With vintage 2023 around the corner, we urge you not to make assumptions about where machinery, equipment and people have been before they come onto your property: be on the front foot and ask them.
This approach might mean you prevent the introduction of a pest, disease or weed to your vineyard.
We encourage you to use a Visitor Register of your choice – an app, a spreadsheet, paper-based – to ensure you screen your visitors and their machinery and equipment before you allow them on your vineyard.
Tips:
- Ask a series of pertinent questions to your visitors and record the answers. If you are using a paper-based Visitor Register, ensure you train your staff to carefully review the answers to the questions posed in the Register, prior to granting entry to your visitors.
- Machinery and equipment:
- Visually inspect the cleanliness of machinery and equipment from soil and grapevine material.
- Ensure you know the SA entry conditions for regulated items to prevent the introduction of phylloxera into the state (refer Condition 7 of the South Australian Plant Quarantine Standard).
- Verify all importation documents (including proof of disinfestation treatments if an entry requirement) if the machinery or equipment has been imported into SA from interstate.
- Ensure that all machinery and equipment leaving your vineyard does so in the same clean condition it arrives – this means you need to provide adequate cleaning facilities. Note: for businesses in the Riverland, pay extra attention to ensuring cleanliness of harvesters in particular, prior to moving them out of fruit fly Outbreak Zones.
- People:
- To analyse the footwear and clothing risk of visitors to SA vineyards, based on prior visitations, and the appropriate actions to take, refer to Flowchart A in Vinehealth’s Biosecurity Planning for Vineyard Owners Hosting Visitors fact sheet.
- For current options on footwear disinfestation, refer here.