On a tranquil stretch of Cornell’s experimental vineyard in Portland, New York, the hum of sensors and whirring of drones overhead signal a new era of agriculture.
On a tranquil stretch of Cornell’s experimental vineyard in Portland, New York, the hum of sensors and whirring of drones overhead signal a new era of agriculture. Here, at the Cornell Lake Erie Research and Extension Laboratory (CLEREL), the vineyard is becoming the university’s first living laboratory of precision, autonomy and sustainability, supporting the grape industry in New York and Pennsylvania.
“There is a lot of environmental variation on a farm,” said Terry Bates, director of CLEREL. “But it used to be you’d set machines at a particular rate and just go, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. We’ve started to get into precision viticulture, using ag sensors, soil sensors and canopy sensors in order to spatially map the variability in the vineyard.”
The farm draws from a new kind of digital toolkit. At the heart of this transformation is Efficient Vineyard (MyEV), a free, web-based platform developed by Bates and software designer Nick Gunner. The founder of Orbitist, Gunner in 2024 started a doctoral program, funded by the NASA Acres program, in the lab of Yu Jiang, assistant professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science, Horticulture Section at Cornell AgriTech. MyEV turns complex spatial data into clear, actionable maps, thanks to funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Growers can sketch their farm layouts, import data from special sensors or just their smartphones, clean and visualize the data, and transform it into management “prescription maps” to treat their crops at variable rates.
Read more at: Cornell University
Terry Bates, director of the Cornell Lake Erie Research and Extension Laboratory, works at the experimental vineyard in Portland, New York. (Photo Credit: Ryan Young/Cornell University)
