Dialing in the Vineyard w/ Cody Ashurst & Lex Palmer, Phytech

Hey listeners, just want to let you know that we've released the latest compilation of show notes in book form, covering episodes from 2022 to 2023. It's full of insights on sustainability, marketing, and even has a few celebrity sightings. Pick what up on Amazon and support the show. Welcome to X-Shadow. The podcast that navigates the business of wine with unique perspectives and insights with your host Robert Vernick and Peter Young. Welcome to this episode of X-Shadow. Today we're continuing our series on "Vidaculture and Winemaking Technology" and our guest, our Cody Asher, director of Vineyards and Lex Palmer Marketing Manager at Phi Tech. And we're going to be discussing leveraging technology to reduce irrigation needs in vineyards. Cody, may we start with you? Can you please give me and Peter a brief overview of your background? Yeah, so I'm Cody Asher. I was born and raised in a small town called Hopland, California, up in Mendocino. We had a family ranch up there for about four generations. So, you know, I grew up on the farm, grew up driving tractors out in the field with my dad. And went away for college and the day that I graduated, I walked across the stage and got into U Hall and drove through the night to get back to work the next day. Sadly, in 2021, we had to sell our ranch. So I was kind of looking for opportunities to help growers in any way that I could to kind of avoid that situation for any other family ranchers that I knew about or anybody that was struggling really to be competitive in the vineyard space. I found Phi Tech and really kind of wondered why I'd never heard about it. You know, monitoring irrigation and monitoring plant stress. I've heard of a couple other companies, but this seemed to bring everything as a whole into a digital platform that growers can use. So I applied for the job and they essentially said they were trying to get into the great market but didn't really have anybody with expertise in that field. And I did a lot of technical work on our ranch, you know, data logger, water reporting, used to do my own spreadsheets for yield analysis and different weather conditions and all that stuff. So coming into Phi Tech and just kind of hit the ground running started working with guys that I've known in the industry for the last 10 years of working on our ranch and slowly started growing it to now it's all over California, Washington, Oregon. Yeah, we're a global company that, you know, I really feel like we're making a difference in the wine industry right now. And Lex, do you want to give us your overview and background? So my name is Lex Palmer. I'm the marketing manager at Phi Tech. I'm originally from San Diego and I studied agricultural communications at Cal Poly and San Luis, I've dabbled in the wine making space. I did two ventages at Villa, Digi, John, no one in 2022, one in 2024. They're just outside of Siena in the Kianti Classico, DOCG. I've also worked up at a winery called Campavita in Mendocino and after my ventages in 2022 at Villa, Digi, John, no Phi Tech found me and I joined their marketing team. I've been with Phi Tech for about two years and working alongside Cody, it's been really rewarding to see the technology evolve in the vineyard space and I'm really grateful to be a part of it. So before we dive deep into the vineyard solution, I know Phi Tech does more than that as you talked about. They hadn't got into the grape space yet. Do you think you could give us a brief overview of Phi Tech more broadly? Yeah, I mean, we're a global SaaS company, which is subscription as a service. We utilize dendrometer technology tracking the expansion and contraction of the trunk of pretty much any plant. So as you know, the plants lose water through the stomatos, we're actually tracking that constriction of the trunk and then the refill when the stomatos close. We're also using irrigation pressure switches to give live feedback during any irrigation event. The water turns on growers get a push notification of their phone. We track that irrigation event and also the running PSI that's going through the drip lines acting as a real time pressure sensor in there to do pressure distribution uniformity live within our system. We also have a soil moisture probe in there. So we're watching the three parameters. We're watching the plant. We're watching the soil and the irrigation and then basically can confirm soil moisture holding and the response from the the vines or other plants from that irrigation. We're also monitoring the climate. We have frost and weather stations within our platform. So on a scale, if you're a vineyard manager with ranches spread across, you know, from north to south, you can keep an eye on essentially what's going on in your fields on a daily basis. And then with the dendromaters, it's all a crop specific algorithm. So we're actually taking those fluctuations, running them through our crop specific algorithm and giving them a color coded stress score for the day. So at scale, you can kind of pinpoint, okay, which blocks do I need to target for irrigation? How are these blocks doing and then actually drill down deep on a block level to figure out what's my irrigation timing need to be what's the frequency need to be durations, how's the soil moisture doing and it helps you kind of get a full overview of what's going on. So Cody, before we dive super deep into that, what are the main crops, the biggest ones that fight, fight tech supports today? I'd say currently not crops are our biggest market right now. So like all mints and things for like pistachios almonds pistachios walnuts. We