Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Sustainable Winegrowing
| Titre | Date | Durée | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 292: Testing Vinifera vs. Hybrids: Which Survives Climate Stress Better? | 04 Dec 2025 | 00:40:43 | |
Will hybrid grapes help vineyards survive climate change? Professor Karine Pedneault of the Université du Québec en Outaouais explores this question through trials that expose grapevines to drought and heat stress. Testing both vinifera and hybrid varieties, her research measured plant water flow and metabolic responses to determine resilience. While hybrids still carry a stigma around flavor, they showed promising resistance, raising the potential to reduce fungicide use by up to half and adapt more sustainably to extreme weather scenarios. Resources:
Vineyard Team Programs: | |||
| 290: Fighting Powdery Mildew with UVC Light | 20 Nov 2025 | 00:27:51 | |
With fungicide resistance on the rise, grape growers are looking for new ways to manage powdery mildew. Lexi McDaniel, Viticulture Extension Specialist at North Carolina State University, explores the science behind using UVC light to combat this grapevine disease by directly disrupting the DNA bonds needed for replication. She shares insights from her trials, including why the light must be applied at night, how often it needs to pass through the vineyard, and how this technique compares to traditional fungicide programs in both cost and effectiveness. Resources:
Vineyard Team Programs: | |||
| 283: Developing Cold-Hardy Grapes with 23andMe Technology | 04 Sep 2025 | 00:33:55 | |
Most of the world's wine grapes, like Chardonnay, Merlot, and Sauvignon Blanc, come from Vitis vinifera, a species prized for fruit quality but highly vulnerable to cold, pests, and disease. Assistant Professor Soon Li Teh of the University of Minnesota is developing new cold-hardy cultivars by combining traditional breeding with DNA technology—essentially 23andMe for grapes. His work taps into the resilience of native American species to improve winter survival and disease resistance. But it's no quick fix: the process from initial cross to cultivar release takes 18 to 25 years. Resources:
| |||
| 193: Looking Back on 40 Years of Sustainable Farming | 17 Aug 2023 | 00:38:40 | |
Cliff Ohmart, Principal of Ohmart Consulting Services reflects on his 40-year career in agriculture. Cliff seeded his career with a Ph.D. in Forest Entomology from Berkley University. He worked in forestry in Australia, as a Pest Control Advisor in Chico, with the Lodi Winegrape Commission, and at SureHarvest. Cliff shares his experiences with sustainable winegrowing innovations including cover cropping, drip irrigation, solar energy, biocontrol, healthy soils, autonomous devices, and farm data management. Plus, he shares his number one tip for growers continuing on their sustainable journey. Resources:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Cliff Ohmart. He is principal with Ohmart consulting services. And today we're going to talk about a little bit of perspective on what's happened in the past. And what's looking forward to in the future in the realm of sustainable wine growing sustainable crops just kind of in general. Thanks for being on the podcast, Cliff.
Cliff Ohmart 0:16 You're very welcome, Craig. It's nice to be with you.
Craig Macmillan 0:19 Just as full disclosure, Cliff, and I've known each other a long time. It's been really fun to see the things that he's worked on over the years, and his insights into kind of what's worked and what hasn't. So again, thanks for being on the being on the program. You've been involved in a whole variety of different crops and led different capacities over the years with different projects I've been with you see, I believe, and then also in the private sector, but how did you first get involved in this kind of thing? How did you get involved in sustainable farming?
Cliff Ohmart 0:45 Yeah, I love that question. Because it wasn't deliberate at all. I was very deliberate in my education, I wanted to be a professor of forest entmology. So I got a degree a bachelor's degree in Forestry and Forest entomology and a PhD in forest entomology. And so basically, since it wasn't delivered, but unbeknownst to me, I got a very comprehensive education especially as undergrad in biology ecology, to pretty intensive program at the College of Forestry, Syracuse, and then going to grad school, again, insect ecology, Plant Pathology, things like that. And then I wanted to be a research scientist at a university. So the only job going at the time I got out was actually in Australia. So I spent 13 years as a researcher in forest entomology and again, but don't to me, all of this was really giving me a very, very solid background to get into ag. My family and I, after living in Australia for 10 years, to make a difficult decision to want to come home. And so I had two fellows that I went to grad school with who started an IPM company in Chico, California. Going to Berkeley for a PhD get a very strong background in integrated pest management. So IPM people, and that's how I got into ag and I was a pest control advisor for seven years. It was a very unusual company in that three PhDs doing PCA work.
Craig Macmillan 2:15 That is unusual.
Cliff Ohmart 2:16 Yeah, working, especially in the 1980s, early 90s is when I worked with them. So we were really out there, independent PCA company. So we charge for our services, we didn't sell products, the thing was that they are very big IPM guys, we worked in orchard crops, and we are all entomology type. So both insects and disease management, especially in almonds, had a great IPM program for almonds. So then being there led to a contract with the Lodi Winegrape commission to help them write a grant. And then if they got the grant, we would administer the grant for them in helping them develop their integrated pest management program for winegrapes. So we got the money, and I ended up in charge of that project. Interestingly, being such having such a strong background in pest management, I quickly realized compared to the crops I've worked on wine grapes at the time really didn't have, which I would what I would consider challenging pest management issues. Of course there was powerdy mildew, which people in Lodi were managing very well made sulfur applications. So all of a sudden, it's like, hey, why don't we actually focus on the whole farm. So using that IPM background of, you know, economically viable, socially, just and environmentally sound. Let's look at the whole farm. That's really how it developed. So very quickly, we started calling our program, a sustainable winegrowing program. And one thing led to another we developed a reputation for our progressive nature, quote unquote, progressive. You know, we were very practical farmers. So that's how I got into it. And I after the first year of working on that grant, they offered me a staff position. And I realized what a great opportunity, so I took it. So that's a long road to get to it. But what's interesting is, you know, that's we're talking about 30 years ago now. So I've been added a long time. But that's how I got there. It was for somebody that was so laser focused on what they thought they wanted to do. I never would have expected to get there where I ended up but of course, it's been fantastic because you know.
Craig Macmillan 4:30 It's all about the journey. Yeah, you know, most of the most of us end up in places we never expected.
Cliff Ohmart 4:36 That's one of our mantras in Lodi is sustainable farming is not about crossing the finish line. It's about journey. And because you're never going to be there, you know, it's very almost Zen.
Craig Macmillan 4:48 Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. Well, I have my own perspectives on this, but this is why I wanted to have this conversation with you is you know, when you go back and you look at something like let's say 30 years ago, you know, there were certain farming practices in different crops and some have applied across crops that came along. And the science was starting to show that there was some potential. And then some of them were adopted by different types of growers and others were not some became kind of industry standards and others kind of did not. And again, you can think across crops, you know, what were some of the things that you saw that came along that seemed absolutely crazy at the time, that ended up being widely adopted.
Cliff Ohmart 5:20 I can't think of anything that I thought was crazy. Now. Crazy, but you know, this is the advantage I had kind of from the research community in the background, I had learning how to talk to growers who have lots of important concerns. But interestingly, the thing that got me early in the early days was cover cropping in wine grapes, and how if there was one, no matter what project we did, and we did things like develop that self assessment workbook, all around sustainable wine grape growing, that was the one topic that I would get in the most arguments over me, it seemed like such a no brainer. But me back to my orchard days up in Chico, because of where they were and the rainfall they had. There was a natural cover crop in all the almond orchards and they mowed it. And then of course, scientific methods was the name of the company that clients down around Fresno, and down there, everything just got tilled, and floated. All of that. And I could never figure it out. And of course, some of its rainfall. But then when I started working on winegrapes, it was clear my interpretation was It was literally like a tradition you till as soon as you can in the spring and get this incredible. And of course Lodi had these amazingly deep soils, trying to convince growers that there's all these great reasons for growing cover crops was a long, slow battle. And what I always chuckled about was, oh, Napa, we grow cover crops, you know, and I'd go over there in the middle of summer and there was bare dirt everywhere. Thank you found that there's something cover crops. I understand if you plant them that cost a lot of money, whatever. But yeah, so that was the one thing. The thing that I've seen happen over time, of course, is so many people now and I'm thinking of orchard crops, especially but wine grapes were they were using drip irrigation pretty early. But now so many orchard crops have them, whether I don't think growers necessarily thought it was a crazy idea. But for various reasons, it took a while for that to really catch on. And yet, it's such an important way to manage your water as well as crop health. The other thing, being a data guy because of my research background, the sort of high level I would call it convincing growers that measure to manage is really the best way to farm sustainably no matter who you are talking to a natural organic farmer, because they felt like they were doing great stuff. They were just as bad as not managing and measuring stuff as the conventional because they felt like they didn't really need to. So we're talking about very the thing that got me in my early days, I developed computer software system, using barcodes for company in Chico. And it really was in the early days I laptop in my truck got barcode readers for data collection, because we collect data sheet we gave growers data sheets every week. And it was all about this measure to manage when the first software companies started to SuoeHarvest was one of the earliest to come up with farm data management systems. It didn't get widely adopted. And I asked myself, and I think it's because in those days, growers weren't doing a lot of measuring to manage. Now, I think, you know, growers, because they're on site all the time, they have incredible wealth of experience in their head. I learned very quickly that what's in your head, and what you think you're seeing may not be exactly what you have what's really going on based on what you're measuring. So that was one, you know connected to that is, over time, autonomous devices for capturing data. And weather station was one of the first soil was one of the next and over time, you know, and those are those costs money. And so over time, I've seen more and more that now. I think we've actually reached the point is companies are selling things to growers that a set of ahead of its time. I'm worried that growers are getting ripped off in a way some growers depending on what they're buying from companies so but this measure to manage I think over time has really changed things and then things like solar. I think in the early growers would have thought boy, that's crazy. One thing I enjoyed about wine grape growing wine growers seemed more willing to adopt new things. So like solar really started catching on for pumps especially. And now I think it's more and more Common, and then things like measuring moisture stress with pressure bombs. I can remember in my forestry days, so we're talking about back in the 60s and 70s. Growers well, bark beetle people were measuring moisture stress in pine trees. But they had pre dawn moisture, which was so bad about the vineyard in the middle of the day, they had to go out when it was dark, because they were looking what trees are stressed or not. But it's the same idea. So all of a sudden, people started coming up with using pressure bombs in orchards and vineyards, again, around irrigation, all good stuff. And so I saw that Come on. And then coupled with this as well is just this whole, clearly farm workers are still underpaid, but things gotten you know, more and more growers are paying health care, more and more growers are paying for time off. I've seen that change again, 30 years ago, I think growers would have thought that's crazy stuff.
Craig Macmillan 10:59 And in that tradition, and that idea of like, I just physically can't I would love this, but I just there's no way well, let's let's see if we can find a way also in terms of tradition and mindset friend of mine, before those rules came into practice, he got ahead of the game and he sat his main people down, he said, Okay, listen, we're gonna go to a 40 hour week, I'm gonna give you a raise. So you have the same wage weekly, the workers were really upset. And they said, Hey, you're taking days away from me, you're taking work away from me. And he says, No, I'm not what I'm doing is I'm giving you a weekend. And I'm giving you, you know, a life, you know, plus, complying with the law, he showed people math and try to explain it. And he was really in he was really frustrated. Because, you know, these were his his managers, these are his supervisors. And these are really smart people, really sharp people. But that change to the culture was just, you know, scary. And I think that that's true for a lot of the things we've been talking about. I remember talking about cover crops friend of mine farmer and going back to like the 90s, early 90s. What was it called was cover cropping and vineyards, I think was the name of the book. It came it was I think it was a SARE book, came out.
Cliff Ohmart 12:07 Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chuck Ingles and others.
Craig Macmillan 12:11 Yeah, exactly. He also I think he also did Steel on the Field, maybe. So okay, people getting interested. Here's how you do it. Okay, now we're going to help you. And here's the crops, and here's how they grow and all that. So it was it was available. And so people were starting to get into it. And so this friend of mine who hadn't been doing it was starting to do it. And I said, Well, how's it how's it going? And he goes, Man, I don't know. He says, I feel like I'm farming two crops. And I was like, well, you are. But is it that bad? Is it that hard? Over time, they figured it out. And he actually told me that he said, I spent my whole career cultivating weeds. And now you want me to grow plants? Like that just doesn't make any sense to me. And I got it. I understand that. Like if you spent your whole career trying to knock stuff down. Now you're asking me to build stuff up? You know, it's tricky. I think we're still now working with adoption around some of these things. Cover crops, I think are widely widely widely used in the wintertime and vineyards. You see that's kind of common practice now wasn't in the past, you kind of relied upon native vegetation, but we are still tilling things under. And all of the science is showing. And we're doing tailgates and podcasts and articles and all over the place, not just Vineyard Team all over the place, about hey, you're really eliminating your soil life when you do that. And I wanted to get your opinion on that. Because this idea of soil health, I had never heard that term up until five years ago or so. And then suddenly is like, oh healthy soil, it's all about soil. But are you doing the things that you need to do to do that? And to get those benefits? What kind of experience have you had around that?
Cliff Ohmart 13:44 Negativity on that concept? It just I think so happened to the personalities involved came from actually a soils person was resistant. They thought this concept of the word health was just crazy when it came to soils. And this is a soils guy. And we just in the end agreed to disagree because we did put all of that in our original workbook back in 1999. Growers for state just, if anything, they get that that's been my experience. It's just that depending on what you want them to do like adding compost if they can or can't afford it. And I think it was more the academics but I think that's changed as they've gotten more used to the term this one person still will not use the word soil health, but it's become accepted now because I think it's been defined. And then on the scientific side, the to me, one of my regrets I don't have very many but my biggest regret is not getting into soils. I had a sales class in forestry school, but I was not interested in below ground. I was interested in the bugs. And in the end when it came to consulting and ag that been my biggest deficiency, I don't really understand the geology of soils. And what I've getting for sure is the science behind what's going on in the microbial communities, the interaction between microbes and plants, and the quality of the soil and what's going on in the soil. It's so important. And I think more and more growers are just realizing it, even though again, I'm worried that the commercial side is getting ahead of it selling inoculants and this and that, I think, we're not quite there yet. But we're learning the soil scientists are doing a great job, I think helping us get up to speed on what's really going on.
Craig Macmillan 15:41 Yeah, absolutely. I'm, I'm on a journey myself, right now, about the last two years I've been on this crash course into soils and to soil microbial communities that because I had no background that, you know, I wasn't really interested in what was happening above the ground. And I was interested in, I was primarily interested in insect pests. And then I got more interested in diseases. And that led to nutrition which led to irrigatoin. And this is the piece I'm kind of learning about. Now, it seems like if you're really interested in sustainable farming, no matter who you are, what your crop is, to me one of the limitations, and I want to see what you think about this, one of the limitations is you say, Okay, I'm an expert. Now, in almond farming, I'm an expert in wind grape farming. Now I've got to become an expert in soil microbial communities. You know, now I have to become an expert in soil, geology, impair material, you know, I mean, every topic that comes along, I now have to I have to go back to school again, that to me is an interesting one, because I find people seem to embrace it. And I find people who seem to be resistant to it, mostly because they don't have time or energy to do it. What has been your experience with folks? Are there certain kinds of different types of people that are more willing to invest the energy? How much? How much energy? Do people have to invest in these kinds of things? Is that a limitation?
Cliff Ohmart 16:51 Yeah, I think where I think, if anything, we're I've seen the biggest challenges with small growers that are basically owner operators, and they don't have any help, really, and and they I think, are really time constrained. But I think the real answer to your question is, this is where Cooperative Extension comes in. If you've got the right people writing the right educational materials, you can distill it so that a grower can take information and apply it. I don't have any proof. But I think for definitely some people that say, I don't have time to get into this, they use that as an excuse. They just don't want to deal with it. I understand that part because farming is very complicated. One of those guys, I work with a longtime Kent Reeves as a wildlife biologist, he helped us in Lodi for years. And his great saying was, farming is not rocket science, it's harder. So getting your hands on the right educational information, if you're a grower owner operator, is the secret. Now, if you're a large grower, and I've seen this, they hire people, and it's getting more and more sophisticated, as large growers are doing so they have the opportunity to hire a soil scientist PhD level. And then most people can really dive into it. And then, you know, they have a management team where they can sit down and integrate what what they've got. It's an issue for sure. Time. You could literally spend all your 24 hours a day worrying about doing stuff around the farm. But it's back to the cover crop thing back in the old days. The thing you probably know Steve Mathiason. Yeah, well, in the early days, he and I worked together for four years in Lodi, and he had this he felt that he call it recreational disking. You know, or people just wanted to get out of the house. So they got discked, you know, and we don't really know if that's true. But growers do want to do things, their program. And I saw that in my early days as a PCA, particularly when it came to spraying for insects is convincing them you don't have to do something today, because they're programmed. And so again, back to your thing about I think it can be a crutch, oh, I don't have time to get into soils or whatever. But the other the flip side is that is convincing me. So much of my experience, especially in orchards and almonds was, look, I know it's hard, but don't do anything right now. And that's how you save money. And it really is, you know, I think for insects spraying you can really make good cases for that.
Craig Macmillan 19:31 I agree. And I think that for the folks that I've seen who have implemented certain kinds of practices over the years, they find that it actually is a savings because they're their vineyards are more balanced. So there's less kind of adjusting maybe that they need to do especially if you can get your irrigation dialed in. If you get your nutrition in to where you want it, there's less manipulation is required. You can get your cost down because you're only putting on kind of what you need. I mean, I think we found out the hard way that we have a tendency to put on more inputs than you necessarily need to be putting on because I need to do something, right? I need to take care of these plants, I need to feed them, I need to water them all of which is true. The question, the question is, do you just put out a buffet of cookies for your kid? Or do you control what they eat based on what you know about nutrition? Right, that kind of that kind of a thing. I think the same is true for what you've mentioned, the time and the knowledge part of it. We have lots of great education stuff out there. And that doesn't take that long to read. And there's also lots of other professionals that can come and talk to you, or folks that you hire that can take on a lot of that I've met, I've been very, very impressed with the quality of knowledge and education of young pest control advisors that are coming out of the universities. Now. They have a very strong grounding in sustainable ag. So they see the world a little bit differently. I think one area that I wanted to ask you about, because it's near and dear to my heart, and I think it is teasers as well as biological control in vineyards.
Cliff Ohmart 20:57 Yes,
Craig Macmillan 20:58 Yes. I'll start the conversation. This part of the conversation this way I was talking to I actually interviewed was talking to a person who manages an insectary. And they said to me, what is wrong with you guys in the Central Coast? When I say What are you talking about? I sell a ton, a ton about control agents in the San Joaquin Valley. And I can't sell hardly anything on the coast. And I don't get it. And my first response was, Well, maybe the pest pressures are different this and that. And he says, no, no, no, I, I'm familiar. Yes, there's some differences. But like these, they just don't seem to like believe in it, which I thought was an interesting observation. Because as a sociologist, my backgrounds in sociology also is like, Hmm, I wonder if there is something cultural going on there? Or if there's a group adoption thing, I feel like we've kind of stalled out what is your take on the state of insect biological control right now in wine grapes?
Cliff Ohmart 21:54 I actually don't have a feel for what the state is right now. What I thought you're going to ask me is, what is my view on it?
Craig Macmillan 22:03 Let's do that.
Cliff Ohmart 22:04 Yeah, and I do have something to say. This is where my academic training especially at Berkeley, you know, that was a hotbed of control scientists, when I was there as a grad student, Robert VandenBosch, probably being the most famous. I went through this very interesting, Berkeley, and it was a huge Entomology Department when I went there. And the concept in Berkeley overall was natural enemies, regulate insect populations. And you have to be very specific, using IPM. And disease management is a whole different ballgame. As with diseases, if there there you, you're behind the eight ball, insects, you can watch them and wait. And then when I went to Australia as a research scientist, there was a school and the weight Institute in South Australia. And they felt that the environment controlled insect populations, not natural enemies. It was the classic academic thing of we're right, no, we're right. And in reality, if you study a particular insect, some insects are controlled by the environment, and others are controlled by natural enemies. So my view about bio control is not all insect populations are controlled by natural enemies. It depends on the insect and it depends on the situation. And so it's a great opportunity for insect trees to flog stuff to people. Because you know, who doesn't want biocontrol for work? The danger of bonafide control is if you're going to use insects, you need to be out there measuring and seeing if it's really helping or not, because you put out natural enemies and you don't have a pest problem, and it may not be related to them at all. Unfortunately, it's very complicated. My guess is there's probably more being agents being sold and used than ever before. Partly because some growers realizing this is important. To me, it's really, you know, things like spider mites definitely are controlled by not only the plant but also their natural enemies. Vine mealybug, again, is very much controlled by natural enemies depending but you've got ant situation. So look at these to me in each specific case. And then of course, the other thing with with natural enemies, of course, is you don't want a natural enemy that's so good. That wipes out your pest population, because then...
Craig Macmillan 24:33 ...It goes away. But it's kind of the problem, isn't it? I mean, the original IPM paper from 1959 It's an economic injury level. It's an action threshold, there's some damages it's tolerated and and things like wine grapes will actually on all the all of the fruit vegetable horticultural crops. So you know, aesthetics is huge. I mean, statics is the whole deal. So you really can't tolerate stuff which makes these other techniques kind of tough. That was just exactly where I was kind of gonna go with This is that sometimes we can find a situation where biological control and release of biological control agents might work really well is an augmentative, then there's also conservation. And if we can think along those lines, if we can think along those lines, that helps balance everything out, as well. That's an area where I think that we can see some adoption, probably there's more room for growth, I don't want to sound like you've been critical of growers. I think I in my career have seen amazing commitment to innovation in the wine industry. I've seen people take on all kinds of things that again, the science didn't says it, say, oh, it's crazy. But people were like that, to me, sounds kind of crazy. It's too dangerous. You're gonna lose crop, I'm gonna lose yield. And then but there have been these companies that were like, hey, you know, we're going to trial this and see that if this works, if there's information that gets out, do you feel like we've made progress in sustainable ag, especially in vineyards? Are we have we improve?
Cliff Ohmart 25:55 I very much think so. It's a slow process, again, for all sorts of reasons that we've touched on some we haven't. But yes, I do believe, especially in wine grapes. And I think in orchard crops as well, the which is were my experiences, I just don't have a feel for for row crops, really. But yes, I think we've come a long way.
Craig Macmillan 26:20 In the area of sustainable ag in the future sustainable ag especially in vineyards, is there one piece of advice or philosophy or idea or concept that you think it'd be important for growers that are what would be the one thing you'd say to a grower this about, hey, sustainable ag is really cool. But...
Cliff Ohmart 26:36 Well, one thing I would just bring up this measure to manage and just remind them, no matter what it is, it's as simple as you know, how many growers really have a way to measure how much water they use on an annual basis in a given venue? You know, do you have a flow meter on your pump. And I still think that's the case that some people don't. And then the thing that we were touching on it, I didn't mention, so many of the things that we you and I've talked about, just bring back memories of why this is so difficult. One of them is, you know, it's can sound like we're really being critical of growers, which of course, if you're trying to work with a grower to help them, you don't want to sound like you're saying, Why are you doing this? And I used to come up with various ways. How can you get this across? And so when we developed the self assessment workbook, for example, what that does is it helps you, in the privacy of your own home, identify very specifically things you're doing or not doing. But I tried to remind people look, I said, How would you feel if someone knocked on your door and said, I don't like what you're doing in your backyard. And I'm here to help. You know, it's all partly it's about the approach. And then back to resistance. I'm a big believer in perception of risk versus real risk. And I think all of us as people, and you touched on it, about irrigation, and about fertilization, and about spraying. It's like, if I don't do this horrible things are going to happen. Again, I would just introduce it's a very high level concept. But have people say, Is this a perceived risk? Or do you think it's a real risk? And how do you know if it's real or not. And of course, this comes back to measure to manage. And again, I would try to come up with various very simple parables of why this is so difficult. And it had to do with spraying because you know, so many people, it's like, growers just spray. And of course, growers don't jump out of bed in the morning say, What can I kill today?
Craig Macmillan 28:46 No, they just don't. That's a thing. When around pesticides, people are like, Oh, growth, you're just looking for a pesticide to use. Yeah, but no, I don't want to do that, right. No, I do it because I think I have because I have to I'm not doing it for fun.
Cliff Ohmart 28:58 And as a PCA, especially in my early days spraying and reduce spraying was what we were trying to accomplish when it comes to insect spraying or disease spraying. When you don't spray, you'll learn one of two things. Gee, I wish that I did. If you don't spray and something bad happens that tends to hang with growers for years. Or the other thing you're learning is, boy, I'm glad I didn't. And that's when you realize, Wow, this is why things take a long time to evolve. And it wouldn't be the same for irrigation or nutrient. You know, if I don't put on my nitrogen, my crop yields can be down and it comes back to risk it growers that are interested in sustainable farming, but growers are risk takers. But I think there's a lot of perceived risk, as opposed to try and really get grips on what is real risk or not. So I would talk to a grower about that. And that's the kind of talk you'd have over a cup of coffee or a cup of tea in the office. But I think it's really something really for growers to think about and that doesn't make them sound Like, they're terrible. We're human. We all go through that.
Craig Macmillan 30:04 Absolutely. And there's a lot of responsibility. I mean, that's the other thing, you know, no matter what says the operation is the you know, it doesn't matter. It's the, it's the farm. It's all on your shoulders, don't screw it up.
Cliff Ohmart 30:16 And it's all financed, usually. And then I'm thinking we were talking about this labor and growers paying more in this and that and of course, one of the big budget items now on in farms is labor. And so people trying to mechanize. But if you actually back up and look at other industries, it's the same. Unfortunately, we, we meaning you and I work expense. And so again, it's not that growers are being terrible people, it's they're dealing with it as as is everyone else is just the farm. And one of the things that really was eye popping, I got I was fortunate to be on the workgroup that came up to this sustainable pest management roadmap recently.
Craig Macmillan 30:57 Oh, right. Right.
Cliff Ohmart 30:59 That was an urban as well as AG. And one of the things that I think growers need to know is there are more pesticides used in the urban environment than in the ag environment. By pound more pounds of pesticides. And yeah, who's the enemy? The farmer? Why? Because regulations make it a requirement that we know what they use.
Craig Macmillan 31:27 Yeah, no, that's true. That's it. And I think that also is a challenge for us ag, when we look around at other industries, for instance, or we look at other uses, or we look at other things, and you're like, Hey, man, I gotta do all this stuff. Like, there's all these things that I have to do that you don't have to do, you know, and and measure to manage is another good example of that is, you know, we have tools to do it, we can do it. I mean, yeah, Flow Meter cost a little bit of money. And you got to monitor it. I mean, that's the other thing, you got to look at it. I mean, that's, that's my job big. Well, I do a lot of things. But part of my job is like I during the summer, I watch our water. And if things don't make sense, I jump in and say, Hey, what's going on? You know, homeowners are not necessarily doing that, you know, other businesses are not necessarily doing that. And I think is a societal level, I think the trend is going to have to go that direction, because the resources are just going to get scarcer. Hope that you will agree, and this is kind of where I want to bring things around is would you agree that that we've seen a lot of progress? would you also agree that maybe we've seen some changes in philosophy over time, and I don't just mean from younger people coming into the business, but just folks who've been farming for a long, long time changing kind of how they think about things?
Cliff Ohmart 32:35 Yeah, I think for sure, I definitely know individuals where that's really happened, which is great. You know, I would hope I would have changed over time, because of what I know. So yes,
Craig Macmillan 32:47 Yeah, I've changed over time. I'm just much more bitter.
Cliff Ohmart 32:51 Yeah. One thing that, you know, given that I've been doing this a long time, there's some things that don't change about and one of the things and it came up during this sustainability roadmap, we had a, after it came out, I was sitting on a panel, one of the growers in the audience and older grower, somebody my age, basically said, you know, regulations are putting me out of business. It's no fun farming anymore. But I heard that 40 years ago, and I said that I was a little worried because I didn't want to sound I don't know, I just didn't want to sound too confrontational. But I said, Look, I have to say something here. I understand what you're saying. I really understand what you're saying, But, I heard this 40 years ago from someone that 40 years ago was older. And at that point, I said, Look, grow. Growers are innovative people. And we have to innovate.
Craig Macmillan 33:56 But no growers are adaptive. Yeah.
Cliff Ohmart 34:00 And it's up to us. And this was going back to the pest management roadmap. It is up to all of us to do better. And yes, it's hard. It is hard.
Craig Macmillan 34:07 But but we can change. We can make progress. We can reduce our inputs, we can protect the environment, we can make life better for people. It's all good. We're going in the right direction. So and I'm really I'm really happy to have you bring that perspective and some of those stories to this topic. We're out of time for today. We could go on for hours and I look forward to it at some point. Having dinner with you. Swapping stories, I would love to have a series on on this just on and on and on and on. But unfortunately we can't I guess today's been Cliff Ohmart. He's Principal of Omart Consulting Services. Thanks for being on the podcast Cliff.
Cliff Ohmart 34:42 You're very welcome.
Nearly Perfect Transcription by https://otter.ai | |||
| 192: Winery Energy Efficiency: Center of Effort | Marketing Tip Monday | 14 Aug 2023 | 00:03:10 | |
With heightened awareness of climate change, pollution, and environmental depletion, it's no surprise that nearly 6 in 10 consumers are willing to change their purchasing habits to help reduce negative environmental impacts (IMB Institute for Business Value, 2020). Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Energy efficiency is about using less fuel and energy to perform the same tasks and get the same results. When a business makes energy-efficient changes, they combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. There are several ways a sustainable wine business can make energy-efficient improvements. Read on to learn how at Center of Effort, many small changes around the winery compounded to have a massive impact on their overall energy use. Energy Efficiency at Center of EffortThe whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Center of Effort sees this clearly when they look at the tremendous energy expense savings they have realized since making Energy Efficient improvements around their winery: · Energy time-of-use adjustments on their cooling system, wastewater aerators, and other heavy energy usage equipment. · Implementing night-air cooling of barrel rooms and case goods storage areas to minimize HVAC use. · Investing in a small chiller enabling them to bring tank temperatures down on select tanks rather than the entire plant down. · Installing a quickdraw door to address insulation loss. These are just a few of the areas in which they took action to reduce their energy demand. "A lot of the changes were pretty simple and had varying impact, but all together it compounded into very meaningful differences," says Kevin Bargetto, Associate Winemaker at Center of Effort. He continues, "With these changes, our entire winery facility, tasting room and offices are entirely solar-powered. In fact, we are running net negative, meaning we are even sending generated power back to the grid!" Their solar project went live back in 2016, and Nathan Carlson, Winemaker and General Manager, says that it "showed 100% ROI over 4 years, no problem." Your brand contributes to a higher standard of wine business through its sustainable practices. We are here to help you tell your customers how your brand protects natural and human resources with the Sustainable Story worksheet. This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. And it just got better with a new online course. Go to the show notes, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story to sign up, download the worksheet, watch the videos, and you are ready to tell your Sustainable Story! Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 191: CropManage: Improving the Precision of Water and Fertilizer Inputs | 03 Aug 2023 | 00:26:12 | |
Looking for a tool to help you make irrigation and Nitrogen application decisions? How about one that will not cost you anything? Michael Cahn, Farm Advisor, Irrigation and Water Resources at the University of California Cooperative Extension in Monterey County explains a valuable software for farmers – CropManage. This free software from the University of California combines a wide variety of data inputs to help growers make accurate and timely irrigation and fertilization decisions based on crop-specific models. The tool aggregates data from the University of California at Davis Soil Web, weather stations, evapotranspiration, and satellite imagery. Plus, it can be integrated with a farmer's existing software. CropManage has been ground-truthed in more than 30 field trials. While the product started in lettuce, it has expanded into vineyards. Your vineyard can be a beta tester to help improve this software for the wine industry. Resources:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Michael Cahn. He is Farm Adviser in irrigation and water resources with UC Cooperative Extension Monterey County. But he also works in other counties as well, as I'm sure we'll talk about. And today we're going to talk about a system a decision assistance system for a whole variety of crops called CropManage, which is free and available online. And I've been following for quite a few years. In fact, he was a speaker at one of our Sustainable Ag Expos a few years back, and at the time, I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. And I can't wait to see how it develops. Welcome.
Michael Cahn 0:29 Well, thank you for inviting me.
Craig Macmillan 0:31 So first of all, what exactly is CropManage? Well, it
Michael Cahn 0:35 is an online decision support tool that's sort of in a nutshell is how we describe it. It's essentially software that takes information from different sources, puts it through some crop models, and provide some recommendations on how long to irrigate your crops. It also for a number of crops, provides decision support on nitrogen management.
Craig Macmillan 1:03 How did this all come about? This was a really interesting project, there's a lot that goes into it, what was the genesis, the idea behind this?
Michael Cahn 1:09 The start of CropManage was in lettuce a number of years ago, we're trying to help growers be more efficient in nitrogen management. Nitrogen, as most of you know, in its mineral form, which would be mostly nitrate, is very mobile in the soil. So it seems like if we're going to manage nitrogen accurately, then we also have to manage water. So they go to hand in hand in hand. Of course, I work in irrigation water management. So I also had the interest in just using water efficiently on the Central Coast, because of our limited water supplies. You know, we could use nutrients more efficiently and water more efficiently if we had some sort of decision support tool. When I started working with the vegetable growers. I often asked them, you know, how are you making decisions on irrigation? How long to irrigate when to irrigate? And you get a variety of answers. But essentially, it came down to the experience of branch managers in irrigation farming, sort of passing that information down from one irrigator to another irrigator. One farm manager do another farm manager. And by the way, this happens at vineyards too, you know, so the question was, well, okay, are they you're getting efficiently. And so, as I started out as a farm advisor, my first question was, how do we measure how much water we apply, you have to remember back when I started, wasn't so easy. The flow meters we had available for these propeller meters, they're often inaccurate. And then to record derogations, there was no output, you couldn't hook them up to a little computer or data logger. So that came later. But once they did start monitoring water use growers, who found that if you base it on crop ET, they're putting on 200, 300% of crop at the estimate. And so, so the question was, who's right, you know, is the crop ET right or are they right? So then we start doing trials, saying, well, let's just follow this crop ET and see if that would work. It worked, you know, we never reduced yields in lettuce. So we kept the soil still with adequate moisture. At that time, it was like a spreadsheet model that we used. At the same time, we were working on nitrogen management using the soil nitrate quick test to evaluate mineral island in the soil.
How are you measuring Crop ET back then? We're estimating it, I should say.
Yeah, it's still the same way as we do it and CropManage, we developed crop coefficients. And that was a big question of growers, what is my crop coefficient, and there seemed to be a misunderstanding of that, because they thought it was one number like point seven, one, and then you use that with the referencing ET value that comes from usually a CIMIS station that California irrigation management information system. Well, it's not one number. It's based on really the fractional cover over the ground. So how much of the ground is shade by the use in in lettuce? This changes tremendously, you know, over a season, it goes from essentially no cover to full cover to about 90%. And so then the question was, okay, no cover here, but I need to irrigate Right. So we do have water loss from the soil by evaporation. So we have to model that too. So that all goes into the crop coefficient calculation. And we have that in our spreadsheet model. We based it on published work that was done in the Silicon Valley by my predecessor, and other people, that model worked fine. So it wasn't a model, I necessarily came up with the innovation was just trying it out. And validating it. That's what we did, then, you know, we got grower interest. They said, Yeah, we'd like to use this type of model for water management. We also were interested in nitrogen management using the soil nitrate quick test. And so another aspect to what we did was look at, well, how much nitrogen does a lettuce crop need as you go through the season, and we did this by brute force by harvesting lettuce at different stages, and analyzing how much nitrogen was in the above ground biomass. And that gave us the demand side of the equation. So so now we want to put it all together, and the grower interest was there. So we realized, you know, if a grower was going to use this spreadsheet, it would be a little cumbersome, because think about how many separate plantings there are on our ranch, lots of them. That's a lot of spreadsheets to keep track of. So we wanted it to be in a sense a database database that we available to a grower online. So that was the idea that we have a web based decision support tool, so it holds all the data. So once you enter it, you don't have to re enter it. There is some upfront cost and time when setting up your farm or ranch on CropManage. But once it's set up, only if you make modifications do you have to enter anything.
Craig Macmillan 7:01 Now there's a lot of inputs that go into this, I was looking at the landing page for the CropManage Site, can you tell us a little bit about all of the different parts and pieces of data and information that go into into the system?
Michael Cahn 7:08 Essentially, you're giving crop manage some information about your ranch. So all the different fields that you have, we need to be able to refer to them. So you set that out, and you associate a soil type with that, because we do have models of water holding capacity in the soil. It's based on the soil texture. Now because it is web based, we can use other tools to help you set this up. So fact crop manage links to UC Davis soil web. So you click on a Google map, find your field, you click on it and the soil type comes up, you can always modify the values there. But we bring those in, you don't have to know to use CropManage, you have to associate CropManage with some weather data. So there's the option to use the near CIMIS weather station, you can use multiple CIMIS weather stations, there's a spatial CIMIS option, which is a hybrid of satellite and weather stations. So it brings in the referencing ET data will also bring in rainfall data from the CIMIS station. Because we are working with fertilizers, you can make a customized list of the typical fertilizers that would be used at that branch. And so there is a list there. You can choose from, you can enter your own specific fertilizers that you use. Also, you'll see a place where you set up your commodity lists. No sense in having information pop up about lettuce if you don't grow lettuce.
Craig Macmillan 8:52 Exactly. And vineyards are part of the system now. Is that right?
Michael Cahn 8:57 That's right. They're in the experimental phase. And if you want to activate it, you'll see in your profile place where you check experimental commodities. And that's because we're still developing the nitrogen model for vineyards. So it's good to use for irrigation management, not put to use, for nitrogen management. We're working with other UC Davis specialists on the nitrogen.
Craig Macmillan 9:22 You're gonna have a hard time with that. Trying to get a handle on the demand side of nitrogen for vineyard stuff. I've worked on that as a as a writer. And yeah, that's that that's gonna take some work, but I'm glad that it's part of the idea. I think it's super important. I think it's something that people have overlooked. I think we've been flying blind as far as nitrogen and vineyards goes, we've gotten better in the irrigation side.
Michael Cahn 9:45 Right, right. And that's what I'm learning is the vineyard people have no agreement on a lot of these things. One of the things one of the purposes of crop damages. Well, first pivotal is public, right? It's developed by the University, it takes our science and tries to make it more available to practitioners by having the decision support models are based on our research. And as we do research, we can update these models, but also, as practitioners use crop damage, they can tell us we oh, this doesn't work, right, you know, you need to investigate X or Y. And so for developing new hypotheses or directions in our research, it's useful that way, too. So it's a two way street, I should say.
Craig Macmillan 10:44 How is this going with adoption? Why is it how's it going with communication from growers back to you? Are people picking this up? Are they giving you back the kind of feedback that you need on the growers side, how can we help you?
Michael Cahn 10:55 So for the vegetables, it's getting adopted by growers that are ready to really implement better water and nutrient management, not saying all growers adopting CropManage, but we do have growers who, and some growers, they're saying, Yeah, this is the direction we want to go. And they're in the phase of figuring out how to get it adopted on their growing operation. Because it's one thing where someone at the top or management wants to adopt it to another thing to get your irrigators to adopt it. So that's the hardest part. And then the same with the strawberries. In some ways we've been even more successful were, they were the strawberries. And then in vineyards, while we're, you know, in the beginning stages here. And so right now, what we've been doing is we have beta testers, essentially, vineyard growers that are saying, Yeah, I'm interested, what we do is we put a flow meter on a block in their vineyard. And one of the nice things about crop manages, it can take sensor data into it, just like a lot of those tools out there that are sold to, to vineyard people for soil moisture monitoring, we can also bring soil moisture, data flow meter data in you can observe it and crop manage. So we've outfitted a few vineyards in the Salinas Valley with that, and some in the Central Valley to see what CropManage estimates and terms of water use and what growers are putting on.
Craig Macmillan 12:39 Yeah, and if they tell me a little bit more about the one thing that I love about CropMnage, it's science based. And it's also ground truth. So as you've gone along, you've you've done the background work you've come up with, Okay, this looks like something that would work in terms of figuring out Kc and things like that. But then you actually have spent the time and the energy and whatnot to actually ground truth of the decision assistance model against reality, right?
Michael Cahn 13:05 Yeah, we haven't done vineyards in the way I would love to do it, which is not just compared to what a grower standard practices, but go beyond that, where we have some pre arranged treatments in compared to those treatments. So for example, vegetables, we've done replicated field trials, seeing broccoli, where we apply 50 7500 and 125 and 150% of the recommendation, then evaluate the yield. Like to do this in vineyards, that is trickier. It's a perennial crop, so you'd have to run it for several years, really, to see, you know, really what the outcome is.
Craig Macmillan 13:50 You have other variables along the way things like crop management or dropping crop they're changing cropping styles through pruning and whatnot, year to year during canopy management. I found that to be particularly tricky. If you're thinking about idea of percent cover. If you've got a California sprawl and everything's flopping all over the place then works. You push everything upright. And now you don't have as much shade, but you still have the same amount of leaves. So doing those kinds of estimates is tough. Yeah, definitely. It's on the fly. But I believe he can do it. I believe in you.
Michael Cahn 14:23 Well, we'll see. Maybe beyond my career, but someone needs to do it.
Craig Macmillan 14:30 Do you still need beta testers?
Michael Cahn 14:32 Sure. Yes. Because the more feedback we get, the better and there's different levels of they could do for the most intensive is where we put you know, a flow meter on and some soil moisture sensors. They want that in the field, and then they can follow, you know, how much water they're putting on. And what this means in terms of soil moisture, what CropManaged recommends We also take canopy photos, to adjust the canopy curve for how they're managing the vineyard. We also import automatically satellite estimates of canopy that comes from a NASA product called SIMIS satellite irrigation management system.
Craig Macmillan 15:20 Which is really cool, by the way.
Michael Cahn 15:22 Yeah. And this year seems pretty accurate, you know, very close to our estimates with ground truth, measurements of canopy. And that's going to be compared with opening ET, which is a satellite based estimate of ET, actual ET again, the nice thing about these web based tools is you, the user don't have to go to all those different websites, we can bring that data in automatically in the parts we need for your decision support, we just pull that out, you don't have to search through different places in websites to get what you want.
Craig Macmillan 16:00 Yeah, I like the way the system is, or the way the interface is structured. It's a great dashboard. It's easy to navigate around, it gives you great information easily, which is wonderful. I think I already know the answer to this question. But what would you say is the number one advantage, or the number one benefit to a grower, no matter who they are, of using CropManage?
Michael Cahn 16:23 I guess the number one benefit is they have a better understanding of really the water and the nitrogen management over a whole season, just at their fingertips. For perennial crops, you can see what you did year to year. So the record keeping, I would say, is a big benefit. Even if you don't follow any of the recommendations, just keeping records is extremely useful.
Craig Macmillan 16:49 Measure to manage.
Michael Cahn 16:50 Yeah, it's been very useful for me, in my research, it's like I built this mostly out of self interest in the sense. You can imagine if you were trying to help people doing irrigation, you need to know how much water they're applaying. And so here we have a tool where I can give them feedback right away, how much water they're applying, I used to have to calculate all those ET measurements, or estimates by hand. Well, this software does it. So it's a great extension tool. It's a great way for me to figure out who there's a gap in knowledge, and that I need to do research on. So it's helped in many ways. We have a number of farm advisors that also develop the interests of crop manage in different parts of the state. And so it's sort of the idea is spreading, I guess, you see.
Craig Macmillan 17:44 Yeah, exactly. I hope that it doesn't happen spreads amongst growers. What is the one thing that you would tell growers on this topic, broad topic?
Michael Cahn 17:54 Well, this broad topic of water management of vineyards, there's a lot of different opinions. What I see, at least in the Salinas Valley, is growers, you know, they they stress those vines a lot, a lot more than they realize a lot of their decisions come from watching the vines and how the tendrils are, you know, how they're growing. And they don't want too much canopy, so a pullback on the water. But it could be that at some point, sir overstressing the crop. And so having good sense of how much water stress that crop is experienced would be something I would like to investigate more.
Craig Macmillan 18:36 Especially if you're going into a hot spell. You know, I mean, it's one thing you Oh, hey, these vines, we want to keep the very small, we want to have stress in this. And then suddenly, next thing, you know, it's 10 days of 105. And it would have been nice for that plant to be in a little better shape going into that. But how do you know, right? That's philosophy versus prediction versus technology. But this is a great tool to help you with that.
Michael Cahn 18:57 Right. And so one feature I better talk about in the development for vineyards is you can decide what percentage of potentially ET you want to apply to your crop for each irrigation. And if you enter the amount of water you applied, or the hours you applied, we have another part of crop manage called the saltwater balance. And it will actually calculate how the soil profile will look you know, in terms of depletion of moisture, and we've calibrated that pretty well by using soil moisture sensors. For example, one vineyard we did last year, outfitted with soil moisture sensors and in ran this and it was pretty obvious from the soil moisture sensors, you know, they really depleted the lower part of the profile, you know, by July and it just never went up even with each irrigation they waited up the top foot but you know there was as much moisture down deeper. And so, you know, the soil water balance showed something very similar. We showed this data the grower, and they said, That is not what we wanted to do. We want to keep some of that deep soil moisture. You could use this as a tool to help you understand just how much you are stressing the crop.
Craig Macmillan 20:21 Where can people find out more about you and CropManage in general?
Michael Cahn 20:24 Well, we have on our website, help link, which has tutorials as introduction to CropManage, we do crop manage workshops. Usually during the winter time, where it's hands on, you bring a computer, or cell phone or whatever you want to interface with CropManage. And by the way, you don't need a computer a desktop computer, or laptop computer to use CropManage, it works just fine in tablet. And it's definitely meant to be used with a smartphone out there in the field. Because the interface reconfigures for the different screen sites. It is used in a web browser environment to be recommended using Google Chrome or Safari attending our workshop. And we also say, you know, call it the crop manage hotline, which is my office, and I'll leave us with some contact information.
Craig Macmillan 21:24 Perfect, but we're about out of time. I want to thank you Michael. Like I said, this has been a long, long road to get to this point. And I'm very happy to see the progress that's been made. And I'm happy to see that it's still going. This kind of work needs to be funded. And I know that you relied partly upon donations, and I hope that our listeners will put a couple of bucks in the hat somewhere to keep this going. We appreciate it. But it's a fantastic idea and a fantastic amount of privacy all made. Our guest today is Michael Cahn. He was former adviser for irrigation water resources UC Cooperative Extension Monterey County and other counties. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Michael Cahn 22:01 Thank you for having me.
Nearly Perfect Transcription by https://otter.ai | |||
| 190: It's here! The Online Course You Need to Tell Your Sustainable Story | Marketing Tip Monday | 24 Jul 2023 | 00:02:26 | |
It's here! The simple yet powerful tool to help you and your staff tell your Sustainable Story – the brand new, 30-minute online training course. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. When asked about the importance of sustainability in a variety of industries, over 80% of respondents said it's important in food and beverage, according to Morning Consult's 2022 Sustainability Report. Sustainability is being talked about more and more these days. We hear from our members that they don't always know how to communicate sustainability effectively. That is why we have created the Sustainable Story online course so that you can learn what it means to be sustainable, how sustainability adds value to your wine, and how you can use storytelling to sell more wine. At the end of this 30-minute course, you will have written 7 examples of sustainable practices unique to your band. These themes are based on SIP Certified's 7 values: Social Responsibility, Water Management, Safe Pest Management, Energy Efficiency, Habitat, Business and Always Evolving. To inspire you, we share a variety of examples of each value plus a story from a SIP Certified Member. Use your Sustainable Story during your tastings, sales calls and meetings, newsletters and Wine Club handouts, social media, and even during casual conversation when you're talking about where you work. We encourage you to complete this course as a team so bring together your viticulturalists, wine maker, general manager, sales, marketing, and tasting room staff. Knowing what makes your brand, specifically, sustainable, will help elevate your customer experience, and can even help increase your sales. Sign up for the course to learn how! Getting started is easy, click the link titled Tell Your Sustainable Story in the show notes to sign up, download the worksheet, watch the videos, and you are ready to tell your Sustainable Story! Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 189: RNA-Based Vaccination for Grapevine Viruses | 20 Jul 2023 | 00:24:13 | |
RNA Interference, known as RNAi, is a biological process that leads to the silencing of gene expression. A lot of plant viruses are RNA viruses including grapevine leafroll-associated virus and grapevine red blotch virus. Yen-Wen Kuo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis is researching ways to induce RNAi in grapevines to target virus. Growers may have heard of double-stranded RNA sprays which are intended to initiate RNAi. The challenge has been that double-stranded RNA breaks down quickly in the elements. The Kou lab is working to improve this process and look for alternatives that will have little impact on the ecology. Resources:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Yen-Wen Kuo. And she is Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at UC Davis. I'm Craig Macmillan, your host, and I'm very excited to have Dr. Koh here with us today. Welcome.
Yen-Wen Kuo 0:11 Thank you for having me.
Craig Macmillan 0:13 So you've been doing some interesting work the lab on interference RNA, and also how it affects plant viruses and possibly insects in the future. Can you explain for those of us that did not take genetics like we were supposed to in college, what interference RNA is and how it works?
Yen-Wen Kuo 0:29 Sure. So RNA interference is a biological process in which certain types of RNA RNAs can trigger RNA interference. And then once it's triggered, it will produce specifics more RNAs, that can regulate gene expression, by degrading or binding to the target RNAs containing a homologous sequence containing a similar sequence of those small RNAs. So this is a general concept of RNA interference, we also call it RNAi is very complicated the whole process. And there are different pathways and mechanisms included in the RNA interference. RNAi is a primary and effective antiviral defense in plants, but also found in some fungi and insects and lower eukaryotes. And because of all these different mechanisms, scientists and researchers, they they work on different aspects of this mechanism for either plants or animals. And they're also looking for different potential and better ways to use RNAi for different applications.
Craig Macmillan 1:45 So if I understand correctly, you have cell and there is DNA in that cell, and there's genes that code for certain things. And so the RNA is was transmitting or was carrying information from that's encoded with the gene out into the world to do something, is that a fair explanation?
Yen-Wen Kuo 2:05 So the genome there in plants or animals and human is their DNA genomes is DNA, and then the DNA will transcribed into RNA. And those RNA, some of the messenger RNAs can translate into proteins. So it's a how the central dogma from DNA makes RNA and then RNA makes protein. In the old days, we thought that oh, the protein is the important things because the protein can have different functional, different functions in different ways to to regulate everything in the body or in different organisms. But then afterwards, we found that actually RNAs they have many different forms and they can function at the RNA level. So it can interfere with gene expressions and many different things.
Craig Macmillan 3:03 And how does this apply to plant viruses because you've done some really exciting work with Gemini viruses, I believe with grapevine virus a Tell me a little bit about that work and how that works.
Yen-Wen Kuo 3:15 A lot of plant viruses, they are RNA viruses, a lot of those devastating viruses in grapevines, for example, grapevine leaf roll associated virus or grapevine red blotch virus they. So grapevine leaf roll associated viruses and RNA virus and grapevine red blotch is DNA virus. So there are different types of viruses. And so my work is trying to use different viruses making them into viral vectors to induce RNAi in Grapevine plants, to target those important viruses causing diseases in the field for the grapevines. And because so for example, when the viruses they are infecting plants, they will trigger RNAi in the plant, so that plants can protect themselves from virus infection. And because of that, we're trying to develop viral vectors can trigger RNA interference to target those viruses that's causing diseases. The work I have on the grapevine Gemini virus A that GGVA is to either develop the virus into viral vectors to target RNA virus first. So that's the initial plan for us to use. GGVA the grapevine Gemini virus A target grapevine leaf roll associated viruses. So before we eventually target that virus, we have to do a lot of different tests. We need to know if the clones the constructs or DNA constructs we have of this, GGVA can actually affect Gravelines plants, so we have to do that. And then we want to see if we can develop it into viral vector to carry the sequence we want them to express in grapevines to do the work we want them to do. So then we use it to target genes in the plants to see if they can silence the genes in the plants. So then we did that, we found that yes, we can use that viral vector to silence genes in plants. And then now we try to see that if we can use this viral vector to target other RNA viruses, or other grapevine RNA viruses, because we are actually at the same time developing different viral vectors, and one of them is GBA, is grapevine virus, a another's name, it can be very confusing. GGVA is a DNA virus. GVA is an RNA virus totally different to viruses. So since we have both viruses in the lab, so first, we try to prove the concept. We use the GGVA, the DNA virus, to target the GBA wild type virus, to see if we can see any effects. The GBA infection viral titers in the infected grapevines. So this is what we're working on right now. And so eventually, we want to use this viral vector, and potentially other viral vectors to to target grapevine leaf roll associated virus. And maybe we can use it to target mealybugs too.
Craig Macmillan 6:35 How are these vectors introduced to the plant?
Yen-Wen Kuo 6:38 We modify from the previous reports how people try to deliver those constructs the plasmids into grapevines. Most of the experiments or the assays, from before, they needed to have grapevine plants grown from in vitro, on media or from embryos. But that's really a lot of work. And it will be harder to have applications in the field. So then we develop vacuuming filtration method that we can directly vacuum infiltrate those plasmids that those DNA construct plasmids directly into the greenhouse grown grapevine plants. So those plants are propagated from the cuttings and then those plants, they are usually maybe 12 to 19 inches high above the soil when we infiltrated those plasmids into those grow vine plants. So this is an we got pretty good results, we successfully introduced those DNA constructs into the grapevine plans and those constructs can be infectious and initiate the whole the virus replicate in the grapevine.
Craig Macmillan 7:50 So is this something that can be done in a nursery then with new plants? And basically, they then would come with the vector or is it something you could do in the field?
Yen-Wen Kuo 7:57 Yes, I think the plan is that we can introduce those plasmas in the nursery in greenhouse plants before we plant them into the field. So then the plants that's planted into the field, they can have this viral vector to protect the plants from specific viruses.
Craig Macmillan 8:18 Got it. That's really neat. That's a great idea. And it's pretty cool. So that's fantastic. And in the work that you're doing so far, it sounds really exciting. And it sounds like the direction that you're kind of going in the future is with leaf roll virus that you mentioned. And then also, interaction with mealybugs you mentioned. Can you tell me more about that? What's that work all about?
Yen-Wen Kuo 8:39 Because this virus does GGVA and other viral vectors we're working on to a lot of viruses infecting grape vines, their phloem limited virus, so this GGVA is also phloem limited, meaning that the virus is can only infect the tissues around or in the phloem is restricted. It doesn't go to like mesophyll cells or epidermal cells in infected plants, because mealybugs they feed on phloems. So we think if they can pick up those RNA interference signals, may be those RNA interference signals those small RNAs can target mealybugs too. So we can choose different target sequences in mealybugs. Hopefully you can see some effects for many bucks to to prevent that from transmitting viruses or have lethal effects for mealybugs. That's the plan. Hopefully we can do that. But we have to do tests to see how the efficacy and everything though it can have mealybugs, because there are previously they are different studies they use RNAi on insects, and many people prove that they can see some effects. We hope that the viral vector approach can also use for really apply this into the field for grapevine plants.
Craig Macmillan 10:00 What kind of index on insects are we talking about?
Yen-Wen Kuo 10:03 Depends on what target genes or sequences we choose. For my first choice, I would like to have a target that can prevent the transmission of the virus by mealybug, that will be my choice. I'm not sure if it's good to kill the insects, if it's going to affect the ecology too much. So if we can make the mealybug not transmitting the virus or other diseases, I think there will be a very good first step if we can see a lower transmission rate. And and then we can see if we need to adjust from there.
Craig Macmillan 10:40 That is amazing. And we haven't, yeah, the little bit of research that I did we have we do have proof of concept basically on this in other cropping systems. Is that right?
Yen-Wen Kuo 10:55 Yes,
Craig Macmillan 10:55 Can you tell me a little bit more about that, because that might give us some some vision of where we might go in the vineyard industry.
