Sustainable Winegrowing

If irrigation efficiency is a goal of yours, a new predictive model may make scheduling easier in the future. José Manuel Mirás Avalos, Tenured Scientist at Misión Biológica de Galicia in the Spanish Nation Research Council (CSIC) (MBG-CSIC) in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) is working on a Decision Support System (DSS) prototype for irrigation and fertilization of winegrapes. This computer model accounts for multiple variables including weather, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, soil type, plant spacing, bud break, variety, and wine quality goals to help farmers make more informed irrigation decisions throughout the growing season.

Resources:

• 191: CropManage: Improving the Precision of Water and Fertilizer Inputs
• 195: Hydrological Mapping: A Vital Component of Effective Water Conservation Plans
• 213: High Resolution Data from Space Helps Farmers Plan for Climate Change
• Decision Support System for Seasonal Irrigation and Nitrogen Fertilization
• Decision support system for selecting the rootstock, irrigation regime and nitrogen fertilization in winemaking vineyards: WANUGRAPE4.0
• Effects of the Annual Nitrogen Fertilization Rate on Vine Performance and Grape Quality for Winemaking: Insights from a Meta-Analysis
• Fiabilidad de la monitorización del contenido de agua del suelo para determinar el estado hídrico de la vid. ("Reliability of monitoring soil water content to determine the water status of the vine") -in Spanish
• José Manuel Mirás Avalos on ResearchGate:
• José Manuel Mirás Avalos On LinkedIn

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 José Manuel Mirás Avalos. He is tenured scientists at the Misión Biológica de Galicia and the Center for Spanish Research Council. Thanks for being on the podcast.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 0:10

Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a great pleasure for me.

Craig Macmillan 0:14

We were interested in talking to you because we saw that you've been working on a pretty interesting type of technology with it with a whole group of folks around the idea of decision support systems, particularly around irrigation, fertilization for grapes, possibly even root stock selection, when I read, first of all, for our audience, what exactly is a decision support system?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 0:34

The idea behind that decision support system is to provide a within one package in this case is a computer platform in which we use different kinds of information coming from real data coming from models that that are implemented within this platform to provide the users the end users with information to make certain practices easier, or more rational. In the vineyard. In this case, we were centered in this particular case in irrigation and fertilization. And there was another it's not exactly a decision support system is more like decisions help decision making for the rootstock which is a independent from the, from the irrigation fertilization system.

Craig Macmillan 1:27

How does the grower use this kind of tool so I'm trying to make decisions about irrigating my vineyard and how did the tool play into it?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 1:36

At the moment is just a prototype, the computer program or the DSS for being short? The DSS Decision Support System can give some information very easy to obtain such as the geographical coordinates the plant spacings location about the nearest weather station for instance, and that information and the algorithm which is inside this platform in the user will receive an information okay for this conditions over this growing season, you will have to use that much amount of irrigation to obtain given in this case, we use an indicator of grape vine water status the user can modulate within a wide array of values. So, you can decide okay, I want that, on average, my grapevines in this particular danger go between these and these values of of water potential. And then from this decision support system says okay, in that case, you must follow these instructions that is to get that much irrigation for obtaining full genes. Or you can use less irrigation in order to obtain a given quality parameter in that case was soluble sugars in the grapes.

Craig Macmillan 2:59

How's that algorithm developed? Your modeling is a predictive model, basically, you're saying. The vine is going to respond a certain way over time. How is how is that done?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 3:10

We've capitalized on previous works from other research groups. And I said that that this work is not my work is I work for in collaboration with several research institutions in Spain with people that have a strong expertise, viticulture, in grapevine physiology, we capitalize on that, on that knowledge in order to model soil water balance, and adapted to vineyards in this case by using a proxy of the grapevine architecture in order to model vegetative growth over the growing season. So with that, we modulate the evapotranspiration of the vineyard. And from that we calculate soil moisture, according to weather that and using data from experiments carried out here in Spain, with seven grapevine varieties located in different regions of the country, let's say correlate soil water content with a measure of grapevine water status in this case was a stem water potential, which is a measure which is considered here in Europe. Well, in the States, there are some kinds of schools that refer other other types of measuring grape vine water status but in this case here in Spain, A, we proved in a previous work that stem water potential is a modality of great buying water status indicator, which works best for irrigation purposes.

