Rob Agnew: Celebrated for sharing the science

The Plant & Food Research Marlborough climate expert has been reading, recording and disseminating weather records for the wine industry for nearly three decades, offering insights into patterns, phenology and disease prevention. He’ll deftly dig out decades-old data whenever it’s required, and act as a harbinger of each season’s progress.

“He is the ‘go to’ person if you want to know about the weather in Marlborough and how it is likely to be affecting our agricultural and horticultural crops,” said Dr Mike Trought when presenting his longtime colleague with the 2022 Marlborough Research Centre (MRC) Award in late September. “Or how much rain we have had, or how we are doing in the national sunshine stakes, or how many frosts we have had, and the extent to which climate change may be affecting the long-term weather.”

Speaking at the official opening of The New Zealand Wine Centre - Te Pokapū Wāina o Aotearoa, Mike called it an “understatement” to say Rob is central to the success of research in Marlborough. “To achieve this, Rob has been totally committed to maintaining a network of weather stations around the region for a long time – no easy task when a spider can cause them to turn off.”

Minutes before I talk to Rob, on a Friday in October, VineFacts arrives in my mailbox like clockwork, the 711th weekly edition since the services began (as VineFax) in 1997. Across the country this potent newsletter is the grapegrowers’ go-to for phenology and disease insights, growing degree days, rain and evapotranspiration summaries, and statistical comparisons with previous seasons. It also provides valuable predictions of flowering, véraison and harvest dates for Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc for 31 monitored blocks across six wine regions.

But if it hadn’t been for Dargaville, New Zealand’s wine industry might have lost its most vigilant data keeper. Rob grew up in Blenheim, then shot off to Lincoln University for tertiary studies, emerging with a degree in agricultural science, a focus on dairy science and farm management, and a likely career as a farm advisor. A few short-term contracts ensued, including six months at Lincoln’s Biological Husbandry Unit, before Rob was offered a job in Dargaville in the early 1980s.

He and his new bride Lynne decided that travel appealed more, and the couple set off for nearly three years living and working in the United Kingdom. In late 1985, when Lynne was pregnant, they decided to return to Rob’s hometown, and by 1986 he had a temporary contract at the MRC, working for Mike. The contract was renewed repeatedly, until two years in, when Mike’s boss said he had to let Rob go. “My response was ‘if you want to sack him, you will have to come and tell him yourself ’,” Mike told the audience at the award’s presentation. “He didn’t come, and so, as they say, the rest is history.” Now, 36 years after his three-month term began, Rob is one of the longest serving members of the MRC and Plant & Food team.

Rob notes that it’s not fashionable to stay in jobs for that long these days. “But different people have different natures, and my nature is not to strive to climb a career ladder.” Instead he has steadily worked to support his fellow researchers and to disseminate science to winegrowers and to the wider public, quoted in at least 144 Marlborough Express articles since 2009.

VineFacts has been a key part of his work, evolving over the years to provide vital information to growers, allowing them to better plan for disease management, vineyard work and harvest requirements. It’s all quite apt, given the Scottish arm of Rob’s family carries the motto concilio non impetu, loosely translated as ‘by planning, not by rashness’.

VineFax – the ultimate example of concilio non impetu – came out of a disease management programme developed with Dr Rengasamy Balasubramaniam (Bala) in the mid-1990s, with a steering committee chaired by Ivan Sutherland, who at that stage was Cloudy Bay Viticulturist and is now an MRC trustee. “You told me I should send this out to the industry, but you never told me when to stop,” Rob said to Ivan at the presentation. “I am still awaiting further instructions, 26 years later.”

The programme worked with a small group of early wine companies, monitoring disease on vineyards with the aim of moving away from calendar-based spraying. Rob says Marlborough spray programmes in those early years were adopted from Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay, where heavier schedules were required. Despite the lower risk of botrytis and powdery mildew in Marlborough, he recalls at least one vineyard putting on 25 sprays in a season.

The Bacchus botrytis risk model was developed and VineFax tapped into its findings to advise growers when to spray, effectively cutting the number of sprays in half, says Rob. When the project ended, the partner growers asked for VineFax to continue as a paid service, and it extended out to others wanting to opt in. As faxes became outdated, VineFacts, as it then became known, was more relevant than ever, and by 2004 they were using focus vineyards in Marlborough to record and report on phenology. Rob says this has built an invaluable data set over nearly 20 years, while noting that the French have been doing that for more than a century.

Long term data and phenology modelling are powerful tools in helping winegrowers plan. “Knowing in advance when you can put sprays on, or when flowering is going to be, or véraison or harvest. It gives them a heads’ up, rather than getting a surprise,” Rob says. “You don’t want to put a spray on in late January only to discover you can’t harvest your grapes because harvest is early. And that has happened.” The same goes for bringing in international vintage labour without a clear idea of when harvest will kick off. “The phenology data for the current season will give you a heads up. We can give a pretty good estimate at budburst when flowering will be, and at flowering when véraison and harvest will be.”

Now, as climate change impacts growing seasons, the data is more important than ever, says Rob, whose latest broadcast notes a run of six years with higher-thanaverage spring temperatures and 10 years of warmer-than-average temperatures for the season from September to April. “The seasons are generally getting warmer and as a consequence earlier.”

From 1997 to 2014, VineFacts was a subscriber-based service for Marlborough growers, delivered via the MRC. In 2014 the MRC gifted VineFacts to New Zealand Winegrowers which, with assistance from the Sustainable Farming Fund, extended it to include Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay, Wairarapa, North Canterbury and Central Otago, with Nelson as a later addition. That meant Rob could dip into even more data, and more growers throughout the country could get their wine facts through VineFacts. That includes extension of research, thanks to Rob’s ability to take the science and make it compelling reading. “Because I haven’t got a PhD in a specialist area I have probably been much more of a generalist,” he says, valuing the opportunity to work more closely with the industry than an “academic scientist” might.

“The thing that really gives me the most pleasure is taking the information that my research colleagues produce and being able to communicate it to the industry and hopefully put it in a way that people can grab hold of and understand.”

Ivan says Rob’s contribution to the wine industry has been “immense”, noting his invaluable role in sharing knowledge of powdery mildew and botrytis and their seasonal effects as relayed in comments to growers. The MRC Award recognises exemplary service to Marlborough and the regional economy in the fields of research, science and technology, aligned to the primary production sector, he adds. “With Rob a great deal of this service has been associated with the wine industry."

VineFacts may have been a long-term role, but Rob says there’s been plenty of diversity during the past 36 years, the first 10 of which were spent mostly with cherries. And there’s always something different going on with the weather, “which is why you can write about it for 30 years”. He’s perhaps less enthused by the sunshine stakes, with his reputation for pronouncing Blenheim as the sunshine capital clouding over in recent years, as Richmond, New Plymouth and Whakatane have stepped up their sunshine hours in comparison to Marlborough.

Rob says his dab hand with data has developed with the job, but admits that it’s become something of a joke in his household, with Lynne heard to suggest she can’t quote a statistic without being told she’s “not quite correct”.

Winning the award was quite something, especially with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the front row. “That was really special,” says Rob. But, true to form, he doesn’t see the accolade as his alone. “I see it being a team effort.”