Season 3, Episode 7 | From Data to Decisions: Advancing Vineyard Nutrition (in English)

00:00 Patty Skinkis

This is the HiRes Vineyard Nutrition Podcast Series, devoted to helping the grape and wine industry understand more about how to monitor and manage vineyard health through grapevine nutrition research. I am your host, Dr. Patty Skinkis, Professor and Viticulture Extension Specialist at Oregon State University.

00:24 Patty Skinkis

Building research teams to address big questions in agriculture is important because most issues that growers face are complex. To address these issues requires varied expertise, skill sets, and cooperation. Vine nutrition is complex. So, the High-Resolution Vineyard Nutrition Project was born out of the need for industry to have better tools to monitor vineyard nutrition and make better decisions. But many vineyard nutrition research projects are typically done by individual researchers; whether it's here in the United States or worldwide. Likewise, there have been single studies using tools such as NDVI, one of the first precision agricultural tools that has been around for decades. These studies show how vegetation indices could relate to vineyard nutrition and vine growth. These projects were helpful in developing new information and pieces of a large complex puzzle. But how do we pull these pieces together in research? The answer is that we need to work together.

This is where industry comes in to help guide researchers and encourage teamwork to solve real world challenges. The High-Resolution Vineyard Nutrition Project was born out of work of the National Grape Research Alliance (NGRA). To discuss the vision of the project and how it will help industry, I have Dr. Nick Dokoozlian with us today.

Dr. Dokoozlian is Vice President of Winegrowing Research at Gallo. He serves in many capacities in service of the national grape industry, including playing a role as research chair at the National Grape Research Alliance (NGRA) and serves on the Advisory Committee for the High Resolution Vineyard Nutrition Project. Again, this project was born out of the Vineyard Tools Committee--that's what it was called, as a committee of the NGRA--and Nick was pivotal in guiding the research team at the outset of the project. He continues to serve on our project Advisory Group, and I'm pleased to have Nick with us today to discuss what the future holds for vineyard nutrition and technology advances for precision agriculture.

Thanks for joining us today, Nick.

02:25 Nick Dokoozlian

Patty, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm looking forward to the discussion.

02:29 Patty Skinkis

So, you have a unique role in the US industry in terms of having a role in research. That’s not very common, so I thought we could start out by having you talk a little bit about your role at Gallo. What does work look like on an annual basis or a seasonal basis or even daily?

02:49 Nick Dokoozlian

All right, let's start there. I mean, we're very fortunate here at Gallo to have a significant research infrastructure that is unique, not just in the US, but even in the wine industry worldwide. So, I think the best way to describe it to your audience is really like being a department chair, or maybe a dean of a university.

So, I have five primary groups that work in our overall research team. There's a group that focuses on grape and wine chemistry. We have a group that focuses on enology research, a group that does microbiology and systems biology research, a sensory science group, and a viticulture research group.

So, very broad disciplinary expertise. You have everything from physiologists, geneticists, microbiologists, and bioinformatics. Just the whole group of academic disciplines that are necessary to conduct that work.

We also have several research facilities that we need to maintain. So right now, we have five or six major research facilities and laboratories. They are here in Modesto--I’m in Modesto--and we have facilities on the north coast at our Sonoma Fry Brothers winery, also in the Central Valley, South Valley, and at one of our ranch locations near Fresno, California.

So, it's a broad landscape and serves the winery primarily in the United States. Occasionally, we will get called into some of our partners outside the US, but primarily within the United States. I think the simplest way to put the job is really... My former boss told me, [when I asked], "what do you want me to do?" when she hired me. She said, "Oh, that's simple. You just make every glass of wine we make better than the last one." I said, "Okay, that's it."

So, I think that's a very simple driving force for our work. It's become more complicated over the past decade because when I arrived here, we just made wine and brandy. Now we make spirits and ready-to-drink cocktails. We also just purchased the distribution rights for beer. So, the research has become much broader. It includes a lot of aid to product development work. So, those are all things that I didn't really work on prior to coming to Gallo. It's been a great learning experience and evolution for me personally.