The work that you're basing this on the research that's been done, was it done specifically for developing this model? Are you able to take work that's been done for other purpose And then put it all together to get the algorithm that you want?

It was basically the second option that that you have mentioned, we have extensive experience working on irrigation in vineyard. So we have several, we participated in several experiments concerning different irrigation protocols within the vine. So we let's say capitalize those data from those experiments. And also perform it a couple of experiences during the course of the project, which led to the development of this decision support system.

Craig Macmillan 5:35

Obviously, there's a lot of variation placed to place region to region. And so how do you account for that?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 5:41

This is a nice question, because it was the most difficult part.

Craig Macmillan 5:45

Yeah, I would imagine Yeah,

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 5:47

For developing this. For accounting this of course, we have weather records from different stations located in different regions of the country, which are close to the vineyards, we use for validating this this model. But we also took into account soil properties such as texture, organic matter, which also vary a lot from region to region, we added two different equations depending on if the soil is calcareous or nor calcareouse, because the hydraulic properties of the soil would be right in case of high calcium carbonate content. But these are the main the main aspects, but there is a parameter within the model that also arise depending on the on the variety, we can imagine this parameter as the threshold of soil water content, until which the given variety of grapevine begins to show signs of water stress. Unfortunately, we could not make a lot of measurements to obtain a wider range of of values for this parameter. According to the data that we have for five varieties, it was very similar, independently of the of the region in which the vineyard is located. So it's more dependent on the variety itself than on the on the location. These are the three main aspects that allow us for four plus eight capturing the variability within within the regions.

Craig Macmillan 7:20

If I was using such a tool, I would give my location that will tell me a lot about what region I'm in, it'll tell me some things. Then you mentioned we put in like the density, the spacing, because that's going to have to what to do with the total leaf area per hectare? Basically, variety, you'd put in varieties as well.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 7:38

Yes, but for accounting for a variety, we also asked, they use it too, to provide their date of bud break. Because it's different depending on the region and also on the variety.

Craig Macmillan 7:51

Okay, so they'll tell me about the season, we're talking about, like season long recommendations. So at the beginning of the season, I would say okay, this is what I'm shooting for. And I would actually put in this is the the vine water status that I would like this is the lead potential I'd like to see. And then it'll say, okay, based on the historical weather, and based on all these other factors, we believe that applying this amount of water would really have that result eventually.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 8:18

That is how it works right now planning to adopt it. But we need help from some company or some people who is expert on computer science, we are planning to develop a tool with the aid of some computer science guys or programmers that allow us to divide the growing season in, let's say, to flowering or flower into venison. Verasion to harvest for instance, on the other hand, using four stages, for instance, ranges of water potentials were tabulated more or less. And the objectives are for the wine producing end user, let's say we'll have the curve that is produced by the model, but in this case, divided into four stages and with the theoretical curve that we should have in order to produce a certain type of wine. So we will be able to say ahead or behind the limit. During this specific stage of the growing season. Suppose you have to apply more water or you should not apply water.

Craig Macmillan 9:35

There's a lot a lot of different ways of trying to achieve this. And that's why this one seems to be kind of a new approach. Even if you're in the development stage. It's still a very intriguing concept and how it might be how it might be applied. And tell me more about how do you actually fit these different pieces together because you got work in a vineyard in one region and work in another you got weather information. You found some way correlating these things with the outcome that you're interested in, which is the water potential.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 10:04

It was kind of difficult but not not so much as as at a first glance, it would be within a soil water balance you have your result is the soil water content at any specific date. But in order to get to that, you need to know the soil water content, let's say the previous day, but you also have already rainfall, you calculate transpiration of the values, the evaporation from the soil is just putting those pieces together that make the thing work. It's It's not so difficult, it's kind of intriguing too, because all these these parts have their equations in the middle to get to them. But in the end is just fit a soil water balance model with with the data from the different, let's say inputs that you have.

Craig Macmillan 10:54

And essentially you as your career actually, I've looked at some of the other things you've done, you do find good fits, you can take multiple variables, this very complicated world. And when you kind of put it all together, you can start to get a picture, you can actually get some fixes to some other variable

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 11:15

Sometimes is easier than some others. So we tried also to model genes, that was very more, much more difficult. We got two nice results. But there was a lot of variation, depending on on climate and in also on the irrigation management. When we validated this other model for dealing with data from from Spain, if I remember correctly, there were poor regions within Spain. It worked well for some regions, but it didn't work for for some others, we didn't get to the solution to get a unique model for all the regions for for GLD. Also, because we combine a deal with dry matter partitioning within the plant.

