Campus & research
A campus that is also a working block of the valley.
Teaching labs, an agritech workshop, a data studio and nine instrumented research plots — all within walking distance of a packhouse line and a demonstration vineyard.
The campus
Small buildings, serious equipment.
Everything sits on one site in The Ridge: teaching rooms in the timber block, laboratories and workshops behind it, and the demonstration vineyard at the back. There is no bus between buildings and no queue for a machine.
- Soil & plant laboratory — sap analysis, soil carbon, pathology bench, live irrigation test bench
- Agritech workshop — sensor builds, sprayer calibration rig, drone repair bench, 3D printing
- Data studio — satellite and weather feeds, yield modelling, 24 workstations
- Post-harvest line — a small packhouse and cold room run with two industry partners
- Demonstration block — 4 ha of vines, 6 tunnels, 9 instrumented research plots
Research
Four chairs, one dry valley.
Our research is applied by design: every project has an industry partner and a field site, and results go back to the growers who host the trials before they go to a journal.
Chair in Water-Smart Irrigation
Deficit irrigation scheduling for table grapes, soil-moisture sensor calibration across five soil types, and a district water-accounting model now used by the Witzenberg irrigation board.
Chair in Viticulture Data
Multispectral imagery for yield estimation, a four-season phenology dataset for the Hex Valley, and open tools that let a farm manager run the models on a laptop.
Chair in Soil Health
Cover-crop trials in table-grape blocks, soil-carbon measurement, and a long-term comparison of cultivation practices on six partner farms.
Chair in Post-Harvest Technology
Cold-chain monitoring from farm to port, non-destructive quality grading, and a packaging trial programme run with two exporters.
Research infrastructure
The valley reports to the data studio, every fifteen minutes.
Nine instrumented plots send soil moisture, canopy temperature, sap flow and micro-climate data to the campus every quarter of an hour. Students use the same feed the research chairs use, and the same feed the partner farms see.
- 112 field sensors across nine plots, live since 2023
- Weekly multispectral drone flights, archive open to students
- Weather stations and a valley-wide frost network
- Cold-chain loggers in transit with three exporters
- Open datasets published with every completed project
Partners
Research and placement partners
- Hex Valley Growers
- Boland Packhouse Co.
- Kaap Agri Systems
- Witzenberg Irrigation Board
- Stellenbosch Vineyards
- AgriData SA
- Western Cape Department of Agriculture
For industry
Host a trial, a placement or a student.
We are always looking for farms and packhouses willing to host field weeks or a 12-week placement. If you have a problem you cannot solve, bring it to the studio.