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Showing posts from May, 2022

Micro and Meso Weather Monitoring in Vineyards

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On a bottle of wine, you normally see a year imprinted on its label. That represents the ‘vintage’, the year that its grapes were picked. But how is this information important? And what makes one vintage better than another? Answer - the weather. It is one of, if not the most important external factor for the calibre of wine produced. The weather in the vineyard during a given year impacts the health and quality of the fruit produced. In viticulture practices, winegrowers need to precisely focus on weather conditions surrounding their vineyard , technically termed ‘meso-weather’, and more precisely the environment within the vineyard canopy (such as rows of vines), called the ‘micro-weather’, as opposed to the weather details of a larger area as determined by any local weather station ‘macro-weather’.  Micro-level variables can be considerably different ( up to 37% ) from that of the macro-level region. One of them is the Soil moisture Content which is specific to the plots. Water stre

Nagpur Orange Belt and Shortage of Water - How Smart Irrigation Can Help?

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Shridhar Thakre, owner of a 20-acre land with 3,500 orange trees in Talegaon village (Ashti) in Wardha district, reportedly stopped going to the orchards as he could not see the condition of the trees. “The temperatures continuously hovered between 44 - 47.5 degrees celsius in the month of May, for the first time. Pre-monsoon showers were absent too” said Thakre to the Times of India. This condition resides with hundreds of orange farmers in Nagpur, home to the most important commercial citrus cultivation in the country occupying around 0.2 million hectares of Satpura hills (Vidarbha region) of Central India.  Citrus crops are high water requiring evergreen perennial fruit crops. About sixty-eight per cent of citrus growers prefer basin irrigation. The orange orchards are irrigated majorly by the basin method using groundwater in this region. Rainfall data in the Nagpur region for the past 100 years show a declining trend. Groundwater levels are declining in most parts not only