Craig Macmillan 12:06

Oh, interesting.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 12:07

Yes. And we did that in collaboration with with American professional.

Craig Macmillan 12:14

Who's that?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 12:15

Alan Luxo from the from Cornell University.

Craig Macmillan 12:18

Oh, fantastic. Cool.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 12:20

Yes, because at that moment in time, my supervisor have made it previously researcher stay in at Cornell University with this professor, he began with the with modeling. In that case, it was apple trees. And we adapted that model to vineyards.

Craig Macmillan 12:40

The cross crop work, it's fascinating because you know, grape vines are a very unusual, kind of unique plant cropping world. But they do have a lot in common with other, you know, Woody perennial crops, other orchard crops. And if we can take the research that's done across multiple areas and use it that's really exciting, increases the efficiency and increases the depth of what we can do, which I really, really like, how you validate this model, where you have people try it, and then you'll come out and you'll take measurements or have them take measurements.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 13:14

For developing the model, we employ that it's a restricted set of that of data, in order to the few parameters that are inside the construction of the model. But we have met so many experiments within the consortium, that we were working on this decision support systems. So we have finally had a set of more than 100 scenarios to validate the model with data collected from the field. In some cases, we have both soil water content and stem water potential. In some others, we only have a stem water potential. So we tested the model against those data. In many cases it worked well. In a few instances, it didn't work well, because of we detected several particularities within the vineyards we use to test the modeling in a given region. For instance, if is you want me to give any an example a specific example, in a region in western Spain southwest, Southwest or Spain, we have vineyard that the field data said that during the summer, it was not as water stress, as the model is saying that it was a fact is a that was occurring is that the vineyard was very close to a river. So it is it is likely that the water table rose within those periods, or that the vine roots were able to reach that water table and the moel wasn't able to capture that. That feature.

Craig Macmillan 14:54

No, but I would imagine if I'm using a tool like that, and I know my sight like can take that kind of thing into account could say, why would a little bit of experience you can say I always know that this recommendation is a little bit higher than what I actually need. But by using that I can say, well, then I'm going to use this number stead. That's kind of the idea. Now, do you see this technology leading to increases in efficiency, reduced water use or just more efficient water use?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 15:22

I like to seem that, that this is a step forward to auto efficient water use in vineyards. But maybe at this moment is, too let's say it's a scope is too broad. And we have to work on in order to be more specific, or I don't know the word in English.

Craig Macmillan 15:43

Particular.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 15:44

The idea is that to be able from this from this, let's say decision to port that we have to build more detailed decision support system that allows allows end users to manage irrigation on a daily or we'll be on a weekly basis, but it's still some work to do.

Craig Macmillan 16:07

Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is this is early days, and this tool isn't isn't out yet. So we wanted to talk about the the concept, which is fascinating, which always reminds me of something I noticed when I was doing the research, you mentioned a consortium, when you look up these topics, you'll hit pages that have many, many different organizations listed at the bottom. And I believe you just moved around between a couple that are part of the same group or consortium is what it looks like, how does this work you've got you've got different agencies, you have different educational institutions, you have different departments have different parts of government that are collaborating, they're working together, they're coordinating what they do, is that how this works.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 16:44

In his particular case, this project came from a network of collaboration, which was funded by the the Spanish government. And that involved, I don't remember how many but maybe 12 institutions that work on different aspects of viticulture, in order to increase the impact of their research that is really done. Because sometimes, I don't know if this happens in the States. But in Spain, we have the problem that many times we work isolated once from the others, and then our research doesn't reach the level of impact that the funding agencies desire. So in order to, to overcome this weakness, the main funding agency for research here in Spain, asks for creating networks of specific topics, between several research institutes, maybe research institutes, but also universities, and in some cases, private companies, but this later is less frequent.

