3 Lessons Learned from a Year of Grape Growing Webinars
August 24, 2021 Many aspects of life have been made more difficult due to COVID-19. However, grower meetings have morphed during the pandemic, and in some ways that has been a good thing.
To be clear, I do miss large, in-person meetings. However, as a substitute, webinars have been more than satisfactory. It is great to be able to see and hear from growers around the state easily.
It is important to note, in my case, that the wine grape industry in Virginia is spread out. We have a couple of areas with a high concentration of vineyards, but most of our vineyards are scattered across the state. In fact, some peers like the accessibility of growing season web meetings, which essentially eliminate the travel time that growers would need to take out of their day to attend the meeting.
Three lessons learned:
1. There is value in well-designed photographs and images.
A well-designed image can capture an important detail and make it evident to the audience, while a poorly selected photo can just muddy the water.
If photos are curated to help display a feature or idea, they can show in a way that may not have been possible in a large field meeting. For example, talking about pruning grapevines can be tricky, and illustrating that can have limitations in a large field meeting. But a couple of well-designed and annotated photographs can be an excellent way to show this pruning technique in a webinar.
Screenshot from Pruning Webinar, Dormant Grapevine Pruning Workshop and Commercial Grower Panel recorded January 2021.
2. Keep the meeting moving.
Wintertime full-day conferences that had been the norm before the pandemic have some pitfalls in a webinar format. I, like most folks, fail to keep my attention during an eight-hour webinar. But if we can design programs to fit into bite-size pieces, we can make Extension content more available for folks to obtain.
3. Record it.
Everyone runs into schedule conflicts. But webinars can be easily recorded and made available for folks who were not able the join the first time. The format of a webinar lends itself to recording in a way that field meetings do not really offer.
Having said this, I look forward to field meetings. Trapshooting vineyard problems remotely is not easy. Photos can be great. But sometimes it is the context that brings a unique problem to the forefront. I cannot wait to get back to tromping around vineyards at our meetings.
Subscribe Today For
