Ray Smith: Dairy still has growth potential despite flat export outlook
Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) Director General Ray Smith believes there is potential for an increase in dairy farming in New Zealand.
Cropsy has been awarded $534,000 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, called You know I can’t harvest your Ghost Vines: Vineyard-scale monitoring of unproductive vines.
Cropsy Head of Product and Innovation Dr Gareth Hill says 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.
“These vines receive all the labour, water, and other vineyard inputs that other vines do without contributing to the overall productivity of the vineyard.”
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, says Gareth. “We are building up a ‘patient history’ of all the vines in a vineyard.”
