
Photo Credit: San Francisco Chronicle
Traditionally, winemaking is a manual effort. Seasonal workers, often quickly briefed, inspect grapes by hand to determine the health of the plant. With this method, checking 1 hectare of land usually takes about a week to complete. Using a drone, this same task can be performed at a speed of 1 hectare per minute with 95% accuracy.Â
Even compared to more expensive airplane surveillance and satellite imaging, drones consistently outperform. While the average resolution for satellite images is 2 meters, drones’ are 2.5 centimeters because of how close they can fly to the canopy. With a plethora of highly-specific data, winemakers can make better-informed decisions about their crops and troubleshoot problems quantitatively.