Robots and drones audition for grape growers at Hopland center

MENDOCINO CO., 7/6/26 — Pickup trucks lined University Road at the Hopland Research and Extension Center on the morning of June 30, their drivers gathered in the shade at the edge of a sunny demonstration vineyard to watch a robot that kills mildew with ultraviolet light. And then there was the drone that sprays rows too steep for a tractor.

The free field day, hosted by UC ANR Innovate, the innovation arm of the University of California’s agriculture division, brought eight agricultural technology companies to demonstrate their creations to growers that just might buy their tools . The show ran from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., with lunch after, and drew growers, researchers and industry people from as far away as Fresno, Sacramento and the East Bay.

“We constantly hear that growers need a place to honestly evaluate technology without the pressure of a sale,” Hannah Johnson, the program’s industry lead, said in UC ANR’s announcement of the event.

That matched the mood in the rows: no hard sells, just info and cool toys.

Robots for hire

Saga Robotics showed Thorvald, an autonomous robot that works vine rows at night, dosing grapevines with ultraviolet light to control powdery mildew — no chemicals and no disruption to daytime fieldwork.

Growers are running out of chemistry, Caine Thompson, the company’s U.S. general manager, told the crowd: resistance is rising and there are “fewer and fewer options to control powdery mildew, botrytis and downy” mildew, especially close to harvest.

The robots run at night because that’s when the mildew can’t fight back. In the couple of hours after a UV dose, Thompson said, the spores can’t repair themselves the way they do in daylight — “so you get this amazing efficacy.” One machine covers about 37 acres on a twice-a-week schedule in regions with heavy mildew pressure, he said, and the company sells it as a service rather than a piece of equipment.

Ag-Bee, a California spray-drone company, flew demonstration passes over the vines; its business is spraying the vineyards ground rigs can’t easily reach — steep ground, dense canopy. Nate Nouwels, the company’s chief pilot and field operations manager, said Ag-Bee flies under the FAA’s agricultural-aircraft and small-drone rules.

“In our exemption, we have compliance for night operations and swarming modes,” he said.

The rest of the cohort ran from dirt to data. Phytech pairs in-field sensors on soil, vines and irrigation lines with analytics to guide watering decisions. Lumo’s smart valves meter water block by block. Verdi bolts irrigation automation onto an existing drip system in under a day.

Agtonomy builds automation into equipment at the factory so tractors can handle mowing, spraying and weeding with less labor. CropMind uses artificial intelligence to read yield, crop load and disease risk from field imagery, while Scout reads vine health, yield and block-to-block variability from equipment-mounted cameras.

The morning capped UC ANR Connect, a program UC ANR Innovate runs with Farmhand Ventures to get young ag tech companies field-ready and in front of the farmers who might adopt them. A board of farmers and industry representatives screens every company that enters the program and helps shape the demonstrations, according to the university.

The Hopland station’s 5,300 acres carry wine grapes, cattle, sheep and 15 to 20 research projects in any given year.” “We have the hands-on experience of testing, using and teaching about new technology in a real-world setting,” station director John Bailey said .

For decades Hopland’s station has been a place to study rangeland, oaks and cattle. That the vineyard machines came here to prove themselves says something about where UC thinks the next farm problems get solved — and it puts Mendocino County’s growers first in line to look.