Dried grape news

Year in review

News from our field officer

2020 was a different year for all of us and our Hort Innovation-funded extension project had to join the global shift to being flexible and innovative.

If anybody had suggested to me 18 months ago that we would have groups of dried grape growers running meetings and engaging in seminars and field days from their homes through online video conferencing, I would have had to reference great Australian film literature and simply say, “tell him he’s dreaming”. But I was so wrong. In the beginning, we created informative videos and put them online for growers and other interested people to watch. These included the final stages of the minimal pruning demonstration at Ashley Johnstone’s, where the video showed that the demonstration rows were mechanically cut and harvested without any issues arising from the lack of rolling on. I was also able to put together a video to introduce DFA’s 10 Tonne Project. With the first three videos having a combined 600 views on YouTube, I had to finally concede that this was a good idea – much to the amusement of the younger staff at DFA! The next leap of faith was into online video conferencing. With the help of the team at Agriculture Victoria and our own Stephen Bennett, our first online workshop involved learning about the capabilities of the IrriSAT program, which uses free online NDVI imagery to track and predict vine irrigation requirements. That seemed to work even better than sharing a video online, so now we were off and running with online delivery. What followed was a wide range of online interactive seminars and events on topics including: - new varieties

- 2020 harvest information from our processors

- collaborative farming systems in the grains industry - updates on downy and powdery mildew and the new disease prediction model from Growcare - how to use the Green Brain system for monitoring irrigation application. All of these events were recorded and posted on the DFA YouTube channel, making them an ongoing source of information for everyone in the dried grape industry. With an eye to the benefits of these new online skills, we will always try to integrate components of video conferencing and YouTube content in all our future programs. It has proved effective and will probably give us better access to experts that aren’t able to travel to our region – no matter where they are in the world. During our brief COVID reprieve in the middle of the year, and again at the end of the year, we were able to run a few face-to-face, barbecue and beverage events. These were great opportunities to have a look at our 10 Tonne Project demonstration sites, including our new site at Duxton’s Liparoo property as part of our Sticky Beak Tour and the results of our herbicide trial run by Frontier Farming Systems and Mallee Sustainable Farming. Other things we continued to develop during the year were: - a Growcare disease modelling system using DFA and Murray Valley

Winegrowers’ infield microclimate monitoring systems - aerial NDVI imaging for our 10 Tonne

Project sites with Ceres Imaging - collecting the second year of data for our benchmarking program - setting up the second year of our trial on chlormequat (Get Set) rates for growing Carina currants. v

Stuart Putland Dried Fruits Australia field officer 03 5023 5174 projects@driedfruitsaustralia.org.au

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