How cold is it? Wireless equipment helps keeps fetzer grapes from freezing

摘要

With vine-yards in both Mendocino and Tehama counties, Fetzer Vineyards personnel stand on guard from March through May each year to make sure their vines are safe from frost damage. Over the past two years they've learned to rely on electronic weather data collect in key vine-yards and wire-lessly transmitted to their base station to predict likely frost episodes and alert local vineyard managers to stand by to turn on irrigation systems. Using pulsating emitters supplied from a dedicated drip line especially for frost control Fetzer can apply up to six gallons of water an hour to protect its grapes. "We're two full years into the electronics and we still do a lot of checking ourselves," Tom Piper, Director of Vineyard Operations, says. "We are very conservative about it. Our manager in Manton (Tehama County) did some exhaustive research and came up with Automata. (Automata, Inc. 800-994-0380, www.automata-inc.com) We ran dual frost control systems for the first year and concluded the Automata information was better than what we had."