Solution description

Terroir from Space contributes to the safeguarding of global viticulture by helping winegrowers adapt to climate change. We deliver strategic action, education on best practices and space derived insights leveraged over an Artificial Intelligence engine.

In recent years viticulture has been affected by the impact of climate change.Existing wine growing regions are experiencing geographical shifts in suitable grapevine varieties and production areas due to global warming. Moreover, for some specific regions the wine quality is going down and vineyards are becoming less cost-effective. That is why we decided to create Terroir from Space (TfS). We believe it is possible to adapt to this changing scenario at the local level by undertaking some strategic actions.

Thanks to the numerous satellites orbiting our planet, an enormous amount of Earth Observation data is available to be explored. From this data, several parameters associated with the soil and the climate can be obtained globally. These parameters are key to growing a vineyard with healthy vine trees able to produce high-quality grapes.By data-fusing this information within our proprietary AI algorithm, it is possible to detect and classify new planting sites both in traditional and non-traditional contexts, while ensuring long-term resilience to climate change, lower CO2 emissions, agriculture good practices and environment harmony. This ‘transition’ has just begun across different regions of the world and Terroir from Space aims to drive it with a solid scientific approach, in cooperation with winegrowers and local rural ecosystems.

A dedicated digital platform will deliver our service, together with training campaigns framed on specific local viticultural scenarios, to boost high quality sustainable productions, proper land use practices and promote the benefits of indigenous vine varieties, in the face of climate change. The end solution is an accessible, user-friendly interface designed for winemakers. Through TfS, they will be clicks away from making the right decisions for their activity with a view to the long term.

Solution context

Terroir from Space provides an answer to the consequences of climate change and global warming for quality viticulture. With global warming, existing wine growing regions are experiencing significant shifts in production quality, with a range of implications for when and what to plant, and how to vinify. In warmer climates, wine quality is compromised and vineyards are becoming less cost-effective: in this context winegrowers try to implement - on a yearly basis - short term adaptation measures such as canopy management, leaf cover, and smart irrigation techniques. Unfortunately, some areas are showing that existing vineyards can hardly adapt to climate change and their productivity inevitably degrades year by year, despite the efforts of winegrowers in the field. Conversely, regions in cooler and/or more mountainous climates are seeing their wine production booming, allocating more and more portions of land to wine growing.

Against this background, Terroir from Space decided to develop an Earth Observation based service for the identification of unexploited sites, with a high suitability potential for vineyard plantation. We want to disrupt the current "analog" vine parcel identification process through our data-centric AI powered approach, that takes into account data of different nature and will have the flexibility to adapt to the local scenario according to customer needs. Our solution thus answers the needs from regions with growing and expanding wine markets, benefitting from new weather conditions, but also from the contracting market in regions negatively affected by climate change.

Solution target group

Primarily, our service is a B2B solution of relevance to actors across the wine making and growing business. Climate change has an undeniable impact on agriculture. Mitigation measures are on the rise and exist, but our solution stands out in terms of the precision and reliability, as well as the scalability it provides. This is particularly true for the wine market where quality matters more than for any other crops.

At present, winegrowers have at their disposal non-data driven means of anticipating climate change. They rely on self-understanding of terroir (usually their immediate surroundings) and see the impact of climate change reflected in their product (higher alcohol levels, suboptimal fruit maturity, risks associated with extreme weather events). They may choose to relocate vine trees to other parcels but this constitutes a big step (financially and personally). Very few small to medium-size wine growers have found ways to address climate change impact individually and discussions at appellation level are recent with no real long-term solution currently available.

Our exchange with multiple winemakers has confirmed that this “instinctive” understanding needs to be supplemented by rigorous data-driven analysis of terroirs. We help winegrowers identify suitable parcels based on their needs and accordingly we cooperate with them to select the best vine varieties and agronomic practices to be implemented, with the aim of preserving local traditions too. We also want to spread the implementation of best practices across local communities to boost regenerative agriculture practices and systemic carbon sequestration actions, by training and guiding producers through the process (both for new sites creation and renovation of old sites).

Solution impact

Our solution belongs to the land management domain, therefore a logical figure to measure our real impact consists in the hectares that are destined to vineyard plantation through our service, alongside with hectares of existing vineyards we support to be renovated.        Accordingly, the quality of our service can be tracked by analysing the number of varieties we help winegrowers plant; this figure has an enormous impact in terms of intrinsic resilience to climate change, since scientific studies have clearly shown a higher resilience to climate variability, drought stress and diseases for indigenous varieties with respect to classical international varieties. For instance, the Italian national registry has more than 500 different allowed varieties, of which more than 70 are indigenous, thus originally coming from local ecosystems. Despite this enormous nature-given wealth of biodiversity, vast pieces of land are covered with monocultural international varieties, that in principle were more productive but which are now suffering the most from climatic shifts. A paramount figure is the amount of CO2 our technology supports to sequester, through a wise pairing of site and varieties, as well as training systems and agronomic practices to implement.