Craig Macmillan 17:58

Interesting. Yeah, it's interesting there's there's more kind of a multi organizational collaboration here in the United States all the time, we've noticed for a particular topic, and some folks are working on this and some folks are kind of working on this and and coming back with things from different regions or different aspects, but they can all be brought into kind of a coordinated outcome for growers is very, very, very, very practical and very exciting. Is there one thing that you would say to a grower regarding this idea of decision support systems, especially around things like irrigation or fertilizers, or one piece of advice or something that they should be excited about or one reason why they might want to consider using such a tool when it becomes available.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 18:39

Nowadays, the number of decision support system is increasing. There are many companies which are developing tools or recycling other tools coming from other let's say, organizations must be aware that the decision support system generally, which is those that I know that are available on the market are general not specific for a given crop. In order to obtain the best results is is better to have a specific decision support system. So that's for one for the one part. And the second part is that in the end, these are tools to help making decisions, but one cannot disregard the experience of the grower. Of course, in the end these these kind of decision support systems might must be used as a tool. If you allow me to give a recent experience that I have working with a private company, not in the case of vineyards, it was developing a general platform for aiding in irrigation decisions. The final aim that they have is to automate the process of irrigation this can be a little bit dangerous, because if you if you let a model perform the whole process of ollecting that data, make a decision and then execute that decision in the whole process, they can be accumulation of errors that may give a final response, which is not the desired one.

Craig Macmillan 20:15

What you're getting out and you've touched on and what makes sense is it's a decision support. It's not decision, it's not making a decision for you. It's saying, This is what the model says. And you say, Yeah, okay, I hadn't thought of that, or, okay, that works. Or, okay, let's try that. It's not just executing it. I mean, you know, I can imagine I can imagine a world where you would have a decision system that would take all this into account, and then it would open the irrigation valves automatically. And that may not be where we really want to be headed. The human is always going to be the arbiter, that the human is going to be the decision maker, this is about providing the best information to help make a good decision. That's it. And I think that that's really, really crucial, because I am familiar with another variety of other systems. So we look at all this information. And the readings might say, Okay, this is the direction to go, or this is this is what you should do or that, but the grower will say, That's fine for this variety on this root stock on this soil. Absolutely. That works. For me, that makes sense. But we know for a fact that this variety on this root stock on this soil is not going to work because of the experience with all the details. And I've had some very interesting conversations with folks where I'm looking at the database stuff and saying, Hey, these vines look fine, there's plenty of water, the water potential looks great. There's water in the soil, everything seems to be fine. And the grower says, Well, we're going to irrigate. And I'm like, that seems surprising to me. And they say, Well, under this condition, this variety will collapse out of nowhere, when it hits a certain threshold, and I want to make sure we don't get anywhere near that threshold. So that that information was useful for making decisions in one scenario, they make a slightly different decision in another scenario, and literally those two spots are across the road from each other. A lot of similarities between the two but the grower has that has that experience to say yeah, but under certain conditions, this is what's going to happen. And so again, it's about having the best information to make the best choice, but the human is the one that's going to make the call the human is never gonna go away. And I would be really fascinated once you have once this stuff becomes available. I would love to see some research on how people use it, how people use the technology. Where can people find out more about you?

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 22:37

I have profiling on research gate which is a social network for researchers there you can find my All my publications in a no the top is a working over my ground and also on LinkedIn.

Craig Macmillan 22:52

Fantastic. Yep, I found you very easily and you have a lot on there and a whole variety of other topics that we will have don't have time to get to today, but it's really cool work. So our guest today has been José Manuel Mirás Avalos. He is a scientist at Misión Biológica de Galicia in the Spanish Nation Research Council. Spain with the center Spanish Research Council was the one well, thanks for being here. This is really interesting stuff.

José Manuel Mirás Avalos 23:13

Thank you very much, Craig. It was a pleasure for me to talk to you

Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

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Resources:

• *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course ***
• Apply for SIP Certified Wine
• Marketing Tips eNewsletter
• Sustainable Story | Print
• Sustainable Story | Electronic
• What's your Sustainable Story?

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

While the tradition of wine is still important to how we connect with customers, the way that we communicate has changed. David Avrin, President of The Customer Experience Advantage explains why brands must have an omnichannel approach to their customer communication. Identify which channels are most valuable to your business by defining your core audience. Then find out what they watch, what they read, and where they recreate. Use these insights to harness the technology that your customers use whether its snail mail or TikTok. David reminds us that there is no shame in not being comfortable with technology but there is no excuse to not work with a technology native who does understand the platforms that best reach your audience.

