Project Vine IQ is an open source project underway as of January 2024. My name is Randy Caldejon. My wife and I own Fidelis Farm, a 200-acre farm which includes 16 acres of vineyard in Central Virginia. The property is situated at the base of the Blue Ridge mountains in Crozet, VA.

We lease our vineyard to our neighbors, King Family Vineyards. Over the years, I’ve learned a bit about viticulture by standing over their shoulders and appreciating their hard work. I’ve also learned that growing grapes in Virginia comes with many challenges. Even, Thomas Jefferson struggled to successfully cultivate vitis vinifera in Central Virginia.

Thanks to modern farming methods and technologies, Virginia vineyards and wineries have come to “earn the respect of great winemakers and sommeliers all around the world.” I believe that we can do more to enable small production vineyards to produce world-class quality of grapes, cost-effectively using sustainable practices. To this end, the goal of Vine IQ is to develop a cost-effective vineyard monitoring and analytics platform using commodity off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. The project includes technologies for remote sensing and collection of telemetry like temperature, humidity, rain, UV index, solar radiation, and soil moisture. In addition, it will also employ machine learning algorithms to predict leaf wetness duration, crop yield estimation, and more (all in due time).

In this publication, I will share details about the project. Plus, I plan publish the hardware specs, code, and documentation on GitHub along the way so that others may use it, provide feedback, and benefit from data-driven viticulture practices, including AI-enabled analytics.

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Data-driven viticulture is the way of the future. It is a young, emerging field. This is why Vine IQ, as a project, encourages collaboration and contributions from the viticulture community. Subscribing is the first step to becoming part of the community and getting full access to the newsletter and publication archives.

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