What if you could target underperforming vines in a vineyard and apply more resources to them, not to entire blocks? What if you could improve yield estimate accuracy so you would know whether you’re a grape buyer or a seller this year? What if you no longer had to send workers into fields to scout vines, but could collect useful data during the passes you already make and, afterward, view actual scans of the fruit for all your vines?
Experts making new precision imaging vineyard software say these are attainable goals, and several of California’s biggest vineyard companies are piloting their products. Vendors are on the cusp of rolling out these next-generation labor saving products more broadly to large-scale growers in 2025.
While most vineyard managers today rely on aerial imaging from flyovers from VineView or Ceres AI (which covers 350,000 acres of vines globally flying at an average height of 3,500 feet), vineyard managers large and small are taking a real-world look at what next-gen precision imaging vendors like Green Atlas, Bloomfield AI and Scout AI offer. These new products provide insights from photos taken in the vine row.
“Imaging tech is really blowing up,” as one North Coast vineyard manager put it. Part of the reason? Future proofing. These new precision tools are poised to enable variable-rate spraying products major hardware vendors are currently developing.
Three Precision Imaging Systems: Green Atlas, Bloomfield AI and Scout AI
Two of the early entrants, Green Atlas and Bloomfield AI, cover multiple crops and use proprietary cameras, while one, Scout AI, is focused solely on vineyards and uses ordinary Samsung phone cameras.
Green Atlas, Treasury Wine Estates trial
At Treasury Wine Estates, viticulturist Allie Hermanson has been trialing Green Atlas on 120 acres for several years. Green Atlas is an Australian-based company that has historically trained its data collection and insights on orchard crops.
“We did actually see quite a difference between our manual counts and the Green Atlas counts, which we thought was interesting, because they’re collecting so much more data than ours,” said Hermanson.
Bloomfield AI, Gloria Ferrer
Pittsburgh-based Bloomfield AI, recently acquired by Kubota, was used in 2023 at Gloria Ferrer in Sonoma, Calif., according to Bloomfield’s website. Quoted in the press, vineyard manager Brad Kurtz said, “Yield monitoring is just the very tip of the spear of what this technology is going to bring to agriculture.”
Scout AI, various vineyards (Mayacamas, Hardin, Enterprise and others)
Developed and funded by California-based data scientists and investors, Scout AI is focused solely on winegrape vineyards. It uses only cameras on ordinary Samsung phones to assess vine and grape quality, a design choice CTO Mason Earles insisted on early on.
Earles is a UC Davis viticulture and enology assistant professor who runs the Plant AI and Biophysics Lab (the university owns a tiny percentage of Scout.) The main investor is Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-vintner Kia Behnia, a wine industry innovator who was already a data geek in his previous career and in his life as a vintner in Napa starting a decade ago.
After successfully beta testing for two years with boutique, artisanal growers in Napa and Sonoma and with two of California’s largest wineries (among the top six in the state), Scout released its fourth-generation version software in December based on three years of vineyard research with growers in both low-priced and high-priced winegrape regions.
Matt Hardin, owner of Hardin Vineyard Management, has been using it with his team and finds it increases efficiency and saves labor.
Said Hardin, “At the end of the year on every single ranch, I used to send a guy through to look for missing vines, rootstocks, young vines, etc. With Scout, we were able to do a scan with one guy. The software would count not only all our missing vines, and all our rootstocks, it would also export all that data which we send to the nursery to order plants. It takes only one guy four hours on a four-wheeler instead of four or more days. And all the data comes back to us.”
After doing a vine inventory with Scout, Steltzner Vineyards in Napa’s Stag’s Leap District found out of 24 acres of vines, it had a half-acre of missing vines. For fifth-generation Napa grower Allison Steltzner, the first scan paid for itself already.
Behnia said these savings are typical across its many users.
“We can do this scouting now on an ATV at 9 miles an hour, about five times faster than it would take humans walking around with a clipboard or with a clicker,” he said.
“The first thing we did for all our customers,” Behnia continued, “is to do an inventory so they have accurate baseline data. The second thing is identifying the lowest-performing vines in every block. Fixing those will get you back into profitability a lot more than focusing on the top ones, right?
“Most people don’t know where those are,” he said. “We literally get down to creating a watch list. Now, some of our customers are doing targeted treatments like compost or biochar just for those vines. Their plan is to see if those vines don’t improve after two years, then maybe they have to replant because the plant was damaged or is not worth keeping.”
Like an X-ray, Scout’s software shows where red blotch is suspected and lets growers view photos of any individual vines.
Hardin said having the data Scout collects is a conversation enabler with customers. “It’s a tool I can use to talk with my clients,” he said.
After meetings in 2024 with 20 growers in Paso Robles and others in Monterey, in 2025, the Scout team is expanding their product offering to more regions and growers, including many large-scale growers with 5,000- to 10,000-acre vineyards.
“We believe we have the largest ground set of photos anywhere in the world,” said Behnia. “What this does, and I think this is where our customers get excited, is not only does this help them this year, but five years from now, they can go back and look at the data.”
Adoption
It’s still early days for the precision imaging industry, and many vineyard managers are waiting on the sidelines for others to prove that the data provides return on investment. But most believe the day is coming when these tools will be the industry standard, widely used in all vineyards.
“When I show it to winemakers, they say, ‘I asked Google to build this 10 years ago. For a lot of them, they’re just in awe,” said Behnia. “The idea is so simple. It’s just they couldn’t believe that we can finally do this now.”
Said Earles, “I think Scout is a tool in your tool belt that can help you farm more profitably and far more sustainably through precision agriculture.”
Added Behnia, “We’re building a tool that helps you measure. If I can measure what you did, that will change culture. I’ve seen this before. Over half my career was built on creating business tools that changed cultures and organizations so that they become data-driven and measure the right things.
“Given climate change and labor shortages, no one can continue doing the same thing they’ve been doing in the next five years,” he continued. “Labor is not going to get cheaper. Oil industry-generated inputs are only going to increase in cost. Today, growers too often spray everything, and agrochemical and farm input companies get a big check. We all need more targeted inputs. We can’t go backward.”