Resources:

• 82: Getting to Know Your Wine Customer
• 85: It's Time for New Wine Sales Strategies
• 98: Selling Wine in Non-Traditional Channels
• 161: Use Storytelling to Sell More Wine
• David Avrin Website
• David Avrin Books
• David Avrin LinkedIn
• David Avrin YouTube
• Social Media: Facebook | Instagram

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 David Avrin. He is president of the customer experience advantage. Today we're going to talk about a little bit about the business side, and how that applies sustainability in the wine industry. Thanks for being on the podcast.

David Arvin 0:14

Thank you very much for having me.

Craig Macmillan 0:16

Now, we've talked about wineries vineyards, but their businesses. In your mind, what are some of the important things that winery and vineyard owners might think about in terms of making their companies sustainable into the future?

David Arvin 0:29

Yeah, it's interesting, because I think the industry certainly has been around for a very long time. And when it goes back to Biblical times, and there's there's certain ways that vineyard owners, those who are in the business suppliers, and others, this is how we do business, this is how it's done. But what's interesting is for the rest of us, who are the wine consumers, our lives have changed. And it's actually for everybody, right? How we connect, and share and grow our own businesses, and our changing expectations for access and immediacy, and flexibility, all of that has changed. So I think part of future proofing your business is striking that balance between the traditions, that, that go into making a great vintage wine, and how we interact and how we engage as consumers in the b2b side with distributors and others as well. So many of those mechanisms have changed. So I think what's really important is for people to be very clear on the technologies that are expected, and the ones that facilitate great communication in great relationships. I saw a study the other day, and the gist of it said that, that companies today are expected to deploy technology that allows their customers to do business with them, not from home, from anywhere, at any time, I don't expect that I can get my hair cut at four o'clock in the morning, but I expect that I can make an appointment to do so or cancel that appointment. So I think it's a very unique industry, because the traditions and what is tried and true and effective are so important to maintain, so important to pass along from generation to generation, but how we connect and communicate and deliver those services, those products, all of that has changed. We need to stay on the front end of that.

Craig Macmillan 2:09

One of the attractions of wine, I think, in my experience with customers, is this traditional aspect this is this is something mystical about it. And how do we maintain that kind of magical quality to a product, when we need to engage with the customer in more electronic ways or more distant ways, and maybe without as much touch?

David Arvin 2:31

I think it's just the business part of it, that it requires that kind of an expeditious, ease of use kind of a methodology are really virtual wine tastings unless you're actually tasting wine in different locations and connecting electronically.

Craig Macmillan 2:46

And that's happened.

David Arvin 2:47

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We did it during COVID. We had so many double dates with my wife and some other couples and stuff, and just opportunity just over a glass of wine and some dinner, to just hang out with each other. It's one of things we learned during the pandemic that was possible. But I think when I've talked about the technology, I think it really is purely just how do we do business, my, my mantra, my new book is all about how to be how to become ridiculously easy to do business with. And so I think fortunately for the industry, I think the traditions still hold true. I think in person, wine tastings and wine enjoys and pairings at restaurants, I think a lot of that will pretty much stay the same. I think it's we're always want to stay on the forefront of that. But it's the the communication, the distribution, the marketing. There are so many new amazing mechanisms now to reach our target market, which is shifting, of course, we can talk about that. But it's using the mechanisms that they use. And so we can be traditional, but we certainly don't want to be seen as stodgy or antiquated, or old school. And so I think there's there's a really wonderful balance that in the terminus is fully intentional, because there's so much that balance comes into this industry. But I think in terms of our communication and our marketing and our in person enjoyment. I think that part's all very important.

Craig Macmillan 4:07

He mentioned the generational change. And that's an issue for the wine business, the generation that really brought us to where we are today, their children, and then possibly their grandchildren are coming of age, they're coming of age. And the question is whether that love of the wine product has been passed on generationally or not. One thing that I learned from looking at some of your other talks and stuff was, it's about and you mentioned it was the ease of connection and the ease of doing business and convenience.