Yen-Wen Kuo 11:01 So, the RNAi applications, people are already trying to do some of those works. So, one example is that before people can spray double stranded RNA into the field. So, let me talk a little bit about the introduction of why using double stranded RNA. So, there are different types of RNAs that can induce RNA interference, certain types, one of them is double stranded RNA, either double stranded RNA or the single stranded RNA, they can form into a secondary structure in folding into a structure like a hairpin RNA, those are found to be able to induce RNA interference. And there's also other things like artificial micro RNAs, there are different types of RNAs that can induce RNAi and most convenient ways to make double stranded RNA. And people have been synthesizing the double stranded RNA or using bacteria to produce those double stranded RNA and then spraying to the field to get some protection for the plants. It worked at some level, but it's just not stable enough. Although double stranded RNA is more stable compared to single stranded RNA, steroids and RNA can be degraded in the field with the sun and everything the whole environment it can be degraded, people started to look for ways like bio clay to protect the RNA, and then so, they can spray in the field. So, the RNA can last longer and cause the effects. So, those double stranded RNAs can be absorbed by the insects, they can pick up from the surface of the plant or the plant can absorb those double stranded RNA into the plants. So, those are different ways and people started to see some effects on that, but still, we have to improve those different methods delivering double stranded RNA or other types of RNA to induce RNA interference in the plant. So, they are different different approaches. So, one of that is now we are trying using virus to introduce the RNAi to induce the RNAi in the plants. So, people are trying different ways to deliver those specific RNAs to induce RNAi to target specific diseases, sometimes not just viral diseases, that they will try to target fungal disease or something else and insects. This is what many different groups they are trying to do also previously, another way is to try to make transgenic plants. So if we can make plants to express those RNAs that can induce RNAi targeting to specific diseases, then you don't need to really use any tool to the deliver because the transgenic plants itself can produce those RNAs doing to induce RNAi plants. So that's also another way that people are trying to do we call that host induced gene silencing HIGS, and the virus induced gene silencing is the way my group is working on and we call it VIGs vigs. So there are different ways that which we would use to introduce those RNAs to induce RNAi in the plants.
Craig Macmillan 14:31 And right now you are at the greenhouse stage, if I understand correctly.
Yen-Wen Kuo 14:35 Yes.
Craig Macmillan 14:36 Have you introduced mealybug into your experiments into your work yet?
Yen-Wen Kuo 14:40 Not yet. We are just working on targeting grapevine virus first to see the effects. So where we have to continue monitoring those tested plants to see if the effects can last long, and the efficacy and how good they can be. So now we're at four for five months, so it's still we can see the targeted virus is being suppressed in a very, very low titer. So GVA can cause some symptoms in the grapevine plants when they see the plans are infected. But we have to peel off the bark to see the symptoms, we want to see that after targeting to the GBA virus, we saw that the viral titer is very low, if we can see that, also, the symptoms is not there anymore, is now like wild type, when when the virus was infecting in the plants alone, if we can see the difference, we don't even see the symptoms there will be really great. And this part, hopefully I can collaborate with the collaborators, Maher, he's run the foundation plan services, he can help my group on this, to see that how good the effects can be using this GGVA viral vector. So after that, if we can successfully target two different viruses, then we will start to work to change the target sequence in this viral vector to target mealybugs. So that's after the virus work.
Craig Macmillan 16:12 Yeah, well, that's very exciting. This is a really fascinating idea, and obviously is still relatively new. And I think it's really great that you and everybody else is working on this sounds like there's tremendous potential, and I hope that you folks continue on are able to continue on, is there one thing really related to this topic, you would tell growers one thing that you would advise them or you would educate them with?
Yen-Wen Kuo 16:34 I understand that there could be some concerns and maybe doubts, questioning RNAi applications in the field, because before, they already probably heard about the spray of double stranded RNA or other methods, and they saw some effects but not stable enough. So they may have some concerns or doubts, I think many scientists are trying different delivery methods that can be applied efficiently in the field. And we will do different types of tests and trials to make sure we work on any potential issues of this technology before applying them in the field and try not to affect the whole ecology or anything in the field too. And obviously, the current approaches we have are not enough to keep certain grapevine diseases, at low enough incidence. So we have to explore more potential control approaches before those diseases get worse, and adjust the ways to manage those different grapevine diseases with this changing environment. And I think hopefully, we can all work together to achieve this same goal. And I understand this is something new, I hope everyone can keep an open mind and willing to work with us to do different trials and see if we can improve different approaches to control different diseases.
Craig Macmillan 17:58 Well, I hope so too. grape growers are very creative. And they're always looking for solutions to their problems that very much fit what you're describing. And it sounds to me, this could be another tool in the IPM toolbox that may not be the single solution may not be a silver bullet. But it sounds very exciting that it may play a very important role to improve the efficacy of other techniques we have, which is great. Where can people find out more about you?
Yen-Wen Kuo 18:22 So because I will, setting up my lab, so hopefully I can have a lab website soon. I don't have accounts at Twitter or Instagram.
Craig Macmillan 18:34 Neither do I.
Yen-Wen Kuo 18:36 I don't use social media a lot. So my email that people can reach me through the email. And hopefully, when this is up or in your podcast, I will have my lab website set up so people can find us our work, my lab website.
Craig Macmillan 18:53 And we will have links and everything else that we can find posted on the episode page at the Vineyard Team podcast website. I want to thank you for being on the program. This was really, really interesting and is a kind of a view into the future of what's possible. Yeah. Our guest today was Dr. Yen-Wen Kuo. She is with the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of California Davis. And I want to thank you for being on the podcast.
Yen-Wen Kuo 19:20 Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk about research to explain some details about our work to the course and hopefully, I answer some questions that growers might have. I look forward to in the future maybe collaborating with different people to make this thing to work.
Nearly Perfect Transcription by https://otter.ai | |||
| 188: Safe Pest Management: Wolff Vineyards | Marketing Tip Monday | 10 Jul 2023 | 00:03:19 | |
The proportion of regular wine drinkers willing to pay more for sustainable wine has significantly increased in the past two years (IWSR, 2022). Your customers will only know that your wine was made sustainably if you tell them! Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Using storytelling to share with your customers the specific things your brand does that are sustainable and why they are important (i.e. telling your Sustainable Story) helps make it clear that yours is a business that truly walks the walk when it comes to caring for the people and the planet. It builds an emotional connection and fills gaps in consumer knowledge of sustainability. Plant and animal pests are a common issue for all winegrowers. Read on to learn how in an effort to conserve water and promote plant health, Jean-Pierre Wolff of Wolff Vineyards discovered a unique pest mitigation strategy! Safe Pest Management at Wolff VineyardsIn 2017, Jean-Pierre Wolff decided that rather than replanting his vines on the same rootstocks, he would convert to drought-resistant rootstocks and plant them three feet into the ground. Deriving inspiration from an African palm farming technique, Jean-Pierre uses PVC pipes to deliver water and nutrients directly to the root zone. There is no wait time for the nutrients to be pushed to the roots, and no water is wasted through parts of the soil that contain no roots. Along with the tremendous water savings resulting from his deeply planted vines and subsurface irrigation technology, Wolff has discovered an "indirectly obvious" benefit - fewer weeds! Since water and fertilizer are applied through PVC pipes that lead directly to the root systems 3-feet underground, native and noxious weeds with shallow roots can't access these resources, and therefore can't thrive. Vertebrate pests have also had little success in establishing themselves in these areas since they don't typically dig to the depths at which the roots lie. Does Your Team Know Your Sustainable Story?Need an easy way to help your team talk about your sustainable practices? Download the brand-new Sustainable Story worksheet. This simple yet powerful free tool helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. Simply download the worksheet linked in the show notes, complete it with your whole team, and keep following along with this podcast series to learn how to incorporate your story into every aspect of your marketing and sales. Plus, we are inspiring you by sharing what like-minded brands are doing to care for the people and the planet. Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling P.S. We have a brand-new online course coming soon! In just a few weeks, you and your staff will have access to a free 30-minute Sustainable Story training that will teach you how to explain sustainability, coach you through writing your own Sustainable Story, and show you how talking about your good work can help sell more wine. Stay tuned. Check out the show notes to download and complete your own Sustainable Story worksheet, read an example from Niner Wine Estates, to see the consumer segment infographic, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 187: Labor and Employment Law Tips from a Lawyer | 06 Jul 2023 | 00:33:36 | |
When it comes to labor and employment, the best thing that you can do is be proactive, says Anthony P. Raimondo, Attorney, and Founder of Raimondo Miller A Law Corporation. Anthony covers the importance of accurate, individualized timekeeping, not just a work schedule. Today, there is software that supports both employers and employees. Right from your tablet or smartphone, you can track clock ins and outs, verify that the employee received their breaks, and even provide telehealth. Anthony provides an update on current union laws, what you need to know whether you use a management company or farm labor contractor, and how growers of any size can stay up to date with recent laws. Resources:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 And with us today is Anthony Raimondo, he is an attorney and founder of the law firm of Raimondo and Miller in Fresno, California. And we're going to talk about some legal and regulatory things that are affecting growers all over the nation in the west coast and local states. Thanks for being here, Anthony.
Anthony Raimondo 0:15 Thank you for having me.
Craig Macmillan 0:17 You've been interviewed and have written and have appeared widely and have had a number of interesting insights. And there are a couple of things that I picked up on from looking at when your interview is that I really for me, it spoke to me personally, because I was in the vineyard side of things for a long time. And that's the issue of timekeeping. I'd love to talk a little bit about the kind of exposure legal exposure that a grower might have around timekeeping, which on the surface sounds like a very simple thing and in the field turns out not to be a very simple thing. And also what kind of practices a grower might get into trouble for what some ways growers can protect themselves? What kind of what kind of experience do you have in this topic?
Anthony Raimondo 0:49 It's something that we deal with quite a bit, we deal with both the compliance aspect of things kind of that front end planning of how do we do things to stay out of trouble. But we also deal with the defense side, a lot of the litigation that's going on right now is class action or collective action litigation, where you have one or a couple of workers who stand in for the entire workforce, over a period of years alleging a range of different wage and hour type violations. And a lot of those things really come down to timekeeping.
Craig Macmillan 1:22 Gotcha. Now, what we used to do back in the day was people would show up, and the management would show up, and we had a clipboard with an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. And we sign people in and check them off. And then we basically looked at our watches and said, Okay, we're starting at 9:05. And then everyone at work, then we check what time we came back for lunch, etc. It seems like that would work perfectly well. But we did have some issues with folks along the lines that that kind of disputed how accurate that was, or those are the kinds of things that get people kind of in trouble kind of backward, or what's the source of some of these complaints?
Anthony Raimondo 1:56 Well, those things have for a long time been in place and have for a long time have been an issue and a lot of it comes down to accuracy. So when you have what we call a daily cruciate, which is very traditional way of keeping a field where like you say, on a clipboard or something similar, we have a list of people's names. And you know, maybe the upper right corner, we have a start time and a stop time and everybody's name gets filled in on that list, with the total number of hours. And if there's piecework what units they produced at, et cetera. Well, way back in time, one of the very first lawsuits I dealt with in my career in agriculture was in a table grape operation, where they had a similar method of timekeeping. But what they actually did is they would cut the bottom off of one of the grape boxes, and the former for the crew would flip that over and draw a grid on the back of it, write, everybody's name on it, and would write the in and out types, as well as grid information and the total hours for each worker. So everybody had the same in and out time, because it was all being kept collectively. And in a deposition of one of those foreman, the plaintiff's attorney asked the foreman, how he prepared these cardboard time records. And he said, Well, you know, we come when the crew arrives, I get there a little bit before the crew and I draw the grid on the back, you know, I write the start time, and I write the stop time. And it was a very big aha moment for the plaintiff's attorney, because, of course, what she honed in on is that he's writing that start and stop time before any of those happen. Right? Because he's writing the start and stop time at the beginning of the day, what he's writing is the schedule of the crew, not the actual events that happen, we really need to have individualized time records, right, because somebody always shows up late, somebody always leaves early, having a crew of 10, 15, 20, 30 people where everybody has the same in and out time, really isn't terribly reliable, because it might generally be so that this is what happened here. There are they work together, they work the same. But as I mentioned, people show up late people leave early, somebody gets sick, somebody gets hurt, these things all happen, where those individual variations are what led to the accuracy of it, and also those records being kept contemporaneously. And what we've seen over the years, this accelerate in recent years, which I'm happy about, is the increasing use of technology as a solution. And I really think one of the most important thing for growers to do is to embrace technology as a solution. And it's not just about the legal compliance aspect of things. Some of the timekeeping solutions they have out there are fantastically advanced now. So, you know, we can have foremen now keeping time on a tablet. We have in some of the types of ag operations I deal with. We have harvesters who have individualized, it's almost like a nametag that they wear where they're in and out time can be kept visually, there's like it's like an electronic pen. They swipe that with the clock people in and clock people out there in and out times for their meal breaks recorded. We have devices where employees can clock in and out individually by cell phones if their smartphones. And by the way, a lot of those can be used for other types of risk management, a lot of the software that's out there now will ask the employee when they clock out at the end of the day, did you have any injuries today? Did you get your meal period today? It's your rest period today. They can be programmed to answer a series of questions that deal with a lot of our risk management issues not only related to things like Wage and Hour liability, but related to workplace safety related to workers compensation, this technology can have a multitude of different benefits, I have one client that I represent, and more started to do this sort of thing, who has even gone to using remote technology, what they really found, like medical triage out in the field. So they have a telemedicine link set up with a monitor out in the field where if a worker is injured, or report some type of illness or injury, they can actually connect remotely to medical providers who can evaluate that injury very quickly. And a lot of times, what they've done is they've reduced their workers comp claims, because they can deal with the small things. First Aid incidents out in the field which aren't reportable to workers comp, rather than the treatment gets delayed, response gets delayed. And then something that could have been dealt with as a first aid accident in the moment now becomes a medical visit down the road, which just creates cost for everybody. So there's a lot of technology out there as an industry need to embrace.
Craig Macmillan 6:21 That's really interesting, because I think that actually is a benefit for both workers and for management.
Anthony Raimondo 6:25 Absolutely.
Craig Macmillan 6:26 If I have confidence that my hours are getting counted accurately, I'm more confident, more secure. If I'm being asked, you know, did these things happen? It does cause me to reflect and say yes or no or whatever. That's it, I think it's really cool. And these are things can be done on a tablet can be done on a phone remotely. Obviously,
Anthony Raimondo 6:41 There's there's a variety of different ways to do this. There are even methods for where there is no internet connection, or there's no cell phone signal. You know, a lot of our folks are in areas where signals are. We've seen for years and years, especially in like the strawberry industry. And some of the other areas of the industry I deal with, they have these, you know, we call them pens, but they're these big data devices. And they will actually save the data on that device. And that can be brought to an office after the is over dropped off the data downloaded. And you can preserve your data, even when you don't have a connection where the tablet or cell phone works. So there's a wide variety of technological solutions available. And I think you're absolutely correct. The best thing about a lot of these solutions is they really are win wins for both the workforce and the employees. You know, it's an it's an interdependence in the industry, the employees need the job and the income, the employer needs the employees to be able to get the work done to produce the product, we can have solutions that work for everybody and benefit everybody.
Craig Macmillan 7:39 That's fantastic. This is new to me. So I'm really glad to hear that this kind of thing is happening. I want to switch gears a little bit here. There's been some changes, I believe in the agricultural Labor Relations Act or the way that it works. Regarding unionization, can you tell us a little bit about that and what the implications might be?
Anthony Raimondo 7:55 Yeah, I'm gonna qualify this because some of it is very much in flux, because there are some regulatory activity going on the agricultural labor relations board in terms of the implementation of the new law. So let me back up and give you what what used to be the case. So you can have context for what the what the changes that has been made, historically, our going back to 1975, when the when the Act was first implemented, what are the things that was going on prior to the ACA was this kind of wild west world of unionization, and there was a big struggle between the United Farm Workers and the teamsters as to who was going to represent workers out in the field, it was very, very contentious. It was one of the things that led to the passage of the agricultural Labor Relations Act, because sometimes that contentiousness even broke out into violence between the competing unions, but what happened was, there was a perception amongst some growers that the teamsters made would be easier for them to deal with or more favorable for them to deal with than the United Farm Workers Union. So a lot of growers that before the law passed would sign contracts with the with the Teamsters, in order to keep the UFW United Farmworkers out. So one of the things that Cesar Chavez actually insisted on when the act was developed was that the only way for a union to gain the right to represent workers in agriculture be through a secret ballot election. In our Federal Labor Law employer believes there has evidence that a majority of their workers want a union, they can simply recognize the union and say, okay, the people want you. Let's sit down and negotiate. Chavez didn't want that because he was afraid that growers would actually voluntarily recognize the union, the teamsters union to cut the UFW out of the equation. So there was this insistence have to have secret ballot elections, because secret ballot elections will actually show truly who the workers want to represent them. So the way the process has worked ever since and is a union has to get a majority of workers to sign what are called authorization cards, which are just little cards that say they want to be represented by the union. They would turn those into the agricultural labor relations With a petition document that answered certain qualifying questions, and if all of the requirements were met for an election, including a majority of workers are expressing a desire to have the union, the agricultural Labor Relations Board would send personnel out to the field, they'd set up a ballot box in a voting booth, you know, much like we would do in an in person election in the political world, and the workers would vote in their secret ballot election, yes or no whether they want a union. Ballots would be counted. And assuming there were no irregularities in the election, that result would be certified. And if the union won that election, they would become the representative of the employees of that employer. What has happened over the years is that the UFW has become extremely ineffective when it comes to organizing farm workers. They simply cannot win elections. And in recent years, they really organizing has been dead, because every time even when they try to organize workers, they either fail, or they end up losing the election. Even if they can get a majority of those cards to get an election, they lose the election. And in the last 10 year, there have been far more elections to actually vote the UFW out from workers who no longer want their representation than there have been elections to vote the UFW . The combination of this pattern. And a few years ago at a large farm in the San Joaquin Valley called Groveland farms. I was involved in this because what happened there was the union and won an election back in the 90s, and had never had a contract there. They kind of went away for a long time, and no one had heard from them. The I want to say 16 ,17 years of no contact between the company, the union, all of a sudden the union pops up and says we still represent these workers, we want to have a contract, the workers found out about it, they didn't want the union. And a group of these workers came to me and I ended up representing these workers for five years on a pro bono basis, we forced an election to be held, the state did not want to count the ballot for those elections, we had to litigate that ultimately, we won that litigation. And 85 plus percent of the workers had voted against the union. And that no, that company remains a non non union. As a reaction to that you now have a law where that was just passed, it took effect January one of this year, that really were for practical purposes removes the secret ballot election from this scenario. Now, there are two alternatives under the law, what they call a labor peace election and a non labor peace election. These aren't really elections, a labor peace election is something that we're probably never going to see because it requires a grower to sign and file a document with the state that says that they will never oppose union representation amongst their workers, growers just simply do that, if that happens, there's a mail ballot process that will happen where the union can gain representation rights to these mail ballots. But I really don't think it's ever going to happen. What really the law is, is now if a union gets a majority of workers to sign something like authorization cards, some document that says, we want the union, instead of that triggering an election to happen, that's now going to lead to a union certification, and the union will gain the right to represent the workers without election. Let me backup. So what we will see happen now is the union representation process. And this is really the meat of this law is where previously a union having worker sign authorization cards or some other similar document, expressing a desire to be represented by the union. Historically, that would mean let's have an election and find out what these workers really want. And by the way, as I mentioned earlier, in a vast majority of circumstances, the union would have an overwhelming majority of those cards. But when presented with a secret ballot, the workers would vote against the Union. But now, those authorization cards alone will be enough for the Union to become certified as the representative of the workers, which will create a duty to bargain by the grower to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the union. And it's important for growers to understand, especially in the wine industry, because there's such a prevalent use of vineyard managers and farm labor contractors. When you have a foreign labor contractor, under this law, the farm labor contractor doesn't exist, those employees are attributed to the grower. So it's not like if the union comes in, the grower can get rid of one farm labor contract or hire another one be free of the Union, the union will still be there that attaches to the grower not to a labor contractor. And for these purposes, in a majority of situations, even a vineyard manager would be considered a farm labor contractor. Under the law. There are some circumstances where a vineyard manager can actually stand in the shoes of the grower. But those are really where you have like an absentee landowner and a vineyard manager that has a long term history of managing the particular property such that the vineyard manager really is acting as the grower. But in most circumstances where there are vineyard managers and farm labor contractors, the union obligation will attach to the grower not to that manager not to that contract.
Craig Macmillan 14:59 Interesting. And so the implications for this are that people may organize or be organized. And the, the quality of the decision is a little bit questionable that kind of what the takeaway is?
Anthony Raimondo 15:16 Yeah, I think it's very prone to fraud. It's very prone to deception. I've been doing this for a long time in a lot of different industries. And I've been involved in a lot of different union elections, and employees sign these cards for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes it's because they truly want a union. Other times they don't understand what it is that they're signing. Other times they're pressured into signing, sometimes there is outright fraud. There's a lot of different issues with this. But one of the big issues I think, to keep in mind, which is disturbing about this law, is that if you look at the history of federal labor law, going back to the 1930s, and the National Labor Relations Act, which governs unionization in all industries except agriculture, there's a principle there that underlies union elections. And the idea is that the workers should hear a vigorous debate on both sides of the question of unionization of why they should or why they shouldn't vote for the Union. And then do do when a democracy when we need to make decisions about our collective future, go to a ballot box and vote by secret ballot, where nobody knows what your vote was. And you have that freedom to say yes or no, based on your own choice. Not somebody coming up to you, under some circumstances, that you're not worrying, we can't identify and saying, hey, sign this thing. Like I said, I've seen deception, I've seen coercion, I've seen outright fraud, some number of them may be genuine, but there's just no way of knowing has no way of controlling it. And the workers are not going to hear both sides of the debate before they make that decision. They're going to hear only from the union, they're going to sign these documents. And in many cases, the decision will be made and the issue will be over before the grower or the employer even has a chance to present why they think the workers don't need a union. It's already illegal to threaten workers against unionization, it's illegal to coerce them in any way. But there is fundamentally in the core of labor relations law a right of free speech, where we have until recently viewed it as healthy for workers to hear a vigorous debate and a vigorous campaign on both sides from both the union and from the employer, and then make their decision at the ballot box. That is what's been taken away from workers, which is very, very disturbing to me. And when I represented the workers, at Gerawan Farms, the lady who was kind of the spokesperson for the worker effort made a really great statement actually, in a TV interview that always stuck with me and sticks with me to this day, the UFW charges dues that are 3% of the workers wages. And she looked at the camera TV interview and said, I think I can use that 3% For my children better than the UFW can.
Craig Macmillan 18:02 Yeah, I can see that that's gonna be an interesting situation coming up here in the future. This is kind of a related question. Many employer employee conflicts, I think where the some of this connected to can be resolved around some kind of effective, transparent internal grievance process where you can handle things internally to address people's concerns or whatever the grievances or whatever, in your experience, what does an effective internal grievance process look like?
Anthony Raimondo 18:29 Well, it's something that I think is very important, as you mentioned, for labor relations purposes. And now I'm just talking about the general relationship between an employer and its workforce, there are always going to be issues that arise. And for a healthy business, what you really want is workers to be able to come forward with those concerns, and communicate them where you can respond in a way where you can come to an agreement about what should be done. And it may it doesn't mean you just say yes to everything. But it means that the workers understand that their voice is heard. And if the answer is no, they understand why the answer is no. So what that really means is number one, you need personnel involved who are bilingual, we operate in what is a primarily Spanish speaking industry. So we need folks who who are bilingual who can educate with the workers. This typically is done through an HR department if you have an effective HR department, but they have to be visible to the people out in the field and known to the people so they need to get out of the office, go out and visit with the crews introduce themselves to the crews, to the workers themselves, not just to the foreman and make sure that people know who they are and know them by name, that they have contact information that is out there to the workers so the workers know how to reach them, and that the workers understand the process that operates outside of the normal chain of command and it doesn't have to go through their foreman or through their supervisor because if it goes to the foreman of the supervisor, what happens if the problem for the employee is the foreman or the supervisors?
Craig Macmillan 19:54 Right, right.
Anthony Raimondo 19:57 We have a process that is outside of that immediate chain command that if necessary, can go straight to the top of authority at the company to address problems and get problems solved. I've seen it be successful. I mean, I'll give you a great example is a longtime client of mine, who is a labor contractor has a very active HR department and they are extremely engaged. And one of the attorneys who works for me actually went with one of the HR representatives out to a location where the company was providing the staffing and providing the employees. And when they got out of the out of the car at the location, the employees were all waving to this HR person and greeting her by name, hi, hi, great to see you. Like they all knew her and they were comfortable. And there was this relationship and dialogue back and forth. So that workers would feel comfortable if there was an issue or there was a concern, you know, anything from Hey, our wages are too low, our equipments not safe, we don't have what we need, the forman it is abusing us, our time records are not correct. Anything that it might be, as an employer, you want those things to come to you. Because then you can solve them. If they don't come to you, they're gonna go somewhere else where there may not be a solution, whether it's a union, a government agency and attorney, but situations where the problem will actually become exacerbated and may not even get solved. Whereas if you have an effective process to understand what's going on on the ground, you can confront those issues and solve those problems before they become bigger problems. When employees have that avenue to communicate and resolve workplace issues internally with the company. It goes a long way. You know, employees go to union because they feel like they don't have a voice in their workplace. And they feel like there are problems that simply cannot get resolved without bringing in that third party. When they feel like they can solve problems internally, they're going to solve that they're going to use that process and they're not going to reach out to that union. They're they're much more resistant to it, because they have to pay for the Union. Why? Why pay a third party, something that you can do for yourself if you feel like you can.
Craig Macmillan 22:05 And possibly have something resolved quickly, effectively and amicably. And I think that's, I think that's absolutely right. I think that human components, huge really, really important. Sometimes we get into our own little boxes, and when the little boxes are not talking to each other when people can actually talk to each other.
Anthony Raimondo 22:21 I think we underestimate the importance of the the relationship aspect of every part of business, including the employer employee relationship.
Craig Macmillan 22:30 Yeah, exactly, exactly. We're getting close to run out of time. But there's one more thing I wanted to ask you, again, you have so much experience in this area. The farming operations vary tremendously in terms of their size, especially when maybe not especially but certainly in the vineyard industry. It seems like it's nearly impossible for a small grower to stay on top and stay compliant with constantly changing and expanding regulatory landscape. They have a lot to do, and they don't have a lot of staff to do it. Given the regulatory burden on a cultural operations. Do you have any advice for small growers and how they can successfully navigate the environment stay on top of these things?
Anthony Raimondo 23:03 I think there's a number of things that people can do. For example, on our website, raimondomiller.com, you can sign up for email, where we put out a lot of information about new laws or new regulations as they come out. And that's completely free. We work I've worked for a long time with the dairy industry where there's a lot of small farms as well as in the wine industry, where we have a lot of smaller employers. And one of the things that we strive to do as a firm is to establish relationships with industry associations, I do a lot of speaking of for different industry associations. And if there's any folks from those kinds of associations listening right now I do those things for free. I've never charged anybody for those things. Were on any topics that anybody wants, we can give updates, we can give other information out one on one and I travel, travel just about anywhere to do that. In a couple of weeks, I will be heading down to Temecula to speak to some wine groups, wine growers down there, which I do, then big event down there called great days, which I do every year. It's a wonderful, wonderful event and a great way to get information out. There are times where we have made relationships with industry associations where they're smaller farmers, where the association will pay our law firm to essentially provide advice consulting input, discounted services to farming operations. You know, we've we've made arrangements with associations where we do things like employee handbooks and other risk management devices on a significantly discounted rate and provide free consultation to their members and those kinds of things can be worked out. I think one of the things that's different about our firm is that we really do strive to be able to work with folks within the industry to make resources and information and advice available to the smallest farmers.
Craig Macmillan 24:48 That is wonderful. Yeah,
Anthony Raimondo 24:50 There's the big guys but the big guys have resources to get what they need, you know, in terms of human resource consulting, in House lawyers, outside law firms. It's really I think the little guys we've got to watch out for in this industry. And most of my career, I've represented family farms and family businesses. And that's kind of the niche that we fit into. If folks are out there, and they're looking for these types of resources, reach out to me. And let's, let's get an introduction with your local association. And let's see if we can work something out where we can provide some time and some resources to making sure that even the smallest members of those associations have access to the information and the resources that they need.
Craig Macmillan 25:29 So there is some support out there, small growers, not in isolation. It sounds like we've got places to go and people to talk to you. And I think it's really great going to the associations, because people will go to those meetings, they're very interested in those topics might draw them to those meetings. So I really appreciate the work that you folks are doing on that kind of wrapping up here. What is what is one thing that you would tell grape growers, just in general, regarding any of these types of issues, HR issues, other labor related things?
Anthony Raimondo 25:57 I think that being proactive is extremely important and understanding what risk management tools are out there for you and what you can do to protect yourself and what is a very difficult and complicated legal and regulatory environment. You know, we started off talking about technology and things like timekeeping, I think stuff like that is really valuable. employee handbooks are really, really important contracts between growers and vineyard managers and labor contractors in writing. You know, a lot of agriculture historically has been done on a handshake basis. And I kind of wish we still lived in that world, but we don't live in that world anymore, need to have written agreements, arbitration agreements for employees are a very powerful risk management tool that we'd love to see folks expand the use of, and it's a very, very inexpensive way to reduce risk. Insurance strategies are really important. There's a lot of great information out there through insurance brokers, for example, most of the insurance brokers that I know in agriculture provide a ton of free help with Cal OSHA compliance. In fact, when when farmers, mostly small farmers call me and they want help with Cal OSHA compliance. Usually, the first place I send them is their insurance broker, because a lot of those guys will do that stuff for free. So understanding what you what you get for free and what it makes sense to pay for it, how much it makes sense to pay for it is a valuable tool. But employee handbooks are important written policies are important training is important. And figuring out how to get those things in a way that is the most cost effective, especially for a small farmer is is really important. And it means not being afraid to reach out and ask questions. And I always take calls from farmers, my cell phone rings, anytime a day. And I'll try to help folks find those kinds of resources. And, you know, I don't want folks to be afraid to call me I'm not going to charge you for a phone call. If you're calling me asking me, How can I get access to some of these resources, I'll try to point you in the right direction, figure out where you can find resources at a cost and with a strategy that works for you. But what I don't want you to do is stick your head in the sand and just be reactive instead of proactive we can in this environment. If we work together. And we reach out, ask for help ask questions. Be proactive.
Craig Macmillan 28:12 That is great advice. And I think we would all be wise to think about that. It's hard to be proactive sometimes. But the benefits are many, many, many, many, many times greater than the downsides that you might think you're going to run into where can people find out more about you? You've already mentioned, your willingness to talk to people.
Anthony Raimondo 28:32 We have a website at WWW. Raimondomiller.com. I'm happy to give out my cell phone number. It's not secret. I'll put it out right here on the air. It's Area code 559-801-2226. Anybody's welcome to give me a call anytime and say, Hey, I heard you on the podcast. I got a couple of questions for you. I'm happy to take those calls. If for some reason you can't reach me, leave me a voicemail. It's rare that I go more than a couple hours without responding to somebody's phone call. I've represented dairy and livestock guys for years. So you know my phone doesn't turn off until they turn the cows off, which is never so never. I'm always happy to talk to farmers and I'm always happy to see what I can do to help. So feel free to give me a call. Feel free to the website.
Craig Macmillan 29:14 We appreciate it very much. So I guess today has been Anthony Raimondo is an attorney and founder of Raimondo Miller law firm in Fresno, California. Anthony Hey, thanks for being here. This is a really great conversation. I'm glad you take the time.
Anthony Raimondo 29:28 Wonderful. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Nearly Perfect Transcription by https://otter.ai | |||
| 184: Wine Customer Segments and How to Talk Sustainability with Them | Marketing Tip Monday | 26 Jun 2023 | 00:04:00 | |
Not all wine tasters are alike - a major understatement. As traffic ebbs and flows in tasting rooms, it's evident that interests, price points, and preferences differ. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. In the tasting room you get a wide variety of customers. There's the outgoing couple that wants to know all the details of wine production. There is the lone taster on vacation with a notebook who just makes his own tasting notes. And naturally, there's the group of friends who get a little boisterous and lose interest when the tasting room host talks about technical attributes of the wine. Wine Intelligence recently published a study outlining six distinct consumer segments in wine. It's important to know how to talk to each of them about sustainability. 1. Engaged Explorers:Young, fun, ready for adventure and super into trying new wines, regions, and producers. These are consumers who like to travel to wine regions and are likely to spend more. SIP Talk: Talk about sustainability vs. organic and biodynamic. They'll appreciate the knowledge! 2. Premium Brand Suburbans:These folks skew older, know what they like and know a lot about wine. They're usually not big spenders, but in wine country can be die-hard loyalists at any price. SIP Talk: Get technical and talk about how fruit quality is measured- Brix, pH, and TA. They'll dig the attention to detail! 3. Contented Treaters:They don't drink a ton, but when they do, they don't care how much it costs and are looking for an engaging origin story to tell at one of their fabulous cocktail parties. SIP Talk: Stick to casual cocktail talk and discuss fun elements of sustainable vineyards like using owls and other integrated pest management practices. 4. Social Newbies:They're young, new to wine and relying heavily upon recommendations and valued information. SIP Talk: Stick to the three Ps of sustainability- People Planet, Prosperity. They'll love this 360° approach and be able to pass it along with confidence. 5. Senior Bargain Hunters:The largest segment of wine drinkers in the USA, they appreciate value. SIP Talk: Value-driven sustainable initiatives like monitoring utility usage and recycling programs. 6. Kitchen Casuals:Very infrequent wine drinkers who rarely stray from what they know and are not as interested in wine as they are in other beers and spirits. SIP Talk: Stick to the basics of what sustainability is and how drinking SIP Certified wine is a win for the people and environment. Does Your Team Know Your Sustainable Story?Need an easy way to help your team talk about your sustainable practices? Download the brand-new Sustainable Story worksheet. This simple yet powerful free tool that helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. Simply download the worksheet linked in the show notes, complete it with your whole team, and keep following along with this podcast series to learn how to incorporate your story into every aspect of your marketing and sales. Plus, we are inspiring you by sharing what likeminded brands are doing to care for the people and the planet. Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling For those of you who are SIP Certified, check your mailbox. Just in time for the summer winetasting season, we have mailed you table signs featuring a graphic of the 7 Values of SIP Certified plus a QR code to "read this month's Sustainable Story". Check out the show notes to download and complete your own Sustainable Story worksheet, read an example from Niner Wine Estates, too see the consumer segment infographic, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 185: Why You Need to Talk About Sustainability | 15 Jun 2023 | 00:27:02 | |
As a wine producer, you owe it to yourself to talk about your sustainable practices as much as you can. Amanda Wittstrom Higgins, Principal at Full Cup Solutions explains that you never know what unique story about your brand will engage your next consumer, trade account, team member, or press writer. Use video and photos to capture specific practices including cover cropping, reusing barrels, and community donations. With a bank of digital collateral, you can easily bring practices to life online. Amanda shares simple and effective staff training tools, how to quickly build rapport with clients, and why sharing your story makes you stand out in the marketplace. Resources:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Today our guest is Amanda Wittstrom Higgins she is the Principal of Full of Cup Solutions. And we're gonna be talking about sustainability communication for wineries and vineyards. Thanks for being on the show, Amanda.
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 0:10 Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Craig.
Craig Macmillan 0:13 First of all, tell us a little bit about what you do. What is Full Cup Solutions do?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 0:16 Thanks for asking Craig Full Cup Solutions is a strategic advising company aimed at elevating agriculture and the beverage industry, I work with companies to help uncover their greatest gifts and tell their stories to customers and partners, all while making their company more efficient from an operational perspective is really just coming in and acting as an advisor.
Craig Macmillan 0:39 So what roles do sustainability efforts play within a company and beyond considering resources? So you're coming in and you're helping people kind of find ways of kind of telling their story is kind of how I understand it. A lot of companies are doing things internally, what's the benefit? Or what are the roles of things to take it outside the company?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 0:56 It's a great question. So sustainability is a really important element of most companies. And I think I've grown up as a farmer and worked in the wine and beverage industry for the last 15 years, both on a national scale as well as direct to consumer. And I think that there's a real opportunity for brands to stand out in the marketplace, through sharing their stories of sustainability, you can stand out in the marketplace, you can stand up to prospective employees, and really just stand out as a farming community, which I think is really, really important. You have to remember that close to 20% of wine consumers live in five metropolitan areas. So the majority of the world
Craig Macmillan 1:42 Wow!
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 1:42 It's pretty crazy. And actually close to 50% live in 25. metropolitan areas. So it's really interesting when you think about it, from a consumer perspective how little most people know about farming. And when we talk sustainability, Craig, especially at the Vineyard Team, and for SIP, it's not just farming practices, you know, it's social responsibility, its economic viability, it's a very holistic approach, which I love, and I think is very encompassing of great business. Beyond simply conserving and those resources, I think that there's huge advantages for companies to talk about what they do, not only in the field, but within their own communities. And for the industry at large. I like to look at it as an overlap between social and environmental progress, and financial gain. It's a shared values opportunity, where you can do good things and still have a direct impact on your company, as well as the community.
Craig Macmillan 2:43 I think you actually I've kind of already moved into this, but I know that you like to talk about the farming aspect of things you come from a farming background. And obviously, folks that live in these more urban metropolitan areas really don't have a connection to that when it comes to communicating a company's sustainability story. Why focus on the farming as opposed to other areas of the operation, let's say like, the winery where they're doing water, conservation of the solar power, or something like that, what what's special about farming?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 3:10 As a producer, you owe it to yourself to talk about as much as you can. So you never really know what's going to engage the person on the other side. And I think that in the wine business, and in the farming business, we tend to talk about what we know about and that's the product, right? It's how we made it, it's how we farmed. But some of the things that are really magical that captivate the consumer that could attract your next employee could attract the next media reviewer to write about you, or perhaps your distribution or retail partner are things that you might not realize are as special as they really are. Because they're so close to you. Farming is one of those things that because the majority of consumers and the majority of the world doesn't come from a farming background. It's a little bit of a mystery to most people. And my experience is farmers are really like magical people. They deeply care about the environment, their salt of the earth, you know, it gets me emotional, just thinking about it. And that's actually one of the reasons that I launched my company, Full Cup Solutions was because I felt like I kept seeing the wine industry decline. And wine is such a beautiful beverage. It's you know, it's taking the best parts of our environment of farming and it's sharing them with people around community and meals, which I think is the fabric of what this world needs to become a better place. I really feel that wine has the opportunity of being bring people together. But you know, when you're talking about farming as opposed to other areas of the operation, I think you need to talk about all of it. But I don't think you should forget how special farming is in particular. It can be a great way to stand out it can be a great way to educate the the greater population that doesn't have regular exposure to agriculture.
Craig Macmillan 5:04 Right, right. I think that's fantastic. And I agree with you, there's a magical quality to this. That was what drew me into the industry was being exposed to grape vines for the first time. And I was it was magical. It really was. And I have, I'd love to have that experience. But I can introduce people to that there. It's just a magical thing. the winemaking process is magical. And like you said, there's this there's a social glue that can come from sharing something like wine, which is, again, a really nice part of the whole picture. So consumers are definitely interested in sustainability. They're also interested in other things related to wine product, what would you say are the top seven or so things that consumers care about most? When it comes to a wine product?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 5:41 Well, I think that sustainability is certainly important. It's towards the top, I'd say it's in the top 10. But it's not number one, when you are dealing with what's most important, I think, you know, quality is number one, quality is number one, price is also very important, packaging, brand story, the service and the experience that a consumer receives, the place that the product comes from, and sustainability. And I think that knowing what a consumer wants is the first step to helping you stand out. So it's not simply all or nothing with any one topic with any one type of content, it's really making sure that you know, your plan your communication strategy, and that, you know, the fabric of your company really encompasses all the things that are important to your consumer, to your prospective employees. And, you know, to your shareholders, constituents.
Craig Macmillan 6:32 I want to come back to something you said a couple of times that I think is really, really interesting. And it applies definitely to my life. In attracting employees. Tell me more about that. Because that's the you're the first person I've talked to that's included that as part of a sustainability messaging.
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 6:45 It's critical. If you look at how to create a sustainable company, right? It's about people, people are incredibly important, it's important for you to realize that you can almost not accomplish any goal without quality people, some of the things that you may be doing and maybe taking for granted, could be something that attracts those people to your company, the next generation, I think all generations want to be part of something that special that's got longevity, you know, that stands for something bigger than simply selling a product and, and receiving cash flow. So making sure that you're aware of it gets you one step closer.
Craig Macmillan 7:24 I think you're absolutely right. That's a really interesting idea. I think having folks that are attracted to a company based on kind of like shared values, and they're kind of in line with the overall kind of orientation of the organization, I think is huge. And you have a lot of retention is another part of that you know, someone who's going to stay for a while, can you give me examples of some of the things that maybe you've recommended to your clients in some of these areas, things that were kind of actionable?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 7:48 Depending on what channel you're looking at, to engage, whether it's social media, there's certainly options, I think bringing your practices to life is really important through video and imagery. And so I would suggest making sure that you're documenting even some of the most simple procedures, whether it's like, hey, we've got farm chickens on the ranch. And, you know, this is why they benefit soil health. And we actually donate the eggs to, you know, the local school or, or whatever it might that sustainability and a number of factors. And it may seem really small, but you never know how you're going to capture that next person that could be interested in you in your brand and your story. Something else would be like right now beautiful cover crops, right? You've got that sweet pea blend that you're seeing all over the place. Now why? Why is that important? How does that help with soil health, water conservation, wildlife habitat, I love seeing people foraging for natural resources, whether that's an experience for their consumers or something that they're enjoying, you know, just as as a fun event, or even just from an educational perspective, animal identification and discovery of plant. Teaching and sharing with the world the resources that you have, and those things that are important to you as a company from a farming perspective. Now you could also go and talk about like, reusable, whether it's a fallen tree and why fallen trees are you know, a great source of firewood or what are you doing with you know, your old barrel bongs? Are you making dog toys? Are you reusing barrel planters from other for for some other purpose or gifting them to your wine club? from a community perspective? Are you sponsoring youth teams? Are you volunteering for mentorship or educational opportunities for your employees? So there's a number of different things that you can do to provide examples and that's to a consumer. Now, if you're looking at say that the trade or accounts or national retailers if perhaps you're your wine producer, you know, this is a really important category within a lot of the national you know, retail set as well as on premise and off premise on independent making sure that you've got Whatever those principles are, and those fabric of of sustainability for you making sure that it's present and available, and you know, and recorded digitally, so that you can share that with others is really important. And from a media perspective, you never know what is going to engage the next journalist. And so by having these types of activities available, either on your website or social media, or as part of your email campaigns, you know, you might just touch someone in a way that's very authentic to you. And meaningful to them. And only good can come from it. Right. And I, I highly suggest, you know, authenticity is the only way to carry yourself in this sustainability perspective. But yeah, absolutely touch people in all sorts of different ways.
Craig Macmillan 10:46 So we have all these many channels, we have social media, I see a lot of things in print, in terms of like travel magazines, or local guides, I see a lot of material and tasting rooms in terms of posters, or pamphlets, or photos and things kind of what's the strategy you might recommend to folks in terms of using these different channels?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 11:05 One of the old, the old sayings was that you have to touch someone seven times before they purchase from you. And that statistic has been increased to 16 times.
Wow!
It's amazing. It's amazing, the world is full of content, I would say, do as much as you can, and make sure that you are utilizing that information in a multitude of two ways and repurposing it for your different channels, as you mentioned. So, you know, I love video, I love imagery, I think that, you know, a picture's worth 1000 words and a videos worth a million. So if we can bring people into our farms or into our business to showcase what we're doing from a sustainable perspective, I think that that adds an incredible amount of value. Social media is a great way to integrate that for very low cost. email campaigns are really important building your your email list for your true fans. Blogs are really terrific. And then making sure you got you know, sustainability sprinkled in throughout your website, during your in person experience, you know, making sure that that's part of your staff training, your team really understands that this is a point of distinction for us as a company, and this is part of our values. And it needs to be mentioned, and it's what customers are looking for.
Craig Macmillan 12:24 Do you think there's particular areas around sustainability that consumers are most interested in? And are there particular areas that they're probably the least familiar with?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 12:33 The social equality aspect that the SIP program touches on is something that not everyone thinks of when they think of sustainability, and that's something that I really love. And over my years in the industry, that's something that gets a lot of raised eyebrows, when you mentioned, the preservation of natural resources is really important. There's certainly several other programs that touch on that. But I think that social equality is really important, and especially in this day and age, how we treat our our people is, is something that's very important.
Craig Macmillan 13:05 How do you do that? And the reason I asked in such a fashion is you're right, that's an area that's often overlooked, and is insanely important. And I'm just trying to imagine, in my mind, how do I how do I convey that to people? What's the framing here?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 13:20 Well, I think it has to be factual, you know, I think that it has to be something that's near and dear to your heart. And whether it's caring about people within your team within your community, or a bigger cause, it needs to be something that, you know, that's actually true. And it's not like you lead with it from a communication perspective. But Must! Charities is a great example of an organization that a lot of members within your group contribute to, and it's about really helping a specific region that is in need, and bettering that part of our community. So if there are things that you're passionate about whether it's certifications for your tasting room team to have WSECT level one or level two, or perhaps you create an internship program, or you're collaborating with the university, or perhaps there is, you know, some type of a, of a nonprofit that you align with or that you like to promote from within and, and that your average tenure for an employee is X amount of years, I think those are all things that can be talked about from a social responsibility, perspective that are important to consumers and, and just help create that link to your brand. From a sustainability perspective that get gets people to engage long term.
Craig Macmillan 14:39 You've mentioned a number of really, really great things in terms of the where consumers are coming from, how do we find these things out? How do we find out what consumers are interested in?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 14:48 Well, I think asking would be great. Asking though, you know,
Craig Macmillan 14:54 I'm chuckling because that's one of my things where people be talking about this or that and I'll say, Well, did you ask them They're like, No. And I'm like, Well, why don't you do that? Why don't you go ask him what they want? Or ask them what they're afraid of, or whatever it is. And does this take place like in the tasting room? Is a survey information? Is this, like surveys on Facebook? Or little quizzes on Instagram would? How do we talk to people?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 15:15 I think one on one engagement and in the tasting room is a great way to start, I think that you're always going to get authentic insights. When you're in person, you know, whether it's your media partner, or your trade partner, your distributor partner, or a consumer or a wine club member, or even your staff. I mean, these are great places to start with just asking the question. Surveys are a great tool as well. You know, surveys on social media are also wonderful. But yeah, I would say just start with, hey, what's important to you and go from there.
Craig Macmillan 15:49 Obviously, tasting room staff are going to be huge here. Because of these, this is the interface with the consumer on a one on one way for a lot of folks, what advice do you have around training staff, training your tasting room staff?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 16:00 Oh, my gosh, I have so many ideas. You know, I think that, like many consumers, a lot of the hospitality staff that works in tasting rooms is probably not that familiar with farming, and viticulture, especially if you are in, you know, a rural environment, which most wine regions are, you know, I think having a solid top notch staff training program is really, really important. I even like to recommend kind of a conversation flowchart for when someone asks this, this is, this might be a great way to respond. Trying to develop rapport quickly with your guests is something that's really important and figuring out what are they most looking for, in this experience, you know, some people are just coming in to taste and enjoy perhaps a companionship with whomever that they they came with. And other people are deeply inquisitive. And if those individuals are deeply inquisitive, and that person, or can that individual offer a rich experience. And the best way to do that is to make sure that you've got tremendous assets from a training perspective available, whether that's tech sheet, or even the really like your eco chart that you've got on your website that talks about the difference between sustainability and biodynamic and organic, organic, from a certification perspective is really important. So just making sure you've got a lot of different assets and tools in a toolbox, ready for your staff. Something else that I love to have is, again, the videos and the pictures are really important. One thing that you all have on your website is like a seasonal sustainability chart, which I think is really terrific. Because if you can create some type of a email campaign or group text message, or whatever it is talking about the seasonality of sustainability, from the vineyard perspective, I think that can be really powerful. So it's not the same conversation shouldn't be happening with guests, you know, throughout the year, it should be seasonal, and that makes it more interesting. And so operating images and videos based on those seasonal activities are really important. Those are just a few things that I'd recommend.
Craig Macmillan 18:11 So it sounds like it would be a good idea to have as part of your regular staff meetings, having maybe folks who work in those areas, vineyard managers, or whoever coming in and just kind of touching base and making sure that people kind of know what's going on out there. I'd like to seasonality, I think that's important because it does also communicate the whole agriculture inland, and climate and season being important. Because a lot of folks don't understand kind of how that works. I think they think of wind kind of as a factory product, like, well, we'll just make some when there's so much more that has to happen. Before we get to that point. In the end. It's not a question simply of what are we doing, but also how are we doing it? That's the sustainability part of it. What do you see in the future? Yeah, what do you see coming down the line for wine companies in terms of what the landscape looks like around consumers and sustainability? I think people are getting more interested? Are they getting less interested? Are they looking for particular things? Are there particular qualities and products? You mentioned a number of things already, and you need when you look into your crystal ball? What do you what do you see the consumer doing in the future?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 19:10 Well, I think depending on your brand, and what assets that you see you have whether you are a tasting room, or a winery on land, or perhaps depending on who you are, and what and what your business plan is, I think sustainability needs to be woven into. Personally, I think it's a it's a really important part of how we as farmers are going to move forward in the industry and in the landscape. The current, you know, beverage landscape is that this is a real way for us to distinguish ourselves as advocates for the environment as advocates for social responsibility and for good business. And so I think that there needs to be a continued focus on sustainability and our efforts to help not only protect Mother Nature, but you know, protect and help grow our teams and our communities. Think that there's no have meant towards that from a retail perspective, from a media perspective and an experience perspective. Truthfully, I think that consumers are dying for authenticity, they're oftentimes really wanting to learn. And Mother Nature is so magical. So I think that anytime you can, that you can offer kind of a peek behind the curtain, whether that's what you're doing from a farming perspective, or how you're, you're uplifting your community or your employees, that you're always going to have people who are interested. And you can only say, why don't you buy my product or my product is Cabernet or Sauvignon Blanc or whatever, or this is my label so many times. I mean, you've got to encourage people with interesting content, that should be part of a healthy sales and marketing campaign. It's just a way to engage people in an authentic way that that helps lift farmers.
Craig Macmillan 20:57 What is one thing that you would tell folks in the industry regarding this topic, one, one piece of advice, or one insight that you would tell people?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 21:06 Well, I have two.
Craig Macmillan 21:07 Okay, I'll give you I'll let you have to.
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 21:09 Okay, thank you, I appreciate that. I would say don't forget how special you are, and how everyday practices of farming and caring for your community and team might distinguish you in the marketplace. So often people want to perhaps play follow the leader. But what makes you stand out is what makes you special, and that's usually individual. And then secondly, I would encourage people to remember, most consumers are not like you, most consumers don't come from a farming and agricultural production background. Make sure that when you're putting together your plan, when you're talking with your consumers, when you're crafting what your experience looks like that you realize that most people are not like you and that other things might be important to them, or more relevant and open to engaging in different ways that perhaps are not as intuitive because it might just be what sets you apart.
Craig Macmillan 22:06 Where can people find out more about you?
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 22:09 Wonderful, while full cup solutions.com would be a great place or on Instagram for cup solutions. Yeah, love to connect, if you'd like insight or thoughts or just to reach out and I'd be happy to hear.
Craig Macmillan 22:25 Fantastic. Well, that's all the time we've got for today. Amanda, I want to thank you this has been a really fun conversation for me and I hope for you.
Amanda Wittstrom Higgins 22:30 Absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Craig Macmillan 22:35 Again, Amanda Wickstrom Higgins principal of full cup Solutions has been our guest today.
Nearly perfect transcription by https://otter.ai | |||
| 184: Water Management: Shale Oak | Marketing Tip Monday | 12 Jun 2023 | 00:03:52 | |
While consumers name food and beverage as one of the most important industries when it comes to sustainability, more than 1 in 4 US adults said they don't know what makes a product sustainable (2022 Morning Consult, What Sustainability Means to Consumers). There is a need for consumer education on sustainability, and this is a great opportunity for your brand! Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. You can help educate your customers by sharing specific things that your brand does to be sustainable. Build a bond over your mutual care for the health of the people and the planet! Sharing your practices is easy. Just reference the Sustainable Story worksheet! The brand-new Sustainable Story worksheet is a simple yet powerful free tool that helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. Simply download the worksheet linked in the show notes, complete it with your whole team, and keep following along with this podcast series to learn how to incorporate your story into every aspect of your marketing and sales. Plus, we are inspiring you by sharing what likeminded brands are doing to care for the people and the planet. As a vineyard and winery on California's Central Coast, Shale Oak embraces Water Management as a top sustainability initiative. Here is just one of the things they do to help conserve water. Water Management at Shale OakOne of California's biggest sustainability concerns is water. In 2022, about 75% of California was declared to be in a severe drought. Shale Oak addresses this critical resource concern by using their tasting room and winery roof to capture rainwater. This water is stored in five 100k-gallon water cisterns atop their hill, and is used throughout the year to deficit irrigate their 5-acre vineyard and maintain landscaping during the drier months. Deficit irrigation is a water management strategy that helps limit water usage by being very meticulous with watering schedules. Shale Oak relies on mother nature to supply the vast majority of the water used at their operation, and they are able to give the vines supplemental irrigation at critical stages during their life cycle. Sustainability is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot these days, but what does it really mean? Shale Oak believes that true sustainability is implementing farming practices that can be passed down for generations to come – practices that will keep their great-great-grandchildren in business, too! Shale Oak helps to lessen the demand on California's water supply by reducing the amount of water they need to pump into their vineyard. Proudly telling their Sustainable Story surrounding Water Management practices helps their customers know that they are supporting a business that cares about protecting natural resources, and inspires their peers and future generations to follow suit! Does Your Team Know Your Sustainable Story?Need an easy way to help your team talk about your sustainable practices? Go through the worksheet as a team and you will walk away with 7 specific sustainable practices to talk about during tastings and sales calls, use in your marketing and wine club material, and so much more! Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes to download and complete your own Sustainable Story worksheet, read an example from Niner Wine Estates, to share the blog post about Shale Oak's story, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 282: 5 Smart Ways Wineries Can Use AI to Save Time and Stay Creative | Marketing Tip Monday | 25 Aug 2025 | 00:04:32 | |
AI won't replace you, but it can help you do more. Marketing expert Tamara Bingham (Likely Story Strategies) shares 5 practical ways wineries can use AI to save time, repurpose content, and plan smarter. Tune in for quick tips to work more efficiently and stay creative. Resources: Vineyard Team Programs: | |||
| 183: Regenerative Vineyard Farming | 01 Jun 2023 | 00:24:20 | |
The three pillars of regenerative farming are soil health, animal welfare, and social wellness. This podcast brings together interviews with two farmers who are exploring regenerative agriculture practices: Caine Thompson, Managing Director at Robert Hall Winery and Sustainability Lead at O'Neill Vintners and Distillers plus Clint Nelson, Director of Vineyard Operations and Grower Relations at Bonterra Organic Estates. Caine and Clint explore the challenges and benefits of going nearly no-till from under vine weed cultivation to using rubber skids to reduce compaction to improve soil health. They also share the many benefits of our favorite living lawnmowers, sheep. Not only do these animals aid with weed management and fertilization, but they are also critical to fire suppression. Listen in to hear both their experienced farmer's advice on how to bring more regenerative practices into your operation. Resources:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCaine Thompson 0:00 Our guest today is Clint Nelson. He's director of vineyard operations and grower relations for Bonterra organic estates. And we're gonna talk about regenerative organic agriculture today, and the certificate, the rock, the ROC. Thanks for being on the show, Clint.
Clint Nelson 0:12 Hey, Greg, happy to be here. Looking forward to talking some organics with you.
Caine Thompson 0:16 Here with me today is Caine Thompson. He is managing director Robert Hall Winery and sustainability lead. With O'Neill, vintners and distillers. Welcome to the podcast. Caine.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Let's just start with some basics. What is regenerative organic agriculture?
