 So now I'd like to introduce Nigel Blischke. Since joining Torbrek Vintners in 2015, Nigel has become an integral part of the company's mission to be one of the world's great wine estates. Nigel looks after his 10 vineyards across Barossa, producing fruit for some of the region's best wines. His mantle is to protect history by nurturing precious old vines while helping drive the evolution of the Australian wine community. Unwaveringly passionate about producing premium grapes and wines, Nigel has worked for some big names including Yalumba and Peter Lehman. He's been highly active in the wine industry and in 2015 was chosen as one of 15 rising stars for Wine Australia's Future Leaders program. Future Leaders graduates are encouraged to innovate, question and status quo, and find new solutions to drive the Australian wine community forward. Nigel has embraced this mission, working to improve the industry he's been a part of for over 25 years. Thank you, Nigel. I'll let you get started. Just before I start my presentation, I've been working in the technical viticulture since the mid-90s. I was very fortunate to work with Yalumba for 12 years and had access to a lot of technology such as Sentec environment, virus scans and the ability to look at some technology for years. So I've been an advocate for this, for technology in vineyards for many years. And my journey at Torbrek started in 2015. I started work at the end of November 2015. So I came into the vineyards not knowing anything about what the vineyards are about. I'm gonna, I'll use our descendant vineyard, which is at Marinanga here in the Barossa as a case study. So when I got to the Torbrek vineyards, I was, I really was very green and I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand what had happened in the past and identify any issues that were there. When I got to the vineyards, they were, there wasn't a lot of technology being used. But the descendant vineyard was one of our most important vineyards. This vineyard produces a wine called the Descendant Shiraz which is, sells for around $125 a bottle. It's been classified in the Langtons classification as outstanding. So it's a pretty important product for the business. So the vineyard was planted in 1994. So it's not an old vineyard planted on some beautiful red, brown earth soils. Mostly Shiraz, 65% with some other paintings of Grenache, Vionne, Marsan, Mataro, and Roussaint. That picture was, I actually took that from Barossa Helicopters. I was showing a group of American visitors around the vineyard and I were flying over Marinanga and I snapped that shot. And I know how easy that is to see but there's some areas that are really vigorous. I've got a little pointer up on there, if you look in here. So it was very variable. And I guess this is where I started my journey because that vineyard at that point, that was the 23rd of February. And most of the vines were defoliated. And 16 was a pretty good year in terms of yield. And clearly there was some issues going on in here. A couple of water leaks in here and I was really quite shocked that this vineyard looked like it did. What I was actually seeing was there was really variable growth. There was variability in quality, yield, and vigor. I said that there was a lot of defoliation and we really, at that point I realised that I had to sort of try and work out what had gone on with this vineyard. And I didn't know any of the history of how the vineyards were planted or what was going on in these areas. So we started off by doing some soil surveying and also looking at some NDVI imagery at Verizon in 2017. So as you can see, there's quite a range of low vigor and high vigor. And what we ended up starting to do was we did some soil testing in some of these areas to really identify what was driving that variability. And as it turned out, the soil testing that we did, where we had high vigor, we had better cation exchange dominated by calcium and where the low vigor areas we had higher potassium and magnesium. We also had some areas that were affected by salinity. We had some sodic clays at depth. So what we were seeing, some areas had higher organic matter and the other areas had low organic matter. I won't go into the detail of what there was a lot of working around the soils in this vineyard. As I said, there's some other factors involved in this. The original soil survey showed that there was some areas with salinity. We had an aging irrigation system. We had vows that weren't working and there was a bit of a lack of maintenance on some of the irrigation system so we had leaks and we had a few issues with that. We also discovered later on that some of the vineyard areas, the younger parts of the vineyard, hadn't been deep-ripped so we had a limited root zone in the area and there was a lot of use but the vineyard had actually been reworked and there was a lot of big cuts so we had a range of issues going on in the vineyard. The use of the NDVI was a really important part of understanding where to look because what we ended up discovering was that it wasn't just one factor leading to variability and what that actually means, the variability, what meant that we ended up doing a lot of differential picking. We had some areas that were ripe and some that were green and that really obviously increased costs and some of the areas weren't delivering the quality that we were expecting. The vineyard, the Shiraz from this vineyard, the descendant Shiraz, the more fruit we could get into that product, obviously the better value for the company. There was a real incentive for us to try and lift the quality of what we were doing. What did we do to fix the problems? First thing we did, we did a lot of mid-row ripping in 2016 and 2018. We didn't have enough moisture in 17 to actually do it so we actually got a bulldozer in and deep-ripped, we added compost to try and build up the soil. We actually did a lot of... We had armed with our NDVI data. We actually walked the vineyard and flagged off the low-vigor areas and the high-vigor areas and then actually went through with our undervine mulcher, undervine spreader and did undervine mulching and put some compost and