David Arvin 4:40

I think on the business side is that I think there's a great opportunity for the industry to become not just present and relevant but preferable to a new generation as well. It's not like there isn't a long history with wine. As I said, going back to Biblical times. They have survived so well over the years. But what's different is each generation How we communicate, and how we connect and reach out, all of that has changed. I think wine is uniquely positioned to capitalize on that new as long as these generations come to fruition that Gen X, the Gen Y, the Gen Z, and all of them as well, because I think there's a natural progression of maturity in the individual. It's like there's a space, I think, between the parties. And I remember when party was a noun, now it is a verb. And then of course, the the more traditional and stodgy. I think wine is uniquely placed in there. And so while the young people are, they're going to play drinking games at 18, to 23, 24, you know, playing quarters with beer, the opportunity when when it's time to grow up, we grab a glass of wine, and we connect together. So you might have party and the stodgy I think the middle is social. And I think wine has a phenomenal opportunity right now to be positioned as the social drinker, we're not drinking to get drunk. We're not drinking to be to be sophisticated in in our smoking jackets with a high ball and of whiskey. But I think wine lends itself phenomenally to visuals, as well. And so I think if you're going to compare it to industries that have survived and thrived in that transition, I think coffee is probably the best. I mean, we grew up our parents, you go down, look for 15 cents, get a cup of joe. Well, now everybody's enjoying coffee, it's become more profitable, it's become more prevalent, because they've looked at a couple of things. One is the social aspect. And Starbucks had a big role to play in how we look at that experiential thing. But it's also a grab and go kind of an item, being able to recognize how easy do we do that and take that to the office. And that industry has done it very well. No, wine, of course, is something different. We don't necessarily take to the office, but the visuals of people who have come of age socializing, and not just drunk at a frat party, I think there's wonderful opportunities in terms of our marketing to say, when you're when you finally grown up, this is how we connect, this is how we socialize. And the other part of it, I think, is the packaging. And this part has been really fun for us because we are of the mind of so many, that when we get invited to a gathering, we always come with a bottle of wine. What's interesting is talking to others that one of the primary drivers. And this really takes us back to like 50 60, 70s was the emergence of clever and attractive packaging. It's less important today in other industries. But I think it's more important in the wine industry. The clever names, the clever packaging, so many people I've talked to say, I just thought this bottle looks so cool. And that's the one that they bring, right. That's not the bottle we tend to open up we like to display because there's so much creativity in that the elegant yesteryear of wine was a very elegant, labelled today. They're whimsical, they're fanciful, they're, they're tongue in cheek, and everything from the 99 crimes that you can scan and get a little story about them to Menage a Trios, which, which, you know, gives people a little bit of a smile when you realize the the inference, I think is such an exciting industry right now. I think the biggest population bubble in history is coming of age, and the perfect target. And then we look at the social how they communicate as well. Whether it's Instagram, or tick tock, for others, as well short form social short form video, it lends itself so well, two people connecting and gathering and enjoying life and sharing a bottle of wine.

Craig Macmillan 8:23

I'm a dinosaur, I just turned 55. And I work sometimes in the tasting room, the winery where I work now Niner Wine Estates, as time went on, it became very clear that I was not able to communicate with my coworkers, because they were talking about Instagram, they were using Twitter, they were Venmoing everything like I couldn't even be involved in social gatherings without getting Venmo on my phone. It's a here's 20 bucks and like, I don't want that. No, I wanted my Venmo account. Yeah, so one of them actually offered to become my social media consultant. And that is still continued to this day. So how can we make it easy for the consumer to interact with winery, if the consumer is not either tech savvy or in my case doesn't want to be tech savvy.

