Cropsy targets ‘Ghost Vines’ with new grant

New Zealand agritech start-up Cropsy Technologies is leading a $1.3 million SFF Futures/AGMARDT co-funded project to help growers identify and replace ‘Ghost Vines’.

Founded in 2019, Cropsy is a New Zealand-based start-up with a unique and scalable AI-enabled vision system for crop monitoring.

It has been awarded a $534k project grant through the Ministry for Primary Industries’ (MPI’s) Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures (SFF Futures) fund and a $200k AGMARDT Agribusiness Innovation grant to lead the project titled ‘You know I can’t harvest your Ghost Vines: Vineyard-scale monitoring of unproductive vines’.

“The project will develop tools to help growers understand the health and productivity of every vine in their vineyards in order to identify missing, dead, dying or otherwise unproductive grapevines,” says Cropsy’s Head of Product & Innovation Dr Gareth Hill.

“These vines receive all the labour, water, and other vineyard inputs that other vines do without contributing to the overall productivity of the vineyard. For all intents and purposes these vines are either missing or may as well be, which is why we call them ‘Ghost Vines’.”

Dr Hill says that ghost vines pose a hidden threat to the sustainability of the industry, both environmentally through inefficient land use and financially through lost production and avoidable vineyard expansion. “There are over 40,000 hectares of New Zealand vineyards with many tens-of-millions of vines. Monitoring the health and productivity of this number of vines reliably and scalably right now is simply impossible.”

Cropsy’s current vision system can measure the current state of grapevines. By also measuring and analysing the state of every vine and its neighbours over time, the Ghost Vines project will enable the diagnosis of declining productivity and disease at the earliest possible stage.

The two-year project is a collaboration with Pernod Ricard Winemakers, Indevin Group, Cloudy Bay Vineyards, and viticultural consultancy Fantail Consulting.

MPI’s Director of Investment Programmes Steve Penno says this innovation is unprecedented in New Zealand vineyards. “The technology-based and data-driven services developed through this project will enable the wine industry to manage their vineyards in a way that’s not currently possible and has the potential to lift productivity significantly – that’s a very exciting prospect.”