Clint Nelson 0:33 Great question. I would say it's very similar to our traditional CCOF certificate or the organic certificate that we we now consider our stay. But the one of the biggest differences between going from traditional organics to regenerative organics is a few changes in animal welfare. So we're looking out for the animals that were hurding and grazing on our vineyards. And that's one of the pillars in the certificate. In addition to that, there's a social equity component, where we're looking at the well being of not just our internal employees and how they're treated and making sure that they have fair compensation for the work and also a nice work life balance, but also the region as a whole or the community as a whole, I should say and how our farming operations are impacting the area that we work with. That's really the additions to this certificate program compared to CCOF from a pillar aspect like something that's new, different. When you look at the farming side of this certificate program compared to traditional organic certificates, the biggest change or one of the most drastic changes depending on your farming techniques, is going from tillage to non till and looking at soil health, and doing infield soil tests to check the porosity or the drainage or the organic matter and things like that. And so that can be a challenge for a lot of traditional farmers that are used to tilling either every row or every other row for weed management or irrigation, conservation and their ideas. But for us, it's something that we've we've taken on and we're excited about what we're seeing anecdotally increases and things like organic matter and overall soil health. And also reduction in cover cropping. You know, once you go from tilling to non till your seed can start to reseed itself. And so you have less passes and your cover crop applications and, and all kinds of neat benefits that we're happy to take advantage of.
Craig Macmillan 0:35 So no till I talked to people all the time about this is a very important topic. And when I talk to the scientists, they're like, man, do not till your setting to set the system back to zero, you're feeding microbes that are there, and then they die because there's so much oxygen, etc, you're losing your carbon, because they're consuming it, all that kind of stuff. And so then I talked to growers that are, you know, believe in this. And then like, yeah, we're no till. And then we have a conversation. And I say, how do you handle things like squirrel burrows and gopher holes and things that are uneven because it's hard on the tractors and the drivers, and they say, Oh, we do it again, every five years, we'll till it again and replant every five years, or whenever we kind of need to do it. Now for you folks, it sounds like you're making a pretty intense commitment to the long term. When you think no till are you thinking like forever and a day or are there times when you might reset the system? And if so, how are you going to do it?
Clint Nelson 3:28 Yeah, I think for looking at this strictly from our certificate perspective, there are times when you're allowed to go back in and do quote unquote, maintenance of your soils. And for me, my biggest concern from transitioning from tilling to not is compaction, you know, compaction can start to limit your ability for water infiltration. And then your roots start to suffer and find declines sets in. We haven't seen that yet and my experience in management and directing the vineyard operations. I've rarely seen compaction be an issue. And so we're not doing maintenance tilling to alleviate compaction. One of the keys to that though, is we're transitioning a lot of our wheeled tractors, to rubber skids are rubber tracks, and so we're alleviating the pressure within the vineyard. And in addition to that, we just avoid all operations when the soils are moist or wet because you can get major running and things along those lines which then necessitate a grading pass just to make it smooth for tractor operations. Once again, if it's wet and rainy, we stay out of it. One added benefit. Craig, you might find of interest. This past season, we've had a lot of flooding up here in Mendocino with the rains, we had something almost like 30 inches within six week period and the rest of the river came up and over to some of the vineyard properties which is normal in a wet year. But being that we are non till we were actually able to get tractor operations back into the vineyards much earlier than anybody else that had been tilling prior to the rain events, because we had that soil integrity and also vegetative biomass there holding the soils together. And so we were out there pruning and flailing without creating any ruts or divots much earlier than anybody else around us.
Caine Thompson 5:19 So when I talked about no till many of them say, oh, yeah, this is a no till system. And then later on, they say, well, every 5, 6, 7, 8 years, we do go in and reset it, get it nice and clean and flat. And then we resed and we go from there, that our time horizon, that you would expect that you may actually go in and till again and reset the system. Either they're sustainable, or ROA system?
There could be. And there's a number of documented studies that have shown that the occasional use of tilling is required and the framework within ROA doesn't necessarily eliminate tillage it does at the Gold level. If you're like a Gold Certified regenerative farm, you've got to be 0 0 till there is the ability to till and divine row for weed control for certain practices in the ROA guidelines, you can still till there's different percentages of areas that you can till based on bronze, silver gold areas, when we do or need to teill, again, we wouldn't in the mid row, we wouldn't do every row would likely do every other row when we need it. So we'll use it as a as a selective tool, kind of like in sustainable conventional systems where there's a patch of weeds where you're not spraying the whole vineyard, but you've targeted application of herbicide to tackle a particular patch of weeds. Same with them the regenerative system and can see the use of selective tilling as a tool to control weeds in particular areas or an area of compaction that you need to work. And so the frameworks great in regards to working with growers for what is needed for their specific vineyards, while having a plan to minimize tillage in the long term.
As with a lot of things, you have a tool and may say, Well, I could reduce the use of this tool in a knowledgeable way. But it doesn't mean I'm gonna throw it away. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say never. And it's interesting that you still have it in the toolbox. That's interesting.
Overarching, with tillage, we would love to just not till it all intelligence, time consuming, it's expensive, makes difficult for gear equipment to go back on the Vinyard. When we get them, the winds and paths are you can see that erosion happening. When you till you're like putting a plow chisel through the vineyard of these ecosystems that's just kind of destroying what's what's there. So it's, we're not wanting to use it, we're wanting to build and regenerate soil that having it as a tool, if we need it at some point, it's beneficial.
What about inro weed control using a weed knife or flame or steam or something like that?
Clint Nelson 8:03 All the above. It really depends on the weed species. You know, we have some areas where I have Bermuda grass, it is almost impossible to tame. And sometimes it necessitates a hand pass, but when it's just your traditional mares tail or thistle or what have you, we like to run under vine cutivators. So to say that we're, we're not 100% non till because we're tilling underneath that find spaces for weed management. We're about say anywhere between 80 to 90% non till and we also like to till right under the vine because of a lot of our fertilizers have transitioned away from fertigation and we're actually banding pellets out there.
Caine Thompson 8:45 Oh really?
Clint Nelson 8:46 Yeah, yeah, it's been quite effective actually. And we're getting a cost effective boost in our nitrogen phosphorus and potassium compared to organic drip fertilizers which can be somewhat costly with very low horsepower behind them you know your NPK is pretty low on this organic injectable fertilizers. But when we can go after we banned on and this is a banding application after we ban on those pellets, we can incorporate them a little bit quicker by running our under vine so we get a two for one pass. We get weed management and also quicker incorporation of fertilizer pellets.
Caine Thompson 9:22 What about weed control? You mentioned on the swings abandoned herbicides in the sustainable area. How do you manage weeds in the ROA section?
In any type of conversion, whether it's to organics biodynamics regenerative farming, it seems to be we've controls one of the largest barriers to entry and how to do that in an economical way. And so, the main way we're controlling weeds under vine and the regenerative side is under vine cultivation just within the vine row. So just under vines, in the wintertime we have what's called like mounting up so we're turning this Soil just inside the vine row on top of uer vine row. And then that starts to break down through the season. And then we use a Clemens blade just with a little sensor arm to undercut the vines.
What's your stocking density like?
Clint Nelson 10:17 It's about 20, head of sheep per acre. And we keep them in a region or zone set of blocks for about a week. And then after that, we'll we'll move them on to another region of the vineyard. And they'll stay there for about a week. And so we do this rotation through all our vineyard blocks,
Caine Thompson 10:35 Five to seven days. Okay, well, that's good. So are you doing the shepherding in house?
Clint Nelson 10:40 Unfortunately, or fortunately, we don't have the bandwidth for that. And that I'll be the first to admit I'm not a experienced sheep herder. And so there's quite a lot of work that goes into it. We have a very close relationship with a sheep herder up here that we've been working with since the dawn of us bringing sheep and they get to take care of that for us.
Caine Thompson 10:59 And you're letting them go. But like December to March, something like that?
Clint Nelson 11:02 More like mid January to just before budbreak. So like the end of March. Yeah, your timeline is pretty close.
Caine Thompson 11:09 And again, obviously, there's no incorporation of any of this. So it's getting in there on its own, which it'd be nature to lay anyway. Right?
Clint Nelson 11:15 You'd be surprised about the incorporation aspect. Yeah, the sheep are really good about incorporating all the sheep. You'll see hoofprints throughout the entire vineyard.
Caine Thompson 11:23 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I'm glad you mentioned that, because that's where I was gonna. Yeah, see you next, are there any other animals in the system?
Clint Nelson 11:31 We actually internally have a couple cattle, just a few. And that's more for our biodynamic reparations. So we keep them around for the compost and manure horns. But they also graze, not so much in the vineyard. We keep them adjacent in the vineyards to help with fire suppression. So they keep the weeds down for us.
Craig Macmillan 11:49 Very, very cool.
Clint Nelson 11:50 And actually, as we transition into budbreak, and we start to move the sheep out, we start to put them in the wild lands around the vineyards as well, that will fire suppression.
Caine Thompson 11:58 Oh, okay. So how long total? Are they on the property?
Clint Nelson 12:02 About six months.
Caine Thompson 12:03 Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, that's a long time.
Clint Nelson 12:05 Well, we we have quite a lot of acres that aren't vineyards here. So fire suppression is critical as the you know, California likes to burn. So we tried to do our part to keep it down.
Caine Thompson 12:15 Yeah, I know, a vineyard winery that everybody focuses on the fact that they have the sheep they talk about in the vineyard, and then the shepherd is part of the meeting. And he's like, Yeah, but this is probably the biggest benefit to us is the little fire suppression. They're doing that for the rest of the year. And I was like, gosh, that's really cool. That's really smart.
Clint Nelson 12:31 Exactly. I was gonna say taking this another higher level from a viewpoint. It can help with your insurance deductibles, too, if you can prove that you have sheep out there grazing and and removing the fire fuel pressures. Yeah.
Caine Thompson 12:45 You mentioned the welfare of the sheep, are there in particular things that you do, or the shepherds do that are focused on animal welfare?
Clint Nelson 12:54 Yeah, I think it comes down to auditing their practices and making sure that they're humanely treated and not overgrazed, like too many sheep in one area or anything like that. And they're, they're well fed and just taken care of properly, there's actually a whole list online of the things that we need.
Caine Thompson 13:11 Now let's transition over to animals, because animals is a big part of the ROA. And they're gaining popularity, but I'm curious about how you folks use animals for animals to use.
Yeah, so I'm originally from New Zealand. So I've a long history with sheep and using sheep within vineyards. And I just love them as a tool for incorporating into the vineyard system and they bring it just another level of energy into the property number one. Number two, they come in like these living lawnmowers that move with between your vines between your rows, they are consuming grass, that weeds, leaf falling off the vine, and they're consuming all of that and then you're gonna manures going back into the system, their hooves are also spreading their weight across across the ground as well. So there's a bit of aeration that the helping provide as well comparatively to large tractors that are giving us the compaction in the mid row as well. Really, that nutrient recycling is really valuable and the weed control it's a great way to you talked about it earlier, resetting weed control at the tail end of the season, bringing the sheep in to really chew down all of the weeds and grass within the system to back to like a base level at the start of the next season. It makes it easier to go in and start your under vine tillage program. So we're using sheep early season, our fruiting wire within the vineyard with a trial setup is set pretty, pretty high. And so the sheep can easily walk underneath the vine rows. And that allows us even even maneuverability of them through the vineyard. And so we find we get good control of weeds with them. It also allows us to extend the use of sheep within the vineyard and both ends of the season because the fruiting wire is way above the heads. So there's no risk of chewing off little young shoots in the early spring.
Craig Macmillan 15:16 So this is post budbreak?
Caine Thompson 15:18 Yeah, so we're putting them in post pruning through to post budbreak, we have noticed that if you leave them too long, and there's not enough grass, they will start trying to climb up the canopy in into the veins. And so there is a limit to how long you can leave them. And then you've got to ensure that there's not too many animals per acre grazing, otherwise, you're going to strip out the food system, and then they're going to be forced to go up into the canopy, which you don't want.
Craig Macmillan 15:50 And you said, there's two times the second one in the fall like after harvest?
Caine Thompson 15:54 Yeah, as soon as the fruits of the sheep come back in, and we really like that as a way of again, cleaning up the understory, then all these leaves from the canopy falling down into the vineayrd floor. And so the sheep are consuming them turning them into nutrients and and putting it back into the soil versus that leaf just usually blowing away somewhere else. Yeah, just running down eventually, by by itself, that's just a faster way of getting nutrient recycling happening and back into the soil. So they're a great tool, there's a local shepherd that we're using that brings in sheep for us, we haven't got our own herd at the moment.
Craig Macmillan 16:35 Is there one piece of advice that are one thing you would tell growers on this topic that you really encourage them to do or encourage them to think about?
Clint Nelson 16:43 I would say when it comes to regenerative organic farming, don't be scared of going non till it's not the boogeyman in the closet by any means. I've been doing it successfully for over six years hands on direct management, and haven't had any issues. And in fact, we're seeing great benefits and duction, one of our blocks this past year had a record setting crop being on non-till system. And then in addition to that, we're seeing these jumps in organic matter and, and the ability to get in in farm earlier than other people. I would say there's a reason where we made this jump. We're excited about it. And I hope that I can kind of spread the word for everybody out there and get more people are excited about.
Craig Macmillan 17:25 Is there one thing that you would tell grower related to this topic that might help them what message do you want to have somebody take away?
Caine Thompson 17:33 I would say just make a start on even if it's a few rows and remove herbicides, number one, and look at alternatives for your agrichemical program. Sulfur has been used for powdery mildew control for hundreds of years, it's very, very effective. And look at the tools that can replace slowly some of the products that you might not want to use around your farm and around your household data, more organic solutions and get your learnings yourself. You don't need to do your whole vineyard right out of the gate. But just start small and get the learnings and if there's a desire you, you learn pretty quick and then expand from that.
Craig Macmillan 18:17 That is a great message and one that I encourage everybody to hear. Try things out. You don't have to put everything on 17 Black, try a little bit, see how it goes. And that's a great way to control cause and the other thing is site specific. Right? That's always the thing. Well, it's all site specific. Well, yeah, it is all site specific. And therefore you need to try it on your site.
Caine Thompson 18:37 Yeah, we started trailers of 48 acre trail. And after year, two, now, we've expanded into 130 acres, but we got the learnings over a two year period to give us the confidence to expand into the rest of the estate.
Clint Nelson 18:53 One more thing I used to work in in research and outreach. And this was back in time when I help with best practices on irrigation techniques, or best practices in pruning management, things like that. And when talking with growers, I would just say ask yourself, you know why? Why why are we tilling? Or why are we doing XYZ farming practice? Is it because our predecessors or grandfathers and fathers were doing it? Or is it because there's a scientific base reason? And I think once you start to ask the why you can start to uncover a lot of information about your farming operations internally, increase efficiencies and have better deliverables just by asking why.
Nearly Perfect Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 182: How to Share Sustainable Stories on Your Website | Marketing Tip Monday | 22 May 2023 | 00:04:00 | |
Your website is the hub for your brand's core information: location, history, shop, and more. It's where people come to learn more about what you have to offer and why they should support your business. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. The brand-new Sustainable Story worksheet is a simple yet powerful free tool that helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. Simply download the worksheet linked in the show notes, complete it with your whole team, and keep following along with this podcast series to learn how to incorporate your story into every aspect of your marketing and sales. By highlighting your dedication to sustainability you create a deeper connection with your website visitors. When your visitors read about the conscious care that goes into producing your wines, they can feel good about supporting a system of winemaking that helps protect the people and the planet. Here are two easy places to share your Sustainable Story on your website. Dedicate a Page to SustainabilityPut your commitment to sustainability front and center by dedicating an entire page to your certification! Here are three great examples of how brands have included sustainably no their website. 1) WaterFire has added SIP Certified right to their main navigation on their home page. This page exhibits a colorful infographic, and tells visitors what their certification means. 2) Cambria looks at sustainability not as a checklist, but as a way of being. Their Keeping it Real – 100% Certified Sustainable page offers six specific sustainable metrics so visitors know what sustainability really looks like. 3) Laetitia Vineyard & Winery goes a step further by embedding a video on their Sustainability page. During his 2-minute narration, Eric Hickey, Senior Winemaker and General Manager, tells visitors a quick story about the history of the vineyard, and gives a few examples of sustainable practices that are used today. Blog Posts1) Ancient Peaks has created an easy to find category for all things Sustainability on their extensive blog page. Complete with a downloadable Sustainability in Practice at Ancient Peaks Winery sheet, this post gives a sampling of six sustainability initiatives that embody their love for the land. 2) Just Enough Wines recently made a blog post highlighting how they source grapes grown through Sustainable Winegrowing Practices. When readers see Just Enough Wines on the shelf, they'll remember that sustainability is one of their core values. 3) Hope Family Wines uses their blog to help educate visitors on what sustainability means. A read through their blog post, Sustainable Wine vs Organic Wine, explains how both programs support a system of winegrowing that helps the planet. They're coming! Sustainable Stories from SIP Certified MembersReady for some Sustainable Stories from SIP Certified members? In the next Marketing Tip, learn what Shale Oak Winery does to address one of California's biggest sustainability concerns through their responsible Water Management practices. Use the Sustainable Story worksheet to help you identify the ways your brand embodies the 7 sustainable values: Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes to download and complete your own Sustainable Story worksheet, an example from Niner Wine Estates, to share the blog post about Vina Robles' story, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 181: Can Applying Compost Reduce Water Use? | 18 May 2023 | 00:27:07 | |
The health of a grapevine starts at ground level – literally in the soil. The California Department of Food and Agriculture is helping farmers improve the quality of their soils through the Healthy Soils Initiative. Taylor Jones, Ph.D., Director of Viticulture at Star Lane and Dierberg Vineyards used his funding as an opportunity to study the effects of compost. After completing two three-year trials in six different soil types in two American Viticulture Areas, Taylor found that compost additions significantly increased organic matter, Reduced Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium usage by 35 percent, and decreased water use dramatically. Listen in to hear the only downside to increasing the use of compost on your vineyard. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Here with me today is Taylor Jones. He's Director of Viticulture at Star Lane in Dierberg Vineyards. And we're gonna talk about some soil health projects that he's got going. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Taylor Jones 0:10 Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Craig Macmillan 0:12 I just learned about this recently, and you talked about a little bit in the vineyard team tailgate meeting that got me interested, you have more than one thing going on? Is that right? Yeah, yeah, we do. And these projects are funded by the California Department of Food and Agriculture Healthy Soils program. Is that right?
Taylor Jones 0:25 Yes, that's correct.
Craig Macmillan 0:27 We'd love to chat about that part of it a little bit later. But right now, I really want to know what you're doing. How many projects, what are they about? What are you trying to find out?
Taylor Jones 0:33 We have two projects, we were awarded two different grants, one for each of our vineyard properties that we have. So we have one healthy soils project over in Santa Rita Hills that started in 2018. And it's a three year program. And then we have another project that's healthy soils program at our Star Lane Vineyard in Happy Canyon, AVA and over their three year project also. And that one started in 2020, I believe. So we just hit our final year, this this last year. So yeah, to two different projects. And essentially, we're the states paying us to put compost down and improve our soil health. So we're jumping on that and trying to see what actually happens in the vineyard after compost has been applied. Since we're getting all of this compost from CDFA. It's we're going to use the money that we're saving on the compost to kind of do some some studies and see what's actually being impacted in our vineyard soils.
Craig Macmillan 1:30 So talking about the Star Rita AVA, project.
Taylor Jones 1:33 Over at Santa Rita hills, we have Drum Canyon vineyard, and over there we were awarded, it was 35 acres of compost applications, we had six tons per acre. For three years, over the three year span, we had 18 tons per acre put down down over there what we did, we tried to, as best we could make an experiment, you know, it's kind of hard to make a proper randomized trial. In a field when you're doing compost applications with your normal operations, we try to apply compost in all the areas that we could in our vineyard and while leaving a few barrier rows that we could do tests. And so we had, for example, we'd have 10 rows applied with compost, and then a few rows, no compost so that we could test those rows separately see what's going on. Are there changes in organic matter? Are we seeing changes in compaction, all the good stuff that comes with soil, so testing soils for nutrition, microbial populations, and then also water, I think water is the big thing. So that's how we set everything up on the property, we have five or six different soil types that we apply conference to and in each soil type, we did our own measurements there. And we were able to have soil moisture probes in most areas so that we could utilize those to help with some data. We really saw a lot of benefits from putting the compost down. I mean, we're in you're entering our sixth year after application, the state's requiring us to send a final numbers and we have to do one more test of organic matter. So that's coming up soon for our final dataset. Overall, we saw some great really good impacts from from the healthy soil program at that site.
Craig Macmillan 3:11 Before we go farther, are we talking about banding under the vine we're talking about broadcasting?
Taylor Jones 3:14 Whenever you do your grant, you have to specify what you're going to do. And in our case, we went with banding the spreader that we have is a bander you know we'd have six foot rows and we have a ag soil works hydraulic gripper, the wings move. So we're in an area where we have a lot of compaction. Typically we like to rip every three years every other row. And so that kind of led to the decision of banding. We're getting the compost close to the vine. Since we're in a six foot row, our rippers going right down the vine row right next to the root zone. So we're trying to get everything incorporated and move down lower in the soil profile. That was our target what we did we since we had three different years, and we didn't want to rip every single year, we did well alternating rows. One year we did every other row with a compost band and rip. The following year we did the even numbered rows with the compost band and rip and then the final year, our desire was to go no till so at the final year, we banded and we just did a light disk and seed on top of that, that we didn't unnecessarily rip over again. So it was technically a combo of riping and broadcast.
Craig Macmillan 4:22 Unrelated just further conversation that I've had weed control under the vine using some kind of cold federal weed knife or using herbicides?
Taylor Jones 4:31 For the extent of this trial. We use it herbicides, trying to keep all the weeds down as much as possible so that we're not seeing any funky results coming from having weeds all over the place. So we try to keep the berms clean as possible.
Craig Macmillan 4:42 And this one has been going for a little while now. What kind of preliminary results do you think you're seeing?
Taylor Jones 4:47 We're seeing some some great preliminary results. The most impactful result that we're seeing is water. Our water usage has declined dramatically. I mean, we went from irrigating every two weeks historically, this will be my eighth vintage here at the company, we used to always pretty religiously we'd water every two weeks, if not more over on that property. And every year, we were kind of able to spread that out, we were seeing water holding capacity almost increase. So last year, we ended up waiting 79 days from basically from bloom until we harvested, we were able to not water at all. Pretty amazing, we were able to heat stress, we have totally sensors in the field that help us tailor our irrigation strategies, but that 79 days of no water being used was significant for our operation in terms of water savings, you know, propane costs, even the irrigator had more time to do other things besides troubleshoot the irrigation system. I think all of that kind of stemmed from the organic matter increase. We saw, on average over a three year timespan, the average was about point 2% increase in organic matter per year for those three years. And you know, 1% organic matter is more or less 20,000 gallons of water per acre that you can hold. That's our goal. Let's try to increase organic matter by 1% and try to achieve that extra water holding capacity. Let's see how high we can get and so we had different different soil types reacted differently in terms of how well they held water.
What kind of soils do you have out there? We're talking about the Santa Ynez River Valley, we're talking about being relatively close to Lompoc, for those of you who are interested, there is tremendous will type variability all through that area. And Drum Canyon is relatively on the west side of that area. I would describe it as that what kind of sils do you have out there?
So we have top of the hill pure sandbox, as you go down the hill, we have some nice Shaylee loans. As we continue down, we get more and more loamy but a little bit more clay and silt as you kind of go to the flats. We're getting a lot more water holding capacity there in the flat zone. And then we have another corner of the vineyard that is the lowest coldest spot and that's mostly sand like a kind of like a sandy clay. So huge variability in soils, we kind of have almost all the types on our property, which is well fun for me.
Craig Macmillan 7:12 Fun for you. Tremendous variation in water holding capacity.
Taylor Jones 7:15 Oh yeah, we had a block we tried to establish our sandy soils, and that was watering twice a week with four gallons per vine, like just trying to get those vines. I mean, it's windy there, we have a lot of struggles and sand is sands an issue trying to get vines established. And to get that taproot down, otherwise, our loams on the hillsides, they tend to have good drainage, they're maybe two feet deep before you hit a layer of sandstone. So our soils are fairly shallow. So we get good water infiltration and penetration, good ability to stress the vines out quickly, but not really holding water. Well, as you get to the flood zone, we've always been able to irrigate a little bit less often those soils kind of have more of clay particles, they're holding on to water a little bit more, until you hit the sandy zone and there are definitely watering twice as much as we do in other areas.
Craig Macmillan 8:02 But you're seeing improvement in all these areas?
Taylor Jones 8:05 Definitely every single area of all in line with each other and what what we're seeing in in our sandy soil series, we saw the higher increase in organic matter than the other soil series. And we were able to irrigate slightly less in those zones than the other ones, which then in previous years percentage wise, which was surprising, but also I'm so glad water is the same you know, in our sandy soils, we saw almost it was point eight 5% organic matter increase total over a final timespan. So that's the equivalent of 16,600 gallons per acre that of water that was used, On the lower end some of the, our loamy silty soils, we ended up getting about a point seven 2.45% increase over five years. So a little bit different there. But you know, we didn't need as much help with holding water in those soils of the sandy soils. So it kind of balanced out percentage wise in terms of how much water we were using.
Craig Macmillan 9:06 What about above ground? Did you see changes in the vines, the fruit crop load, wine quality?
Taylor Jones 9:11 Not so much crop load tons tons per acre, we're pretty spot on throughout the vineyard with seasonal variability. For better or for worse. Some areas we had too much vigor, some areas are vigor was improved overall vigor was higher than than previous years, even with reduced water and reduced and reduced fertilizer inputs as well. So yeah, above ground pruning weights increased a little bit. But that was that was kind of expected. We're having a lot more vigor. But yeah, fruit load was not impacted, which is fine. We're not like trying to pump out as much fruit as possible.
Craig Macmillan 9:43 We've made wines out of these?
Taylor Jones 9:45 Yes. So why is not really a lot of changes in wine. Our winemaking team. They make a couple different wines. A lot of its blended from different areas of our flat zones. And in our other ranch we saw some Yans increasing Other than Yans, that's about it in terms of wine quality was still on point with with every previous year, so no changes in wine quality and no changes in Brix or pH, anything like that phenologically ripening, everything seemed to be pretty, pretty standard for our ranch.
Craig Macmillan 10:18 And that's a good transition. So what about the Happy Canyon?
Taylor Jones 10:21 We're just getting some, I'm finally organizing some data for Happy Canyon. And they're we're seeing similar results. And if anything this year more so or we have had some pretty significant rains. But our cover crop took off a lot quicker than any previous year, this last November, November, December is when we put our final load of compost in from healthy soils. So we were in year three, and we're finally seeing cover crops just taking off. Unfortunately, I think the only downside of these projects has been a lot of increase in in inter row weeds, we've had a lot more weeds creeping up. And that's just I think, some of the compost we're getting this now the seed beds in there just stuck there. And you can see the Malvo just coming up right where we planted and ripped, which is frustrating, but I'll take the soil benefits and deal with the weeds later, you know. Happy Canyon, we're seeing very similar results, we're starting to be able to use less water on a per annual basis, we have a little bit less soil diversity over at Happy Canyon a lot more silty clay silty on the hillsides, clays towards the bottom and the flats. That grant there was 95 acres of compost and give that reference over over a three year timespan that ends up being it was 58 $59,000 worth of compost that we got to not to have from the state which which was phenomenal. And then at the Star Lane project, we're only doing four times an acre, not six tons an acre, the grants kind of based off of what compost you're buying and your carbon nitrogen ratio of your compost, so four tons an acre and Happy Canyon still with the goal of trying to go no till over there. And we're seeing similar increases in organic matter where we're getting that point 2.25% increase year after a year. So there were targeting hopefully, my goal is to find one block, maybe that we can get a full 1% increase in that would be amazing. But it's good to see similarity over two different ADAs two different ranches. It's nice to see the similarities kind of confirming what we're seeing at one ranch versus the other ranch.
Craig Macmillan 12:24 And I want to come back to that. But before I forget, again, we're talking about this is four tons per acre banded, you are not tilling the middle right now.
Taylor Jones 12:32 Correct.
Craig Macmillan 12:33 But you are tilling with that piece of equipment over at the Santa Rita ranch when you have to occasionally yes in terms of no tilled you for see Star Lane being able to farm with a no till system indefinitely? Or do you have plans that you'll have to reset the system every so often? And if so, how would you go about it?
Taylor Jones 12:53 That's that's a good question. I think that I would love to go no tilling indefinitely, unfortunately, with the rate of compaction all of our soils have and then the heavy equipment we're using it's it's inevitable that we're going to have to rip and till but I don't think that we'll ever have to do like every single year full plowed down kind of stuff. I'm totally fine with instead of ripping every three years, let's double that to rip every six years or even further down the road, see how far we can push it. I think with our compaction results that we're seeing in both ranches, our rate of compaction has reduced by about 80% We should be able to go for about five and a half years without ripping instead of every three years. So we can probably push that to six years and rip and then you know, maybe future copost applications will help reduce that even more. We're doing some no till trials where we planted a vineyard and started it no till and comparing it to the same block that's being tilled annually every year. And so far, we're five or six years in now and seeing no differences in yield or plant growth which is promising because I think that for our soil future we kind of need to go the the no till route and you know show that it can be done. And let's see what happens.
Craig Macmillan 14:06 Something that we didn't touch on that. I think if our listeners are not familiar, this is in Santa Barbara County, Santa Yenz Valley. Happy Canyon and the Star Rita AVAs are about as different as you could possibly get in my opinion. So fill us in a little bit about what's going on soil and climate between those two branches.
Taylor Jones 14:24 Both are similar in terms of frost. I mean we had we always have the same amount of frost days I feel like but yeah, so So Santa Rita hills a lot closer to the ocean. You've got the Santa Ynez mountain range, they're going east to west kind of funneling in all the morning fog so we get Santa Rita Hills morning fog usually burning out towards the end of the day, high winds and that that kind of leads to some nice distressed plants are really big fluxes in temperatures with daytime highs versus nighttime colds very similar toHappy Canyon Aava like stuff over there, we get a lot warmer during the day, we're seeing a lot more 90 degree plus days than what we would see in Santa Rita Hills. And with with the way the climates moving, both ranches seem to be trending towards more and more and more high heat days. And we're seeing more cold days as well. And out at Happy Canyon, we're kind of on the far edge of Happy Canyon where Star Lane is and we have morning fog kind of creeps in and it will kind of tickle the edge of our ranch almost kind of recedes a lot more back into Santa Ynez. So at Star Lane, we get a lot more a lot less foggy mornings, kind of ocean mist, and we have a lot more beautiful sunny mornings out. But over there, we also have a lot of wind as well, the significant amount of wind. So AVA wise, they are, you know, they're fairly, fairly similar, I would say only because you have some of that marine influence. High winds with soil types are completely different. And just like the amount of the day that you're getting sunlight in different areas, and wind is fairly different as well.
Craig Macmillan 16:05 Tell me a little bit about the Healthy Soils program. I think this is a really fascinating thing. I remember when it started, and how did you find out about it? How did you get led to it? What was the process like for getting into it?
Taylor Jones 16:17 Trying to think I found it, I really liked looking for grant money, I came from an academic background. And if there's free money to be had, why not apply for it, we use all the tractor replacement grants, we're trying to get electrification grants, you know, find money where we can find it to help our help our company out. Pretty sure we just stumbled upon this program being available. And we basically talked to CDFA. And we're like, Hey, we're interested in applying and said, Here's the process. And it ended up being kind of ridiculously easy. I'm surprised that more people don't apply for Healthy Soils programs, there's just an an online application that you fill out, not only while you're filling out this application, they make you use the Comet Planner tool online, which is a really fun tool, if nobody's used it before, just to estimate greenhouse gas emission reductions based on you know, that's, that's kind of the core of the program is reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing organic matter in your soils. And comet planner can kind of help you look at that. So there's some criteria you have to meet, you cannot have applied compost on these fields within I forget what it was in the last five years or something like that. If you've been applying compost, you can't get the Healthy Soils program. So we used some areas, we had put compost down so we couldn't use those zones, which is why in our Drum Canyon Ranch is 69 acres, but we could only put compost down on 35 of that. So that's one One limitation of the program. But overall, you pick your blocks that you want to do you set out a sampling protocol for them. And they'll usually accept it. And it's essentially you sample your soils every year during the program prior to compost application. And they'll reimburse you for those soil samples as well. So that you can track your organic matter. That's that's all they require. We submit our soils for more testing than just organic matter. Yeah, overall, it's a really simple end of the year, you have to send them proof of your project. And that's generally photos of the compost arriving pictures of the team implementing the compost, actually putting it into the ground, receipts, invoices that you had for just everything to prove that you've done what you do. And then yeah, it's three years. And then in year five, you have one last soil sample to send to the state. So overall, it's a simple application process. I found it one of the easier grants to actually apply for.
Craig Macmillan 18:38 You mentioned that you were doing soil analysis beyond just the soil organic matter what what variables are you looking at?
Taylor Jones 18:44 We just submitted for a full a full soil health panel looking back on it, I wish I would have added bulk density on that, because I think that would have been interesting to see how it changed. But you know, hindsight is 2020 but we looked at you know, NPK, calcium, magnesium cation exchange capacity. Any differences in pH, soil moisture, sodium, just kind of the whatever you send to us soil lab, whatever they'll give you for those tests. I think the biggest thing was we reduced our NPK usage by about 35%. At both ranches after this soil results showed you know we had some NPK increases, but not really as much. I think what we're seeing more so is our vines, roots, finding new areas where they haven't been before. And they're kind of being able to utilize resources that previously weren't available to them. So that's leading to our decrease in fertilizer usage, which is great. We're trying to go towards organic and getting away from a lot of inorganic fertilizer usages would be spectacular.
Craig Macmillan 19:47 That reminds me of something so have you been applying either synthetic organic NPK formulations on top of the compost as the compost been it for the fertility program?
Taylor Jones 19:56 We still do add a little bit, a little bit of NPK but more so calcium, we will have more calcium applications. Especially out in Happy Canyon, we have really high serpentine soils and really bad magnesium problems. So we're always trying to add in gypsum and calcium whenever we can. The Drum Canyon Ranch, not too much of a problem over there we have a problem with potassium uptake. Um, so we do increase our potassium usage they're coming into this year, I think we're really going to reduce based on what we saw last year in terms of vigor and vine health. I mean, our nitrogen applications are going to be really low. Phosphorus, we're always pretty fine on we don't need to use much will probably continue with potassium, but we'll see what petioles looked like this year.
Craig Macmillan 20:40 Well, we're running out of time. Is there one thing that you would tell a grower one piece of advice you'd give to a grower regarding what you've learned from this project?
Taylor Jones 20:49 I mean, the advice is use compost, I think we're we're seeing root zones reaching areas they haven't before where we're using significantly less water, which is just key to farming in California and really in the world going forward. You know, you're you're increasing your CEC or your cation exchange capacity so less nutrients down I mean, you're getting compost is kind of like a win win scenario. The only downside is weeds. Our soils are seem to be returned to normal. We had earthworms returned for the first time since I've been at this ranch. Five different soil pits we found earthworms in which they've never been in before. They're kind of creeping in from the edges, which is awesome. I think we're gonna maybe transition to worm farming.
Craig Macmillan 21:33 (laughs). Where can people find out more about you and what you do?
Speaker 2 21:39 you could always find out. Dierberg and Star Lane Vineyards, we have Dierbergvineyard.com. Starlanevineyard.com. Otherwise, I kind of just bounced around the Santa Barbara County. I think it always...
Craig Macmillan 21:50 Just like if you're looking if you're looking for him. Just go to Santa Barbara County and drive around a little bit. Yeah. Probably near a vineyard.
Taylor Jones 21:58 Yeah, exactly.
Craig Macmillan 22:00 He has a lot of friends.
Taylor Jones 22:02 But no, yeah, you know, I'm happy if people want to reach out to me. You know, my emails, Taylor taylor@Dierbervineyard.com. Yeah, happy to help people out with applying for grants or if they want to chat or look at some data. I'm always down to see what other people are seeing and compare what we're seeing in our AVA versus another AVA or different grower strategies for compost applications. You know, I think information sharing is the way to go.
Craig Macmillan 22:28 Yeah, totally. Fantastic. Well, Taylor, I just am so happy you could be on the on the podcast, this has really been fun for me.
Taylor Jones 22:35 Thanks for having me.
Craig Macmillan 22:36 This is a topic. It's obviously a hot topic, continuing topic. And I think that the longer that we as an industry have been doing this, because this isn't something that people were doing in the 70s for instance, you know, is this you know, we've all had to learn we've had a compost is not just compost, you need look, the analyses and this rate is not the same as that rate and on the soil does that and the fact that you guys are doing that work along with everybody else and that you're sharing information. I think it's really fantastic. So, thank you so much for your contribution.
Taylor Jones 23:03 Yeah. Thank you.
Craig Macmillan 23:04 So our guest has been Taylor Jones. He is director of viticulture at Star Lane and Dierberg Vineyards in Santa Barbara County.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 180: Social Responsibility at Vina Robles | Marketing Tip Monday | 08 May 2023 | 00:03:31 | |
While telling your sustainable story serves a practical purpose in educating consumers about the real-world impact of your sustainable practices, it also goes deeper than that: it builds meaningful emotional connections. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. The brand-new Sustainable Story worksheet is a simple yet powerful free tool that helps you tell your own personal sustainable message. Simply download the worksheet linked in the show notes, complete it with your whole team, and keep following along with this podcast series to learn how to incorporate your story into every aspect of your marketing and sales. Today we share why messaging around social equity is important to your customers and you'll hear how Vina Robles embodies social responsibility. About 70% of the decisions we make are based on emotional factors (Gallup 2022). Build emotional connections over shared values with your customers by telling your sustainable story. When you do this, you are reminding your customers that at the same time that they are appreciating a great glass of wine, they are also supporting a system of winemaking that cares for the people and the planet. Social Responsibility at Vina RoblesDid you know that planting a tree can be as easy as enjoying a bottle of wine? It can be when you buy a bottle of Vina Robles' the Arborist! In their partnership with One Tree Planted and the Arbor Day Foundation, Vina Robles dedicates a portion of the proceeds from every bottle of the Arborist that is sold to plant trees. Since the program began in the year 2000, nearly 33,000 trees have been planted thanks to these organizations and every person who purchases a bottle of the Arborist. This partnership is a natural extension of the winery's passion for trees and sustainable viticulture. The oak tree depicted on the bottle of this red blend represents the Legacy Oak – a 300+-year-old oak tree rooted on the estate Jardine Vineyard. The wine is dedicated to Vina Robles' founder, Hans Nef, and named for the arborist who saved the tree from its declining health in 2014. This initiative is a tremendous display of Social Responsibility by Vina Robles. Giving back to the community and environment that they call home is just one of the ways they embody the 7 SIP Certified Values. Tell Your Sustainable StoryMany people know that there is a higher value in products that are made sustainably, but they don't really know what sustainability means in day-to-day operations. That's why we encourage you to identify specific sustainable practices that your brand uses and create a narrative that is easy to share and incorporate into daily conversations. Use the Sustainable Story worksheet to help you identify the ways your brand embodies the 7 sustainable values: Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes to download and complete your own Sustainable Story worksheet, an example from Niner Wine Estates, to share the blog post about Vina Robles' story, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 179: Farming with Alternative and Renewable Energy | 04 May 2023 | 00:24:25 | |
One way that growers can farm sustainably for the future is through vineyard fleet management. Marc Di Pietra, Regional Service Maintenance Manager for Treasury Americas, a subsidiary of global wine company Treasury Wine Estates, is doing just that by exploring alternative fuel sources and automation. Electric and hybrid vehicles reduce carbon emissions and lower the cost of fuel. The use of remote-operated equipment improves safety for operators, upscales the workforce, improves efficiencies, and has the potential to passively gather valuable data. The challenge is the existing infrastructure needed to support these tools. Learn what equipment Marc and his team are trialing as they work towards a goal to use 100% renewable energy. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. Transcript Craig Macmillan 0:00And our guest today is Marc Di Pietra. He's Regional Service Maintenance Manager for Treasury America's part of Treasury Wine Estates. And thanks for being on the podcast.
Marc Di Pietra 0:09 Thank you, Craig, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you today, especially about some of the things we're working on. We're really excited, quick background on me. I joined Treasury wWine Estates in mid 2018, then transitioned into vineyard operations around 2019. And then since then, I've been focused on our equipment, sleep management in the vineyard with an eye on what farming of the future looks like.
Craig Macmillan 0:28 Farming of the future. That's a really interesting topic and a really big question, what that is going to look like, what kinds of things are you doing? What kinds of things do you do as part of this position as part of this project?
Marc Di Pietra 0:40 It's a great question, because every day it changes, right. But two of the biggest areas of opportunities that we see, we see alternative fuel types, fully electric, hybrid hydrogen or alternative fuel sources, and then also automation or remote operated mechanization. And so for alternative fuels, two of the major points here are obviously the rising cost of fuel, and then also how to lower our carbon emissions. So Treasury as a whole and supportive lowering emissions, we've been implemented two key goals in our journey. And that starts with a target of 100% renewable energy by 2024. That's the first step. And then the second step of that is net zero for scopes, one and two by 2030. So pretty big, lofty goals there. But that's why we're starting that path now.
Craig Macmillan 1:24 So Marc, can you kind of explain what scope one and scope two are in the world of carbon accounting?
Marc Di Pietra 1:30 Yeah, sure. So scope. One, emissions are direct greenhouse gas emissions that occur from sources controlled or owned by an organization. So an example like fuel combustion, boiler, furnace vehicles, things like that. Scope, two emissions, or indirect greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of electricity, Steam, heat, or cooling. And then lastly, scope three, which is much bigger than that as activities from assets not owned or controlled by the organization, but indirectly affected value, like shipping supply chain, gas bottles, things like that.
Craig Macmillan 2:00 Yeah. And there's a lot of folks that are getting interested in that part of my job with Niner Wine Estates is who I work for. We're trying to figure out what's the carbon footprint of the glass we use, and many other people are looking at that same thing. Because when you stop and think about it, you go, Hey, wait a second, this came from France. And it weighs X, huh. You know, and so it's that kind of scope three stuff is really interesting to a lot of people.
Marc Di Pietra 2:23 Treasury on the background has done a lot of work on that to understand that big picture.
Craig Macmillan 2:26 And we have an episode that mentions that.
Marc Di Pietra 2:28 And the second big piece, which I hadn't hinted on was automation, also a key initiative because it allows us to help improve like our operator safety, upscale our existing workforce while improving efficiencies in the field. There's also an added bonus, that with this type of technology, we'll have the ability to gather passive data, which right now, it's still relatively new. But as we continue to grow and develop, we can process that data to make smarter decisions, you would ask some of the things that we're working on. So here in the US, we're working with GUSS remote operated spray systems, we've got Agtonomy, which is electric and remotely operated alternative to the tractor that you're familiar with. We've got two atari and Polaris electric, RTVs, Robotics Plus systems, which is both hybrid and remote operating. And we're also currently waiting for order of Monarch tractors that should be here in the next couple of weeks. Our international teams, they're also using some different equipment as well, such as vide bots or farm, Kelby, the yields and a few others.
Craig Macmillan 3:25 Talk to me about these alternate fuel things. I think this is a really interesting idea. And I haven't really followed it, tell someone who's never heard of this kind of thing, how this works?
Marc Di Pietra 3:35 Well, the easiest way to think about as you're driving up and down the road, and you see a gas station, and you see those three different price points, for 87 89, and 91. And that's all pretty basic, but then you add in the cost of diesel on top of that there are other ways to fuel equipment as well. So we have a fully electric like you're familiar with your Tesla's or your Chevy bolts, but there's also hybrid, which you're familiar with to it has been doing this for a long time. And then there's also other types of fuel, like methane and hydrogen that are out there as well. The real big challenge that we're seeing, at least on our end, is the infrastructure to support all of these different growing ideas. That's why we're currently trying both electric and the hybrid options.
Craig Macmillan 4:14 Do you think that there is a future for things like methane, hydrogen, those ideas have kind of come and gone? And I think a lot of it, like you said, is the infrastructure part?
Marc Di Pietra 4:21 You know, it's a great question, because I don't have all the answers. But I do know that different companies are trying things to capture, especially in farming, so where you have dairy farms that can collect the methane, you've got the fermentation process, which allows you to capture different chemicals across the way. So I think there is a place for it depending on where you're at. And then again, it goes back to how you can capture and store that safely.
Craig Macmillan 4:45 So let's go back to electric and hybrid. You mentioned a whole range of different vehicles that could run on electric and hybrid. Can you tell me a little bit about is it a hybrid tractors or strictly electric tractors? These are the things that need more house horsepower, and they're a little bit big You're What's that landscape looking like right now? That's very exciting for a lot of us.
Marc Di Pietra 5:04 Yeah. And it's a great question because again, that's those are all the things that we're asking ourselves. The reason we're so spread out is because we're in the early adoption phase, and Treasury has allowed us to be that. So we're trying different pieces of the puzzle to see what works best for us. The reason we've tried a fully electric tractor is because there are currently two or three options out there that we feel really comfortable with demoing in our fields, it's not going to take the place of what we're currently doing. But it allows us to step into our farming practices and see if it is truly a viable option. Hybrid is a little bit more of that in between step, it's, you know, it's one step towards that end goal of zero emissions, because it is more efficient. You know, you get the benefits of that. But also, it doesn't completely Have you dependent on the grid, the electric grid or infrastructure of what's happening around you. You talked about going into larger formats, and there is a concern about battery life there. And that we know that that technology is changing rapidly. So we are starting with a couple see how it evolves, and then we can make an informed decision based on that.
Craig Macmillan 6:06 Stay with tractors are these vehicles that are coming to you from manufacturers ready to go? Are you making modifications yourself? Are you taking with a base unit making modifications to something that's already existing? What kind of involvement does it take on your part to work with this technology at this point?
Marc Di Pietra 6:21 Depending on the program that we're using, so let's say on our for example, that comes to us more or less ready to use. So they have tools that will connect to your standard three point. So there's not much modification or or there but another company, Agtonomy that we're working with, we're on the ground level with them while they're still developing. So it gives us an opportunity to give our feedback of what we're looking for. So we're seeing a lot of rapid change quickly that will help support our needs.
Craig Macmillan 6:46 Will that tractor still be based on a three point hitch?
Marc Di Pietra 6:49 It will have a front mounted tool bar on the front? And we're talking to them about getting front and rear mounted tools?
Craig Macmillan 6:56 What kind of horsepower? Are we talking here? Are we are we comparable to a regular track layer? Are we talking to a regular four wheel drive depends on the size, but are we in the same range?
Marc Di Pietra 7:06 That's the goal, you know, obviously Electric is more efficient than your standard diesel motor. So when you get a diesel motor that says they're pushing 100 horsepower, we believe that the electric range tractor that's stating a range between 45 to 85 horsepower is comparable to that 95 to 100 horsepower tractor. Now again, there's still a lot of work going on to validate that, but we have seen improved efficiencies and we think that will be if not, they're close to it.
Craig Macmillan 7:34 And getting really technical. What is the power supply? Like for these? Are you having to bring in extra electrical service above what you already have? Because a lot of shops don't have a 480? For instance, amperage? What kind of amperage do you need? It sounds like a totally new kind of thing.
Marc Di Pietra 7:50 Yeah, so for the two that I've mentioned, for us, we are using both 60 amp circuit with a 48 amp charger capability, as well as some 100 amp circuits that will support an 80 amp charger. So we're not using anything that is above and beyond like we would see with a Tesla quick charger. And in both of those cases, though, with the 40 and 80 amp chargers, we're still looking at a charge time of overnight, four to six hours.
Craig Macmillan 8:15 So that's very practical. Really. That could work.
Marc Di Pietra 8:17 Yeah. And because Treasury has several ranches, we are looking at it holistically, excuse me, we're implementing different charging systems on different sites as well to understand the draw on the need of those to see how efficient they are affected they are on our site.
Craig Macmillan 8:32 Is there any real change for the tractor operators? Are there new things they need to learn how to do or is it kind of based on what they've been doing is,
Marc Di Pietra 8:39 There is a big change for the operator because they need to understand that it's not sit in the seat, turn on the key and hit the gas pedal. It's understanding what the screen is telling you when you turn on the tractor, where you're at power wise. So there's some nuances, but ultimately, it still runs and drives like a tractor that you're familiar with. It's just like learning a new a new cellphone, for example, Android versus iPhone.
Craig Macmillan 9:02 Yeah, I just got a new phone and I'm struggling. I have to admit. You also had mentioned passive data collection, which I'm very interested in. I've been tracking this concept for quite a few years now. What kinds of data are you interested in collecting? And how's it been going so far?
Marc Di Pietra 9:15 We have been talking to several different companies that offer passive data. But our goal is to try to implement it on the platforms we're currently working with. I referenced the Agtonomy a lot, because again, our input is going into their development quite a bit. They're looking to add sensors to their machines to gather that data that we're looking for. I would say we're still in the very, very beginning stages of that. Some of the benefits of using this passive data is the machine will have more than two sets of eyes on like our current tractor and operator with that we can gather information around density, disease cluster counts, as well as monitoring the sensors that are out in the field such as irrigation or moisture. And just about anything else you can think of that a sensor can gather for you.
Craig Macmillan 10:00 And you're in early trials with it sounds like you actually started collecting data. I was a little confused.
Marc Di Pietra 10:07 Oh, excuse me. No, we haven't there are companies out there that we spoken with. But again, we're trying to rely on our partnerships and use their platform. Again, we're trying to do a lot of things on one machine to see what's valuable to us long term. Yeah.
Craig Macmillan 10:21 And you had mentioned remotely operated vehicles. Is that correct? Yes, sir. Tell me about that. I just think that is so cool. Autonomous machines.
Marc Di Pietra 10:29 Thinking about remote operated, there's several factors involved. First and foremost, it's important to me and our team is the safety of our operators. Currently, we've got spray teams that are working, you know, in the middle of the night, they're working back and forth, up and down each row. So what this allows the operator to do is get back outside of the tractor, manage, ideally, multiple machines from one computer. So obviously, efficiency gains, but you're getting that operator out of harm's way out of the way of the equipment as well as out of any chemicals you might be spraying along the way.
Craig Macmillan 10:58 Are there elements of this that are controlled by computer or artificial intelligence, what I'm thinking of is there's been some work by John Deere, in particular, with GPS guided tractors in the Midwest, where you set a path and it will go wherever you tell it to go little trickier when you have a row on either side, especially if it's a seven foot row or something like that. How hard is it for an operator to control this thing?
Marc Di Pietra 11:23 Actually, from my experience, so far, controlling it with through a laptop computer, controlling not one machine, but multiple machines seems to be quite easy, because there are so many sensors on the platform that will allow it to tell you not only where it needs to go to go from, say, your barn or your shed to where it's starting a job for the day. But while it's going through the row, it's looking for any obstructions that might be in the way whether that's a tumbleweed. Coyote, a person, you know, all of those things for safety, but it also gathers all of that data. And it also knows where all the other machines are as well. And the operator is sitting behind a laptop, making sure that each path because they can see multiple machines on one screen, you know, through data points on a map, it can say, hey, that machine is going well. It's has 25% solution left, and it's tank. So we need to stop at at this point. And all the machines are talking to each other. So there's awareness about what's happening around it as well.
Craig Macmillan 12:17 That's amazing. That's amazing. How far down the path are you with this?
Marc Di Pietra 12:20 Well, I mean, there's two commercial products available now that we will have in our vineyards. Currently, we have the GUSS spray system. They've started in nuts in the Central Valley. But now they've they have actively sprayed over 1 million acres. And we have the first two vineyard sprayers in California that we will have started spraying with I guess in the next, like two weeks or so.
Craig Macmillan 12:41 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, here we are. It's time Yeah, exactly.
Marc Di Pietra 12:45 It came fast. Yeah.
Craig Macmillan 12:47 From a cultural standpoint or a management standpoint, I just am curious. What kind of terrain are we talking about? Are we talking about really steep slopes, we talked about flatter ground, we talked about narrow rows. Treasury has properties all over the place, I'm sure there's a variety of topography that you're having to work with.
Marc Di Pietra 13:01 Yeah, out of the gate, we're starting at a ranch that is relatively flat, it's got long half mile rows. So it'll be nice and efficient for the machine to go up and down back and forth all day long. But the goal is ultimately to take it into the foothills where we're talking up to 10 to 15 degrees of incline that we should not see any problems. And that's with, you know, the equipment that we know we have worked Agtonomy for example, I've seen their machine, go up a degree a slope of about 25 to 30 degrees, no problem.
Craig Macmillan 13:25 We're talking about the machinery. Now let's talk about what the machines are doing. So we've talked about spraying, which is absolutely amazing. Are we using this for under vine cultivation? Are we using this for mowing or using this for tilling what kinds of things you're able to do with these machines?
Marc Di Pietra 13:40 One of the biggest benefits is the underlying cultivation piece, which will allow us to reduce the chemicals that we use in spraying specifically around our herbicide use. We've seen the ability with this autonomous equipment or remotely operated equipment to use undermine tillers and we could do multiple passes with that volt we'd knives, sunflower cultivators, things like that. We can also do a mount where we have a mower on the front and cultivator on the back, that's been a huge benefit and time savings for us as well.
Craig Macmillan 14:08 What are you seeing at this point? Or what are you thinking about? And I know that a lot of things you haven't really kind of gotten into yet, but I know you're looking forward in thinking about this, what is this going to look like from a maintenance standpoint, and also from an employee training, regardless of the position because we're going from a period of having a diesel mechanic, someone who understands how hydraulics work basic things around having vendors who can come out and replace a tire and all that kind of stuff. It sounds like there's going to be some very, very different kinds of maintenance and repair issues here. And we already mentioned drivers, it sounds like there's going to be some very different set of skills that folks are going to have to have to make these systems work. What's that wood in your imagination? What that's looking like right now?
Marc Di Pietra 14:44 Yeah, I think one of the greatest things is the opportunity to upskill our existing workforce. I mean, honestly, it's been really great to see the initial hesitation from our guys when they see this stuff rolled out on the ranch, but then ultimately, once they get their hands on it, how quickly they've adapted to it. And that's been the great Interesting to see because you know, it's getting harder and harder to get employees for the vineyard, it's they're just not available to us, which I'm sure everybody's experienced. So this has really been a great opportunity to see these guys get excited about something new, and upskill them. From a maintenance standpoint, believe it or not, it's actually been much easier than we've anticipated. There's much less regular preventative maintenance needed. So we're not doing oil changes every 500 hours, because electric components require less, they're all sealed. So there's no going into there and changing fluids and things like that. Also, the software on these systems are also capable identifying similar like your car with like a check engine light comes on the system identifies those issues and points us to to those repairs much faster. Now that said, as we evolve, I do see the need to have someone on the team who has a solid understanding of the computer systems and how to address these types of issues outside of our current model, but we also know like we've seen with the car manufacturers, they're training folks up for that. And we're, I've already reached out to a couple of the local, I wouldn't say local, but the the training like UTIs and the wild Tech's of the world to see what type of implementation they haven't talked with them about their job boards. So any young folks coming out of those programs might be looking for something interesting.
Craig Macmillan 16:14 You guys are doing so much stuff. This is amazing. You got a lot going on. Marc, is there any one thing though, that you're really excited about that you're really, really optimistic about at this point?
Marc Di Pietra 16:24 I would say from a process standpoint, like I said, it's really about the operator safety, you know, getting these guys out from behind the tractor in the middle of the night, the efficiency that it brings the reduction of chemicals, like that's all the process stuff that I'm excited about. You know, there are several cool companies out there that we're working with, you know, these guys have great ideas and great minds. And we're all thinking forward. I think that's been one thing that I've really enjoyed is seeing people not worrying about just today. But looking forward.
Craig Macmillan 16:52 And when you look into that crystal ball, what kinds of things do you see coming down the line, not things that you're able to trial now, but things that have potential on the future? There's a lot of work being done, like the precision vineyard project with Cornell and Carnegie Mellon and folks like that, what do you see out there on the horizon? It's, you know, a year ago with science fiction, hint now is starting to look like it could actually happen.
