Flowerday Contracting: a scanning business on one Jimny

Ross Flowerday went to the WinePRO trade show looking for new vineyard innovations and came home to build something bigger: New Zealand’s first Cropsy service provider. One scanner on the back of a Suzuki Jimny now serves over 100 growers across Marlborough, and vine scanning has become a product line: pruning QA, vine counts, disease passes, yield counts, trunk-disease detection.

Customer

Ross Flowerday at Flowerday Contracting. A family vineyard-management business in Blenheim, New Zealand.

Use case

Pruning QA as a service (plus counts, disease, yield, trunk disease).

Setup

One Cropsy system on a Suzuki Jimny scans 8,000 vines/hour; clients see their data next morning.

Result

6.49M cumulative vine-scans on one scanner; a 1-year deal renewed to a 3-year term; 400+ ha of client growth in a season.

The challenge

Pruning contractors are paid per vine, against counts the grower only thinks are right. Pruning QA did exist, but as a spot check: the grower’s own QA person walks a few dozen vines and the thousands they never see are assumed to match. Nothing scored every vine in every row, so nobody could say whether a whole vineyard had been pruned to standard. “It’s about creating a baseline of data that will help manage the crop,” says Ross.

The opportunity

Cropsy’s row-by-row cane and vine counts gave Ross an objective record of every pruning job, back by the next morning. That turned quality assurance from guesswork into something he could sell, and because one scanner on a light vehicle can cover a whole region, he could offer it to growers of any size.

What happened

• One month, 84 vineyards. In his first winter campaign (September 2024), Ross scanned 221 blocks across 84 vineyards. That was over 1.5 million vine-scans surfacing missing vines and a pruning-quality spread nobody had ever seen row by row.
• Pruning QA became a product. In Ross’s own words: “It gives us row-by-row the percentage of canes that have been achieved to the standard… It shows us the best rows, and the worst rows. If we do a scan at the end of a day, we can have the analysis back in time for the next morning. We’ve been able to use it as an educational tool with our pruners… Some may be at 75% of the spec, some may be at 98% but with this info we can get the quality up to where it needs to be.”
• His own vineyard is the proof point. The same first-winter campaign scored his own Shamrock Vineyard: across 479 rows, 94.1% pruned to target and 98.4% of canes laid, which is well above the 85% average across his client base and a regional norm of around 75%.
• The renewal is the verdict. After one season, Flowerday re-signed for three years. The following season he added 400+ hectares of new clients, on top of the Marlborough Grape Growers Cooperative (MGGCOOP), whose members he has scanned since his first winter.

The results

• 6.49 million vine-scans on a single machine in two seasons with data to every client by next morning.
• A new revenue line for a family contracting firm, from pruning QA to trunk-disease scanning.
• Growers of every size getting data that used to be enterprise-only through a contractor they already trust.