Best's Wines installed Smart Apply, a LiDAR-based spraying system that cuts chemical and water use by targeting only where vines actually need it. The Sugarloaf vineyard, one of Australia's oldest, solved a vintage problem with precision technology.
People always very nervous they might lose some crop. But if no people try, then there's no innovation, and then we're just stuck. So the vineyard we're in is called Sugarloaf. It's a beautiful vineyard. It has panoramic views. From top of the hill, you can see the Grampians, you can see the Pyrenees, Mount Cole. It is a very pretty vineyard to work in. We're one of the oldest wineries in Australia, starting in 1866, with our first plantings in 1868. I'm fifth generation at best. It's interesting, the history. I don't feel it until someone asks me, because I'm here every day. And just like my father and my grandfather and my grandfather before that, you only start to really think about the history when people come in and go, wow, isn't that cool? And you go, yeah, it is pretty old, and it's pretty special. We've got our nursery block out the front here, which is a really interesting block. There's many, many different varieties in there, and there's no water. There's reds, whites mixed up. These were planted in 1868. We still have seven unknown varieties in that block. We're pretty sure we've got the oldest Pinot Munia in the world. Oldest Pinot Noir. We can't say for a fact that we think we have. They amaze me. They just amaze me. The reason we think that is. Phylloxer is an aphid that attacks vine roots, and all of Europe years ago had got phylloxera and had to rip their vines out. We've never had phylloxera here, so we've still got the original source. And it's only starting to dawn on me as I get older, so you feel a bit of responsibility there to sort of keep it going. So this is still the natural earth. I have a very simple philosophy with wine. If you like it, drink it. If you don't like it, don't drink it. I think in the. In the wine industry, it's very traditional. We do it this way or we do it that way. Our winemaking here is we've always been. Always happy to try stuff. So at the moment, there's too much Shiraz in the world. So we're thinking to ourselves, what are we going to do with all this Shiraz? So we've ended up making white shiraz bubbles, and it's been quite successful. So it's just trying to be inventive and think outside the square a bit and try different styles and it doesn't always have to be traditional. I like looking at something going, why are we doing it like this? What can we do easier? Why? I do a lot of time looking across the fence at other industries for fungicide spraying. We've always just, right, I'm going to put on 200 litres of hectare. Next spray, I'm going to put 250 litres on. It didn't really matter whether this vine had six leaves on it, this vine had 600 leaves on it. We still put the same amount on that one as that one. But I just wanted to try and save some costs and, you know, make me feel good with her. Right. I'm not usually spraying as much chemical round and all that. So this is where we found her. The Smart Apply system. We had a field day after we actually put the machine on for the first year here. A runt. We had a field day. We don't have a lot of field days here. We had a field day. There's probably 35, 40 people and half of them going, yeah, that's amazing. The other half, no, it'll never work. So we've run with it now, the Smart Apply system, for three years now, and I haven't regretted it one bit.
So Smartafly uses LiDAR sensors to deliver precision spraying to our HVC customers. The system effectively senses where the crop is to engage the nozzles just when it needs to. So it's not spraying where there is no crop in the canopy. So now growers can go into their operations center account and view their AS Applied maps as well. And this really supports the requirements around traceability and documentation within the sector. So then when a grower accesses the Smart Apply application, they can drill down to each vine, plant by plant, so they can really get an understanding of their exact application of spray chemical to the exact vine. And that really starts to deliver some further insights into online optimal plant health as well as production on a vine by vine basis.
We've seen a reduction in 40% of our chemical use and 40% of our water use, which is also then making us more efficient out in the vineyard because we're not driving backwards and forward to fill up. As often. They all ask, how's your Smart Apply going? And I say, great. How did you go last year? Any disease? No disease. That's my biggest thing. We've had two pressure seasons. The first year was some big pressure. The last two years were fairly wet. No disease. If I've got no disease and I'm using 40% less water, 40% less chemical. It's the biggest proof I've got.
Smartafly is just one solution that we are bringing to our HPC segment to deliver greater efficiency gains and technology for our customers in this space.
