We're fortunate to have a 40-acre vineyard at our Niagara on the Lake campus. There are two programs taught there: winemaking and grape production or oenology.
Our work has involved second-to-second weather tracking, with the intention of predicting harmful weather such as cold drops. That's Dr. Duncan's background, weather physics. We've also looked at communications between ground robotics and aerial photography and data capturing, to better understand and predict diseases happening in the vineyard. If a perennial crop dies—temperature could kill it, and disease could kill it—it takes three to four years for production to come back. A lot of it is predictive work. The other piece we're working on is enhancing staff members or team members on the ground with robotics—not replacing them but enhancing them with follow robotics or data-gathering robotics.