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Student's work may help N.C. mountain vineyards
She tries to figure out best places to grow grapes, how to improve soil conditions
Journal Photo by Monte Mitchell
Lauren Hunter checks a vineyard geosensor at Banner Elk Winery.
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Published: July 19, 2008
BANNER ELK - In an area better known for ski resorts than grapes, vineyard operators face challenges that come with the territory.
It's colder here and higher in elevation than in the flatlands. The growing season is shorter. Viticulture is so new here that growers lack the decades of experience that have shown French winemakers which areas of a vineyard produce the best grapes for wine.
Lauren Hunter, a graduate student at Appalachian State University, has taken a high-tech approach to precision agriculture that could help growers better manage mountain vineyards.
Hunter installed 13 geosensors in an acre plot at Banner Elk Winery, where the elevation is about 4,100 feet. The small electronic devices use radio waves to send data to a computer, recording such things as temperature, humidity and solar radiance. The idea is to figure out which areas might need more water, perhaps, or a different amount of fertilizer or fungicide or other treatments.
The precision-agriculture approach has been used on vast cornfields and wheat fields, and on a more limited basis in vineyards in California's Napa Valley, but it is new to the North Carolina mountains.
Hunter said she has been surprised how many variables she found in a plot as small as 1 acre. Mapping out a vineyard will help managers make decisions that affect grape quality.
"I can come up with five zones in this 1 acre, and I can highlight what's going on in this area," she said. For example, "the temperature seems to be high, it gathers more humidity. What do we want to do in this area?"
Norm Oches, the director of ASU's new Appalachian Center for Winegrowing, said that the approach could prove to be more useful in the mountains than in other areas because even small plots here have so much variability.
"Every area might have different soil composition, different drainages," Oches said.
Hunter set out the geosensors for two weeks in May and has since been working on associated research. As of Monday, she had written 71 pages of a master's thesis on the project and expected it to be about 100 pages long by the time she turned it in yesterday.
She is heading out this weekend to give a poster presentation on the Banner Elk project at the International Conference on Precision Agriculture in Denver. She is one of 10 graduate students from six countries to receive the conference's Precision Agriculture Outstanding Graduate Student Award for 2008.
The money for the research project came from a $10,000 grant from N.C. Beautiful, a nonprofit organization that pays for student research that is aimed at preserving North Carolina's beauty.
Each of the geosensors cost about $700. Hunter found the geosensors didn't always work well, but she was able to get reliably consistent data from 10 of the 13 units.
Because the geosensors can gather and transmit information 24 hours a day, part of the project involved figuring out a way to help growers organize and interpret the large amount of data. She developed a Geographic Information System database for storing and accessing the data.
She also worked on figuring out how many geosensors should be used, where they should be placed and how the data should be filtered.
Hunter said she hopes that vineyard managers can use her project's findings. She also said she thinks that the geosensors could be used with success in the area's Christmas-tree industry.
Hunter expects to graduate in a few weeks, and said she hopes to find a job in agriculture research or vineyard management. She is from Marietta, Ga., and graduated with a biology degree from ASU in 2006.
In addition to working on her project and her master's degree, Hunter has been a part-time research analyst at the Appalachian Center for Winegrowing.
"She's been fantastic, because we do a lot of research from around the world, doing research on steep-slope vineyards, and she's the one who gathered all that," Oches said.
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.
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