than a standard air blast sprayer. And an air blast sprayer is kind of the the general comparison we always use. That's the most widely used sprayer type. What's the work? Yes, it's been the classic workhorse for, you know, 80 years. Yeah, for a long time. Yep, yeah, implementing these sensors, you start saving volume, and then that leads to fewer fill ups of the sprayer, which then leads to less labor, because you're in the field for less time, and then also less diesel, then you're also releasing less pesticide into the environment, and using less pesticides. So there's less pesticide waste as well. So there's kind of a suite of benefits that come with using these more precise sprayers.

 

Craig Macmillan  7:09 

And that was the next thing I wanted to talk about. So in my experience, when you're working with fungicides, in particular, it's all about coverage, coverage, coverage, right? It's all about coverage. When I use a lower volume, I am perhaps reducing the coverage that I'm gonna get. That's always been kind of the mindset, for me, at least, you know, my understanding, how does this technology overcome that issue? I mean, are we getting good coverage with this kind of technology, and then I want to talk more about the reduction in pesticide as a result.

 

Brent Warneke  7:38 

So that's actually a great segue, I can talk about some of the work we've done using both micronized sulfur and and also biological fungicides. So we first got this system back in 2018. And we took it as an out of the box sprayer, we're gonna see what it can do. That was our approach. And we chose micronized sulfur as our product to really investigate it with because it's a contact fungicide that you need really good coverage with in order to get good disease control on powdery mildew, which is the disease we mostly focus on. So yeah, we took it with it's out of the box sprayer settings, and micronized sulfur, and out in the field, it didn't perform as well as we were hoping it would, with a standard five pounds per 100 gallons sulfur mix rate, we took that and we decided to make some adjustments to how we use the sprayer. So we kind of tested two different things, we upped the concentration of sulfur in the tank, and then we also increased what's called the spray rate in the sprayer, which is where the sprayer will apply more spray per unit canopy. So per canopy density unit than the original lower setting. And we were able to get control that was controlled powdery mildew that was comparable to our standard airblast sprayer. So those were two adjustments that we were able to make to get to get good control. And along with that we've done coverage studies as well. And volume is related to coverage amounts. So with higher volume, you will get better coverage, you can get to the point of oversaturation, then you're not really providing any benefit. That's more of a waste situation, you may you know, you probably will still be getting good good disease control, but then you're also probably wasting materials. Well, we found that with adjusting the various settings we could get also get comparable coverage to a standard sprayer.

 

Craig Macmillan  9:39 

How hard is it to calibrate this kind of technology?

 

Brent Warneke  9:42 

You know, these these technologies these sensors sprayers I mean they're they're just sprayers like any other air blast sprayer. I like to work backwards when I'm thinking about calibration. So that really is how well is it actually covering the leaves. Using water sensitive papers is a great way to About this, you can get them from many agricultural suppliers, and just bring them out into the field. And it takes, you know, it'll take a half day or you know, it'll take a little bit of time to really dive into adjusting your sprayer. But using those cards, adjusting the air volume, adjusting the spray volume to match the canopy really has lots of benefits, in terms of streamlining spray efficiency.

 

Craig Macmillan  10:27 

You talked about increasing the concentration in this particular study we started with said five pounds per 100 gallon, I think, was the ultimate outcome in terms of what the concentration was.

 

Brent Warneke  10:37 

We jumped up to 20 pounds for 100 gallons, so four times the amount. Oh, wow, that's not to say that a lower concentration wouldn't still have efficacy. But we just jumped up there just to see how well that higher volume would work. And using the lower per unit canopy settings with at higher volume yielded similar control to our standard sprayer. So we may have been having a hotter spray mix. But then we applied, you know, quite a bit less volume. So there is a trade off there. You know, maybe with some products like sulfur, you know, there's potential to maybe not be saving as much spray pesticide material. As you know, one one would hope based on that the trade offs. But we've also done work with some trials with synthetic fungicides. And those, even with the reduced rates and kind of mixed at a standard rate, they still performed quite well. And there's been lots of other studies across the US with this intelligent, prayer technology that have found great disease control with synthetic products at those lower use rates.

 

Craig Macmillan  11:49 

You mentioned biologicals. First of all, why the interest in biologicals and then secondly, what did you find out?

 

Brent Warneke  11:54 

We've really zeroed in on biologicals over the last three years, we kind of started with sulfur and looked at that for three years. And then we transitioned over to biologicals. And mostly because there is such an interest among growers and using them. I mean, they have a lot of, yeah, they have a lot of benefits. I mean, they're typically organic, they typically have short reentry and pre harvest intervals. And there's a ton of different development that's going on in the field and new products coming out all the time. Yeah, there's a lot of interest out there. So that's kind of why we started looking into them more, just to kind of quickly go over what we found, we definitely found that some products, there's a bit of a rate response, like if you apply more of them, you might get some better control. And then other ones, we found that that's not actually as much of a thing where those lower application rates can still have fairly comparable control to the higher application rates. And then we've also found some found that some products don't don't work very well, as well. So it just kind of depends. Another kind of overarching caveat is that the disease control that you can expect is definitely dependent on the disease pressure that's present. So these products are these biological products really need to be applied preventatively. And if there's a lot of disease pressure, a lot of disease in the field, they're not going to reverse that, like, you know, many fungicides will not and these, these are the same. So that's that's kind of another caveat.

 

Craig Macmillan  13:25 

Right. What kind of reductions are we talking about? Like in terms of the sulfur work? You know, I think a standard application might be anywhere from two to five pounds per acre, biologicals, we're talking ounces per acre, or whatever liquid, what kind of reductions Did you see between your comparisons between the normal sprayer and the LiDAR controlled sprayer?

 

Brent Warneke  13:45 

So this is a it is a true variable rate sprayer. So when there's less canopy, it applies less material, and then when there's more canopy, it applies more material. So looking at a graph of how it applies spray over the course of a season, it starts out really low, so at approximately 10 to 20 gallons per acre, and then it'll slowly increase up until the canopy is full. And that can be 40 to 50 pounds gallons per acre, depending on the settings. In general, we saw it we see approximately 70 to 90% SPRAY savings in those first applications of the season. And then as the canopy fills and the maximum canopy is achieved, it's more like 30% Spray savings.

 

Craig Macmillan  14:36 

Ah, that's that's a lot.

 

Brent Warneke  14:37 

Yeah, plus or minus depending on those those settings.

 

Craig Macmillan  14:41 

What does that translate into in terms of like pounds of sulfur per acre?

 

Brent Warneke  14:44 

That all depends on your mix rate and your application volume per acre. We saw with those lower application rates that were the default when we first got it. We were applying approximately one ish pound at the beginning of the season up to to about two and a half pounds at the end of the season, with that lower use rate and five pounds per 100 gallons, whereas in Standard Mode, it was applying about five and a half pounds of sulfur per acre. And with that higher spray rate that we tested, it still started the season at approximately one and a half pounds, but then increased up to around four pounds per acre. Yeah, and that was the setting where we adjusted the spray rate and were able to get good control of mildew.

 

Craig Macmillan  15:30 

So if I was using a synthetic fungicide with this technology, that could be a major cost savings. Some of these fungicides are pretty expensive.

 

Brent Warneke  15:38 

Absolutely. What we found with the synthetic fungicides is even mixing them at kind of your standard rate. And using this technology, which applies a lower volume, we still got great disease control comparable to a standard application. In terms of spray volume savings with synthetics, there's greater potential to save on volume and wastage than with contact pesticides, which need higher volumes higher coverage to be efficacious.

 

Craig Macmillan  16:06 

Now, you said you started with an with an out of the box sprayer. So when you started this, it was a machine - a whole sprayer that you got. That was all constructed. Is that right?

 

Brent Warneke  16:22 

What I had meant to insinuate by that was it was a sprayer that we just took and used as it was, we actually started this project, kind of midway into its usage. So some folks back at Ohio State University and the USDA ARS over there, design the sprayer and kind of developed a concept model for it and prove that it worked pretty well. And then the next step of the project was to take that control system that they developed and retrofitted onto existing sprayers. And then that's where we came in. So we got just a standard 50 gallon air blast sprayer, and had this sensor system retrofitted onto the sprayer and use that system in our tests.

 

Craig Macmillan  17:10 

How difficult was that?

 

Brent Warneke  17:12 

So the retrofitting itself is not too difficult. So we have two of the systems in our research program. And one of them uses a research version of the system. The other one uses a commercial version of the system because it has since been commercialized. And when we got the commercial system installed, it only took about two hours, maybe two or three hours to get installed, and then also calibrated on to our crop that we were focusing on. So pretty quick. And the company has, you know, representatives and stuff throughout the West, and across the country. So they're able to come out and provide customer support for that.

 

Craig Macmillan  17:51 

So if I'm a grower, I don't need to have a master's degree in Ag Engineering to implement this kind of an idea. This is something that I can I can take and I can do myself.

 

Brent Warneke  18:04 

Yep, yeah, the technology is there. And there is support. And it can be run by any knowledgeable pesticide applicator one, one note, all I will say about these sensor systems is it's good to have someone who wants to use them and to take an interest in them. Because they do have more caveats than your standard sprayer would. And if you don't really put the time and really learn to use the system. You won't be able to realize its benefits as much as you potentially could.

 

Craig Macmillan  18:40 

Yeah, so like anything else you have to there's a learning curve, but this one doesn't seem like it's too steep.

 

Brent Warneke  18:43 

Yep, it's a tool. And it takes some practice, but it can give you some good benefits.

 

Craig Macmillan  18:49 

Are there other ag technologies out there that you're excited about?

 

Brent Warneke  18:53 

You mentioned remote sensing earlier, that's a technology that I'm very interested in in terms of being able to detect changes in plant canopies and use that as a way to detect what's going on in the field. I'm also interested in drones both as a way to collect some of that remote sensing data. But then also in terms of spraying. Yeah, there's there's just been an explosion in drone spraying technology. It's constantly evolving. So that's something that I would like to do some more research on is looking at how good is are these drones for spraying in specialty crops such as wine grapes, what can we do to use them in that capacity to actually get good disease control good coverage and get some good returns.

 

Craig Macmillan  19:45 

I remember a while back seeing it was a remote controlled helicopter that was set up to be a sprayer for wine grapes. Are you familiar with that technology for me when we're talking about.

 

Brent Warneke  19:57 

Yeah, I think those are maybe the yeah Mahara Maxi are mentioning, it looks like a little helicopter. And they've done tests with them, I think up in Napa and that area

 

Craig Macmillan  20:08 

Is it the same concept?

 

Brent Warneke  20:09 

It's the same concept. Most of the drones I'm referring to are kind of more the quadcopter, with the four different rotors on the top kind of your, your classical drone shape. Just larger. I mean, these things have wingspans of close to 10 feet.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:28 

Oh, wow.

 

Brent Warneke  20:29 

And they, some of them can have eight gallon tanks on them. So they're, they're pretty sizable.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:36 

And then we need an operator. So we need somebody who has the training and the licensing to do that.

 

Brent Warneke  20:43 

Yep.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:44 

How far away is that kind of technology from being out in the world?

 

Brent Warneke  20:47 

Well, the drone sprayers are being used right now. There's, there's folks in the Willamette Valley, where I live in work, that are using these things in all kinds of crops. Right now, it's a very wet winter here where we live, so the fields get muddy, it's hard to get equipment in there. So that's kind of one aspect that is really appealing about these drones is that they can get into these areas that are kind of difficult to reach with tractors. And the same goes for hilly terrain.

 

Craig Macmillan  21:17  

Eight gallons does not sound like very much

 

Brent Warneke  21:19 

No, no. So application rates that these drones are targeting are typically less than 10 gallons per acre, you know, two to five gallons per acre is pretty common. I'm not by any means an expert at this point. So I won't get into the details of using them too much. But that's that's part of the impetus for the research is there's kind of there hasn't been a lot of looking into how efficacious these things are in specialty crops. So that's something that I think is a good opportunity.

 

Craig Macmillan  21:52 

You mentioned remote sensing. Tell me more about that. You were interested in drones. But are you interested in satellite, aerial, proximal, you know, you have some kind of a sensor on on a piece of equipment being an ATV or being on a tractor. Where does your interest lie in that world?

 

Brent Warneke  22:09 

I think in terms of remote sensing, I definitely have interest in the drone space. Because with that type of surveillance, you're able to get a lot finer spatial resolution than you can with, say, a satellite, I do appreciate that satellites, you can get information and data on a much wider field of view. So you can track much larger areas easier. And there's lots of different options out there that are either low cost or free. But drones I've I want to focus on a little bit more just because they're widely available. And lots of farms may already have them. And you can get very fine spatial resolution, which could allow determination of plant stressors such as disease, or localized water stress, or kind of other stresses with hopefully more precision than using satellite based technologies.

 

Craig Macmillan  23:10 

With things like vine stress or disease pressure, can that be combined, either directly or indirectly, in combination with your on the ground spray application that can inform what you do?

 

Brent Warneke  23:21 

Yeah, definitely, the spray application technology that we talked on a little bit earlier, was mostly in reference to real time sensor applications. So these are sprayers that go through the field, and adjust that what they're applying in real time based on what the sensor is seeing as it drives through the field. But there's other systems out there that use more of a prescription map approach, where they will take these remote sensing maps, or maps that are created from sensors on tractors, and then use that data to construct a prescription map. Where that is actually used. The map itself is actually used to adjust the amount of spray applied in a given area.

 

Craig Macmillan  24:06 

Where are we going into the future? What kind of what actually I guess what I'm really asking is what kind of projects are you looking forward to. Is the current work ongoing? Are you starting new things? Where do you where do you want to go next?

 

Brent Warneke  24:16 

Yeah, so our current work is, you know, as research tends to, it's always ongoing, there's other things always developing. So we're definitely continuing looking at biological fungicides. One aspect of biological fungicides that we want to delve into is kind of the compatibility. So what can we mix these things with? Is there any impact on the viability of these biological organisms that are in the products? Another thing is, are we affecting viability by using them in these various sprayers? So if we put these products through these airblast sprayers or through drone spraying systems and the like, is there any impact in their efficacy because they're expensive, and they're a lot they're alive. So those are some Some aspects. And then with the drones, I hope to do some research on looking at sprayer efficacy, specifically in wine grapes, and potentially other specialty crops as well, just to get some data on some of the spray parameters. So droplet size, volume per acre, how is that impacting coverage and efficacy? Those are, those are two things I definitely want to delve into.

 

Craig Macmillan  25:25 

Cool, what one thing what one message, or recommendation do you make to our listeners regarding these topics, overall?

 

Brent Warneke  25:34 

I would say that there's always a place to start to improve your spray efficiency. So we've been talking about sensor array sprayers and drones and remote sensing. And they're all kind of big technologies. But you don't need to worry about any of that if you just want to increase your application efficiency. I've looked and I work with other colleagues that work with spray application technology. And you can do what's called canopy adaptive spraying, which is basically working backwards from coverage on the spray cards to adjust your spray volume and the air volume that your sprayer is putting out to match the canopy. And actually looking at that in detail can save quite a bit of time and money and pesticide wastage by really targeting and matching that spray application output to the canopy itself. So that involves adjusting the spray volume using different nozzles and adjusting the air volume that's getting expelled at the sprayer by either changing the RPMs of the tractor driving faster or slower, or various ways like that. And then circling back to getting you know better good coverage. That's that will be efficacious with your products. And then on top of that standard sprayer, if you want to take it one more step, you could look into one of these sensor based systems, which could be retrofitted on your standard sprayer and increase efficiency in that way. And then on top of that, there's other autonomous sprayers that are out there that can take even more labor out of the equation. And many of those can be fitted with these sensors to increase their efficiency even more. And then if we want to take it one more step, then using some of this remote sensing data can even help streamline these things even more.

 

Craig Macmillan  27:32 

So there's lots of things we can do. They don't all have to be rocket science, but the science is out there. And it's coming to us in new forms constantly, which I think is really exciting. The one of the things that got me excited about your work was, like you said, you know, the basic airblast style sprayer has been around for forever. We have all gotten very used to it. That's like the base technology. And I think it's a great message to say, we don't have to stop there. We can keep going we can make improvements on what we have. And it doesn't have to be, you know, skull crushingly difficult.

 

Brent Warneke  28:05 

Yep, there's always some way that we can improve. Yep.