do a lot of work with citrus as well, pears, now we're getting into row crops as well. We actually have the technology to monitor a celery stock or let us stock. We can actually track fruit sizing of let's say strawberries or cherries table grapes. And in those markets where fruit size really comes in, we're giving growers visibility on that as well. And just for our listeners who are a bit of cultural is there anything like that. What exactly is a dendrometer? A dendrometer has been used in the past for scientific a lot of UCs use them. They're used to be banded in drummers, but the problem with that is you would have to go out and read those measurements daily basically tracking how much the vine or plant has expanded. It basically wraps around you can see it on a micron level of you know it's expanded 300 microns with this last irrigation. The bike has basically digitized that with our dendrometers that mount on to a vine or a tree and basically have a pressure point on the vine or the tree that tracks that expansion outward. Got it. So it's a device that's on like the trunk of a vineyard. Yeah, we go directly on the trunk of a vine. Sorry, just to add the micron to a micron is 70 microns as a human hair. So the dendrometers are measuring really really microscopic fluctuations within that fine. Oh wow. Okay. So it's really really small measurements. So when we're seeing you know a fluctuation of stomato water loss of let's say 60 microns, it's nothing you're going to walk out and see with your naked eye, but we're able to track that really accurately. What does it provide in terms of solution for vineyard management? You mentioned the and drometer you mentioned soil, moisture sensors, and then the third one I forgot. The irrigation pressure switch, the irrigation pressure switch, so how much pressure is going out to that. And okay, so in terms of that, can maybe you can talk about like a typical vineyard that you work with, like how are you assessing what is needed? Because I'm assuming not every vineyard would need all three combinations or maybe they do. I mean, for the most part, when we're looking at a vineyard, I always like to look at root stocks, clones, soil texture, soil differentials. And it's a lot of it's geared to what the growers looking for. Are they a quantity grower? So they're looking for tonnage mid-level quality? Or are we talking a premium ultra premium where you know the nitty gritty is the details that matter the most. And so from there we can tailor make our solutions to if you're a large scale thousand acre ranch, and you want to make sure that your your gators are doing their jobs. We can tailor fit our situation to where you know maybe you don't need plant monitoring on every block because you have the same clonal and root stock pairings. That we put a couple sites with the dendromators soil moisture and irrigation pressure sensor, but you want to make sure irrigating is being conducted the way that you're planning it. We can put our precious switches across the entire ranch giving you full visibility of what your irrigators are doing the amount of times that you know, a viticultural requests a six hour irrigation. They have no way of actually knowing was it six hours that went down and we give that visibility on a large scale or even a small scale I have growers that have four acres of ultra premium vineyards with multiple monitoring sites monitoring average lines and below average lines to make sure that we're elevating the production of those below average lines and keeping everything happy and really improving one quality as well. So you have these three different sensors that you can place in the vineyard dial in for the different types of customer those remote transmit to the data out that goes that gets aggregated into a website or an app that they can. Access and view and monitor is there other functionality in that software in terms of what that you're providing on top of that because sometimes like all this data coming in like knowing how to parse it I'm sure as part of the education of this of a solution like this as well. Our entire system is all wireless so there's no wires running in your field. It's all radio so it goes from the units themselves that are radio to a data logger that then goes to the cloud. We're using Amazon Web Services so everything's encrypted backed up. We're not too worried about those kind of servers going down and from there to enters our mobile app and our website. If you're in your field and you want to know what's going on where you're in your truck you have the ability to monitor everything as well from your phone. If you want to get into the details our software I would like to say it makes it very visually and easy to use. I have growers all the way from their 20s all the way to their 70s. The ease of use that I think makes it the most interesting for growers. You're not compounded by spreadsheets of numbers that you have to dig through and interpret. The system does that for you and then also you get someone like myself that is looking at your data, analyzing it, talking to you, working with you on recommendations of what we're seeing on our end and helping you every step of the way to make sure that you're getting the most benefit out of the system. And so the data loggers is that a cell connection back or do you have to have Wi-Fi into the vineyard or something to collect it? It's all cellular. We have different capabilities for those real like back in the hills of Lake County where there's no cell service. We have satellite capabilities with data loggers. We have Wi-Fi capabilities with data loggers. So we're basically making