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eKo Case Studies – San Francisco Chronicle

Wireless System Can Detect Water Level In Soil

Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, September 1, 2008

(08-31) 15:50 PDT -- On a rolling hillside planted with row upon row of Cabernet grapes, viticulturist Jason Cole waxes eloquent about the elusive notion of terroir, a term French farmers use to describe the je ne sais quoi of crops harvested in any given locale.

San Francisco Chronicle, StageCoach vineyard

"Grapes, chocolates, coffee, these are all incredibly good at soaking up their environments and spitting them out in their fruits," said Cole, who oversees the preening and pampering of more than 500 acres of vines planted at the Stagecoach Vineyard in Napa County.

That vineyard is a test bed for a new wireless sensing technology that measures soil wetness, wind speed, temperature and humidity to take the statistical pulse of the vineyard's microclimates to help determine how often and how much to irrigate.

The system being tested at Stagecoach was developed by Crossbow Technology, a privately held, 90-person San Jose company that has created inertial guidance sensors for the aviation industry and researched the use of wireless sensor networks for the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The sensors that Cole is using at Stagecoach Vineyard represent one manifestation of a broader phenomenon called precision agriculture - the attempt to tailor the cultivation of large stretches of land so that the smallest possible subsection of a farm gets special but automated attention.

In the Midwest, with its amber waves of grain, precision agriculture has been synonymous with huge tractors equipped with global positioning systems to keep the rows straight, for instance. But in California, the land of fruits, nuts and other specialty crops, precision agriculture has been expressed in technologies such as Cole's efforts to use wireless sensors to compute terroir.

"The way that growers for many years decided whether it was time to water was they stuck their thumb in the ground," said Robert Robinson, vice president for Crossbow's wireless sensor division.

The basic field kit that Crossbow released earlier this year, priced at $3,359, consists of three sensing nodes that feed data collected in the field through an electronic gateway into what is essentially a Web page that can be viewed from any Internet-connected device. Crossbow says that basic configuration can divine the microclimate of sites as varied as a 4-acre plot of land in hilly and varied terrains such as Napa and 20 acres in the flatter, homogeneous Central Valley. Additional kits can extend the sensing network, wirelessly and indefinitely, over hill and dale.

Moisture sensors
Kneeling alongside a vine at Stagecoach Vineyard, Cole explained how the system, in addition to measuring temperature and humidity with above-ground sensors, sticks a virtual thumb deep into the soil in the form of two moisture sensors, one at a depth of 1 foot and the other at 3 feet.

"The whole point is to monitor what the roots are experiencing," Cole said. "Watering grapes is one of the most important factors to wine quality. You want to stress the vines in order to condense the flavor into smaller berries." …

… But at Stagecoach Vineyard, where cachet is central to the business plan, the cost of wireless sensing technology is hardly a barrier to the pursuit of quality. "We're trying to grasp the terroir, but you'll always be grasping, you'll never have it all," Cole said.

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Stagecoach Vineyards is testing new soil sensors that use telemetry to provide information about soil water in a more precise way than existing technology.
(Kim Komenich / The Chronicle)

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