 

Craig Macmillan  28:09 

Well, thank you, Brent. Our guest today has been Brent Warneke. He is senior faculty research assistant in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University. So I'm really excited about the work that you're doing. And it's really, really great. And I hope that you can get your message out there and help people reduce their pesticide load and improve their efficiency. You know, less labor, less diesel, less water. Those are all good things. So thanks for being on the podcast. Brent.

 

Brent Warneke  28:34 

Definitely. Thank you very much for having me.

 

Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

You may be wondering, what do emotions have to do with simple, everyday decisions? It turns out, quite a lot!

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

A 2023 Wine Glass Marketing (WGM) blog post points to Harvard Business School professor Gerard Zaltman’s findings that 95% of our purchase decisions comes from our subconscious, emotional brain.

Leveraging common psychological triggers in your marketing can help drive more sales!

In this Marketing Tip, we’ll help you identify how your brand elicits positive emotions, and what you can do with that information.

Positive Emotional Triggers in Marketing

Think about some of the things that give you positive emotions:

• Recognition: either for something you did, or for just being you!
• Achievement: completing a task, winning a game or raffle, etc.
• Engagement: in an activity or setting, whether solo or social. 

From a marketing perspective, these can be achieved by:

• Personal communications with wine club members and regular visitors.
• Recommending products based on previous likes.
• Rewards programs, punch cards, discounts for special occasions, etc.
• Fostering an environment that aligns with your customer base:
• Soft background music versus upbeat dance tunes.
• Dim, romantic lighting for intimate conversations versus areas to play. 

Can you think of more ways to elicit positive emotions from your members and visitors?

A Personalized Approach

Since every wine club is unique, how you use these tips must be tailored to your specific brand.

Start by gathering data: How do people engage with your brand?

• Check out the click rates of your club emails. Which links get the most attention?
• Look at your tasting room traffic. Who is there, and what do they tend to do?
• What kind of social media posts get the most engagement? The ones that showcase the views, animals, events, or staff at your property? 

Then, ask yourself if you can infer their possible motivations. Are your guests looking for:

• An opportunity to score a deal on their favorite wine.
• The sense of connection that comes from being engaged with your brand.
• A social event or place to interact with others.
• Information about your products and/or processes. 

Take everything you’ve gathered from this exercise and think of ways to shift your current marketing efforts to include more of what gives your customer-base positive emotions.

Tell Your Sustainable Story

We are here to help you tell your customers how your brand protects natural and human resources with the Sustainable Story program.

This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. And it just got better with a new online course.  Go to the show notes, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story to sign up, and start writing your Sustainable Story today!    

Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

Resources:

• *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course ***
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• ReSIProcal February
• Sustainable Story | Print
• Sustainable Story | Electronic
• What's your Sustainable Story?
• Whitney Brownie | Get YOUR Sustainable Story Featured

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Erratic weather like deluge rain, longer falls, and patches of drought disrupt vinifera’s adaptation to long-sustained winters. Jason Londo, Associate Professor of Horticulture in the School of Integrative Plant Sciences at Cornell AgriTech explains how big weather changes in the Pacific North East can cause vines to wake up earlier posing a risk to freeze or frost damage. By researching acclimation and deacclimation, Jason is working to breed and select varieties for enhanced cold resistance, drought resistance, pest resistance, plus good fruit quality. In the future, to reduce inputs in vineyards and increase economic sustainability we need to put the right grape in the right climate. 

Resources:        

• 135: Cold Hardiness of Grapevines
• Cold Hardiness prediction model and monitoring website for the Eastern US
• Foliar Applied Abscisic Acid Increases ‘Chardonnay’ Grapevine Bud Freezing Tolerance during Autumn Cold Acclimation
• Jason Londo
• Jason Londo’s Recent Publications
• Vitis Underground: NSF-PGRP project looking at rootstock-scion interaction across multiple environments.

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Get More

Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.  

Transcript

Craig Macmillan  0:00 

Our guest today is Jason Londo. He is Associate Professor of horticulture in the School of integrative Plant Sciences at Cornell agritech. We're gonna talk about some pretty cool stuff today. Thanks for coming on the show. Jason,

 

Jason Londo  0:11 

Thank you for having me.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:12 

Your work tends to center around identifying things like climate induced disorders, developing medication methods, improving resiliency and sustainability of crops like apples and grapes. How did you become interested in that that's a pretty interesting area.

 

Unknown Speaker  0:26 

Originally, I was mostly interested in how plants adapt to stress just in general plants, because they're stuck to the ground that the seed lands on they are forced with so many complicated life's challenges, that it's really amazing what a plant can do in the face of stress. And so my curiosity has always been trying to figure out those strategies. But climate induced part of it is sort of reality striking into my passion, right? We know the climate is shifting, and it is shifting those stresses in a way that our plants can't necessarily respond in the same way that they used to, particularly because of the rate of climate change. So that's how I got interested in this topic, just trying to figure out how plants work when they're stressed out.

 

Craig Macmillan  1:13 

And you're interested in plants in general. And then now you're focusing on specific crops, right?

 

Jason Londo  1:18 

Yes, indeed, I started out originally working on endangered mints. If you can imagine that. Then I worked on rice. Then I worked on canola and I landed and fruit crops. And so yeah, lots of lots of diversity in those systems. All those plants have different stresses.

 

Craig Macmillan  1:35 

They're all different families. I mean, he really jumped around.

 

Jason Londo  1:37 

Oh, yeah. One of the coolest things about working in plant stress is plants across different clades evolved different ways of handling maybe the same stress. And you can learn a lot about sort of the limitations of stress response and the advantages and opportunities when you work across a lot of different systems. And so it makes for a tricky CV, because my publications kind of snake all over the place. But from trying to figure out the next strategy or figure out the next experiment, I feel like it's a real positive to have that background.

 

Craig Macmillan  2:13 

I want to go back for a second because I think this is an important topic. And you mentioned clade. What is a clade? And how does that apply to looking at plant stress?

 

Jason Londo  2:24 

And its most basic a clade is a group of plants that belong to the same sort of evolutionary history, and without getting into the real jargony. And the fights between what makes a species and what doesn't make a species. The basic concept is an evolutionary group. And so when I talk about plant stress strategies and differences between clades if we think about rice, it's a monocot. And so it has a completely different evolutionary lineage from most of our dicot fruit crops. Canola is a dicot it's a mustard. Both rice and canola are typically annualized, maybe sometimes there's a perennial version, when we talk about fruit crops, we're talking about, in my case, grapes and apples, Woody perennials, so dicot species that persists for many, many years. And so the strategies that are successful for for getting through a stressful situation can vary very much by those different life histories.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:24 

We're kind of talking about stresses in general, what are particular stresses on things like apples and grapes that you're looking at.

 

Jason Londo  3:29 

So in my program, it has a climate adaptation focus. And we all know that the main drivers behind climate change are temperature and precipitation. And here in the northeast, we do have a benefit in that we've got some room to get warm before it gets uncomfortable. And we have plenty of rain. But what we're seeing here is big changes in our winter weather shifts in our phonology. So the spring is coming earlier, the fall is coming later. And then we're also having big changes in precipitation. So little patches of drought, deluge, rain, and so very different from California, where things may be drying out. We're drying out, but in a very episodic sort of pattern. And the systems here are not built on drought management. They're not built so much on water logging either, although we do use tiling in the fields to Drain off excess water. And so when we're talking about climate impacts, here are primarily talking about temperature and shifts in precipitation.

 

 I know that you've been looking at cold hardiness. What has been the pattern? What's the change that's happening in the Northeast as far as cold goes?

 

Yeah, so most of my career, as a as a PI has been in cold hardiness and cold stress response in grapes. I spent 10 years at the USDA as a geneticist, particularly diving into this topic, and even in those 10 years years I've seen a major shift in the intensity of our winters they are getting much more mild, but they're also coming very erratic. And so we're having large swings in temperature. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the concept of a polar vortex we've had enough of them. Now, that is pretty common. When you take a perennial crops like grape, and you put it through winter, it's it's adapted to a long, sustained winter, not a real chaotic, episodic type winter where it gets warm and cold and warm than cold. The the complex molecular components of what tells the grape that it's safe to wake up don't function as well when you have those erratic temperatures. And so we're seeing, in general more mild, which is good for baseline cold hardiness, but also an uptick in sort of chaos. And that's not good for for any form of cold hardiness. And it particularly affects late winter, because the the plants wake up. As they're coming into spring, they respond to heat. And when you have weird weather in that really late winter, early spring, they can wake up too early and then suffer a lot of freeze damage or frost damage if they happen to break bud.

 

Craig Macmillan  6:11 

What is the mechanism around freeze damage? I've interviewed some folks from like Michigan and Iowa and Ohio, we don't have freeze damage in California very much Washington, obviously. What are the parameters there? How cold for how long? And what's the actual mechanism of damage to the volume?

 

Jason Londo  6:29 

Yeah, great questions. Very complicated questions.

 

Craig Macmillan  6:35 

That's why we're here.

 

Jason Londo  6:35 

Yeah, yeah. All grapes gain cold hardiness in the winter, regardless of where they are, it's a part of going dormant and making it through winter. The biggest changes that we see in the vine is that the buds will isolate from the vasculature. And so the little connections that come from the xylem and the phloem, into the bud, they actually get clogged up with pectins. And so you have to think of the bud is sort of like a little island tissue, it's not connected to the cane during winter. Once the bud does that it's able to gain cold hardiness and traverse winter. And that process is called acclamation. And so the buds gain a greater and greater ability to survive lower and lower temperatures. We don't know exactly how all of it works. But it's a mixture of making more sugars and making more Ozma protectant inside the buds so that water freezes at lower temperatures and also controlled dehydration. So the more you can dehydrate a tissue, the less likely ice crystals will form in pure water. But and we don't know how they do this. And it's quite magical if you think about it, but they're able to suck out all of this internal water so that it is less and less likely for water to freeze inside the cell. If they can keep the ice crystals from forming inside the cell. We call that cold hardiness that they they are surviving freeze damage, we can measure the temperature that reaches that defense. And you've had other speakers on your show that have talked about cold hardiness. It's called differential thermal analysis. And we basically measure the precise temperature where the water freezes through some tricks of thermodynamics, that cold hardiness failure point changes throughout the whole winter, and it changes by the location that the grape is growing in. What we do know about the system is that it takes oscillating temperatures to gain cold hardiness. So it has to get warm than cold warm than cold, warm than cold and progressively colder in order to ramp down and gain cold hardiness, then it has to stay cold for the cold hardiness to sort of hang out at the maximum cold hardiness. And that maximum cold heartedness is going to differ by region. So here in New York, something like Chardonnay will reach a maximum cold hardiness of maybe negative 27 Celsius. I cannot do the Fahrenheit conversion,.

 

Craig Macmillan  9:00 

That's fine. That's fine.

 

Jason Londo  9:03 

But say, say negative 27 Fahrenheit, whereas in California, it may not gain more than negative 20. And that's because it just doesn't get pushed. As you go through winter. You go through a whole bunch of other stuff with dormancy chilling our requirement, and that changes the way that the bud responds to temperature. And you enter a phase called Eco dormancy, which is now resistance to freezing based on how cold the vineyard is. And so when you get warm spikes in late winter, when the buds are eco dormant. They think those are a little preview that it's springtime and so they lose their cold heartedness really quickly they start reabsorbing that water, and they'll freeze that warmer and warmer temperatures. And so that's really the most dangerous time in this sort of climate chaos. When you think about winter that late winter period is when the vines are reacting with their adaptive complex for 1000s of years. When it started to warm up. It meant it was spring and now they're starting To think, okay, spring is coming. But we're still in February in New York, maybe in. In California. It's more like it's January and you're getting a warming event. And they all move right towards bud break. And then of course, they can get hit pretty hard by a leak freeze or a frost.

 

Craig Macmillan  10:15 

Yeah, exactly. I'm guessing this varies by variety.

 

Jason Londo  10:19 

Yes, very much. So, vinifera varieties are typically less hardy than the North American adapted varieties, the, the hybrid varieties is often gets used. I don't particularly like the word hybrid. But these cold climate grapes that have been bred by University of Minnesota and Cornell, they tend to have greater maximum cold hardiness. But they also tend to wake up in the spring much faster. And that's partly because of the genetic background that those hybrids were made from. When you breed with species that come from the far north, like Vitis riparia, those species are adapted to a very short growing season, which means as soon as it's warm enough to start growing, they go for it to try to get through their entire cycle. So now we're starting to see that there are some potential issues with climate change when we think about hybrid varieties that use those those northern species, and that they may be more prone to frost damage in the future.

 

Craig Macmillan  11:15 

Oh, really, that's I wouldn't have thought that I would have thought the opposite. So obviously, we have different species. So we have some genetic differences between what I'll call wild grapes or native grapes, the Oh, invasive plant itis vinifera that has been  thrown around. What can we learn by looking at the genetics of native North American varieties?

 

Jason Londo  11:38 

from a cold hardiness perspective,

 

Craig Macmillan  11:40 

cold hardness, just in general drought resistance, pest resistance?

 

Jason Londo  11:44 

Well, in general, they're a massive resource for improvement, which depends on who is who's calling a species species. But there may be up to 20 Different wild species in North America. And each of those wild species has a different evolutionary trajectory that has given it the ability to create adaptive gene complexes, that could be useful in viticulture, as we have shifting climate, away from what maybe vinifera likes, hot and dry into further northern latitudes, you know, that if the California industry has to start moving up in latitude or up in altitude, we start integrating different stresses that maybe those vines haven't been exposed to in their evolutionary history, you know, from Europe. And so these wild species just have these potentially novel genes, potentially novel pathways where genes are interacting with one another, that give vines a greater plasticity. And so this concept of plasticity is if you take an individual and you put it in environment a, and it grows to size 10, but you put it in environment B and it grows to size 20. The difference there is the plasticity between those two environments. And we really, if we want sustainable viticulture, what we want to encourage is using cultivars that have maximal plasticity. So as the environment shifts around them, they're still able to give you the same yield the same sugars, the same quality, you know, within a within an error bar anyway, they're the most resilient over time. And incorporating traits and pathways that come from wild grapes can help build that plasticity in the genetic background coming from the European great.

 

Craig Macmillan  13:23 

So we're talking about crosses, we're talking about taking a native plant and then vinifera crossing to create something new. You had said that you don't know you don't care for the word hybrid. Why not? That's interesting to me.

 

Jason Londo  13:35 

Because it has a negative connotation in the wine drinker. realm, right people think of hybrids as lower quality as not vinifera, so lesser. And I think I'm not an enologists. I'm not a viticulturalists. So I want to be careful on whose toes I mash. But if we're talking about sustainability of a crop through an erratic climate, we can do a lot with vinifera we can we can mitigate climate change a lot with vinifera, but at some point, the inputs may become too much to make it a sustainable crop and then we need to be able to move to adapted varieties. And we can adapt the wine quality from vinifera to climate chaos, by breeding and and selecting for enhanced cold resistance, enhanced drought resistance, enhance pest resistance, and good fruit quality. That's a little bit of a soapbox. But when people say hybrid, it's like lesser, but it's, in my opinion, it's more we're taking something great. And we are increasing its plasticity across the the country across the growing zones. We are giving it a chance to grow in more regions reach more local communities create a bigger fan base. So I get really my hackles got up because there is amazing hybrid based on Climate adapted based wines, and winemakers. And when we use the word hybrid people just automatically in their mind shifted into lesser. And I think that's unfortunate. I think it's something that we need to work actively as an industry against, because a lot of those particular disease resistance traits are coming from wild germ plasm. That is not in the European grape. And we just can't solve all our problems with that one species.

 

Craig Macmillan  15:30 

So the kinds of traits that we're talking about these environmental adaptations, or acclamations, these will be polygenic trades, how do you find these? I'm assuming that you're looking for those specific genetic information to say, Yeah, this is the plant that I want to use in my my breeding program. What does that look like? How do you do that?

