By Laura Reiley
On a tranquil stretch of Cornell’s experimental vineyard in Portland, New York, the hum of sensors and whirring of drones overhead signal a new era of agriculture. Here, at the Cornell Lake Erie Research and Extension Laboratory (CLEREL), the vineyard is becoming the university’s first living laboratory of precision, autonomy and sustainability, supporting the grape industry in New York and Pennsylvania.
“There is a lot of environmental variation on a farm,” said Terry Bates, director of CLEREL. “But it used to be you’d set machines at a particular rate and just go, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. We’ve started to get into precision viticulture, using ag sensors, soil sensors and canopy sensors in order to spatially map the variability in the vineyard.”
The farm draws from a new kind of digital toolkit. At the heart of this transformation is Efficient Vineyard (MyEV), a free, web-based platform developed by Bates and software designer Nick Gunner, the founder of Orbitist who started a doctoral program in Yu Jiang’s lab in 2024. MyEV, funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, turns complex spatial data into clear, actionable maps. Growers can sketch their farm layouts, import data from special sensors or just their smartphones, clean and visualize the data, and transform it into management “prescription maps” to treat their crops at variable rates.
With MyEV, traditional vineyard tasks are guided by data rather than guesswork. Farmers can now, from their desktops or phones, flag spots needing more or less fertilizer, identify pruning needs, and map block-level differences in their crops with surgical precision.
“MyEV does five things,” Bates said. “It imports data, cleans it up, interpolates it and makes a map, translates the map into a viticulture information map and then uses that in a prescription for vineyard management. I’m building tools for growers.”
Source : cornell.edu