4 Benefits of Accurately Recording Your Vineyard’s Water Use at a Block Level

Imagine, for a minute, that you had a complete, accurate, up-to-date record of exactly when and how much you irrigated every block of your vineyard for the past ten years.

What would that be worth to you? How would it benefit your business?

These questions are worth asking because you have the opportunity to start building that exact asset for your vineyard today.

Lumo One smart valves only have one season under their belt, but the vineyards who used them last year are already seeing the benefits of having a better record of their past water use.

Because our valves have built-in flow meters and are connected to the internet, they automatically store start and stop times, and precise volumes, for all your irrigations at a block level. You don’t have to rely on an irrigator to enter start and stop times into a spreadsheet or an app on a tablet. You don’t have to guess exactly how much water was applied based on a rough duration. And you don’t have to worry about whether your irrigation system is actually performing the way you think it should.

With Lumo, you get exact times and precise volumes, all in one place, with no manual work required to maintain it whatsoever.

Over time, you build a historical record of your water use that’s valuable in a bunch of different ways to a bunch of different people. Let’s talk about a few that come up all the time.

1. For fine-tuning or dialing-in your precision

Viticulturists are big on Lumo because it makes it way easier to learn from past seasons. Data about exactly how much water was delivered to each block is incredibly valuable for making more informed irrigation decisions in the future. Many viticulturists have never had access to this information, or at least nothing better than a rough estimate, let alone in a format that’s actually easy to search through and use.

2. For prioritizing system maintenance

Rather than performing maintenance on a set schedule, or not at all, Lumo allows vineyard managers to prioritize blocks based on actual flow rates. They can see which blocks are performing worse compared to others, and also, which blocks have declined the most in performance over time.

Having a record of flow rates removes the guesswork and allows you to allocate your maintenance dollars to the areas that need them most.

3. For passing institutional knowledge to new hires

Irrigators retire. VMs come and go. The people who know the quirks of your irrigation system, and who have some sense of what volumes of water have been applied in the past, don’t always get a chance to pass that knowledge on to the next person in line. Sometimes that opportunity doesn’t exist.

But if you’re using Lumo, all of that knowledge is already stored in a database. A new irrigator or viticulturist or vineyard manager can easily get up to speed with what’s been done in the past and how the system has performed, block by block. No knowledge gets lost in the transfer.

4. For easily complying with any future water regulation

Regardless of what state and county regulations come to pass, growers will be well served by having a complete picture of their past, current, and future water needs.

Because better water management starts with better water measurement, having an accurate and up-to-date record of water use is going to become a central part of what it means to be a good water steward. In time, all growers will have one.

Those using Lumo already do.

To learn more about how the data our smart valves deliver could benefit your vineyard, contact us at [email protected] or request a demo here.