sure that we can cover every grower and their needs. And the functionality of the software, is it to control the sensors or is it just to monitor the sensors? So if I wanted to like change the pressure on one of the PSI switches, could I do that from the app or is that something that I would then have to go into the vineyard and do? No. So you have the ability to let's say monitor your pressure where you're normally running at 14 to 30. If you're running below that, it'll actually alert you. So if you wanted that alert to be set lower, like you don't have enough head pressure at your well or your pond and you normally run 12 PSI, you can go and custom tailor this entire system to your needs and wants. Also, I mean, we're talking about the real capabilities. We also do pump control, involve control within our system. So growers actually have the ability, if they have that portion of our system, we have a thing that's called our planner where they can actually go in and schedule up to two weeks of irrigation and the pumps will turn on, valves will open, you'll get that dynamic feedback of pressure at the valves and then with our units in the field, we're also giving you that confirmation of pressure in your drip line as well. I would say we're becoming the one stop shop for monitoring every aspect of your operation. If they have that control element, do you have like something that's automated that just says, hey, just irrigate it for me and I don't have to look at it in a whole bit. Based on the pressures you're getting, optimize it automatically. It's the growers schedule because every growers irrigating differently. If you're looking at the hills of Lake County or the hills of Sonoma where you get that really rocky soil, you're not going to irrigate the same as a Mendocino County nice, low clay soil, so it allows the grower to come in and punch in their preferred irrigation schedule and then the system will run it for them. We don't want to pre-schedule anybody's irrigation because you never know what they're doing in the field. Okay. I guess this place into the next question which is around like, what are the core benefits of the solution for vineyards? I would think making that decision for them would help them optimize their irrigation site and their water needs and reduce their water needs presumably. I mean, with the whole monitoring package, I never like to promise water savings because it really comes down to how a grower uses the system and what they're comfortable with. But I mean, just being able to monitor and see, a, when your vines need water, that's a huge component that we can figure out, you used to run a 12-hour set once a week. So with that set, are you permeating pasture three foot layer where your root zones really not going to be drawing that water? Okay. We might need to shift that and break that up into three hours, three times a week to really target the root zone, those active feeder roots and make sure that vine is able to draw that water that's necessary in there without wasting water. I mean, in some instances, we've seen a 60% reduction in water use over the course of the season, also being able to track the soil moisture from all the rains that we get in the north and some of it in the south to actually tell you when to start irrigating. So we really track that soil moisture drainage, see when that first kind of pre-stress comes in and say, okay, it's time to flush lines and get ready to start irrigating and whether dependent, I've seen guys that used to irrigate starting in February just because they didn't know when to start. Now push this all the way back to June. So they're saving months of irrigation just by watching that soil moisture in the vine response. And you mentioned some growers target different things, whether it's volume or quality. How does your solution help those who want to have high quality, super high quality help them achieve that? So with the quality versus quantity, what we've seen and a lot of the work that we've done post-beration, I mean, we can monitor all the way from bud break to bloom all the way through the season to make sure that you're not overstressing the vine. In some cases, we've actually been able to track when the vines are stalling because there's not enough water in that system where they essentially just shut down and stop growing. But post-beration work that we've done, being able to essentially track the vine growth and see when it starts to dehydrate and pinpoint those little short irrigations to make sure that the vines are satiated, but they're not oversaturated, diluting bricks, diluting pH. It's a game that we can custom make per block. So with one of our growers in Napa, with ultra premium, being able to pinpoint when to irrigate and how much. First year, I believe he got a 94 point score with wine enthusiasts. And then the following year by using our system and really tailor making those post-beration irrigations, he added three points by not changing anything besides just how irrigated. Well, I mean, the year might have had some difference. We're talking the heat wave of, I believe it was 2021, where there was a lot of dehydration, there was a lot of issues where it got 117 degrees in Napa. And I believe his neighbors lost 30% of their crop. Just because he was able to monitor that soil moisture in the plant response, he only had a 3% loss. And we've also seen with dehydration and other climates, one grower had a 50% loss and was really looking for a solution. We came on board and brought them from a 50% loss due to dehydration down to a 3%. And this is on ranch level. And I believe we made them an extra 1,600 tons that