Marc Di Pietra 17:10 Yeah, I think as the autonomous piece gets smarter and better, that's going to be a huge game. And again, I go back to one operator being able to control multiple machines. So that creates efficiency. Again, it goes back to operator safety. For me, it reduces those long days, it reduces middle of the night work for those long hours, and the monotony and the safety of that individual operator, I also really liked the idea of passive data stuff that we've not been able to easily get before and then be able to make smart decisions in the field. If you've got a spot that is say disease prone or not producing as strong as other areas in the vineyard, we'll be able to capture that data and make smart decisions go forward to improve that.
Craig Macmillan 17:48 Measure, to manage, right, get to get the data to make good decisions.
Marc Di Pietra 17:52 And I think that's going to be the biggest opportunity is how do we manage all of that data? That's what I'm really curious about. And that's, that's one thing that I would really like to figure out how to unlock in the future, because we can talk about it. But there's nothing there that can manage multiple systems, multiple points of input. And then whether that's a comparison of like for like mechanical versus the, you know, the future, or whatever that might be, there's so much that we just don't know how to do yet.
Craig Macmillan 18:18 This is a huge area. But is there one thing that you would advise growers are one thing that you would say to growers around automation, hybrid electric, passive data collection, the future basically the future of this kind of mechanization in this kind of electronic world that we're moving into? Is there one piece of advice or one thing you'd one message you'd like growers to know?
Marc Di Pietra 18:37 I think everybody needs to be curious. It's all something that we need to be thinking about, talking about and to help ourselves in the industry and our planet. I mean, there's a quote that I always think of when I talk about this stuff as a rising tide lifts all boats, you know, everybody wants to keep their secret to keep their grapes or their strawberries the best, I understand that. But this technology, the way it's going, you know, labor and employee safety, it's a huge concern for everybody. And I think the more we're talking, the more we're asking questions. And you know, you brought up John Deere. I mean, they're looking into it. Now New Holland is looking into it now. And this is all things started by small people having these ideas, and it's all rolled into bigger things. I encourage everybody, just be curious and talk about it.
Craig Macmillan 19:17 This is great advice. And I think that that's important for our industry. And one of the things I've found over time grape growers are curious and grape growers are willing to experiment within limits and try different things. And I hope that no matter who you are out there, that you will heed Marc's advice and be creative and be optimistic and be open minded. Where can people find out more about you and the things that you're doing?
Marc Di Pietra 19:40 I mean, feel free to reach out to me, obviously, through LinkedIn, feel free to, you know, share my email, if that's an option. Again, I'd like to talk to anybody who's doing something or ask questions.
Craig Macmillan 19:49 Absolutely. And we have a page for each podcast where we will post any kind of resources including contact information, links, papers, anything and so Be sure if you find this interesting to check out the venue team podcast website and take advantage of all the information that's there. Well, Marc, that's all the time we've got for today. Our guest today has been Marc Di Pietra. He is regional service maintenance manager for treasuries America of treasury wine estates. I want to thank so much for being here. This has been a really fascinating conversation. For those of you who are new to downloading the podcast please, again, go to the vineyard team podcast website. We've got hundreds of episodes now on all kinds of different topics.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 178: The training your tasting room staff needs | Marketing Tip Monday | 24 Apr 2023 | 00:02:52 | |
Employees who are regularly trained and educated report higher levels of motivation, performance, company loyalty, and more. Yet, almost 52% of employees in the food and beverage industry only receive training when they join their organization. Of those that do receive regular training, only 4.5% receive training about their company's mission and values (TalentLMS, 2019). Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. In this week's Marketing Tip, we are sharing how the brand-new, Our Sustainable Story series is the perfect tool to use to train your tasting room, sales, and marketing teams. If you aren't regularly providing training and education for your staff, especially on your company's mission and values, you're missing out on opportunities to create a stronger, more dedicated workforce! One way tasting room managers can educate their staff on the company's mission and values is to have continual conversations about what your brand is up to behind the scenes, i.e., your sustainability efforts. The latest tool for your teamOur Sustainable Story is the latest addition to our arsenal of tools to help empower your staff. We created this tool to help you identify and communicate 7 sustainable practices that are specific to your company. Complete the worksheet as a training and conversational exercise for your team at your next staff meeting. We highly encourage you to invite your farmer so they can describe what sustainability looks like out in the vineyard. Worksheet for Print | Worksheet for Electronic Filling SIP Tip: see an example from Niner Wine Estates! Share your Sustainable StoryRegular training for your staff leads to more skilled, informed, and satisfied employees. Plus, after completing this exercise, your staff will be geared up with several unique sustainable stories to share with clients during tastings (a practice that we know can lead to more wine sales!). They're coming! Sustainable Stories from SIP Certified MembersReady for some Sustainable Stories from SIP Certified members? The next Marking Tip will share how Vina Robles displays tremendous Social Responsibility by giving back to the community and environment they call home. Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes to download and complete your own Sustainable Story Worksheet, an example from Niner Wine Estates, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 177: The Role of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi with Paul Schreiner | 20 Apr 2023 | 00:37:53 | |
Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi, commonly abbreviated to AMF, coevolved with plants from 500 million to one billion years ago. Fossil evidence shows AMF in existence back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Paul Schreiner, Research Plant Pathologist at USDA-ARS in Corvallis Oregon explains that grapes are a very receptive host for AMF and their symbiotic relationship benefits both organisms. AMF helps plants obtain nutrients like potassium and phosphorous. The plant provides AMF with sugars and fatty acids. AMF lives both inside and outside of the plant. Inside the plant, they form arbuscules inside the root cell. These structures look like little trees and increase surface contact dramatically. Outside the plant, AMF mines for nutrients, likely releases carbon, and prevents soil erosion with its root hair-like structure. Listen in to learn the practices you want to use, and not use to increase AMF populations. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Paul Schreiner. He is a research plant physiologist with USDA ARS in Corvallis, Oregon. And today we're going to talk about our arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Thanks for being on the program.
Paul Schreiner 0:11 Thank you for having me, Craig, happy to be here and talk about one of my favorite subjects.
Craig Macmillan 0:17 Obviously, can we just go with AMF, we'll just jump right to that. Yes. Because if I have to arbuscular too many times today, I'm gonna, I'm gonna crash.
Paul Schreiner 0:27 It's a tough one. And it's back in the old days, it used to be called vesicular, arbuscular mycorrhiza. So it was even harder.
Craig Macmillan 0:34 Yeah, it was even hard. We're not in the old days. Whenever a bunch of scientists were sitting around and going, like, you know, what the V this just too much. Can we get into three words, you know, was that big national meeting of mycologist. All right. So let's just go for you studied EMF for a long time. And you have stayed in the field. So you've studied vineyards? Let's start the very beginning. So what are AMF? And what kinds of roles do they play in the soil and interacting with plants?
Speaker 2 1:00 AMF are, as you said, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. So there are a group of fungi that evolved a really long time ago, estimates are from at least 500 million to a billion years ago.
Craig Macmillan 1:15 Wow.
Speaker 2 1:16 Yeah, that the billion number comes from some molecular clock kind of work, which, you know, is based on mutations in DNA that might be slightly overestimated, but there's fossil evidence that shows them at 450 million years ago. That's a really long time. You know, that's, that's what dinosaurs were around.
Craig Macmillan 1:35 Early dinosaurs if we had time later. I want to know how paleo Micology where I How do you find fungi, but we don't have time for that right now. But if we can come back to that, that's mind blowing.
Unknown Speaker 1:48 Yeah, we can.
Craig Macmillan 1:49 Go ahead.
Paul Schreiner 1:50 Yeah. So one thing I should say I think that's helpful is there's more than one kind of mycorrhizal fungi group, basically, right? The arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are this older group, or they evolved a very long time ago, and there's been a long period of coevolution with plants. And what's happened is the arbuscular mycorrhiza, which is the kind that grapevines form. Most of our crop plants also form arbuscular mycorrhizal that mycorrhizal group can no longer grow or complete their lifecycle by themselves on their own, they require a host plant to get carbon to survive, there's a whole bunch of other kinds of mycorrhizal fungi. The most important besides the arbuscular would be what we typically call Ecto mycorrhizal fungi and the Ecto are typically on forest trees, especially in temperate and boreal regions. Interestingly enough, a lot of the trees in the tropics are am or arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. So, it is important to just think about that, because some people, when they hear Mycorrhizal, they automatically assume one or the other Ecto or am or arbuscular. It's even far more complicated than that, because there's like five or six other types of mycorrhizal fungi that different plant groups associate with. However, the mycorrhizal fungi that I studied the arbuscular type are the most prevalent, they're the oldest. And you know, it's kind of an interesting thing, science wise that, based on our best information, they evolved, the whole world was one big continent, right? That's when they really radiated and evolved rapidly, I can get a sequence out of grapefruits. That's a mycorrhizal arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus. And it'll match 100% to a sequence in Europe somewhere, or in South America somewhere on any other crops. And, you know, so that's kind of an interesting thing.
Craig Macmillan 3:39 That's a question. And so if we have that kind of similarity in different parts of the world, does that make the research that's done either in on vines in another continent? Or on a different crop? Does that is that useful for understanding how these things work in advance?
Paul Schreiner 3:56 Certainly, yeah. Especially in the last, I'd say 20 years, because we've developed molecular tools to really delve into evolutionary questions and DNA, those kinds of things. Were starting to separate that group of fungi with a finer tooth comb, if you will, right. In a very broad sense, there was this massive radiation during Pangea, and then all the continents separated, a lot of that genetic material is very, very similar. However, there is still evolution going on. It's just you have to look harder for it. And you have to do whole genomes. That's not something that I do. I'm much more on the practical side of agriculture. But I tried to stay in tune with all that. This group of fungi traditionally were thought to be asexual. Now, we think there might be some sort of sexual phase, but it's unclear and not clearly demonstrated yet. We're learning more all the time. But it's also a slow, kind of a slow process. Their interest intractable to study this group of fungi a little bit because they do rely on a host plant to complete their lifecycle. So like, we can't culture them and put them in a lab. So were grown on petri dishes, you know, that kind of thing. They have to be grown with a plant. So we've developed ways to do that. But it does present challenges.
Craig Macmillan 5:10 Yeah, how do you do that.
Paul Schreiner 5:11 And this is really important for this group of fungi. From a practical sense, you have to grow them on a plant companies that produce mycorrhizal inoculum have this kind of fungi, the arbuscular type, they are growing them on plants. Typically, they're doing that in a some kind of either soil or soilless mix, and producing that in a greenhouse. And what like when I grow cultures of these fungi, we grow them on plants. One of the challenges with this group of fungi that relates to all this is that they're also ubiquitous around the globe, pretty much anywhere you have plants, these fungi are are there, the diversity is different in different places, of course, and there probably are some specialists, you know, groups, for example, that might be in more tropical climates versus more boreal climates. But I mean, we're still just beginning to understand that kind of information with this group of fungi. You asked also, what role do they do in terms of soil ecology or plant ecology? There's no question. The biggest role that this fungi plays is in helping plants obtain phosphorus. There is evidence of uptake of other nutrients, particularly those nutrients that are more immobile in soil. And that's why phosphorus is one in particular, but Potassium is another nutrient that's not super immobile in soil, they help take up potassium, they also help take up copper, zinc, I'd say those four are probably the top. However, they also play a role in nitrogen uptake in some plants. You know, we have addressed this in grapes with my former student, Tian Tian, who's now a farm advisor in Southern California working on table grapes, part of her thesis work was looking at the nitrogen impact on mycorrhizae, and how they help with nitrogen uptake. And we're continuing that work to some degree now with my new student. So far, we've not been able to show that the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are helping grapevines take up nitrogen. However, lack of evidence doesn't mean it can't happen. Other groups have shown in other plant systems that they do help the plants take up nitrogen. But still even even though that's true, without question, Phosphorus is the main thing that this group of fungi helps plants obtain from soil, you know, and phosphorus is a really critical thing, because yeah, phosphorus reserves are running out, you know, we've been mining basically guano, right? I mean, that's our main source of phosphorus all around the world. I just read an article it was in the New Yorker the other day, about phosphorus. I'm glad it's, you know, being highlighted again, because, you know, some people think 20 years from now, we're going to be out of phosphorus.
Craig Macmillan 7:40 I think so.
Paul Schreiner 7:41 And we're going to be in a world of hurt. Yeah. So it's hard to know for sure. Other people estimate we've got hundreds of years, but I don't know how good these estimates are. But helping plants get phosphorus means we don't need as much phosphorus to apply as a fertilizer. This is becoming an issue for basically the whole globe and human production. Yeah, their biggest role is Phosphorus, they also probably help do other things in plants, which I can kind of go down a list if you want.
Craig Macmillan 8:07 Well, before we do that, I do want to do that. Because I think that that's crucial because a number of ideas have come up and some I think are probably accurate. Some I think are not, but I don't know, AMF, it's a parasite or it's a symbiotic organism?
Paul Schreiner 8:21 Yeah there symbionts.
Craig Macmillan 8:23 Okay, there's symbionts. Now, how does the plant and the fungi interact? Are there things that go into the root or the root is coded by something? Or how does that work?
Paul Schreiner 8:34 Yeah, so that's, it's a pretty interesting process. If you start at the very beginning of a naked root, let's say, you know, a root does not colonize this starting to grow in soil. It sends out signals that the fungus consents, or the fungi, you know, there's more than one fungus in this group. Some of those signals, we already know what those are, like Striga lactones are one for example, you know, complicated term, but it's just a particular group of compounds plants make, the fungi can sense that. And they can grow towards the root, you know, the hyphy of the fungus, when it touches the root or makes contact with the root, it forms what's called an apex thorium, and then it makes a penetration peg and can basically punches through the wall of the root. This is the same way that fungal pathogens, you know, who are bad fungi, let's say right, they also use the same kind of mechanism. And typically when that's happening, you know, there's enzymes involved, bits of the cell wall of the plant and or some of its cuticle get kind of chewed up by enzymes and it releases certain compounds and then the plant can say, Oh, I know this one's a bad guy, or sometimes a plant is producing enzymes, for example, kinase that's trying to degrade the fungus itself and then you release certain other signal compounds, so the plant can sense that and in certain pathogens. We know that a very specific metabolite can be sensed by the plant and it stimulates the plant to respond in a defense response with the mycorrhizal fungi. The defense response is repressed.
Craig Macmillan 10:00 Okay, oh.
Paul Schreiner 10:01 Yeah, and so part of that is probably the kinds of chemicals that the and fungi have that are being released, you know, through these various enzymatic interactions have yet to be recognized by the plant as as the bad guy. Anyway, that's, that's maybe getting a little too into the weeds. But yeah, it all starts in the same way like a pathogen trying to get in or even, you know, there's a group of parasitic plants that form these things called hostaria, that attack roots of other plants. Same kind of process.
Craig Macmillan 10:31 It sounds to me like there's an enzymatic reaction, and then also a signaling reaction, which would probably be some kind of a protein, I would guess it's complicated, or it's a feedback thing in that, oh, I've been poked, oh, I'm gonna do this, Hey, wait a minute, this is okay. And then they kind of settles into a balance, I guess. Is that fair to say?
Paul Schreiner 10:49 Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. It's really complicated. And I mean, we only are beginning to understand the way they communicate. You know, there's a whole new class of compounds called effector proteins, which are secreted by different organisms and soil plant can recognize a lot of those, it crosses many things like even goes to nematodes, right? Like this is all kind of newer stuff that we're learning. But the bottom line is, the am fungi get in because they don't stimulate a defense response in the plant. And that's because there's been at least 500 million years of coevolution the plant knows these guys are okay, these are the good guys. Once they're inside, they grow throughout the cortex of fine roots. And then they form these things called arbuscules. And that's where they get their name. So the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form arbuscles, our bus skills are basically like a little tree, if you can see a picture of it, it looks like a little tree inside a root cortical cell. It's just basically a way that both the fungus and the plant increase their surface area contact by like, a huge amount, you know, like, like, imagine what a tree looks like above ground, you know, like, especially without the leaves on the wintertime is a great time. That's exactly what it arbuscular Looks like in miniature inside a root cortical cell, the plant membrane grows all the way around that there's all kinds of activity that arbuscule cell is super active, because there's a lot of metabolic things happening. And that's where the plant and the fungus are exchanging nutrients,
Craig Macmillan 12:17 then then exchange is cell wall to cell wall. It's not puncturing into a cell, or is it punching into? Oh, heck, what's the word I'm looking for, a pipeline?
Paul Schreiner 12:28 No, the and fungi don't get into the vascular tissues of the plant, they actually colonize these cortical cells, they're sort of like, if you think about leaves, leaves the cells, we think about most of the mesophyll, or the spongy mesophyll. They're the ones that are doing photosynthesis, right? In the root cells that are most active in the fine roots are the cortical cells. That's where most of the activity is happening. So the fungi colonize there, they form these arbusculs which is, I mean, they're, they're amazing structures, they're very cool. They're short lived, like, a lot of times in arbuscular, will form, develop, and then degrade within, say, a week to 10 day period, you know, so it's like a fairly rapid turnover during that you increase the surface contact between the two organisms, but there's always still a membrane on the fungal side and a membrane on the plant side that keeps those two organisms separate, you know, their cytoplasm doesn't mix. You know, that would be weird, kind of, you know, would be weird. Yeah, we just don't see that in biology, you know, they really have much greater metabolic activity in those arbuscular cells. So what happens is, the fungus is giving phosphorus to the plant in this process, and other nutrients. And then in exchange, the plant is giving the fungus sugars. And we now know also fatty acids. Yeah, that's been a recent discovery in the last two decades. Anyway, I can't remember exactly when it came out. We now know because of genome sequencing efforts, that this group of fungi lack the ability to make fatty acids, they actually get those from the plant as well.
Craig Macmillan 14:01 So we've got the arbuscules on the roots. That's kind of the structure, we've got the peg in there. Now what's going on away from the roots? Are these big long, multi celled single identifiable organisms, or is it kind of a community or what what's going on?
Paul Schreiner 14:19 There are different fungi. Okay, so there's multiple species, a single root can have many species of fungi inside it. However, those species also probably mark out some territory. This part is still a little bit unclear because it's really hard to pinpoint this stuff. Just as an example, our research vineyard here at Oregon State University that I work on, even though I'm ARS I also work in in part of OSU, our research vineyard. I think we found 19 Different mycorrhizal fungi. colonizing the groups, the roots of the grape vines, you know, there's a fair number, how they actually interact on a very tiny scale like within an individual single individual root is it's hard to know for sure, that's again Getting off into the weeds a bit.
Craig Macmillan 15:01 Not so much because I'm going somewhere with this.
Paul Schreiner 15:04 I want to get back to your question though about what's happening outside because that's really critical. Yeah, what's happening inside is we have these aruscules and hyphae growing inside the root, and it can be, it can be very intense, especially in Grapes. Grapes are a super host, in my view, they really love mycorrhiza they get heavily colonized. But then on the outside out in the soil, the naked hyphae, if you will, of the mycorrhizal fungi are exploring the soil. And that external phase we call extra radical hyphae, it actually is physiologically different than what's on the inside of the root. I'm trying to think of a good analogy, but basically, the inside part has a different function than the outside part. And so the inside part is trying to get carbon from the plant give the plant phosphorus and other nutrients, the outside part is mining the soil for that phosphorus, exploring the soil, it also probably exudes a significant amount of its carbon into the soil and helps the soil microbial community get a carbon source as well. And these fungi seem to play a critical role in helping soil aggregate and or resist erosion, basically, I mean, the evidence of this is, is pretty clear. But we also know that roots do the same function, especially root hairs, you know, so one way to think about these fungi is they're, they're sort of like root hairs. Except they're even finer, you know, their job is to connect root to the soil and to the soil, water and nutrient supply
Craig Macmillan 16:30 Two spatial questions. One, when they say they explore space, how deep do we find an organism? Do we find a fungus that's connected to a to a vine or plant, right? So how far down is it going? And then how far out in lateral space is it going?
Paul Schreiner 16:44 People have studied this by using artificial system where we can put a screen for example, like we can grow a plant in a greenhouse in soil, have it be colonized by microbes and fungi, and then put a screen in place that the roots cannot cross. But the fungi can, you know, something below like, or I don't know, somewhere in the ballpark of 40 micron diameter screen, so very fine screen like a silk screen, the hyphae can grow in there. So like people have shown they can grow 15 or 20 centimetres away, no problem, you know, significant distance when you're talking about soil as far as how deep they go in soil, that varies a lot with the rooting depth of whatever the plant of interest is, or, you know, the ecosystem, we tend to see greater colonization in the, in the surface soil, which just fits everything else that happens in the surface soil, right? I mean, that's where more of the water and nutrients are being turned over. It's also you know, where the soil environment is more favorable to life, right, because of this whole soil structure, idea and porosity, allowing oxygen to get into the soil in a vineyard. Particularly, you know, we always talk about vineyards and how the roots go all the way to China kind of thing, right?
Craig Macmillan 17:52 Until you hit clay or limestone.
Paul Schreiner 17:54 Sometimes roots can go really far. I mean, 30 meters I've seen reported and get into, you know, basically rock, right? There's not too much mycorrhizal fungi down where we're there in rock, we did the study, again, it was at the research vineyard. And when you get into what is known as the sea horizon, in the soil, which we would typically think of as the subsoil, it's where it's more compact, there's less porosity, and it's pretty dense, right? And it's more like clay, colonization drops off a lot, you know, we might have 90% of roots are colonized in the topsoil. But in the subsoil might be 30%. That's because many things, one, the environment is just not suitable for life in general, at that depth, because it's compacted, there's less oxygen, it's a different environment.
Craig Macmillan 18:37 And again, you've mentioned AMF need more than just a plant root, they need to be out in the environment, there needs to be oxygen, there needs to be water, there needs to be other, there needs to be a favorable environment for life period. Right now, one thing we've talked about water holding. In other interviews, we've talked about water holding capacity improves in fields that have a higher or more successful AMF population, and that you talked about aggregates, it's part of that picture. We've talked about nutrient movement particular phosphorus, one of the things that I've heard people just kind of say colloquially is that if you have a meaningful mix, whatever the popular population, ecosystem involving AMF, it's going to lead to greater stability in the vine, and give the vine an ability to tolerate drought stress a little bit better. Are you finding those things? Are those things true? Even if it's kind of anecdotal? I mean, you're scientist, so you don't like anecdotal probably. But
Paul Schreiner 19:33 Yeah, so that's, you know, that's the interesting world of science in my world. I need to have evidence for what I say, especially, especially when it comes to publishing scientific papers, right?
Craig Macmillan 19:43 Well, of course, yeah.
Paul Schreiner 19:44 But then there's also opinion, you know, sometimes you can't show things in science. I mean, science isn't perfect, right? Mistakes happen, and some things are just more intractable and difficult to show, however, okay, on a broad scale, there's pretty good evidence that mycorrhizal fungi helped Plants tolerate drought stress better than non mycorrhizal plants when you know when they've been compared. So that has certainly a long term consequence that you might think would eventually relate to stability in some way.
Craig Macmillan 20:16 So one of the reasons that I asked that is science, Applied Science, especially applied Agricultural Science often is moved by growers noticing something or having an image in their head about how something works. And then folks like you come in and say, Okay, well, let's find out. Another thing that I've heard people mentioned that I don't know is true or not, is do AMF actually move water into the plant? We know that they transport minerals, or they actually move water into the plant?
Paul Schreiner 20:42 Yeah, that's a great question. The answer to that question at this point in time is, they don't move water in a way that we would like to think of it, they're not acting like a pipe, because their own cytoplasm is a, you know, it's a vital part of them, it's just like us, you know, like the inside of ourselves, we're not just gonna give that away, people used to think of them like, Oh, they're just pipes out there, and the water just flows right through them into the plant. Well, that's impossible, that just can't happen. What does happen potentially, is water moves on the external surface of the hyphae. Because similar to a plant root, they exude some carbon, they have some structure makes connection to soil water in the pores of soil. And so in theory, because these fungi are much finer diameter, let's say 50 to 100 times smaller in diameter than a root is, you know, fine root of a plant so they can get into smaller pores inside the soil and get access to soil water that the root may not be able to get access to. On top of that, there's potential especially because they help aggregate soil and help improve soil structure, they may actually in the long run, improve soil water holding capacity, because they're adding to that long term carbon storage of the soil. It's really well known that as you add organic matter to soil, you improve the water holding capacity of soil. The am fungi do do that. I mean, partly it's this bit of carbon that they exude into the soil rhizosphere itself or the we call it the micro rhizosphere. Even their turnover. So when they die, or when they're eaten by something else, they're also then contributing to that pool of soil carbon, and the more old and complex that carbon is, probably the more it's tends to be tied to soil, water and small pores. Yes, they do help, we can show that they help plants take up a little bit more water, but it's not a big deal. You know, it's kind of like let's say the plant on a given day use 10 liters of water and you let the plant go to the wilt point. Maybe the mycorrhizal plant got another 10 mils of water out of 10 liters, you know, it's not a huge amount.
Craig Macmillan 22:55 They're not the pipeline, but they are changing the soil environment such that the water holding capacity is changing. And that makes it more water for the mines to pick up. So it's not that there is a pipeline through the mycorrhizal fungi but that it's changing the environment in a way that makes it more likely that the water will be held and that the mind then has it available.
Paul Schreiner 23:12 Right and that that effect is small, it's hard to show because it's very small. The other thing that they probably help with the plants is that as soil dries, nutrients are harder to get. And particularly those nutrients that are more immobile and soil like phosphorus, a big part of why we see improved drought tolerance in a mycorrhizal plant is because they are accessing soil phosphorus better than a non mycorrhizal plant can and that's contributing to the overall drought tolerance of that plant. So some of our effects that we see are an indirect effect of improved phosphorus nutrition that goes across to any of the other functions that AMS might help plants do. Like another big category that I feel I should mention is there's good evidence that mycorrhizal fungi help plants resist or become more tolerant to other pathogens in the soil. So the bad guys or even nematodes, a lot of work has been done on this, you know, the experiments run the gamut, like they're there all over the place, because, you know, we're talking about really complex things. One of the things that we know, is that just improving the overall phosphorus nutrition of the plant and or other nutrients, sometimes it's, it might be another new nutrient that's limiting that gets you added tolerance to to any of these other effects, right? Whether it's drought, whether it's a root pathogen, even like insect feeding on above ground parts of the plant, you know, I mean, if you're in a better nutritional state, you're going to be better able to tolerate a lot of things. A lot of what happens with AMF is linked to their role in phosphorus, you know, so going back to this phosphorus story, some of my colleagues get mad at me because I they think I'm too opinionated about phosphorus. But I mean
Craig Macmillan 24:59 You You're having beers with people. And they're like, Paul, when you get off the phosphorous thing?
Paul Schreiner 25:05 Yeah, they're like, come on, Paul, you know, they play a role in nitrogen too.
Craig Macmillan 25:10 Okay, so we're in at a time with a couple of things I just absolutely, positively have to hit on if we draw the big old box around this topic, we would say, AMF are beneficial for vineyards. Okay, so what kinds of things can I do as a grower to encourage a AMF and what kinds of things should I not do that might dink the AMF community?
Paul Schreiner 25:29 Very good question. The most important thing probably is to think about AMF, before you plant a vineyard. And so like in some of the materials that I've I've, I've written about and published on, especially for like trade journals and trying to help growers, it's really important in my mind to separate pre plant versus post plant, and at the pre plant stage is really a time you should think about mycorrhizal fungi because that's the time. If they're not there, you've got a problem. But chances are, they're already there. It's also the pretty much the time that you can add mycorrhiza and they're going to do something, you have an opportunity to inoculate vines if you want when they go into the ground. The biggest thing about pre plant is what is the past history of that land, especially the recent couple of years if you've had plants on it, especially if their host plants for mycorrhizal fungi, which almost all of our crop plants are, even if it came out of say, forest land, and then was converted to vineyard. Typically, there's a AMF there because even in the forest, which are dominated by Ecto mycorrhizal trees, for example, here, and in the north, west, for example, there are still understory plants that rely on AMF. And so the AMF are there, normally, you don't have to inoculate. But knowing what the land history is, is very helpful. The worst thing you can do is of course, apply a fumigant, which we are doing much, much less now than we used to. Not that that will will stop entirely. But if you fumigate especially with like in the old days, methyl bromide was the main fumigant used, you'll kill the mycorrhizal fungi. And so you would want to inoculate if you did that. The other thing is if you have a really, really long period of fallow land, and when I say fallow, I mean fallow no weeds, nothing, most of our weed species also support AMF. So I mean, even having weeds on the ground before you plant a vineyard is going to keep the population up. And again, that goes back to the biology, this group of fungi that they can't grow on their own. And so eventually they'll be depleted in soil if there's no plants to keep feeding them. So that kind of relates back to the very beginning of our conversation, which is why this group of fungi is different. So like, basically avoid long fallow plant a cover crop of clover, for example, that's a good one, because Clover is very heavily colonized. It also provides nitrogen, which is good for vines, you know, especially at establishment and avoid fumigants. Once you get to the post plant side of things, I think the most critical things to think about are tillage, and then fertilizer use.
Craig Macmillan 27:56 What happens there?
Paul Schreiner 27:59 With tillage, you breakup the mycorrhizal network that's in the soil. And so like we talked about that external phase, or what we call the extra radical hyphae of this group of fungi, that phase is out in the soil and it actually survives and overwinters even for example, like you know, some of it dies back, but some of it remains if you keep destroying that with tillage. Eventually you reduce the population of AMF, there are a few fungi that seem to be much more tolerant of tillage. And these are some of our favorite lab rat ones, for example. Ones that are tolerant of disturbance have been ones that are most often done well in the laboratory and are easily easy to culture. Again, we're culturing on a plant but still similar kind of thing. So tillage is one thing. The fertilizer issue is I would avoid both high nitrogen and high phosphorus inputs. We have shown in some of my work if you apply phosphorus, for example, to the foliage, which some people like to do, you can reduce mycorrhizal colonization. It's all tied into the whole plant response to these this group of fungi, you know, plants evolved with the fungi, right? It's not just the fungi that were evolving. They know that the main function is phosphorus. So when the plant has high phosphorus status, it down regulates the colonization by this group of fungi. Well, when you get plants phosphorus, especially to the foliage, it sends a signal to the roots, I'm very happy, and it tends to reduce colonization.
Craig Macmillan 29:24 Specifically, how many units of nitrogen are we talking about?
Paul Schreiner 29:28 That gets into tricky territory.
Craig Macmillan 29:30 You know, if I'm putting on a 777 am I am i doing a bad thing?
Paul Schreiner 29:35 Probably not course, it also depends on the rate, you know, I mean, 777 But you're putting out 200 pounds per acre that's
Craig Macmillan 29:42 Yeah, that's why use the term units.
Speaker 2 29:45 Yeah, you know, and the thing about viticulture is we don't need as much nitrogen and as much phosphorus that as we do in other classic farming crops, you know, like the big the big crops corn soybean commodity. Yeah, commodity grapes are super cheap. super efficient at getting nutrients, other work that I do, which is actually more of more of my time spent on nutrition than it is on mycorrhizal fungi. But, you know, we've shown that high nitrogen is not necessarily a good idea in the vineyard, right. And most people know that. And almost intuitively, you don't want a massive canopy, that shading the fruit.
Craig Macmillan 30:19 In a vineyard, if I'm putting on nitrogen at a replacement rate, so I'm looking at how many pounds per acre I took out, I'm guessing and how many pounds per ton that relates to taking in cycling from canes and leaves that fall on the ground and go into the soil. You know, most vineyards you're looking at not a lot. So I've looked at some organic systems that are putting in, you know, two pounds per acre, the highest I think I've ever seen was 25 pounds per acre. Eight is a pretty good number kind of on average total. It sounds to me like these replacement level rates, not the high rate, but the replacement level rates where we're, we purposely are trying not to get a bigger canopy, we're not trying to bump a vine. That sounds like those are fine.
Paul Schreiner 30:58 I think so we've done work here, see, it was in Chardonnay, and also Pinot Noir. And we were putting out 20 and 40 pounds of N per acre. These are not high rates in in my view, especially when we look at agriculture as a whole right, we can see a little bit of a depression in mycorrhizal colonization, when we apply, say 40 pounds, or 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre, we don't wipe it out entirely, you know, the vines also can recover. The other thing is, the kind of nitrogen you put out may play a role as well. More soluble classic conventional fertilizers that have more soluble N and especially more soluble P will probably have a more negative impact. If you're putting out more organic sources of those fertilizers, because they're more complex, you know, they don't cause as quick of a response in the plant. And it does seem that that does not have as a negative impact on AMF, as the more soluble forms.
Craig Macmillan 31:58 There we go. Now we're out of time, unfortunately, this could go on forever, you and I should get together sometime and just hang out talk about phosphorus all you want. What is one piece of advice that you would give to grape growers related to this topic, especially if they want to increase or maintain in AMF population in their vineyard?
Paul Schreiner 32:17 You know, the most important thing is to be conservative with inputs. I think that's probably the the key thing conservative with both water inputs and nitrogen inputs and phosphorus inputs. You know, the role of fungicides, so far does not really appear to be a big deal. And again, we don't have time to go into all that. But the evidence that we've collected so far suggests that you know our fungicide spray programs, for example, which we're talking about controlling things in the canopy, I'm not seeing a clear effect on microns of fungi because of that. If you overwater over fertilize. That's when you're going to do damage to Microsoft fungi, you know that that's clear. And then the other piece of advice is think about it pre plant, because that's the time you can actually do something put a cover crop in prior to planting the vineyard and I bet 99% of the time, the mycorrhizal population that's there will be sufficient to colonize the vine roots and be healthy goes back to just very briefly the fact that I consider grape vines, a very, very receptive host for mycorrhizal fungi. I've looked at other crop plants, including other woody perennials, and grape vines are so heavily colonized. It's it's truly amazing.
Craig Macmillan 33:28 That is cool. Where can people find out more about you? And or more about this topic? You mentioned research that's been published recently on some of these topics. Where can we find you?
Paul Schreiner 33:39 So the easy way to find me is type my name Paul Schreiner. And grapevine will be in the title in the show notes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you just put my name and grapevine nutrition, or grapevine and AMS, I should pop up as the first thing on Google. But you can also just email me paul.schreiner@usda.gov. And I'm happy to provide for those that are more interested in getting into the weeds. I can provide you some lists of good references and whatnot. So I'm happy to do that.
Craig Macmillan 34:05 That's fantastic. My guest today has been Paul Shriner. He is a research plant physiologist with USDA ARS. He's based in Corvallis, Oregon. This has been really fun for me. I hope it's fun for our listeners, too. This is such a hot topic. And so thank you very much for being on the podcast. Really appreciate it. Paul,
Unknown Speaker 34:22 Thank you so much, Craig. It was great having this conversation
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 176: What's your Sustainable Story? | Marketing Tip Monday | 10 Apr 2023 | 00:02:37 | |
It's here! The tool that you need to tell your Sustainable Story. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. In this week's Marketing Tip we are launching the brand new, Our Sustainable Story series. Research shows that the demand for sustainable products keeps growing so we developed this series just for you! By following along with this series, you will be able to incorporate your message of sustainability into your whole business. Here is how to start telling your customers how you take care of the people and the planet today. Get Started
Want an example? Read how Niner Wines Estates protects the people and the planet by embodying the 7 values of SIP Certified. Stay TunedBecause telling your sustainable story can help you sell more wine, we have created a 7-month series to help you incorporate your good work into every aspect of your messaging. Throughout the rest of the year, we will share easy-to-implement training, branding, and sales strategies that will positively impact your business. Plus, we will share SIP Certified members' Sustainable Stories to further inspire you. Stay tuned, here is what's coming up:
Download the new Our Sustainable Stories worksheet to easily highlight 7 things your brand does sustainably! Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 175: How to Prepare for Invasive Pests in Your Vineyard | 06 Apr 2023 | 00:25:41 | |
Vineyard farmers manage numerous pests but the invasive species can be some of the most troublesome. Kyle McAbee, President of McAbee Ag Consulting, PCA and CCA sustainability specialist shares what growers need to know to manage pests currently in their area, like Vine Mealybug, and prepare for ones that could come in the future, like Spotted Lantern Fly. Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is critical. Sustainable and conventional growers should rotate chemistries, scout to track location, time of year, and mating events, look at how other areas manage the pest, control host species, and be ready to do something about the issue. Most importantly, growers should talk with their Ag Commissioner, Farm Advisor, and each other. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Kyle McAbee. He is president of McAbee Ag Consulting. He is a licensed pest control advisor, and certified crop advisor with a certification in sustainability specialization. And we're going to talk about pests. Thanks for being thanks for being on podcast Kyle.
Kyle McAbee 0:18 Yeah, good to be with you Craig.
Craig Macmillan 0:20 So you and I were just chatting. And I also been thinking about this a lot recently. And one of the big challenges for sustainability in agriculture in general was pest management, obviously. And I've been looking back into the past and kind of watching things. And I've been wondering if you see something similar to this, have you seen changes in pest pressure, different kinds of pressure, particular pest in different regions? In the last seven or eight years?
Kyle McAbee 0:46 Yes, absolutely. Definitely seen, you know, fluctuations in pest pressure, with certain pests, likely an average overtime average, slow increase, but that said, you know, it's it's year to year, some years, you know, we're looking for certain pests in places that we've seen them for years in and years out and can't find them. I'll give you an example. Last year, the mite population, in particular Paso Robles, but I think in a wider area, you know, I speak with a lot of different PCAs in the local industry, and we're all scratching our heads wondering, you know, hey, we've had Pacific Mite these blocks for the last six, seven years in, we can't find one this year. It just depends on the season and what pest we're talking about, of course, too.
Craig Macmillan 1:29 And that's a really interesting one to me, because that suggests that biological control is working, right? Because you're not treating for mites unless you're seeing mites. So it's not a question of a prophylactic set of sprays, necessarily, they've knocked on the population, one would think, or maybe it's some kind of changing climate reason.
Kyle McAbee 1:48 When we're looking at any of these populations, whether it be pest or whether it be a beneficial insect. It is absolutely environmentally based, whether, you know, we had a warm winter, and it didn't knock back the overwintering populations as normal, or we had an extremely cold winter, which, you know, could further give us some over over winter kill on the overwintering populations, depending on what pest we're talking about, obviously, but yeah, environmental chemicals that are being used, and well, not even chemicals. You know, of course, cultural practices, you know, what folks are doing for dust control for mites? For example, you know, there's just so many factors. But yes, I do think environment and warm winters, and obviously, warm spring and summer have played a big part in increased pest pressure, and particularly mealybug.
Craig Macmillan 2:34 Yeah, so with mites, we just talked about a decline. And when we're talking about vine mealybug, I've been hearing the same thing. And it seemed like, well, back in the 90s, when it showed up, it was just a disaster. I mean, it was really, really bad, you know, and it's never gonna go away. But then things seem like they kind of settled down. I mean, he still had to deal with it. But it wasn't the kind of incredible devastation that we saw in the late 90s. Now you're seeing these things start to these populations and the damage start to come back up, right?
Kyle McAbee 3:02 Yes, I do believe that, you know, as an industry, overall, we've definitely seen an increase in the last, I guess, eight harvests or so that have been in Paso Robles. And not just Paos Robles, you know, kind of up and down the central coast. And yeah, yeah, absolutely seen seen situations where, you know, we've been in control of vine mealybug in certain areas, you know, our hotspots, if you will, is that all of a sudden, we've kind of lost control lost a grip a little bit, or, you know, they're starting to win a little bit more than they were before. Additionally, and more importantly, to me, is we've got blocks and vineyards, that historically, you know, we've been rigorously scouting them season in and season out. And all of a sudden, we're finding mealy bugs, and I'm, and, you know, we'll, you know, blocks that we've trapped, for years just preempt, you know, preventatively to monitor the population that way as well. All of a sudden, we start getting a, you know, a couple counts here, and a couple of counts there. And so we start paying closer attention. And, you know, couple year two, year three after that, then we, you know, all of a sudden, hey, we found some vines with mealybug, on Vine mealybug. And knowing that, you know, had not had that problem in those blocks previously. So new populations moving into new blocks.
Craig Macmillan 4:17 From what I understand we're finding vi mealybug in areas where we haven't had it before. We're seeing increases in the counts, populations are there. Do you have some ideas about why that might be?
Kyle McAbee 4:29 Two different things going on here? We're gonna start with areas blocks of vineyards that we know we've had hotspots of vine mealybug we've been watching them and fighting them for years, maybe a decade for some folks maybe longer for others in those areas. You know, we've had successful years weather that we've had help from Mother Nature and those years in addition to our, you know, IPM programs, whatever it may be, but I do know that over time in the last, you know, five years call it I've definitely had some areas where I've seen Those spots increase, and I've started to scratch my head. And despite the fact that I rotate chemicals, and, you know, IRAC groups and all that, and our cultural practices, I do see, you know, some loss of control in those areas and increase in population and maybe, you know, even growth, you know, outward into the vineyard, you know, I think that, in particular has a lot to do part just in part, but a lot of it is that has got to do with maybe some chemical resistance, some some product resistance, you know, in particular, the neonic, the IRAC 4A's have been so widely used year in and year out, over and over, I've been very suspicious of resistance to those, I don't lean just on those, but I've definitely seen areas where we get no control from those products. And so I've done some work with the USDA to look into that, in particularly one vineyard in Monterey County, we, you know, we took samples of the population, and that was an inconclusive test, you know, there's many reasons as to why that didn't, didn't really work out, a lot of it was the protocol in the lab and how they were doing it, but that doesn't change my mind. And the idea that we do have some resistance to, to those products, not just to pick on those, but I think that's where first place to start, if we're going to talk about resistance with my mealybug I think that's a big part of the problem. The other part of that the meaning, you know, hotspots that are have spread, or you know, are getting worse, I think that those vines are getting older, and the, you know, the bark is fluffing, and there's just more protection for them underneath the bark, as opposed to young, young vineyard, you know, so those hotspots, you know, obviously, as you go, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 years later, well, those vines are a whole different environment for vine mealybug. And I think that plays a big part into it as well, you get some old grenache or syrah or whatever it may be some of these varietals that that do tend to really multilayers of slough bark, it's just impossible to get any of these chemistries, whether it be organic, or conventional, whatever it may be any of these products in there, and there's just too many places for him to hide, there's got to be some sort of resistance issues, at least that's my opinion, I think others agree. But there's also you know, environmental factors, not just the weather, but you know, in the more of a micro environment for these insects. So you know, these these areas that we've had these populations that we've monitored, that we've been fighting for years, and been successful all the sudden, you know, you're seeing lack of control, and you're having a hard time with even new products, and new chemistries, and additional rotation and stuff. And I think that's got a lot to do with, you know, those vines have changed in the you know, those five or 10 years, you know, they've gotten older and a big part of, as we all know, are most you know, most folks know, and older vines got, you know, much more complex bark system on the trunks and cordons, multi layers, much more area for these these insects to hide under the bark and where we can't make contact with them. And I think that's a big part of it that I know a lot of folks have talked about, and we're all aware of and there's just, you know, what do you do? Right, but I think that's a big part of why these hotspots have have gotten worse, personally, it's coverage at that point, right? It's it's simply coverage.
Craig Macmillan 8:20 In the world of fungicides we faced this for a long time. And the question then is they go Okay, now what do I do? Where do I go from here? I've become dependent on certain materials? Now I'm trying different things. I'm still like in control software chemistries, we're talking about organophosphates, or anything. What's your strategy? What do you think? And where are you going to go in the future with this?
Kyle McAbee 8:39 I'm not the only one doing this. But we in our problem areas, we rotate our chemistries a lot, but that's not all we do. A big part of this is scouting, obviously, you know, we we have to stay on top of it and monitoring any spread or new hotspots. So that's a big one. Another huge part. I mean, okay, so you've identified where they're at, well, what do you do? Well, trapping is a huge part of this cultural practice, if you will, in monitoring not just where they're at, and what they're doing, but mating events and trying to attack these things from the inside out, in addition to chemical programs that are, you know, we all use a lot of the same products, which is kind of why I touched on potential for resistance, but trapping and reacting accordingly. So looking at those meaning events, if you're going to trap, you better be willing to do something about it. Okay, we've got a count of 50 in this trap. Well, the clock is ticking. You know, that mating event is happening. Now. You don't have seven days, you don't have 14 days, you need to be able to get out there now. And if you're using floatable meeting disruptors, you've got to be willing to go out there and spray that at least that area, you don't have to spray the whole vineyard but you know, depending on the size of the property, reacting to it accordingly. The other option, you know, some of these mating disruption companies, they have the hangers and those last long So you can, you know, you've got a hotspot in an area. And as soon as you get that first flight, you know, hang those things out there in the spring, you'll likely, you know, disrupt a couple mating events at that point, you know, I believe they call for a lot of those that last, you know, 90 days or so depending on the weather. I know for a fact they're working on ones that their prototypes at this point, but they are supposed to last quite a bit longer than that. So I mean, we're talking a big chunk of our season at that point, and it goes to the organic versus conventional, right. So the flowable is not organic, certified, the cards are, well, just because you're conventional, doesn't mean you don't use the cards, I think the cards are a big part of that, you know, that meeting disruption process. So if you're conventional, I think, you know, don't look away from the cards just because they're organic. I mean, there's a lot of benefits to those things.
Craig Macmillan 10:47 Absolutely. And I think I've seen that in powdery mildew management to where folks that are not certified organic are putting a lot of Omri approved products in their in their rotation, which is interesting, because that was so that was certainly not the case back in the day. Okay. So this is a great example where we had an invasive pest, we've been trying to figure out what to do now we're trying new things, and it's gonna be constant, right. But what about new invasive pests? There's a couple of things that are out there that I think it's only a matter of time before they show up here in California, or Washington or Oregon or the other direction in your mind, because you're scouting really carefully. You're looking for stuff, all kinds of things. So you obviously you're scouting for pests that you know, but I'm guessing that you're scouting for insects, you don't know, what do you do? What would you recommend as a game plan? If I find something that's new, I don't want to get a toehold.
Kyle McAbee 11:39 Oh, yeah. Well, number one, if it's a new sighting of an invasive species, notifying the Ag Commissioner letting the you know making sure that USDA gets involved and making them aware of it, because a big part of it is it's a big picture. Program. So that's, that's number one. If you're one of the first people to find it, or if it's new to your area, if it's in your area, and it's new to your property or your your vineyard or whatever it may be looking at the States or the country, or countries that that that pest has come from and doing research and looking at what they've done looking at what they're doing there. Is there anything that they've done that is successful to mitigate that pest or deal with it? I think the spotted lantern fly is a good example. I don't think anybody knows exactly what to do with that. With that pest yet. I've obviously I don't have any direct connection with spotted lantern fly being you know, a PCA in California, however, I have done research on it, knowing that it unfortunately isn't inevitably likely to come to California, it's an invasive species from China, it was likely brought in over, you know, cargo ships and things like that. They're, they're very good movers, they lay their egg masses on semi trucks and, you know, see trains and just vehicles and they they can travel across the country that way. That's why I feel inevitably will likely be seeing some of this, you know, in the news or something. In the United States My understanding is it's you know, mostly focused on the East Coast. That's where it came in. I think Pennsylvania might have been first one I know New Jersey and Virginia, I think West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, I think maybe even a couple others have had this issue. And it's a very, it's a very big problem. Not just for the vineyard, it is a problem for the vineyards. But it's a nuisance as well just you know, across communities. And if you have a tasting room next year, your vineyard they pretty good fliers, they're large insect, they're not afraid of humans so they can kind of swarm and just become an issue. But regarding vineyard pest control, they're very, very good feeders. They're aggressive feeders and they will suck a vine dry in in one one to two years and just take all the life out of the vines and that's that's the concern there. The other concern obviously with as goes most invasive species, we don't really have IPM program for them we don't we don't really know what to do we don't have products registered for them. We don't have spotted lantern fly for example written on really any labels that we can use and also bio control, you know, we that's part of an invasive species as well, but it likely didn't bring their you know, their predators with them, you know, their enemies. So I know they're doing work with the native bio control insects in that are in China. Currently, gypsy moth, I believe is one of them. And I believe they're doing some work with some different fungi and things like that. Yeah, I think one big thing to note that I've read is Tree of Heaven is is you know, obviously an invasive species as well from China. That's its host plant in China. So I know we've got it here. I've got areas I've been fighting, you know, Tree of Heaven for a while. So one of the biggest things other than looking for this insect is once it comes here, even now making sure you're controlling that Tree of Heaven, get rid of that stuff and not an easy one to take care of. But that's that's a big part of it, too.
Craig Macmillan 14:52 I live in the city of Paso Robles, and there's a little patch of it like right on the city limit on buying Street. It's spreading come into town. Like it's grown. It's grown up through sidewalks and stuff. And you know, as the biology pages look at, and you're like, oh my god, like, this is just a monster. I'm like, what are you gonna? Do? You know? But yeah, you're absolutely right as if you can identify those plants ahead of time and work on those. That's a great, great idea. Do you have any kind of plan? Not maybe not even for just spotted lantern fly, but let's say we get a report of something.
Kyle McAbee 15:28 Right? And that's how it's gonna happen. I mean, somebody's gonna find it somewhere. And then we're all gonna go, oh, man, what do we do? This is already part of my work anyway, is getting rid of the Tree of Heaven, trying to minimize any reason for that particular pest or other pests? You know, you got you just got to look at their hosts, I mean, their host plants, their host environment, where did they, you know, not just spotted lantern fly, but you know, other invasive species that we're looking at that are making their way into this country? And in figuring out what is their biology? What is their host environment or or plant or whatever it may be? If it it has shown up in other areas, you know, where did it come in, look at what the folks in, you know, country or other area that this invasive pest has come from? What do they do? What what products are they using? And what have they done to control it? Right? Maybe they haven't maybe it's such an aggressive problem. They haven't done it. I think number one, obviously is looking for it. For example, we get a report of spotted lantern fly, like you said in in Napa, or somewhere in California, then okay, well, it's probably here somewhere, just training your folks training your employees, you know, making sure your PCA and his his or her scouts are looking for these pests is important. And it found reporting it you know, not just to not just to the customer, you know, not just to the grower, it needs to be known on a state level or county level, you know, contacting the Ag Commissioner and asking them where, you know, what do we do with this information? Somebody needs to know about it, and making sure the USDA is aware of it. And in that way we they can kind of start tracking, you know, whatever insect it may be. But yeah, on a on a more micro level on on your own operation, looking at what products may be available to try to find it once you have it, looking at what the what they're doing and other maybe other states that have been fighting it for a while, what have they been successful with? And contacting, you know, farm advisors and talking to them about it, you know, Hey, have you guys figured out in the bio control? That's always a tough one. It's not just as simple as Okay, well, lantern fly in China, their main, you know, arch nemesis is the Gypsy Moth, well, let's just bring the Gypsy Moth over well, it's not that simple. Because there's, there's a lot of years of studies that have to go into that to make sure you're not gonna cause that insects. But looking at that, I mean, maybe that's already been done on whatever invasive species may come in, maybe that's already been figured out, and we have access to it. Who knows, you know,
Craig Macmillan 17:53 Or maybe we have an organism already here, that's similar enough that it can do something I think in terms of in terms of like predators, definitely, I think that's an option. And maybe we can do some augmentative biological control or something like that. It does sound like one of our best strategies might be to take cultural approaches initially, and just make it an unfriendly place. And then, and then kind of go from there. And like you said, see what other people have done and kind of go from there. I think that's the tricky thing, mealybug, all kinds of things, bugs and virus. We've learned a lot internationally in the last 10 years, which has been great that we've got folks working on this syndrome, variety of places we can learn from what they do, we're kind of running out of time, I want to ask you, though, in terms of sustainable pest control, and this can be fungi, this can be insect can be nematodes, it could be anything, what one piece of advice, or what one take home idea would you give to a grower if they say hey, I want to manage my vineyard in a sustainable fashion? How do I control my pests?
Kyle McAbee 18:55 Sustainability is, you know, very well correlated with IPM touched on cultural practices and things outside of, of chemical control, trapping, you know, looking looking at mating events, again, like you mentioned, making the environment unfriendly for whatever pest it may be, you know, scouting, making sure that you're aware of what is actually happening out there, what pests are out there, where they're at, in making sure something doesn't get out of control before you know it's there. Because it's really hard. Even on a you know, more aggressive, more conventional program, it's hard to reach back and knock down a population, it's much easier to to get them early on. Right? It just depends on what we're talking about when I say cultural control, looking at you know, hey, are there weeds that are causing the problem on the ground? Is it are you creating a secondary host or environment for X pests, right, keeping those things down and, you know, making sure you're not spreading them mechanically looking at you know, on a sustainable program, rotating different groups if you're on a conventional sustainable program if you're you know, if you're going for the organic products only or your organic certified then looking at those different bio insecticides or organic insecticides that are out there and what your options are, and making sure you're talking to people talking to people that have been doing it, talk to various people get multiple opinions. And one thing I've always heard about PCAs is talked to three, and you'll get three different opinions, which is good, though, because then you can kind of dig through it and see what the best options are, maybe use all three different ideas in in a rotational factor, you know, I've always been an advocate of, you know, communication with with each other. And we're all on this together. And, you know, making sure that we're all learning from one another and figuring out what worked for others and what didn't work for him, and so on and so forth.
Craig Macmillan 20:43 Yeah, exactly. And one thing I want to underline with what you just said is, you know, Scout Scout Scout monitor, monitor, monitor, record, record record, and then go back and look at those and look for those trends. And, and then the second thing being cultural, I think that's a really important idea is that if we can modify the environment, we can do a lot of good. And I think mites is a classic example mites and dust, so where can people find out more about you?
Kyle McAbee 21:06 Honestly, the best way to get a hold of me is either email or phone. I, I'm not very present on social media, with my business. I do have a Facebook, it's, you know, McAbee Ag Consulting. But that said, I think the best way to get a hold of me would be either to call me text me or email me, and I can give you that information.
Craig Macmillan 21:25 And we can put that information in the show notes, folks will be able to find you. This has been great. Thanks so much. I guess today it was Kyle McAbee. He is president of McAbee Ag Consulting, and He is a licensed pest control advisor and certified crop advisor with the sustainability specialization. Thanks so much, Kyle. This has really been a joy. I'm really, really glad you were here.