 

Jason Londo  15:49 

So the approaches are very similar to when you're working on single locus traits. And so disease resistance and fruit color are good examples of traits that often can be found in single locus examples, again, would be fruit color, or sort of run one disease resistance, there's a whole bunch of different disease resistance was like polygenic traits can be found the same way, you have to make a cross between two different grapes that have different phenotypes. And so that might be a drug sensitive, and a drought tolerant individual. And you plant out a whole lot of baby grapes 200, 300 progeny from that cross, and then you score them with phenotypes. And with polygenic traits, it's a lot harder to find them sometimes, because in that group of, say, 300, babies, you're not looking for the movement of one gene. In that background, you're looking for maybe the movement of five to 10 different genes. And that means instead of getting a light switch kind of trait, red or white fruit, you're getting a little bit more drought resistant, a whole lot more drought resistant, but there is a gradient, right? When you have a gradient for a phenotype, you need a lot more grape babies in order to get the statistical support to say, hey, this piece of the genome right here, this makes a grape, a little bit more drought resistant. And over here, this piece of the genome does the same thing. And when you put them together, they either add up one plus one, or sometimes they multiply two times two, you use the same approaches, it's typically a little trickier. And you got to kind of do a couple extra years of screening. But it's the same basic playbook to track down those different traits. And we have to do a lot of different phenotypes for drought response, you might be looking for the ability to root deeper, have bigger root masses, you might be looking at bigger hydraulic conductance in the trunk, you might be looking at betters to model control. You might be looking at pyres to model density or lowers to model density, you could be looking at thicker or thinner leaves. So you can imagine if there's lots of ways to be more drought resistant. There's lots of genes that help you in that pursuit. You need a lot of baby grapes in order to find all those little pockets where those genes come together and give you a statistical shift and in the phenotype.

 

Craig Macmillan  18:10 

So you're able to identify these are you using something like qualitative trait?

 

Jason Londo  18:13 

Exactly. Quantitative trait loci?

 

Craig Macmillan  18:16 

Yes, exactly. So that helps speed the process up a little bit. Maybe.

 

Unknown Speaker  18:20 

Yeah, so so QTL mapping, quantitative trait loci mapping is the probably the dominant way that we map traits. There's another way called GWAS, genome wide association studies, is built on the same concept where you have a big enough population of either grape babies or in the case of GWAS its diversity. So you'd say, let's say you had 200 Different Vitis riparias instead of 200. Babies, the principle is the same. You are looking for across all of those vines, statistical association between a specific part of the genome and a phenotype to like make it really simple. In 200 babies, grape babies, you want to have enhanced drought resistance. You let's say we take a measurement of carbon isotope concentration and so that carbon isotopes tell you how often the stomates are open, right? So you do an experiment. And you drought stress your plants, and you use carbon isotopes as the phenotype and you say, Okay, this group of 75 individuals, they all shut their stomates right away, and this other group of 125, they kept their stomates open. So then in those two groups, you look at all the genetic markers that are in the background, right, which are like little signposts across the genome. And you say, in this group of 75, which genetic markers do we see over and over and over again, outside of statistical randomness, right? And what that will give you a peek a QTL peak, if you're lucky, right, I'll give you a cue to help you can say hey, right here on chromosome four, every single baby in that pool has a has this set of markers, these five Mark occurs. So there must be a gene, somewhere near these five markers that contribute to closing your stomates. And so then extrapolate that out whatever trait you want to look at how whatever phenotype method you're using, maybe it's not carbon isotope, maybe it's leaf mass, maybe it's node number, I don't know, whatever that screening process is, the concept is the same. You have big enough population, a good genetic marker background, and a phenotype that you can measure. And you can find the statistical associations.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:32 

And actually, that reminds me of something, how many chromosomes do grapes have?

 

Jason Londo  20:36 

Well, bunch grapes have 19 muscadine\. grapes have 20.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:39 

That's a lot. Which means that there's a lot of genetic variation in the genome of these plants, then.

 

Jason Londo  20:47 

Yeah, if you think about, I mean, grape is sort of a funky beast, because a lot of these varieties that we grow, they're all They're all of the arrays, we grow our clonal. And some of them are 1000s of years old, the same genetic individual from 7000 to 10,000 years ago, we still have around today, in that process, it's it's changed, right? There's mutations that happen in the field all the time. And so even thinking about genetic clones and thinking the idea of Chardonnay being around that long, it's changed in those 7000 years, just naturally. So when you think about comparing two different clones, or two different cultivars, or clones, there's something like 43,000 Different recognized genes in vitis vinifera, that number I can give you in the different wild species, because it varies by species, but roughly 40,000 at those 40,000 genes in a in a single individual, you can have up to two different copies, right. So you could have essentially 80,000 different alleles, then you go across, I don't know, what do we have 12,000 recognized cultivars or something like that? There are something like 60 Grape species. And so now imagine the amount of potential variation you have across that entire gene pool. And so yeah, the genetic diversity within the crop as a whole is incredible. There's a lot of room for improvement. And there's a lot of room for climate adaptation. Just takes a lot of grape babies to figure it out.

 

Craig Macmillan  22:12 

And that brings us something else. And that is the the idea of mutation. One of the issues, I think that is a stumbling block, and you mentioned it, there is the consumer, if it's not Cabernet Sauvignon, can't call it Cabernet Sauvignon. I'm not as interesting, which is something that I think we need some help from the marketing world with. Because I agree with you very much. I think if we're going to have wine in the future, we're going to have to start thinking about things other than just the cultivars that we have. Now, can you do the same kind of work with but mutation? Can you take a cane grew from a button, plant that out and look for differences between the same plant?

 

Jason Londo  22:53 

Yeah, so you're basically talking about clonal selection clonal selection is practice worldwide by different regions, always with this eye towards making something that we currently have a little bit better or a little bit more unique, right, somatic mutations, random mutations occur in the genetic background all the time. And they often occur in response to stress, which is a really interesting angle, if you think about climate stress. So these mutations happen all the time in the background. Frequently, they will land on pieces of DNA that don't do anything that we know up. I don't want to say that no DNA is unimportant, that there are sections that we don't believe are that important. We call these non coding regions are sometimes introns. When you have a mutation in that area, sometimes there's no effect on the vine at all. And that's happening all the time in the fields. Right now. If you think about all the 1000s to millions of cab sauv vines that are growing in the world, we like to think of them even if you pick a single clone as the same genetic individual. And that is, that's simply not possible. There's so much background mutation going on in those parts of the DNA that don't give us any change in phenotype. There's no way it's all the same. We'd like to simplify it. We'd like to simplify it for our drinking behavior, as well as you know, like our sanity. But yes, you can select for clonal variation. And clonal variation happens all the time when those changes happen to land in a gene producing region, exon or perhaps a promoter or, or even in a transposable element to make a piece of DNA jump around the genome, we get a new clone, you can purposely create clones as well. So it happens naturally, but you can create clones on your own and mutational breeding is something that gets used in a lot of crop species in grapes it doesn't get used as often because it's modifying the base plant, right? So if you take Chardonnay and you want to increase his disease resistance, if it doesn't have a gene that you can break or change that would give it more disease resistance, then you can't create a clone with more disease resistance, right? You're working with a big a base plant that has limitations, but we have So we have a population where this was done it was it was done actually by the USDA by Dr. Amanda Garis. She no longer works for the USDA, but she worked here in Geneva. And they did a project where they took the variety of vignoles, which has a very compact cluster and tends to get a lot of rot. And they took a bunch of dormant canes with the buds, and they put it in a high powered X ray machine at the hospital and blasted it with X rays. What X ray damage does to DNA is it causes breaks between the double strands so all of our DNA and all our genes are wrapped up in in double stranded DNA. And when you do DNA damage with X ray mutagenesis, you break the two strands. And then when they heal themselves back together, it's often imperfect. And so they'll often lose a couple base pairs like there'll be a little piece get that gets nipped out. When you put those two pieces back together and repair, if that landed in exon, you can sometimes change the protein that would have been made by that exon or completely knocked the gene out in its entirety. Creating a clone, you're just doing it faster than nature is doing it on its own. We do it with a hospital X ray machine. And so with this method, they created about 1000 clones of vignoles. And they've made I think 10 selections out of that group that have bigger, looser clusters, so the berries are further spaced out. So they don't get damaged, they don't get as much rot. And I think those are now starting to make their way out into trials. There's an example of a very directed approach to creating a clone to fit fit a very specific viticultural problem that may or may not work for climate adaptation because of the polygenic aspect that you brought up before. Because if you break one gene and a poly genic, adaptive complex, it may not be enough to shift the entire physiology into a recognizably different pattern, it could work to make them less resilient, because you could break something that's really important. But breaking something that's important, but works out for you in the long run is just playing that randomizer lottery a little bit further. So it's doable. It can happen in nature, it can happen on purpose in our hands, but it is trickier for certain traits.

 

Craig Macmillan  27:21 

So we're not going to X ray our way out of climate problems, basically, or diseases problems, right? Well, there may not be the right genetic information in the background of vinifera that even if we tried that, we'd have that set of genes that we would need, whereas we would have it in a native, native vine North American vine.

 

Jason Londo  27:42 

And just a sheer a sheer number of breaks that you might have to make in order to shift the physiology enough to matter. These climate adaptation pathways are highly networked. They involve hormones, they involve sugar metabolism. And so if you really break something important, it's going to cause a really bad phenotype of death phenotype, you have to nudge the system enough in a specific direction to make a meaningful change. And so, given the complexity of the trade, it makes it harder. I don't want to say anything is impossible. I do think that there would be ways to make vinifera better, more plastic in the environment. I think the potential is there for vinifera to do better in a lot of climates. I don't know if directed mutagenesis is the most efficient way to do it. I mentioned is that random, right, you're breaking double stranded DNA at random, and then it's really healing and there's so many things have to work out for you to hit the right gene, have the right repair, you know, all of that sort of stuff that it's a method, but I don't I wouldn't say it's the most efficient method breeding with wild germ plasm is also a method, the key weakness there is then it's no longer Chardonnay, right from our wine drinking sort of our own personal biases on that situation. We outcross Chardonnay to make it more climate resilient. It's no longer Chardonnay. So it can't be sold as Chardonnay. And that itself creates a market pressure against changing it to something that's more resilient. And I think until the climate imparts an equal level of pain as consumer pressure, we won't get there. I don't think it's a question of if it will happen. It's a question of when.

 

Craig Macmillan  29:23 

What kind of projects are you working on currently? You've mentioned experiments and breeding and it's now what do you what do you up to?

 

Jason Londo  29:29 

So I have a pretty diverse program climate impacts is all season so we have a lot of winter projects. And we've covered some of that now trying to understand how Acclimation and deaacclimation work and if we can enhance it, we're working with but birth control. So if we could slow down deacclimation and delay by break, we could get around frost damage. And then I'm also working on a really big project is actually coming to an end where we've been looking at what the role of a rootstock is our mapping population concept that we talked about for QTL Mapping, we were talking about the scion, I have a project where we did that with the rootstock. And so we created a mapping population. The only part that is the grape babies is the roots. And we've grafted the same variety onto those roots. And then we're looking at how the different grape baby roots change the scions behavior. A really cool thing about this project is that we've replicated it clonally replicated it and grafted it in three different locations. So we have a vineyard in Missouri, a vineyard in South Dakota and a vineyard here in New York. And so across those three different environments, which are quite different, both in maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation, we're learning so many cool things about what the roots can do to the same scion for your listeners, of course, they know grapes, so they know hopefully enough about grafting and that the rootstock and the scion are two different individuals. And they're mechanically grafted together. From a climate adaptation point of view, what you've done is you've taken an intact and adapted individual, and you've cut its head off, and then you've taken another climate adapted individual, and you've cut its legs off, and you've glued them together, and ask them to perform in the environment, which is just a wild, wild communication question. When the roots are experiencing one environment, and the shoot is experiencing another, how do they communicate? And then how does that affect our grape quality and wine quality? And so we're looking at drought response, can we increase the drought resistance of the Scion, based on the type of root it's on? Can we change the leaf nutrient profile, so the different ions that are taken up from the soil and how they're concentrated in the leaves. And of course, we don't really care about the leaves as much as we care about the fruit, the leaves are easy to work with. And we're even started working on wine quality. And so it looks like across our experiments, we might be able to optimize the rootstock and scion combinations we grow in different climates. To produce specific wind quality attributes, which is really cool.

 

Craig Macmillan  32:00 

That is really cool. That is really cool. We're just about out of time. But I want to is there one thing on the on these topics that you would like or recommend to our listeners, or you'd like our listeners to know?

 

Jason Londo  32:11 

Oh, well, I think their take home is is that we should all appreciate the new cultivars that come on the scene, whether they be from early regions like the the Eastern caucuses, something that we are not used to having in this country, or its climate adapted varieties that are bred in this country, and grown in these different regions. We need to do our best to open our minds not to does this grape or that grape tastes like cab sauv, or tastes like Chardonnay. But isn't it amazing what this grape tastes like period, because a lot of the the advances in resilience and sustainability that we can get out of either adopting new cultivars, shifting cultivars from climate to climate, or by using hybrid varieties in different regions, all of the benefits that we can get out of growing the right kind of grapes in the right climate, reduces inputs in the vineyard reduces inputs on the ecology. It increases the economic stability of rural communities. And it gives you pride in what the local region can produce. And I guess my take home would be is drink more adapted wines, enjoy them, figure out the nuances. Some of them are not great, but some of them are really great. drink more wine.

 

Craig Macmillan  33:33 

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

 

Jason Londo  33:36 

So the easiest way is just to Google my name and Cornell and that will take you right to my Cornell page. There's not a lot of information on my Cornell page, and I'm a big procrastinator on my personal website. But you can find my contact information there and certainly get a hold of me directly. If there's anything of interest. I will also send you some links that you can use to take listeners to the Vitis underground project, which is the NSF rootstock project I talked about, I can send you a link to we have a cold hardiness website where we post prediction models that we've built about cold hardiness across most of the Eastern US. We hope to expand that to be nationwide once once I get a stronger computer, but I can send you some links there. Yeah, I would say that that's probably the best places to find information on me and the program here. And if people are in town to come and see Cornell Agrotech and see some of the stuff in the field.

 

Craig Macmillan  34:30 

I would love to pay a visit. I've interviewed a number of your colleagues there and there's so much cool stuff going on. really innovative and really groundbreaking feel like we're on the leading edge of a wave that some point is going to break again. Maybe we'll be drinking wines other than the ones we've been drinking. I can see that happening. Anyway. So our guest today was Jason Londo. He's Associate Professor of horticulture in the School of integrative Plant Sciences at Cornell agritech. Thank you.

 

Jason Londo  34:55 

Thanks

 

Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

People today are paying closer attention to the values of the brands they support.

Research conducted by Harris Poll revealed that 82% of shoppers prefer a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don’t feel a match.

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

In addition to consumers voting with their dollars, Harris Poll found that 75% of shoppers surveyed have even parted ways with a brand over a conflict in values!

Sustainable winegrowers and winemakers can easily connect with conscious consumers over these 7 values."

1. Social Responsibility

Practicing social responsibility helps foster healthy relationships at work and in the community:

• Treat employees and the community with care and respect.
• Get involved in charity work, volunteering, & donations.
• Are aware of the impacts of the business (social and environmental!).

2. Water Management

Did you know that less than 1% of our planet’s water is accessible freshwater we can use to fulfill our daily needs?

Sustainable wine brands do! That’s why they:

• Use native plants for landscaping and cover crops.
• Conduct plant and soil tests to determine irrigation needs.
• Collect and reuse wastewater. 

3. Safe Pest Management

Both commercial and hobbyist farmers deal with pesky pests that damage crops, steal resources, and spread diseases.

Sustainable winegrowers use an informed and tailored approach to tackling their farm’s unique and dynamic pest complex:

• Introduce beneficial insects to challenge insect pests.
• Attract birds of prey to hunt vertebrate pests.
• Manage canopy and fruit density to reduce mildew pressure.

All of these practices are part of an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system.

4. Energy Efficiency

Making wine is an energy-intensive process. Whether from fuel, battery, or electricity, energy is used at every step of the process that turn grapes to wine.

With so many uses of energy, there are many ways to improve efficiency:

• Reduce tractor passes with vineyard equipment that covers multiple rows.
• Reduce energy use by properly insulating tanks and buildings.
• Reduce dependence on fossil-fuel—based electricity with alternative sources like wind and solar. 

5. Habitat

Sustainable winegrowers cultivate a biologically-diverse ecosystem that sets the vineyard up to thrive without excessive use of inputs like water and fertilizers:

• Create and adhering to conservation plans.
• Maintain wildlife corridors to give wildlife safe passage.
• Preserve open, uncropped areas so native plant and wildlife species have a home. 

