Precision Agriculture for Vineyards: Challenges and Solutions

The strong competitiveness involved in wine production, mainly driven by the aggressive economic policies led by emergent production areas, leaves the use of advanced technologies as the only resource to make production in traditional areas viable and sustainable. Among the possibilities offered by current technology, the set of techniques known as Precision Agriculture probably provides the most effective way to assure the long-term survival of Mediterranean vineyards. However, despite the great interest and gradual acceptance of this methodology, its actual implementation rate by local producers is too low and in most cases totally absent, relegating its use to government researchers and universities. The main reasons for this low implementation rates are technical complexity, low long-term reliability, additional investment with unsure returns, and especially the intricacies involved in the retrieval and interpretation of field data by producers illiterate in information technologies. This paper introduces a simplified architecture to promote the early adoption of this technology, allowing the decoupling of reliability problems in global positioning errors and local perception failures to provide individual solutions to each individual subsystem. Finally, this approach proposes the standardization of crop information through two-dimensional field maps represented in the Local Tangent Plane coordinate system, with a user-selected origin and a working space divided into regular cells of dimensions also chosen by individual producers. This site-specific management system was successfully tested in a traditional vineyard to build vegetation maps, which were eventually related to grape yield and several quality parameters that provided information on the enological potential of the field.