David Arvin 9:11

The term that you're going to hear so often which is which is omni channel. And omni channel means no matter how they want to communicate with you give them that opportunity. I mean, you talk about Venmo, for example, and I speak to audiences around the world, I write books on all of this. And one of the things I talk about in the new book that I'm writing right now, which is called ridiculously easy to do business with one of the chapters is be ridiculously easy to pay, you know, somebody wants to pay you through Venmo Okay, and this is scary for people with very traditional businesses. And I'm like, oh my god, somebody's trying to give you money, say yes. As you had recognized sometimes it takes a younger person who is a technology native who is immersed in all of this to help you translate and help you implement. There is no shame in not being comfortable with some of the new social media platforms or mechanisms. There is no excuse to not work with somebody who is and just because it might be a little bit scary. And for I mean, if you're old, I'm ancient, my kids run circles around me are all of our kids where we've got a Brady Bunch, they're all sort of 20 to 29. And I've got two of them who do digital marketing and digital media for a living. I wrote books if you can, if you're watching the video behind me, I wrote books, and I couldn't keep up today. But what we do is we surround ourselves, we outsource we, we hand off to people who are comfortable with those mechanisms. So when I talked before up omni channel, we're all going to have people, we're going to have customers from 21 to 85 or above, they want to communicate with you differently, they want to access the product differently, some might be able to do sort of online video introductions, a tour of the winery, some things that look very experiential, and some are very, very comfortable using the app and doing things online ordering. And there's another segment that needs to talk to a person for for those in business, those who are listening to this podcast, you don't have to be all things to all people. But you have to be very clear of who your audience is, and who your future audience is. And make sure that you have the processes in place for them to reach you by phone, by text message. However, that might be an even if it's just the b2b aspect of your business and dealing with vendors and others as well. No matter how they want to communicate, try and make that available. We look at the lifetime value of our customers, both on the consumer side and also on the distribution side. being ridiculously easy to do business with is a competitive advantage today. And all of this is with a recognition that you have to be good at what you do, right? This isn't in lieu of a quality product, don't take your eye off the ball. But what's different today, what's different post pandemic is that our mechanisms for how do we communicate or pay or order or reorder have got to be simple and streamlined. And then when we look at the audience is how do they where are they getting their information if you want to really target those, those 21 to 30 year olds posting clever, engaging intent and enticing videos on Tik Tok or Instagram, it's not fluff, it's business. If that's where they get their information, you need to be there. You need to be there effective.

Craig Macmillan 12:11

And that raises another question. I think it's tough for a lot of businesses just in general, how do you keep up on all this stuff? As there's new applications? There's new channels, there's new preferences, that's another one Pay Pal was the thing. So yeah, Pay Pal? I'm cool PayPal Venmo I'd never heard of it until somebody demanded that as a payment. If I'm the general manager of a business or if I'm an executive, how do I stay on top of this?

David Arvin 12:34

Um, first of all, is the recognition you don't have to do everything. Because it is overwhelming. It's 100%. You don't have to be on every social media platform. You don't have to take every form of payment. You don't have to take Bitcoin, I would advise against it. But it doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to be a student of business be a lifelong learner of business. And there's no shortage of content available online. That tells you here the the the hottest trends, how do millennials or Gen Z prefer to communicate what is their greatest influence into what they buy? When and why just read I mean, there's videos on on online every day, part of my responsibility to my clients and my audiences that I serve is I need to be very, very current. There was somebody who had booked me to to keynote a conference and that's my my primary business as a keynote speaker. And it was six months away. And they asked if I would send they were finalizing things if I would send my slide deck. And I said, I'm happy to send my slide deck but understand it's not what I'm going to present to you in six months, because things will change between now and that whether you have a second generation who's moving up within your business, make sure that you have people of all ages in the room as you discuss strategy. I think to answer your question, just be a student of this there is no shortage go on YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world only second to Google, and it's owned by Google. But YouTube is a wonderful way to have just looking at stories and news clips and others about what are the latest trends. How are they predominantly buying? Where does Gen Z get most of their information? Right? I saw some of the day was fascinating that Disney was suffering in a significant way just because the youngest of our people are getting most of their videos and content online now on YouTube and others and it's in lieu of that it's not like they did anything wrong. Bed Bath and Beyond goes bankrupt not because they did a bad job. It's that we had changed and how we buy and how we connect we just get it delivered to our house through Amazon or something else. So I for me, I think it's it's a it's an exciting thing. It's a positive thing to be a constant learner, stay up to date and relieve yourself of the pressure to do everything. Just look who is my core audience? What do they watch? What do they read? Where do they recreate and congregate and dine and connect and are we there? And are we there in a way that is is not just present and not overly salesy. Persuasive and social and big the big rule in social media is don't sell share.