year. Wow. And so are there other sort of like cost reduction or labor impacts that you get with your solution? I mean, for the most part, the cost reductions is always your input to outputs. We can monitor also fertilizer inputs. So essentially we put a flow meter on that fertilizer tank. We can see your wedding pattern, your injection of the fertilizer, and then the flushing of the lines afterwards. So fertilizer being what it is, being so expensive, I think it's gone up 600% in the last five years. We can actually track where that fertilizer is inputted. And with the soil moisture and the plant response, we can track, was it effective? Did they flush too much afterwards, putting all those nutrients way past the root zone, where it's not going to be utilized? Of course, we talked about irrigation, savings of water, and with that, I mean, that comes with diesel cost, electric cost, pumps. We're able to monitor electric use now with a portion of our system for on peak hours and total pump runtimes. And then I think the biggest thing right now with the labor shortage of good quality irrigators, having that pump control in, one of my clients that has it, their irrigator was working 17 hour days during harvest, because they had six ranches demanded. She was running around. He was never home just by automating that one ranch, that's off his plate now. There's no more going and turning valves. He can actually go do his other job, which, you know, tractor driving, disking, making sure that everything's ready for harvest. And it's the biggest thing nowadays is you could have an irrigator with your company for 20 years. He gets a better job offer, and he leaves with 20 years of your irrigation knowledge. You don't have backups on that. Now you have to train up a whole new irrigator on how he was doing it, but you don't really know. So our data with our system, we store all that data there. So if somebody leaves, you see exactly what they've done for the last three years. And do you actually sell the control technology for that as well? Yes. It's our our own system. So we actually designed it. And in my opinion, for vineyards, very small footprint, it's all radio. So there's no conduit's ran. And so come harvest time. You can just flip over the valve control units and drive your harvest gear right over the top of it. It's out of the way. in my opinion, it's one of the best solutions in Vindierd's for that style of automation. - I've also seen in that pup monitoring, it like work really well when there's succession going on in the Vindierd's, like say your irrigator doesn't leave 'cause he got a better job offer, but he's retiring and you have the younger generation, the son, somebody in the family that's coming in to take over that Vindierd, they might not know and so you can kind of reverse engineer his strategies for irrigation and use that as like a blueprint for training and problem solving, you know, how do you handle heat wave, how do you handle the drought this year? - Got it. - Stuff like that. - I think I saw maybe on your website that you're able to identify when variation is happening, what benefit does this give to wine growers? - So with the dead dromotors because we're actually tracking the trunk, we can essentially see when that vine starts transition from barrier development into leg phase. So when those seeds start to match rate, things start getting a little bit softer, we can actually identify that process in the trunk about a week ahead of time before you can see any visual cues in the field. And a lot of growers are using this now too, depending on the weather variables, they'll switch up their irrigation practices right around this time and sometimes run a post-vuration RDI, so a regulated deficit irrigation to really increase that brix accumulation or the phenolics within there to make sure that, you know, you're not dumping your standard 12 hours a week. Now we're gonna drop back a little bit and make sure that we're giving just enough water that we're not diluting brix, but we're making sure that things are have available water that's needed. And so it's just giving the growers a good heads up of, okay, it's time to shift our gears. We're not so focused on making sure all the berries are making it to this phase. They've made it. Now let's focus on ripening. - And there's been, you know, over the last few years, a lot of issues around wildfires. Does your solution provide any relation to that at all? - My dream was to have a smoke sensor out in the field, so that way that's always been coming from the growing side of things. You're as a grower, you're kind of at, I wouldn't say battle, but you're at the behest of a winery. And so when they test and say, "You have smoked cane," do you or don't you, you don't really have a say in that process. So that was my dream and we hopefully one day can get that on the road map. So growers can actually advocate for themselves and say, you know, this is actually the smoke units that we achieved in this block. I don't believe that's gonna have an effect on the wine quality. You shouldn't have smoked cane within there, but that's down the road. - And so in terms of the solution, I'm curious on how it's priced. I mean, obviously you mentioned it was a subscription as a service that there's some ongoing cost, but it also sounds like there's probably some kind of up front cost as well, given the rollout of the technology. Maybe you could give us a breakdown of how pricing works. - It's really grower dependent. I have some growers that, you know, one of our sites in one block, I have some growers that want two sites in a block, and then they want multiple soil