Arizona Vineyard Embraces Technology

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Doug Standley and his team at nio labs had developed a platform for factories to unify all their data. Then wondered if it might work in an unstructured environment like agriculture. A successful pilot at Deep Sky Vineyard convinced him to look for more agriculture applications for the technology.

Standley… “The problem that we tried to solve at deep sky vineyard initially was one that was fairly simple. The owners of the vineyard lived about a two-hour drive from the vineyard. And frankly, they didn't know if their vineyard had been watered or not. So they were a hundred percent dependent upon manual labor to make this critical operational move of watering a vineyard 20 miles from the Mexican border in Arizona.”

Standley says the platform helped them reduce their water and energy use while lowering their labor costs.

Standley… “Those hard tangible costs are great to talk about, but the reality is we've also increased their fruit quality as well as their yield. And so that has enabled them to go to transition from being what they thought they would be: wholesale growers to the quality of their product is now such that they've built a tasting room and a bulk of their fruit is going directly into the bottle and sold directly to consumer through a DTC model.”

Another example of how bringing data together can translate into real actionable results and opportunities for growers.