But I will be fair to say that the viticulture people still get an enormous amount of attention from me. That's my primary research. I love doing work in the vineyards. I still spend quite a bit of time providing a lot of guidance and oversight to the viticulture team.

05:52 Patty Skinkis

Well, it's amazing to hear the scope of the research and development team that you lead. I knew a little bit, but I didn't know those details. For those of you who don't know Nick's history, he was previously in viticulture extension with the UC system. So, I'm not sure how many years you did that, but I think that probably paved a great way for you to enter your position at Gallo.

06:18 Nick Dokoozlian

Oh, yeah. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for that experience, frankly. So, I spent almost 15 years at UC Davis, and then I've been here. I just celebrated my 20th year here at Gallo. So, I've been doing it for a while. I think that the experience at Davis, providing hands on research and managing a laboratory, gave me the momentum to start here.

I should say when I started here, I was just responsible for viticulture research. I think, at that time, I had viticulture and chemistry, and then it expanded over time. It was a lot of fun. I have to say that for me, personally, I can't imagine having a more rewarding career, being able to work in both academia and industry.

At various times in my career, I started off working on raisin production, and I worked on table grapes and wine grapes. But now I’m very deep into wine production as well as the production of other alcoholic beverages. So yeah, I just feel very privileged. It's been really a fantastic career experience.

07:32 Patty Skinkis

So, that is really a huge amount of experience. You've seen the whole picture from academia to industry and on a very big scale. Having that as a background, I want to get your perspective on vineyard nutrition. So, vineyard nutrient management and how you look at nutrition research and its applications with the many acres of vineyard that is either owned, operated or farmed for Gallo.

08:03 Nick Dokoozlian

When you first invited me to make these comments, I had little time to prepare and think about this. Honestly, I really can't think of anything we do in the vineyard that's more site specific than nutrition. So that makes it extremely, extremely challenging.

I was even thinking about our irrigation schedules. We can put a more generic perspective in irrigation schedules than we can in how much nitrogen, potassium, zinc or boron, whatever we're applying, that we should put on a vineyard. So, we have made a lot of advances with remote sensing for irrigation management. Primarily using NDVI as a way to calculate our crop coefficient. Then later, as more tools became available, thermal imagery and higher resolution imagery, we can start doing other things with that data and the algorithms. But at the very least, we've thought about application of, “Hey, could we use remote sensing as we use it for irrigation management? Could we use it to help guide our nutrition schedules and applications?” And I think that's how the High Res [Vineyard Nutrition Project] really got its start when the group first came to us and said, "Hey, we have this idea."

I was tremendously enthusiastic and on-board, saying, "Yeah, let's do this because we've been doing it at Gallo, trying to develop those algorithms." But again, the talent of that research team and the broad disciplinary perspectives that the HiRes team has brought to the problem has put a lot more wind in the sails than we could provide here at Gallo. Our resources aren't as broad. So, I think that's been a real learning [experience] for me watching the results of the project. I'm anxious to see—I think now we finally have accumulated enough data that some real learnings can be generated.

So fortunately, you addressed our NGRA group a few months ago and gave us an update. So, it looks like the data is being analyzed, and I think we're finally getting to some conclusions. Here's a reason why it's so important from my perspective. Number one, being able to have a platform where we can more reliably and analytically determine how much fertilizer we should apply is important for a couple of things. Number one, cost and vineyard performance. Those two factors kind of go together. So, what's the minimum amount of nitrogen we need to apply to maximize vineyard performance and to get the maximum yield? That's always the question that we're asking ourselves, and today there are no simple formulas for that. I know that the HiRes team is focused on that and we're working on that.

Increasingly, there's also an aspect of sustainability involved in this. We want to be very judicious with our use of all inputs, water and fertilizer at the top of the list just because those are--water is of

course is a very precious resource. Fertilizer also, is expensive, but also the fate of that fertilizer we want to apply just the amount that the vine can take up and incorporate into the fruit and not apply excessive amounts which would potentially be leeched through the soil profile and ultimately get into the groundwater. So that's been a major focus. Sustainability has been a major focus at Gallo for many, many years.

