A WEB-based app enabling the risks of downy and powdery mildews in vineyards to be monitored remotely from a computer or mobile phone is hoped to save growers in the Murray Valley and Riverland in SA thousands of dollars.
Murray Valley Winegrowers executive officer Paul Derrico says the web-app’s expansion into the Murray Darling and Swan Hill regions has been funded through Wine Australia’s Regional Program.
“The web-app provides growers with a good return for the levies they have contributed,” Mr Derrico said.
“It will become a valuable tool to integrate with the MVW weather station network, an industry asset also funded through grower levies paid to the Murray Valley Winegrape Industry Development Committee,” he said.
Mr Derrico said the GrapeWatch web-app for the Murray Valley is still in the final stages of beta testing, but Murray Valley Winegrowers will provide details on how to use the web-app once the trial is completed.
Loxton-based plant pathologist Peter Magarey said the GrapeWatch web-app also provides growers with information on when to spray their vines to reduce the risk and damage caused by these fungal diseases.
Mr Magarey said the web-app was initially trialled by growers in the Riverland in 2020/21, before being offered to growers in the Murray Valley to test last year.
Mr Magarey said the web-app is the product of many years of hard work, which initially began with research on downy mildew in the mid-1970s at the Department of Agriculture’s Loxton Research Centre.
This led to the vine disease monitoring service CropWatch for the Riverland in 1995.
Since 2009, the system has been completely redesigned in a web-based system for growers. Called GrowCare.
He said the advancement in the knowledge of how to combat downy mildew means that in most seasons the disease no longer costs the Australian wine grape industry some $100 million a year, as it did 40 years ago.
“The development of the system we have now, means downy mildew is now costing the industry much less and in some seasons some vineyards are not sprayed for downy at all,” he said.
“So much so, that powdery mildew is now considered the most significant disease in Australian viticulture.
“In addition, the time has come to more seriously tackle the significant problem powdery mildew poses to the industry.
“Powdery mildew was costing the industry in the 1980s, $60 million annually — it probably is now $100 million or more.”
Mr Magarey said the development of technology meant complex information from the vineyard about the weather conditions and risk of downy and powdery mildew could be shared with growers in a simpler and quicker way.
“Over many years we have had to determine the epidemiology, that is how the disease spreads in time, under what conditions does it spread, the amount it spreads and the stages of the disease and its development during different weather conditions,” he said.
“We then needed to find a way to talk to the grape growers in a simple fashion to convert the knowledge we had, which was very complex and in fine detail, we needed to simplify that.”
The data included in the GrapeWatch web-app is collected by the GrowCare information service, which provides growers in the Murray Darling and Swan Hill regions and the Riverland with alerts when weather conditions generate a risk of downy and powdery mildews in their vineyards.
The data is collected from Automatic Weather Stations installed in vineyard monitoring sites in the Riverland and Murray Valley.
These have been funded by Riverland Wine in the Riverland and Murray Valley Winegrowers in the Murray Darling and Swan Hill regions.
Mr Magarey said the GrapeWatch web-app enables growers to seamlessly download the latest information from the weather stations.
He says the web-app is set up to assume that budburst begins on a grower’s vineyard on September 1 and the stages of foliage development is based on this date.
“We then will assume that flowering will occur in weeks nine or ten from budburst, but if these dates are not the case, growers can amend this information to fit their vineyard and their varieties,” he said.
Growers can also modify the dates in the web-app to suit the stage of growth their vines are at and assess the risk of downy or powdery.
He said the web-app is much simpler than computer assessment tools developed in the 1990s, which required growers to collect the data themselves from their vineyards and enter it into the software.
