Casella Vineyard Irrigation Project

Casella Family Brands is Australia’s largest family-owned wine company. The owners wanted to expand operations in Griffith, New South Wales where their main winery and export centre are located. Through a recommendation they approached us directly to help with irrigation infrastructure, developing around 1,000 hectares of greenfield to complete working vineyard over three stages.

Our Adelaide team work predominantly on agribusiness irrigation projects, providing key services such as irrigation design and system energy optimisation, pump station design, rising mainline design, tender evaluations and document preparation, and irrigation system construction supervision. So, they were up for the challenge.

The land’s existing waterways made the site tricky to work with. Plus, the pump station design needed careful consideration to enable the three stages—all from one dam—to operate at different pressures since they’re at different elevations.

For future-proofing and sustainability, we needed to incorporate the potential use of solar power because the owners wanted the ability to be able to switch from electricity to solar. This meant one of our key design objectives was to have the lowest possible operating pressure.

We also incorporated new technology to enable automatic back flushing of the secondary filters, so when the filters block, the system automatically back flushes to remove the blockage. This is not only efficient, it creates time and cost savings for vineyard operations.

Our team came up with smart solutions for the many challenges on Stage 1 of this project and delivered a product the client was very satisfied with, and as a result we’ve been given the green light to complete Stage 2 and commence planning for Stage 3.