Craig Macmillan 15:04

I was reading something this morning, which reminded me of a topic that we had talked about internally in our winery. And that is the the idea of story. You just mentioned that storytelling. We also know that attention spans are short. And we know that a lot of us technology is set up for no more than a minute, two minutes, three minutes, how do I tell a really compelling story in a short amount of time? there's

David Arvin 15:28

Well, two ways to do it. One is a story, a traditional story. And that might be through an article, it might be through a longer form video, it tells us a situation or something about a Thanksgiving dinner, and something that emotional happens. And you see that on the table. Most of story today, in terms of short form, video format, is literally very short. It can be a 22nd, Instagram reel, with pictures and pictures and pictures and lots of lots of music. I think the best example, if you think and look at how pharmaceutical companies are doing their commercials today, for Jardiance, or whatever those might be, whether it's a musical number, how often you see seniors at a farmers market, or at a kid's birthday party, but they're showing them connecting, and being being social, and family. And they just put these scenarios, you don't really know what the whole story is. But it puts it within the context as opposed to somebody holding up the product. And talking about the product. It's what do we want people to feel and I think that's the greatest opportunity for wine today, when looking at Gen Y millennials, or Gen Z is is is showing them in the in the kinds of situations that makes sense. It's laughter It's friendship, it's it's connecting, but it's also post fraternity party, it's post red solo cup, I could see a great ad campaign when you're ready to graduate from the red solo cup to a nice glass of Chardonnay, right? But that doesn't mean that somebody's 60 years old, it can be young and sophisticated. And the romance and all of that I think the stories can be told in short form, through the visuals, you know, and the music and all the things that and once again, here's here's a great thing about about YouTube, you can go on YouTube and search, how do you use YouTube? And you'll see a million videos, how do you create Instagram reels that capture the attention or look for others within your industry don't copy but emulate you know, which are the ones that get engagement and why I think it's an exciting thing to become a student of this. And I've learned so much from my kids who are no longer kids. My oldest daughter works for the number one social media channel on the planet. And they post videos and they get between 40 and 50 million views on their videos in the first 24 hours. Wow. And so what I'm learning from them is astonishing. And did I mention I wrote books on this?

Craig Macmillan 15:29

You said you've got one out right now what is that?

David Arvin 17:22

Yeah, well, but my new subject, and it's not really new. But I realized about seven or eight years ago because I talked about marketing and branding for most of my career, what are the what are the words we use that best describe and differentiate what we do in the marketplace. And I came to the recognition probably seven or eight years ago that we had changed in such a substantial way because of social proof that what we say about ourselves, is not unimportant, but it's not nearly important, today's what other people say about us. And it's Yelp and TripAdvisor and rotten tomatoes, and Glassdoor and of course all of the your own social media sites. So I might that's what led to my research would lead to my book, why customers leave and how to win them back is one of the points of frustration, friction in the process, unnecessary delays and, and lack of convenience for certain things. My whole business changed. And so all of my work and my research and my speaking and my books are around the central theme that in a marketplace where everybody's good. The winners are the ones who are ridiculously easy to do business with.

Craig Macmillan 18:56

I think you just answered the question, but what is the one thing you'd recommend?

David Arvin 19:00

There's two aspects Well, once the business aspect, and the other one is the marketing. So I think in terms of internal process, you have to be able to replicate what we're seeing in a broader marketplace. You have to be able to reach somebody, if somebody's yelling into the phone agent, real person real person, you're doing something wrong, right doesn't mean we can staff 24 hours but we're learning we can learn from Uber and Amazon and Domino's and others as well in terms of how do they use the mobile technology to make it super easy to reach someone to ask a question to reorder, make sure you have an off ramp so they can talk to a real person. That's the ridiculously easy walk your customers journey. Are there too many steps? How long is your contracts, we're seeing companies reducing their contracts and things that are really relevant and important. Be easy to work with your distributors and your vendors and others as well. And then of course on the marketing side is just recognize who not only your buyers are today, but your future buyers. Beware they are speaking language that's persuasive, authentic for them as well. And I think this this is one in industry and I speak to industries that are really struggling. I think the sky's the limit for the wine industry.

Craig Macmillan 20:05

So where can people find out more about you?

David Arvin 20:08

You find me online. My name is David Averin AVRIN, I'm on all social media on some of them. It's the real David AVRIN. That's a whole cat fish for another day. But you can look me up at Davidavrin.com or just google music videos as well. And as we had said, Before I speak and I consult. I love talking business. I'm a fan of business and I'm very optimistic about where we are post pandemic.

Craig Macmillan 20:32

Fantastic. Hey, we gotta go. Thanks for being on the podcast. David. Our guest today was David Avrin, president of the customer experience advantage

Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai

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

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 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

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• 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.

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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:

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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

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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 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

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