How satellites are helping farmers adapt to global warming
When to harvest is one of the most crucial decisions a winemaker can make. Too early, and the result is bitter. Too late, and it's overly sweet. It's a delicate balance—one that's increasingly being upended by the climate crisis.
In France, global warming has been wreaking havoc on this ancient equation for some time. Wine-growing regions across the country have seen seasons truncated—the harvest date in the Châteauneuf-de-Pape appellation, one of the most prized, has moved up almost three weeks since 1960. Simultaneously, plant diseases are appearing in regions that have never seen them before, rain patterns are changing and the heat that helped speed the harvest in some places is now drying out vines in others.
To acclimate, the old ways are increasingly being replaced by the new. In this case, granular data aimed at tracking the progress and health of vines in a fast-warming environment. Satellite technology, according to startups such as Ticinum Aerospace and TerraNIS, is being used by vintners to harvest the right grapes at the right moment.
“Sometimes producers don't collect data on grapes, or they do but it's not stored in an easy way, or they don't know which plots they collected samples from,” said Daniele De Vecchi, project manager at Ticinum Aerospace for Saturnalia, a data platform for evaluating vintner crops. “Now the wine industry can make decisions based on data. It's not so romantic, but I think it's the only way to move forward.”
Marc Tondriaux added that more French growers are joining in. He's president and founder of Terra NIS, a company that provides agricultural data based on satellite and drone imagery. “Just ten years ago, the key customers for these applications were mostly in Bordeaux,” Tondriaux
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