all that sort of stuff. We put some permanent annual squads in and the other big thing is the irrigation valving was starting to get pretty old so we actually replaced a lot of valves and we had the opportunity to install a Motorola ICC irrigation controller which allowed us to remotely turn on and off irrigation and that was very vital. We were a small team at Torbrek. At that stage we had 10 vineyards spaced between Lindock and Nuriupta and we were a small team. It was quite difficult to get across the ground so having that ability to automate also allowed us to water at night so we're getting better water use efficiency by doing that. So there were some real practical benefits for taking on that technology and also allowed us to do a better job of irrigating with a small team. So that was a big investment in ag tech at that point in time and obviously that's expensive but it was worthwhile just to make our job a bit more efficient. So after doing most that work was done in 2017 so we did the flyover again in 2017 and 2018 this is part of the descended vineyard this is actually Shiraz here you can see this area just to point out the soils were really influential in this vineyard this area through here has got saline subsoils this area here is actually high in potassium and magnesium where this high bigger area was there used to be a piggery next door and what we discovered 30 years ago probably 40 years now they used to put all their pigment newer in a pile in that area they then surrounded that with bales of straw to stop the smell from blowing around so when you actually look into it this was actually high in organic matter and very nutritious soil also a little bit deeper this end here was naturally high in magnesium and potassium so it actually had pretty poor structure so we had tried to address those by putting in inputs on that we addressed those issues and if you look at that area particularly you can see that was actually a high bigger area that had remained pretty stable but these really low bigger areas improved quite markedly so we felt we had a really good result in actually addressing those issues so to give you an idea in 2016-17 we had pretty high rainfall we had about 480 mils during our growing season it was a pretty kind season 2018 was actually quite a dry season and yields overall were down we managed to actually increase the yields between 30 and 105% so we were pretty happy and the quality of that wine is exceptional and in 2017 because of the bigger issues we actually differentially picked the Shiraz on those vineyards because there was such a range in 2018 we were actually able to pick it in one hit so it actually saved us a bit of money the non-multi-area where we didn't put on the higher inputs they improved only by about 5% so yeah like saying after the what we thought was excessive 2018 2019-20 really smashed us we had two of the driest years on record we had a frost in 2019 2020 the set was absolutely appalling we had hot dry conditions in flowering and our yields were halved on what they were and after 2018 we could have sat back and said oh that's great we've fixed the problem the climate really put us back in our place and if you look at the bigger maps from 2019 you can see that the vineyard bigger has just dropped and that's when we really started look at irrigation as being did we put enough order on what was the timing of that irrigation and as you can see we still had issues with the main line in this block runs along the middle actually where we done deep ripping we actually had a lot of damage from the bulldozer and so we had leaking valves another main line here there's a few issues one of the other things I'll just go back with this particular when I talk about so this vineyard here was planted in 1994-95 the vineyard here was planted in 2007 and this vineyard here was also planted in 2007 that vineyard if you look we go back to one of the issues that we also identified by doing this using this technology you can see this end of the vineyard is actually quite vigorous in 2017 this end isn't one of the things is a slope running down that hill one of the things we discovered that there's two valves in this vineyard and we were irrigating the whole lot in one hit and so what we also discovered was that this end was downslope was getting more irrigation so the uniformity in this vineyard was actually quite out this vineyard here we discovered later that when they dug out the winery in 2007 they put all the tops all down this end of the vineyard so this part of the vineyard was excessively vigorous this part wasn't and it hadn't been deep ripped so there's some other issues that go into which drive these problems that we were seeing and when we got to 2019 there's a point where you have to choose between trying to fix something and starting again so in this vineyard we actually decided to pull it out but we really wanted to work with this vineyard and through our work we'd realised that we needed to keep water up to this block it had a very limited root zone it's only about 50 centimetres before you hit clay and the vine roots there's only a 50 centimetre root zone so we think we were actually doing quite a good job we didn't prove the uniformity in this vineyard but that was one of the sites that we really had it was really difficult to maintain the health and obviously that was part of our thinking around irrigation we really started to see that we needed to get better at irrigation so that's when we started talking with the guys from Swan Systems we were looking for a system to be able and forecast when we needed our irrigation so despite the improvements with our soil health and irrigation management timing we remained a weakness for us so we really looked at we started to have discussions with Swan Systems and for those who don't it's a computer based irrigation management platform and it allowed us to integrate we'd spent money on irrigation controllers we had soil moisture monitoring one of the things we did after when I first started we were using a diviner which we had to go do manually and so one of the things we wanted to do was get some continuously logging soil