2023-08-22 13:19:37
The vine in the terroir of Banyuls and Collioure is undoubtedly part of what the Spaniards nicely call “heroic viticulture”. Because the floors are drier than a cudgel. Because the stones are legion, the grass is a fierce competition and the slope makes any mechanization, understand the use of the tractor, most often impossible. Add to that the difficulty of recruiting seasonal workers, the additional difficulty of housing them in the villages on the coast where the season sets the prices…
“Frankly, I did it once, with a pickaxe, eight hours in a row, it’s a Roman job”, testifies Lionel Lavail, director of the Cazes house, which acquired the Clos de Paulilles in 2012. It is for these reasons that the company, which belongs to the Languedoc group Advini, decided to invest in a revolutionary tillage robot. His mission, for now: to pull the grass.
“So it’s true, continues Lionel Lavail, it’s expensive to buy this type of machine, we’re not far from the price of a tractor, around 30,000 euros, but we have to put the return on investment. If we add the workforce that we can no longer recruit, the efficiency, the speed of work, it’s ten times faster than the human hand… For us, with the surfaces we have to weed , it is amortized over one or two years, at most, ”he analyzes.
And then there is the elimination of the arduousness of this galley-slave work. “In a logic of corporate social responsibility, this is a factor that weighs just as heavily,” adds Lionel Lavail. “Our employees are trained to drive a radio-controlled machine, not to handle a pickaxe. They all want to do it. We are experiencing the same thing in our Rivesaltes vineyards with the electric tractor. »
Used for a few months, on a spring during which the grass did not grow due to lack of rain, the new robot has proven itself and the technical teams of Maison Cazes are now working on adaptations to go beyond simple weeding. . To be able to use it, by adapting a sprayer, for vine treatments for example, which even if they are organic, require care.
“For that we looked at drones, but it’s not as easy to implement, it’s complex to maneuver, it’s often windy here… But here we are, we’re working on that, we can also put a GPS there to take readings, analyze passing speeds, yields…” And even further, the Clos de Paulilles talks with some of its prestigious neighbors on the Côte Vermeille, La Rectorie, Philippe Gars, in the he idea of creating a cooperative for the use of agricultural equipment to jointly acquire and operate a second robot.
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