I think those two aspects of nutrition management make it very challenging for us today because we don't have a lot of robust analytical tools to make those decisions. So, hopefully you'll get us there. The cost and complexity of going out every year and taking tissue samples, collecting the samples, where do we take the samples within the vineyard block? Where's the right place? How many do we need to take? Sending those samples then off to the lab, getting the analysis back, and there's again, no simple formula tells us, okay, nitrogen levels are at X and we should be at this. We understand the delta, and we have some idea of what the threshold value should be in those tissues. But the amount of nutrient we need to put on to get there, whether it's nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, for the most part, that's an educated guess. Let's put it that way, and there's some instinctive nature of that. We have a lot of experience doing so we know some, but again, there's no specific formula or analytical relationship between those numbers. So again, greater insight into that. And lastly, being able to predict that without going to the field would be, you know, an incredible advancement not just for viticulture, but for all of agriculture.

00:13:07 Patty Skinkis

Certainly, some of the focus of the project was exactly that. Can we sample better, whether it's using our old tissue methods and come up with a sensor that could do a more holistic job because we can only cover so much ground.

I think they're going to be the low hanging fruit for the project. The harder thing is going to be interpretation. I think we can still get there with the research team because we are doing these projects, mostly nitrogen, some potassium, some phosphorus, and some magnesium trials as well in the project.

So, we'll get there. It's great to hear that and I've heard it from producers all around. They all want to know the easy answer, that formula for fertilizing. It seems that that's the hardest part

of the equation, and certainly amongst the research team as well. With your perspective of working with industry research every day and your prior work in extension and as an applied researcher, your research is very valuable to advancing the industry.

However, some in academia and the public fear the bias that comes with industry research. But we obviously need to partner together. So, what do you think is the best balance of academia meeting the needs of industry while balancing the greater good over private interests and investments?

14:26 Nick Dokoozlian

That's a great question. You know, we could spend the remainder of the hour talking about that. I'll try to summarize as follows.

I think High Res is a great example of how we can do it effectively and efficiently. I think that there's a fine line for me between what we do as far as helping the academic community advance their agenda and what we need from industry. We hope to achieve both in all these projects. Especially these large crop research initiative projects that are funded by NIFA, which High Res is an example.

Let's put it this way. I think this is the way I look at it most of the time. What is the academic currency that comes out of that research? What's the currency that comes out of the research? And I often tell my industry colleagues, well, look, for them, it's publications. That's the general thing. That's what, for the most part, what drives the academic engine. That's what drives the promotions and advancements, et cetera.

You know, there are many people like you, and I've been a big fan of your research for many years, because I think you are a researcher that very much understands and gets at and can do the academic part of the job and publish papers while still performing very valuable research that industry is using. So, this isn't like it can't be done, but the researcher must have the right perspective.

Academic currency is publication and industry currency are dollars. So how do we make money from research or how do we improve our practices? How do we improve our efficiency? How do we reduce the number of resources we're using? At the end of the day, whether our goal is to make money or increase sustainability, there's an economic benefit and value to the research for industry for it to be valuable, right? So, I think that's a fine line.

So, what I would like to see and what I try to educate, I feel like one of the roles you mentioned earlier. I used to work in academia, and I was one of the researchers that used to go to industry and ask for money, so I understood that. I understand that perspective very well, and I always felt coming to Gallo that was one of my obligations to give back to the industry to try to educate the industry on the needs of the academic community, and then likewise, to go to the academic community and try to educate them on the needs of the industry and perspectives of the industry so that we could collaborate and work more closely together.

I think that something like HiRes is great. So, what I would say is, “Hey, as Gallo we want to help set the objectives of the project. Okay, we want a tool that will allow us to measure nitrogen using remote sensing, all right, or some other proximal sensing, remote sensing. Something to reduce or potentially eliminate the need to walk through the vineyards, collect tissue samples every year, get those processed, et cetera.” That would be fantastic.

Now, we will provide you with vineyards to do that. We'll provide you with experimental vineyards. We'll provide you, in the case of Gallo, research assistance if you need technical help or assistance. We’ll provide some infrastructure in our vineyards if you need some equipment, and we'll also help provide--by supporting the initiative and the project--the funding necessary to do the work. And that's where our input ends. I think the researchers then go back and they say, “okay, this is what industry needs. Let's figure out how to get there.” As far as how the work is done, I don't think industry should micromanage that. Certainly, you come to us with your protocols. We can give suggestions, right?

