Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/744696
www.goodfruit.com GOOD FRUIT GROWER NOVEMBER 2016 27 The winery bottles 40,000 cases of wine each year, purchasing grapes from off-site. However, Vargas man- ages only the Adelsheim acreage. Vargas is known in Oregon for testing and tinkering with new technology. He was one of the first in the area to experiment with thermal, or hot air, treatments on grapes. He grew up on an Environmental Protection Agency research farm where his father worked and first studied civil engineering before returning to agriculture. He purchased the drone for himself, but Seattle sensor and analytics company MicaSense issued him the cam- era to test whether he could use it to guide his decisions about where to pick and when, as well as troubleshoot problems related to fertilizers, irrigation and pests. His ultimate goal is to use the images taken from the air to measure chlorophyll development, note when it begins to drop off, connect that to a corresponding slowdown in sugar development, determine if his fruit is mature and send pickers out to harvest in specific spots. Connecting all those dots is a big question mark, he said. "Whether we can get it so good that winemakers will trust this." Even large growers have reservations. "I think that the technology just isn't there yet," said Jenn Smithyman, precision agriculture specialist for Ste. Michelle Wine Estates in Prosser, Washington. So much of drone technology, though exciting and developing rapidly, still is yet to come for tree fruit and wine grapes due to limitations of imagery indexed from multispectral cameras, such as the Sequoia camera and most others currently mounted on drones. Vargas views his drone work as paving the way for that future. "What I feel like I'm doing is prepping for the next generation of sensors," he said. Some in the drone imagery field suggested mixing drone imagery with ground-based methods, such as mounting a camera to a Gator and taking pictures as it drives down the rows. Others suspect more advanced hyperspectral sensors will provide the next step to make drones more useful.