Winemaking is an ancient practice for many countries and an increasing one for few others: we aim at serving the highest number of nations, preserving centuries old wine making scenarios and boosting new wine hubs for countries currently benefiting from climate change (in terms of local conditions more and more suitable for viticulture). Another parameter to track is a measure of educational outreach we will be able to generate, through analytics of our digital platform visitors and type of content actually visualized.

We have ambitious plans and we are already thinking of structured means of training such as online theme focused courses to be designed in cooperation with institutions and academia.

Solution tweet text

Detecting unexploited planting site optimal for viticulture and helping winegrowers in the fight against climate change through our AI model trained with EO data. Educating them on safeguarding biodiversity and indigenous varieties potential. That's Terroir from Space!

Solution innovativeness

While other businesses in the field of Precision Viticulture rely on in-situ sensors and  collection of data (through aerial photography, laser mapping, drone flybys and even satellites), Terroir from Space makes use of AI processed Earth Observation data (plus specific datasets from other relevant sources) to offer a streamlined experience to customers anywhere in the globe.

Rather  than pursuing mitigation strategies to balance climate change effects that in the short to medium run will prove themselves as not sufficient, our solution tackles the problem at its roots, studying how local scenarios are more and more affected and what are the best actions to take within an adaptation philosophy. This concept is particularly valid for wine grapes, a highly valuable crop extremely sensitive to climate and with a long-term return of investment. Terroir from Space, in other words, is developing a service that translates into action the coming wine geography disruption that environmental conditions are forcing. Terroir from Space innovation is paired with our educational aim that will be met through digital interaction with winegrowers, wine consortia and other relevant actors across the wine value chain.

Moreover, at a later stage we plan to explore the B2G market segment, offering  Public Entities insightful data into the agricultural parcels within specific regions and controlled production. This type of knowledge is particularly useful for Governments to enforce national or E.U. regulations, to support the adoption of a just and fair agriculture tax system and help develop, from a scientific perspective, the Governments’ Agriculture policies and rural development strategies.

Solution transferability

We propose a data-driven transferable solution, able to predict and identify optimal land parcels for agriculture and viticulture. By gathering large amounts of data, processing them in a customer-driven way, we can deliver precise and powerful solutions mitigating the impacts of climate change for their productions over the next years. Furthermore, the nature of our solution means it is easily scalable in terms of 1) datavariables; 2) customers and 3) crops.

Focusing on the wine production, during the last years we have experienced a growing interest for new high quality products: this clear phenomenon is pushing  producers from wine traditional regions to rethink their own production; they experiment new vine varieties by converting their vine parcels or by finding new sites (often even outside appellations) to have the freedom of creating products with peculiar qualities. This tendency is even stronger in emerging new wine hubs, where hectares destined to wine production are skyrocketing: clear examples, among the many, are the UK, Germany and even Sweden in Europe, but also China and Canada. With our platform we wish to train local actors on the need and benefit of technology to better outline land use strategy, reduce costs and ensure good yields. We believe the wine sector must abandon wrong tendencies to go for high quantity productions, using herbicides while destroying biodiversity and neglecting traditional indigenous varieties.

Lastly, a major role is played by insurance companies who are providing their services to wine producers: the current global scenario is more and more impacted by detrimental phenomena such as extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and insurance companies’ demands for technology driven models to assess and predict the associated evolution. Within our model, we are including a site risk assessment, that will be paramount for ensuring winemaker’s investment to be safe but also that would be offered to insurance companies too.

Solution sustainability

We have currently initiated the incubation phase within one of the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centres, focusing on the development of a prototype in close partnership with leading winemakers. Over the coming 6 months, we will continue refining our prototype before being able to provide a full service within the next year or so, serving multiple customers at a time. As our model grows more and more refined, it will be able to cater to more and more customers with various needs. Eventually, we also plan on expanding to different crops, as well as serve public institutions.                                                                                                                                                                             

Following the UN millennium development goals (MDG), TFS wants to help sub-developed nations by offering training, education and insight on best agriculture practices, to boost agriculture and food sources in current inhospitable and poor regions.

Solution team work

TfS’s strength stems from the team members that compose it. Our uniqueness lies in bringing together complementary skillsets from the world of business, data, aerospace data and wine. So far, our 4 team members worked hard into gaining traction for our project, successfully running for various incubators and unlocking initial funding. At the same time, work on the prototype has meant an increased workload and we are currently actively hiring 2 data scientists to complement our team. In the near future, we expect to expand further with recruitments in the field of software engineering as well as through the hiring of a specialised agronomist. Terroir from Space is fastly growing its network of strategic partners, belonging to both the technical and institutional domain. A genuine interest of wine domain actors towards our effort is emerging, pushing us to keep on this path.

Terroir from Space recently has been officially incorporated in Italy.