6. Business

Sound and responsible business practices help set a business up for long-term success:

• Annual and multi-year budgets.
• Accurate record keeping.
• Offer benefits packages and competitive pay. 

7. Always Evolving

In order to stay successful and relevant, sustainable businesses constantly look for opportunities to learn more and evolve:

• Attend and host educational events.
• Subscribe to local and industry news.
• Provide education and upward movement opportunities for employees.

We are here to help you tell your customers how your brand protects natural and human resources with the Sustainable Story program.

This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. And it just got better with a new online course.  Go to the show notes, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story to sign up, and start writing your Sustainable Story today!    

Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

Resources:

• *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course ***
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• ReSIProcal February
• Sustainable Story | Print
• Sustainable Story | Electronic
• What's your Sustainable Story?
• Whitney Brownie | Get YOUR Sustainable Story Featured

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Adding biochar as a soil amendment creates an ideal habitat for beneficial microorganisms. Sitos Group CEO and Co-founder Mayo Ryan and PR, Marketing, and Communications Manager Jessica Bronner explain how biochar amendments improve disease resistance, plant health, pest resistance, water retention, and drought mitigation. The team explains three different ways to make biochar and why they have chosen to use the slow pyrolysis method to ultimately produce biochar for different soil types.

Resources:

• REGISTER: February 16, 2024 Biochar in the Vineyard
• 56: Conservation Burning and Biochar
• 106: What? Bury Charcoal in the Vineyard?
• 167: Use Biochar to Combat Climate Change
• Burn: Igniting a New Carbon Drawdown Economy to End the Climate Crisis
• Carbon Removal FAQ
• Monterey Pacific Inc.
• New Science Says Biochar is Very Permanent
• Regeneration
• Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation
• Sitos Group
• Sitos Group Biochar Page
• Sitos Group Blog
• Sitos Group Social Channels: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
• United States Biochar Initiative
• Why ‘regenerative viticulture’ is gaining ground among major wine producers

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Get More

Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.  

Transcript

Craig Macmillan  0:00 

Our guest today are Mayo Ryan. He is CEO and co founder of the Sitos Group and also his colleague, Jessica Bronner, who is the PR marketing communications manager for the Sitos roup as well. Thank you both for being here.

 

Mayo Ryan  0:12 

You're welcome, Craig. Hey, happy to be here.

 

Jessica Bronner  0:14 

It's a pleasure.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:16 

So what is the Sitos Group? What do you folks do? How did it start? I know the answers to these questions, but like why are we here? Today we're going to talk about biochar. But where are you focusing? What do you do?

 

Mayo Ryan  0:29 

Well, you know, when we when we figure it out, I think we'll let you know but anyway, where we are today is Sitos Group is a California based biochar manufacture and carbon removal company and we got started two years ago. It was a really great collaboration between myself and our co founder Steve McIntyre. Steve is the owner, founder and owner of Monterey Pacific, which is a very large vineyard management company, based in solid California about an hour south of Salinas and Monterey  Pacific farms about 18,000 acres of wine grapes in the Monterey County and San Luis Obispo areas. Steve's a winemaker and has his own winery. And he started using biochar with his in house soil scientist Dr. Doug Beck. almost 10 years ago, Doug has spent a lifetime in Far East Asia perfecting and understand the use of biochar and brought it to Monterey Pacific. They've perfected that use. And so, Stephen Monterey Pacific along with Doug had the use of biochar and winegrapes down I started my journey into biochar in late 2017. Designing and building an almond processing company in Northern California, in that process wanted to do something different to the almond shell market is is really valueless. It's a valueless byproduct almond hole is used in cattle feed in that year, the price dropped by 75%. So we were looking for an alternative income source in the form of almond shell and the next year and 2018, Kathleen Draper and Albert Bates wrote this seminal book called Burn and oddly enough, coincidentally, Steve and I read the book The same year, and it's what got us into biochar was the big sort of lightbulb moment. And then in 2018, I think October it was the inner governmental Panel on Climate Change wrote its report about negative emissions technologies. And in my head, I put those two together and have really drank the biochar Kool Aid and never going back. This is a lifelong venture now. We got together a few years ago, a fellow graduate of the California ag leadership program, we're both graduates of that program got us together, Steve's headwinds where he knew everything there was to know about using biochar in agricultural setting. And I had the, you know, production technology side of it pretty well wrapped up his headwinds were my tail winds and vice versa, we got together and as I said earlier, it's a marriage made in heaven. We've had a really wonderful partnership over the last almost couple of years, we have a pilot plant up and running at Regen Monterey, which is Monterey County's Waste Management District, with this incredible staff there. And our partner in that project is Keith Day, who runs the compost operation, the Keith day company that runs the compost operation at region Monterey, and we've had a pilot plant up and running since early this summer. And yeah, things are going really well.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:04 

So question for you, Jessica. How did you get involved with the Sitos Group?

 

Jessica Bronner  3:08 

That is a lovely question. So Steve reached out one day and was like, Hey, I have a job opportunity for you. And he connected with mayo, and the rest was history. And I always joke that I never thought I'd be excited about dirt, except now I'm excited about chocolate ish, kind of st compound. But yeah, that's how I got into it. And I'm never looking back. I can tell you that for sure.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:32 

And so I've got another question for you. Jessica because I think you might have a really great answer to this. We have other episodes on this topic, but just very briefly, what exactly is biochar and what are some of the uses for it?

 

Jessica Bronner  3:44 

So biochar, what Mayo calls is a wonder drug. And I could not agree more. I really porous material, and it's actually a type of charcoal with a low ash content. So it's a higher carbon content. What sets it apart from charcoal is its porosity. So it's has a lot of pores inside of it. We call it the coral reef for the soil. So all of those pores and little rooms are kind of housing for the micro organisms, or the soil biota that we incorporate into it.

 

Craig Macmillan  4:16 

Mayo, you had mentioned how you kind of got connected to it. What are some of the uses for biochar in agriculture?

 

Mayo Ryan  4:22 

We're farmers at heart and I mean, you all of us are lifelong agriculturalists. So we really start the conversation about biochar from an agricultural perspective. It is a wonderful soil amendment and because of its porosity, as Jessica said, and the idea that it is this coral reef for the soil, all of the complex fungi and bacteria and the myriad other micro organisms that help us with our digestion and our immunity and our disease resistant, live in, in biochar, it's like long term housing for all of those organisms. And I mean, in a single handful of soil there are more micro organisms, microbial bodies and our human beings on the planet and and biochar is their long term housing. You know, it's a condo for them. And so they take up residence, and it just fuels all this great activity that all those organisms have when they interact with the plant this complex communication between microbial activity and the plant itself. And so it leads to increased fertility, plant health, disease resistance, pest resistance, a really good amount of moisture retention, so drought mitigation, you know, and you just go down a list like a, like Jessica said, I think it's a wonder drug because it has these almost unbelievable amount of CO benefits. It does so many good things. That's just on the on the agricultural side, what we think about at Sitos are these co equal benefits of soil health and carbon sequestration. It's a really effective shovel ready and efficient tool. First, full carbon seed, atmospheric carbon removal,

 

Craig Macmillan  5:50 

You talked about carbon. So obviously, this is made from materials that are high in carbon, Jessica, what kinds of materials go into this process that we're going to talk about in a second, what kinds of materials go into making biochar?

 

Jessica Bronner  6:02 

Well, ultimately, you can pyrolyze is the secret word that we're going to get into in a little bit, but you can pyrolyze any organic matter Sitos Group specifically, we are currently working with municipal wood waste. We tried working with some compost leftovers previously, and they were a little high in water content for us to make biochar in the moment. So now we're just using some wood residue from other wood materials that are lower in the water content, but you can pyralyze organic, any type of organic waste, if that's biosolids, if that's corn husks, if that's vineyard waste, or almond waste, we're looking to get into almond waste almond hole and shell later on down the road hopefully sooner than later. But anything organic ultimately, if it's going back into the agricultural application,

 

Craig Macmillan  6:51 

So Mayo, there's a particular process we've called pyrolysis that's necessary to make this happen so that you don't end up with ash or charcoal is it's a different kind of a combustion Mayo, Can you talk a little bit more about pyrolysis and then we'll talk about how you actually do it.

 

Mayo Ryan  7:04 

Our goal is to ultimately make various qualities of biochar for specific soil types. And so we want a machine that's adjustable, which is why we pick slow pyrolysis there are other means of making biochar one's called gasification. And that's what we have largely in California. These are these are really energy production facilities where energy is about 80% of the product and biochar is a byproduct. Fast pyrolysis is another way to do it. Slow pyrolysis is a little bit different. There aren't many manufacturers that equipment around the world, but I think we found a great one and that machines very adjustable. So we can through different throughput times different temperature rates, we can make biochar 's that have higher pH level than others or a higher cation Exchange capacity and ultimately hope to customize biochar for soil types but you know, it's a new process. This is our machine at Regen Monterey the pilot plant is the first of its kind in the country. We've spent a good long while investigating manufactures years actually at this and, and are really pleased with this. With this process. The machine was invented or designed by two professors and biochar, Johanna Sleeman at Cornell and Stephen Joseph at the University of New South Wales, to pretty eminent people in our world. And so far, we're really pleased with the design and hope to perfect it over the years. And, you know, get the most out of it that we can it's economic, it's fairly easy to operate. As Jessica said, it's feedstock agnostic, we can use a lot of different feedstocks, and it's transportable, we can put one in a 40 foot trailer and, and you know, it's not like we can hook it up to the back of a car and drive it around. But it is somewhat transportable.

 

We've had other guests on the podcast and I've had tailgates where we have had big piles of vines that we lit from the top and then hose down material at the end. I've talked to people about digging pits and burning stuff covered in the ground. We've seen some smaller kinds of units, kind of like a tank I've seen people doing and kind of an open trench. The secret to pyrolysis is it's the low edition of oxygen. Is that right?

 

That's exactly right. Yeah.

 

Craig Macmillan  9:08 

So you're talking about a machine. So what is this machines, magical machine? What is how does it work? How do you get stuff into it? How does it burn? How do you get stuff out of it? How much can you do at a time? Does it take 10 people to operate it? I've just gotten super curious about this, because this is the first time I've really heard about this kind of technology.

 

Mayo Ryan  9:27 

You make it sounds so mysterious, but it's really not all the processes you described, Craig are what stands out about them is that they're batch processes. We wanted something that was continuous. There's such an abundance of agricultural byproducts, waste and biosolids, and forest waste in California that we wanted something that we could start this machine or put two or three of them side by side and it was a continuous process. So the feedstock enters the machine in a in a trough at the bottom of the machine at a temperature say 150 degrees centigrade, the moisture leaves so we dry the feedstock going in and In it say 350 to 500 degrees centigrade, all of the non carbon materials. The volatiles, if you will in that feedstock, whether it's almond shell or biosolids, or wood waste go away from the feedstock. And what we create is this bubble of sin gas or production gases. And at those temperatures, those sin gases combust. That bubble of of flame, if you will, lives above the feedstock. And that heat is what pyralyzes that say 750 degrees centigrade, paralyzes the feedstock. And what paralyzation means is it literally means change by fire. And so that feedstock goes from whatever it was with whatever quantities of lignin, cellulose hemicellulose into almost a pure carbon, it's completely chemically transformed. And what you end up with is just because it earlier is this very porous material. One of the quality standards for biochar is the International biochar initiative, surface area standard, which is 500 meters per gram. It was hard to get my head around this, but that's the surface area of a football field in the size of a pencil eraser. And that just speaks to how porous and fragile it is. And if you were to take an electron microscope and look at one of the walls of those pores, it would look exactly like the original start. It's very fractal down to different degrees of magnification. And at that high carbon content level microbes break their teeth on it, you know, it's it's something that lasts in the soil for hundreds, if not 1000s of years, as farmers we are using the biochar, principally for soil health and Plant Health take that responsibility for using that biochar in an agricultural setting, you know, very seriously. And so we are, you know, we really think that that leads to a more durable and permanent carbon removal, but it's just as I said earlier, it's a wonderful, incredible wonder drug. It does so many great things.

 

Craig Macmillan  11:48 

To continue, mayo what happens to the stuff that's not the carbon you said it volatilizes off, but what's its eventual fate in the environment?

 

Mayo Ryan  11:50 

We essentially combust it and so the machine acts as its own thermal oxidizer, so everything that's not carbon gets lifted above the feedstock. The feedstock never actually catches fire all the sin gas and production cloud gases do above the feedstock and they're consumed right then and there. And so theoretically, you know, what comes out of the stack is very little heat, principally, we generate a ton of byproduct heat, but very little exhaust gases, little NOx little Sox, well under what you know, are the standards here. Everything that's as I said, Not carbon gets combusted within the chamber

 

Craig Macmillan  12:34 

And gets broken down into less problematic. Compact.

 

Mayo Ryan  12:37 

Exactly, yes,

 

Craig Macmillan  12:38 

Question for you just the coolant, the biochar coolant. I'm hearing a lot about biochar. Obviously, there's a lot of people mixing up the Kool Aid. I'm guessing that your job is probably to sell the Kool Aid.

 

Jessica Bronner  12:49 

My job is actually to educate people on what the Kool Aid is. Once they know it kind of sells itself going from there on. It's definitely breaking down the complex understanding of slow pyrolysis and biochar so if someone could understand it, who's new to the ag industry or carbon removal industry or any of that.

 

Craig Macmillan  13:13 

So again with you, Jessica, so this material is produced, you folks are selling it to other folks selling it to different people, outlets, companies, municipalities.

 

Jessica Bronner  13:23 

That is the future plan for now we have an offtake agreement set for this first pilot plant with Monterey Pacific. So actually, all the biochar we'll be producing in the years going forward will be going directly into the vineyards that MPI manages, which is terrific yay for Sitos, Group biochar. And then moving forward it will be available to sell to outside markets.

 

Craig Macmillan  13:46 

What do you think those markets might be?

 

Mayo Ryan  13:47 

I can go with that. You know, we're we're we're lucky in that biochar and wine grape vineyards is an established fact more or less. We can all stipulate the benefits of biochar in wine grapes largely due to Dr. Doug Beck and Steve's work over the last eight to 10 years. We're doubling down in the wine grape industry is is kind of a short term means of proving biochar is affecting agriculture. Next, we'll spend time educating almond and pistachio growers in the San Joaquin Valley about those same benefits. I used to work as pistachio grower relations guy for a large pistachio company. And you know, I'm convinced pistachios and biochar go hand in hand. But there are so many other uses. We can sequester carbon and concrete, you know line production for the concrete businesses one of the largest carbon emitters in the world. If we can get biochar and concrete we can significantly reduce by 20%. Perhaps the amount of lime going into concrete, we can create graphenes and graphite for use and batteries. The endless list of uses of biochar is really endless. We were starting in agriculture but there are a lot of opportunities for us as we build the business.

 

Jessica, are you you said you're doing the education and the outreach. You're teaching people what it is what kinds of methods tools, avenues are you using to communicate all this stuff?

 

Jessica Bronner  14:59 

So far we've been very successful on LinkedIn. That's a great avenue for people to find out what we're doing where Mayo is every week speaking to different at different arrangements and educating people that way. With that we do a lot of public outreach. So we spoke at the Monterey Rotary Club and then the Cannery Row Rotary Club. So we had some good educational moments, we'll be having a biochar tailgate with a vineyard team coming up next beginning of next year. And then our website has a lot of information about biochar. We'll write blogs, if people have questions, they can submit questions on our website. We really want to be open book to the public and to people who are interested because educating oneself is kind of the most powerful tool that you have i We really value that and we want to create avenues for people to learn from their own standards. And then a website that we like to go to for information for the public to know about, they obviously probably already do if they know about biochar is the US biochar initiative USBI. They have a terrific website with a lot of knowledge and materials on biochar and application and agriculture and different settings.

