Meaningful practice based change occurs at a grassroots level. It is therefore imperative to provide winegrowers with information that they can use to benchmark their performance against. This has been done via the provision of individualised reports to Sustainable Wine-growing New Zealand (SWNZ) vineyards and wineries on water, energy and agrochemical usage. These reports encourage sustainability, and provide winegrowers with the data necessary to increase the efficiency of their operations.
Each year approximately 16,000 – 18,000 individualised 1-page benchmarking reports were sent to all SWNZ growers (9 reports per vineyard). These reports covered such topics as greenhouse gas emissions, irrigation use, sulphur application rates, spray timing, and adherence to resistance management strategies. In addition, over 500 individualised greenhouse gas/energy use and water use reports were prepared for wineries.
There is potential in the future to expand this style of reporting onto electronic dashboards such as Tableau or PowerBI. This will enable growers to actively participate in manipulation of the data, and will ideally encourage a greater level of understanding and benchmarking – as well as increasing the efficiency in updating the reports.
Whilst results from the benchmarking reports can be hard to quantify, feedback from an NZ wine survey showed that:
-94 % of SWNZ members found the benchmarking reports helpful
-41 % discussed the results with someone else
-26 % made changes as a result of the report
The results of this survey indicate that the reports are driving a significant level of change in the industry, increasing the level of sustainability in many aspects of wine production.
A quarter of SWNZ members made changes based on their individualised benchmarking reports.