moisture sensors or irrigation pressure switches. And so it's all kind of tailored made to how they're gonna utilize the system. But with our service, there's a small up front fee for the installation because we have a whole technician team behind us. So when sensors go down, we come out, fix them, and no extra cost, there's no maintenance fees. Anything that needs to be upgraded, it's all a part of the subscription. You're never gonna get, once you sign a contract with us, that is your fee for the year, and you're not gonna accrue any additional expenditure with that after that. I mean, my ballpark estimate right now for because it's different within California when we're talking a central coast large block size versus a Sonoma Napa where we're talking half an acre blocks. But overall, we're in the $50 to $80 acre range. - A year or month or-- - Annually, yes. - Okay. - And so in terms of that range, whether you're that small Sonoma, one or a large Central Valley, it's-- - Yeah, the prices don't fluctuate. - You know, depending on locality, it's just the cost of our sensors and what they cost us to run it, and then with all the maintenance included in there, but as far as the bank for your buck of what you're capable of monitoring, comparative to the price, I believe it's well worth it. It's an investment that no large upfront capital, you're not gonna break the bank by putting the system in, like going out and purchasing a weather station. Right now, I believe the Davis is or somewhere around $3,500, you can include one of those systems with us for about $700 a year. - So in terms of the benefits and the costs, how do customers calculate the return on this investment when they're making a solution? Like when they're coming to you, like how are they justifying the cost to themselves? Like what are some of the things that they've told you? - I mean, if you're looking at an automation system and you have a veneered management team that's running your veneers, if you're an owner, but you don't run it yourself, you are charged by truck roll, someone coming out turning on your pump, turning your valves, then coming back, that's all expended to you. But if you purchase an automation system with us, the veneered manager can essentially save that cost by just prescheduling irrigation, confirming the pumps are ran in your fields, irrigation's happening. And then with the overall ability to actually pinpoint on a ranch scale, which blocks any to target. You're not driving around putting on excess water, running extra pump times, right now, sustainability's huge in veneered industries. So all the carbon emissions from running diesel pumps, electricity usage, having the capability of monitoring that and seeing where your strong points are and your weak points are, it gives you a game plan on how to reduce those costs. - Lex, I'm curious, when you're doing your communications, do you have a benchmark case study that you talk about of what good looks like for in terms of the benefit that a poster child for the solutions and could you give us some specifics there? - Yeah, I have two. So I use the benchmark a lot. One being our ultra premium grower in Napa, and then the other being a bigger grower in Mendocino. So our ultra premium grower, it's Kia Benia with Neo Tempo. He's fantastic. And our bigger grower would be Bontera up in Mendocino. And they're just different styles, essentially, and they're utilizing five tech in different ways. So I think it's good to be covering that whole scope. Most of our customers are here about us through word of mouth and referrals and those grower testimonials that we've recorded. I think the biggest goal in all of our marketing is educating and earning the trust of these grower's agricultural technology is so new. And I see it as being 10 years behind the dot-con boom. So we really have a lot of catching up to do. But as it continues to evolve and five tech, we continue to strengthen our algorithms and our products that we're able to offer growers, I really see this taking off and being a useful tool for physical tourists. - So how do most new customers hear about you guys? What's your marketing pipeline there? - Yeah, so we're doing a lot of digital media. I'm doing science, those grower testimonials are video based and we're also doing trade shows and just getting out into the community and talking with people. Cody's been speaking on panels, his most recent being vineyards of the future at the wine industry network expo in Sonoma. So just getting in front of people and having small pow-wow's and conversations has been the most valuable thing. It's always incredible when like hear your neighbor talking about something that they're using and you're like, oh, that could work for me too. I wanna learn more, I wanna talk to you about this. Tell me about your experience. - And have you seen the return on any of those marketing techniques be higher than others? - Absolutely, the video in the digital media is definitely the most valuable. I think people being able to see somebody that they recognize, a name that they know, a place that they're familiar with, is earns their trust. And being out in the community and connecting with people one-on-one is definitely really valuable for us being at trade shows, learning about people's problems. I mean, people come up to us all the time at trade shows and say, hey, I have this problem on my vineyard. Can you please help? I don't know what to do. Like we've tried everything and because we've been talking to other growers and seeing other people on our platform were able to say, hey, have you tried this? Maybe thinking outside of the box here. So