 

Craig Macmillan  16:12 

And just as a as a timestamp, this has been recorded in November of 2023. And so this Tailgate you mentioned, would be in 2024. For Mayo to you what what is the future look like? The big picture future do you think is going to be for this industry? This is a sounds like it's an industry are potentially a fledgling industry, maybe. But where do you see this going? You've talked about almond orchards and you've talked about municipal waste. What's the potential here on a big, big picture? You

 

Mayo Ryan  16:42 

know, agriculture is facing a huge set of problems, which makes it just more and more difficult to meet this global demand for a secure and healthy food supply. And those problems are, you know, soil degradation and desertification, drought or moisture loss. You know, carbon emissions from agriculture is huge. We've got to fix that loss of biodiversity. And so, we believe that biochar is a way to transition conventional traditional ag into a regenerative ag set of practices, which would include things like cover cropping and minimum or no till on but but essentially at the highest level conversion from a chemical based farming regime to biological based farming regime and, and we want to facilitate that our vision of sounds embarrassing a bit, Craig, but you know, Steven, Jessica, and Alan and our wonderful operators who Swain said, Well, I'll want to sequester a million tonnes of carbon be a mega ton supplier of carbon removal by the end of 2030. It sounds crazy. When I say it, I get a bit embarrassed. But our friends in the carbon world are telling them that's not enough, we need to have much more larger ambitions, you know, we all need to be sequestering a billion tons by 2030. And we're you know, we're just a very small part of that. But that's our goal. That's what we want to have happen. That's what we're going to pursue over the next seven years is to take these plants that we have the goal of the pilot planet region, Monterey is to perfect a three machine design that will templatized and deploy throughout the Salinas, Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, I think in my lifetime anyway, you know, I don't have to look much beyond those regions for opportunities to make biochar and sequester in soil. But that's the plan and to you know, to do our best to facilitate regenerative ag and, and those regenerative site supply chains and remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as we possibly can.

 

Craig Macmillan  18:24 

Jessica what do you have to add to that? What? What do you see? What's your vision?

 

Jessica Bronner  18:28 

My vision for biochar is really lead the regeneration of the earth to the soil. I mean, I recently read, or am reading the book by Paul Hawkins called regeneration and mayo knows it very well. And I encourage everyone else to go and read it if they have not. But it ultimately talks about how are we supposed to thrive on a planet that's degenerating? And what can we do to regenerate that so we can continue to sustain life? Well, not just since sustain life, but to thrive, have life thrive on this planet? So future going forward would for biochar to Excel that regeneration of the earth of agriculture of supply chains of humanity? That would be that's my big end. I'll be I'll go through this.

 

Craig Macmillan  19:14 

That's a good goal. Let's continue with you, Jessica. We're getting close to the end here. What is one thing that you would recommend to listeners or that you'd like them to take away regarding this topic?

 

Jessica Bronner  19:26 

I mentioned it earlier, but really is just to educate themselves on biochar and sustainability and regeneration, because there's only so much you can do from here. So he or she say, but when you actually double down and find out what it is that you're passionate about, or maybe you're not passionate about for your individual self, I think that's really powerful. Like I said before, I had never knew that I'd be excited about charcoal or about agriculture, but here I am, like, never, never going back and I really attribute that passion to education. personal education me diving in and figuring that out so that's that's my biggest encouragement for people just curious about it is to read about it dive in jump in headfirst come down a rabbit hole and drink the Kool Aid.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:14 

How about you Mayo?

 

Mayo Ryan  20:16 

Know what I'm gonna shamelessly crib what Jessica stains it's get involved. I mean, if you're on our website and you find that that tab and that button all over, we have a little mantra internal saying it Sitos. It's not either or it's also and we have a very limited competitive view, we don't think there are such things in, in the biochar or carbon removal world as competitors, we need lots of Sitos' we need lots of other companies in this business as many as can can get involved. And that's it. You know, Friday, we hit a record. It's the first time we were over two degrees of pre industrial temperature, a third of this year was over 1.5 degrees, which was the Paris Climate Accord. It's here it's happening. And so my suggestion and my hope is that is that people just get involved educate, as Jessica said, and, and join us in this effort to save ourselves.

 

Craig Macmillan  21:03 

Jessica, I am going to ocme back to you, where can people find out more about you and your colleagues and the Sitos group in general?

 

Jessica Bronner  21:11 

Our website and click the Get Involved button and you send an email directly to me and I will respond to you ASAP. You can also find us like I said on LinkedIn, we have our social media platforms on Facebook and Instagram. We're thinking about launching a YouTube channel. You can go check us out right now and find some terrific vineyard application videos of biochar have been applied to some of the McIntyre vineyards, soils. But I would say email if you want to get direct contact with us. It's our first names with our last initial at Sitos.earth it is not.com We got fancy and put a dot Earth on there. So yeah, send us an email reach out. We're happy to chat set up a call and have a conversation. Well,

 

Craig Macmillan  21:53 

our guest today has been Mayo Ryan. He is CEO and co founder of the Sitos group and Jessica Bronner, who is the peer Marketing Communications Manager for Sitos want to thank you both for being here.

 

Mayo Ryan  22:05 

Delighted, Craig, thank you for having us.

 

Jessica Bronner  22:07 

It was a pleasure for sure.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

There are a lot of buzzwords today surrounding eco-friendly production:

• Regenerative
• Sustainable
• Climate smart
• Carbon footprint
• Social equity

Did you know that the sustainable winegrowing community touches all of these points?

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

1. Regenerative.

From the block to the bottle, making wine is a science. Growers and vintners alike must understand and work with nature to make a quality product, and sustain their business for years to come.

That’s why sustainable winegrowers use practices that protect and regenerate natural resources:

• Enhance soil health and biodiversity by planting cover crops and using compost and biochar.
• Support native wildlife species by preserving a portion of the property as non-cropped land.
• Reduce pesticide use by attracting birds of prey and beneficial insects. 

2. Climate Smart.

From the fuel and batteries that run vineyard equipment, to the electric pumps and motors at work in the winery, to the electricity that power the buildings, it takes energy to make a bottle of wine!

Reducing reliance on nonrenewable energy helps to combat climate change. Sustainable winegrowers and winemakers do this by:

• Using equipment that covers multiple rows to reduce tractor passes.
• Improving insulation of buildings and winery tanks to regulate temperature and reduce energy demand.
• Utilizing natural light, energy-efficient bulbs, and motion-detecting lighting in buildings to reduce electricity demand. 

3. Social Equity.

Sustainable wine businesses know that people are our most valuable resource. It’s common practice for them to:

• Provide competitive pay and medical insurance.
• Have a communication plan to reach neighbors and the community at large.
• Give back to their communities through charitable donations, volunteer work, and hosting educational events.

We are here to help you tell your customers how your brand protects natural and human resources with the Sustainable Story program.

This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. And it just got better with a new online course.  Go to the show notes, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story to sign up, and start writing your Sustainable Story today!    

Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

Resources:

• *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course ***
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• ReSIProcal February
• Sustainable Story | Print
• Sustainable Story | Electronic
• What's your Sustainable Story?
• Whitney Brownie | Get YOUR Sustainable Story Featured

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Ecosystem Science combines biology, chemistry, and physics to model and predict responses like wine grape yield forecasting, water management, and disease vector mapping. Joshua Fisher, Associate Professor of Environmental Science & Policy at Schmid College of Science and Technology, Chapman University and science lead at Hydrosat explains how high-resolution data from space helps farmers plan for climate change. His research uses satellites to help growers understand how change their practices to succeed in their current location and predict future winegrowing regions around the world.

Resources:

• 199: NASA Satellites Detect Grapevine Diseases from Space
• 191: CropManage: Improving the Precision of Water and Fertilizer Inputs
• Hydrosat
• Joshua Fisher
• Joshua Fisher on LinkedIn
• Joshua Fisher on Twitter
• Martha Anderson, Research Physical Scientist, USDA-ARS
• NASA Acres - applying satellite data solutions to the most pressing challenges facing U.S. agriculture
• NASA Earth Observatory
• NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Get More

Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.  

Transcript

Craig Macmillan  0:00 

And our guest today is Dr. Joshua Fisher. He is Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Chapman University, and also science lead with Hydrosat. And today, we're gonna be talking about ecosystem research that he's been doing in some modeling ideas. Thanks for being here, Joshua.

 

Joshua Fisher  0:16 

Thanks for having me.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:17 

Your area is broadly defined, I understand as Ecosystem Science, that'd be an accurate description of your professional life.

 

Joshua Fisher  0:25 

Sure, yep.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:26 

Before we get started, what exactly is Ecosystem Science?

 

Joshua Fisher  0:29 

it's kind of a combination of many sciences. And it's a combination of biology, we got to understand plants, animals, in, you know, down to bacteria and fungi. It's a combination of chemistry, you know, we need to understand how different nutrients and water and carbon interact and transform and it's combination of physics in terms of how energy flows through the system and in heat, and how to model and predict responses of the biology and the chemistry through the physics. So I kind of got into Ecosystem Science or environmental science more broadly, because I was indecisive as a student and couldn't pick a science, like all the sciences, and

 

Craig Macmillan  1:10 

I feel your pain.

 

Joshua Fisher  1:11 

And I didn't want to just pick one. So I was looking around for a major that combine the sciences and environmental science was a good one and got me a chance to get outdoors.

 

Craig Macmillan  1:20 

That's an interesting way to get into what are the applied aspects of this area? Like what are the things things are that you're interested in, in terms of like the applications, but what do you do, and then we'll talk about what you do.

 

Joshua Fisher  1:32 

The applications are really interesting. And it's kind of a career trajectory to, I think, as a student, and as an early career scientist, it was really about doing science, with the applications kind of out there more broadly, for context, but not actually doing anything about anything other than coming up with the best science possible, coming up with the best models, launching satellites, developing new datasets and understanding the way the world works. But actually feeding back to society was something that I've really ramped up throughout my career. And I've seen that among my peers as well, you know, especially in terms of the science trajectory and science reward system, science rewards you for publications for getting grants, and for doing a bit of ivory tower research, it doesn't really reward you, promote you and sustain you for doing applied sciences. And that tends to be a luxury that one gets one when gets into mid career, which is where I'm at now. And it's a great aspect. It's a great privilege to be able to feed back to society, to help farmers, water managers, policy makers, communities, people of color, indigenous tribes, and so on. It's a different type of award. Now it's, it's a reward, that's a personal reward. Something that I feel, you know, really happy about satisfied when I go to sleep at night. And I, you know, have to do my part to change the system for the early career scientist of today, to be rewarded for those applications as well. But in terms of my Applied Science, nowadays, I use my technology that I've launched a space and I'm continuing to launch the space, especially on thermal imaging, to monitor plant stress and water stress, heat stress, and plants using that to help inform irrigation and agricultural crop management, forest management, wildfire, prediction response, even down to urban heat and public health. I have got work with environmental justice, and communities of color and using the data that I've launched to help to help sustain public health as well as environmental science and agriculture and food production and food security. So lots of great applications out there. I'm even working with volcanologist. Our technology to help predict volcanic eruption.

 

Craig Macmillan  3:43 

Oh, wow.

 

Joshua Fisher  3:44 

Incredible array, you know, there's geology as well, mineral exploration. So a lot of applications, aquaculture, you know, helping improve shellfish and diversity as well. So when it comes to what I've gotten myself into, or gotten yourself into Dr. Fisher, over the years a bit of that. And it just happens to be that what I do has a lot of the connections, it isn't very limited. And what I what I've been doing for the past decade has a lot on temperature and heat. And so anywhere there's a signal of heat or temperature, whether it's in crops, whether it's in urban settings, whether it's in volcanoes, whether it's in wildfire that temperature permeates everywhere. And my data have and my science have the ability to help not only the science, but also the applications across nearly in the entire earth system.

 

Craig Macmillan  4:35 

All right now, what are you talking about heat you're looking at this, we're talking about what you do so like on any given day, and I know everybody has these crazy lives where we do one thing on Tuesday and something completely different on Wednesday, but you are scientists, scientists work with data. Your data is coming from space. How did you get into that? I know you've worked on a couple of other or a couple of projects both now When in the past with information data collected from sapce, and I want to know more about that, what kind of data? How's it collected? How's it work? Exactly, yeah, how does somebody get into terrestrial data scientist?

 

Joshua Fisher  5:14 

How does someone go from having one's head in the dirt to having one's head in space?

 

Craig Macmillan  5:21 

And then then back in the dirt sounds like.

 

Unknown Speaker  5:24 

I'm back in the dirt again. Back to my college days, environmental science, started doing undergraduate research at Berkeley, where I was at, mostly because as an undergrad, I was like, Why? Why did I go to Berkeley, you know, it's just a number in a class. It's huge, not the best teaching, the reputation of Berkeley is really for the research. So I said, Well, if I'm going to be here, I better get involved in research. And I got involved in research as an undergrad, and started getting into the Environmental Modeling. And I liked it so much that I continued on at Berkeley for my PhD, and my PhD, and continued Environmental Modeling side. But I was like, well, let's add a new tool to my toolkit. And let's start playing with satellites. Because really, they were just cool toys in the sky, I had really no other kind of ambition, other than to learn how to pick up a new tool and play with it.

 

Craig Macmillan  6:12 

I've seen some really pretty pictures, if you go to the NASA Earth Observatory page, and with all their links and stuff there. It's like a Christmas tree with presents under it. It's just all these pretty colors and all these amazing things. So I can see how you could get drawn into it.

 

Joshua Fisher  6:27 

Yeah, I mean, when you get into all the beautiful imagery, not only in the visible spectrum, but across the medic spectrum, you start to wonder if you are looking at science or art, that distinction that polarization between art and science really starts to blur. And you forget, what are you doing? Are you doing art? Are you doing science? And really, you're doing both. And it's all together. And I've been doing a lot of art, science and synergies over the year as well, which I'm happy to talk to you after I answer your first question, which is how I got into it. So playing with cool satellites, cool toys in the sky, interested in water, because I grew up in California and Alaska, kind of two, polar opposites of environmental extremes. And you know, when I was a kid, we were putting low flow showerheads, you know, in my showers in Los Angeles, where I grew up with my mother. And then my parents split when I was little, my dad lived in Alaska. And when I went to visit my dad, Alaska, we were putting on high flow showerheads, as a kid just kind of flying back and forth. It made me wonder how the world worked. And so growing up in California, especially under droughts and water shortages, as I got into college, I got involved in interested in being able to predict water and how much water we need. We had been able to measure rainfall and snow and groundwater, but not the evaporation components so much. And so that was where the models had to come into play. Because we couldn't measure it. We had a model that we had predicted based on other things. So when I started playing with satellites, my PhD, I was started wondering, I wonder if we could get at evapotranspiration from satellite remote sensing. And so that became the focus of my PhD. And sure enough, I was able to do it at the end of a nice long doctorate. So then right around that time, climate change really blew up. And I was in a unique place where I was observing the earth, using cutting edge technology and models and looking at cycles that transcended the whole earth. And so I kind of stepped right into that, for a fact finished my PhD, decided to if I wanted to be a global climate scientist, I needed to work globally. I had been in the Bay Area for almost 10 years in LA and so on. So I left the US and I went to England to Oxford University. And I thought I would leave the satellite and evapotranspiration stuff behind me. I started working on the climate model. There, I started getting into nitrogen, and the nitrogen cycle. And really my number one goal of moving to England was to pick up a British accent so clearly that although I can't say...

 

Craig Macmillan  8:56 

You went to Oxford, you went to Oxford to figure that out. You just couldn't move to the west end and a little apartment for a couple years. That wasn't going to do it clearly.

 

Joshua Fisher  9:03 

But partially because we got a big project in the Amazon as well and Andes. So I moved into the Amazon and Andes and conducted a big nutrient fertilization experiment up and down the Andes along with a larger team studying ecological dynamics of the rainforest and cloud forest there. So my Spanish got a lot better although it's very much field Spanish, you know, I can converse very fluently when it comes to roots and leaves and soils, but put me in a fine dining restaurant. And I'm like, what is all this cutlery? We didn't have this on Amazon. Eventually made my way out of Amazon Andes back to Oxford and was teaching remote sensing and GIS geographic information systems to the students there. We had a collaborator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab who was visiting with us and he had tried to recruit me to JPL back in California. And I said, Ah, you know, I just converted my postdoc to a faculty position at Oxford. we're pretty happy here. But then my partner who's awesome from Los Angeles, got a job at Occidental College in Los Angeles. And so she got the job. And so I was like, okay, so I called up my friend at JPL. She has that position still available. And he said, Yeah, you should apply. And so I did. And so I ended up taking a job as a NASA scientist at JPL. And I was there for about 12 years before I left, and joined Chapman University and Hydrosat. Hydrosat was actually a spinoff from JPL. Some JPL scientists, engineers spun off some technology that we'd actually launched to Mars, and decided that we could actually use it for Earth Science and applications and accelerate that transition to society a lot faster. If we did it from a commercial sphere, than from a governmental, you know, wait for contracts and proposals, sphere prime, the science lead for Hydrosat. And even though it's in the commercial realm, I represent the science community and my push to make sure the data are available for free to the science community. And so that's one of my big pushes. It's all about advancing the earth as a whole. And Hydrosat really supports that. And our employees are driven by that mission as well. So that's exciting. So yeah, that's how I got involved in remote sensing and satellites. And it keeps me here today, because that's just what I've gotten good at, for my time at JPL.

