It seems everywhere you go, people are discussing coronavirus. It officially became a pandemic, so it makes sense, but it is hard to write anything, let alone a blog, without considering the ramifications.
My classmate Ben Levinson wrote a thoughtful piece on how this pandemic is going to affect the Italian wine industry. It was an interesting observation that got me thinking, from an agricultural standpoint, how this could play out.
There is a scenario that keeps coming to mind: the shortage of labor. With simply less travel, countries seemingly becoming more restrictive with emigration, and farmers looking to keep costs low to prepare for what will likely be a downturn in the market, I predict that on-farm automation, made economical for smaller and medium size farms, will increase.
Take for example a point Ben makes: pruning. Growing up on a farm that had 40 acres of grenache and French Colombard, spring break for me meant pruning row after row of vineyards. This work was way more pleasant than pruning almond trees, but nonetheless painful, tedious work. There are new, advanced technologies out there that can help farmers to do more optimized pruning automatically using computer vision and robotic cutters. These are generally available only to large farming operations with enough acreage to make it economical, and/or stuck in university R&D labs, where progress crawls at an incredibly slow pace.
This is just one example, but I believe there could be a world where the scaling of technology moves faster as the willingness to pay from more farmers increases. Whether labor, harvesting, warehouse work, or even bottling, labor is going to become more scarce and this lends itself for entrepreneurs and technologists alike.
This is a great article Edward and really appreciate you sharing your firsthand experience! Related to this topic is the discussion around how vineyards can afford such technologies, especially given the concerns you mentioned around a reduced labor force. If the technology becomes necessary for a vineyard to survive, it seems we need to find a way to help vineyards finance these purchase or possibly rent the equipment they need. Coming from Ohio, I would hear about farmers who had to buy new combines to harvest their fields and often take out loans to buy these machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. While doing so was necessary in order to farm their fields, it put a huge stress on their farms and their families because one bad harvest season could cost them the farm (literally). Expanding this analysis to vineyards, I think the industry could benefit from discussions around how to make necessary automation machinery more accessible to every vineyard because if we lose vineyards we lose the variety and richness of wines that everyone can enjoy and only the largest and most commercial operations will survive.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the thoughtful follow up to Ben's post, Edward. I also have been thinking about how automation can help with coronavirus. In particular, I know many food brands are teetering the line of production and safety and more and more workers need to go into social distancing. (Public health aside: COVID-19 isn't transmittable by food, unless you say sneeze on it according to the latest from the CDC--so eat on.)
ReplyDeleteHowever humans persist--and we must eat (and drink!). So the demand will always be there. I've similarly wondered about how automation can help.
I am inspired by Abundant Robotics who has the world's first commercial robotic apple harvest. What could be the wine equivalent?
Abundant was invested in by Andy Wheeler of Google Ventures, who also led the GV round with Farmers Business Network. Since you were there this summer, seems like we are just a couple of connections away from some folks who may be up to the challenge!
I had the fortune this autumn of going to the Peter Michael winery where I had a tasting with the winemaker, Nicolas Morlet. What really struck me (especially coming from a computer vision / machine learning background) was the technology they had on site to automate not just pruning, but also sorting, and down the entire process.
ReplyDeleteWhen we look at the general adoption path of new technology, there are early adopters who often overpay because the technology hasn't yet hit scalability - and then it makes its way down market as economies of scale come into play and the viability and ROI becomes more clear to slower adopters. In the case of agriculture, there are obviously the massive industrial scale companies that can pay the high ticket price of new technology (and in some cases develop it in house). But I wonder if wine may be playing the role of early adopter to high end tech, proving out a model that could then be brought down market to other farmers. That being said, I'm no expert in agriculture and therefore I really don't understand how specialized farming grape vines vs other products gets.