But again, I think that the academic community needs to do the research because to meet the currency of publication, you may do the research in a little bit different way than maybe the way industries would design it or think about it. But that's a good thing because in general, if you're publishing data, absolutely, it's done at a level of rigor that's necessary, not just for the publication, but also to ensure that the research is good quality. So again, from my background, I understand that as well.

When we do research at Gallo, it's absolutely--and maybe, again, this is my influence from the academic perspective, right? We absolutely do the same thing here that we would do when we ran the lab at Davis. So, we do highly replicated controlled studies, much the same way, Patty, you would run your work or any of the academic researchers run their work.

But there is a different perspective when I get up and give a presentation or one of my team gives a presentation at a grower meeting, as opposed to- Patty, you giving that same presentation. We could have the exact same data. But there is an assumption, although it's certainly not true in our case that there may be some undue bias or some influence on that. That's certainly not true at Gallo. But I do think it's very important for us to have academic researchers assisting them but having them work independently on their projects and publish that work is essential. At Gallo, we continue to publish our work, too, particularly our vineyard work where, you know, we're trying to help the entire industry with whatever knowledge we can create.

19:54 Patty Skinkis

Well, certainly the role you've played in the Advisory Committee--I can say firsthand--has really helped keep the research team for the HiRes Vineyard Nutrition Project on target. So sometimes the research protocol- I can give it as an example. We get in our comfort zone of doing things a certain way. Throughout the life of the project, it was really the voice of the Advisory Committee, which you serve on, Nick, so it might have not just been you, but other people who have really helped guide us to making better decisions with our time and resources and with the research question.

So, I think that's been very valuable, and I think that role, all of specialty crop research initiative-funded projects, need to have some sort of industry advisory group with them. I think we've used the group well. In this season of the podcast, we've interviewed a couple different people from that advisory group. So, we appreciate the perspectives you bring to the project and the willingness to step back and let the researchers f figure out what pieces go together without too much coercion.

21:00 Nick Dokoozlian

Believe me, Patty, I see the eyes rolling as I'm talking, believe me, no, no, it's been great- it's been a great collaboration. There's great leadership, with you and Marcus and the others on the team. There's been great leadership in that project.

21:11 Patty Skinkis

I can tell you being an extension specialist and a professor, I must walk this line between industry and academia. Of course, my role in the project is outreach, and it's also helping vision the group as to what the outputs from the project are.

A lot of times researchers tend to be very reductionist, like, we must address this question here, and I try to flip it the other way and say, “Well, is that what industry needs? Do they really need to know down to the individual vine level?” No, they want to know on a block level. If we can get to the vine level, that's fantastic. I don't want to see the volumes of data that you would manage to get there. But I think it's also helpful for me to hear the different perspectives from industry, whether it's this project or others, and bring that back to the table when it comes to addressing these research questions and how we do the research, but also how we analyze the data.

You know, we can collect lots of data, and we can look at it in different ways. I don't think I've left any outreach meeting with industry without a different perspective that I hadn't thought of before. So, I thank you for--you and the rest of the advisory group--for that input.

Another big part of the project obviously is putting the team together. So, I started out with the intro and mentioned that we as researchers tend to want to work individually because of the academic currency is, what did I do as a professor? Now, in my time, I'm one of the newer generation professors that was hired and told collaboration is key, which is good.

I come from a big family, and there was no way you were going to do anything alone. So, I always tell people that's why I'm collaborative. I was born collaborative because I'm from a big family, and you had to make things work and work on a family farm. But I come from a generation where we were told, yes, you must have your individual inputs at the university, but you also need to work in teams. It's still hard for many to learn that collaborative spirit.

So, Nick, you are known for identifying and encouraging teams of researchers to work together. Can you comment on the importance of teamwork in industry and/or academia and give some suggestions on how both academics and industry can improve on this aspect?

23:38 Nick Dokoozlian

Man, that's a tough question. So let me try to try to, you know, give you a concise response. Again, this is what we talk about internally all the time.