Kyle McAbee 21:45 Yeah, thank you, Craig. Appreciate it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 174: SIP Certified members give back | Marketing Tip Monday | 27 Mar 2023 | 00:04:48 | |
We know our SIP Certified members are generous donors in the community. Last week, we shared the exciting news about the expansion of our Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship. In the same spirit of giving back, this week, we want to acknowledge some of the ways SIP Certified brands give back. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Get ready for a feel-good episode about generous brands in the wine industry. And get inspired about ways that you can give back. Vina Robles' the ArboristDid you know that planting a tree can be as easy as enjoying a bottle of wine? It can be when you buy a bottle of Vina Robles' the Arborist! Vina Robles partners with non-profit environmental conservation organizations to plant trees with a portion of the proceeds from every bottle of the Arborist that is sold. Since the program started in the year 2000, nearly 33,000 trees have been planted. When you purchase a bottle of the Arborist, you are joining them in supporting this great cause. Two Funds by Talley VineyardsTalley Vineyards has two charitable funds that benefit SLO County agriculture workers and students of Arroyo Grande High School. The first to be established by the Talleys was the Fund for Vineyard and Farmworkers, created in 2004. This fund supports the Farm Worker Community in San Luis Obispo County by awarding grants to local nonprofit organizations that serve agriculture workers and their families. Talley also supports the youth of the community through the Marianne Talley Foundation, named in honor of Brian Talley's sister who passed away in 1993. This is a scholarship fund that supports the children of farm workers who attend Arroyo Grande High School with scholarships to support their pursuit of higher education. Niner Wine Estate's Buck-a-BottleNovember is Buck-a-Bottle month for Niner Wine Estates. Every year, they donate $1 to a local charity fund for every bottle that is sold in their tasting room and online during the month of November. Their 2022 fundraiser generously benefited Vineyard Team's Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship. Niner Wine Estates has been supporting the scholarship for years and has hosted the past few annual Scholarship Recipient Award Ceremonies at the Vineyard Team Member BBQ, where scholarship recipients, their families, and Vineyard Team members get together to enjoy great company, wine, and a meal crafted with fresh ingredients from Chef's Garden. Thank you, Niner Wine Estates, for helping children of vineyard and winery workers achieve their dreams of higher education through your support of the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship! Sustainable funding for education opportunitiesIf you missed our past Marketing Tip Monday, the Vineyard Team's Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship is our way of giving back to the community and contributing to a prosperous future of educated and determined professionals. This funding supports students and their families in achieving their dreams of successful graduation to pursue a professional career. The majority of awardees are first-generation college students, who have more barriers when it comes to attaining higher education. This isn't designed to be a one-time award. Starting in 2023, we will award two- and four-year scholarships, complete with a graduation bonus to help them launch into the next phase of life. The total will end up being in the range of $6k to $20k per student. We've also invested in a program mentor, Alex Gonzalez, who will be a resource to the students. This upgraded scholarship is possible because the local non-profit, Must! Charities, recognized the importance of this program and has created a matching funds program for us. You can help the program flourishTo receive the gifted money from Must! Charities, we need to raise matching funds each year. In the true spirit of sustainability, we want to create a program that has long-lasting funds so that we can continue to better the lives of our industry's children for decades. Use the link in the show notes to make a donation to the program, and share this podcast with those you think could benefit from learning more about the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship. Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes for links to the scholarship flyers, paycheck inserts, application, to donate, to read stories from our incredible scholars and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 281: How Rootstock Impacts Vine Drought Tolerance and Longevity | 21 Aug 2025 | 00:31:23 | |
Originally developed to combat phylloxera, rootstocks are now being researched as a solution to one of viticulture's challenges: drought. Dr. Suraj Kar, Assistant Professor of Viticulture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, explores the 150-year history of rootstocks and their evolving purpose. He explains the complex influence rootstocks have on drought tolerance, vine vigor, and fruit set—and how long-term research is identifying those best suited to support vine longevity in a changing climate. Resources:
| |||
| 173: Reduce Your Carbon Footprint with Lightweight Wine Bottles | 16 Mar 2023 | 00:31:54 | |
Did you know that standard wine packaging, including the bottle and the process, is 42% of the wine's total carbon footprint? That statistic is exactly what inspires Erica Landin-Lofving, Chief Sustainability Officer at Vintage Wine Estates to explore alternative packaging. Lightweight bottling positively impacts the full circle sustainability of wine from saving money on glass and transportation to the quality of work for the people lifting cases to less wear and tear on equipment. Erica covers challenges and solutions related to all types of alternative packaging (wine in a bag, wine in a box tetra pak, lightweight glass) including choosing the best packaging for your brand, quality signaling, getting leadership to buy in, what changes will be most sustainable, and educating consumers. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 My guest today is Erica Lofving. She is Chief Sustainability Officer with Vintage Wine Estates. And we're going to talk about sustainable wine packaging today. Welcome to the podcast. Erica.
Erica Landin-Lofving 0:09 Thank you happy to be here.
Craig Macmillan 0:10 You have done a lot of work on sustainable packaging. It's obviously an area that not only you're interested to, but there's a major component to the work that you do with with Vintage Wine Estate. How did you get into it? What is your interest? What kinds of things you've worked on recently?
Erica Landin-Lofving 0:24 Well, I first got into sustainable packaging, maybe six, seven years. Back when I was still living in Sweden, I'm Swedish. I was consulting for the Swedish wine monopolies, Systembolaget. They are possibly the biggest buyer of wine in the world. And they have sustainability as a core issue. And they started lifting the packaging, and did lifecycle analysis together with the other Scandinavian monopolies and saw that packaging bottling and the process of doing it was up to 42% of the total carbon footprint of a wine, which is huge. Of course, they started focusing on on that because of course being big buyers, they can require changes in packaging of their buyers. So they launched projects on lightweighting bottles and alternative packaging, which they are still very strong and probably leading in the world. So that's that's when I got interested at that time, there was almost no discussion about packaging as part of sustainability and wine. We talked vineyards, vineyards, vineyards, maybe a little bit of winemaking, but packaging got ignored most of the sustainability certifications around the world don't even mention packaging, or didn't at least at that time. Actually, that was my project for the monopoly. I went through basically all the sustainability certifications around the world. Comlpex job. Let me tell you that.
Craig Macmillan 1:39 Yeah, I guess.
Erica Landin-Lofving 1:41 So of course, when I started at Vintage, I, you know, packaging was one of my key topics that I want to bring up. It was also really interesting to see we did a survey last year when we set our strategy I've been with Vintage for a year and a half. So one of my first things was to start collecting the information called a materiality analysis, basically pinpointing which areas are key sustainability areas. And as part of that, we did a survey in house and a lot of our staff were also interested in packaging, primary secondary packaging, and then of course, the waste of incoming packaging. So that that became one of our core core topics, and a very exciting one to be to be working on.
Craig Macmillan 2:22 For those of us who don't know what to what kind of companies of Vintage Wine Estates, what do they do?
Erica Landin-Lofving 2:28 Oh, yeah, Vintage Wine Estaes is a group we own 13 wineries, I believe and have 50 brands on top. Plus we do contract production for for external brands. We went public. Last June, June 20. June 22. It or is it 20 this year?
Craig Macmillan 2:47 Yeah. Oh, that's right. No, that's right. No, I do. Yeah. That was kind of a big deal.
Erica Landin-Lofving 2:53 It was a big deal. There aren't. Yeah, there aren't that many public public companies. So year and a half ago, we went public. Yeah, I know. That was that was part of the goal of of Pat Roney, our founder was to build a company to take public so that was definitely a big deal for the company. And we're continuing to grow. A lot of our brands, we will buy grapes, we buy juice, we even buy finished wines. So packaging is one of the sustainability aspects we can control there. For me, there's there's two big aspects to to packaging, of course, that the wine bottle is bigger than any of the other packaging considerations. The one that I'm most attached to is lightweighting. of glass, find alternative packaging is interesting. And so in Sweden, I think it's 56% of the wine sold by volume is in bag in box. But they are also big buyers of Tetra Pack, PET bottles, cans, wine and cans, and it becomes an interesting market to watch. I'm not completely positive to all the alternative packagings and we can we can get into that if they do have a much lower carbon footprint. But there are other considerations. I cans I am some fairly positive too. But let's dive into that separately. But I'm still a firm believer that the glass wine bottle is going to be our key wine packaging for the foreseeable future. However, this attachment that consumers and therefore producers have to heavy bottle being a signifier of quality of the wine, we've got to let that go. That is that got outdated when we set the Paris, Paris climate goals like that's it has nothing to do with the quality of the wine. This is part of the message that is finally slowly catching hold. And it's gone a lot further in Europe professionally in Scandinavia than it has in the US still, but I believe that we're heading that direction. I've started seeing articles on the negative aspects of a heavyweight bottle in New York Times ,Wall Street Journal,Wine Enthusiast and when that starts coming, it's like we're starting to get that message into the mainstream. It is going to bring change. Fancy wine wants to be sold in a heavy bottle still,
Craig Macmillan 4:59 Based on On that basis, we're now getting national non wine press paying attention to this a little bit. Do you think there might be a groundswell of public interest attitude belief that might put some pressure on wineries to reduce their glass weight to go to a lighter weight package?
Erica Landin-Lofving 5:15 I believe so I believe we're in the early days of it still, I think the people that we're going to reach first are the wine connoisseurs that read those newspapers, magazines, and want to be part of early adopters who want to show that they know something, as well as the millennial consumer who is not as concerned with tradition, and is very concerned with environmental aspects and more knowledgeable in general on on environmental impact. I think those are the two groups that will start making the change from two directions.
Craig Macmillan 5:45 Now, do you think that there is a curve of this behavior that's related to price, so somebody's going to buy a $100 bottle of wine in a traditional dead leaf green Berg bottle as opposed to a big heavy deep punt? You know, I've been doing some analysis, you can have a bottle that's say 400 grams, or you can have a bottle of over 1000 grams big difference? Am I going to pay the same for 400? As opposed to 1000? Do you think?
Erica Landin-Lofving 6:12 I think you will, when you understand why I mean for 400 is still an extremely lightweight bottle. 420 grams is kind of what the international wine industry has set as the limit for true lightweight bottle in the US. I know a lot of producers who speak about eco weight or lightweight and they mean 470 to 490 grams, I've started speaking in terms of true lightweight as something under 420. Those bottles do feel quite light, I think they will be their shoo ins for anything under $20. But I think for for these $100 bottles, moving them from the 900 Gram 32 ounce massive pieces down to more normal weight, like 500 500 grams, we should be able to do that. And again, this is where we're New York Times and Wall Street Journal's writing matters the most because they reach that consumer, when the first adopters there, start understanding this, they might react negatively to one of those super heavy bottles. I do now. I mean, this has been something I've been I've been looking at for a long time. But now if I lift a bottle and it's a 900 gram bottle, I just say like, seriously, why? Why would I want to buy this? Also, why would I want to drag this home and then drag it to recycling?
Craig Macmillan 7:24 Well, I think that you're absolutely right, that once we get below about a $20 retail price point, the lightweighting seems to be kind of a no brainer. As we push up. Hopefully that message will get out I think from a sustainability standpoint. But I also do wonder how far that can kind of go. Right. I remember, this is how old I am. I remember when very expensive Napa Cabernets came in a straight sided forest green Bordeaux bottle with a just a big square paper label on it and a very cheap foil. Now I don't think I could get $100 for that package. Even there's been a lot of work that's been done. And if I understand it correctly, this is you know, social psych stuff. If you give a consumer two bottles, one's heavy one's lighter, you say this is the same product even? Which what will you pay? Their willingness to pay is higher for the heavier package? Yeah, if that's true, right. That's a tough psychology to ignore.
Erica Landin-Lofving 8:20 That's a tough psychology to ignore.
Craig Macmillan 8:22 So some of it, I think, is consumer level. But I'd also like to hear a little bit on what's going on behind the scenes on the production side, what kinds of conversations ideas, potential is there because it seems like there might be some work to do there on the marketing side. But there's some work to do. Maybe behind the scenes side.
Erica Landin-Lofving 8:36 We'll just say that imagine that they were doing this test again. But that the test subjects had been given an article to read that said that the environmental impact of the bottle was the biggest contributor to the carbon footprint of the wine, how many of them their mind, and that's what I believe is the key. I think as long as the consumer does not know this difference, we will see a preference for the heavier bottles, the more that information disseminates into the marketplace, the more impact it will have. I will also say that so behind the scenes, one of the calculations that I'm doing is that I have a much bigger impact taking a SKU that has 300,000 case production and moving it from 500 grams to 400 grams. Then I do taking a SKU that's in a seven 750 gram bottle and moving it to 400 grams, but the production is only 1000 cases or even even less. So for that reason, my focus and our internal discussions center around the big volume wines. That said there there are bigger volume wines that come in those super heavy bottles. I For me, it's the super heavy bottles. We've got to watch out there because while I would like to make the move purely from a sustainability perspective, there is the marketing risk, but there's also a risk of not making the change. because I'll just tell you when I was in Sweden last time now Sweeden, as I said, much further along than the US market when it comes to consumer understanding of sustainability and an interest in sustainability. I went into the store and I was asking for advice on something cool and something high end. And the guy picked out two bottles, and he said, Oh, this one is great. This is Niepoort I, you know, I love this wine. 10 years of age for selling it aged, which is, you know, not always easy to find in a store. He said, but you might not want it. It's a super heavy bottle. And I said, Oh, why do you think I might not want it now? The sustainability impact is is pretty big. I don't know. I've had people hesitate. I was like, wow. They advised me away from a really cool wine because it's an a heavy bottle. And and I liked that. I know that I know that Jancis Robinson, for example, called out Joe Wryneck iIn South Africa, great producer, amazing wines, and definitely a sustainability champion. And this was a couple of years ago, you know, in in her magazine, she said you can't have accountability, profiling, make these beautiful wines, and put them in a super heavy bottle, if the message doesn't add up. And again, the more we get that, the more you're going to have high end consumers turn away from these bottles and be like, nope, gotta gotta change that.
Craig Macmillan 11:19 Maybe we're getting groundswell on both sides. Now, I want to get technical, I've done some of this work myself and feel like I have failed miserably. Probably not entirely true. But tell me about your methodology when you're looking at this with glass and you're trying to get a carbon footprint sense, because what I'm guessing when you're telling me what you're doing is you want to come back to management ownership and say, Hey, this is how much reduction we have in ourCO2 equivalent. Is that fair is that by alright?
Erica Landin-Lofving 11:46 Let's be completely fair, the the message to leadership is, this is how much we're saving on glass. And this is the sustainability messaging we can attach to it. But you know, the savings, CO2 reduction, for a lightweight bottle will almost always come at a lower price point. For us. One of the challenges has been finding really nice quality molds with perfect stability and stability. I don't mean to make the wine stable. I mean, we have some high speed bottling lines, we don't want it to crush in the bottling line, or we're losing speed. So finding these really nice looking molds, making sure that they're not shorter and smaller, we had a launch with 100 gram bottle on the on the Canadian market, it was shorter. We did not want to bring that to the to the US market.
Craig Macmillan 12:29 Well, why not? Oh,
Erica Landin-Lofving 12:30 The funny thing is you, you get a surprising number of people writing in saying, Hey, you're cheating me out of wine, I see this bottomless is smaller than a regular wine bottle. Right?
Craig Macmillan 12:40 Right. Yeah.
Erica Landin-Lofving 12:42 Especially the amount of it just didn't look looked nice on the shelf. But it makes me makes me laugh. And it makes me also understand the the millions of packaging said had that say this, you know, this package was full at the transport and items might have settled or things like that, because I understand that those companies were getting callbacks, saying, Hey, you're cheating me out of product. It still needs to look nice, then you have the calculation on saving on glass cost. But then you also get the calculations on saving in other parts of the production, which include transportation, because if you do have your bottles, a lot of our trucks aren't physically full, they are at their weight capacity, you lower the wine bottle weight, and you can load that truck to capacity before before hitting the weight limit. That's a saving right there. It's also an additional carbon carbon saving that I might not calculate. I would love it if I sat on all the data to do that. But I know that there is a gain there. But also things like throughout the supply chain, when you have people handling it, it's better for the for the people, it's better for the people who are lifting those cases. And if that's our crew, or if it is if it is the crew in the store or or logistics company, there's less wear and tear on people. I would personally if I was working in a wine store rather restock shelves with with the lightweight bottles or lighter weight bottles and those super heavy ones.
Craig Macmillan 14:05 Part of my job is I work in the tasting room. And it's amazing as a server, you know what a huge difference it makes, just carrying stuff from place to place and you can't tell whether something's full or not because of the weight of the glass is darn close to the weight of the wine, you know, it's drinking sense. So yes, absolutely. We do need to take that into account. There's wear and tear on people and there's efficiency questions. I think the mechanization question is a good one depending on which direction you're gonna go, what kind of molds you have and how fast you're trying to do it.
Erica Landin-Lofving 14:35 The super heavy mold so we're talking like the 32 ounce mold that's also wear and tear on equipment and extra energy for the for the forklifts and trucks transporting it around. I'm not at the level where I'm doing calculations on that but definitely in the bottling line running a 32 ounce bottle this is going to be rough around the mechanics. And again, lifting it with a forklift is going to take more energy I mean In basic physics, you might not know the exact gain from a lighter weight bottle. But there's definitely gains throughout.
Craig Macmillan 15:07 You mentioned it before. And this is a really interesting question because there's a winery that I'm familiar with, that's in the oh, golly, 25 to $75 retail range with their products at least. And they just brought out a bag and box product.
Erica Landin-Lofving 15:22 Tablets Creek?
Craig Macmillan 15:23 Maybe.
Erica Landin-Lofving 15:26 I love those guys. I really...
Craig Macmillan 15:30 I think we can leave that in the podcast, can't we?
Erica Landin-Lofving 15:34 It was a was three liter.
Craig Macmillan 15:36 I'm sorry, yes, three litre, and was a customer who brought this to me because we were talking about these issues. And they said, hey, you know, I just saw this product. Maybe I'm not gonna put super high end wines, really expensive wines. I mean, I don't want to have a $400 box product and then say, okay, you gotta drink all four bottles necessarily. But how many future do you think there is for that, or one liter turbo pack packaging and that kind of thing.
Erica Landin-Lofving 15:57 With those alternativepackagings, I'll just list the ones that I would look at. One is Tetra Pak, usually one liter, can be 77, or 750 milliliters to the PT plastic bottle, which is very often same size as a regular wine bottle. Aluminum can which can be between 25 centimeters and 33 centimeters. Generally, you have the wine pouch, which is the one and a half liter and the wine pouch is more or less like the inside of bag and box, it's usually a little bit thicker. And then you have the bag and box, which is generally three liters. I've seen two liters, frequently as well, the bag and box. As I said, it's 56% or more of the Swedish market by volume. It's popular as well in places like Norway, Finland, partially because it brings down the price of wine a little bit, but it's also growing a lot in France, supermarket sales.
Craig Macmillan 16:48 What kind of price points are we talking here? I know that I know. We're talking about years and things.
Unknown Speaker 16:53 Yeah, so I would say for three liter box, which is the equivalent of four bottles, I would say most of them lasted between 20 and $40. So at $40 because you have a lower packaging cost, lower lower handling cost, so on. So at $40 It's not a $10 bottle of wine. It's a $15 bottle of wine. I mean, it's not high end high end, but it's not bad wine either. What Tablas did launching $100 $100 box, so $25 a bottle. That was that was unusual, and it was a great PR thing and it got got people talking, I don't believe we're going to see mass market boxes in that price range. But I definitely think that there should be more 30 $40 boxes. There's one advantage of the bag in box, which is of course it's really just take one glass, it's also really easy to take three glasses not notice that you're taking three glasses every night. So you know, two sides, two sides to that. But it's a it's a pretty convenient format. And it's gone from being something that people hide in Sweden to something that you actually you know, you have people over for dinner, you put it out, maybe you poured into craft to make it look nicer. But it's it's not something that the mainstream consumer hides anymore. Maybe the wine geeks still shy away from it. Carbon footprint of wine in pouch or wine in bag and box is once we say it's it's less than a fourth of a lightweight bottle per liter equivalent.
Craig Macmillan 18:19 Wow. And huge.
Less than 1/6 of a traditional glass bottle at 540 grams.
Wow.
Erica Landin-Lofving 18:27 So yeah, it's big
Craig Macmillan 18:29 That's very attractive.
Erica Landin-Lofving 18:31 So let me tell you what I don't like about t.
Craig Macmillan 18:32 Yes, please do.
Erica Landin-Lofving 18:34 And honestly for you know, for your general consumer who consumes their wine within days or a week of buying it and who buys at the $15 price point. Sure. Go for the box. What I don't like about it is plastic recycling in the US is still pretty limited. So that pouch does not necessarily get recycled, which means plastic production and landfill. Don't love that. And then of course, most of the plastic pouches have a petroleum base. So fossil fossil base, you can you can weigh that against the carbon footprint and see what what it's important to you. The other thing is when I worked as a wine writer, many years back since we had so many quality wines and seven saying like 15 $20 wines in both box and bottle, maybe not $20 wines but let's say $15 We would as journalists, we would sometimes go and we would buy the same wine in bottle and the same by wine in box and make a comparison and 80% of the wines tasted tasted a little bit better in bottle 20% of the wines tasted better in the box and they were usually the ones who would have in the bottle needed a little bit age a little bit less sulfur or somehow just breathe more. Because it's not inert. That pouch is not inert. While the Swedish monopoly says it has says six month in six months there's no problem with a with a bag and box. I would like to do taste tests on. I think maybe what they're checking that acid and sulfur levels and VA and things like that aren't actually changing. But I do believe that there are some sensory changes over time.
Craig Macmillan 20:12 Interesting. What about cans.
Erica Landin-Lofving 20:13 Oooh I like cans.
Craig Macmillan 20:15 Aluminum is very attractive from recycling standpoint, it's one of the one thing that we seem to be able to do fairly well out in the US compared to plastic of things.
Unknown Speaker 20:23 I'll call out the US. So let's just say that glass recycling percentage in Scandinavia is 98 to 99%. In the US, the recycling rate is 31.1% for glass and in California and step up towards 60 beer and soft drink cans. So that's where we can classify wine cans to the recycling rate. It's actually 50. A little bit over 50% In the US, so isn't terrible. It's still almost half of Scandinavia, which is again 98%. But let's just say it's, it's not it's not terrible. So yes, it's decently easy to recycle. The carbon footprint is about twice that of a pouch or bag and box, but still, then less than half way less than half of lightweight glass bottle and about a third, a little less than a third of a standard weight bottle. So, so good. I liked the format. I can't I can't help it. I'm, I'm a bonafide wine geek. I drink the fun stuff. I like that. It's a small, small package. I like that it's very easy to transport. It is inert. It does have that little tiny plastic lining sometimes but I just think you can play with it. You can put fun wines in it if it doesn't suit all wines. And not all wines are good drinking from the county there. But I think it's a great packaging, especially for newer consumers, millennial consumers who aren't so stuffy about how things are supposed to be done. But you know, rosacea, white wines, orange wines, sparkling wines, lighter quaffable reds, and some fun packaging to go with it. Say like, why not? I like it. We we have one we have Alloy Alloy comes in cans. And we've done some specially can projects for festivals. But isn't it a nice format. I mean, if you're going to go to a festival or a picnic, and you're drinking out of plastic glass anyway, so you might as well just bring a can. I think it's a way for the wine industry to also tap into all those people that are drinking spiked kombucha and hard ciders and who are you know, necessarily dragging my bottle around.
Craig Macmillan 22:32 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was a long time ago. But I forget the name of the product. There was an Australian product that came out and it was in a half size can. And you see sodas occasionally in this like smaller can. And I thought it was really interesting. And then I met an Australian winemaker who was visiting. And I asked him about it. And if he was familiar, he was oh, yeah, absolutely. Everybody loves those things are everywhere. It was like really knows, yeah, you don't need to take the thing. You dump it in your cooler and you put a bunch of ice over it. And anyway to the barbecue you are set. It's easy. It's great.
Erica Landin-Lofving 23:01 I do think a key thing is putting in like quality stuff.
Craig Macmillan 23:04 That's the question then is what's the quality level that we can kind of get to.
Erica Landin-Lofving 23:08 I think like a sweet spot a 10. A $10 canister is nice. Like don't make it the crap wines I want I want a little bit better quality and a little more fun ones and actually suitable to natural wines, natural wines to both from a style stylistic perspective. And also because you have to reduce your you can't add as much sulfur to to a canned wine or it becomes productive. So you have to adjust your..
Craig Macmillan 23:32 Yeah, we we keep coming back to millennials. And so I kind of want to wrap wrap this up on this topic. Again, based on your experience, your view, you obviously are on top of this, because you mentioned it several times. How much of a difference is there generally generationally in interest, and maybe even willingness to pay just the sustainability topic? For folks. It sounds like Millennials are much more interested in do more research on this than maybe the folks that from later or earlier generations. You see that continuing?
Erica Landin-Lofving 24:10 Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's with with younger generations, and I mean, I'm on the cusp of that myself. There's definitely more interest. And they are better at calling out BS too. They might, you know, they're not going to dig into every every number, but they they want a credible story and they want sustainability to be part of the story that you are telling about your wine. And yeah, I mean, they it's definitely one of the things that makes me hopeful is the more consumers is that we have a problem reaching them as one consumers but if we can pull them into the fold, one way of pulling them into the fold of wine lovers is actually To, to show this connection to the earth that we have in wine, I mean are seriously our product is so much more natural than a lot of the stuff that sold us, you know, no additives, no super sustainable, no carbon footprint, whatever they're selling it as it's still like a manufactured product in a, in a more synthetic way we have a direct connection to land, I think we need to communicate that to them. And part of that communication needs to it needs to consider sustainability that we are stewards of our land.
Craig Macmillan 25:29 So maybe just to editorialize for a second maybe not only on an individual level to individual wine companies, but maybe it's an industry wide, we need to do a better a better job messaging sustainability, and communicating to the consumer, especially apparently the millennial, what we're about what we do in in some of what our kind of standard practices are I you know, I mean, I remember when I first started farming years and years and years ago, the idea of cover crops was a little bit iffy. And I had one friend of mine, and he tried it, he says, you know, I'm farming two crops, I can barely farm one crop, and I'm farming two now, minimum and many years later. It's everywhere you just, of course you do you know, why wouldn't you? You know that so those changes there. Now it's a practice that I think it's an important practice that if people realize what's involved and why people do it, I think it could be very, very beneficial. Kind of wrapping up what one piece of advice or message or idea would you like to communicate to, let's say, winery owner or management or whatever on this topic, what's the one piece of like advice that you would have?
Erica Landin-Lofving 26:30 Well, I guess we've spent the last half hour talking about it, but it is definitely to consider the full scope of your packaging as part of your core sustainability work. Lift your eyes from just the Vinyard. It's super important, but include the winery and definitely include packaging, primary and secondary packaging and see what you can improve. Start asking questions, start asking your suppliers for information, ask your glass producer, what their coolest content is the recycled content, just start getting an understanding of what sustainable wine packaging is and how you can implement it and start communicating it to your customers, the more of us that tell the customer that these super heavyweight bottles are actually not an environmentally beneficial way of selling wine, the quicker the consumer is going to catch that and you know, what if you don't care at all about the environmental footprint, care about your your costs of goods, and help the rest of us get that message.
Craig Macmillan 27:24 Because one of the E's is economy economics, right? And that's part of the picture and controlling my costs is huge. Where can people find out more about you?
Erica Landin-Lofving 27:33 Oh, geez, I was to say I'm all over the internet. I've been a writer on other podcasts and speaking probably Google my name I there's not that many Erica Lofving spelled LOFVING in wine out there. My name is we Landin. So half of my articles are in Swedish. But you can you could probably find out online and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to have a dialogue about anything.
Craig Macmillan 27:58 Fantastic. Wonderful. Our guest today has been Erica laughing. She's Chief Sustainability Officer with Vintage Wine Estates. Thank you for being the guest today. It's been a really fascinating conversation. And I look forward to talk to you again. Let's meet you in person at some point.
Erica Landin-Lofving 28:11 Thanks for having a good podcast. I always enjoy listening to the people. You're interviewing so much knowledge out in the wine industry.
Craig Macmillan 28:18 There really is. There's just a lot of richness and that's one thing that I love about doing this is meeting people like yourself and hearing perspectives and information I never otherwise would have gotten.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 172: The most important "P"... | Marketing Tip Monday | 13 Mar 2023 | 00:02:59 | |
Of the 3 Ps of Sustainability (People, Planet, and Prosperity), People is no doubt the most important one. Without the supporters, partners, and cherished friends in our community, who would be here to enjoy the prosperous planet we are all striving toward? Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. This week's Marketing Tip is a bit different than previous tips. We want to share how the parent non-profit organization of the SIP Certified program, Vineyard Team, helps children of vineyard and winery workers achieve their dreams of higher education. Applications for the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship are open through March 31st, 2023. If you work in California's wine industry, you probably know several people who are eligible to apply for the scholarship! Investing in future generationsVineyard Team's Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship is our way of giving back to the community and contributing to a prosperous future of educated and determined professionals. This funding supports students and their families in achieving their dreams of successful graduation to pursue a professional career. The majority of awardees are first-generation college students, who have more barriers when it comes to attaining higher education. This isn't designed to be a one-time award. Starting in 2023 we will award two- and four-year scholarships, complete with a graduation bonus to help them launch into the next phase of life. The total will end up being in the range of $6k to $20k per student. We've also invested in a program mentor, Alex Gonzalez, who will be a resource to the students. This upgraded scholarship is possible because of the local non-profit Must! Charities recognized the importance of this program and have created a matching funds program for us. Share this scholarship opportunity!Applications for the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship are open March 1st – 31st. Please share this opportunity with your team by posting and electronically sharing the flyer (available in English and Spanish), and sharing the paycheck inserts with your payroll facilitator so they can reach the families of your operation's workers/employees -- who are likely eligible for this opportunity! You can help the program flourishTo receive the gifted money from Must! Charities, we need to raise matching funds each year. In the true spirit of sustainability, we want to create a program that has long-lasting funds so that we can continue to better the lives of our industry's children for decades. Use the link in the show notes to make a donation to the program, and share this podcast with those you think could benefit from learning more about the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship. Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes for links to the scholarship flyers, paycheck inserts, application, to donate, to read stories from our incredible scholars, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 171: How to Farm Wine Grapes for Climate Change | 02 Mar 2023 | 00:25:45 | |
Amid extreme weather events, many grape growers ask themselves what they can do to adapt their vineyard for climate change. Chris Chen, Integrated Vineyard Systems Advisor in Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake Counties at the University of California Cooperative Extension is exploring solutions to this question. Mediterranean climates like California, with hot and dry summers and cold wet winters, are particularly sensitive. Researchers expect temperature maximums will be higher and the minims will be lower in years to come. Chris explains a few tactics growers can use to continue farming successfully amid climate changes including rootstocks, canopy management, new scions, and most importantly trialing.
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 My guest today is Chris Chen. He's integrated vineyard systems advisor for Sonoma Mendocino and Lake counties with the University of California Cooperative Extension. And I think we're gonna have a very interesting conversation today, Chris has done some pretty interesting work and some pretty interesting ideas. So welcome to the podcast, Chris.
Chris Chen 0:14 Thanks, Craig. Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.
Craig Macmillan 0:16 Doing a little bit of background on you. Would you say that there's a particular thread or what the thread is that runs through your research and extension work? Because it seems like there is one to me.
Chris Chen 0:25 A lot of my work is focused on adaptation to climate change and vineyards. And it's something that goes back to when I was in grad school, you know, the, the whole climate change thing became really big and something to focus on when I entered grad school. And as I went through grad school, it became what I did. The thread here is kind of how do we adapt viticulture, to changing climates? How do we predict what a climate today is going to be in 510 years, the thread is to see how can we adapt to these changing conditions, and still keep viticulture, thriving and successful.
Craig Macmillan 0:57 What is the prediction right now, in terms of let's start with California, but we can talk about the West Coast, we can also talk about New York, and we can talk about Europe. But you work in California, what is the current picture in terms of long term climate change that might affect grapes?
Unknown Speaker 1:15 It's not really easy to say this will happen that will happen. But what we expect to see in California, it's a Mediterranean climate right now, these are very sensitive climate types, typically classified as regions with really hot, dry summers, cold, wet winters, right. And they're kind of fringe ecosystems, fringe climates. So they're on the border of, of an inland climate in a coastal climate, that means they're the most sensitive to climate change. So what we're expecting to see in California, and what a lot of researchers, climate researchers are planning on is, you know, increased temperatures, the maximums are going to be higher, the minimums are going to be lower, and those swings are going to be more drastic in between. So the diurnal temperature shift is going to be huge. You know, that is something that everyone kind of expects with climate change. It gets hotter, it gets colder, the extremes are more extreme, but what we're not really sure about is how precipitation is going to change. And in California, rainfall is such a huge thing. It's variable year to year, we have droughts for three years at a time and then one relief year, what we're really confused about is how is the rain pattern gonna change where we are today are we going to get the same rainfall and we're going to be able to support viticulture here anymore?
Craig Macmillan 2:33 Now that brings up an interesting question. I'm going to bring up Andy Walker here, Dr. Andy Walker, the very famous plant breeder and I attended a seminar that he did on rootstocks, which he's done a ton of work and many rootstocks are out as a result of his lab. And he started off the whole thing by saying, you can dry farm winegrapes anywhere in the world. And the room just went silent, like I don't think anybody was breathing. And then he says, Now you might get two clusters, providing but the plant itself is going to do what it does. It's an amazing plant. It's incredible. And then he went on and talked about being in the Andes and seeing things in different parts of the world. And I found that really inspiring because when we talk about what we're doing right now, water, obviously is probably the biggest knob. If you have all these knobs, you can twist fertilizer, whatever water is probably the biggest one. Yeah, California, you have done some work with a number of people, but also with Kaan Kutural who I love on drought tolerance, drought resistance, I would say and what kinds of things? Are you finding out what you mean? Where is it kind of leading you? Where is it? What's kind of the thought process?
Chris Chen 3:38 Andy, he was also my doctoral advisor. So I've heard his Spiel once or twice about dry farming. You know, you can do that can grow grapes in most almost all places without water there. There are grapes on islands that are irrigated with fog drip, so it's possible, but he's also right in saying that you're not going to get the yields that make you profitable. So that's concerning. And what we want to avoid, because we still need a certain tonnes per acre to reach profit margin that matters in terms of what can we do and how we're going for drought adaptation. There's the old approach of using rootstocks. And it's a very useful approach, right, these rootstocks from Andy Walker's perspective, and if you're looking at it from his lens, they have different rooting patterns. They have different water demands, and that translates to what we're growing on top. Whether it's Cab, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, whatever you want to grow on top of it, it's going to be impacted by what it's grafted to that is actually a very reasonable strategy to address drought that has its limits, you know, you still need water to grow grapes. Almost all grape vines in the wild, are only found near perennial water sources. So it's not like we can get rid of water altogether. We can't just leave them alone and expect to have any crop on them. But there's other things we can do. One of the huge management strategies that we can look at is canopy management. So canopy management in vineyards have really impacts how much water transpires and how much water evaporates from the surface of the soil. With a bigger canopy, you get less evaporation. But you also get more transpiration because there's more leaves, right. And vice versa. If you have a small canopy, you have the opposite problem that actually really impacts your fruit, your crop load, you know the quality of your fruit, the characteristics of the berries. So it's not something that everybody's going to play around with, because they want us to in the end, they want a certain kind of fruit with certain characteristics for their winery. But canopy management is a huge one as well, as rootstocks, there's also the interest in precision agriculture. So there is the spoon feeding approach where instead of irrigating large quantities at once, we can irrigate small portions at a time.
Craig Macmillan 5:43 Irrigate strategicly. I mean, I've seen some pretty interesting work from the past where it was like a 10, Vine irrigation block. And you were able to control this and that little bit in that little bit. And you could use NDVI to figure out where you want to do it. Interesting work. I'd never was convinced how practical that might be for most growers, especially if you're retrofitting their orchards.
Chris Chen 6:05 In Australia that irrigate on a tree to tree basis. So it's very doable. You know, the question is, how much water would you actually save doing that? And how much energy are you using to pump that every time?
Craig Macmillan 6:18 Exactly. Now, we're talking about rootstocks rootstock breeding back in the day, 100 years ago, or whenever it was all about phylloxera. And it was about salt. I know that Dr. Walker has done a lot of work on salt resistance. n=Nematode resistance is turned out to be a big one. If I remember that's the GRM series are specifically for nematode. Is that right?
Chris Chen 6:38 Correct. Yes. Those are anti Walker's.
Craig Macmillan 6:40 Crowning achievements. Brilliant stuff. You know, we're talking about genetic differences and rootstocks that have been bred for different conditions, including things like drought tolerance. What about what's on top, you make a point one of your articles that the landscape of wine growing is dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, which means we have a very limited genome, essentially, of what's above ground. And we've learned from other crops that might not be such a great idea. We're talking about maybe trying to rootstock our way out of some of this. Can we variety, some of our way out of this.
Chris Chen 7:11 So the short answer to that is yes. The long answer is a bit more complex. You know, overall, all of the scions we put on are all one species Vitus vinifera, there's a few others like Vitesse labrusca, which is Concorde. And there's a there's a couple others that we use, but the majority of what we consider winegrapes is Vitus vinifera. So the genetic differences in the scions are not huge. The real differences are in the phenotyping. Right, you look at a Cabernet Sauvignon vine. And you compare that to a Tempranillo or Zinfandel, you'll see that the latter, they actually have quite larger canopies, even though they're the same species. The weird thing is they're more heat tolerant. Part of that might be their transpiration and might be for several reasons, these small changes in how they look change how they interact with their environment. So the real concern in you know, changing the scions from place to place site to site is that some places actually have latched on to a variety or two. If you think about Napa Napa, you think Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, where I work in the north coast, it's Pinot Noir, a little bit of Chardonnay, some Sauvignon Blanc and Lake County, right? It's very possible to say, you know, if we have a one, one site that increases temperatures by, you know, temperature accumulation by 20%, in 10 years, it might behoove them to go from a cold climate grapes like Pinot Noir and switch over to something like Zinfandel. The problem is, well, the market that purchases their wine actually still keep buying their wines. If they go to Zinfandel, it would be a smart move. If you're thinking about, you know, the physiology of the plant of the difficulty of managing the vineyard, all the extra things you have to do if you want to stick with that cold climate grew up in a hot climate, not to say that people don't do that we do have Pinot Noir grown in San Joaquin Valley, for instance, just not as much as up here. So it's possible one of the problems is actually picking those varieties, picking the right varieties because just because it gets hotter here doesn't mean you know, Santa Rosa has the same climate as Bakersfield. There's differences in humidity and light incidents. There's differences in just cultural practices, what people do to manage the soils what they do for fertilizing. So overall, yeah, it's possible but there's other barriers besides just switching the plant.
Craig Macmillan 9:29 It sounds like some of those barriers are the ability to make accurate predictions about what might happen if I'm planting Zinfandel in an area where it's never really had Zinfandel. I don't know exactly what's gonna go on. But then also it sounds like acceptance of the marketplace is gonna play a big role. That's that's a different conversation. Unless you have a feeling about it. I think part of what goes on is we do have information from the marketplace. We do have research, but a lot of what goes on here is growers themselves as individuals are making decisions out what's gonna happen? Right? It's not necessarily that we're getting handed down this necessarily the trend, but like, I think this is where we're gonna go. When you talk to people about this kind of thing. What kind of response do you get from growers?
Chris Chen 10:10 Yeah, you know, it depends. There are growers that are all about trying new cultivars, and they usually inhabit kind of niche markets, a lot of these growers will grow varieties that are useful for blending. So if you need some more color, if you need some more acids, they'll grow these varieties that impart that to wines that otherwise wouldn't have them. And you know, there's only so much of a market for that. I think there's also growers on the other side where they say, Well, no, in order for us to make our ends meet, we have to stick with so and so variety, we have to stay with Pinot Noir because our entire consumer base wants it. And you know, there's trends in viticulture in California as a whole that have followed these, you know, this chain of events Muscats Muscats, used to be very popular along with making a rose out of Zinfandel. Riesling was another one, people planted a bunch of these things, and then the consumer market dropped out. And they were stuck with fines that take, you know, five years to hit any kind of good crop. And within those five years, it fell out of favor. So they're selling their grapes for pennies, compared to what they would have been if had they had them at the peak of the popularity, we can't change our varieties just based on popularity, and we can't keep them just based on popularity. But there are these constants right 40% of the grapes planted in California are Cabernet Sauvignon Chardonnay, which is not a bad thing. It just means that people want it.
Craig Macmillan 11:31 use the term asynchronous or asynchrony, and viticulture. What What do you mean when you refer to that?
Chris Chen 11:37 so that's a term that I thought would be very applicable to the situation. So vineyards as a whole run on a schedule, they run on timing, and part of that is their biological timing, right? So their biological timing is based off of heat accumulation. So the hotter it is for the longer the quicker we have budbreak, the quicker we have chute growth and fruit set, and so on. So that as the climates are changing, and we know we're going to see higher temperatures in some places, then we're seeing a shift in that timing. And a shift in that timing changes a lot of things, it changes how the plants interact with insects and pests and beneficial insects, because they're also changing their timing, we're seeing, you know, some insect pests are increasing their generations. So they instead of two generations a year, they'll have three in some really hot places, for instance. But also these these beneficial insects that control the pests are switching their timing of hatching and switching their timing of maturity. And we're seeing that more and more, and we're afraid we're gonna start seeing that in agriculture relatively soon. So what all of that together means is that when you look at a vineyard, the events that you would have had for the past 100 years are not happening at the same times as they would have been in the next 10 years than they did previously. And that's a challenge actually, for you know, management as well, because labor resources are, especially in agriculture are often you know, made more available during timeframes where they're needed. And if that timeframe changes, there's gonna be a year or two where that's a problem.
Craig Macmillan 13:09 If we don't change anything, let's say we don't change varieties, we don't change the root stocks or anything, I'll get vineyards that are 10 years old now and hopefully get another decade or two out of it, or I'm making decisions 20 years from now for a variety like Cabernet Sauvignon you're in and we will talk about Pinot Noir as well that I think that's an important one. But I want to start with Cab, in your experience, let's say things get warmer and colder. And then we don't know what's going to happen with weather. So let's just leave rainfall out of it for now. But just the swings in the higher the highs and lower lows, what impact do you think that's gonna have on wine quality or yield? How are these things going to change? Do you think as a viticulturalist?
Chris Chen 13:45 Especially wine grapes really need that big swing in temperature, so they need that diurnal shift that's really hot summer days and really cold summer nights. That really helps them develop their flavonol profiles, their tannins, their anthocyanins, anthocyanins more so about, light, you know, incidents light exposure, but that's beside the point. So it's actually kind of a good thing. The problem is when we hit these limits, right? So when we hit these limits of it's too hot. So now instead of accumulation of these compounds, what we're seeing is a degradation of them. So they're accumulating in the grapes faster throughout the year. So again, this is that asynchrony, right. So as you get closer toward the traditional historic harvest time, you think, okay, these grapes are still accumulating their tannins, or they're still accumulating their flavonols or their their anthocyanins are not degrading it. But what we're seeing is that increase in the growing degree days or heat accumulation is actually decreasing the amount of stable compounds in the grape that we want. So we're seeing especially with color, we're seeing a degradation in color. anthocyanins are degrading, much sooner and to higher degrees in these really hot summers, especially when We have these heat waves that we had last year. These heat waves are terrible for these things. But we don't know which varieties are going to be tolerant to this and can can withstand these changes in extremes. So the increases in high temperatures, the decreases in low temperatures, the low temperatures aren't really a problem unless we get freezing temperatures which we shouldn't in summer, but it's not impossible.
Craig Macmillan 15:23 Not impossible could happen. What about Pinot Noir, famously very sensitive, very narrow range that it likes. Right. I got you on the spot here.
Chris Chen 15:32 Yeah, I can't speak to that too much. Because all of the trials that I've done and I've seen have been with Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the most popular red varieties in the world, I can't say that it's more or less sensitive to these changes Pinot Noir. But based on its classification, as a region, one region two cold climate grape, it's likely to be more sensitive to these extreme highs in summer and degrade faster. We do know that Pinot Noir ripens sooner than Cabernet Sauvignon does, on average, you know, put them in the same spot and your Pinot is going to be done. I don't know spitballing number here two weeks before the Cabernet is so you harvest the two weeks ahead of time. That means if you're harvesting it at the same time as Cabernet, you're getting more degradation in those anthocyanin. So that would be the theory behind why Pinot Noir might be more affected by these high temperatures. But I don't have anything to cite for you at the moment.
Craig Macmillan 16:25 Sure, sure. But I think that your insight there is useful in that. Okay, maybe we don't know what's gonna happen. We can kind of guess at some things that might happen. But if we know kind of where things might end up, or how the vine might repond, I might change my winemaking, I might change my canopy management style, right? I knew a guy who was an old school farmer, and he refused to put in drip irrigation even in new vineyards. And I asked him about it. And he said salts, that's the way to go. That's it only way to do it. And I was like, well, that's 1974 It's not 1974 anymore. And he goes looks listen in the middle of a day, it's 105 I can turn on those sprinklers. And I can cool that canopy and I can avoid stress. I said we're gonna overwater, you're gonna do it, because you just gotta know what you're doing son, like just, I can put it out there. And I can manage this a more effective tool for me. I watched him over the years and saw what he did. He had it really dialed in. But he had a totally different approach to what tool he wanted to use to deal with whatever the environmental condition was. And I thought that was really interesting and very clever. Are there things that we can learn from other parts of the world? Because obviously, there's differences in climate different places to Australia, you know, very different interestes and very warm areas there, if I understand correctly, are we gaining knowledge, we gained some guidance from other parts of the world on this topic?
Chris Chen 17:42 If we're not we should be there's this popular topic that England United Kingdom can grow grapes now, and they can grow good grapes now. And that's new. That never used to be the case. And you know the story of I don't know if this is true. But the story of why Brut champagne or Brut sparkling wines called Brut is because the French made it for the English and they didn't like them. No, I mean, we do have things to learn. Yeah, we do have things to learn from other people, especially places that are really hot. South Africa, Australia, these, you know, these locations are, a lot of them are dealing with conditions that, you know, we see here as well, but they're dealing with it on a much larger scale. So we see, you know, really hot temperatures in the San Joaquin Valley, Sacramento Valley. But we grow grapes there. And we're good at it. You know, in Australia, that's a huge swath of land that's in those kinds of conditions. But then the one where it gets really sensitive is when we get to the coast when we get to colder climates, like where I work where I operate. So it's going to be, you know, the coastal regions that really are impacted more, because they don't have the infrastructure, they don't have the cultivars to really tolerate that heat. And what we need to do is look at places that are experiencing this change before we're experiencing it. And often these are Mediterranean climates, also, right, New Zealand, Australia, South America, Chile, and see what they're doing, see how they're adapting to it and what cultivars they're planting. You know, I'm not saying that all of Mendocino County should be planting Sheraz or Sahra. But you know, it might be good for some growers to try it out and see what's going on. I've been advocating for a lot of growers that, you know, if you're replanting, and vineyard, plant a few other cultivars somewhere and just see how they do, you know, it's not really great for if you're harvesting with the machine, because you end up knocking those into the same bin as all the other grapes. But if you could, you know, find an area where it's isolated and far enough away that you're not going to mix them up might be good to plant five, five to 10 vines of something else and see how it does because each each region is going to be different. Each region is going to have to have a different response because climate change is very regional.
Craig Macmillan 19:53 But the good news is that we are pretty clever. As an industry we've come up with all kinds of solutions to all kinds of problems over the years. without the folks like you have made that possible. We're running out of time. But I want to ask you one very simple and very short question. And that is based on everything that we've kind of talked about what one piece of advice or what one takeaway would you give a grape grower?
Chris Chen 20:16 I would say the most important thing is to do really good monitoring practices to really get out there and see how your vines are changing, and how your site is changing. You can you can try new cultivars, you can try, you know, different root stocks, you can try different canopy management practices. But if you don't keep track of how things are changing in response to that, then there's no point, right? There's a lot of really good tools out there. There's a lot of new things coming out that you can you can, you know, remotely sense and identify diseases, changes in stomatal conductance in different physiological measurements that are really important to developing a grapevine. Just look at these new monitoring solutions. Be wary of ones that may or may not work, you know, don't don't put all of your your eggs in one basket, that kind of thing. But get out there and monitor.
Craig Macmillan 21:06 I think that's great advice. And I think that applies to a lot of things. Where can people find out more about you?
Chris Chen 21:10 I have a website. If you go to Google, and you type in UC AND Chris Chen, it should bring up my bio, and there's a link to my lab page there, has a bunch of resources has a bunch of links and papers. And I think you know, especially if you're in the North Coast region and the counties I work in, you can just give me a call. You know, most people can just call me anyways, I work for University of California. So it's, you know, quasi public domain. Yeah, please feel free to reach out.
Craig Macmillan 21:38 Fantastic. So our guest today has been Chris Chen. He's an integrated vineyard systems advisor for Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties with the University of California Cooperative Extension. Thanks for being on the podcast. Chris. This is really fun.
Chris Chen 21:50 Thanks for having me. Craig. Enjoyed it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 170: Sustain Your Branding Efforts | Marketing Tip Monday | 27 Feb 2023 | 00:03:16 | |
We hope that the previous Marketing Tips' strategies to build a strong brand and practices to maintain consumer trust have been helpful in planning or reviewing your branding strategy. But branding isn't something you can set and forget. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. This week we'll go over ways you can manage the brand strategies you have already put in place. Ensure Consistency with a Style GuideConsistent imagery and language help to provide the voice and visual presence of your brand. A style guide is a document that provides guidelines for the ways in which you communicate through and about your brand. Style guides typically include your logo and any variations of it, your color palette, typography details, and design standards (think minimalist, modern, etc). Having all of this standardized and readily available for reference will help to give direction and provide cohesion for all of your visual communications. SIP Tip: check out our Style Guide! Bring in the TeamIt's important that your entire team is on the same page when it comes to branding efforts. Start your next team meeting with an overview of your branding strategy so that everyone is aware of your brand's communication style and messaging. And be open to their feedback! Every team member has a different experience when it comes to interacting with your brand. They can provide valuable insights into how the brand is being perceived, what efforts seem to be working, and which ones can use improvement. Continually Share Your StoryWhether it's in the tasting room, on your website, in your sales calls, or in casual conversations, telling your brand's story in an open and authentic way is key to a consistent brand identity that people will recall and trust. Did you know that talking about your specific sustainability efforts can boost wine sales? In her recent research, Kathy Kelley Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management at Penn State University found that when brands shared stories about their sustainable practices and why they used them, consumers were willing to pay $1 - $4 more for a bottle of wine! Listen to her 22-minute interview with Craig Macmillan to learn more about her findings, and how you can experience these benefits. More SIP tips to come!Searches for sustainable goods have increased by 71% since 2016 making it more important than ever to share your message of sustainability. Continue to tell your customers how your brand protects the health of the people and the planet. It lets them know that by purchasing your wine they are supporting a brand that shares their values. Stay tuned for more ways to communicate your good work. Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes for links to our latest tips to help you build your brand strategy and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 169: Do You Need to Crop Thin Your Vineyard? | 16 Feb 2023 | 00:35:07 | |
The study of whole vine physiology does not isolate one variable in grape growing. It looks at many factors at once including data collection in the plant, in the environment and in fruit. In her research, Patty Skinkis, Viticulture Extension Specialist and Professor in the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University helps growers improve their farming practices by evaluating the plant growth stage, shoot growth, pruning weights, yield, cluster weight, berry size, and fruit chemistry. Patti shares her surprising results from a 10-year trial on crop load management. Grower trials found there was very little difference with crop thinning in both fruit and wine quality. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 And our guest today is Dr. Patti Skinkis. She is viticulture extension specialist and professor in the Horticulture Department at Oregon State University. And really excited to have you here tonight. Welcome Patti.
Patti Skinkis 0:10 Thank you. It's great to be here.
Craig Macmillan 0:12 So there's a concept that's kind of out there. I'm familiar with the words, but I'm not entirely familiar with what it means. What is whole vine physiology?
Patti Skinkis 0:21 Whole vine physiology is really looking at the study of how the vine is responding to its environment. And it's not looking at just one component, it's looking at how the entire vine is responding. A lot of times, whole plant physiologists are more applied plant physiologist, rather than more fundamental in that they're looking at exactly how that plant is responding to its environment. And sometimes that environment is things that we do to it, such as the studies that we do and in crop management, as well as fine tuning, looking at some aspects and and trying to understand how it links to other aspects of how that plant is responding to its environment. But we're taking the plant as a whole.
Craig Macmillan 0:59 That sounds kind of difficult. It sounds like there's a lot of variables there. How do you do you identify a couple of variables? And say, we're going to look at these? And if so, how many might you be able to handle at a time? You know, I've done a lot of research and statistics. And every time you add something the whole system gets exponentially more complex. As an example, what kinds of things might you look at with a plant, you're going to modify one variable in the environment? But then what other kinds of responses might you look at?
Patti Skinkis 1:23 Well, doing whole plant physiology work is difficult in it's the nature of the beast, when you're looking at the entirety and taking it in as a whole. I like to address this question from a standpoint of what it is not. And partly because I work with a lot of other scientists who work in biochemistry or fruit chemistry. And they always want to isolate the one thing or two things that can explain what we might be seeing in fruit chemistry, or in plant nutrition. But the reality is, we have to accept that we can't explain at all that it's a whole package. It's not one specific mechanism. As a result of that we look at a lot of things, we try to understand how one piece will influence another piece. So a lot of times in the studies that I'm doing, we tend to do a lot of data collection on the plant as well as in the environment. And then the fruit, it means that we do a lot of data collection, maybe more so than other scientists would if they are just looking at pathology or insects or some other aspect, we monitor the vines phonology. So the growth stage, we monitor shoot growth early season, and then we switch to leaf area, we do pruning weight. So all of those are giving us an idea of the plant size, how much it grows. And then of course, we look at yield, and then yield components, which takes it through looking at cluster weight and rakus, length and very size. And all of those just take a lot of time. And then of course we get into the root chemistry. And it's not just you know basic ripeness at harvest, we then go into global analyses of key compounds like nitrogen and the phenomics. We do collect a lot of data and ultimately, what refines what we're looking at is kind of we always write our research questions to say, Okay, here's what we're going to target. But then a lot of times, we end up coming back to doing all of those measures, in part because we know that a lot of it is interlinked. And so it is a lot of data collection, a lot of complexity. One of your questions was how do we deal with all the variables? And so that really, you know, from the standpoint of doing whole plant physiology, where I'm working in a vineyard, I'm working typically in research farms, or on grower collaborator sites. And when it comes to controlling variables, that's when we try to do as much as we can. So can we pick a trial site where we've got very healthy vines that we know are consistent, rootstock consistent soil as best we can consistent, slope, we try to even avoid hillsides if we can. And if we can't, then we block accordingly. So we're doing a lot of re study evaluation of the site to know what can we at least try to eliminate instead of creating more messiness, in a system that we're trying to understand.
Craig Macmillan 4:02 You mentioned work that you're doing what what kinds of things you're looking at right now.
Patti Skinkis 4:05 So right now we have a number of different trials, but main work is in vineyard floor management rootstocks and yield management. And so those are the three primary areas that I'm working on currently.
Craig Macmillan 4:19 What do you do with root stocks? I know that wasn't the topic you and I talked about earlier, but I'm curious about that, because that's a fixed thing. Pick the root stock. And that's it forever. I hope I made the right choice.
Patti Skinkis 4:30 While we're doing a rootstock trial, and I'm lucky that my predecessors had established a block in 1997. So we have a well maintained mature trial with 19 rootstocks that are include Pinot Noir on those 19 rootstocks and owner divines. And so we came back thinking okay, there's a lot more questions coming from growers here in Oregon about what rootstocks they should be using climate change is definitely occurring. We see warmer, drier seas Once and while most of our vineyards can be dry farmed in the Willamette Valley, many people are very concerned about being in sites that have limited soils or not as luxurious soil. So we call them in terms of soil moisture as and nutrition, but also there, even though we're dry farmed, we don't necessarily have access to water. So if they needed to irrigate and may not be be possible if they're getting into different vineyard properties, we decided to embark on looking at this trial that has been in place at our research farm and come in and start looking at plant water stress and comparing those to our standard rootstocks, which happened to be in our trial. So we have a whole mix of more drought tolerant root stocks as well as our standard vineyard rootstocks, which are mostly vigor reducing, not drought tolerant. And those are what most of our industry is planted on, at least here in the Willamette Valley. And so the the trial was really done to see, okay, if we do switch to root stocks, what does it look like for yield for canopy size. And we, of course, looked at the the water stress response as well. And so we've been monitoring over the last four years different components of that rootstock trial, and the last two years being looking more in depth at plant water stress as a result.
Craig Macmillan 6:12 This is kind of a practical question, in my mind when we're talking about things like yield changes, are you pruning like this rootstock tell? Are you pruning everything to the same bud count? Are you leaving the same number of growing points on every mind?
Patti Skinkis 6:22 That is a great question, because it's such a mature trial, the results of rootstock are clearly visible. So for the most part, we can prune to the same number of buds per plant. But in some cases, we have to do balance pruning, because there's so little vigor, so for example, with Riparia rootstock, it's very degrading. And so we cannot do the same number of buds as we can, for 1616 or 1103 or 140R for the most part, we try to keep to the same, but number. But again, we have to balance prune some of those that are clearly very invigorated by the rootstock.
Craig Macmillan 7:00 You've been doing work on crop load recently, which I'm very, very, very interested in. What is it specifically that you're looking at terms of variables, manipulations, then also very user? How did this come about? How did this become a research question they became interested in?