moisture which we put in in our system so we could actually watch the soil moisture but we were looking for how to integrate all this and we had weather stations so we had a whole heap of technology in our vineyards and we wanted a system where we could incorporate all that together and use that data because we were building up a lot of data and Swan Systems had a system that we could actually take all that information and use it to our advantage and it also has a weather forecasting facility so we can actually track where our vines are at and actually make some better decisions so we first trialled Swan Systems in 2021 2021 season and this year's been our first full season with the system you know one of the things I like about is quite simple it's very visual so we without going too much into the detail of Swan Systems they're actually here today so John I think is here somewhere so it'd be worth having a talk to him if you're doing irrigation but we really like the way we could actually look at that it's a visual system it tracks the soil moisture is brought into the visual sorry the dashboard we can also maps rainfall and also predicts where the soil moisture is going to go we also get a facture about the plant health so we have satellite imagery we'd obviously been doing the NDVI we can now look at that in the season current season and also go back and compare how the vines were forming so that's been we really had the chance to use it one of the things we're trying to grow a really premium product so we're looking to try and put some stress on our anisharas particularly but within that we've got white so we do have a very different strategy for whites to red so again we're able to actually look at individual blocks in this system which is really beneficial when you're trying to grow multiple varieties and certainly end uses we have a younger vinyards are generally targeted at a lower end point so we're looking at different yields as well so we can also factor that into that expert system the swan systems and set different coefficients for the vigor that we're looking for so that's really important so for what our experience with this year has allowed us to make better decisions regarding our timing it's easy to visualise as well it actually gives you a it gives you a forecast of where the soil moisture is going to be but as I said a lot of that is in the past we've looked at vine vigor you know we're trying not to irrigate shiras until it really slows down our aim is to dry grow in 2017 we actually dry grew a lot of the shiras the older shiras patches that we have on this vineyard so the soils when we got the soils right and we get a reasonable rainfall season we can dry grow the vineyards so again we're really every year we take on its own merits so in a good year we can actually dry grow so we're not trying to add inputs where we can so that's um so when I look at a system like this I guess initially you're a little skeptical saying well I'm trying to grow a premium product is it going to you know tell me to water all the time so that I'm going to change my the quality of the wine and at Torbric every one of our parcels is kept separate so I've got nowhere to hide so our winemakers look at each parcel and they're saying well that's up to scratch or it's not so again I can't blend it away and you know hide the quality I have to deliver so again there's always a reluctance to change what you're doing you know I visually look at the vines but what I can say is that the system and again this is where we work very closely with John and the team at Swan Systems to get a coefficient that worked for our quality aspirations because not everyone is going to be doing what we're doing so again we're looking at a pretty high end product so we were able to balance up the vegetative index to what we required which was worked really well the health we can also look at the satellite imagery unfortunately this vineyard I'd love to say to you that we've improved quality and improved yields but on the 28th of October last year we got hit by a hail storm which sort of took out between 25 and 50 to 70% yield so we've had a really tough season so I can't tell you that we improved quality but certainly if we got I was talking about that younger part of the vineyard that had the irrigation that was a bit wasn't working probably that vineyard was we would often defoliated even after our first season and defoliated we were getting defoliation because it was on a knife edge it was had moisture one minute and the next minute it was stressing out so this year we were able to maintain canopy we were able to regrow our canopies after the hail storm so again we were able to look at where the satellite imagery you can actually compare say October you can then compare what it was looking like in November so again it allowed us to really track where the vigor was going and if any issues came up if there was any irrigation leaks we could also see where the vigor was higher so things like that as well so it allowed us to be efficient and go to fix problems when they arise yeah so yeah again we're able to we've been able to manage our blocks specifically and again there is you know the soil types change so rapidly in these vineyards it's really important to be able to manage individual parts of the vineyard and the younger blocks we're really hoping that once without hail we're going to be able to move those young vineyards into the descended vineyard currently we're probably have room for to double the amount of descendant Shiraz that we can produce so there's a real benefit if we can actually get this right the other thing about these expert systems and swances in particular is we can add in other sensors and we were lucky enough to work with Nicky and Dave Gerner and the guys from Athena last year and install some Athena probes, thermal imaging cameras one of the I guess the holy grail for me about monitoring vineyards is actually to monitor the vine and this year we had the chance to trial the Athena and that takes a thermal imaging camera and monitors an individual vine to see what the and creates a vine water index so this year was our first