5 Reasons to Use Lumo for Your Next Vineyard Development Project
When you’re weighing your irrigation automation options for your next vineyard development project, there are good reasons to consider putting Lumo in from the start.
1. Faster Vine Establishment
With Lumo installed, you’re never going to miss irrigations, which is especially important during heat events that can damage young vines. Everything will run automatically according to the schedule you set, even overnight and on weekends and holidays.
You’ll eliminate the risk of under or over-irrigating because you’ll be tracking water volumes at a block level and you’ll receive alerts whenever there’s something up with your irrigation system performance.
Nailing your irrigation upfront is critical to the longevity of your vines, ensuring their roots get properly established and improving the long-term productivity of your vineyard.
With Lumo in from the start, you can be 100% certain your vines are getting the care they need to thrive.
2. Lower Labor Costs
Lumo automates your valves and pump, and catches issues as they happen, which saves you from having to send an irrigator out just to turn on water and check the lines.
With the high demands of young vines, those savings add up quick.
Trips to the ranch get reduced to only what’s required for repairs and maintenance, and even those trips are quicker and more targeted because they’re based on real-time declines in flow and pressure data.
When a filter needs to be flushed, you’ll see a decline in flow, receive an alert, and can go flush that filter specifically to return your system performance back to normal.
3. Greater Design Flexibility
Putting in Lumo from the jump also saves you the cost of putting in manual hardware and can simplify your irrigation system design in ways that reduce material costs.
Designing with Lumo automation in mind lifts the traditional constraints on block sizes and shapes, where valves can be located, and how many separate blocks are practical for irrigating.
Setting up different irrigation zones accounting for soil types and depths, water holding capacity, and for that narrow gravel streak running through the middle of the vineyard, makes a big difference for improving uniformity and directly impacts yield and quality down the line. Plus it will make your fertigations more precise.
Traditionally, this hasn’t been practical because when your irrigator drives out they’re just going to end up irrigating it all pretty much the same anyway.
But with Lumo, you can easily schedule each soil type for slightly different amounts of water. You can schedule the gravel streak 3x per week, you can irrigate the heavier clay soil 20% less than sandy clay loam, and so on.
Because you schedule it all from your smartphone or laptop, and it runs automatically, no combination of irrigation amounts or times is impractical.
4. A Bulletproof Record of Irrigation From Day One
If your vine take rate is low, one of the first questions you’ll get from the nursery is whether your vines were adequately watered.
With Lumo in from the beginning, you’ll have a clear record of exactly when and how much water the vines received, and will be able to show definitively that under-irrigating or poor system performance wasn’t the cause.
In addition, water totals per vine and block will be easily accessible and exportable at any time for any compliance or reporting requirements.
5. Set Yourself Up for Long-Term Success
The future of vineyard irrigation is efficient, precise and data-driven.
Labor is only going to get more expensive and harder to find. Water is the same. Energy costs. Regulatory compliance. Climate volatility. Profitability. Pick your poison. Every reason to automate is getting stronger by the day.
And Lumo is emerging as the clear choice for vineyards. Lumo is now installed at over 180 ranches in Napa, Sonoma, the Central Coast, Washington State and the Okanagan. And the Lumo system delivered over 650 million gallons of water with block-level precision in 2025 alone.
More and more winegrowers are standardizing on Lumo because they’ve seen the power of the data.
They know Lumo is the precision irrigation platform of the future, the system that’s going to ensure they hit their irrigation plan across every block, every time.
Less labor. More precise watering. Increasing take rates. Protecting your infrastructure. Just one of these alone can pay for the Lumo system and provide returns well into the future.
Using Lumo for your next vineyard development project is the best way to ensure your vines get confidently established and that your vineyard is set up for long-term commercial success.
Why wouldn’t you want to do that right off the bat?
If you're working on a new vineyard development project and would like to chat about getting Lumo installed from the start, you can shoot us an email at [email protected] or request a demo with our team.