 

Craig Macmillan  11:19 

So what kinds of things is hydroset do?

 

Joshua Fisher  11:22 

So we are launching as of, you know, less than a year just in June of 24, a constellation of satellites. And then they measure thermal infrared, so temperature, have very high spatial resolutions. And because it's a constellation, we can cover the earth really rapidly and frequently. So we can get measurements every day, what we call field scales down to 50 meters, for the thermal and in the visible and near infrared down to 20 meters. So really high resolution really frequent and and that's what we need, especially for growers agriculturalists. But even for other applications, like urban heat waves, volcanic eruptions, you know, a lot of things happen at very fine scales, wildfires, and you need to be able to capture it frequently, you can't just wait. And so there's always been this traditional trade off between high spatial resolution and high temporal resolution, you can have one or the other, but not both. It's because you either have your satellite close to the Earth where you can see close detail, but it takes forever to wrap around the earth in full coverage, or you can be further away and cover the earth more frequently. But then your pixel size is not as sharp. The problem with the thermal infrared imaging is that it's always been really expensive. Because it's a temperature sensor. It requires cooling, cryo, cooling, which takes a lot of energy and takes a lot of mass and volume. And on the engineering side, you start to add those up. And it becomes very expensive, from our public public satellites. Landsat has been our workhorse over the past couple of decades. And it's like a billion dollars to watch Landsat so you cannot have a lot. And that's a 16 day repeat. We advanced from Landsat with eco stress out of JPL I was the science lead for eco stress. We put it on the International Space Station. So we could use that energy system and power in crowd cooling. Interesting overpass cadence. So we didn't have to pay for a lot of the engineering. But you know, the the space station, of course, is very expensive.

 

Craig Macmillan  13:10 

What is the overpass cadence on the International Space Station? I've always wondered that. If you're up there, and you're going around how often do you see your house?

 

Joshua Fisher  13:17 

Yeah. And the answer is funky.

 

Craig Macmillan  13:21 

Scientists love that Josh. Yeah, that's a great scientific, that's great for science.

 

Joshua Fisher  13:27 

That's the jargon. That's the technical term. It is it's really funky. It's really weird. It doesn't go over the poles. For one, it hits about 50 to 15 degrees north and south. So it kind of like starts to get up there near Alaska. But it like it turns around, because what we call precesses kind of turns around, and so has this funky orbit. So if you're living in Los Angeles, or Chicago, or New York, a traditional satellite, like Landsat or MODIS, will pass over at the same time, every day for Motus 1030 or 130, for Landsat every 16 days at about 1030. So it's very consistent. And that's good for scientists, as you said, like scientist like that kind of consistent data, they can see if the planets heating up because at 1030, every time things are getting hotter, or whatever, the space station passes over at different times every time it takes your schedule and rips it up and says, you know, I'm doing my own thing. And so today, it'll be 11am. The next time it'll be 2pm. You know, next time it'll be 9am. It's not like every day or every three days. It's every like, sometimes it can be every day. And then like it just says like sia and then it comes back a week later. So it's very inconsistent. And that's why remote sensing scientists, NASA scientists had historically shied away from using the space station as a platform to observe the earth. I came along and said, You know what, this interesting high resolution spatial resolution because it's pretty close to the surface. You can actually see it from your house, passing over at night in this different times of overpass passes actually really good from a plant centric standpoint, plants, they use water throughout the day. But if you don't have enough water, especially in the afternoon, when it's hot and dry, plants will close this stomata, they'll shut down, and maybe reopen them a little bit in the evening to get a little bit more photosynthesis. And before, you know, there's no more sunlight from a 1030, consistent overpassed, you would never see that even from 130, you might not always see that getting that diurnal sampling was a unique trait that I thought would be valuable for Plant Science Ecosystem Science in agriculture. We propose that as part of the Eco stress mission proposal, the review panel at NASA headquarters, Congress love that we had been spending so much money as a nation on the space station. And we hadn't really been using those unique characteristics for Earth observation until we came along. And I think we were like the second Earth mission on the space station. And really the first one to ever use it to observe the earth with its unique characteristics. After we did that a whole bunch of other missions came up afterwards. We were trailblazers.

 

Craig Macmillan  15:59 

That's cool. There's implications in terms of and you know, we're we're focused on plants and one plant in particular, the grapevine the implications for this are that we can see quite a bit of detail, I mean, 50 meters by 50 meters is actually surprisingly tight pixel, small pixel. But we also can see regional, and learn in larger scale patterns that we wouldn't find otherwise, where let's say grow A has great information about what's happening in terms of ET rates on their property, or plant water stress measured with leaf water potential or something like that. Stem water potential, but I'm guessing the field is probably picking up on some some patterns that are beyond what we might have otherwise known about, even if we had really, really good high quality high definition data just at the ground level, but limited parcel size, for instance.

 

Joshua Fisher  16:47 

Yeah, absolutely. Thing is that hydrostat really combines a lot of great characteristics that you might get one from any, any any other individual instrument. So from again, Landsat, you've got that great spatial resolution, but you missed that frequency, promote us, you have the frequency, you miss the spatial resolution from drones, you get that great spatial resolution, but you don't get that large regional coverage, or even frequency from towers, similar, so from aircraft. So with Hydrosat, we're able to pick that a lot, which means that we can do a lot with I think we don't replace drone operations or towers, because those present and provide really useful information. But what we do provide is that just very consistent objective and large scale coverage at the field scale. So if you're a grower, and you got fields, you can run a drone or a couple of times, but you're really not going to see your field, you can get your Lance and your motors, but you're not gonna get that frequency or that resolution tight. So Hydrosat is really beneficial for you in terms of your audience for growers that have a lot of area, and a lot of interesting dynamics that you know, they need to be able to monitor and evapotranspiration, the soil moisture, the temperature, we can get that we also create a lot of products from our data. We just acquired a company called IrriWatch, which was started by my colleague Wim Bastiaanssen, who's a who's a giant and evapotranspiration, and so with me and Wim teaming up, we've got just where you know, the the two headed dragon of evapotranspiration are really pushing technology and solutions into agriculture, viticulture and all the other applications. So Wim and IrriWatch has done is they've reached out to hundreds hundreds of growers all over the world 60 countries and figuring out what are you what are your decisions? What are your What are your questions? What are your operational needs? And have answered pretty much all of them it can be from transpiration to soil moisture to soil deficit to how long do I need to turn on my hose? How long do I need to turn on my valve for? Where am I seeing water deficits? Where am I seeing water leaks? Can I tell us something about my soil health can I forecast crop yield, you know, in growing in viticulture, of course, we're not always trying to maximize the soil moisture to the field capacity. We're sometimes doing deficit irrigation. You even need more precision on that and more frequency. And so we work a lot with the US Department of Agriculture. I've got colleagues at USDA, Martha Anderson, they'll acoustics and tell him they've been doing a lot of viticulture applications. And so they're very excited about Hydrosat and we've been working with them on our early adopter product and hoping to have the USDA be a direct feed from Hydrosat and as much as all our individual growers and collective so we're definitely excited to support agriculture, viticulture, and anyone who can use the data. We want to make sure everyone has the best crop yield and best production and withstands these increasing heatwaves droughts and climate change that is facing everyone.

 

Craig Macmillan  19:56 

So what kind of products does hydroset producing report it advise advising, like, what? What does it look like?

 

Joshua Fisher  20:03 

Yeah, it's a huge list. I mean, so we actually have, since we acquired IrriWatch, we're trying to distill it because I think, with IrriWatch, we inherited about, like 50 different products. So different. So you got this web portal, this API, you can go in on your phone, or on your laptop, or your tablet, or whatever, and load up your field. And you can get your reports, your maps, your tables, your graphs across your different variables, your your irrigation recommendations, we provide irrigation recommendations, things before 10 In the morning, every day, local time. So people know what to do. But you know, then that's like growers, then there's more like water managers who are trying to manage water for a region, we've got policymakers, we've got consultants, so it's we have got a lot of different users, we've got a government. So we've got a lot of different users with different needs. And we have applications for all these different users. We're focused on agriculture, although we have a lot of interest and buy in from, again, like I said, wildfire communities, and forestry and public health and so on. So we're supporting a lot of those communities as well with our data. But we have a lot more analytics information and services for the Agricultural Committee at this at this time.

 

Craig Macmillan  21:17 

I wanted to transition into that area of analytics. And related, you also are interested in modeling. I understand. To me, that's the Holy Grail, and also the Demon. of anyone who works around data. When I collect data, I've got maybe a great looking backward looking model. Fantastic. I tell you what has happened. Okay, great. Tell me what's going to happen. Josh, that's a little harder. And you are you are interested in this and work with this and which supercomputing Is that correct?

 

Joshua Fisher  21:48 

That's right. That's right. Yeah, I do a lot of our system modeling. And it started with evapotranspiration, right again, because we couldn't measure it. So I had to predict it. And we had a lot of different models starting from him in Monte Thornthwaite. And recently, Taylor. And then moving forward, about the time I was in school, the global community started developing Eddy covariance towers, flux towers. And so we had some of the first ones at Berkeley that were measuring evapotranspiration, you know, frequently and across, you know, an ecosystem. So, I was like, well, let's test the models there. So I was, you know, one of the first scientists to test these different evapotranspiration models, and we got it like a dozen or so tested at the number of reflex sights, and I installed sap flow sensors and measured a bunch of things about water to be able to predict the models, or predict, predict evapotranspiration. That got me into understanding the process really well in the mathematics and the predictive capabilities. And then when I moved into the satellite remote sensing realm, we couldn't measure evapotranspiration directly as a gas flux. But you know, we were measuring the temperature signal, which is directly related, we can measure soil moisture, we can measure meteorology, we can measure vegetation, phonology. And so these components start to go together to get out of Apple transpiration. Actually, we can measure evapotranspiration using kind of atmospheric layers. It's very coarse resolution. It's not particularly useful for our land applications, but useful for weather and things like that. That modeling continued into using satellite data as the inputs to those models. And then like I said, I thought I would leave evapotranspiration remote sensing behind me as I moved to England and worked on the climate model. So I got into earth system modeling, and being able to predict, you know, essentially climate change, and what's happening to the fate of the whole planet, not just this year, next year, but 20 years from now, 50 years from now, and at the end of the century, as climate change is really ramping up and we're looking at tipping points in their system. When do plants really start running out of water? When do they run out of nutrients? When are the temperature extremes so much that plants can't survive? And this was actually just a paper that we published last month in nature made the cover of nature, and we use eco stress to detect temperature limits that we're seeing in tropical rainforests right now that we're just seeing starting to exceed the critical temperature in which photosynthesis shuts down. So that got a lot of widespread news coverage. Now we can put this back into their system models and say, are their system models doing this correctly? Some of my volcanology work is actually linked to earth system models, because one of the big uncertainties and unknowns and the fate of the planet is what are the rainforests going to do with increasing co2 And normally, we would set up experiments and pump co2 on to ecosystems and see what's happened. But it's hard to do that and rainforests working with my volcanologist colleagues, we've discovered that volcanoes leak co2 out of their like flanks into the low lying forests. And there's a chain of volcanoes in Costa Rica that are doing this in the rainforests. So we're going in again, back into the jungle, this time, the jungles of the volcanoes, flying drones to sniff out those co2 leaks, flying Lidar and thermal hyperspectral to see what the rainforest responses are. So that all ecology that remote sensing ties back to their system modeling predictive capabilities.

 

Craig Macmillan  25:05 

One of the things I think is fascinating is here we have an ecosystem where we can collect data, we can the ground truth, that data or collect other variables to ground truth and connect, we can then develop like you said, some predictive modeling, and you go, what would a rainforest have to do with Cabernet Sauvignon? My answer is a lot. So where I want to steer things next, as a viticulturist. This is where I should say, the viticulture side of me. I'm very selfish. Not all viticulturist are many are giving open people, but I'm very selfish, and the only thing I care about is okay, what's happening with my vineyard? And what's that gonna look like? 10, 15 years from now, very hot topic right now in the in the wine industry is Wow, things are changing clearly. And so what kinds of changes Am I gonna have to make? Or can I make in terms of what plants I'm planting? Going forward? And I'm guessing that you probably are having some, some insights into plant response under these different conditions? Do you think that we're going to have some models or some ideas in the future about how, you know specific crops like vines might be modified, either in terms of species choice varieties choice or management techniques, or things like that? Is there is there some help for us here?

 

Joshua Fisher  26:18 

Yeah, we already have those, there's kind of two paths or two, two sides to this coin, when it comes to climate change, and viticulture. One is big scale, where can we grow grapes that we couldn't grow before? And to where are we no longer going to be able to grow grapes into the future? The second one is, you know, it's hard to pick up a move to move into a new place or to move out of an old place, what can we do under the changing temperature and changing water cycle and changing seasonal cycle? And so I think that's probably the more immediate pressing question to potentially some of your your listeners is what can we do now? And so, you know, we're working with like the USDA and testing out different seed varieties, and so on. And there's a lot of commercial companies that do to do that as well. And so how do we help? We're not doing seed varieties. We're not doing the genetics of it, although I've got colleagues at Chapman University who are doing that. But what we can do is say, all right, you've got 5, 10 different varieties of the same type of grape, how much water are they using, what's the temperature sensitivity, and not just in a greenhouse or a lab, but across the field. And you can't always get towers and drones everywhere. And you know, maybe you can, but there's local conditions are a little bit unusual. So let's go ahead and plant 10 experimental fields, or maybe you're a grower, and you have a couple fields that you're willing to try out some new varieties. And we can just tell you, yeah, they use less water, or we have also another product called Water Use Efficiency crop for drop in terms of how much carbon is being taken up relative to how much water is being used. And so we can tell you that variety was was pretty good. I think that's the main crux, we can also tell you other things that other people can tell you in terms of phonology, and in Greenup, and so on. I think that helps and dovetails with how I actually got on your podcast with my buddy and colleague, Professor Katie Gold at Cornell University, who does a lot of remote sensing on disease. And so there's diseases are changing with climate change as well. And so with Katie and me arm and arm across, you know, across the coasts, hitting the disease in hyperspectral, and the plant water stress temperature shifts of the thermal, we present a very powerful one, two punch against climate change as it starts to attack our fields and crops. In a more immediate term, we have like a crop yield crop forecast, you know, seasonal forecasts that helps growers understand what they're doing in terms of coming to market, you know, that's a little bit potentially less useful for viticulture, it's more for grain crops and you know, big kind of bulk crops, it's also useful for investors as well. So there's a lot of futures, a lot of crop investors, crop insurance, and so on. And so we can provide just, you know, more accurate forecasts from the existing forecasts, because we have better data on existing conditions and more, a deeper insight into what the plants are seeing doing and feeling and responding because of that temperature signal because of that thermal response.

 

Craig Macmillan  29:09 

That's really cool. And very exciting. And I'm very happy with it. You and Katie, other people are working on this because I think we've done a number of interviews in this area now over the years. And one thing that I have been really inspired by is that 15 years ago, this was kind of a glint in somebody's eye. And then 10 years ago, things were starting to happen. And then probably at least more than even more than five years ago, you'd go to any of the big meetings, and it's like, Hey, we got drones, we can fly your plane. Hey, we got planes, we can fly a plane and these beautiful pictures and stuff. And then suddenly, it actually getting more than five years ago then it was like look at all this NASA stuff. I was like, holy cow. This is taking it to a whole nother level in literally a whole nother level. And so I'm really excited about first I was excited about the data and I'm excited about how we're learning how to use it. And I think that's always been a challenge is We're pretty good at finding ways of collecting data. We're not always so great at figuring out how to use it can run out of time here. But the one thing on this topic that you would tell grape growers in particular, there was one thing that you would tell a grower, what would it be?

