Will Davenport and his team have been collecting data for years but it was confined to scruffy notebooks and only typed up a few months later. No he uses Sectormentor to record the pruning weights from sample vines to determine how vigorous growth is. Back in the office they use the Sectormentor website to look at weights, combined with bud numbers to decide if they need a second pruning, or if they should add more compost in specific areas. Good data, combined with their years of knowledge, helps ensure they do all they can to help the vines produce high quality organic grapes.
Last year he also used Sectormentor to record number of flowers per vine in early June, and that same day he had what turned out to be pretty accurate prediction of his yield 5 months before harvest, helping him plan and have his harvest run smoothly.
Sectormentor is very flexible so you can set it up to record whatever is important to you on your farm, so we have many different types of farmers using it. Sectormentor is also coming in handy as part of on-farm research and trials across groups of farms, from soil-sampling to agroforestry it can help everyone collect information and learnings that can easily be combined to help create a consistent and reliable data set, perfect to find patterns between multiple farms.
Will Davenport tells us about his experience:
“Sectormentor helps us run our business effectively. It’s a management tool for out in the field, the more data I have about what’s going on in the vineyard the better I can do my job. We use it to record things like flowers per vine which gives us an early prediction of yields. It’s simple, you just record the things you need.”
Interested in how this could work for you, you can read more about it here, or contact us here