Read this first! As agricultural consultants in California, irrigation consulting during the growing season is our bread and butter. A lot of times, especially in vineyards with lighter soils where I recommend short and frequent irrigations, I know my desired schedule amounts to a tall order. Not everyone can feasibly do two hours, three times a week. No matter what’s best for the vines, I have to work with a human irrigator, who is still going to turn the valve on at 5 pm and turn it off at 7 am the next day. In a lot of cases, this amounts to a vineyard that is both over- and under-watered: the 14-hour irrigation percolated past the rootzone in under 3 hours and the rest of the week (after the root zone water was depleted) the soil was dry as a bone. So, I’m happy to see so much interest these days in valve automation. I’m also apprehensive because I’ve automated valves and it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not any bullet. It’s a useful tool t

This month, Congress (barely) passed the Inflation Reduction Act, known colloquially as "The Climate Bill." This bill puts an unprecedented $369 billion towards reducing carbon emissions and investing in domestic energy production and manufacturing. A big slice of this is ear-marked for agriculture. How much you ask? Let's see... $4 billion is included specifically for drought-assistance for the West and the Colorado River Basin via the Bureau of Reclamation.  $14 billion is going to support rural electric cooperatives' transition to cleaner energy and help farmers invest in renewable/more-efficient energy. This is the single largest investment in home-grown biofuels...ever.  $5 billion is going to protect communities from wildfires and combat the climate crisis through climate-smart forestry.  $25 million is going towards climate-smart ag and soil health innovations. Some of this can be a little nebulous, but one very clear point is that $20 billi

February 16th: Pinot Noir is already bursting at this Russian River Vineyard It's been a little toasty for February. It looks like we're off to an early start this season...again...and with that a particularly dangerous frost season.  If you haven't noticed, it's still pretty hard to get stuff. Frost systems are no exception. If you don't want to be camped out next to your fans this spring, now is the time to order your frost alert system. Set thresholds, get phone call alerts, and keep track of your data.  Contact loni@advancedvit.com to discuss the best solution for your vineyard. What can the EQIP grant do for you? A lot of you may have missed out on SWEEP this year. The EQIP grant can pick up where SWEEP left off, helping to cover soil probes, flowmeters, and weather stations. That's just the tip of the iceberg! What about rotating cover crops, or brush-management? Owl boxes? There's so much this program can do. Check out this full intervi

The following is an excerpt from a recent blogpost. Read the full article here. I was lucky this past week to sit down with Brooke Pippi, an agricultural engineer with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to talk about the EQIP Program and how it can help farmers in the U.S. with their conservation projects. This is a long one, but read up! If you’ve got a problem or a project idea, EQIP could provide you with funding to make that happen…and ahem, if that project happens to be vineyard related, AV can help out too…just sayin’ (photo: a weather station like this one would make a good project that EQIP can help pay for). What Is EQIP and How Does It Work? So, EQIP stands for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and it’s a financial assistance program to put conservation practices on the ground.  EQIP is designed to address on-farm resource concerns that producers have. We’re available for any agricultural producer, to come into th

If there is a project in your mind and you need a spark to get started, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) is available to grant financial assistance.  There are opportunities for qualified applicants of federal funding for vineyard projects that demonstrate a conservation benefit available through the USDA NRCS Petaluma Field Office. Projects often include (but are not limited to): irrigation system control and automation, soil moisture monitoring, flow meters and weather station implementations. If you have a vineyard sensing and/or automation project in mind, AV will help build project specifications and install/support the system once accepted. We want to see funding go towards vineyards in the North Coast.  Email paul@advancedvit.com or call us at (707) 540-2704 to discuss potential projects or find out more information about this federal funding opportunity.