So, I didn't really learn the value or the power of true teamwork until I came to Gallo, to be frank. Here we have a central research budget. We have an internal process where we propose projects and then we select the projects we work on and then we apply our resources to that.

Once the projects are initiated, however, the allocation of resources is set. So, everybody has what they

need to achieve that goal or objective. When I first got here, one of the first projects I worked on was impact of fruit maturity on wine quality. You may have remembered this. 2004 in California, at least, was the beginning of the hang time phenomenon where people were trying to hang the fruit, harvest at very high Brix, based on Parker wine scores, et cetera. You know, the whole story.

I saw very quickly, okay, well, look, viticulturists, you go out to the field, you get the grapes and measure the yield and measure the berry weight, measure the yield components and how they change over time. Grape and wine chemists, you analyze the grapes, and then you'll analyze the wines. Tell us what's really changing there. Research winery, you make the research wine. Sensory team, you do the sensory. You could see the teams, which is the reason that that collaboration and that team was so successful.

In my time here, I think that's been the most single impactful project because it dramatically changed the way we make wines and dramatically changed the way we interpret grape maturity with respect to wine style targets or price targets, et cetera. So, it was extremely, extremely valuable work.

We went from doing, in academia prior to getting here, I would do that trial on one or two sites. When we started at Gallo, we did 40 to 50 sites a year, every week, picking fruit, measuring all the grape and wine analytics, making the wines. Some of those sites we have ten to twelve weeks [of] consecutive wines made and analyzing all of this, doing the sensory. It was fantastic. It was a fantastic project, and it lasted for three to four years.

Bottom line was, I could see that the incentive there was the chemists on the team really didn't care where the grapes came from. They just wanted to dig into the grape and wine chemistry. The viticulturists didn't really think about making the wines. They just delivered the grapes to the research winery. At the research winery, they didn't care where the grapes came from or the chemistry. They just made the wines. So, everybody focused on their specific part. What was great is there was no overlap.

So again, my experience on that project taught me very quickly, I said, “Oh, okay, so this is a way of true collaboration works.” It's when the people you're collaborating with know something that you don't or can do something that you don't, and everybody is so proud. Then we get up at meetings and we present these results, and one of the viticulturists would talk about the yield components. The winemakers would talk about the wine. A sensory person will talk about sensory. The chemist talks about chemistry. It was a beautiful thing, and it started to put this together.

The great thing about Gallo, of course, is that the funding is in place, right? So, we don't have to fight for funding. So that's one of the biggest problems and I was hoping, when we first went to Congress and got the Specialty Crops Research Initiative passed, that this would provide a similar kind of funding mechanism. This would be a large amount of money sufficient to fund the absolute disciplinary expertise that we needed from each group. Back to your example of your family, teamwork is necessary now because none of these problems are easy.

I know in an academic lab when I was an academic researcher, you see all those steps in that maturity project that I described that were done by specialists, we did all of those ourselves. One person in our lab did the chemistry. One person would go and make the wines. I'd go at night and punch the caps down to make sure the wines were being made correctly.

You know, we were internally doing all those functions, and now we had a team of people supporting each one of those functions discreetly, and it made a lot of difference. So SCRI kind of has been somewhat successful in providing that funding.

Now, unfortunately, because of the congressional mandate, there are also some stipulations, as you're aware of on that funding--multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, multi state. All those things dilute [the effort] unfortunately. While they do build a collaborative, they need collaboration. Unfortunately, the collaboration is not natural or organic. People start grabbing people and putting them on those projects.

So, I think that's the main thing that I see and the problem with the way we fund research as an industry to academia today. At least in grape and wine-- is that we don't have enough money to fully support the programs that we need. And we don't have a way to clearly facilitate collaboration in an organic way, just as I explained to Gallo, it's generally done in a way that forces people to work together to get this funding. I would say 80% of the time that it works, and we've had great success. But every once in a while, you will have an unnatural collaboration between people that just don't get along or they overlap, or they compete. So, the synergy and power of the project is obviously lost.

So, I think that's a key to collaboration for me is making sure that your partners know something and can do something that you can't. Then you rely on each other. You need each one of those partners to complete the project. They all have their incentive, and you have your incentive to collaborate because you can't be successful without them.

