So when I look at vineyards or potential vineyard sites, I ask myself – what kind of wine would I want from this site? Yes markets mostly dictate what a farmer plants, but with wine, plant the vineyard on the wrong site and see if the market wants it!
But it’s not that easy. Like I said in the previous post – South isn’t just South. There are numerous factors to keep in mind. The soil type, soil chemistry, contours, slope, erosion patterns, do you want to harvest mechanically, wind, row direction according to the sun etc. I won’t be looking at most of these factors when I look at Solar Radiation, even though those are equally important. Those are a whole new science by itself – soil science – and I am no soil scientist!
Let me first show you differentiation from Regional scale to farm scale. This will visually illustrate the importance of your data quality and also the scale difference we can see when breaking the data down to farm level, and eventually to block level.
5m Elevation model of Darling
30m Elevation model of Darling
Let’s zoom in a bit…
5m Elevation model on farm scale
30m Elevation model on farm scale
So this just illustrates the quality difference in models. The 30m model you can download and play around with (here), but it’s no use if you plan on doing high quality maps.
So let’s have a look at the actual solar radiation for a change…
