How Drone Software is Impacting the Wine Industry

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. 

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.

We often see drones used to plan vine locations, irrigation patterns, and canopy management. However, by far the most common use case is identifying diseased plants. Illnesses such as leaf roll, red blotch, and flavescence doree can be identified using drone data and swiftly removed from the vineyard to prevent spreading. In a pilot program in partnership with the Moldovan, Swedish, and U.S. governments, flavescence doree detection improved by 85% when using drones.

Technology like DroneDeploy’s Thermal Live Map further assists by assessing damage after fires or pipe bursts. In the past, this information could only be gathered after the event had occurred. But with drone technology, these incidents can be predicted and avoided, allowing owners to be proactive rather than reactive.