I would say that one-on-one connection is really valuable. - And there are some other people who are trying to also do irrigation solutions. How does your product compare to other solutions on the market? - I would say that FITEC is really a holistic app and platform and because we're monitoring so many different points and putting it all into one view, I think that's really important. Just because everything on a vineyard's interconnected, I think that you need to have things correlated to each other. Just having soil moisture and weather is great, but how do you know how the plant is responding to that? How do you know if your hydraulics turned on and actually are irrigating at the proper PSI for the proper duration of time? So being able to see all of that in one easy view. really I think is beneficial to growing as a whole. - And you mentioned that your solution is sort of along the West Coast. Is it global or on the East Coast? What's the scale of your customer operations? - For vineyards right now, it's mostly on the West Coast in California, that's our main goal. Fishing in to Portugal, in Spain, and Italy is where we see ourselves going here in the future. In terms of other crops though, if I take as global and we're on multiple continents across multiple countries, and so the operation is quite large in that regard, but wine were definitely picking up steam here. - Oh yeah, you know, I was supposed to go slated to Italy, but now you know, talking to growers and chili, some of the wine regions in Mexico, South America, Texas is booming right now. Actually, Arizona is actually starting to have a growing wine market as well. So, you know, when you start getting into those different climates and different regions, growing is completely different. So having a solution there where you can, let's say you're a California wine maker that wants to get out of California and set roots in Texas, you're gonna hit some hurdles there where you're bringing your California growing mentality and it might not work over there. So how do you tailor make a solution to monitor and figure it out? The solution's already here with us. - Are you able to leverage the global infrastructure, whether it's the operations or, you know, the brand recognition marketing to get your customers in other locations? - Yeah, I mean, we're growing fairly rapidly in other regions as well, 'cause at scale, you know, some acreages in chili are 21,000 acres combined. How do you monitor at scale or if you have operations in Peru but also in California or in Spain? If you're a CEO of this company, how do you know what is going on with all these regions? There's not really an effective way. And even bringing it more locally, if you're a vending management company and you have properties all the way through Paso Robles, going up through Carneros and Napa and Filo over in Mendocino, you're trusting you're vending managers, but if you wanna know what's actually going on in your operation, we can give you that visibility at a large scale. - So you said you're growing really fast with the vineyard space. What are you hearing as the main barriers for people adopting this solution? Like, one, you hear people and they're like, eh, it's maybe not right for me because, you know, what are the reasons that they're not pulling the trigger? - I'm growing up in this space. I know farmers raised by one and there's this sense of technophobia. They think that technology is on route to replace the hands in the soil, going out in your field, feeling your leaves. And I wish people wouldn't look at it that way because it's not here to replace anybody. Farming is a labor of love. You do it because you love it, not because it's easy. All we're trying to do is provide a tool to allow you to see multiple locations at once. We're not here to replace farmers by any means. We just wanna help them. I mean, that's my goal with joining Phi Tech. I've been out there and I just wanna try and give them the best tools possible to back up every decision they make with data. So it all comes down to the fact that, you know, 20 years ago, everyone used to just have regular field thermometers. Now we have temp watches in our truck. We have digital thermometers. We have automated frost systems. I mean, for the longest time, my dad still had the corded frost sensor that ran 700 yards into our vineyard with an old alarm sitting on his nightstand. And you were just hoping that thing worked when it needed to. Whether a tractor hit that line going out in the field and broke it, hey, you really didn't know until it didn't go off. And now we're giving growers the capability to digitize that. We can wirelessly put frost sensors across an entire ranch that will call texts, push, notify 10 people on your accrual to make sure that someone is out there turning water on, making sure that you're protecting your vines. And then we also confirm that the frost water is running and the pump is still running. When you have to go to another ranch, giving you that little bit of ease in the middle of the night while you're drinking your coffee is my pump still running. Did it shut off for any reason? It all comes back to just being a tool to make growers lives a little bit easier. What I'm hearing here, one-part solutions are architect one-part therapist. Yeah. I do run therapy for a lot of my growers, too, and things go awry. And it's always fun to have those conversations and tell them, look, we're here to help you however we can. So really, Technophobia is the main barrier that you're seeing as opposed to cost or-- Yeah. Yeah, with the vineyard market being what it is. I mean, everybody knows it's-- things