Patti Skinkis 7:12 The crop load work has been a part of my research program now for about 12 years. And I started out doing that work, because I saw a lot of focus on reducing yield in the Oregon industry. When I first came here, it didn't make sense to me, because our vines are very healthy, we get a lot of leaf area, they're well managed. And it's not high shoot density. I mean, everybody has shoot thinning to the the required three shoots per linear foot, or three to five at most per linear foot. And so their crop thinning at that time to one cluster per shoot, which is about a 40% crop reduction, and they're doing it late in the season. So around lag phase, of berry development. So I embarked on a study to studies timing by intensity trial in 2010, through 2013, and looked at just when should they be cropping and by how much. And we found that from that study, there was very clearly no benefit to really doing it early, we could do it late in which was my surprise, I thought if there was going to be any impact that would be necessary to hasten ripening, then, and that's always our goal, hasten ripening and increase quality because a lot of growers believe we need to do it to get our harvest end before the fall rains, or just to improve what they call concentration.
Craig Macmillan 8:34 Real quick, just talked about Oregon in general. So if I've got Pinot Noir in the Willamette Valley, how much danger do I have from rain coming into harvest? Is that a common problem? Is that happen occasionally, but enough that it's an issue?
Patti Skinkis 8:46 Certainly 10 to 12 years ago, it was a real and present danger every year. And now in recent years, it's been less of a concern because we become warmer and we tend to be harvesting earlier. So when I embarked on this trial, you know, it's always a concern. And it certainly is at the forefront of most of the longtime grape growers and winemakers as we get new people and I think they're willing to do more hangtime. So there's always this dichotomy of wanting hang time, but always the threat of, of rain, and we just don't know there's no crystal ball to know how long we'll have. But typically, we're seeing more dry September's than we have in the past. Usually, by the time we get to October, everybody's you know, they're worried about the rain coming, it's a percentage chance of having rains during harvest is significantly higher. As we get into October when we were doing the work. We wanted to see, you know, should they be thinning because their vines are behind and they need to thin earlier or do we thin later as a means to kind of have them catch up. And what we found in those first studies was that did not really make a difference to crop thin, early, and in fact, it made more vigor and we deal with a lot of over vigor in the Willamette Valley, so there was definitely not worth cluster thinning preboot Boom or at bloom or even at fruit set and waiting to leg favs was completely founded. The second thing we found is that the cluster thinning really didn't have had much of an impact at all. The only year it did was in 2011, which was a, a cooler season, and a very big crop. And we were very late. So about a month later in everything. And so we did see a benefit of of cluster thinning in that year where we kind of reached a maximum level that we would expect that these plants would be able to carry through ripeness. So when I did all of those trials, I shared it with growers, they were very excited to hear the results growers much more excited than winemakers about the results. But their answer kept being to me, you know that that's great, you got an answer for those two vineyards where you did that work. But those are special cases or only those vineyards. And I thought, you know, is bigger. When we look at crop load management is such a entrenched practice that you crop then in high in cool climate regions for high wind quality. Restricting crop is important. And that's something that one study here there is not going to change. And the only way to really change it would be to embark on a very large project that directly engages growers in that process, not only growers but winemakers, too, and doing that work on their farms. So prior to my first crop load studies even being finished, I started embarking on this idea of a much, much more grandiose project that involved a lot of partnership with industry directly. And so over two years, we had planned the study, working with growers on an advisory committee and said, Okay, here's my idea, what do you think, will you join? And how can we make this work. And so that was in 2010, I basically started having those conversations while I was also doing my smaller scale projects. And as a result of that, we started what's called the statewide crop load project. And we ran that for 10 years from 2012, to 2021. So 10 growing seasons, and we solicited partnerships with growers, they were all volunteers, and they came mostly from the Willamette Valley. And they basically did the cluster thinning or crop thinning to their determined levels that they wanted to use over as many as 10 years. So so they had to be in the project at least three years if they could. And the the goal was for them also to make wine. And so sometimes the winery that owns the vineyard made the wine sometimes other folks or other people who bought the wine made the wine, the wines had to be made. And so the process was that the growers had to do the thinning and collect data per protocols that my lab gave them. And then they had to produce the wines that then we did some analysis on. And we did the analysis on fruit as well.
Craig Macmillan 12:43 These growers, were they doing different different levels of thinning on their property, side by side, and then you were using site as rep. I'm totally geeking out here, but or were they designed as replicated experiments on site or just this ranch does this and this ranch does it? How did you how did you set it up? Because that's hard?
Patti Skinkis 13:01 Yes. So we set it up as more robust is what I wanted, I wanted to be replicated on site. And then so each trial is its own trial. So each grower had to replicate it in a randomized complete block design in their individual vineyards. And so that at the end of the day, we could analyze their data within their vineyard, as well as across all vineyards. So it's replicated at least three times. In fact, most vineyards were replicated far more than three times, but I only made them get data on three reps, because they've quickly realized that they could divide their vineyard up into as many treatment reps as they wanted. But then if they would collect data on all of those, it would just be time to time consuming. So we did minimum of three reps of data collection.
Craig Macmillan 13:45 You are my statistical hero. Now, I've had to do these. And what you're doing is just the gold standard gold plated. I'm so happy. I can't wait to find out what you found out because you did it exactly right. I'm so struck, anyway continues to have. So this is great. So the industry they're doing, they're doing it on site. They're collecting data.
Patti Skinkis 14:03 They're collecting the data, they hand in the data, they make the wine, and then we did sensory for five years with the Oregon State University. My colleague here Elizabeth Tomasino led sensory trials with winemakers. And so we did the first five years that way. And then the second five years, the group as a whole decided they wanted to switch gears and focus on just their internal sensory. So in house evaluation of their wines, which I had hoped that they were doing the first five years, but it turned out unless you gave them a protocol, they did not collect the data on it. They were collecting data, but they weren't sharing it. So that was my the second half of the study. I thought okay, we'll shift gears and part of that was, you know, ideally, someone would say, Well, why don't you just stick it through with that the sensory analysis at OSU? Well, it costs money. And this project was, you know, for a 10 year project, we had to try to save money as best we can because no granting agency wants to get have money for 10 years of research. And so we decided, you know that we were not going to continue with that and, and shift really to the focus of the growers. I mean, that's who's making the decision growers and wineries, I should say, making the decisions about the quality of the wines as a result of thinning to make their choices as to where that fruit goes and make future plans on crop thinning. And so we really took it towards that first five years looking at do we see a difference? Versus and doing some descriptive analysis to the second five years still trying to see asking questions about difference testing, and about descriptive analysis, but now taking it from a standpoint of who's making this decision about these wines, and they're tasting them. And so really encouraging growers to taste them and wineries to taste them if they had not already done so.
Craig Macmillan 15:51 And what kind of things did you find out?
Patti Skinkis 15:53 So the power of doing the research in each individual vineyard meant that I could do the stats for each vineyard and hand them a report of their project. And each year as we went through the project, we would share the results with the growers. So we went every year crop year that we closed, we shared the viticulture data with them. And the results were there's very little difference with crop thinning over time, we figured okay, this might be a you know, impact of, you know, over time, you know, we always hear from crop consultants or vineyard managers, if you keep cropping heavy, you're gonna have to add more inputs. We didn't see that, generally speaking, we have some vines in the study that were full cropped, never thinned for 10 years. And they did just fine. There are some things that we did find, you know, generally speaking in any one vineyard with lag phase crop thinning, there was very little impact on and fruit quality. So fruit composition is mostly what we had data for. But we're talking bricks, pH titratable. acidity, very rarely were they different until we got into years where our base yields were just much higher than normal. So we saw that in a year where maybe our yields were double. So cluster sizes were bigger fruitfulness was higher than we saw some impact, but it wasn't every site, it was maybe a third of the sites, the results really came that most sites there's very little difference in that end wine quality and when I'm sick or fruit quality, I should say. So Brix pH ta Yanes. So use this global nitrogen, we looked at total phenolic total tannins total anthocyanins and for the first five years of the study, we had ETS labs run their whole phenolic panel, and as well as their ripening panel, and we saw very little differences in there might be some years that a certain vineyard had a difference. But then after that year, they didn't have it anymore. So it was very inconsistent. And it's not to say that thinning did nothing, but it was very, very limited in the results to say okay, we are definitely changing x when we crop then we didn't see that. And that was a real eye opener. So that was the fruit. So I should say that was what the fruit told us now when it came to the wine. For the first five years, our sensory panel led by Dr. Elizabeth Thomasino, you know, here at OSU, she was winemakers. So the winemakers were Oregon winemakers, the results of those years was that crop level was not what drove the quality or the perceived preference of wine, it was really the vineyard or the the winemaker from a given site, there was never really any clear identity of higher quality or higher concentration or higher certain descriptive analyses for a crop level. So it became clear that there wasn't very much difference. And that was one of the reasons the real reasons why I think the collaborators wanted to go a different route because they were not seeing seeing much difference. And so they thought, Well, maybe if we start looking internally, we see differences. So the second five years, we did ETS labs didn't run the analysis, I ran those in house in my lab. And so we we did the same measures as ETS lab from from the standpoint of global analyses, same thing, very little difference. But when we switched to looking at the impact of wines from getting the data from the winemakers, number one we had a really hard time getting that data and so many collaborators, they followed through, and they didn't do the paperwork, or they didn't ever follow through with us. And so it was really challenging to get the data but from those who did follow our protocols, the results mirrored our first five years which was there was very little difference. And it was very hard to tell a difference in in the wines. Now they knew that there was a difference. So when we asked him for a difference test, we said can you tell the difference? Of course they said yes, because they knew they were blind tasted but they knew if any, it was an evaluation, so it was a little leading there. But when it came down to describing what they were seeing in the wines, comments like all of these wines are lovely came up and so there wasn't a clear distinction on quality, that one was very clearly bad. So we did a two step approach, we had them first taste some blind, do their ratings individually, then they would find out the identity of the wines. And then they as a group, they would talk about them. And it always came out that after they knew the identity, that's when they were changed their mind about any given wine that they rated initially. So what we see in the pattern of the results was that they were willing to not completely downgrade the higher yield. Unless it was the no thin. If it was no, thin they felt very uncomfortable saying, Okay, we don't need tp thin, but they felt more comfortable saying, Okay, we like this one and a half clusters for shoot, which is a one to one to thinning pattern, which is about a 15 to 20% crop production. And I can understand that as a winemaking team, as a grower team, you want to be conservative, you want to be careful, you don't want to say okay, yeah, so I found a lot of what they were answering on was more future looking rather than what's right in front of you right now. Like looking at, okay, here's the wines use the full crop or no thin and here's your one and a half cluster, one cluster pursuit, you didn't find them all that different in the descriptive analysis. But now when you're, you know, the identity, then you're saying, Okay, we're not going to take these notes into our highest here. We're going to leave those aside. So there's some bias.
Craig Macmillan 21:20 Yeah, well, no, absolutely. And that's one of the things I love talking about. And you know that the winemaking techniques were consistent across the lots. Yeah, so it wasn't canopy management manipulations or anything like that.
Patti Skinkis 21:32 Yep. So both in the vineyard and in the winery. So when we said they did this in their vineyard, they couldn't do things differently in the vineyard of two, one or the other. And we actually picked up an issue. And that some you know, when you do crop thinning, you have labor crews come through and leaf pull. And we recognize that early on that some growers just wouldn't leaf pull as much in there no thin so we had them go in and leaf pull the same as they would for their other thinned to remove that that issue. In the winery we told them they had to make all their wines the same. And we did not have them do for example, long barrel aging in oak barrels, they could make the wines how they normally make their wines. But they we did not want them to go to barrel. And so they had to be bottled and then tasted after about a year of bottle aging.
Craig Macmillan 22:21 Interesting. Maybe I missed this but you were talking about the thinning protocols meaning like around bloom time and round lag phase. What about at verasion that's at least around where I'm at in Central Coast's is very common to do crop dropping about 85% verasion was that a component what you did was or verasion era?
Patti Skinkis 22:40 We did verasion time point included in our time core study that was before we launched on the big project. So when we did the big project, we decided we would just go with what growers always do, rather than adding more time points. And so they just did in the statewide crapola project just did like face for our crapload are thinning by timing by intensity trial, we did include verasion for that time for that trial.
Craig Macmillan 23:08 And that green drop is at about the same, like at about 85% or somewhere in there. What was the trigger for the drop at verasion?
Patti Skinkis 23:16 It's post lag phase was done when there's about 50% color.
Craig Macmillan 23:20 Okay, there we go. Okay, that makes sense.
Patti Skinkis 23:22 The verasion time point is or late, even later, is oftentimes done in Oregon as well. But usually it's a result of either thinking that they have way too much crop out there for their target yields, or disease, so botrytis.
Craig Macmillan 23:54 And when you're talking about these different crop load levels, I would imagine that disease pressure would be an important issue, especially in Pinot Noir in Oregon, I would think.
Patti Skinkis 24:04 So that's a great point, because some people, you know, will crop thin because they want to avoid overlapping clusters. But in our trial, what we did was we said, Okay, for the no thin, we want you to just do things like you've always done and some growers would say, Okay, now when they're, we're sorting that fruit, should we sort out at the sorting line, you know, and I said, No, you know, if you do sorting line for that fruit, make notes, you know, obviously, you don't want to make a bad wine because there's too much botrytis. But basically, what we had them do was if you're going to sort through one you have to sort through the other and don't just have preconceived notions that you're going to have to sort more in your no thin than the others. And we always in the data that we got in we looked at as we dissected clusters, we looked for detritus, and what we found is in most years, there is not an impact of having no thin having more disease. Now Could there have been sure if there was years with very heavy crop yield, and with high shoot density, but most of our vineyards have when we looked at all of our data we got in and one of the quality control checks is, what was their shoot density, and almost everybody's following in that perfect shoot density. And so there wasn't that necessary, necessarily that much fruit on their vine. So they're all cane pruned. And they're all shooting for that shoot density of between three and five shoots per linear foot. And we're more on the three end. So we can see that in all of the data. So it's not surprising to me that we didn't see disease issues as a result of leaving that full crop on there, why we didn't see a lot of differences in this trial, I should provide some context here. Without you know, the amount of yields were not terribly high, with that kind of shoot density. So single canopy, low shoot density, we're at a pound per linear foot on average full crop in only a couple of years. During the 10 year period, we're over one and a half pounds per linear foot. So the tonnage that would come off of that. And I always put talking pounds per linear foot because our vineyards were in many different spacing and shoot and vine density. So you we can't talk tonnage, what we found in looking at the data that there were clear years where once we had yields over one and a half pounds per linear foot, then we saw some benefit of cluster thinning. But those years where we are barely at one or just over one, there really was not a benefit. And of course, that's because of the canopies being well maintained. The shoe density is not too high cluster density is not too high a cluster size themselves are smaller.
Craig Macmillan 26:36 What has been the reception so far, for both growers and winemakers because this goes a little bit against conventional wisdom, at least in my experience?
Patti Skinkis 26:45 It goes a lot against convention,
Craig Macmillan 26:47 I'm trying to be polite.
Patti Skinkis 26:51 Well, the nice thing is, you know, because along the way of doing a 10 year project, I was always giving presentations as the new data set came out and people in the industry would hear me give presentations about it. But I think the strongest impact was seen because I had grower collaborators, they saw the impact in their vineyards and in their wineries. And what we found was that people are much more willing to increase their yields. My answer is not that they they stopped crop thinning, surely that didn't happen. But they were allowed to evaluate and recommend higher yields than they had in the past. And this is a data set that was really hard to get directly from people. But we see it in our state yield reports that basically they've gone up 25% The yields have for Pinot Noir. Since the work has been started. When I talk to people who are contracting fruit or selling fruit. They said they definitely see that winemakers are more receptive to vineyard owners and vineyard managers recommending higher yields. And they're no longer saying it has to be one cluster per shoot, or it has to be two tons per acre. And I would say the 25% increase in yield is conservative I when we did ask the collaborators about the project, we asked them about three quarters way through the project said, What do you feel comfortable doing as a result of this work. And they said, we feel comfortable adding another half to one tonne per acre, which is about a 20 25% increase from what they've done before. And so that's really is really astounding, I think any if I hadn't done the project this way, I don't think that people would have been able to understand the true impacts or lack thereof, of doing cluster thinning. So it provided with them with more evidence that they can take this risk and or they they didn't feel like it was as big of a risk to leave more fruit out there.
Craig Macmillan 28:48 Which reminds me I know it's difficult to talk in terms of tonnes per acre. So we can talk through the linear foot, but the range in your work from the most aggressive thinning to the unthinned. What kind of a range is there, how big of a difference in terms of the crop load?
Patti Skinkis 29:04 In terms of the yield that they've had in vineyards, the lowest crop thinning level that growers did was half cluster per shoot. So that meant thinning pattern 0101 or 1010. The yields on those would be as low as one and a half tonnes per acre. But it depends on the vineyard that it came from because one of the vineyards that did it was a very high density. So their yields were actually pretty high even still, but I'd say the max that we got in any vineyard was probably close to about eight tons per acre. So clusters per linear foot were always pretty consistent unless they went to a double canopy. So we did have one collaborator in the study that was on a GDC or Geneva demo curtain. But that vineyard was actually pretty degraded so it didn't explain higher yields. What we saw was higher yields were from those vineyards that had high density meter by a meter and a half spacing. Normally we were at on a pounds per linear foot bed He says that the extremes were about two to two and a half pounds per linear foot. And so for those vineyards, they could be pretty substantial if they were in the high density.
Craig Macmillan 30:09 We are running our of time. So I want to ask you a couple of kind of closing questions. Is there one piece of advice or insight or one thing that you would tell a grower regarding this topic.
Patti Skinkis 30:18 It all depends on what you have for your vineyard, your rootstock, how the vines are trained. So the biggest thing that we came up from this research is that we don't want to tell people that they have to crop them or that they don't have to crop them that and that we don't have a real answer of how much it has to be. But one of the things we do have clear in the data is that we know when we've gone too much, a lot of people think that that's every year and it's not every year because of our climate is so variable, we don't know what we're gonna have, we can go and quantify fruitfulness. But really until we get through fruit set in June, we don't know what our yields look like. And so I always tell people to keep monitoring your printing weights, your yields, calculating your your your Rivas index or the crop yield printing weight ratio, and just keep monitoring it for your site to know what Max is going to be because some vineyards can handle more than others. And the last thing I would say is quality is dependent on the vineyard site and how that site is managed. And even if you have a good manager, you are never going to have a really high end wine if you don't have the right site or the right you know, selection of clone rootstock etc. So it all plays into that quality and just crap any is not going to guarantee you a high quality wine.
Craig Macmillan 31:41 Once again. It's a great big world with lots of different variables all of which have to be considered. I want to thank my guest Dr. Patty Skinkis she is a viticulture, extension specialist and professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Horticulture. Real pleasure this has been really, really fun. Like I mentioned, this has actually been kind of a pet topic of mine for a long, long time. And I'm really happy that you've been doing this work and I hope more people learn about it.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 168: Do Consumers Trust Your Brand? | Marketing Tip Monday | 13 Feb 2023 | 00:03:43 | |
We are exposed to an estimated 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements per day. Branding and advertising are crucial to the success of businesses, but the trust that your brand builds with consumers carries a heavy load when it comes to the success of your efforts. Do consumers trust your brand? Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we share how to build brand trust. Building Brand Trust Create an experiencePeople don't buy products, they purchase experiences. Poeple are emotional beings, and often make decisions to fulfill an emotional need, whether it's to relax and unwind, have a lively social experience, find entertainment, or ease a heavy heart. You must know the kind of experience you want to create in order to sell it. People like consistency and familiarity. Returning customers come back because they enjoyed a previous experience. Identifying the kind of experiences you want to create for your customers allows you to consistently deliver an experience worth coming back to. 6 steps to creating an awesome brand experience:
Humans thrive on emotional, personal connections -- and these aren't limited to human-to-human relationships. An article in Foundr points out that, "Consumers crave personal relationships with brands..." How can you foster these personal relationships? Sharing your common values is a great place to start. Consumers today are growing increasingly environmentally conscious. Through her research at Penn State University, Kathy Kelley, Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management, found that building stronger connections with your customers can be as simple as talking with them about the specific things your company does in regard to sustainability and why those practices are important. This can even increase the willingness to pay more for wine (listen to the podcast)! Be open and authenticThe Internet has become an integral part of our lives and can be a wonderful tool for showing transparency and authenticity. Use your online channels (website, social media, eNewsletter) to connect, not just to market. We often pull up the Internet to fulfill emotional needs like decompressing, catching up with others, and exploring our interests. Use the creative platforms available to you to welcome your followers to learn more about your business -- things that a one-time visitor may not have the opportunity to learn. This will help your followers to form a stronger, more personal connection with your brand. More branding tipsIn our last Marketing Tip, we shared 3 ways you can strengthen your brand. Building brand trust is a crucial step in creating loyal supporters. Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's specific sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes for a links to the Eco-Awkening and Full Glass consumer purchasing research, this article, research on consumer preferences, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 167: Use Biochar to Combat Climate Change | 02 Feb 2023 | 00:31:36 | |
Wood burns twice. The first burn takes wood to charcoal. The second phase takes charcoal to ash. Unless you remove oxygen. Josiah Hunt, Founder and CEO of Pacific Biochar Befit Corporation explains that Biochar is made at a high temperature in an oxygen-limited environment. Organic waste is taken through the first burn phase and by limiting the oxygen, remains charcoal. The final product is buried in the soil where it improves water retention and fertility. And you can do this at your own ranch. Listen in to hear Josiah's tips on how to make and incorporate Biochar into your vineyard. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Today is Josiah Hunt, who is founder and CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation. And we're going to talk about guess what biochar. Josiah thanks for being on the podcast.
Josiah Hunt 0:09 Thank you.
Craig Macmillan 0:11 Let's just get right into it. And let's start with some basics. What exactly is biochar?
Josiah Hunt 0:15 Biochar is a funny word. First. biochar in its most basic terms is biomass charcoal, which is redundant because charcoal is from biomass and the generation like where the word came from is even funnier in my opinion, the word biochar was born out of the word Agra-char. But in the world first Agra-char conference in 2007, a company came forward and said, Sorry, we've already trademarked that back to the drawing board. And they came up with biochar. That's that's the origin story that I've heard. I think one of the really interesting questions is, why did we have to come up with a new word for charcoal, and the reason for that is climate change. So I think the key differentiator from where the word biochar came from is part of an idea, rather than a simple material. And that idea is wrapped up in waste organic material used to create biochar, a biomass charcoal, which is then buried in agricultural soils, where it serves two important purposes, carbon dioxide removal by sequestering that stable carbon into the ground and long term soil fertility. So this helping address climate change mitigation by removing carbon and climate change adaptation by facilitating food security. So it's a lot packed into that concept. So the word charcoal just couldn't hold it anymore.
Craig Macmillan 1:39 Just couldn't hold it off. We're talking about charcoal, which people have been making for millennia, essentially. So how is biochar made and are there multiple ways of this different materials, etc.?
Josiah Hunt 1:51 High temperature in an oxygen limited environment. So you're you're basically reaching these combustion temperatures, but you do so with an oxygen limited environment. So a woodchip brought up to 500 degrees Celsius would become a glowing ember. Its molecules so excited, they're shooting off photons. Now, if that woodchip came up to five degrees Celsius, and there's sufficient oxygen, you would have complete combustion first, that woodchip would volatilize off the gases become a chunk of charcoal, and then the oxygen would come in and destroy that charcoal, releasing all of its energy, and leaving only the ash mineral residue. If you have limited oxygen, that first part occurs pyrolysis part where you go from woodchip to charcoal, but that second phase of burning from charcoal to ash can only occur with the presence of oxygen, and thus, the limiting of oxygen is the key component to making the material.
Craig Macmillan 2:48 And then second phase is where the carbon is leaving into the environment?
Josiah Hunt 2:52 A better way to put this is that wood burns twice the first phase of combustion and the first phase of burning would be from woodchip to charcoal. And the second phase is from charcoal to ash. And that second phase can only occur in the presence of oxygen. Therefore, if you can limit the oxygen, you control, whether you're generating charcoal or ash.
Craig Macmillan 3:16 So controlling the oxygen is important. If you have a way of stopping that process midway. That's obviously the key to this, you have to be able to stop at the end of the process step not going any further. Is that right?
Josiah Hunt 3:29 That's correct.
Craig Macmillan 3:29 How do people do that?
Josiah Hunt 3:32 There's two kind of main ways one would be we're working with continuous flow machinery. So the woodchips come enter a system in which they experience incredibly high temperatures and limited oxygen environment where pyrolysis occurs, the gases leaving gases go off and they have their own work to do. And then that carbon flows out of that hot chamber into areas where we maintain that oxygen control. And we allow the temperature to begin to drop down to temperatures that are ambient, essentially. And once you get that charcoal material to ambient temperature, it is safe, it's recalcitrant, and will will last for a very, very long time. So that's how we do it in a continuous flow. And then generally at the tail end of the process, we're adding water for dust control and safety. And if you had a batch process, you would initiate a paralysis to occur you initiate process to create basically start big fire, it would be one way to do that, and then allow it to go through that first phase where you'd have you know pyrolysis carrying wood becoming charcoal and then extinguish it, you got to stop it, you got to either completely cut off the airflow and snuff it out or introduce so much water that you would quench it that's also snuffing it out so that would be kind of a batch process approach to stopping it.
Craig Macmillan 4:46 So that's the the key stopping and along the way there and having some way of doing that. And that's what makes this whole thing essentially work. Now I've got this stuff. What is this charcoal, it used to be wood now what is it chemically? How was it changed, what do I have here in my hands?
Josiah Hunt 5:02 Biochar differs from the plant biomass that it was made from in that it has undergone a thermal thermal chemical conversion, an irreversible process where the associations of the carbon and other elements in there become completely reassociated, you have a wood chip that goes into a temperature range of 500 degrees Celsius plus and becomes a glowing ember shooting off photons. And those carbon atoms realign themselves into a different form that is highly aromatic versus aliphatic, meaning you're basically tightening these carbon rings here. And that helps the material become highly recalcitrant, meaning that it will have a persistence. In the environment, an order of magnitude are orders of magnitude greater than the plant biomass that was made from lasting hundreds to 1000s of years in the soil, and also with some very interesting changes to the surface characteristics.
Craig Macmillan 6:09 So that leads into the next question there. So we're talking about something that will remain in the soil for a very, very long time, which is one of the reasons it's of interest to agriculture. What are some of the applications why are people using this in agriculture? And how are they using this in agriculture?
Josiah Hunt 6:25 The charcoal material has some really interesting attributes some some really interesting characteristics. Other than just being highly recalcitrant, charcoal is the oldest known filter material, maybe most widely used over a long period of historical time, it works great, it can hold nutrients, it can hold plant nutrients, in this case, against a gradient, and it can hold plant nutrients in such a way that they will be resistant to environmental loss yet still plant available or biologically available, I should say, because sometimes it's the microbes or fungi who would access the material off the charcoal surface and make it available to the plant. And so that filtration characteristic is an incredibly important part of, of how biochar helps plants grow is it can help keep nutrients in the topsoil and resistant to environmental loss in a way that plants can still access them.
Craig Macmillan 7:24 And the same is true for water, correct?
Josiah Hunt 7:26 Yes, biochar material is incredibly porous. So a lot of the vascular tissue of the plant body remains intact. So it's really interesting, because you have this, you have this like, just completely dramatic molecular change, where the woody cellulosic material becomes a target material. And on a molecular level, it's so incredibly different. But on a structural level, most of the plant body remains. And so you can take a small piece of charcoal, and oftentimes a botanist, would be able to identify the plant species, it was made from
Craig Macmillan 8:02 Really?
Josiah Hunt 8:02 Yeah, the vascular. And in fact, this is an important piece of archaeology. So this is like in archaeology, they'll, they'll find little bits of charcoal, because it's highly recalcitrant. And they'll be able to identify what species of plant it was, because of the vascular tissue. And it can be pretty evident sometimes, I mean, it's really easy to tell the difference between oak and pine, you've got to be a connoisseur to be able to tell whether it's a Valley oak or red oak, yes, the vascular tissue of the plant body remains primarily, you know, largely intact. And so this is really interesting, you have a material that, you know, on a very, very micro level is very porous, but then even on a macro level, you have this vascular tissue of the plant body. So a lot of the a lot of the capillary action that the plants were taking advantage of transfers over to this biochar material, which is really interesting because now you have this highly recalcitrant material with incredibly high surface area, a functional surface of that and, you know, just incredibly intricate porous design determined by the DNA, that plant material, you know, it's just riddled with tubes and tunnels and nooks and crannies that help hold water and provide habitat for microorganisms.
Craig Macmillan 9:16 Is there research that's been done other findings about what quantity or type or whatever of biochar and how that relates to increases in water holding capacity or increases in soil microbiome populations or things like that? It seems like that'd be a pretty straightforward idea.
Josiah Hunt 9:33 I think I was looking at a graph this morning and I don't remember where it came from, but I think since 2007, there's been 28,000 research articles about that, that are related to biochar not specifically focused on biochar, but have biochar as a key word or an aspect. So biochar is is a you know, part of about 28,000 research articles. And a lot of that is focused on water because it's such an important part of the puzzle the dynamics between application rate and expected response get really nuanced. It comes down to what are the characteristics of the biochar material? And in many cases, what is really important, what are the characteristics of the soil, so you can expect to see a quite quite a range of different response, depending on the characteristics of the biochar material and the native soil that it's being applied to, you know, without any research articles, we're now at the stage where we're they're doing systematic reviews of the meta analyses, which begins to give you a lot of really powerful data. Overall, the water use efficiency, or there's so many different ways to measure it. And again, I'm a little bit undergunned the difference between plant available water and, and water holding capacity, you know, become existentially important to tell us that I probably don't have the same level of experience with.
Craig Macmillan 11:01 You may not need to be the expert, but you probably are the expert on where to find this information that helps. So if you can, if you can connect us with some things, even just general stuff, we'll pass that along to our listeners. And it'd be greatly appreciated. Because again, this is an ID the reason I bring this up is that, you know, we were talking earlier about, you know, 2007 and whatnot. I remember the first time this was introduced to me, and it was probably around the year 2000. And it's from a college student. There was one of my students, and I was and they were like, Hey, that's a great idea. We should really try it. And I said, I don't know I don't get it. They're like that. And I said, Well, how much material do we need? And I'm thinking like tons per acre. They're like, Oh, no, no, we just use a little bit. We do this and I was like, Okay, that sounds like witchcraft to me. Show me the science. Well, now here we are 20 years later. And we do have a lot of science. This is not a story anymore.
Josiah Hunt 11:50 There's a lot of science and, you know, the water conservation part. I think that's just such a key component of of the value that biochar can provide, particularly when we're talking about vineyards in California. And so I think it's it's useful to spend some time on that. So a couple key points of, of biochar and, and water use efficiency or water conservation. One is just that the material itself holds immense amounts of water. I mean biochar alone, the biochar that we're working with, we usually hold about six, six times its weight in water. But then the real important thing is how does it affect the water holding capacity or plant available water in the soil, and in most all aspects, the results are positive pretty much across the board. And here's a few key metrics, I think that would be useful to mention and that I find valuable. A couple of key points of biochar and water use efficiency or water conservation. One is that one of the easiest ways to think about biochar is that it is pyrogenic organic matter. Perhaps that's a better word than biochar. It's a much more scientifically accurate word. And when we think about this material, it's not unique. Humans didn't invent charcoal, or biochar for that matter. In fact, it's been part of soil development, as long as plant life and fire have coexisted. And according to geologic records, about 350 or more years ago, biochar became a significant component of topsoil development. And that generally, soil organic matter is measured by loss on Ignition, which does not differentiate between charcoal organic matter pyrogenic organic matter and non charcoal organic and studies that have used some very expensive and kind of painstaking processes to identify the charcoal organic matter as separate from the non toxic organic matter have shown us that charcoal organic matter is prevalent in most all agriculturally important soils, and oftentimes greater than 10% of the total organic matter, and not uncommon to find it as much as 30 to 50% of the total organic matter. And in some of our most valuable soils such as the Midwest plains like in Iowa, some of those those those highly fertile molecules up there can be 30 to 50% of organic matter in the form of charcoal. So I probably went too long into that definition or that that that distinction. But one of the easy ways to to think about biochar is that biochar is part of organic matter is not separate from and so when we're thinking about how does biochar impact my soil? Usually, we can kind of just consider what are the impacts of organic matter and what are the impacts of increasing my organic matter, and then think of biochar as a stable portion of your organic matter. That will have a lot of water conservation and tilth benefits, but it will not be a significant source of nutrients. And that's one of the significant differences of charcoal organic matter versus non charcoal organic matter, but in so many other situations, that's an easy way to think about the effects of biochar. So With biochar, and water conservation, one of the really important elements would be the soil type in determining what the projected outcomes might be. And there's been some really interesting findings in this area. At first, the primary focus was in sandy soils, which have a very low water holding capacity. And it's an easy win small amounts of biochar can have large impact on coarse soils, large positive impact, improving the water holding capacity in coarse soils
Craig Macmillan 15:30 What's a small quantity, a small quantity?
Josiah Hunt 15:33 That's a great question. You opened up a big box there. Biochar is a three dimensional application not a two dimensional so like if you add nitrogen, your soil, it's going to disperse throughout your soil. So nitrogen is simply you know, pounds per acre, whereas biochar, it's not going to distribute itself through the soil on its own, it's wise to also consider the area cultivated. So for instance, two tons per acre cultivated only in the planting row is very different than two tons per acre, cultivated 100% of the acreage or two tons per acre and the top six inches versus two tons per acre, two feet down.
Craig Macmillan 16:11 Is the real metric, then like volume to volume may think in cubic yards to cubic yards,.I just use percent organic matter equivalent, what I've found the most useful and looking at Biochar application rates, and again, kind of going back to how I find it really valuable to just kind of consider biochar applications within the frame of I'm going to change my soil organic matter, I'm going to be adding some stable soil organic matter. How much do I want to add and why? And framing biochar applications in that I find very useful. And then also, when I'm looking at when we've seen successful applications, either through work that we've done, or in research articles, how do we translate that into another successful application that might have different cultivation practices. And what we found is the percent organic matter equivalent is the most transferable number. And so what that would mean is that the biochar is primarily organic matter, but some of it can have a lot of ash content. So that would reduce the organic matter content of the biochar. You know, most of biochar that we're working with 95% organic matter. So then you're looking at the effect of that biochar in the area cultivated, right, so let's say if we have 10 tons wet weight of biochar might be six ton dry weight of biochar, which might be you know, 5.5 or 7%, dry tons organic matter. And then if we're cultivating that in to an area of our soil, we measure the general area that we're cultivating into, and we can come up with an organic matter equivalent. So just as a rule of thumb, a number that I find useful is that if you were to cultivate nine tonnes per acre down to six inches, it would be equivalent to 1% organic matter.
Okay, yeah. So that gives us an idea that gives us that gives us a sense.
Josiah Hunt 17:55 If you're doing a quarter of your land, like say you're doing two, two foot wide planting rows, and they're eight foot on center. Now you're a quarter of your acreage and you're going down 24 inches, that's 1%. Nine dried tons per acre plowed to six inches depth would be equivalent to 1% organic matter.
Craig Macmillan 18:13 Now let's let's bring this back to the vineyards because I know that there have been some folks that have been doing trials and whatnot with this that I think you're familiar with, how would somebody apply this method? In a vineyard setting? We would want to get it close to the vine row. Can we do it in the middles? What what's kind of the strategy? Do you know?
Josiah Hunt 18:31 with vineyard applications, we've learned a lot over the past several years, and I want to, you know, provide a big shout out to Doug Beck with Monterey Pacific who has been instrumental in helping pilot you know, and pioneer, some some really successful applications of biochar and vineyards. In some of the early trials that we did. We found that with a pre plant, you know, with fresh plants going in the best utilization of biochar is in the planting row only Delve are plowed you know, right down the planting row only don't waste any the biochar on the surface broadcast. Keep it in the planting row only and take it to depth. That's one thing we learned. And so using biochar in pre plant has really shone as you're shown shown, shawn as past of shown I guess, is as a really successful way to utilize biochar, it helps get the plants up. And we've been seeing significant yield benefits, where the biochar has been plowed down the planting row. And the application rate in that we found to be quite successful is in the range of about a half percent organic matter equivalent in those field trials. Now, that doesn't mean that's the only successful application. That's just one that we identified early on as being quite successful.
Craig Macmillan 19:45 Are you familiar with or do you think there are ways to do things post planning?
Josiah Hunt 19:50 For post planting there's been a number of different approaches, and I can't say if I've seen any single approach rise to the top as being In the winner, and I think this might be due to how many different management practices there are after the vine's planted, which I think have a wider spectrum of variety than than the planting process itself. And so something that Monterey Pacific has been working on is applying it to existing. And I guess I'm not sure how much of this they've published and how much needs to keep quiet. So I better hold my tongue I'm getting describing exactly what they're doing.
Craig Macmillan 20:30 So here's an example. So one of the things that I've heard from other people but I haven't seen anything on is that they make biochar which when asked you about they make biochar and then they, they grind it essentially, or they break it up and then they mix it with compost, and then they they band that on in the vine or like they would have compost. Anyway, all they've done those, they've added some biochar to it, but it sounds like the incorporation is really crucial.
Josiah Hunt 20:53 Yes, you nailed it. That's it. That's how they're doing it. So basically, what what a lot of the folks are doing with compost applications in existing, they're simply just incorporating biochar as part of that. So rather than looking at doing compost, only, they're doing a biochar amended compost and applying the same method, and this works out really well.
Craig Macmillan 21:15 It does work out well. Okay, so I was gonna say it sounds like there may be some limitations there. But there are some benefits.
Josiah Hunt 21:20 Yeah, no, this works out really well, the biochar you blend it up with the compost, it flows through the equipment, no problem. And there's a lot of synergy to biochar and compost working take they work really well together. That that basically captures it however, using compost, you can consider including biochar as a portion of that. And then what portion becomes a really interesting question. A lot of people have been kind of in the range of between 10% to 30%. By weight when they're doing maintenance. That's the range that I most commonly see.
Craig Macmillan 21:52 So let's say I'm interested in this either as a pre plant or maybe as abandoned, I need to go with compost, can I make my own? And if so, what materials do I need? And what can I do? How hard is it to make biochar myself from a vineyard or winery? What do I what do I need to do this?
Josiah Hunt 22:06 Making biochar yourself by hand in the vineyard is it's hard work. But it's totally it's it's not rocket science, it can be done with some fairly rudimentary approaches. Commonly, what's done now is when a when a vineyard is gonna get ripped out, they'll go and they'll push all the piles up metal vines, the whole thing that push all the piles up right after harvest, and then they're gonna be aiming to replant by March, you know, replant several months later. Now, this is really tricky here, this is the biggest problem, because yes, you can make biochar to that material. But with that much moisture content in the biomass, it's gonna be really hard to do that. To do it in a rudimentary fashion, one of the easy ways to do this would just be push up those big piles, let them dry, which kind of requires that you fallow for a year, and then you come back the following year. And you can do what's called a conservation burn, essentially, it's the same thing. But instead of lighting the pile from the bottom on the inside, you just do a top lit pile. So you light it from the top, and then the flame starts at the top and the heat causes the wood underneath it to volatilize releasing its gases and the flame consumes all the gas is as it as it comes down. And it also kind of then works as a protector of the charcoal that's created. This conservation burn approach is cleaner burning. And if you quench it at the right time, you can get a significant amount of charcoal, but it does require that your vines have to be dry, which is in most cases that we've seen. It's going to take a year of fallow to get there.
Craig Macmillan 23:40 So I could do it with vine material.
Josiah Hunt 23:42 You can do it vine material, you can do it in the field without any fancy equipment other than just doing a top down burn, which just takes a little bit of a slightly different approach to it. And there's been some some farms that have really been doing a good job with this Kendall Jackson hosted a little workshop or something on this down in in the King City area a couple years ago, a lot of different vineyards that whose names are escaping me right now have been tinkering around with this method of biochar production, it's fairly easy, but it does require a fallow period and let that material dry. The other would be to potentially grind up that material and take it to another location where you could have a centralized biochar production facility. But the difficulty particularly in vineyards is is the metal content you just got you got a lot of of wires and steaks in there. And that makes that makes it tough.
Craig Macmillan 24:32 How would he do things need to be? Can I do this with landscaping waste? Can I do it with grasses? How much lignin do I need? How well would he do this step up to be?
Josiah Hunt 24:45 That's a great question. You know, you can make biochar with omega with biosolids, you know, which is not very woody. It'll just have very different characteristics. So woody biomass will have different characteristics than say grass biomass, the grassy based biochar can actually be really interesting materials, particularly because you have those monocots you have those really long, you know, the different type of vascular tissue. And so monocots makes some really interesting biochar, in my opinion. And you know, part of the question gets to what's the best use so if you have grass clippings, generally you have quite a bit of nitrogen content and grass clippings might be more beneficial in a composting pathway to because when you burn something to make biochar, it's hard to keep the nitrogen around a good chunk of that nitrogen is going to leave during the burning process. So sometimes you take your grassy materials and you manures and those can make good materials for anaerobic digestion and or composting, and then the materials that are kind of more woody content, harder to compost, and therefore, often prime candidates for biochar production, but you can use most any of it.
Craig Macmillan 25:48 That is fascinating and encouraging. I think there's a lot to be done here. It sounds like not only are we getting some science, we're getting some experience. And now we're also getting some application. I think that's really, really great. And that's a big part of any aspect of farming is people have to have some science to base it on, but then they have to try it. And it sounds like that trying is happening. And that's really, really exciting. Really, really encouraging. Is there one piece of advice or one thing that you would tell a grower related to biochar one thing say, Hey, that's a great idea. Here's either why or here's what you might want to do.
Josiah Hunt 26:17 No pressure, no pressure, no.
Craig Macmillan 26:21 I like putting you on the spot.
Josiah Hunt 26:24 The one thing Oh, my gosh.
Craig Macmillan 26:25 Career, take your entire career, boil it down to like two sentences.
Josiah Hunt 26:31 Biochar has shown to be an investment in your soil infrastructure, in that adding nitrogen is like fuel. You know, it's like putting fuel in the tank, whereas adding biochar is more akin to an infrastructure investment that is not necessarily putting fuel in the tank, but it's going to improve your fuel efficiency so that you can increase your ratio of output versus input with rising cost of fertilizer questions on the availability of water that becomes increasingly valuable. And I think those are the primary reasons why an investment in biochar would want to be considered.
Craig Macmillan 27:12 And I think that's great advice. And I think that's a really good way to look, we're not talking about a, an input the same way that we might think about something that, you know, goes away, this is an investment in infrastructure. And I think it's a really good way to think about it. Um, where can people find out more about you and what you do?
Josiah Hunt 27:27 The website for the company is Pacificbiochar.com. We've got a lot of information, I think we definitely have some room to improve how how well organized the information is, but there's quite a bit there. We've been working with vineyards for quite a number of years. And throughout the website, there are sprinkled different bits of information and case studies about some of the vendors that we've worked with.
Craig Macmillan 27:48 Yeah, and I want to underline that definitely, there's a lot of great information, including webinars and articles, the meta analysis that you've mentioned, it's a really great resource, and I encourage people to check it out.
Josiah Hunt 28:01 Yeah, we have a whole section on white papers and stuff that we've produced, you know, benefits of biochar and agriculture and, and other white papers that we've produced specifically to try and help provide these resources.
Craig Macmillan 28:11 Well, that's about all the time we've got. I want to thank Josiah Hunt, Founder and CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation for being our guest today. Please check out their website, check out our website. They'll be more links and information, all kinds of resources there. As always, thank you for listening to Sustainable Winegrowing with Vineyard Team thanks Josiah.
Josiah Hunt 28:31 You bet Thank you Craig.
Can you hear my dog drinking water from the water bowl? He's a super he's like a water buffalo drinks a lot and loud.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 166: Did you know...? | Marketing Tip Monday | 23 Jan 2023 | 00:02:28 | |
Did you know… that searches for sustainable goods have increased globally by 71% since 2016? Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we share two ways you can build a strong brand so that your customers will remember you. Products carrying a sustainability claim have continued growing through the COVID-19 pandemic, capturing a 17% market share during the first half of 2020! Sheila Bonini, senior vice president of private sector engagement at WWF US states: "Sustainable and planet-friendly products used to be a niche market. Today, that's no longer the case. The research backs up what we've seen anecdotally over the years -- demand is there." Tell the Trade You are SustainableAccording to research from Wine Intelligence and Full Glass Research in 2019, 73% of buyers in the trade feel that the demand for sustainably produced products has increased over the past five to 10 years, and 76% think it will increase in the next five to 10 years. "Clear and highly visible labeling" on wine packages is one of the best ways to differentiate your product on the market, so buyers will know your wine was produced sustainably when you can't be there to tell them. SIP Tip: read Is Wine Certification Worth It? Tell Your Buyers You are SustainableSelling grapes or wine? Tell your buyers they are purchasing sustainable fruit so they too can differentiate their product in the marketplace! If you are SIP Certified we are here to help you with:
SIP Tip: you can add your grapes to our Classifieds page! Click here to learn how. Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's specific sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes for a links to the Eco-Awkening and Full Glass consumer purchasing research, this article, research on consumer preferences, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 165: Become a Microbe Farmer: Make Compost | 19 Jan 2023 | 00:33:07 | |
Composting is taking diverse organic material and making a habitat for the microbes that will process the material. Jean Bonhotal, Director of Cornell Waste Management Institute in the Department of Soils and Crop Sciences explains that there are three necessary ingredients to make a great compost. First, the pile should start with carbon-like woodchips to help move air through. Second, add in wet waste like food or pomace. And third, top the pile with carbon. The most important factor in making compost is temperature. In fact, you do not need to turn piles. The organisms that break down compost generate temperatures that are about 90 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. A great example of this is seen in mortality composting, used for livestock. These piles are created by layering 24 inches of woodchips, followed by the animal, and top with another 24 inches of wood chips. The animal will liquefy and then everything starts to mix as the microbes work. In 12 to 24 hours the pile will reach the desired 130 degrees Fahrenheit. While compost is not technically a fertilizer it has numerous benefits including imparting nutrients, pest resistance, helping with erosion control, and improving water holding capacity because it works like a sponge. Listen in to hear Jean's best advice on how to create great compost. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 My guest today is Jean Bonhotal. She is Director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute. And he's also a Senior Extension Associate in the Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Science Section at Cornell University. And we're talking about compost today. Thanks for being here, Jean.
Jean Bonhotal 0:13 Thank you.
Craig Macmillan 0:14 I like to start with basics when we're talking about a topic. And sometimes it seems kind of silly, but it oftentimes shapes what we talk about. Let's start with a very basic definition. What exactly is compost.
Unknown Speaker 0:26 So I'm going to start with a definition before I get into composting, and that is what is organic, what is organic? When I'm using the term organic, this is what it will mean something that was once alive and is now dead, and needs to be managed. That comes with all different types of quality. But we are usually looking for clean feedstocks, that are organic in origin. So we don't want glass and plastic and other materials that really don't break down and have put a lot of plastic into our environment, because they break down into little tiny pieces, and they're still there. So I'll start with that. Composting is basically taking organic material, all different diverse, organic materials, preferably, and making a habitat for microbes, the microbes that are going to process these materials. When we're composting, we can do all of the work mechanically. But it doesn't really work that well because composting is a process. And if we set it up so that we have our carbon and nitrogen ratios, well balanced. And those are browns and greens, wet and dry materials. So those are the things that we need to balance, then we will have a proper habitat for the microbes to work in and they will thrive. The microbes are what make the heat in a compost. When we're composting very small volumes, we don't always have heat. And that's because we don't have the volume that we need for that composting to happen in commercial scale, we generally will have enough volume. So as long as we balance that carbon and nitrogen, we will have a very good compost that will actually work mostly by itself.
Craig Macmillan 2:29 So you need different kinds of microbes for taking action on different types of materials, whether they be high nitrogen or high carbon or whatever. Where did those bacteria and fungi, where do those come from?
Jean Bonhotal 2:40 They come from everywhere. They come from us breathing on the medium that we're putting in there they come from the air, their bio aerosolized is what we consider. So these things blow in, and we really don't have to inoculate most composts. The only reason we might need to inoculate a compost is because we've shut it down. Either we've put something in there that's too toxic for the organisms to work with, or we've made it too hot in that pile. The organisms that we're working with are thermophilic organisms, they generate temperatures that are about 90 to 150. And the actual range for thermophilic is more like 130. Those are the temperatures that we really like to reach 130 to 150 is really degrees Fahrenheit is really the temperatures that we want to heat want to reach.
Craig Macmillan 3:42 And that's because those are the ranges where these particular microbes are the most happy.
Jean Bonhotal 3:46 Yes, and the microbes are actually generating the heat. It's like putting 55th graders in a room you don't have to heat. They're giving off lots of energy and have to do anything else. They're doing the work and metabolizing all of that material.
We were talking about a range, what if we're not generating enough heat? What kinds of things happen then? Or what can we do to change that?
Well back up because that is dependent on size. So we have to have that volume and that and if we look at physics, that volume is three by three by three feet cubed. However, when we're working in cold climates, that is not large enough. So everything will freeze really, we have to have everything so perfect with that three by three by three cube that we're not likely to reach those temperatures. So it's really balancing the carbon and nitrogen the moisture. And because if like in arid climates where everything dries out horribly, we need to make sure there's enough moisture retained in that because these are aerobic organisms that are doing all the work. And we really need to make sure that they have that moisture, or else they can't really work. People think that worms make compost, and to an extent they do, there's vermicompost. And it's a different than thermophilic composting that I'm talking about. But Vermacomposting is done with epigeic worms. It's done in a 24 inch bed. So you're making that compost in kind of a shallow bed so that it won't heat up, because the worms are actually doing all of the work in that system. When worms come into a compost, or thermophilic compost, that's at the end of the process, they can't tolerate the heat in the thermophilic process. But they do like to process those organisms that are in there. So they will go in and actually process some of that material toward the end. And in some ways, you can tell that you have a more finished compost, because worms are actually able to thrive in there.
Craig Macmillan 6:07 Where did the worms come from?
Jean Bonhotal 6:09 Generally from the ground, if you're composting in a vessel, you're not going to have worms in there unless you had like warm eggs or something that were already in the medium, and hatched or something like that. So that's where those are coming from. So like indoor facilities generally wouldn't have an earthworm coming in and processing. And the epigeic worms are surface feeders, so they're coming up, they detect that something's up there to eat. And they'll just come to the surface, eat it, pull it down, up and down, you know, they can actually handle above 54 degrees, where a lot of worms dry out and die there. As they get if it gets too hot, and they get too dry.
Craig Macmillan 6:57 You had mentioned the right mix or blend the right kind of connection of different materials and other recipes that that work for certain practical applications are given certain materials, you want certain ratios, how does that work?
Jean Bonhotal 7:10 There are recipes out there. But basically, you have to look at everything as carbon and nitrogen. So if you're a vineyard that wants to compost, the pumice, all your all your promise while you're squeezing all that kind of material, then you're gonna have to look at that and figure out whether that's going to work by itself, just that promise. But you do have grape skins, and you have grape seeds in there. So the grape skins and the grape seeds actually can work together to create a good habitat and actually make things work or you have a pH of about four or five in those pressings. That's going to deter worms for a while it is going to deter some other organisms for a while, but things will start to get going. And that's how we tend to do that. If it's really sloppy and wet, it would be better to add a little bit more waste, but another waste, marry it with another waste, whether you have some manure or you know the if there are some animals on site, if you can mix in manure, or some shavings, or I don't usually like to put wood chips in because it makes a coarser compost for a vineyard. And we want generally want to find our compost.
Craig Macmillan 8:30 Which actually reminds me of something. There were two things that I had learned and that they may not be true when I was coming up and we're talking like 20 years ago. One was that you had to have manure as part of the mix, some kind of a manure there was one and then the second one was forget about using any kind of wood chip vines, anything like that, because they're not going to break down. And that's not going to work. So how is that accurate for either this ideas?
Jean Bonhotal 8:54 No, we have to use all of our carbon sources. Honestly, we do have to use all different carbon sources in different types of composting. I'll give you an example of facilities that by regulation, they're only allowed to compost leaf and yard waste. So they're not allowed to bring in food unless they have a permit to bring in food waste. So there's a lot of different rules that occur over municipalities. Some municipalities got the idea because they needed more nitrogen, there's a lot of carbon and your dry leaves and your woodchips and your woody waste. And I generally will say if I make a pile of sticks, which is all carbon, so all all different sticks and just put them in a pile. If I go back six months later, what is it going to be?
Craig Macmillan 9:42 Dried sticks?
Jean Bonhotal 9:43 A pile of sticks, because I don't have any real nitrogen there is nitrogen in there but I don't have enough in there to make that break down. So I do like to size reduce those chips, the woody waste and that's chipping off or grinding or something like that. And that will make things go better. If you need to compost just leaves, what the municipalities were doing was adding chemical fertilizer to them. Because the chemical fertilizer would bring the nitrogen in, you have to decide do you want to use the chemical nitrogen, the chemical fertilizer, or not in your process, but that will make it work because their carbon and their nitrogen, and we can do that.
Craig Macmillan 10:27 Do I need to do some analysis on these materials and figure out what I actually have and then make calculations from there.
Jean Bonhotal 10:33 So the ratios that we want to use are two to three to one. So I have a good picture of a bucket. And it could be any bucket, think of a cottage cheese container up to us eight yard bucket, I want one bucket of wet material, a very wet material. And then three buckets of very dry material. That's how we balance those ratios. But we are really some of it is like It's like making bread, we don't dump all the flour and all the water in at one time, we put in a little bit of time, because we need to balance out what that recipe actually needs. And the same thing happens in composting, the operators get very good at knowing, okay, that's really, really dry material. And that's really, really wet material. And I might even need to make because we can compost liquids, I might need to make a bowl to put that liquid in there or that really wet material in there so that it can stay in the pile. So I can use that moisture, mix it with the woody waste, and allow that to happen.
Craig Macmillan 11:42 This is beginning to get kind of intimidating. I was kind of hoping that I just would throw a bunch of stuff in a pile and walk away and come back and magically I now have compost. Yeah, how do I figure this out, I guess we're gonna get my education?
Jean Bonhotal 11:58 So one of the ways we do small scale composting is we layer the materials in so we'll have a bin and we'll put carbon down at the bottom, make sure we have a good carbon layer because that's going to act as an air plenum on the bottom. So simple, just woodchips a pallet, something that's going to allow air to come in, then we'll put nitrogen or put in our wet waste, our food waste, our pumice, those materials, we're going to put carbon on top of that. So we never should be able to see what we're composting, it should always look like a pile of comp of compost. But I will talk a little bit about mortality composting and how we do that, because it really tells us how the whole thing is supposed to work. And what we do is we put down 24 inches of woodchips, then I'll put a cow in. And then I'll put 24 inches of woodchips over top of that, what happens in that is the cow starts to liquefy. And then it starts to mix with all of the material, all the all the microbes are starting to work. And everything starts mixing together in a very slow motion in 12 to 24 hours, I should have 130 degrees Fahrenheit in that pile. If I don't, then I've built it wrong. But generally even with we're composting right now with frozen animals, and we're able because of the size of our piles, we're able to do that, that heats up. So whatever the pile is, or the windrow is that heats up, and then the heat rises, and it actually convex around that that medium. So the organisms are getting all that and we don't have to do any turning. We don't have to turn at all. So we don't always turn and if I do that layering like I was talking about in a bin, if we layer it in a bin, then we will be able to do that and walk away and just let the rain and snow fall on it through the season. It'll be slower, but it will compost.
Craig Macmillan 14:11 So again, I had been under the impression that you always have to you have a regular schedule, you have to turn it to aerate it. And you also have to monitor the moisture. No you do not.
Jean Bonhotal 14:19 No. No. The only real tool that we use is temperature. We monitor temperatures in piles, we can tell everything that's going on in that pile is that making sure that it's working well or we need to add more water or we need to whatever we can tell that by temperature.
Craig Macmillan 14:39 If the temperature is getting too high. What do you do?