year with that system and we were able to look at soil moisture and the swan systems were there forecast of where the vine water status is and it's really interesting that we're seeing really good correlation between what the swan systems is saying to us what we're seeing in the field with what the Athena probes are telling us and our aim for that this year again is to for the next coming years is to incorporate that into our irrigation unfortunately again the hail the block that we were working on was the young block of Shiraz and that was the one that got the most smashed so we can't say that we improved yield and quality but I think we're going to get there so it's another bit of technology that's going to make our lives a lot easier and more efficient but again we are about targeting quality so it gives us another tool in the shed to hit those targets consistently because one of the things with our business that I work in for us one quality is about consistency it's about performing year in year out it's not about having a great vintage in 18 then you have a few bad ones when you're trying to sell really high price wine it has to be year in year out so again for me the benefit of AgTech is about delivering consistency and that's what's going to keep us in the game for the longer term and again I highly recommend if you're in a situation where you've got limited resources these tools can make your life a lot easier obviously there's obviously expense in this and we've tried to chunk it off in pieces so I've been with Torbrek since 2015 and we've just tried to incorporate a little bit each year and it certainly helps when you can do that rather than try and spend a lot of money on it so on systems you pay a subscription fee and it's around $200 a block so it's probably costing us around 6,000 a bit over 6,000 a year well that's about 13 hectares there again we've got 9 different sites we probably won't do them all at once but I think given that the ability to we've also got the ICC we've actually put that on to a number of vineyards now so it's quite transferable once you get set up with this I just mentioned that I was talking to the Athena people just before after trialling the system on Torbrek's vineyards they're looking for some more growers to put the system into hopefully funded by Wine Australia so if you are interested in having this as a trial on your vineyard this coming season just let me know today and I'll get you on the list alright because it's a good opportunity to trial it if it's been subsidised by Wine Australia so let me know My name is Ta from MicroBionology Lab I just very good thing you talk but just want to ask this one system is automatic system you need in a shop where you control your irrigation system or just manually there is operability to be able to link with it it links into the all our valves so we can't there is an opportunity down the track to actually link that up and fully automate the system so we could actually once we get to a certain level it can turn valves on so we we're very lucky in that we have an ICC system which links to all our valves so we can automate that system so we can I can turn the irrigation system on from my phone and like I said when I started a tour brick we had vineyards that had 22 manual valves and I spent a lot of summers turning on and off valves so yeah that would be the ultimate goal I think at this stage we're not taking up that option because we do we really like to look at the season as it is and affect do that ourselves basically but it can do that and I think Athena will these systems can we'll be able to do that as well so you know again having there's many I guess there's a number of systems there but they do offer that ability now with digital technology so that we've got radio link valves and a lot of valves and where we've got we have got inline valves but automated and they link back to our pumps and we can turn them on and you know that way so that's been handy Colin we use bill water so whatever the bill is 400 parts 300 400 parts salt's the enemy of the valley you see salt affecting this technology you can water when it says you want water what does that leave a bucket of salt sitting around your roots we've actually changed our system in one of our patches where we water far more frequently to try and keep the salt flushing through is there anything in this technology that's addressing the enemy I guess you got to look at the whole system we started the process looking at the soils we were seeing salt in the PDO analysis we did soil biology testing we put a lot of organic matter on the soils to try and build up the organic matter and improve infiltration so we're looking at a lot of factors to try and we can't get rid of the salt we can try and leach the salt again the better the soil structure we have the better leaching we're going to have one of the benefits of actually using this automation is that we can turn the irrigation on at night and irrigate at night where we get better infiltration into the ground when there's not being evaporated so that helps with our soil moistures again a lot of that subsoil salt has been there for many years so we can only address what we can address you can't get rid of it unfortunately but the better you do your irrigation the more chance you're going to get for leaching and again the more you build up your soils you get more water into your soils can't make it rain unfortunately there's obviously bill water to not put as much salt on it doesn't help it's not going to change that soil influence or salt influence no but maybe the next step in technology is to measure soil salinity along with moisture I think one of the things I'd like to see is about it like we've got soils that range from this deep in the same row to a metre and a half of root zone I'd like to see an irrigation system where water is very where we've got shallow soils I'll water a lot more where I've got salt you can actually put more water on but then convolutely at the other end where it's really vigorous it puts out half the amount of water so I don't know whether that's another but that's something that would be ideal thank you