aren't the brightest right now, but we see these cyclical things happen within this industry about every five years. This one might last a little bit longer until the overall market balances a little bit more. But I would say it's the fear of adoption. The fear of adoption of technology right now, I mean, even automation, you try and talk to somebody like, hey, we can automate your pumps, turn it on for you. Like, I don't want to do that. I want to turn on my pumps. Because then I know that it's actually running. And it's like, well, we can do that in a digital way. I mean, we can monitor your flow meter so you can see exactly how it's running, give you pump status, RPMs, what your pressures are and your filter. We give you that confirmation so you don't have to go out there and physically do it. And we can still make you feel good that the irradiation is actually running. So this area of technophobia, is this something that you and Lex talk about quite a bit in terms of how to mitigate that challenge? And what are some of the things that you've been doing to kind of break down that fear? I would say in the marketing pitch, I always talk about how fight against subscription based on the hardware. We're going to take care of everything, fix things, upgrade. So it eliminates that tech graveyard that growers talk about. Yeah, I mean, every, every grower, I guarantee you, they have a pile of stuff that they bought into. And the company went out. They never came back to pick up their stuff. And so it's just sitting in their yard. And that's where, you know, everyone's had this where they, they buy something because they, someone made them promises and then they didn't deliver. And they're like, I don't want this anymore. So with, with that in mind, I mean, we're not going anywhere. We're here working with growers boots on the ground every day to try and make sure that we are meeting their needs, hearing them out, and then providing solutions for whatever pain points they have. And in terms of the product romance, we mentioned a little bit of, you know, end goal trying to get smoke sensors into the solution. But like, in terms of the more immediate next, like 12 to 24 months road map, what are some of the products that you guys are going to be or services you're planning on adding? So for the vineyard space, I mean, the things that I, being in my position and being coming from the vineyard industry, there's solutions that I think just need to happen, especially with the utilization of AI and the data that we collect. One of my goals is to actually have a predictive bricks in pH model, where, you know, everybody's going out and doing their sugar testing. Well, if a grower inputs their sugar tests, it follows on a very almost even curve. So the bricks accumulate in most vineyards. You're, you can kind of tell, OK, I'm getting half a brick per week if the weather's right, or one brick per week. There's an inverse correlation between bricks and pH. So having this curve where growers are inputting it, we're tracking all the weather variables, soil moisture, vine response, using it as a predictive tool, so there's no more panic picking, where a sugar tester comes out and essentially says, OK, you're at 21 bricks last week. We're going to go out and test today. Oh no, you're at 26. You're scheduled for next day, tomorrow. Run out there, get the harvester's going. We need this into winery immediately. Our goal is to actually monitor those climates on a block level and almost be able to predict when you're going to pick that block. So you can actually schedule it as a grower and say, OK, this is kind of the course of action we're going to take on a ranch scale. Another one is our GDD monitoring. Grapes are very predictive and heat unit accumulation for different phenological stages of development. So having the ability to not just have one weather station in the middle of a ranch and kind of spread that across, but when you get into different varietals and clones and root stocks, they act very differently with heat accumulation. So having a small temperature humidity unit in your field, tracking that GDD on a block level, and then analyzing it over the course of years that we can actually start to pinpoint, OK, this block is going to see blood break at this many GDD units or bloom. For those who are familiar, GDD, meaning grower degree days? Yeah, growing degree days. And you guys are out there in the space at all these conferences and in the fields. What are other vineyard or winery innovations from other companies that you guys are seeing that you're excited about? Can I loop back to that last question? Because there's one more product that's on our roadmap that I'm actually really excited about. It is our FITEC AI advisor. So we are actually utilizing large language models and AI learning and bringing this into our system and actually able to-- look at past data, current practices, current soil moisture, plant response, irrigation, and actually have a grower input and say, you know, based off of the forecasted weather events in this block, what should my irrigation schedule be to maximize cluster set or very development? Or I want to run a post-varation RDI to really improve my pH or my brisk scores. What kind of deficit irrigation should I run? And this will be a grower specific block specific AI tool for growers. It's almost active and assistant for all the data that we're collecting and analyze it for them on a daily basis, weekly basis, and really work as a helpful tool for them. So for the language model that you're pulling this data into, are you aggregating all of the data from all of the sensors that are