Data gathering grows insights

As producers have retreated to harvest their fruit, coordinate logistics, and adhere to export and marketing requirements, the team has been active behind the scenes on trials, technology and industry representation.

The team harvested fruit from the dormancy breaker demonstration trial site in February. This demonstration trial has compared the efficacy of several alternative treatment options to those currently used.

The harvest and assessment phase was quite lengthy, as it involved recording bunch weights, colour uniformity assessment, berry weight and brix measurements. We’re thankful to Agriculture Victoria for providing their laboratory facilities for this purpose.

The abundance of data collected will be statistically analysed over the coming months.

The team also collected the final samples for the mealybug trial, which we conducted to establish if a selection of favoured chemistry applications would result in reduced mealybug populations in the following season. We conducted leaf assessments to establish the presence and/ or number of mealybugs in each treatment and replicate. This data will be analysed during autumn.

We’re thankful to the producers who hosted trial sites over the past growing season.

In the hunt for new technologies which make life easier and efficient for table grape producers, the team has been working to source funds for another year of yield estimation and harvest management technology, detailed in the cover story on pages 4-6. Participating producers will use machine vision to record budburst, flowering and bunch counts in vineyards.

The team, with the help of Agriculture Victoria, has also been investigating the use of a non-destructive maturity measurement device from Rubens Technology. The device is currently used in stone and pome fruit industries to measure brix, acidity, colour and firmness. We’re hopeful the device can be adapted to suit table grape applications in the future – watch this space.

The team has an ongoing commitment to biosecurity representation for the table grape industry.

As part of our involvement in the viticulture biosecurity reference panel, the team spent time determining high priority pests for the industry to focus on.

We are also on a national viticulture committee that aims to establish a germplasm collection and streamline nursery standards.

Additionally, the team was able to sit in with the WA grower representatives to learn valuable lessons from the recent Western Australian Queensland fruit fly outbreak response coordination.

Aside from biosecurity representation, labour is a priority area for the team and we attended the recent Labour Hire Authority events in Mildura and Robinvale to understand more about the legislation. This feeds into an ongoing seasonal worker network facilitated by the Australian Table Grape Association with support from other Sunraysia-based industries, employment networks, Mildura Regional Development and state and federal government representatives.

Excitingly, we also had a team member represent the Australian table grape industry at FOODEX in Japan to highlight and promote new Australian table grape varieties. Read more about trade promotion on 24-26 .v Alison, Jenny & Karen