Jean Bonhotal 14:41 I do compost in arid places where our temperatures can get really high because our piles are too big. Okay, and then we really have to be careful because we can have spontaneous combustion. And our large ones I worked with some facilities in Idaho that around the Boise area, and they were in danger of combusting. And as they were like, what do we do? Well, if we add a lot of air real fast, we're going to be in trouble. If we add a lot of water real fast, we're going to be in trouble. So what we do is we, we will break those piles carefully, break those piles down, just deconstruct those, lay them in sheet, and then just make sure that they've cooled off, then we can build a pile again, but it can be a problem in hot and arid climates. And it can happen anywhere there are different manures like poultry manure will burn more easily than other manure because of the ammonia contents. Because of the just the nature of that material.
Craig Macmillan 15:45 What kind of temperatures are we talking about?
Jean Bonhotal 15:47 When we're getting over 170? I get nervous, especially if it's really hot, ambient temperature. We have to be careful about that.
Craig Macmillan 15:56 Excellent. Okay, that's useful. That's that we can keep that we can track that ourselves. Now, before we run out of time. We have time I just want to get to this topic, because I think there's a lot here. Now, oftentimes, compost is treated like a fertilizer, you say, oh, there's nutrients here. And we're doing it for that reason. But compost will do a lot of other things for you in terms of your soil.
Jean Bonhotal 16:18 Yes, and compost is not technically a fertilizer. So if I have a finished compost, it's not a fertilizer and doesn't follow the fertilizer rules. So there are rules that govern fertilizers and rules that cover compost, and so we have to be careful about that. So it does impart nutrients to our soil compost does impart nutrients to our soil, it helps with erosion control, it helps with water holding capacity, because compost acts like a sponge, and it will pull that moisture into the soil. And then the plants are able to use that when things get droughty. So we really want to use a lot of compost, if in my dreams, I would like to have three inches of compost spread on the whole terrestrial earth. Because I think we need it, it's the only way we can create or recreate our sustainable soils, our soils are very much bankrupt, we might put nutrients back on those soils, but we don't put the organic matter back on the soils, were able to take more of the corn crop. So less gets tilled in, and less of that organic matter is there so we don't have sustainable soils because of that. And compost can help us create and generate sustainable soils so that we don't have to do that. We don't have to constantly add fertilizer.
Craig Macmillan 17:49 Now that leads me to a couple of other things. So in terms of application in vineyards, it's very common to band compost right under the vines in the vine round and not in the middle. Some folks are experimenting with full on broadcasting across the whole surface, right and this has worked really well in range land contexts, which is interesting. And then there's a question about whether compost needs to be incorporated into the soil or does it need to be cultivated in what are your feelings about that for you know, a soil that's maybe a clay soil relatively dry.
Jean Bonhotal 18:23 I'll talk specifically for vineyards on this some vineyards will start their new plants their starts with like some vermiompost. And vermicompost is a pretty popular product to use when we're putting our starts in. And these are like five year old vines that are just getting planted. And we really want these guys to go. So that will help with nutrients. It will help with soil aggregation, it will just make healthy soil. I have had a poster up before as because it says compost don't treat your soil like dirt. And that's really what we want to do. We want to compost we want to add compost so that we're not just dealing with mineral soils. And I think it's really important for us to be thinking about that way. So the adding a you know, an eight ounce cup of compost vermicompost into the holes is supposed to work very well. And a lot of people in California have actually experimented with that. From what I'm told. What their plant responses are, I haven't followed those. So I don't know. Broadcasting I've seen people more put it in the row middles so that they don't end up with a lot of bull wood in their vines because if they get the nutrients up against the vines at the wrong time, that can be problematic. So sometimes they'll even take immature compost and put that in the row middles. That keeps keeps grass down keeps weeds down, you'll still have some cover there. But then it slowly works its way into the vineyard.
Craig Macmillan 20:06 When you're referring to row middles you mean under the vine?
Jean Bonhotal 20:09 I mean, between the, the rows.
Craig Macmillan 20:11 Between the vines. Okay.
Jean Bonhotal 20:12 Yeah, I've seen that done a lot in New York, where people are using it that way. And sometimes we'll use an immature compost because that we call it a killer compost, which we shouldn't, but it kills the area, and it won't encourage the growth in the row middles. And it keeps it a little bit away from the vine for a little while, then by the next season, that's all integrated into that soil system.
Craig Macmillan 20:39 Fascinating. Fascinating. Now, what do you think about banding underneath the vine?
Jean Bonhotal 20:43 By banding, you mean just putting it right against the wood?
Craig Macmillan 20:48 Generally, just underneath the vine, not in the middle, the strategy there, I think is I'm trying to get a higher concentration, if you will, and I want to put it where the vine roots are going to be in. So they're going to be predominantly in the vine row, not not exclusively, but they're gonna be that's where the highest concentration of roots is going to be. So the idea is, hey, if I'm going to put five tons per acre on, let me put it on in a narrow band, like 18 inches, as opposed to, you know, eight feet, you know, in terms of in terms of width, it sounds like you're kind of more interested, if you would kind of recommend, you know, putting it in the middle as opposed to under the vine.
Jean Bonhotal 21:21 I don't have enough experience with grapes to recommend. So I'm not going to make that recommendation. This is what I'm seeing in the vineyard, the way the growers are choosing to actually experiment and see what is getting the nutrients to the plant at the right time. So what strategy is, is working best. Using the vermicompost in the hole that's been very productive using some of the row middles. I'm not sure about banding I have no experience with that. So I don't want to speak on that. I'm more of the compost production cleaning up the best person. You know, what, when we get the calls, this pile over here, stinks by the neighbor, then I step in and and try to get everything more productive.
Craig Macmillan 22:13 That makes sense that makes tons of sense. One other application that I do think you can speak to is erosion control. What role can compost have an erosion control.
Jean Bonhotal 22:22 We do a lot of work with compost, and I'm gonna share with you some posters that will give you simple compost use instructions. We work in agriculture, we work in erosion control, we work in urban garden gardens and farms. So there's all different possibilities with all different compost and every compost, even the compost that aren't the quality that we want for our vineyard. Every compost has a potential use, even if it's just daily covering a landfill, so that we've taken those metals or those that toxicity out of the environment, and at least concentrated it in smaller places so that maybe it can be recovered at some point when we figure that kind of stuff out.
Craig Macmillan 23:07 And the way this is working is that the compost is binding this soil somehow or is it reducing the impact of the raindrops or what's the mechanism.
Jean Bonhotal 23:17 We do both compost blankets and compost socks and erosion control. So the compost blankets we have blower trucks that can spray compost, it's a big big hose, we spray compost onto a hillside, when we put that blanket down. When the rain comes if the rain comes in, it hits the soil, it hits the soil and it makes mud and that mud starts running down the hill. And that's erosion. When it hits the compost, the compost acts like a sponge. And that sponge will just keep sucking in that moisture. And then slowly release it like a sponge will. And so the plants can use it better and it doesn't create those rivulets and the erosion that other things do.
Craig Macmillan 24:10 What kinds of rates per acre per square yard or what are we talking about?
Jean Bonhotal 24:15 For it depends on per crop. When we put a blanket down, we'll put in out about a inch blanket. So that's a visual, and we want to make sure that it's well covered I'd put one or two inches down easily, because that will start incooperating. Remember I told you about those worms? The worms will come up and start processing some of that material. And that'll only be incorporated in the soil in that way. So we don't actually incorporate we will seed put the blanket down and then we might hydro seed on top of that blanket. And that'll create cover some kind of cover crop whether it depends on our goals. We'll put whatever cover crop we might put red clover on our roadside we might put, you know, depends on where we are what we're putting in, but usually a low grow local plant. So we don't want to take you know, a plant from New York and put it in California, it's not going to produce the same way. We want to make sure that we are in the right conditions. We have the right plantings and all that and Soil and Water Conservation Districts which are all over the country. They give you guidance on what should go on to slopes. What should go into row middles, it depends on the plants though, and cooperative extension does a lot of that, what application do we need for what crop. One of the things that we are finding with soil blends and stuff when we're trying to bring in topsoil topsoil has lots of different definitions, a lot of times it's sand. Because we can't get topsoil, it's very difficult, we've used up a lot of our topsoil, and we don't have that rich earth to bring to someplace else to put that topsoil down. So we're working right now on grow tests to look at what percentage of compost should be mixed with the mineral soil, or with close to mineral soil or with the soil existing soil. And one of the things that we're finding is that we can really use in most for most crops, and for soil sustainability to build those soils, we can use about 50% compost in all of those, and we're getting really good results with crops. It does depend whether we're growing cabbages or grapes, or we really need those soils to be more sustainable. If our soils are sustainable, they'll increase the water holding capacity, you know, through the compost application, but they also help with pest resistance. So we'll have more pest resistance, because we have healthy soils, we have more competitors that are actually able to take things out instead of working in a chemical system where okay, the cut worms came in, and the cut worms are really happy to be working in. There's nothing telling them not to. And similarly with powdery mildews and some of the other diseases, we seem to have better results with having a healthy soil. So not just dust that we've added fertilizer to.
Craig Macmillan 27:32 Sure. And that makes total sense of any there are a lot of folks that are looking at this kind of a holistic plant science, plant physiology approach, which is what you're talking about. And there's a lot of exciting things going on and talking about compost being a part of it is really cool, basically at aout of advice or what one thing would you like people to know as far as their own compost production goes.
Jean Bonhotal 27:58 If you're producing compost, you're a microbe farmer. And that's what you really need to consider create a habitat that they're going to thrive in, and they'll do all the work for you. And that is my best piece of advice to anybody.
Craig Macmillan 28:14 That's great. And where can people find out more about you and your work?
Jean Bonhotal 28:17 I'm with Cornell Waste Management Institute at Cornell University. You can you can google us pretty easily.
Craig Macmillan 28:25 It's easy to find information about you. Yeah, and about the CWMI. So our guest today was Joan Bonhotal. She is the director of the Cornell Waste Management Institute. And she's also Senior Extension Associate with the Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Science section at Cornell University. Lots of great stuff is gonna be in the show notes. Again, we encourage you to look into this topic. It's exciting. There's a lot going on. Wouldn't you agree there's a lot of new science every year on this topic.
Jean Bonhotal 28:51 There is a lot a lot going on in composting, a lot going on in sustainable soil production and if we have sustainable soils, we will be able to grow healthy food and sustain healthy people. So there's just so much going on with all applications of composting.
Craig Macmillan 29:12 Very exciting.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 164: 3 Ways to Build a Strong Brand | Marketing Tip Monday | 09 Jan 2023 | 00:04:02 | |
Did you know that telling your sustainability story can help you sell more wine? Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we share three ways you can build a strong brand so that your customers will remember you. Kathy Kelly, Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management at Penn State University found that describing specific practices and why there are important not only sets you apart from the competition but helps to create an emotional connection with your customers. It can even increase their willingness to pay more for a bottle of sustainable wine! Elements of a brand"Brand identity" is the personality of your business -- it's what people think about when they think of your brand. "Brand awareness" refers to general familiarity with your brand. Both concepts should be taken into consideration when creating a branding strategy. By cultivating recognition and understanding of your brand through design, messaging, and more, you can make your business and your customer experience more memorable. Your brand's name, logo or symbol, tagline, colors, imagery, voice, and more -- this is how your brand is presented to the outside world. Maximize your brand experience by dialing in these key brand features. 3 ways to build a strong brand What makes you so special?Every wine brand has its unique story. Whether it's a business passed down the generations of a family, a hobby that grew into a booming business, what started out as a weekend project for a couple of friends, or a drive to fill a hole in the industry, identifying what makes your brand different from the rest and including elements of this story into your communications and imagery is a great way create a more personal connection with your customers. Define your target audience to help dial in the kind of messaging you want to send through your branding efforts. Do you want to create a playful feel with your brand? Are you after a more sophisticated and elegant aura? Talk to your clients and return customers about why they support your business and what keeps them coming back. Pay attention to the type of messages that seem to resonate most with your audience and clients through engagement and sales activity. Consistency is keyCreate a consistent experience each time a customer interacts with your product or service. This will help to reinforce the personal connection to your brand and maintain a sense of familiarity. Communication channels to consider include your website, tasting room, email newsletters, social media, and packaging. The tone and spirit of your messaging should be consistent to keep your channels harmonized. New year, new opportunitiesPeople want to support brands that share their values. Does your brand's messaging and imagery provide a clear sense of what your brand stands for and the kind of experience it wants to provide your clients? The start of the new year gives us an opportunity to come back from the holidays with a refreshed perspective. It's a good idea to take some time to assess your brand's identity and be sure your messaging is in line with the impression you want to make. This can help you prepare for all of the opportunities in the year ahead to connect with new and returning customers! Stay tuned for more Marketing Tip Mondays, where we will help you explore ways of incorporating your brand's specific sustainable practices into your messaging. Check out the show notes for a link to the interview with Kathy Kelley, links to this article, research on consumer purchasing preferences, to download the seasons of sustainability PDF, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 280: How to Write a Wine Industry Press Release That Actually Gets Picked Up | 07 Aug 2025 | 00:36:45 | |
Want to get your winery featured in the press? Start with a better press release. Erin Kirschenmann, Managing Editor of Wine Business Monthly and founder of Novel Pairings, shares what makes a press release newsworthy. She explains how to tailor your message, capture editors' attention with the five Ws, and why showcasing the human side of your brand matters. Learn how to craft more effective press releases and make your brand stand out. Resources: Vineyard Team Programs: | |||
| 163: Onsite Compost Production Using Vineyard Waste | 05 Jan 2023 | 00:32:07 | |
Like with many projects on a sustainable farm, composting at Niner Wines Estates began with a problem; what could be done with all the pumice from the winemaking operations. Patrick Muran Winemaker at Niner Wine Estates started experimenting with thermal aerobic composting in 2016. With a 200-acre property, the farm has a diverse array of plant material coming from the restaurant garden, cover crops, and vineyards. Patrick explains how they turned a waste stream product into a valuable commodity including what temperature a compost pile must reach, what plant material to include, how to inoculate a new pile, and how long it takes to make top quality compost. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Patrick Moran, winemaker at Niner Wine Estates in Paso Robles, California. And today we're going to talk about composting. Welcome, Patrick.
Patrick Muran 0:07 Thank you, Craig. Happy to be here. And to talk about some compost today.
Craig Macmillan 0:11 Yes, we are. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I want to let everybody know that Patrick and I work together. So this is not the first time that we've talked about this. So I know about what we do. But we're gonna try to get into the details here and try not to forget anything. It's a really cool project that you, you kind of you founded. Correct. You kind of got this whole thing going, right?
Patrick Muran 0:31 Yeah, it was birthed out of a problem of what do we do with all this pumice waste and ruin to kind of a passion project of figuring out how to unlock the keys and composting all this waste that we had?
Craig Macmillan 0:49 So when did it start? How long have you been doing this?
Patrick Muran 0:52 So this started late 2016, early 2017, we start building piles, Gosh, 5, 6 years now?
Craig Macmillan 1:01 Yeah, in a minute. So the idea here was that you had a lot of waste that was coming in, or grape material that was coming in and you wanted to do something with it. What were you doing with it prior to accomplishing with it?
Patrick Muran 1:12 I mean, I've been at this now, gosh, almost 24 years, you know, when I started, we had our big 40 yard roll off dumpsters getting dropped off and are filling them up with grape waste and pumice and stems and all that kind of stuff. But you know, we're scheduling trucks and paying for these trucks to be on the road and do all this material and material is getting stinky out there in the yard, flies are starting to fester, we had, you know, a similar problem here. Here I'm paying for a truck to come drop off this dumpster that's going to kind of make a mess and in our yard for weeks on end. And then pay to have that material removed. It was a kind of an, I love elegant solutions in this was elegant solution to a problem where we can turn a waste stream product into you know, a valuable commodity.
Craig Macmillan 2:04 Did you have an experience with composting prior to that?
Patrick Muran 2:07 No, not to the degree of what we're doing now. My notion of composting was probably like most people's it's like, oh, just chuck it in a in a black container or something in the yard and forget about it for six months and then come back later. And all of a sudden, it's it's all done. That was more or less my notion of what composting was. But when you're talking thermoaerobic composting, to the NOP like organic standards, it's a little bit of a different feel.
Craig Macmillan 2:36 How did you educate yourself about this? This is interesting to me this is you went from zero to now 100.
Patrick Muran 2:41 Yeah. With Cal Poly, actually Cal Poly had an extension program. And they brought in Dr. Elaine Ingham, and she did a seminar on composting, thermalaerobic composting in particular. And it just blew my mind like because I'm I'm microbiologist by by schooling, you know, I spent my year in college studying microbiology, and she was talking my jam, like she was talking all the biology in the soils. And in this compost that was promoting plant growth. So she she really kicked me off on this path. And, and so I just started educating myself on how to do it properly, and how to the biology and the ecology that supports your plant that you're trying to grow.
Craig Macmillan 3:33 So did you already have a plan for what you were going to use this stuff for?
Patrick Muran 3:37 No, I just knew if it was done properly, we could definitely use it all over the place. Like all of a sudden you've got this thing that can grow. But we did have a target because we have were growing grapes in a world. Our compost is going to help support the life that grapevines.
Craig Macmillan 3:56 When you started, were you using just pomice or were you adding other material to it?
Patrick Muran 4:02 No, I learned pretty early on that the more diversity of your ingredients that go into that compost pile, the more diversity you'll have as far as microorganisms, bacteria and fungi and protozoa and all these these different layers of of organisms. And I figured out pretty early on that we're going to need a diverse stream of sources to kind of hit our target.
Craig Macmillan 4:28 And where did you source that stuff from? Was it from the property? Did you bring stuff in from the outside?
Patrick Muran 4:33 Yeah, I mean, we've got over 200 acres here. So with a with a garden, cover crop growing, you know, we've got kind of a diverse array of materials, it was just a matter of collecting them your and making sure they're kind of staged and ready to go.
Craig Macmillan 4:54 What's the timeframe from when you have let's say pomice from harvest until you have something that you can use?
Patrick Muran 4:59 Yeah, so the ideal timeline for promised to complete product is about 60 days minimum is 15. But 60 days is the point of which you get that rich, organic material that's consumed all it's easy foods, and you get a little more diverse array of microorganisms in there.
Craig Macmillan 5:20 Are you measuring the microorganisms? Are you sending samples out or something to get an idea of what's there?
Patrick Muran 5:26 Yeah, we were doing both I do it here, or I was doing counts like bacterial counts, and, and fungal counts kind of fungal biomass and bacterial biomass. It's a little labor intensive. And after doing it enough times, you can kind of get a good sense of what the populations are, by easy look under a microscope, we are also sending out to an outfit called Earth Fort where they'll do the assessment for us, and then just kind of give us the results.
Craig Macmillan 5:56 So is that how you know when it's done? Or is there other cues to you? You go, hey, all right, we're there now?
Patrick Muran 6:02 Yeah, the cues that I use really are color temperature and and sort of the touch and feel of it all he can you get a sense of that digestion is complete, and you get into a form that really does look, I mean, it looks like 70%, dark cocoa chocolate bar, you know, hit that. And the whole pile has a very consistent makeup. So it's just there, you know.
Craig Macmillan 6:30 So you mentioned easy foods, what would those maybe be in those are things that the microorganisms are consuming? Is that right?
Patrick Muran 6:37 I would go back a step, I think of this is a lot like making wine, you know, you have the materials, you're starting kind of an inoculum, or a biomass that is going to grow, that's going to consume the nutrients that are available. You know, as a winemaker, there's a lot of parallels in composting as there is to making wine, you know, tank size or vessel size can inform you on how much heat will be generated and how fast fermentation may complete. Same goes for composting, the size of the compost pile will dictate kind of the thermal insulation that can take place. So you can kind of create a lot of thermal mass and a big pile. The next step is food. You know, we think of these two simple nitrogen compost, you think the carbon to nitrogen ratios. So again, nitrogen is your food source, those readily consumable foods, sugars, for example, really, you know, feed into the bacterial populations that just want an easy hit of sugar, and they go, so those are going to be the easy foods, the more complex foods, and it's again, similar to, to fermentation, you've got diammonium phosphate, you're now your DAP is like just putting gasoline on a fermentation. And you have more complex organic foods like for fermato or whatnot, yeast derived but they're much more complex or not as readily available, and they'll take longer to digest and release that energy. So then you got your food source. So I think carbon to nitrogen ratios, composting, I think of yeast to simple nitrogen and fermentation.
Craig Macmillan 8:23 So you're using a lot of the same kind of conceptual ideas that you use for making wine for making compost, it's there's some similarities in terms of kind of functionality in your mind.
Patrick Muran 8:32 And figuring out the proportions of those different components. And kind of the momentum, you know, that can be generated by it is really the key to unlocking a successful compost operation, as it would be with a successful fermentation operation too.
Craig Macmillan 8:50 When I was first learning about this topic, there was like a recipe that you were supposed to kind of follow. And one of the elements there was manure, so you had to have manure in the mix doesn't sound like you're doing that because there's not cattle on site.
Patrick Muran 9:02 That's right. And we've stayed away from manure for the moment because we'd like to use whatever's available on the property. And high nitrogen can come from other things other than manure, which includes things like alfalfa, all your nitrogen fixing plants, alfalfa, some clovers, but also seeds have a fairly high nitrogen content, just so happens to be got a lot of those coming out of these fermenters. So we use seeds as a high nitrogen component, they act a little differently because they're kind of a slow burn as opposed as opposed to a fast burn. They definitely will contribute to that heat to that energy release that temperature zone that you're trying to hit.
Craig Macmillan 9:49 Do the seeds breakdown because I've seen pomice compost piles before where the seeds just didn't change. Do they break down for you?
Patrick Muran 9:56 Yeah, they do break down they're not they're not fully in kind of destructured, you know, they're still like this funny shell, they almost look like a popcorn, they swell a little bit and kind of spilled some of their guts, but kind of the shell sort of remains of the seed. So they definitely have a different look and feel than when they started. But they do add a nice volume filling component, something like perlite or something like that, you know, they kind of fill, fill out the compost, make it a little fluff here.
Craig Macmillan 10:29 So even though there's this material left behind actually has a role that actually does something for the way the pile behaves, and what it will do eventually, it sounds like. On the manure topic, we have a new aspect to the system, the ecosystem at Niner. And that's chickens. Have you thought about or are you using manure from the chickens?
Patrick Muran 10:48 Not yet, just because we haven't needed to. This is what the beauty of this whole system is, you're getting rid of this waste as it is, you know, you're getting rid of garden waste, when you throw it in a green waste bin or you throw it in a, you know, a compost pile, we're getting rid of chicken manure as you clean up the chicken house and things of that nature. So you're collecting it, so why not use it. So all of these different streams are going to come into play in the chicken manure will come into play as well. It's just a matter of getting the material there staging it to making sure using using the right proportions at the right time, we just so happened to have worked out a formula with what we have currently. That's really nice and consistent. And chicken manure will change it a little bit. So we'll have to tweak it a little bit to get everything just right.
Craig Macmillan 11:38 Another thing that I believe you've been bringing into the system is chipped grapevines, and also material from landscaping. Again, I was under the impression that things with high lignin did not compost very well. Have you started with that material? Or is are things happening? Are you looking at stuff what's happened in there?
Patrick Muran 11:54 Yeah, so the high carbon source. So that's things like any sort of wood material, wood chips, hedgings anything that's going to have a lot of that cellulose hemicellulose. Like those really difficult to digest components, those can definitely be incorporated. And we like a nice proportion of those because they are great fungal foods, and we're trying to grow fungi as well on these compost piles. Those are a great source of fungal foods. And those do decompose, they take a little longer, we can give a little more time to the compost piles in terms of digestion, because you'll get that fungal push towards the latter half of composting. As they start speeding off of those partially digested woody components and high carbon sources.
Craig Macmillan 12:50 Do you have to inoculate the piles?
Patrick Muran 12:52 You can totally kick them off if you make compost teas. And so basically you take a finished pile, make some tea, and then use that tea to inoculate a new pile that's like Like imagine and throwing it in, it's really kick things off. The other way is to simply just take a finished compost pile and use a small amount as an inoculum. Like you would fermentation an inoculant you with the yeast and innoculate you with all the stuff that I've grown up with this previous pile to get you started right away, or like a native ferment and you can kind of sit around and wait for it to it's kind of naturally get some momentum, it takes a little longer certainly get that going as well.
Craig Macmillan 13:38 What is your method here? So you're collecting material, and then you have to make it into a pile of some kind. And then you have to manage the pile? Right? So there's things like moisture and temperature, correct. What specifically are you doing to manage the pile? And specifically, what are you looking at in terms of the variables that tell you oh, I need to do this or that.
Patrick Muran 13:55 To start wit we start with about four different streams of materials. We're starting with wood chips, or woody material, high carbon source, we're starting with green waste, which is anything that was cut green. So garden waste that was cut green, we even took grass clippings from you know, when they mow or around here as long as it was green. That's going to be one stream. The other stream is going to be rake. So anything that came out of destemers, it's going to kind of live in one vein. And then lastly, we're going to do the skins and seeds. So anything that came out of a fermentation tank that was fully fermented so they don't now we have our seed component. So we just treat each one of those streams as a different source. And we'll compose it's about 40% of woody material and we consider the rake is of woody material. So we'll go rake plus wood chips that's going to compose about 40% of the material. The green waste stream is going to be about 30% of that material. Okay, so that's going to be in those green waste, clippings and whatnot. And then lastly, we'll use the last 30% of the seed, and skin material, all the pumps that came out of tanks as a string. So we're going to take those components in those proportions and assemble it and kind of mix it up, we make windrows out of this, and they're roughly four feet tall, four to five feet tall, and about eight feet wide, we're gonna try and mix this as well as you can, and get moisture in there. Moisture is really the thing that sets this whole stage up to digest. I mean, you like any living organism, like you can't live without water, neither can these organisms. And moisture really is the key component to keeping that. We're going to try and strive for about 40% humidity or 40% moisture content. That's a touch and feel thing. Like you can really get scientific on how much moisture goes into a pile. But really, once you learn touching, feeling, squeezing the material, you'll get a sense of moisture, Woody materials really difficult to soak up. So we try and pre wet that a little bit. Seeds and green waste usually has sufficient moisture content to get things started. So mix it into a pile, mix it into those windrows. And then we no longer have covering piles at this point. So we just let them be out there. But if you have the right components in the right size, moisture, and composition, they'll kick off, I mean, we'll be up to 130 in gosh, within three days, certainly, we'll be right into a nice thermal compost, and then we're going to be turning it and we use a bucket on a tractor. It's not ideal. Ideally, you have a compost turner that aerated and really does a nice job of mixing. But we felt we got we can get by with a with a bucket on it on a tractor. And we do it by just simply folding that pile laterally. So if you think of a windrow, like pointing down, basically, one direction, we're going to come in perpendicular to that windrow, take kind of the outside piece, we're going to fold it up over the top, then we're going to kind of try and pull the core which is the hottest piece. And that's going to be become kind of the back end of that windrow. So you're kind of taking these in different sections. A better way to put it is if you think of a triangle, cut it into four parts. So you're going to have like the two wings, the top in the core. So you're trying to get the inside core cycled out, and you're trying to get the wings, whether it's the top or the outside sides to become the core, say you're just trying to fold union. So you're cycling the material through the core, that's basically the key. It is temperature and moisture determined. Typically were like every three to five days, but you'll find it needs more rigorous turning in the beginning. And then you can kind of back off towards the tail end.
Craig Macmillan 18:18 When do you get the water in? And how do you do that? I've seen different solutions to that problem. What do you put it in? How do you do it?
Patrick Muran 18:25 We've tried multiple solutions to this, the ideal is very small droplets. Like that's the ideal if you can get up a fine misting spray, that would be the best solution. Getting moisture in we use a fire hose, a water wagon. And that fire hose is able to emit you know a fine spray. So we go in with a water wagon, fire hose and a pump just basically wet out all the outside and then immediately turn it that's kind of the key is not set. It's just trial and error to figure out how much water do I apply? You know how what does this need to get? And that just has taken us a little bit of time to understand. You know, in the beginning it is more difficult to wet up. In the end. It's it's much easier to wet up knowing when and how much to apply is kind of that's what's taken us time to learn.
Craig Macmillan 19:21 Yeah, practice. You mentioned temperature you mentioned 103 degrees Fahrenheit, what what are the temperature bounds? What do you have to hit? Why do you have to hit it? What's too hot? How often do you measure that? How do you measure it?
Patrick Muran 19:33 temperature requirements are over 131. 131 to 170 for a minimum of 15 days. And you have to turn a minimum of five times in that 15 days. We use just a long stainless temperature probe. It's three feet, even a PVC sleeve and basically inserted into the core each day just to see where you stand. And then you're we do that kind of along the windrow in different spots, and kind of get an average of what's happening throughout the pile. And then secondly, we dig a little gopher holes into it like basically trying to dig down, or to get a sense of what the moisture content is like. And so we'll go dig through these piles, see where they stand, see what the moisture contents like, and then make a determination as to whether it needs water and turning and whatnot.
Craig Macmillan 20:31 You just dig in there with your hand, you already have a tool?
Patrick Muran 20:35 Now, I mean, it's it's, like I said, it's kind of nice. It's a touchy feely kind of thing. And you get a real good sense of what the moisture content and the different layers you can you'll find like moisture sort of will reside on the outside, but the core can become kind of dry, because that's the hottest spot. So just using your your old hands to kind of get in there is sufficient.
Craig Macmillan 21:04 Oh, when I forgot ot ask, What do you been using the compost for? Where's the finished product been going?
Patrick Muran 21:09 Right? Yeah, that's kind of going both into our garden or vegetable garden that we use for the restaurant and out in the vineyard. So they're applying it both aspects. And then I'm also making some compost tea or extract that I'm using to apply in the vineyard as well. The whole idea is, is really biology, you're trying to build the biology to support the plant that you're wanting to grow. And this is a great way to get the microorganisms that do the nutrient cycling and promote water holding capacity of the soil, suppress weeds. I mean, it's it's there's so many wins in the successful application of compost in those microorganisms to the soil. It's pretty cool stuff.
Craig Macmillan 21:57 Are you measuring that to see if there's changes over the time? Like maybe you're doing some kind of trial or experiment?
Patrick Muran 22:03 Yeah, yeah, we're working on on trying to assess this from a biological standpoint, what we're doing, what type of impact is that making? And how do you quantify that? There's a lot of discussion on that right now, what organisms matter what organisms don't matter? What is that nutrient cycling? Like? are you introducing harmful organisms to the, to the process? Yeah, we're trying to get answers both from a metabolic standpoint, just like metabolically, what's the activity in that soil, and then we're also doing it just by cell counts, and biological counts out there. Ultimately, we'd like to see long term what the impact is on the vine, as well. So we're trying to segment out different different blocks in our vineyard and assess what the yield is like what the cane weights are like what you know, the growth is like, and possibly even water holding capacity of the soil in the future.
Craig Macmillan 23:08 What is the number one like challenge or obstacle that you've had to overcome with this whole program?
Patrick Muran 23:12 It's like anything, just just getting off the ground, you know, like trying, failing, trying and failing. Doing it over and over again, it did take some time to get comfortable with like these types of assessments because I don't have like the analytical tools like to do it. So there is a little bit of a touch feel component. So just being comfortable going out there and saying, we need moisture, we need 200 gallons on this pile, you know, it needs to be turned today, you know, that sort of stuff, keeping things from going anaerobic is is really key that promotes a loss of nutrients, organisms that that are not going to help your plan all these things and keeping things in an aerobic manner on that aerobic side is, is very important as well. So it's just trial and error and getting those compositions moisture and size.
Craig Macmillan 24:11 That sounds like patience is an important part of this little in the willingness to keep trying, which I think is an important.
Patrick Muran 24:17 Wine making should be a good base of knowledge because it's also an act of patience. You know, these these compost piles will take a couple of months. I mean, fermentations and aging takes a couple of years.
Craig Macmillan 24:30 I do love the overlap. I've never thought of it this way. But I really do love the love the idea that the kind of the training and experience in one field can apply to another than some of the same kind of concepts in terms of like, hey, I have something that's alive, and I need to keep it alive. And I need to be patient as it does its thing. It reminds me of like a sluggish fermat you just have faith. You're gonna get through it. You know, just keep keep trying and try different things. Is there one piece of advice that you'd give someone who to start producing compost on site, either at the vineyard or the winery.
Patrick Muran 25:03 Yeah, I mean, I, my advice would really be just to start, like just getting a sense of even a small pile, like something you can manage and screw up and not have much consequence, just start small. It will help inform you on, like how you can shift the dynamic, based upon what you add to it, you know how much moisture it takes to kind of get this thing together. And then also recognize when you scale, things are going to change a little bit, because the size is going to change and the whole, the whole dynamic is going to change when to scale to like a windrow size. Just as get started, like we started with wire, mesh kind of hardware cloth piles built on pallets basically and, and just learn from it. And it was a bit of work. But I mean, you could do a really small one in in the yard, just to get a sense of it, keeping it aerobic learning the kind of the warning signs of when things go anaerobic, keeping consistent moisture content, that kind of stuff, you'll know if you got it right, or you got it wrong. I mean, it's, it's pretty apparent. And we and we screwed plenty up and re composted, um, you know, a few times over each time you learn a little bit from the process.
Craig Macmillan 26:22 Where can people find out more about you and more about what you do.
Patrick Muran 26:25 I mean, as far as education goes, I would really reach out to either Davis or Cal Poly, find out what they're doing, they'll give you a nice baseline where to start, and maybe the education that can help you not learn the hard way, I would really go to those groups first. Obviously, there's a lot of online type of stuff. And this is this is a dangerous thing. So I would really pick maybe some organic standards, there's some good worksheets on making organic compost put out by the NOP like National Organic Standards and, and things of that nature, that would be a good place to start. Because you could go down a YouTube rabbit hole with thermal composting and the different ways I think that was my struggle to begin with was the subjectivity it became a subjective form. And it's like, wow, no, I think that there's a little more, there's a little more precision here that than just again, throwing it in a bucket and leaving it for six months. And coming back, there is a little more science to it.
Craig Macmillan 27:30 And I do want to underline that there is so much so much more information and much higher quality information than there wasn't even 10 years ago. And so there's a lot of resources out there. And I think you're right, you have to be selective and decide what stuff is useful. And going to folks that have you know, the background and the science behind it. And there's a lot of that there. And so that's, I think we're living in what's going to become a golden age of composting here. There's more and more people do it. And there's more and more experienced this more and more ways of trying it. I think that's really exciting. And I really compliment you for the work that you've put in and sticking with it because like you said, you have to be patient and you have to try things and you're gonna fail and you have to just keep going. That's how you learn. You know, you gotta you gotta crawl before you walk, walk before you run. But that's our time for today. Our guest today was Patrick Muran, winemaker at Niner Wine Estates where he's been composting material on site for quite a while now has learned a ton and I really appreciate you being on the podcast, Patrick.
Patrick Muran 28:22 Absolutely. Craig happy to happy to be here and happy to be supportive of anybody out there trying this and want to reach out to me do whatever I can to help steer you out of the potholes.
Craig Macmillan 28:35 Well, we will have a lot of information also on the end links on the site. So there's a lot of resources out there.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 162: 3 Places to Talk About Sustainability in Your Marketing | Marketing Tip Monday | 26 Dec 2022 | 00:03:50 | |
"In North America, and the U.S. particularly, sustainability has grown from a nice-to-have to a key trigger for consumers," according to Food Business News. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we share three places where you can create a story narrative around your sustainable practices to drive sales. 1. OnlineConsumers are increasingly using the internet and social media to find and share their favorite brands. So, bolster up your website like these two brands. Castoro Cellars has a dedicated page on their website complete with a video showcasing their solar arrays, an image of their recent environmental award, and an explanation on what sustainable agriculture is. Another great example is the Farming for the Future blog post by Pisoni Vineyards. This article includes beautiful photography of their insectary, the tools they use to reduce water, and how they care for their team by providing competitive wages, health insurance, and excellent training. Your website is the perfect place to showcase the sustainable practices that you use. Talk with your farmer, winemaker, owner, and the whole team to gather up stories that are specific to your brand. Pair them with nice photography to give your customers a peek behind the scenes of your great wine. If you are SIP Certified, you can also include the logo on your website with a link to the SIP Certified website to encourage shoppers to learn more about your practices and the requirements for certification. 2. Off-PremiseYou can also showcase your sustainability off-premise. These channels include any place your wine can be seen outside of your winery or tasting room. With so many consumers purchasing from physical retail outlets and online stores, it's clear that promoting your message of sustainability on your physical product or at the store shelf is vital. Work with retailers to set up a sustainable wine section or to add shelf hangers with information on sustainability below your bottles. Of course, if you are SIP Certified you can include the logo on your wine label as well. Food and Beverage Insights reports third-party certification is increasingly important with consumers; "The idea of 'responsible consumerism' is growing as Americans are turning their dollars toward companies and brands that are backed by a commitment to bettering the planet for generations to come." 3. Staff TrainingDon't forget to train your team. Your customer-facing staff are the front lines for consumer education. Training them to speak about your sustainable actions is easy! We offer a free online training course that anyone can complete to brush up on all things sustainability. It even includes a fun quiz to test your knowledge. If you love these episodes, they are another great way for your team to learn about effective ways to incorporate the message of sustainability into everyday customer-facing conversations. If you did not know, we also offer these in a newsletter format so you can sign up to get marketing tips delivered right to your inbox twice a month. If you want to learn more about how storytelling can help you sell more wine, check out our interview with Kathy Kelley of Penn State University. She explains how understanding why people drink wine allows you to use their attitudes and behaviors to improve your marketing to keep your customers coming back. Check out the show notes for a link to the interview with Kathy Kelley, links to this article, research on consumer purchasing preferences, to download the seasons of sustainability PDF, and sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| 161: Use Storytelling to Sell More Wine | 15 Dec 2022 | 00:22:25 | |
Understanding why people drink wine allows you to use their attitudes and behaviors to improve your marketing to keep your customers coming back. This research is exactly what Kathy Kelley, Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management at Penn State University loves to do. In her studies, she has found that sustainability is very important to customers however it can mean different things to different people. While 7 out of 10 adults in the United States consider purchasing food and beverage with a sustainability component a priority, one-fourth of these respondents could not articulate sustainability. This gives the industry a great opportunity to better communicate what sustainability means. Communicating sustainability should be incorporated into a brand's DNA from point A to point B through all marketing channels including face-to-face, social media, print, and website. Storytelling is a great way to convey your brand values because consumers are more likely to remember stories. By describing specific practices and why they are important, you set yourself apart from the competition and create an emotional connection with your consumers. Kathy's research on sharing cover cropping practices found that customers were willing to pay one to four dollars more per bottle after learning about the specific sustainable practices. Listen in for more tips on how to determine your customer demographic and refine your marketing. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 I'm your host, Craig Macmillan and with us today is Kathy Kelly. She is professor of horticultural marketing and retail business management at Penn State University. Kathy, thanks for being here.
Kathy Kelley 0:08 Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation.
Craig Macmillan 0:11 Tell us a little bit about the work that you do and where your kind of research interests lie.
Kathy Kelley 0:15 So I've been a faculty member at Penn State since 2001. And I have a teaching extension research appointment, all three of my aspects deal with some sort of marketing component. And my research, I really became very interested in learning about why people drink wine, how to kind of use those attitudes and behaviors to help smaller producers, medium sizeed wineries, focusing on the consumer and use that to their their benefit. So I've really kind of done a bit of research in the mid Atlantic area to understand why we buy and then what type of product characteristics and tasting room components really make that an experience for consumers that the want to come back again and again to the facility.
Craig Macmillan 0:58 That is super interesting. So based on consumer research, how much do consumers care about the origins of the products they consume in terms of sustainability.
Kathy Kelley 1:06 So sustainability is very important to consumers and more so with the younger generation, then maybe generations that are a little bit more mature. But sustainability can mean quite a few things to many different people. Sustainability not only refers to the environment, but to the social, and the economic sustainability pieces of that three piece stool, but within one economic sustainability. One person may consider sustainability and include organic or certified organic foods, and another may not. So there is an interest in say sustainability. But there's some confusion as to what it really means. Talking with the students in my class, who are Gen Z's young millennials, you know, they really are interested in sustainability. But like the consumers at large, they might not be able to articulate it. We also have this component where consumers are not really that knowledgeable or a portion of consumers not really that knowledgeable about how their food is grown. So when you put the two together, you can see that the confusion grows even more. In Pennsylvania, for example, because of our excessive rain and humidity, it may not be possible for us to grow grapes organically. But we can use other certain types of sustainable measures, like cover crops to control weeds, and use other production methods to control diseases. Or we could use lighter weight glass bottles or be a recycling center for consumers to bring their wine bottles back to and then we use those pieces to inform consumers that we do partake, and we do incorporate certain sustainable activities in the wine production for the industry. And then we need to craft the message that it makes sense to the audience. But I do have to point out that there's been quite a few reports published recently about how sustainability is becoming more important to consumers, and one if I could point it out as morning consult, and they published a report in September called what sustainability means to consumers. And they divided the report up into different types of chapters, if you will, based on the topic and for food and beverages. They found that 7 in 10 us adults would consider purchasing food and beverages as a priority if it has a sustainability component to it. However, when they asked survey participants to describe what it means to be sustainable, one in four said that they didn't know they couldn't articulate it. Others referred to the packaging with such as reducing the amount of filler or the the types of components used to package the product to ship it to the store to the consumer. And others talked about how it was recycling that the facility recycled materials that they didn't use, or any scrap or call material was recycled rather than thrown in the trash. And then some talked about how it was less waste when growing food. So there's quite a bit of difference as far as what consumers say sustainability is. But we know that there's interest, it's just that we need to do a better job of communicating to consumers what sustainability means in the food and beverage space.
Craig Macmillan 3:59 And that sounds like a larger scale, picture communicating just kind of in general, what about a specific company or brand? Obviously, differentiation in the marketplace is crucial to the success of any brand. And this is often done by a compelling story to the consumer about the brand. We also might be telling a story from an industry standpoint, why is it important for a winery or vineyard to include the sustainability related aspects of their business in their story?
Kathy Kelley 4:24 So I'm a real proponent of of storytelling. Storytelling is a great way to convey to consumers the business's purpose or its why, who they serve and the solutions they provide. And we are more likely to remember stories than facts. So if a wine brand has a compelling story to tell about what they're doing to minimize their impact on the environment, they should certainly use it and they should share that information. But the store needs to be authentic. If a brand's story is not genuine, and it is clear that the sustainable efforts are implemented merely to boost their profitability, consumers can tell and could likely decide not To pursue that brand. But brands who make sustainability a central part of their business need to identify consumers with the same interest and learn more about these consumers, these likely buyers, so they need to learn about their needs, their wants and behaviors that can help them develop the narrative, it would then be ideal to ask likely buyers with an interest in sustainability to react to the story, so that it does make sense to them so that the words that are used are appropriate. And then this information can help wine businesses determine whether the message resonates with consumers. And when it does, it becomes more powerful than just providing facts.
Craig Macmillan 5:38 Now, is that a face to face human to human kind of communication? You mentioned that you have to have some response from the consumer or are there other communication at a distance ways that you can engage to other consumers interested or how to get through them?
Kathy Kelley 5:52 Absolutely. So in the tasting room it makes sense that it would be somebody behind the tasting bar sharing the information, kind of striking up a conversation, seeing what's important to the consumer talking about certain sustainability efforts that the wine brand is doing. But also social media is really key with the ability to have you know, images and video, and even you know, one and two way conversations with you know, different platforms, it should be incorporated into the brand's DNA from point A to point B, which would be the consumer, it really has to flow through, it has to be authentic, there's just so many ways to kind of focus in on what that component is that that is so meaningful to the brand. And it's an emotional thing to you know, consumers are so emotional, emotional beings, that when a wine brand is able to convey the emotion as to why sustainability is so important to them, then that builds a stronger connection between the wine brand and the consumer. And the consumer is more likely to respond in a positive way. And you know, frequent that brand tasting room or purchase that brands product.
Craig Macmillan 6:58 That's a question I hadn't thought of until you just mentioned it. And that is emotion, do we know very much about what kinds of emotion are a tap to sustainability products or how emotions are attached to a company, and it's talking about sustainability.
Kathy Kelley 7:12 So I don't have that particular data set in front of me. But emotion is very important to any type of purchase that we make. 94% of our decision making processes based on our emotion that we use emotion in some capacity to make a decision whether we're going to particular pharmacy to just get medication, because it's an absolute need, or something like wine, where it's more of a pleasure seeking type of product, or we're seeking pleasure by purchasing it or as the after effect of of making that purchase. Emotion is very important. There is research that shows that about 64, 65% of both men and women have stated that at one time, they've either developed an emotional bond with a brand, or an emotional bond with a brand's product. So emotion is very important in our decision making process.
Craig Macmillan 8:02 Is it a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling of happy, positive feelings is it a feeling of obligation? Like, how do I know what I'm feeling? I just feeling? What is it that I'm feeling kind of specifically, I guess, do we know do we have any idea?
Kathy Kelley 8:20 So I don't have access to the literature. And I haven't really looked at the exact emotions that sustainability. What particulars of an emotional branch of state sustainability resonate with consumers, I can take a guess. But that's about it.
Craig Macmillan 8:34 That's exactly I can take a guess I feel the same way. I've had a lot of experience working in tasting rooms, including recently. And when you communicate with the customer, sometimes you get a really clear picture of kind of what they're about. And other times you really can they're very opaque. And yet you know, that those processes are going on? It's just hard to tell. And it's hard to tell which what processes can interfere with other processes and which ones are gonna be most effective. So you mentioned a little bit about social media, website, stuff in the tasting room. Does describing specific sustainable farming practices make a difference in consumer attitudes towards a product do you think? And are consumers interested in specifics?
Kathy Kelley 9:12 So I believe that describing the specific sustainability practices used in the vineyard to grow grapes is important for a few reasons, it's likely that you'll be able to educate consumers about a topic that they may not be familiar with, or it kind of sparked some interest in them where they you've used some key words, and they understand that because that's in their vocabulary, and also provides a level of transparency. You're not just saying that you're sustainable, but you're talking about the different steps you're taking to be sustainable, and it's part of the storytelling process. So for example, we conducted a survey and we published the results in the International Journal Wine Business Research and 2021. And we had identified wine consumers who were likely to sample wine from vineyards using cover crops as a way to suppress weeds and reduce herbicide applications. And we felt it was important that our survey participants responded to questions based on a specific scenario. We just didn't want to say that the wines were sustainable. We wanted to talk about what we were doing in the vineyard to make them sustainable, so that we will get more accurate data. So we did not want them to just make assumptions about why we use cover crops, but we told them specifically that they were to suppress weeds. So before they responded to questions about their likelihood to sample such wines, they read a short passage about herbicides being used in the vineyard, and that they were used to maintain a weed free zone under the grape vines, but that herbicides could potentially leak in the groundwater and cause soil erosion that by planting cover crops under the grape vines, we may be able to control weeds and reduce chemical input or eliminate herbicide use overall, this is something that's being used by Makayla Centinari. She's an Associate Professor of viticulture at Penn State University. And this is what a good portion of her research is on how do you suppress weeds in a vineyard using cover crops. We were also interested in investigating what consumers are who as a consumer group, we're willing to sample wines made from these grapes, but also pay $1 to cover the costs of implementing the cover crops. Because we know that based on some cost of production materials that we had, and some statistics, that it was more expensive to plant cover crops and to maintain them as opposed to applying herbicides to control the weeds. So we did have to provide that information to consumers. Because it's very much part of the purchasing process. Not only is it what the label on the bottle, the wine looks like but it's also the price that the wine sells for. So we did find consumers who were not only just willing to pay $1, more for that bottle of wine, because we had told them about the benefits of using cover crops in the vineyard. But we actually found segments of consumers who are willing to pay up to $4 more for the bottle of wine. So for us, we think it's very much that we have to provide the situation for the consumer, not just for the study. But for other studies as well, I don't think that we would get as rich have a dataset, if we just did sustainable or grown using x, we have to explain why that is. And again, it's a little bit of understanding what the consumer want. But it's also a little bit of explaining to consumers what what the product is. So it works for research. And that's something that I would strongly suggest wineries do as well, being very transparent. Talk about the specifics. Again, there's many different benefits to the business as to why you would want to do so.
Craig Macmillan 12:33 you know, probably don't have that on this. But just just to kind of talk about it for a minute. How much energy do you think a consumer is willing to put in to understand or conceive or think about these kinds of things? And the reason that I ask is, I think most of us at least being for myself have a relatively short attention span. And so I might seek out a product or try to find a product with a particular set of qualities like oh, this is, you know, less impact on the planet, or there's a social justice component to it. Personally, I'm only willing to go so far to put in so much energy. What is your take on that? How, how much energy do you think people were willing to put in? And so I guess what I'm asking is, how much of a window do we have? Either in terms of text or time or imagery, or ease of access to information? What's the what's the window like? Do you think?
Kathy Kelley 13:20 Yeah, so I think that's a pretty important question to consider. Because when I'm thinking about the students in my class, and there's data on this, that somebody has suggested that the millennials have an attention span of 12 seconds, Gen Z, the young, who are younger than Millennials have about eight seconds, as far as an attention span. And then when it comes to the internet, both groups having shorter attention span, so it kind of goes along with the what do you do as far as promoting your product to your core group, your target market, first of all, you have to identify them. So if I was going to craft this sustainable message for a winery, I would first of all understand what wine consumers like dislike, and then find that segment within those consumers that are interested in sustainability. I'm never going to get everybody to want to buy sustainable wine. So I have to focus on those where it makes the most sense the likely buyers, and then I have to talk to them about how do you learn about particular types of issues? How do you learn about sustainable? How interested are you? What are your habits. Do you recycle? Do you not do X, Y or Z because of some sort of limitation or barrier and me as a winery, if it deals with wine? Can I make that offer you a solution for that. The students in my class again, those millennials, those Gen z's, they they really can flip the switch really quickly on whether the information is going to grab them or not. So with social media, luckily, photos do such a great service to us to convey a message so it's very much about crafting a visual that that is going to capture their attention and then hopefully be the hook for them to read more either in the description the caption or another website, the frequency of how how many times you send that message out, you've got to kind of think about what the social media suggestions are for number of Instagram posts, when to post them. It is a mix of knowing who your audience is knowing what words or emotions to use in the message, and then knowing how to craft that message so that it hits the right target audience at the right time, and is compelling enough to convert them to a buyer or to seek you out for more information.
Craig Macmillan 15:25 How do I find out who my consumer is?
Kathy Kelley 15:29 So there are acouple of resources online that are free. Some have particular types of data that's behind a paywall. But there are certainly ways to find information about consumers without mentioning a particular type of association or organization that provides information for free. Certainly, if you search the web for in quotes, wind marketing, wind consumer, or you set up Google Alerts to find that information for you, you'll find that there's information that is even published in our mainstream wine business, wine marketing journals. A good deal of information is published by the restaurant industry, or you know, you may not be just looking at wine data, you may want to seek out data about consumers of all alcoholic beverages or spirit drinkers or beer drinkers different information is out there, just take a little hunting then to find the specifics. But then once you find those resources, I think that you, you just continue to return to them. Certainly other options include paying a consultant to do research. But also winery should invest their time into, you know, looking at their list of subscribers, if they have a news, e newsletter, or if they have some sort of membership club and really using that those names and surveying them, asking them to learn more about specific topics. And not just sustainability. But other types of topics that will if they had that information, and they gathered it from likely buyers, would help them in being more economically sustainable.
Craig Macmillan 17:02 That's encouraging, because I was afraid I was gonna have to spend a year and a half with focus groups. Other people take care of that for us. Thank goodness, that's great.
Kathy Kelley 17:13 And so the data might be skewed to perhaps California just because of the size of the population. But you can then use the information kind of think about it, see what could potentially work for your business and then query your own consumers to learn about their their attitudes and behaviors.
Craig Macmillan 17:31 Well, I guess today has been Kathy Kelly. She's professor of horticultural marketing and retail business management at Penn State University. This has been great thank you for for sharing all of this work and knowledge that you have. Where can people find out more about you or related topics?
Kathy Kelley 17:45 Well, thank you again for inviting me. My information is published as far as the types of articles that are right based on research that we've done, and then just general articles about wine marketing can be found on the Penn State Extension website. Our grape and wine team has a number of articles from viticulture technology to the ones that I write on marketing and business management, and then others that kind of fall in between those three main topics, feel free to reach out to me anytime.
Craig Macmillan 18:13 Fantastic. And we will have those links in the episode page on our website. So please check it out. Again, Kathy has been great.
Kathy Kelley 18:21 Thank you very much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 160: Sneak Peek – The Marketing Strategy You're Not Using | Marketing Tip Monday | 12 Dec 2022 | 00:03:32 | |
Understanding why people drink wine allows you to use their attitudes and behaviors to improve your marketing to keep your customers coming back. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we bring you a sneak peek into next week's full-length episode to share the marketing strategy you're not using. Defining consumer purchasing behavior is exactly what Kathy Kelley, Professor of Horticultural Marketing and Retail Business Management at Penn State University loves to do. In her studies, she has found that sustainability is very important to customers however it can mean different things to different people. While 7 out of 10 adults in the United States consider purchasing food and beverage with a sustainability component a priority, one-fourth of these respondents could not articulate sustainability. This gives the industry a great opportunity to better communicate what sustainability means. Communicating sustainability should be incorporated into a brand's DNA from point A to point B through all marketing channels including face-to -face, social media, print, and website. Storytelling is a great way to convey your brand values because consumers are more likely to remember stories. By describing specific practices and why they are important, you set yourself apart from the competition and create an emotional connection with your consumers. Kathy's research on sharing cover cropping practices found that customers were willing to pay one to four dollars more per bottle after learning about the specific sustainable practices. The Seasons of Sustainability: WinterHere are some great practices you can share with your consumers to tell that block-to-bottle story. Use these activities to create blog posts, social content, and tasting room talking points. It's this type of content that captivates and educates. Here are some sustainable practices SIP Certified brands do during the winter:
Tune in on December 15 to hear the whole interview and get more tips on how to determine your customer demographic and refine your marketing. Check out the show notes for links to this article, research on consumer purchasing preferences, to download the seasons of sustainability PDF, and sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References:
| |||
| Bonus: Green Medal Awards – Leaders in Sustainability | 05 Dec 2022 | 00:09:22 | |
Now in its eighth year, the California Green Medal Sustainable Winegrowing Leadership Awards provide recognition to vineyards and wineries that are leaders in implementing the Three E's of sustainability (environment, economic and social equity). Welcome to Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team where we bring you the latest in science and research for the wine industry. I'm Beth Vukmanic, Executive Director at Vineyard Team, steering committee member and judge for the California Green Medal Awards. Applications are open now through January 30, 2023. As a listener to this podcast, you could be a perfect candidate to receive recognition for your good work. The Green Medal Awards inspire others in the industry and highlight the benefits of participating in a sustainability program. It's a great opportunity to showcase the amazing commitment many California growers and vintners have made to protecting the environment and enhancing the communities in which they live and work. We're proud to count a number of SIP Certified members among the winners including Jackson Family Wines, Monterey Pacific, Inc., Pisoni Family Vineyards, Sheid Family Wines, and Trinchero Family Estates. We wanted to highlight last year's winner of the Leader Award, Wente Vineyards in Livermore. So, our host, Craig Macmillan, Critical Resource Manager at Niner Wine Estates, with a long-time SIP Certified vineyard and the first ever SIP Certified winery, took a few minutes to talk with Nikki Wente. If you attended our Sustainable Ag Expo in November, you had a chance to hear from Nikki about their use of autonomous and electric vehicles. In this interview, she talks about their no-till system, use of sheep in the vineyards, oak forest land, electric tractors, and balancing capital investments. Listen in to hear her number one piece of advice for sustainable winegrowers. You can apply for the Environment, Community, or Business awards and also the Leader award by going to greenmedal.org. Check out the show notes for a link, to read about previous winners and to learn more about Nikki. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 159: Under-Vine Vegetation to Control Vine Vigor | 01 Dec 2022 | 00:28:17 | |
Under vine cover crops can both improve soil health and control vine vigor. Justine Vanden Heuvel, Professor and Chair of the Horticulture Section School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University and Michela Centinari Associate Professor of Viticulture at the Department of Plant Science at Penn State University have trialed different cover crops to find the best plants for vineyards. By adding a cover crop under the vine, growers can impact the size of the vine by stopping vegetative growth at version. Ground cover has additional benefits on the soil including decreasing the impact of water drops, improved water infiltration, increased carbon, soil aggregate stability, and microbial activity. Listen in to learn which cover crops are best to improve the overall sustainability of a vineyard. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Today our guests are Justine Vanden Houvel from Cornell University and Michela Centinari from Penn State University. And we're going to talk about some really exciting work they've been doing around the topic of under vine vegetation. Thank you both for being here.