across the FITEC Vineyard Management, or are you opting in, or do you have to opt in to provide your data, or is it something that's always just part of the contract? So all of our data is compartmentalized per grower. So no grower sees another grower's data. In any facet anyway, it's all separately encrypted for each individual grower. So this would be a tailored solution for each individual grower on their own data. And so they can opt in and use it, but in the scene behind the scenes, it would be analyzing that data. So as soon as a question is asked, it can spit out a reliable answer to that grower. It'll have your metrics of irrigation, what you're emitter spacing, emitter flow rate. If you're running microsprinklers under your divines, all of that data is already in our system. So when you ask it, what should I do for block B12 next week for an irrigation schedule? It already has all that information in there for you, so it can run through that prompt and give you an answer as quickly as possible. Okay, I'm assuming that was, there, we've done some training on the larger data set that isn't mislead shared with the other customers, but it's using that to, so that it actually has more use cases that it's encountered from that data set. Yes, so that can then you, you know, predict more accurately for your individual clients. Yeah, cool. So what about other solutions and technologies that are interesting to you guys? As far as the autonomous revolution with tractors, companies like Gus that are really trying to alleviate sprayer technology, as far as guys going out, being out, you only have so many sprayers, their ability to automate and solely do herbicides, air blast spraying all autonomously. So one driver can control multiple sprayers at a time, getting more acreage done. Same thing with Monarch, really enjoy what they're doing in those fields as well. I know John Deere, Kubota, all working on this kind of application. Vineyards are tough just because, you know, variants and road spacing, all that kind of stuff. It gets challenging. Another one for me would be Scalp with UC Davis behind the scenes that whole team back there using their optical arrays to really get down into the nitty gritty of what individual lines are doing, giving health scores, yield prediction, cluster analysis. I mean, the utilization of technology in this space is just going to continue to grow. And then another one for me is for the organic and biodynamic space is the company Myland, which we actually work with as well. And, you know, bringing back that native soil health using your own soils, micro algae in there to really boost all that nutritional capability, water holding and seeing the benefits in your crop. I mean, those are kind of the three across the spectrum for me that I think are going to do big things in the vendor industry in the next few years. Lex, any you're seeing that outside of those that are exciting? Yeah, I was going to say the same of Myland, and I know that we talked about Scalp as well. I like, I'm really passionate about the bio-dynamic space and organics and soil health is really big. I think that Myland with the micro algae and then also all the bio-char stuff is really, really cool in terms of water capacity for the soil and those nutrient cycling. Awesome. Well, this has been very informative. We like to wrap up each episode on a personal note. And our question is, what is the most cherished bottle of wine in your cellar and when do you plan on drinking it? Okay. For me, I have two. So for me, I have a 2002 McDowell Coralm in the Sino. And that was a wedding gift. And the reason it's important to me is McDowell actually used to be a part of my family. So it was my uncle's winery. I grew up there. I go into the tasting room all the time. I spent a lot of time there as a kid. I think that one's never going to be court. I'm just going to leave that one. And then my second is my 2002 Neo Tempo from Kia out in Napa. Sorry, 2022. My fault. His 2022 cab. He gave it to me as a gift for the work that I did with him with Fitec and just him being ecstatic about the benefits that he saw. And that one's going to be saved for a special day because that one's important to me. I also have two. The one that I cherish the most is my 2022 Canticlastico Reserva. It was the first vintage that I made at Villa De Giordano. And the second one that I have is it's a bottle of 1998. Sponsored cab from Napa called Alexis, which is my full legal name. It's a bottle wine that I don't ever plan on drinking and I grew up having it on the shelf. And my parents always took a picture of it with me on my birthday every year. Having that in the same cabinet as the 2022 Canticlastico that I made is really a full circle, cool moment for me. You do know that you guys can drink the wine and keep the bottle. So the label looking at the record and the smoke. No, for that tempo, it's a reminder of the hours and the effort that went into that on my side, but also on Kea and his team side. I don't know if I ever want to drink it, but there might be a special day. Awesome. Well, we want to thank you both for joining the episode and sharing everything about Fitec and what they're doing for vineyards to reduce irrigation needs and just be smarter in the vineyard. We know what's going on day to day moment to moment across multiple sites. It's really innovative. Yeah, thanks for having us. I really appreciate the time. Thanks, you guys. Thanks for joining us. If you loved this episode of X Chateau, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and give a review on iTunes. Or wherever you get your podcast. Until next time, cheers. [BLANK_AUDIO]