I think that's the spirit of true, strong collaboration.

29:57 Patty Skinkis

Yeah. I like having trust--to have others with different expertise.

That's great. Well, it's been wonderful talking to you, and I want to end with a fun question. So, the fun question is, of all the viticulture research you've done over the years, whether it's been in academia or industry, what is the most interesting project that you were involved with and why?

30:20 Nick Dokoozlian

I think that's hard. It's hard to say one project. If I had to tell you one project throughout my career, it would likely be a project we refer to as GrapeX. So, GrapeX was a collaboration between Gallo, the USDA-ARS, and NASA. In addition to that, about 20 to 30, depending upon the time frame, academic institutions, primarily in the US, but also several outside of the US--international collaborators. It was a project that was really focused on trying to develop remote sensing applications for irrigation management and estimating vine water use. That was a very, very rewarding collaboration.

Again, back to what we were just talking about--can you imagine we have 30 different institutions, more than 30 people, 60 or 70 people, but 30 different institutions, again, all coming in and doing their

very specific specialty but then integrating all that information at the end of the study and getting to solutions. Which ended up resulting in something called OpenET, which is a NASA platform website available to the public that houses the algorithms, several of which were based on the work that was done here at Gallo with GrapeX.

So that's tremendously rewarding because you see fundamental research and researchers coming together to solve a real-world problem. You need those very deep subject matter experts and fundamental scientists to do this kind of work then but, as it cascades up, being able to apply it to a very practical problem and then seeing the solution results in a publicly available website. The data pipeline to put that website up and run it is incredible. None of us could have done that by ourselves. Only an organization like NASA with those resources can build, develop, and provide that kind of data pipeline necessary to run those algorithms. But it's up and running.

And I take a lot of pride in that because that's something that Gallo contributed that's helping to advance the entire industry because when it comes to resources like water, we're all in it together. We're all using the same aquifers to irrigate here in California or throughout the world, really. So, anything we can do to help the greater community be more efficient is a fantastic objective. I think I feel a lot of reward for that effort.

I think the team really did a fantastic job. Our team worked collaboratively with public scientists, and it was great to see the commercial application of that work.

33:18 Patty Skinkis

So that's a massive project. How long did it take from start to finish? Do you know?

33:23 Nick Dokoozlian

From the time we got that- well, it's still ongoing because we're still tweaking. We're still trying to improve the algorithms that are there that have been developed. But ten years, it was a ten-year effort.

We started around 2012, and I think OpenET really went live late 2022, early 2023. So yeah, it was a ten-year, decade long effort, and there were many people that worked on it and many other aspects of that. But the grape work specifically was mostly done here at Gallo.

33:55 Patty Skinkis

Wow! Fantastic! Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Nick. It's always a pleasure to hear from you. If you are in the audience and want to learn more about the project, the High Resolution Vineyard Nutrition Project, we have a website—it’s hiresvineyardnutrition.com, and we are also on social media.

And if you're enjoying this podcast, you can take the survey, the listener survey and the link is in the episode information.

Show notes and links:

Learn more about the HiRes Vineyard Nutrition Project:

Website: https://highresvineyardnutrition.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hi_res_vineyardnutrition/?hl=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hires-vineyard-nutrition/

Projects and resources mentioned in the podcast:

GrapeX – Grape Remote sensing Atmospheric Profile and Evaporation eXperiment

OpenET-open access satellite ET data for water management

Related podcast episodes:

Season 1, Episode 1 | How it All Started (Russ Smithyman)

Season 3, Episode 4 | Vineyard Nitrogen and Potassium Impacts on Wine Quality (Emily Hodson)

Season 3, Episode 5 | Tailoring Vineyard Nutrition from Soil to Wine (Anji Perry)

Season 3, Episode 6 | Building Bridges: How NGRA Connects Science and Industry (Donnell Brown)

Podcast listener survey: https://oregonstate.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bvkyFYGqwy23AWi

This podcast is funded through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Specialty Crop Research Initiative Coordinated Agricultural Projects (CAP) grant. Project Award Number: 2020-51181-32159.

Audio mixed by John Adams.