 

Joshua Fisher  30:16 

Yeah, if there was one thing I would tell a grape grower is that we're here to support you. And we are working on the technology to meet your needs and demands, the technology is available for you, by all means, reach out, you can Google me, email me, no problem. I'll hook you up some sample data, you know, see if it looks good. If you want to buy in great, if not, no worries, if you just want some advice, consulting, it's all about help. We're all on this ship together Planet Earth to get there. You know, it's all about collaborations and helping across the board.

 

Craig Macmillan  30:46 

Where can people find out more about you?

 

Joshua Fisher  30:48 

I've got a website, my own personal website, you can see all my publications and datasets and so on.

 

Craig Macmillan  30:54 

We will link to that.

 

Joshua Fisher  30:55 

JB Fisher dot org. You can Google me on Josh Fisher and Chapman or Joshua hydrostat. I'm on Twitter, try to tweet out all my papers are relevant papers and science findings in the literature. I'm on LinkedIn and I do meet blog posts on papers met once a quarter on medium. So we're trying to get out there and try to communicate Yeah, more than happy to help.

 

Craig Macmillan  31:17 

Sounds like you're easy to find my guest today. It was Joshua Fisher. He's Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Chapman University. And he's also the science lead for a company called Hydrosat. And we've been talking about things that are a new window, and I'm very excited about having that window opened in that window being opened wider and wider all the time. Josh, thanks for being a guest. This is great.

 

Joshua Fisher  31:39 

Thanks, Craig. And hopefully, your listeners found it interesting.

 

Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

Do you know where your food comes from?

“Food disconnect” is a term used to describe the average consumers lack of knowledge about where their food comes from and how it’s made.

When it comes to wine, most people only see the finished product: what’s in their glass.

Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values.

For sustainable wine brands, there’s yet another level to this disconnect:

• While consumers name food and beverage as one of the most important industries when it comes to sustainability, more than one in four US adults said they don't know what makes a product sustainable (Morning Consult, 2022).

This introduces an opportunity for sustainable winegrowers and winemakers. 

Sustainability Sells!

After Kathy Kelley and her colleagues at Penn State University learned about the environmental benefits of using cover crops under grapevines, they wondered if promoting this sustainable practice could be part of a marketing strategy to sell more wine.

When they tested this theory with real-world wine consumers, they found that 72% of the wine consumers surveyed were willing to pay a $1 surcharge to cover associated sustainable production costs, and 26% were even willing to pay a $2 surcharge! 

Get Specific

It’s important to note that for the participants in the study, simply hearing that a wine brand acted sustainably wasn’t enough – it was learning the importance of the specific sustainable practice that increased customers’ willingness to pay more for the wine.

“… We’re seeing a consumer group that wants to be educated and wants to know exactly what is going on with sustainable wine production,” Kathy says in a Penn State article summarizing her findings. “So, being descriptive about what it actually means to include cover crops in a vineyard is a way to be attractive to them.”

Sharing your sustainable story has many benefits. It can be used as a marketing strategy, it helps combat “food disconnect,” and it helps spread awareness of sustainable practices that protect and regenerate natural resources.
 

We are here to help you tell your customers how your brand protects natural and human resources with the Sustainable Story program.

This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. And it just got better with a new online course.  Go to the show notes, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story to sign up, download the worksheet, watch the videos, and you are ready to tell your Sustainable Story!   

Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team.

Resources:

• *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course ***
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• Sustainable Story | Print
• Sustainable Story | Electronic
• What's your Sustainable Story?
• Whitney Brownie | Get YOUR Sustainable Story Featured

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

When it comes to nutrition in your vineyard, you need to know the environment that your vineyard is planted in including mineral nutrition, soil microbes, nitrogen from rainwater, and nutrients or potentially salt from well water. Fritz Westover, Host of the Vineyard Underground Podcast and Founder of Virtual Viticulture Academy shares a big-picture approach to nutrient management that is practical for any grower. He covers:

• Why it is important to test tissue both at bloom and veraison
• How to take tissue samples
• When macro and micronutrient additions are most essential

If you are a long time Member of our organization then you probably remember Fritz from his days with Vineyard Team in 2013 and 2014. We are thrilled to have Fritz back on air with us for the third time. Plus, I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on his podcast, Vineyard Underground. Search for episode 034: Why Sustainability Certification Programs for Vineyards Matter – with Beth Vukmanic on your favorite podcast player to listen in. And we have that linked in the show notes.

Resources:

• 1/16/2024 Tailgate | Ag Order 4.0 Update
• 57: Wet Climate Viticulture
• 115: Examining Plant Nutrient Mobility with SAP Analysis
• 155: Sustainable Vineyard Management Across Different Climates
• 191: CropManage: Improving the Precision of Water and Fertilizer Inputs
• Fritz Westover Bio
• Healthy Soils Playlist
• The Science of Grapevines - Marcus Keller   
• Vineyard Underground Podcast
• Vineyard Underground Podcast - 016: Nitrogen Sources and Strategies for Application with Paul Crout
• Vineyard Underground Podcast - 034: Why Sustainability Certification Programs for Vineyards Matter – with Beth Vukmanic
• Virtual Viticulture Academy

Vineyard Team Programs:

• Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate
• SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  
• Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year
• Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace
• Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Get More

Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources.

Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.  

Transcript

Craig Macmillan  0:00 

Our guest today is Fritz Westover. He is a Viticulturist, who works around the United States. Especically the the south east and he is the host of the Vineyard Underground podcast, and also the founder of the Virtual Viticulture Academy. And today we're gonna talk about nutrient management. Thanks for being on the show.

 

Fritz Westover  0:20 

Hey, Craig, how you doing today? Good to talk to you and to see you because I get to see you on video while we make this recording.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:27 

You're back. This is another episode for you. Right?

 

Fritz Westover  0:29 

This will be episode number three with Sustainable Winegrowing. So I love coming back. And you know, as you know, I worked with then Vineayrd Team back in 2013, and 14. So, of course, I love what you guys are doing and fully support it.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:42 

Fantastic. So injury management in vineyards is today's topic. Can you give us a definition of what that means and why it's important?

 

Fritz Westover  0:51  

Yeah, and I'm not going to give you the textbook version though, as you know, Craig, I'm going to talk from just how I view it and how I see my growers viewing it that.

 

Craig Macmillan  0:58 

From the heart is that yeah,

 

Fritz Westover  1:00 

I speak about nutrient management from the heart here. In terms of vineyards, you know, we want to see our vines grow healthy. When you plant to vine in the ground, there's certain things in the soil, there's mineral nutrition, there's microbes that cycle nutrients in the soil. So you have kind of a baseline there, you can add things to it. But you have to know what's in the soil. First, we have rain that falls from the sky, hopefully, and hopefully when it needs to, and that has certain mineral nutrient content and nitrogen, things like that people don't count that sometimes nothing will make a plant or like and rainwater. And then if you're pumping water through well, there's different ions, caverns and ions that are in that water, whether it be something that's good, like nitrogen, or magnesium or potassium or something that's not good, like a salt, in large amounts. So there's there's things coming out of the pumping out of the ground on a property that go to vineyard. And then you know, there's things that we put as inputs through a spray program or fertilization program. But before you do that, if you're going to manage the nutrition in your vineyard, you need to know what the content is what where the nutrients are coming from, how the vines take them up. Are you irrigating? Or is it a dry farmed vineyard, and that will determine how much of that nutrition is available to the vine, right, because you can have nutrition in the soil. But during a drought, if the roots aren't actively growing, or if they're pulling away from the soil, they're just not taking it in. It's a very dynamic thing. Management is really just knowing how to read your plants, how to read the environmental conditions, and knowing what you have there and what your inputs are contributing in terms of mineral nutrition to your system as a whole.

 

Craig Macmillan  2:31 

What are some of the considerations then, that growers need to take into account when they're designing the fertilization program? Have you talked about where things come from? You've talked about what you need to look at. But how do you go about it.

 

Fritz Westover  2:43 

I work with several growers all around the southeastern United States and in other states as well through my online academy. So I really get to see a large profile of soil reports, plant tissue reports. And there's certain benchmark measurements we can take in the vineyard that can help us to understand how vines are taking up nutrients. So we can look at a soil test. And we can determine what nutrients are available, we can look at the pH and that will determine the different availability of certain nutrients. We can also take into account the plant tissue samples that we should be doing in the vineyard, whether it's a tissue analysis from a petal, a leaf blade, a whole leaf with petiole attached, which is what I'm using currently, there's more and more interest in SAP analysis. So there's all these different methods of looking at nutrition within an actively growing plant. It gives you the snapshot at best during a certain time of the season. And those are benchmarks. So we're looking at the plants to see kind of what's being taken up from the soil and from the environment and from the water that's being either falling from the sky or going through the irrigation. My best analogy for grape grower would be the VSP probably the most common training system is the VSP so you have the that's vertical sheet positioning, but I use it and say the visual, we look at the soil for moisture, we look at the plants for any signs of higher low vigor to determine usually, if nitrogen is needed in greater quantities, or for certainly for any nutritional deficiencies that show up visually on leaves like magnesium or potassium deficiency, things like that. We know what those symptoms look like, we can look them up easily. And then the P would be the plant tissue test. So I always think of the soil is kind of the bank account of what nutrients are available. And then the tissue test is telling you if your plant is making that ATM withdrawals, so to speak from the soil. And then the visual really just validates if everything is really working as well as that plant tissue test says because I don't know about you, Craig, but I've looked at plant tissue tests that say everything is within the normal range of nutrients, but the plant is stunted. And it could see that the concentration of the nutrients is good in that plant, but the quantity is limiting the growth and production of that vine and it's going to limit the yields in that case. Those are the considerations I look into but there's one one more thing that there are some rules of thumb, what we're taking out of the system. When we ship our grapes out of the vineyard into the winery, whether it's your winery or winery across the state somewhere across the country that is removing nutrients. So you're literally mining your soil and your environment for nutrients, you're putting them into a truck, you're moving them with the fruit, and then they're being made into bottles of wine and someone's drinking those nutrients and they don't get back into the vineyard, if that's what's happening. So, when creating a nutritional budget, a lot of growers will account for the tonnage or whatever measurement of fruit is removed. And there are some tables available. I know Dr. Marcus Keller of Washington State University, in his book on the science of grapevines publishes some of those, but the example would be an average of four pounds of nitrogen. For every tonne of fruit removed from the vineyard, if you do four tons an acre, that's about 16 pounds of nitrogen. So we start to think in these terms of, okay, I just removed 16 pounds with that four ton per acre crop. This is an example of course of an average number, it's really not that simple, because the soil might have three or 4% organic matter in it. And we know from every 1% of organic matter, we're getting x units of nitrogen that are developed and processed within the soil system itself. And so if your organic matter is high enough, you may actually generate enough nitrogen in the soil to replace the nitrogen that was moved out of the vineyard. And this is why growers might go year in and year out without applying some fertilizer, even though they're moving it out of the vineyard in the fruit.

 

You got a good healthy soil web happening there, you got the relationships that you want, and you're cycling stuff. And so the impact of that removal is less. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And cover cropping and whatnot.

 

Soil conditions, too. I mean, if the soil is dry in a drought condition, it's not really you're not gonna have a lot of activity, or if it's really hot, because it's been cleaned, cultivated. And you know, how does that affect the microbes that can then cycle those nutrients and convert organic matter into nitrogen and other other mineral nutrients?

 

Craig Macmillan  7:05 

I want to touch on something, something regarded this and that's timing. So like at the grade school science version that we learn is there's a plant, and it grows and things come up. And there's a plant. Yeah, and grapevines don't work that way. There's certain things that they'll take up at certain times of year, they need to have water, moving through the plant, different nutrients are important at different times of year. What do you recommend? What do you how do you manage that?

 

Fritz Westover  7:34 

Yeah. So you know, when I do a presentation on grapevine nutrition, there's this one slide that I go to from a study in Germany, and where they basically took plants apart at different times of the phenological steps throughout the year, whether pre bloom bloom, fruit set, version, and harvest, and they looked at the total mineral content of these nutrients. And they use that to determine what the demand of those nutrients were at different stages. And so what we see is that nitrogen and potassium sort of follow the same curve, where as you get into bloom, there's a spike in demand for nitrogen and potassium. And then after fruit set, it goes down a little, and then the roller coaster ride goes back up, and the demand goes back up in your veraison as your ripening fruit, you need more nitrogen, potassium, things like that. It's all part of the sugar production system. And then you look at also the quantities you know, nitrogen and potassium, are by far the macronutrients that are needed the most, and then something like magnesium. And we do see a lot of magnesium deficiency, east of the Rockies at many sites, it's needed, but not until after fruit set, really, that's where the bumps starts. So the bumps gonna start afterwards. And it's going to kind of gradually go up and down and up again towards veraison But the amount is not as, let's say the quantity that's needed is not as great as something like potassium. And you could do that for each nutrient and look at it to me that that triggers the kind of the benchmark of when we have to start applying fertilizer. And so the interesting thing about that is if I've got a vineyard, where we can put everything through the drip, irrigation and fertigation, we can wait until either right before the time of highest demand, or right at the time, and we can just slug it through the drip, right. If you don't have irrigation, you might be able to do foliar application, but that's not going to get a lot of nutrients into the vine like it will if you put it into the root system. So you'll you'll hear and I know we're going to discuss this as well, because we discussed it earlier that you know, dry farmed vineyards or vineyards in areas where it rains and they don't have irrigation, have to plan a little bit farther ahead. Because if you're going to put something like magnesium out or potassium, it needs to be worked into the soil with a rain event if you don't have to ration or cultivated in in some cases. So you can't wait until that perfect window. You've got to get it out ahead of time so that it makes its way down to the roots and it's available for uptake at that critical window that I was referring to before in the phenol logical stages.

 

Craig Macmillan  9:56 

Can I wait till I see a forecast that there's a storm coming and then get my material out? Or do I put it up earlier than then just kind of hope that it rains? I mean, how much time do I have?

 

Fritz Westover  10:08 

Yeah, that's a really great question to Craig. And so you don't want to answer every question with it depends, right? So you've got to get some concrete information for a grower to actually follow. So then you start thinking about...

 

Craig Macmillan  10:19 

There's nothing wrong with it depends.

 

Fritz Westover  10:21 

It's okay, as long as you follow up with, but this is what I would do, right. And that's what I like to say. So this is what I would do if nitrogen was the nutrient in question, if you put out especially an ammonia, nitrogen, something like that on the ground or something that is not bound up, like if compost, you have a more stable form of nitrogen that's in organic matter, if you have something like ammonium, it might be readily evaporated, or it's going to it's going to volatilize, and you'll lose it to the atmosphere. So you definitely want to get that out as soon as you can, right before the rain. So the rain can immediately move that nutrient into the soil. And that will secure it, so to speak, and stop the volatilization from occurring. If it's something like magnesium, really not as volatile, right. Or if it's something like phosphorus, or if you're putting out calcium in the form of lime, or gypsum, there's not going to be a lot of volatility. So you can put those types of products out farther ahead of the rain, and hope that the rain will eventually come and work them in. So I guess in that matter, depends on what you're applying. And you can, you can decide based on that, if you want to trust that forecast or not.

 

Craig Macmillan  11:28 

You know, I just started something, I interviewed somebody else recently, and they were working with underlying vegetation issues. It was fascinating to me because of the work that they were doing in there not necessarily chemical burn down, not necessarily inrow cultivation in the comment was it rains enough here that I can do whatever I want. But there's going to be plants growing there two days later, in your experience in parts of the country. And I would love to have some, you know, compare and contrast here. What do I need to do in terms of preparing that area, you know, around the root system, because I'm trying to get top to bottom right down to get in there. And then also, you mentioned system wide things. And so what do I need to do there to make that work?

 

Fritz Westover  12:12 

Let's cover the system wide. First, when I talk about system wide or make creating these, quote unquote, sea changes in the soil, you're not going to make a sea change the soil is the soil. It's got its own living breathing organisms in it. But let's say you were chronically deficient in calcium, or magnesium, right? We'll use those as two good examples. If you apply your calcium, whether it's lime, or magnesium in the form of dolomitic, lime, which is calcium with 10%, magnesium, great way to put magnesium and calcium in the soil to acidifying your soil like you would with a magnesium sulfate. Or if you're putting out a magnesium sulfate in a high pH, soil, anything that you're trying to put out to change the plant uptake. So let's say really high potassium uptake in your plant is undesirable to you for some reason, and you're getting magnesium deficiency. As a result, if we only put that magnesium or that calcium right at the base of the vine, you can only really change the the cation exchange or the base saturation of those cations right in that small area. And that's important because it's a major area of uptake. And this is something a lot of growers don't think about, even when you're dripping something through a system that biggest area of uptake is near the crown of the vine at the base of the root system. And feeder roots will take up stuff too. But that's where if you're going to put a one time slug, you know, it's got to be within 18 inches or so the trunk, but you still have roots, especially on older vines that are moving out into the row middles. Over the years, they get into the row middles. And so they're still getting access to that perhaps high level of potassium in that bass saturation or that cation exchange out there. So they can still kind of pull that up. So if you want to create a wider change and impacts the system as a whole, you're better off applying that product as a broadcast into the middle and under the vines. I have done that with magnesium when we're trying to compete with potassium, because we see magnesium magnesium deficiency, or also if we're aligning soil. So in eastern states, we have acid soil, parts of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, where I've worked, even in East Texas or north of that in Arkansas, depending on where you're at. You run into these acid soils, and we're talking like 4.5 ph. Yeah, so it is or like wine, right? Yeah, yeah. So we know that nutrients are not as available many nutrients like phosphorus is deficient boron, other cations are not as available. Due to that high hydrogen ion competition. We're going to add lime. Hopefully before the vineyard is planted. You do that before but I often go back and add maintenance applications of lime over the years as well within the vineyard system, and we do that over the whole field. We don't just do that in the rows where we're planting vines, because we want the vines to be encouraged to explore the soil and to mine, if you will, for nutrients outside of that immediate crown zone near the vine. Because eventually that will be depleted, your vines are going to keep growing and searching for these nutrients. So by doing a broadcast application, you create a soil that not only is more amendable, for roots to grow in, because acid soils are actually toxic to root tips that you get a high amount of available aluminum at 4.5 ph. And that will stop a root tip from growing. So if you want your roots to grow and expand, you don't want any chemical barriers, you don't want any physical barriers like compaction, you put something like that out before planting. So in Georgia where I work, very acidic soils, we will put out something around six tons per acre of the dolomitic lime before we plant some of the sites and then within two years, we're coming back with as much as two times per acre, because we're trying to to over time, bring that soil into maybe a 6.0 or 6.5 pH so that nutrients are just more available, so that we don't have to fertilize as much we don't have to put inputs into the soil. Right? We don't want to do that we don't have to cost money, and it could have environmental impacts.

 

Craig Macmillan  16:12 

While we're still on this, this area, you got pre planned, are you recommending that we shank materials in? Or are we incorporated in a disking pass? And then over time that moves down in? And then also, if I've got an established vineyard to incorporate these materials? Or to get these materials there? I mean, do I need to do a cultivation pass and then do a broadcast and then cultivate again to stir it in?

 

Fritz Westover  16:39 

Yeah, so these are all different methods that are used Craig and any grower out there who's developing a vineyard site in the near future or has done it recently, you'll hear conflicting opinions on the best way to do it. But what I like to do is break it down to how did the nutrients move in the soil environment? And how do I put them by the root where they're needed, and make sure they're not going to get washed away right away? So yes, if I'm starting a new site, we're going to look at the soil, we're going to determine what our amendments are going to be, let's say that the vineyard soil is low in phosphorus and need some line that to change the pH but also to increase calcium. And let's say it's a little bit low on potassium as well. Okay. So in that instance, if you just stir the soil up and put the lime in and fix the pH, that would be wonderful, because you've already made nutrient availability, so much better for that for the uptake of that plant root system. So that's good. That's the first step. But if then you go in and plant the vines, and you say, well, we needed phosphorus and potassium. And I know that new plants need nitrogen, so I'm going to take like a triple 10, or a triple 13, that's nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium at 10 to 13%. And I'm just gonna sprinkle three ounces around the vine. Well, how did those nutrients move down into the soil? Well, the first time it rains, or you irrigate, and it touches those granules, the first thing that moves down quickly through the soil, what we call the mass flow is the nitrogen. And so that's going to be immediately available. So the vines is gonna pick up nitrogen, it's gonna say, let's go, let's grow. The next level of infiltration would be the potassium, we know that potassium is somewhat moderately mobile in the mass flow, but it doesn't move as fast as the nitrogen. So with enough rainfall and frequent rainfall or irrigation, it could move down gradually and get to the root system, that phosphorus on the other hand, it's just going to sit there on the surface like a rock. And it might take years for it really to move effectively. And so if you know your, your soil needs something like phosphorus, and potassium, you might add the phosphorus, whatever form phosphorus, you're using rock phosphate, if you're organic, or PTO five or some, put that on the on the surface, and you amend it with the lime to get it down deep to where the roots are going to be planted to. So maybe it's 15 inches, for an example 30 centimeters, that's all they're ready for the roots. And then later, you can come in and topdress something like potassium, for your final cultivation, just to work it into the topsoil. So it's, it's at a better stage, and I'm giving you an ideal scenario, obviously. And then the nitrogen, you could go ahead and top dress later, or put your drip system or let the rain work it in right before the rain like we talked about with that nitrogen. And that way you're getting things right at the root where it's needed. And you're not doing it in phases where it gets nitrogen grows a lot and then doesn't have enough other stuff like potassium, magnesium or micronutrients to keep up with that growth. And that's where you see these deficiencies starting to set in.

 

Craig Macmillan  19:26 

Actually, that's a great kind of transition. You know, we talked about VSP and I think we do a lot of folks relies primarily upon visual and it's not simply the, you know, the tiger stripes in the leaf and that kind of a thing or the yellowing, but they're looking at how the crop set they're looking at when the sheets tipped start to quit. Because yeah, that's driven by water, but it's driven by by other resources to that kind of thing. Yeah. What can I do to quantify that? And how can I be kind of forward looking? I mean, you talked about removal. is a materials with harvest? So I know I'm I want to order some stuff, you know, but it's a long term kind of project.

 

Fritz Westover  20:07 

Yeah, it is. It is.

 

Craig Macmillan  20:08 

I mean, you walk vineyards with people, obviously. But then also you mentioned you see all these reports of it? What kinds of reports? Do you want to see what time of year? How do you put all that together?

 

Fritz Westover  20:19 

Right. The visual is really important. And the only risky run there is some of these nutrients don't show visually until it's too late. A lot of our micronutrients are really important, as you know, Craig, for fruit set, and pollination, and fertilization rather, boron, zinc, molendinum, copper, all these things. So if you do your plant tissue test at bloom, which is the first time you would do it during the season, it you're already in bloom. So you're late to add that micronutrient, right. So then some growers will say, Well, I'm just going to put up this prophylactic kind of micronutrients, spray two or three weeks before bloom just to make sure they have what they need. And you can do that. But do you really need to. So I really rely on taking the bloom sample, because it is kind of like your progress report. It tells you, you know, how you're doing for the season. And you know, are you destined for an A plus a B minus by the time you get to the end of the season, because you still have a chance to get things in gear and improve your grade, right. So that bloom time sample of what I do is whole leaf sample with blade and petiole attached, some people just do petioles, separate the petiole and the blade, I've had very good success and consistent results with blade and petiole attached. I also, when I have an issue where there's, you know, maybe we're doing intensive fertilization, or I've got a deficiency, I might sometimes separate the petiole from the whole leaf. And that way, I can look at both reports and have two numbers to kind of look at instead of one. But the ranges are different for a blade versus petioles. So you definitely want to look at those. And I tell my growers to just go to my website, and you can download the, the standards there and look at them, because you don't need a consultant to just see what's out of balance, you can look at a table, I do that at bloom, and that gives me the report card. But the second time I do it is that version. And that's your report card for the season, so to speak. So by the time you get to version, you're at entering your maximum stress time, if you take the plant tissue sample too far after version, a lot of the nutrients have moved into the fruit. And the tissue sometimes is already suffering from the seasonal wear and tear. So it can give you these false ideas that you're really low and then you put out too much fertilizer. At bloom, we take a leaf next to a inflorescence or flower, because that is a representative leaf. And then at version, we go about seven leaves down from a shoot tip that has not been hedged or altered. And that is what's considered a representative leaf at that stage of growth. And that's the report card. Now the report card is really important. And I tell my growers if you can only afford or have time to do one sample, do the one version and get the final report card because that's the one that we then use for the next season to say okay, boron was a little low zinc was a little low. So we're going to find some boron and zinc to put into the system either through the drip or through a foliar spray before bloom, to make sure that we don't have issues with fruit set. So that's how we use that if we wait for bloom, it's a little late to make the change. So getting those two phases is really key for me. And then of course, like you said, being in the vineyard observing growth, looking for signs of deficiency, some things do show, you can clearly see nitrogen as pale leaves. Boron is actually important for nitrogen assimilation. So you could have what you think is adequate boron or nitrogen in your program. But if boron is missing, you might not get the assimilation and the you know, the proper use of the boron, or the nitrogen rather within the vines. So there's, you know, things to look for, to give you clues as well. So when I see something visual, sometimes magnesium deficiency can look a lot like potassium deficiency, it's on the order of interveinal, the potassium tends to be more beginning around the margin or outside edge of the leaf. So I always tell my growers, let's send in a sample, it's like 20 bucks, right? Let's just verify it with a lab report before we put the wrong thing down and make the problem way worse, right.

 

Craig Macmillan  24:10 

When we're doing this, what are some of the most difficult decisions, some of the biggest obstacles to being successful here? And I'm talking about everything in terms of like you're getting good information, getting picking the right to formulations or the right products, the right individual minerals, and then getting into the plan. Are there regional differences that you've seen? Or are there kind of obstacles that everybody kind of faces?

 

Fritz Westover  24:37 

There's definitely regional issues. You know, I can say that across the board. And this state over here, like I'll say, Georgia, we see magnesium and boron and nitrogen are our three biggest deficiencies consistently in those soils. You go to California, and certain areas where I work there we'd see it's either nitrogen or potassium that are low and sometimes zinc. And then if I go to the high planes in Texas, it's usually nitrogen and zinc, are my lowest. And sometimes, and then I go to the hill country of Texas, where it's cacareous soil. And we see that iron deficiency becomes an issue because it's just that high pH really ties it up, growers will sometimes put a lot of zinc down in the soil, but then we have to be mindful of the competition of certain nutrients with each other, because too much zinc can compete with phosphorus for uptake and vice versa. And then, as I mentioned already before, the pH of the soil varies greatly from one region to the next. And that's why getting the amendments and getting the soil in a pH that's, you know, ideally at that 6.5, for greens, right? That's kind of like, you know, you're good. From seven,

 

Craig Macmillan  25:40 

Have you ever receive a site that was like, exactly 6.5.

 

Fritz Westover  25:45 

I have I have because I've looked at it for their soil reports, I've seen a few but no, usually we're saying we need to add a little or, you know, seven is fine, we can deal with it, we'll put a different rootstock that's better under you know, calcareous soil. You know, I didn't mention that and really emphasize that enough, I talked about plant tissue sampling, and visual evaluation, I don't do soil sampling annually with most of my vineyards, because their soils just aren't changing that much, unless they're really doing heavy amendments of something that that sea change, they're trying to go for it. So we'll do this about once every three years, and just compare them. And so I think the most important thing any grower can do, and this is how I work with it with kind of my long term growers I've been with for 10 years, you know, we have a soil sample every three years. So we can compare what the trend is, over those years, if we see potassium is going down. Well, we know that's one of the greatest Nutrients taken out of the system of the soil with fruit that's much higher than nitrogen much, much, much higher than magnesium or phosphorus. So you're literally mining your soil for potassium, well, I have sites where we have high potassium, and we're trying to get more magnesium in there. So I almost never put potassium back in the soil, I'm happily mining it out of the soil. And that's going to be totally different than maybe a vineyard in California where potassium availability is just not as good or as high. We're kind of looking at it that way. And same thing with plant tissue test, you can really see sometimes more volatile fluctuation in plant tissue tests from year to year. And that's where you have to start asking the question, okay, how much rainfall did we have? Was there good soil moisture, I've run into problems where irrigated vineyards, we hit a drought, and you have normally rained during the season, like let's say, in West Texas, or parts of Arizona, where I work, there's rainfall during the monsoon season. So you go into the winter with a soil profile that's nice and full. And then in the spring, you come out and you really have full access to the whole mineral nutrient profile of the soil and the roots grow throughout the whole soil, then all of a sudden, you have a drought for year two. And this has happened in my West Texas growers, areas where those roots that are in the row, middle, all of a sudden are not able to pull up anything from the soil. So they're shrinking. And as they shrink, they pull away from the soil as a strategy to minimize water loss. And so you're not getting the nutrients that are available out there. So we have to consider that and sometimes increase our fertilizer levels based on the fact that we're losing access to the soil nutrients. And the best way to do that is to take the plant tissue test, and find out if that's really happening, but the plant tissue test can fluctuate. And I guess my point is understanding how the environmental conditions right in and around are leading up to that plant tissue test. really affected nutrient content is important. So we don't have that. Like I'll say it again, that knee jerk reaction like oh my gosh, nitrogen is low, let's put 50 pounds per acre out which is you know, ridiculously high. Yeah, maybe just needs to rain or you need to irrigate more, and that will fix the problem.

 

Craig Macmillan  28:41 

Yeah, what is one thing, the one thing that you would tell growers on this topic, one piece of advice or insight or anything.

 

Fritz Westover  28:50 

In addition to doing your soil sampling every few years, and your plant tissue tissue every year at bloom at veraison and some growers may even do it more often or some growers may prefer to do SAP analysis on a more frequent basis. That's all good and well. Just do it at your regular intervals, and get your long term data so you can see trends and changes. Then take some time to really understand number one, as we mentioned before, with the demand of the plant for each nutrient, okay, when is nitrogen, potassium versus magnesium or other micronutrients? When are they most essential for uptake into the vine? And how could you put them into the ground or into the system or onto the foliage in a method that is going to get that nutrient to the vine in time for its high demand, you need to know that vine needs it, because if it doesn't need it, you don't need to put it in there. And then finally understand how the nutrients move within the soil. That was the other thing we covered. So I had a great podcast on the vineyard underground with Paul Crout who works in the Central Coast a good friend of mine, he's worked with video team to Episode 16 We did a deep dive into Vine nutrition and availability in different forms of nitrogen and how some are immediately available and some are more slow release available. So I won't get into all that now. But understanding the availability of that fertilizer formulation that you're using is really critical. Because that's going to tell you not not only when you're going to apply it, how far ahead of the demand for the vine, but what method you're going to use to apply it. Will it be better off put into drip, apply to the soil? Or maybe as a foliar application.

 

Craig Macmillan  30:25 

Where can people find out more about you?

 

Fritz Westover  30:27 

Ok me? Oh, thanks, Craig.

 

Craig Macmillan  30:29 

Oh, little Oh, me. Oh, me.

 

Fritz Westover  30:31 

Well, you can find me chatting like I am with you on the Vineyard Underground podcast, the vineyardundergroundpodcast.com Or just look for that, wherever you stream podcast on Spotify or for Apple podcast, or if you would like to download some of the past presentations I've done on nutrition management, or the charts to determine the critical levels for nutrients have many of those that are free and available to the public go to virtualviticultureacademy.com The academy is where I teach grape growing and have a membership in there where I advise growers on a week to week basis.

 

Craig Macmillan  31:05 

That's awesome. Our guest today has been Fritz Westover. He is a viticulturist. He's the host of the vineyard underground podcast. He's also the founder of a really great resource. You definitely need to know about this. If you're a grower, and that's the Virtual Viticulture Academy. He's not kidding, a lot of resources there and really good quality resources as well. So thanks for being on the podcast.

 

Fritz Westover  31:27 

Hey, thanks, Craig. You guys are an amazing resource to the industry to and you have tons of free and available information. Keep doing the great things that you're doing. I'm a listener, so I'm a fan. It's really privileged to be on here my friend.

 

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