Justine Vanden Houvel 0:14 Thanks, Craig.
Craig Macmillan 0:16 Tell us a little bit first of all about what under vine vegetation kind of is, to me that sounds like weeds coming from California. To me, that means weeds and it's gotta go. Your work is looking at some maybe some benefits of it and things that might help in the eastern United States at least, can you tell me kind of what the basic definitions of these things are?
Michela Centinari 0:33 I understand why you think you know, that the under vine vegetation should go because I'm from Italy. And also we don't like to see weeds. Cover crops grown under the vines, because it's a dry, you know, hot warm climate. Is a little different for us here in the eastern United States and the Northeast US, because we have a very different weather conditions, you know, it's more or less humid, wet, and we have fertile soil. So cover crops are weeds, even weeds growing under the under the vine can actually be beneficial for the vine and for the soil. And this is because our vines can be overly vigorous, because it's, you know, it's humid is wet, and the soil is fertile. And this competition provided by the cover crops to the vine for water and nutrients can actually decrease the amount of vigor of the vines. So that is seen as a positive traits in our region, at least some of the sites in our region.
Justine Vanden Houvel 1:31 I agree with what Michela said, and sometimes they are weeds. Sometimes they're specific species that we're we're cultivating. From a management perspective, it really doesn't make any sense in some of these eastern vineyards, not all of them, but in some of them to have this bare strip under the vines because we have to go through and hedge the top of the canopy two, three times in a growing season, we have to go through and do leaf removal once or twice in a growing season. You know, we're spending a lot of money in the industry, here on the East trying to manage the vigor of the vines. And those are Band Aid solutions, right, they don't really help fix the situation. Whereas providing that competition that Michela was referring to, can make a big difference in terms of reducing the available water and nutrients that the vine can take up.
Craig Macmillan 2:19 What kind of species of plants are we talking about here? You know, a weed is a plant at a place. Mint is often a weed but also if I have it in a container, and it's next to my front door, and I like to have my food and it's not a weed. What kind of plants are you talking about?
Justine Vanden Houvel 2:32 Yeah, we've been working with quite a few different plants. So some different grasses, buckwheat, chicory rosette forming turnip. We are having a problem with a lot of the brassicas though and that the groundhogs like to eat them, so we're kind of steering away from those ones a little bit. But we've worked with a wide variety of species and looked at you know, do we see a big impact on Vine size, small impact on Vine size, or no impact on Vine size, because we need to make sure we dial it in so that the grower has the amount of control of vigor that they want. We don't want to deviate the vines too greatly.
Craig Macmillan 3:10 In terms of monitoring vigor, are you doing this from pruning weights? Are you doing this from trying to weigh green mass during the summer, this is gonna be kind of tough, because if you're hedging something two, three times, you know, how do you get a number on that? So what's your metric? How are you getting the baseline metric here?
Justine Vanden Houvel 3:28 We mostly in my program, and Michela can comment on hers we use two methods. One is pruning weight dormant pruning weights, but the second is what we call enhance point quadrate analysis. So some of your listeners may know about point quadrate analysis which was you know, made famous by Richard Smart and sunlight into wine, my group added to sort of a calibration with a light bar in the middle of the canopy so that we can then look at actual numbers for how much light clusters are getting and how much light different leaves are are getting. And so we use those two metrics to really enhance point quadrant analysis. It's a proxy for vigor right, it doesn't measure actual growth rate, but we use that in pruning weight as our measures for this.
Michela Centinari 4:12 Yes, yes, I mean, definitely we measure printing weight because it's something you know growers are familiar with, and it's easier to quantify. We also have been looking at changing the fruiting zone, right light exposure and canopy density. We even, and that is very labor intensive, we looked if the cover crop can reduce the length of the growing season. Basically, in our region, we see the length of vegetative growth because in our region we see the shoots keep growing after verasion on and we want them to stop earlier. So we basically assess if the cover crops can you know stop this vegetative growth around veraison that you know helps in terms of fruit ripening.
Craig Macmillan 4:59 That's interesting. But one of the things I wanted to ask you about as part of all of this, and I think vigor may have something to do with it. The paper you're published recently had a kind of a focus on the effects of heavy precipitation. And the benefits of UVV, undermine vegetation, pardon me, jumped into lingo a little soon, and the effects of heavy rain events. That's interesting to me, because we don't have heavy rain events in California, where I'm from, and I can only imagine what it must be like. And so what are what are some of the benefits there? Oh, and actually, before we get to that, I got a question. In the east in Pennsylvania in New York, that those areas, how common is the use of under vine vegetation as opposed to a clean berm since we have an idea for how much adoption there is out there?
Justine Vanden Houvel 5:42 That's an interesting question. And it basically depends on on how busy the growers are, how many of them have wholeheartedly adopted under vine vegetation? That's a handful in New York, it's not a lot. At this point, I'd love to see more, how many of them will absolutely let the weeds grow and then not worry about it until they get too tall? Because they know it's helping to deviate their vine? That is a fair number.
Michela Centinari 6:06 Yeah, it's very similar here in Pennsylvania, you know, I have to say, growers are definitely interested, you know, we did lots surveys, and we see, you know, most growers want to try but then you know, they get busy. And it's hard, you know, for them to change, a management practice that is working right, you know, spray herbicide. So they need, you know, it's not always easy, right. But definitely, there is an interest, it's just not, a widely adopted practice.
Justine Vanden Houvel 6:34 We are starting to see growers in New York purchasing the undermine mowers so that they're able to maintain and under rvine vegetation and mow it reasonably easily. And so it's been great to see people making that investment.
Craig Macmillan 6:48 The reason I wanted to get to that was because this issue of precipitation, one of the things that I had never thought about that came up in your writing was erosion, and also so crusting and negative impacts on soil structure and aggregate formation and all that kind of stuff. Which is something yeah, very much an issue on bare ground. I had never really thought about it as an issue in let's say, July in a vineyard. Can you tell me what overall like when I've got a rainstorm like that, and I don't have under vine vegetation around what are the all the impacts that I'm looking at that I'm being affected by?
Michela Centinari 7:17 Yeah, I mean, definitely, we see that and we, you know, I even took pictures to show growers because we do see multiple negative impacts on the on the soil under the vine. We see increase on erosion, I mean, definitely most of our vineyards you know, sloppy, you know, on a hill, so we see erosion, even if they use cover crops in the middle row still under the vine, you see this erosion, water and nutrients, you know, in soil washing out from the from the vineyard, we also, you know, showed through an experiment mostly just sean studies that there is an increase in the leaching of nutrients, whether to agrochemicals into the underground water. So definitely leaving bare soil under the vine, create, the negative impact has negative consequences on several parameters of soil health. And since you know, we want the vineyard to last 20 plus years, hopefully, you know, it's important to maintain soil health and to reduce soil degradation and definitely under ine cover crops or weeds can really help in that.
Justine Vanden Houvel 8:20 And I'd also add that our comparison here is bare soil versus soil that's covered with vegetation, whether it's weeds or a species. Is some people will say, well, I cultivate so that's all right, but really the problem in agriculture is bare soil versus not bare soil, right? So cultivation isn't a practice that is able to help reduce a lot of these problems, like the leaching and the runoff in particular.
Michela Centinari 8:51 And even you know, as an as important sort of, for us to increase soil carbon, and definitely soil cultivation doesn't help with that, while you know, let some type of vegetation grow under the vine can be also use as a way to accumulate carbon in the soil in addition to the other benefits that we mentioned.
Craig Macmillan 9:12 There's also some things that you talked about that I'm super curious about, and that is other positive effects in terms of things like soil structure and soil health. What can you tell me about that? That's the cover cropping idea?
Michela Centinari 9:24 Yes, yes.
Craig Macmillan 9:25 So we're not simply covering the ground at this point, we're looking for other benefits.
Michela Centinari 9:29 So definitely, overall cover crops, no, just under the vines can improve many parameters of soil health, not just you know, decrease erosion. But for example, the biomass of the covered crop can reduce the impact of the raindrops that you know can really break the soil aggregates when you live you leave a bare soil under the vine on the middle row can also improve water infiltration. So you have less you know, water runoff can also as we mentioned, improve the soil carbon or the over nutrients in the soil, which you know are all good for the long term sustainability of our vineyards.
Justine Vanden Houvel 10:06 I'd add a couple of other soil health aspects to that is aggregate stability. So aggregate stability for soil is the ability of the basically the soil to withstand physical pressure from the outside. So usually rain in some of the studies that we've done in my program here, we saw a huge increase in aggregate stability of soil up to 80, something percent after three years, when we compared cultivation to weeds growing under the soil for those three years. We see an increase in soil respiration, which we assume means a healthier soil with more microbes. And we see an increase in microbe diversity as well. So we also did a study where we were comparing some different under vine treatments. And we saw that with each passing year, there was more diversity in the microbes when we had weeds growing under the vines than if we had bare soil under the vines. And we assume that helps in terms of nutrient turnover and, and other processes like those.
Craig Macmillan 11:10 I'm know you'd mentioned some species at the beginning, in your work, I'm assuming this work is experimental so that you're choosing what is going on going under the vine for these different trials. Or actually, I'm assuming it's actually experimental, you must have a randomized design or some kind of replicated design of some kind. So what are the plants that you're picking to plant as that undermine vegetation?
Justine Vanden Houvel 11:30 So my group is done lots of different iterations of these types of studies at this point, because we've done it in young vineyards and old vineyards and with hybrids or with vinifera. So they're always in replicated studies. What we basically come down to is we use usually sometimes cultivation but usually herbicide is our control for comparison, because that's what most growers here in New York are doing. And we use buckwheat as our cover crop that will usually have a very slight impact on vine vigor. So buckwheat establishes beautifully, right because it's only allopathic. So we don't tend to have a big problem with weeds, the height of it seems to be appropriate, we don't normally have to mow it, it doesn't get up into the fruiting zone kind of flowers falls over and there's not a lot of management there. And the most we've ever seen at reduced pruning weight might be by 10% or so. On the much more significant side we have chicory root. So chicory is pretty low growing, you can get a dwarf version of it. And I should mention, we normally work with annual cover crops because we hold up over the graft union to protect scion buds in the winter. Chicory is technically a biennial, but what we find is it just keeps coming back, coming back coming back. It can deviate a vine significantly. So we've used it in some of the bigger vineyards when we've wanted to really pull back on the pruning weight. Sometimes that's been up to about 30% compared to our control of herbicide, and then we found that different grasses are somewhere in the middle in terms of their impacts on vine vigor.
Michela Centinari 13:06 Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, it's the same for us, right, we try different type of cover crops, depending on the growers, you know, what they need, what they want to achieve. In addition to what Justine mentioned, we also have been doing some work with perennial grasses, because for some growers, you know, they like, they like to plant something perennial, right. So that reduced the amount of work that they have to do, you just planted once and if you plant a species that doesn't grow too tall, you don't even have to mow sometimes the grass, so it's kind of a lower maintenance. So again, depending on what the grower needs, and what is feasible for that site, you know, we try to match the cover crop with with the site.
Craig Macmillan 13:45 And I'm sorry, I might have missed it, what type species of perennial grasses are we talking about?
Michela Centinari 13:49 So we try and for example, the creeping red fescue, we also try other fescue mixes mix of different fescues including like tall fescue and and we try, you know, to look for species that grow well in a kind of shaded area, because it's not in the middle row. Like it's different. You have more sunlight there. So you want something that establish quickly so the weeds don't grow overgrowth in the grass, and also something that doesn't require too much management in terms of you know, more in like Justine was talking about, you know, buckwheet, chickory, because that is not something that the grower can easily do, like in the middle row, or not every grower can easily do.
Craig Macmillan 14:28 My next question is so how do you plant these grass seeds in the row? Grasses are tiny, they need to have a little bit of cover. It's not a planting grass is not a simple thing. Usually you have to prepare a seed bed. How do you how do you do it? I just am really curious about this.
Justine Vanden Houvel 14:46 So that's a good question. So Michela , and I both have grad students so for years it was our grad students.
Craig Macmillan 14:54 I was a graduate student once I see how this works. Okay,
Justine Vanden Houvel 14:58 Bbut no knowing that the growers were never going to want to do that, I worked with Hans Walter Peterson, who is the viticulture extension specialist for the Finger Lakes here for Cornell Cooperative Extension. And he designed basically a fertilizer spreader, he did a welding design that has two shoots that go off the back to put the seed under the rows. And we can just dump the seed in that drive down the row and set the spinning rate. Sorry, I'm not a good equipment person. So I'm probably not using the right names here. We set the spinning rate for how quickly we want the seeds to come out.
Craig Macmillan 15:31 The application rate.
Justine Vanden Houvel 15:32 And we have that you can look it up online he has a video on YouTube, if anybody's interested in who happily shares those plans so that growers can build their own.
Craig Macmillan 15:40 That's fantastic. That's fantastic. You said extensionist in the Finger Lakes region. And his name again was?
Justine Vanden Houvel 15:46 Hans Walter Peterson.
Craig Macmillan 15:47 Walter Peterson . And God bless you. Dr. Peterson.
Justine Vanden Houvel 15:50 Yeah. And he and Alice Wise, who's our extension specialist on on Long Island for Cornell, they've done a lot of work on how do we get growers to adopt some of these practices. So Michela and I have done basically the research that informs it, but they've looked at what are some of the obstacles? And how can we overcome those so that we can get rid of bare soil in the spots where we really don't need to maintain it here?
Craig Macmillan 16:12 Oh, that reminds me of something else. So in Finger Lakes, Pennsylvania, I don't know very well, I don't know either region really? Well, I gotta admit, is all of the water coming from summer precipitation, or is there supplemental irrigation?
Justine Vanden Houvel 16:24 There's a handful of people with supplemental irrigation here, but it is not very common in the Finger Lakes of New York.
Michela Centinari 16:31 Yeah, neither neither for us. Mostly, like in young vineyards.
Justine Vanden Houvel 16:35 Yeah. I mean, we can give you an example. We got an inch and a half of rain here just yesterday. Alone. Right. We get a lot of precipitation. And in some years this year, started out dry. But then it's been raining pretty consistently for a couple of weeks. Now.
Craig Macmillan 16:52 Pardon my presumption is, but it sounds like the team should be working on fungal diseases. That's what's going on. That's a lot of rain. That's a crop killer.
Justine Vanden Houvel 17:00 Yeah, that's what the pathologists are working on. But we should actually mention. So there has been some good work on under vine cover crops done in Uruguay, where they looked at weather, botrytis, and I think some other fungal diseases, I'd have to refresh my memory on that, was impacted by under vine cover crops. And indeed, because of the reduced vegetation in the canopy, right, smaller leaves and just the canopy not being so thick, they did see a reduction in cluster rots as a function of under vine cover crops as well.
Craig Macmillan 17:31 There you go. That's fantastic.
Michela Centinari 17:33 Yeah. And that's great. Because actually, several growers here are concerned about growing under vine cover crop that will increase disease pressure, because they're afraid about you know, the humidity, increasing humidity in the under vine area. But like Justine said, We never observe or measure any negative effect of under vine cover crop on you know, increase in mold to other fungal disease. Actually, sometimes if there is an effect is a positive effect. What actually we don't know yet is, you know, if we can increase the presence of pests under the vine, right, like a course, some insects or other type of pests. We never had any issues in our vineyards, I mean, in vineyards, where we are conducting research, and that is something definitely that, you know, could potentially be a problem. We don't know yet.
Craig Macmillan 18:22 Okay, I'm gonna ask a tough question here. That's because we've kind of ended up here. I'm a grower, I'm worried about too much impact on vigor, I'm worried about the disease, I also might very likely have a gut wrenching fear of something getting out of control, and me not being able to control it or remove it. If I changed my mind, or I don't like what's happening. How do you put that fear to rest, that I'm not going to lose control of my floor, I'm not going to lose control of my row. It's okay. But this is goes back away. So Paul Annua, for instance, was one that a friend of mine was looking at as an underground vegetation in California. And I said, Hey, why don't we just use Bermuda grass, it's summer dormant. It loves the earth, it's great. And he was like, if you try to get anybody to plant that you're gonna get killed, you're gonna get shot in the head. Like, if you go around, recommending we plat Brumida, you're gonna get killed. When I had experienced with it in a vineyard where he had escaped. I had worked with it, but here was the thing. There was no getting rid of it there that we were that was it. We were committed, there was no getting away from it. And so I can see having the same kinds of fears about a species of plants that I haven't worked with before, for instance, or what happens over years and years and years. What are you going to do to help me sleep at night?
Michela Centinari 19:28 Wow, the tough question. No, I mean, definitely, you know, it's a tough decision and manufacturing needs to be taken into consideration. So I wouldn't just go and plant something right you need to do your research and work maybe with the extension or you know, with specialists even to make the right decision. Also, I recommend trying on in a small area of your vineyards. So no just you know, plant everywhere. If you have you know, 10 acres, or maybe try on a few vines and see how it goes right and see if you can keep it under control. If it's dry and there is too much competition for the vines, you know, maybe to be able to do a soil cultivation or kill your your cover crops, you know, plan or to head on options on what you can do to be able to manage, but definitely on choosing the right species is the first step, right.
Justine Vanden Houvel 20:15 Yeah. And I'd add to that, you know, where I could see it being a problem is what we call resident vegetation. So keep in mind, and in a at least here, we always have a cover crop between rows, right, we usually start with some sort of an orchard mix, and it becomes whatever and we really don't care, we're not going to bother replanting that. So we have that as a little bit of protection. But when we allow weeds to grow under the trellis, and then just mow them down, I know, I've heard that there's some concerns that we might have a weed there get out of control, and then continue to propagate itself. And that is a possibility. But what we actually find is that as each year progresses, we get more and more species in that undermine part of the vineyard. Right? Often we've started in vineyards where they've sprayed a preemergent in previous years. And the first couple of years, we have like two species four species, five species, and then in a few years, we're up to 30 or 40 different species of of weeds in there. And so it does give me at least some hope that it would be very difficult for something to get completely out of control. But what we usually tell the growers here is that if you were going to spray a herbicide anyway. And now you've tried to under vine cover crop, if you don't like it, you can hopefully get rid of it. Right. But the other thing we tell them is that we probably don't need the same cover crop under vine cover crop year after year, right? Because once you, for example, devigorate the vines a little bit and get them back to a more manageable size using chicory, for example, then you want to keep them at that size. You don't want to keep dropping the pruning weight year after year. So every year there needs to be a decision about what did I think of the vine size and the canopy characteristics last year? What's the predicted weather? And what am I going to plan to maintain under the vine for this year?
Craig Macmillan 22:05 We're getting close here to wrap it up. So there's two quick things I want to ask you what each for each of you will start with Justine, what is the one thing you would like growers to take away from your recent work on under vine vegetation?
Justine Vanden Houvel 22:16 Bare soil is not a good idea in vineyards environmentally, really, it's quite a poor choice. And there are options for if you have small vines or or young vines or a lack of vigor, vigor. There are some potential options out there. We haven't done all of the research on this yet, but that there are options to explore.
Craig Macmillan 22:40 Michela.
Michela Centinari 22:40 Yeah, definitely. I mean, I agree with Justine, there are options. Of course, we don't have one cover crop that can solve all the problems that definitely bare soil is no good, especially again, in our region. And our growers are also concerned about the cost of implementing under vine cover crops. And I'd say you know, for us, sometimes planting a perennial for example, grass is no more expensive. I mean, depending on depending on the year, how many times you spray herbicide and the effect of on the on the yield of the vines, but it's not necessarily more expensive than spray herbicide or sub cultivation. So hope they get cover crops a chance.
Justine Vanden Houvel 23:18 So Craig, we've mostly been talking about work here on the East Coast where we tend to have a lot of precipitation, but we have colleagues in in other countries and other climates that are doing work on under vine cover crops as well. And there's been some great work that's been done in the south of France, in Spain and in Australia. And so while Michela and I haven't focused our research, of course on California, there are going to be some opportunities for growers in warmer climates as well.
Craig Macmillan 23:46 And where can people find out more about you and your work Justine, go first?
Justine Vanden Houvel 23:50 Probably the easiest spot is on the Cornell webpage, or I am on Twitter. My one social media is Twitter. And my handle is @thegrapeprof. And I tweet about research and mostly in viticulture, but a little bit of a enology as well.
Craig Macmillan 24:06 Michela?
Michela Centinari 24:07 Yeah, I would say have a Twitter account. I'm not very active like Justine. I should. You know, I have a website if you Google actually Centinari lab, Penn State so we have you know our lab website where we post about research and also we have an extension web page prep and wind through Penn State.
Craig Macmillan 24:26 Fantastic and for audience, that information plus links to some other things will be in the show notes. Want to thank you both for being here. I guests have been Justine Vanden Houvel and Michela Centinari. They're doing fantastic work in an area that most of us in the West Coast certainly don't know about. But I know there's important for other regions of not just the United States but the world. You guys are doing great work.
Justine Vanden Houvel 24:45 Thanks, Craig. This was really enjoyable.
Unknown Speaker 25:07
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 158: Why Brands Certify Their Wines Sustainable | Marketing Tip Monday | 28 Nov 2022 | 00:04:04 | |
Over the past two weeks, we've looked at studies showing that people everywhere have been making more sustainable purchases, and how they are doing this by seeking out products with eco-certifications -- and wine is no exception! The wine market is steadily growing, and the majority of sales come from retail outlets. This is why putting the SIP Certified seal on your bottle is the best way to be sure your wine isn't being overlooked when shoppers are out looking for sustainable wines. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we share why our member get certified. When wine enthusiasts see the SIP Certified seal on your bottle, they know they are looking at a wine that was made with conscious care for the people and the planet. But don't take it from us -- here's what fellow SIP Certified members have to say about certifying their wines: Sincerity, Vetting, & Media Coverage!From consumers to employees, and from vineyards to media, Adam LaZarre, Director of Winemaking at Wine Hooligans, tells us that the rigid requirements for attaining SIP Certified wine have been well worth the time and dedication: "For us, having our wines SIP Certified is easily the best way to let our entire audience know we are sincere about doing the right thing for the health of our vineyards, customers, and employees. The requirements for certification are pretty rigid but are easily obtained provided you maintain some detailed record-keeping. That is an important aspect actually because it ensures that the third-party inspector can vet the entire process completely. I know for a fact that this is a HUGE selling point for our wines and it also gives the media an extra topic of discussion that they and their audience can sink their teeth into. For us, it's been an extra paragraph or two in the magazines or another five minutes on the radio. It's clearly one of the biggest bangs for your buck and for many of our clients, just as important as the quality and price of what's in the bottle." Sharing Common Goals"The three pillars of the SIP Certified Model lays the foundation of our winery's values and drives our commitment to sustainability. By having our wines SIP Certified, our consumers are actively supporting a system of winegrowing that is done with conscious care for the planet. It is extremely beneficial to us to share this common goal with our consumers and continue to make wines with people, the planet, and prosperity in mind." - Fred Delivert, Winemaker, Tolosa Winery Fred adds that their tracking software, Vintrace, makes the process "very easy." All of the block-to-bottle documentation required for the audit process can be pulled from major tracking systems, meaning that if you are using winemaking tracking software, you likely already have all of the necessary records on file! The Legitimacy of Well-Respected Third-Party Organizations"We choose to have our wines certified because of the legitimacy of well-respected third-party organizations like SIP Certified. Designating our wines as sustainable brings a cache with it that the consumer finds really valuable." - Tamara Bingham, Brand Manager, Cambria Estate Winery Tamara notes that their auditor is helpful in guiding her and the winemaking team through the certification process, and that the process is painless and easy! Get in on these benefits!If you're making your wine with SIP Certified grapes, your brand can experience these benefits, as well! Any wine made with at least 85% SIP Certified fruit -- estate or purchased -- can bear the SIP Certified seal. All you need to do is complete a Wine Application (page 35 of the Information Package) and send it to a Wine Inspector. The inspection is all done remotely via email exchange of chain of custody documentation. Inspections range from 1 to 5 hours depending on the number of wines on the application. Fees range from $100-$175 per hour and are paid directly to your inspector. Certification rates are on an annual production basis and can be viewed here. Visit our Get Certified: Wine page to read more about wine certification, and email mailto:whitney@vineyardteam.org ?subject=SIP Certified Wines if you have any questions. Check out the show notes for links to this article, research on consumer purchasing preferences, a link to get your wines certified, and sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 157: Help Us Give the Gift of Higher Education | 17 Nov 2022 | 00:26:15 | |
Vineyard Team's Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship provides multi-year, higher education investments in the children of vineyard and winery workers on California's Central Coast based on academic excellence, financial need, and community involvement. The majority of awardees are first-generation college students. This funding supports students and their families in achieving their dreams of successful graduation from a trade, or two- or four-year school to pursue a professional career. Vineyard Team's Executive Director, Beth Vukmanic, and milti-year scholarship recipient and Assistant Grower Relations Representative at Justin Winery, Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza talk about how the scholarship impacted her education and career trajectory through not only financial aide but industry connections. Evelyn gives her advice on how to succeed in college to new students and Beth shares how to apply for funding. First-generation students have more barriers when it comes to attaining higher education – they cannot ask their parents how to navigate the system, budgets are often tight, and they can feel guilty for leaving their families. As a community, we can band together to better the future of the next generation. Multi-year recipient Alberto Gonzales says, "I am proud of breaking the cycle and being the change in my family as the first generation to go to college." You can give the gift of higher education to students like Evelyn and Alberto this GivingTuesday. Our goal is to raise $75,000 by November 29, 2022. You'll be doing more than just donating — your kindness will make it possible for working families to send their children to two-year colleges, four-year universities, and trade schools. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 And today our guests are Beth Vukmanic, she's executive director of vineyard team and Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza. She is assistant grower relations representative with Justin Winery. Today we're going to talk about the Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship. Beth, would you tell us a little bit about how that came about? What it is what it does, and that kind of thing with the background is?
Beth Vukmanic 0:22 I would love to, but one of ours Memorial Scholarship is to benefit the children of vineyard and winery workers. For anybody who has been a fan of this podcast. You know, we talk about sustainable winegrowing. And a lot of the times that focuses on the planet part of it. So we're talking about soils and pests and irrigation, but people are our most valuable resource. And this scholarship program is a way for us to give back to the people who helped us make a wonderful industry.
Craig Macmillan 0:50 Who was Juan Nevarez?
Beth Vukmanic 0:52 Juan Nevarez was a winegrower, who started out in the Paso Robles area, he moved here to the United States as a teenager, I believe he was just 16 years old. He didn't speak any English. And he just learned everything from the ground up. He was a very, I guess you'd probably call it a gritty soul, he would always put in the time and effort to try to teach himself. So if somebody was putting in irrigation lines, he would go over and ask them questions. Or if somebody was planting vines, he would go in and ask questions about why they made that choice. And he over time really developed a successful management company called Nevarez Farm Labor, he helped establish a lot of notable vineyards, including Justin in the Paso Robles area of California. And then he actually developed his own vineyard property, too. And he unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago. And something that was really special about Juan is that he held that he was a self made man, he dreamed of higher education for his own children, his daughter, Mia said that their dad had just one require from them that they had to go to college. And his thought with that was that he felt like he had to work really hard to prove who he was and what he knew. And that an education would help his children get that foot in the door, so that they could more easily build a better lives for themselves. And so that's why we named the scholarship after him to honor that memory of somebody who really supported higher education and valued it, and wanted it for the next generation.
Craig Macmillan 2:24 I never met him, I never connected with him. But from what I've learned, over the years, talking to people, one of the things that made this such an obvious thing to do for the community to start this scholarship was he was connected to like everybody, like he knew everybody. Everybody knew him. Curious more about that this idea of community, because I've talked to so many individuals who had some kind of connection to him, was that part of how this all came about, as folks wanted to, you know, encourage this idea. But also, they all felt like maybe they had some kind of connection there, they had some kind of responsibility. Scholarship is not a simple thing. Like you have to get kind of a critical mass of people to do it.
Beth Vukmanic 3:00 That's definitely true. Yeah. So when we first started the scholarship program, back in 2015, we were hosting our Earth Day Food and Wine Festival. And that was a way that we would take, you know, some of the proceeds raised by that to give back. And I think those first couple of years, that's the total amount that we were giving was, you know, maybe $5,000, to a few different students. Over time, like you said, because it is a community driven effort, as more people learned about the program, and especially a lot of our vineyard management companies that work with us, they will outreach the scholarship program to their team so that their students can apply for it. So they're really seeing this direct impact of helping their own employees, children attend school and earn that higher education. So I think that's really how the community build started. And it's just grown from there. This year, we gave out $62,000 to 14 different students. And it's just phenomenal. Like how much growth it's seen over the last so many years since 2015.
Craig Macmillan 3:58 That's fantastic. That's really, really wonderful. If I'm gonna apply, do they have to be a high school senior? Do they apply once they get one year of funding? Can they apply multiple times? How does how does the funding work?
Beth Vukmanic 4:10 The way that the funding works is they don't necessarily have to be a high school senior, although a lot of our applicants are that could be somebody who is already attending school, they can still be eligible to apply for the scholarship program as well. So far, the way that the scholarship has worked is that students would apply each year to get a scholarship. However, we just had an incredible investment from Must! Charities that's going to help us expand this program to a whole new level. They've raised $1.3 million dollars...
Craig Macmillan 4:40 What!
Beth Vukmanic 4:42 Which is a huge and so a big change that we're going to make that's going to be incredible is to provide multi year scholarships. Instead of a student needing to come back and apply every single year as they're going to into your school or trade school or possibly a four year school, we would be able to give them funding for that period. bit of time, if they beat the benchmarks of a minimum GPA, and then also checking in with our organization. And that's something that we found was sort of kind of happening already with recipients like Evelyn. But now we have to do that more intentionally.
Craig Macmillan 5:14 And let's ask everyone. So Evelyn, you are a multi year recipient, is that correct?
Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza 5:19 That is correct. Yes.
Craig Macmillan 5:20 How did you find out about it? What was the process like when you first connected with vineyard team in the scholarship program? How did how did this come about for you?
Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza 5:28 So I found out about the scholarship through my dad's job. So my dad is currently employed by messa vineyard management, he works as a tractor driver and Sierra Madre Vineyard, which is located in Santa Maria, I'm not sure who exactly approached him with information about the scholarship, but it was something through his work. And he came home one day, and he gave me the application. He's like, I think this would be great for you to apply to it's a scholarship. I know, you're always seeking scholarship opportunities, you should give this a try. And of course, I was like I, I will do it. You know, like I was always seeking these type of opportunities throughout my college journey. And so I went for it. And the process was very simple. It was great communicating with the Vineyard Team. If I had any questions, it was very straightforward and clear. The application process itself was very simple. And I'm just super grateful for it, I had no idea that it would lead to a multi year scholarship recipient outcome. And I can't express enough in words that I'm so thankful for that in the change that I made throughout my college educational journey was just undescribable. It was very impactful for sure.
Craig Macmillan 6:37 So the first award that got you started. And where did you go to school?
Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza 6:42 So I attend a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. First award, I believe I received in 2017. So it was during my sophomore year at Cal Poly. And during this time, I was pursuing a degree a Bachelors of Science degree in animal science. So that was my initial career direction. I would definitely say that the scholarship not only represented financial assistance for me to be able to afford my education at the time. But really the way I saw it was an opportunity to open up doors throughout my educational journey, and kind of helped me figure out a little bit more what direction I could take career wise connections through the Vineyard Team really kind of helped me land where I am today. And I can definitely talk more about that if you'd like me too.
Well. Yeah. I'm curious because first of all, Beth, students do not have to be pursuing a degree in an agricultural area. Right? They can they can be pursuing any career paths that correct?
Elizabeth Vukmanic 7:37 That's correct. Yeah. We're happy to support students that are pursuing any kind of career. So it doesn't have to be an ag, although sometimes we find ones that are still working and viniculture too.
Craig Macmillan 7:46 So Evelyn, but you were doing animal science?
Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza 7:49 Yes.
Craig Macmillan 7:50 How did you how did you move then into the viticultural world? How was what was that path link ? How did that happen?
Unknown Speaker 7:56 Yeah, I love sharing the story. Um, it's an interesting one. So animal science, for me started out with my passion for animals, I always kind of assumed, okay, I will have a career that has to do with working with animals and helping them. And it's one of those things that as I navigated Cal Poly with my animal science degree, I just kind of came to a point where I realized I was learning a lot of valuable information but I just didn't feel like my heart was in it. It wasn't speaking to me. And so I realized that this is probably not the field where I want to obtain a career that I would be content with. And so then I started to think about any other fields I could possibly explore that would interest me and I thought about my dad's job. He's always worked in vineyards for as long as I can remember, remember, ever since I was really young, I decided to explore that through a research project that was presented to me at Cal Poly. And that was my first exposure to vineyards, specifically, wine diseases is what I worked with, and I ended up falling in love with it. And I wanted more I wanted to dive in a little bit deeper into the viticulture industry.
Craig Macmillan 9:03 I think there were a lot of us that started doing something else and then got exposed and we got the bug. After that you kind of just can't look back. I know so many people have that story. So you completed your undergrad at Cal Poly? Is that correct?
Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza 9:16 Correct. Yes.
Craig Macmillan 9:17 And was at that point, was the wine and viticulture program happening? Or was this a fruit science degree? Where were you at?
Unknown Speaker 9:23 At that time, I finished off my degree in animal science just because by the time I realized I was really interested in viticulture a little too late to change my major. So I finished my degree animal science and then I decided to do a master's in agriculture with a specialization in crop science. That was the closest I could get to having a research experience related to viticulture, just because of the moment Cal Poly doesn't offer a specific master's program for wine and vit but it was a great opportunity. I decided to take that route just to kind of specialize a little bit more in my field of interest.
Craig Macmillan 9:56 And did you get scholarship money through your masters?
Unknown Speaker 9:59 Yes, I did get scholarship money from other vineyard organizations. The Vineyard Team scholarship specifically was throughout my undergrad journey, my undergraduate degree, which was an animal science. Needless to say, this scholarship did help expose me more to this industry through connections, talking to people who already were embedded in the industry. And it really did help me get my foot in the door in the matter speaking for kind of ended up where I am now. So.
Craig Macmillan 10:31 Were there things that the scholarship allowed you to do that you otherwise would not have been able to do? Because I remember talking to some folks who want it and they some of its tuition, but some of it's also things like rent and food or the ability to travel potentially, or something like that, or the materials that they needed. How did they How did the money help you? What did you What were you able to do that you would otherwise not have been able to do?
Unknown Speaker 10:52 Many things. And what was important for me is my parents at the time had other things to worry about in terms of expenses, and I have two older sisters. So they were also helping them get through their college journeys. And so the biggest thing for me was able to take a weight off of my parents shoulders in terms of having to financially support me. And this scholarship made a huge difference in me being able to take care of rent, take care of book costs, or any type of trips related to my classes, I was taking any extracurricular activities that kind of helped me dive deeper into my interest, career wise. So it definitely made a huge difference in being able to afford these opportunities and being able to become more involved in activities I was very interested in participating in for sure.
Craig Macmillan 11:44 Do you think you would have gotten into the vineyard industry without the scholarship?
Unknown Speaker 11:47 No. I think part of it was the research opportunity that I was presented at Cal Poly, but really this current job that I have now, I don't believe I would have attained it if it wasn't for this scholarship, because it was through this scholarship and having my affiliation with the Vineyard Team and their roots in the wine growing community here that really helped me meet, they introduced me to Molly Scott, Director of Grower Relations here at Justin. And it really just connecting the dots, it played a huge role in landing me where I am now. So I don't believe that I would be in the Viticulture industry as I am today without the scholarship.
Unknown Speaker 12:33 And so that is another part of the scholarship program where we've seen these connections being made, you know, over the years. And it's an area where we can further formalize this to with our new investment. We've had a few different students who've met different vitiulturalists at like, I remember barbecue or different video team events and ended up with jobs or internships out of them. And our membership is very supportive of the scholarship program. And not just in terms of donations. But going beyond that and wanting to offer internship opportunities wanting to offer job opportunities to the students who are recipients of it.
Craig Macmillan 13:06 Again, how many recipients per year does it vary?
Unknown Speaker 13:09 It does vary. Yes. So this last year was 14, we're going to be looking at adding in more because we have the capacity to add in more over the next few years. Another thing that's been interesting about the scholarship program, too, is we're really reaching for the most part first generation college students. So 98% have been first generation so far, by going into this next phase of the program, we're going to bring on an administrator who's going to help us oversee the whole program. And I think a really important component of that is kind of like a coaching element that they're going to provide, you know, not just processing applications, but actually doing active outreach to all of the recipients with tips and ideas like how to file the FAFSA form or, or college, you know, have you looked for these kinds of resources. So go into that next level of providing help support to help the students not just financially, but really get through the whole process of getting to college. A challenge that a lot of first generation college students run into is that no one of their families had this experience before, right. So they can't ask their parents, you know, like, hey, you know, how do I how do I get into school? And like, what do I do when I go to class? You know, a lot of times budgets are tight, or they might have maybe me feel guilty about like, you know, leaving their family, stuff like that. So I think having this scholarship administrator is going to provide a wonderful level of support for everyone who's a part of the program.
Craig Macmillan 14:31 98 percent first generation. It's not a requirement, though, isn't?
Elizabeth Vukmanic 14:33 No, it's not a requirement.
Craig Macmillan 14:35 What are some other examples over the past golly, how ling has it been now seven years of really interesting cases or success stories of folks that have gone out and done other things or would not have made it without somehow?
Unknown Speaker 14:45 I think an incredible story is Esteban Garcia. He was a young teenage dad, his family worked in the fields, his grandparents worked in the fields. He did the same thing too. And at a certain point, he thought, you know, is this what I'm just going to do is just sort of live this day to day, you know life or am I going to do something else. And he saw, you know, being in the United States as an opportunity to get a higher education. Later on in life, he went back to college with two children and a fiancee, works full time. Just a total Rockstar. Right now, he's been a multi year recipient, he went to Allan Hancock College, which is down in Santa Maria and then moved over to Fresno State, he actually is going into viticulture as well, and has a great job at Sea Smoke vineyards too. So that's another one of these kind of parallel stories maybe with Evelyn where he got the scholarship. And then by being involved with the Vineyard Team through us was able to make these other connections and move into a nice career as he graduates school.
Craig Macmillan 15:45 Evelyn, you're relatively early in your career. It sounds like this is a completely personal question. Where do you want to? This isn't like an interview question. Where do you want to be five years from now? Where do you want to be 10 years from now? How do you what do you see your trajectory being?
Unknown Speaker 15:59 Oh, man, yeah. I love to think about that all the time and plan. What I have clear right now is my interest in viticulture, anything related to wine grapes. Honestly, my biggest goal at this moment is to just advance in my career, I like to apply value to what I've learned and not only be able to apply that in a job, but also continue growing professionally. Five years from now 10 years from now I see myself without a doubt still being an agriculture still been in this industry. Who knows I may kind of divert a little bit from viticulture, we try horticulture, you know, even different avenue, but for sure still in the agriculture world. I know agricultural is for me, it's in my family. It's been for years. So this is where I want to stay for sure. Honestly, right now, I guess to put it in a clearer way is I'm open to opportunities that offer learning and growing. And that is really what I am seeking after. So.
Craig Macmillan 17:04 As someone who's come out the other side and have educational piece, what would you say? How would you mentor a young person who's just senior in high school or freshman in college, about how they should navigate all this and how they should look for help.
Unknown Speaker 17:17 My biggest point of advice would be take the time to research take the time to get to know and become familiar with opportunities are out there. For most scholarships that I received, including the Vineyard Team scholarship, I wouldn't have known if I didn't either hear it from someone that I knew or look more into it by doing my own research. So I know sometimes it can be like, oh, man, I don't know if I have time for this, you know, to write an essay or ask for a reference letter or a reference, but it's worth it. It's the few hours or even minutes that you put towards a scholarship application can result in something so big like landing an ideal career, you know, I'm opening the door to a route that really will land you where you want to be career wise. And that's what happened to me, and I can't stress enough. I always talk to my peers, and people that I know are currently navigating college and they say, you should, you know, definitely take the time to apply to scholarships, use your resources, talk to people, you know, and it will never have a negative outcome for sure. And you will always have something rewarding come out of that. So that's my biggest point of advice for people.
Craig Macmillan 18:31 And turning back to Beth, I think the idea of having an administrator who not only manages numbers, but also helps to managing council people is a really, really great thing. I think better, scholarships had that it would be more successful, not just in getting people but also the outcomes. I think that's really wonderful. Beth, how is it techniques and getting the word out to the community about the scholarship?
Unknown Speaker 18:53 A lot of times the scholarship gets sorted out by word of mouth. We also have a newsletter on our website, if anyone wants to sign up for that. And in there, we've been sharing some wonderful stories about students like Evelyn and updates on the scholarship program. And then a lot of it ends up going through like Evelyn said to through the vineyard management companies, because they're telling their staff about it, who's been telling their children about it to help them apply.
Craig Macmillan 19:19 Where do you see this going? You've talked about multi year awards. You've talked about getting to more students, what's your five year tenure plan for this scholarship path? Where do you see this headed?
Unknown Speaker 19:29 I will look forward to the next phase of the scholarship. We're going to be making some of these tweaks, I guess, to our current system so that we can really solidify a lot of these great things that were already naturally happening. I'm really excited about the multi-year scholarships. I think we can come up with a really good communications plan with the administrator for the students and really figure out like what their pain points are like, where are they struggling, where do they need more help? Maybe doing even more conversations with the students themselves with the question that you just asked Evelyn like what is your piece of advice you would give somebody who is in your shoes, you know that you were just issues a few years ago, I think all of those are going to be really, really valuable to everyone participating in the program.
Craig Macmillan 20:12 Which reminds me something. So who's on the selection committee? How are already selected?
Beth Vukmanic 20:17 So we have seven different members on the selection committee. And the way that the process works is once the applications come in, we blind them. So you know, so they don't know whose application they're reading. And all of the applicants, you know, give kind of like basic information about themselves, you know, where they are in school right now, what they plan on doing, but then they always write these wonderful, you'll have more personal essays where we get to learn more about them as an individual. And so this selection committee will spend their time reading through all of these applications, and then sort of discussing based off of need, which students will get a scholarship that year.
Craig Macmillan 20:54 And these are folks in the vineyard and winery industry. They are, what is the cycle? Where do students go to apply? What time of year does it take place? What's the timeframe? Like how does that work?
Unknown Speaker 21:04 Applications are going to be opening up in March for students, so they can be popping on vineyard team.org/scholarship, to see when applications go live.
Craig Macmillan 21:15 That's fantastic. I had been involved as well over the years, I think this is a fantastic thing. I have also followed some individuals through the process. And it's been very rewarding for me as a person. And I know it's rewarding for them, because I could see outcomes that happen that otherwise never would happen. I really am proud of you, Evelyn, I think you've done great. And I'm glad that you participated. And I'm super proud of you, Beth, for making this all happen over the years. This is not a small task, but it started. And then the successes, runaway and really, really exciting. What can people do to support? You mentioned the website? Is there anything else people can do?
Unknown Speaker 21:51 We are fundraising for this. So although must has raised $1.3 million for the program, we actually have to match a chunk of that money in order to be able to apply it to the scholarship program. So matching funds are really, really important to to help us keep this going. People can go ahead and donate at being your team.org/scholarship And right now our goal is to raise $75,000 By giving Tuesday, which is November 29, 2022.
Craig Macmillan 22:18 That's fantastic. Well, that's all the time we have for today. I thank you both so much for being here. Beth Vukmanic, executive director of Vineyard Team and Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza, assistant grower relations representative for Justin Winery. Again, there's gonna be information in the show notes, look online, go to the links, get a checkbook, please support this project. This has done so much good for so many people and all of us very excited to say continue. Thank you both for being here.
Evelyn Alvarez Mendoza 22:46 Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 156: Is your wine being overlooked? | Marketing Tip Monday | 14 Nov 2022 | 00:03:38 | |
Most wine shoppers purchase from retail outlets, whether online or in person. This means that the majority of your wine sales probably aren't coming from your tasting room or even your winery's website, where you have a controlled platform from which to deliver the message of your brand's sustainability. With the search for sustainable goods on the rise, you need a way to let wine enthusiasts know about the sustainability of your wine when you can't be there to tell them. Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we talk about how you can help your customers find your sustainable wine. Can your wine be identified as sustainable?Wine Intelligence and Full Glass Research conducted consumer and trade research on perceptions of sustainable winegrowing, certification, and practices. Here are five exciting insights from their research:
Can consumers and the trade easily identify your wine as sustainable? Data shows it: people buy sustainable productsThe market is driven by consumer demand. The 2021 Sustainable Market Share Index found that sustainability-marked products were responsible for a third of the growth in consumer packaged goods from 2015 to 2021, and market share growth continues year over year. Randi Kronthal-Sacco, Senior Scholar at the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business states that their research "demonstrates the perceived consumer demand is realized by purchasing data, and growing." Simon-Kutcher & Partners' 2021 Global Sustainability Study shows that 63% of consumers have made modest to significant shifts toward being more sustainable in the past five years. Purchasing behavior is a major player in these shifts, and 50% of consumers rank sustainability as a top 5 value driver across categories. It's clear: consumers are looking for and purchasing sustainable products! Are you marketing your sustainable wine as such? Don't let your wine be overlooked!If you're producing wines made with sustainably grown grapes, putting the SIP Certified seal on your bottle is the best way to let it be known and increase sales with sustainably-minded consumers. Any wine made with at least 85% SIP Certified fruit -- estate or purchased -- can bear the SIP Certified seal. All you need to do is complete a Wine Application (page 35 of the Information Package) and send it to a Wine Inspector. The inspection is all done remotely via email exchange of chain of custody documentation. Inspections range from 1 to 5 hours depending on the number of wines on the application. Fees range from $100-$175 per hour and are paid directly to your inspector. Certification rates are on an annual production basis and can be viewed here. Visit our Get Certified: Wine page to read more about wine certification, and email whitney@vineyardteam.org if you have any questions. Check out the show notes for links to this article, all the studies referenced, our previous Marketing Tip "Is Wine Certification Worth It?, and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 155: Sustainable Vineyard Management Across Different Climates | 03 Nov 2022 | 00:39:01 | |
As a vineyard advisor across the United States, Fritz Westover, Viticulturist at Westover Vineyard Advising and host of the Virtual Viticulture Academy, has the opportunity to see a lot of different vineyards, varieties, diseases and climates. Much of his work in recent years is in Texas. This large state about the size of France has a number of challenges including rain that is not seasonal, Pierces Disease, late spring and fall freezes, hail, and poor water quality. Fritz and Craig, both former staffers with Vineyard Team, discuss a variety of practices that impact the long-term sustainability of a vineyard including leaching salts, why irrigation systems are important in wet climates, and the number one way to manage disease. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 Our guest today is Fritz Westover viticulturist with Westover Vineyard Advising and the virtual viticulture Academy. Is that right?
Fritz Westover 0:10 That's correct, Craig.
Craig Macmillan 0:11 He's got some other things in the in the works that we'll maybe talk about a little bit later. Fritz and I have known eachother for a long time. And actually, we had the same job
Fritz Westover 0:19 That we did that we did that we did.
Craig Macmillan 0:21 He is based in Texas, lives in Houston. But he works in all parts of the country. You're you're all over the place. What different states do you work in in these days?
Fritz Westover 0:30 Yeah, Craig, thanks, again, for having me on the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast, love to be here. Actually, it's my second time. So this is really an honor to get to get invited back. I didn't screw it up too bad the first time. So I appreciate that. You know, to answer your question, I work primarily in Texas, that's where I'm currently office in Houston. Got a great airport. So I do go to other parts of the country. The second largest area working would be Georgia, primarily in the north mountains of the state of Georgia, I also do some consulting a little bit in some of the states in between Louisiana, Alabama, and some virtual advising that I've started doing, where I'm actually, you know, on site to see the site to understand it, but I'm not there on a frequent visitation basis, like I am, in, let's say, Texas, or Georgia. So those are the primary areas I'm working. And they have a lot of things that overlap. And they have a lot of differences. So the cool part is I get to see a lot of different scenarios, varieties, climate and challenges.
Craig Macmillan 1:26 So let's, let's start with Texas, obviously, we're very interested in sustainability, and sustainable approaches to problems, roadblocks, obstacles, issues, and every region that I'm familiar with anywhere, they have different sustainability issues and hurdles, you know, you say like, oh, here, we're doing this in a sustainable way to do it. And these other people, people are like ah that't not going to work for us. So they're trying to find a different way. So in the case of Texas, which I understand is now not just the hill country, it's quite a broad spectrum of climates and soils and whatnot. What are some of the challenges that Texas growers and these different regions are facing?
Fritz Westover 2:03 Yeah, great question. And, you know, if you look at Texas, it's a state roughly the size of France. So there's a lot of different growing regions in Texas, anywhere from the Gulf Coast region to which is you know, the eastern part of North Texas. Closer to Oklahoma, there's grapes grown that far north and Texas to hill country, which is outside of Austin, Fredericksburg, San Antonio, that's probably where the majority of wineries are, and also a large concentration of vineyards. And then the majority by far of grapes grown in Texas are grown on the High Plains region, which is West Texas, or northwest on the High Plains. That's about 3000 to 4000 feet above sea level. So we have a lot large range and climate and topography and rainfall. I mean, we can get 40 inches in East Texas a year and 10 inches in West Texas a year. And we haven't had that much unless Texas this year, there's been a drought that's affected growers,
Craig Macmillan 2:58 How much of that rain is during the growing season?
Fritz Westover 3:00 Okay, so in Texas, the rain can come at any time. It's not necessarily seasonal. So we don't have the luxury of saying, hey, you know, harvest is done, we should be getting some rain. Now let's plant a cover crop, and let the soil profile fill for the winter. In fact, sometimes we have to irrigate in the wintertime to keep our profile moist. In other times, it's raining, right at harvest or right before harvest or right at bloom when you don't want rain necessarily in a vineyard setting. But in terms of sustainability, if you start on the east part of Texas, and that's our example we're using now we have severe Pierce's Disease there. So there are only certain hybrids of wine grape that are resistant or tolerant Pierce's disease that you can grow there. So if you're growing those varieties, it's almost like here's this disease is not an issue, right. So you've kind of found a way around that. But then you get into the hill country more in Central Texas and we're growing vinifera there anything from Bordeaux varieties to Spanish or Portuguese varieties, Italian varieties are growing there as well. And so Pierce's Disease is a big issue with those varieties. And so is the erratic weather patterns, like seasonal rain, hail, things like that. I think the best example, though, would be to just jump right up to the high plains, because I can look back at my consulting in the last four years. And one year, we had a terrible, devastating late spring freeze. And that happens frequently, maybe two or three out of every five years, we have sites getting hit by late spring freeze, and it takes out a majority of the crop. So now you see these orchard right or other types of fans going up. And those are there for when we have, you know, a radiational freeze, we can we can hopefully skirt through that. So you put these expensive fans up, you solve the problem. And then the next year, you think you've got that you get through the freeze, there's no freeze at all late spring, right? And then all of a sudden, you're just at the point where you finish shoot thinning all of your vines and everything's perfect and set for the year. And then it hails and then you get a hailstorm takes up all of all of your crop for the year and set you back another year. So then what are we doing? We're putting up helmets and a lot of vineyards in West Texas now. So you put up the hill net And that solves with a physical barrier, the hill issue. So now you got the fans for the late spring freeze. You've got the netting for the hail, which also can protect from birds and other things. We're using that year round. So the next year comes up, we don't get away spring freeze, we don't get a hail. What we had instead was this freeze in the fall and early fall freeze, where it got down in October, late October, just after harvest got down into the 20s, which doesn't seem like it should do a lot of damage. But I mean, it will if vines are not cold hardy and ready for it. It's devastating. I wrote a little bit about that and wine business monthly for an article a few months ago and summarized it. But the summary here is that it wholesale killed vines, took vines down to the graft knocked out cordons, and there's a lot of retraining that needs to be done. So now the question is, okay, what's the variety of grape we can plant that's late bud burst right to get past the spring freeze late spring freeze that harvest early. So we had time to harden off for the winter and not get hit by that early fall freeze. And, you know, is bulletproof and doesn't get hit by hail? Right. That'd be nice. But that's,
Craig Macmillan 6:03 I was gonna say it's hail resistant. I can't wait to see the plant breeding on that one.
Fritz Westover 6:07 Yeah,right. Oh, by the way, consumers have to love the wine made from it, and it has to be a good yielder. Okay, is that too much to ask Craig?
Craig Macmillan 6:14 No,? the plant breeding community can take care of that I'm I'm concerned.
Fritz Westover 6:19 I hope you're right. We could use it. I'd like to get invited to their to their planning meeting, I can give them some input. Those are some examples. But you know, Pierce's Disease, water is a big thing. Just like in California, we you know, we have limited water supplies in certain areas of the state, I'm sure you'll you'll want to touch on that. And, you know, its water quality, too, is an issue in some areas. But the really the erratic changes in climate that we see from year to year, it's, there's, you know, there's always a surprise, if you don't like the weather, just wait an hour, and it'll change.
Craig Macmillan 6:51 I'm glad you brought that up. Because I am a big believer in if you plant the right plant in the right place. That's how you address a lot of sustainability issues. So for instance, California, what we've done is we planted lots and lots of Chardonnay in areas that are like perfect, prone for powdery mildew, you know, it's 75 or 80, every single day year round. There's coastal fog is just designed to have disease and you look at it and you're like, Oh man, what maybe we shouldn't be doing that we could cut our chemical load down and we weren't planting this plant in this environment. But the problem is it makes great wine wine quality, that's where you want to be, you know, and so there's some tension there. I am very interested in this variety selection piece. So for instance, I understand that I don't know in detail in Texas, I don't really do grow vinifera you mentioned but they also grow alleles hybrid. So things like Marechal Foch I think it's pronounced, Frontenac or sac showing my my lack of knowledge. Are those working out viticulturally and then are they also working out from a wine quality standpoint of wineries buying these making products that people are buying because that would be like this, your solution is finding varieties that are going to tolerate. Can you turn that around then into a product. How's that going?
Fritz Westover 8:07 to be exact in Texas, there's there are not a lot of hybrid vineyards, it's mostly vinifera. However, if you go to the Gulf Coast region, that is where we do, we do grow primarily Pierce's Disease tolerant hybrid. So that would be blanc Du Bois or Lenoir. And then there's some of the Andy Walker, Dr. Andy Walker, UC Davis, PD tolerant that 98% 97% vinifera varieties that are just now being planted. I mean, we're just at the pioneering stages for those in both Texas and in Georgia, where we have high PD or Pierce's disease pressure, the blanc Du Bois, the Lenoir, the things that have been growing for 25 years now or more have established a market and it took that time to do it. Right. So really, the question is, as these new varieties and the new breeding programs come out with grapes that have tolerance to Pierce's disease, or tolerance to cold, or tolerance to whatever it might be rootstocks that tolerate nematodes and salt, you know, that's, that's a rootstock issue. But when it comes to the variety of the thing that we're putting in the glass that we make the wine from these newer ones, are not quite as proven. So we're gonna have to have this learning curve of where they're best suited, because here's the thing. You take this variety of grape, that's mostly vinifera, and it happens to be have the single gene resistance for Pierce's disease. So you say okay, great, that's gonna work for now, let's put it in the vineyard in the gulf coast of Texas or West Georgia, or South Carolina or whatever, Alabama, you name it, wherever there's Pierce's disease in the southeast, and that's all good, and well, it probably won't die from Pierce's disease, but it's still going to get powdery mildew, which other hybrids are very resistant to, it's still going to get downy mildew, which we have various levels of resistance to it's still going to get black rot, it's going to get phmompsis and then it's all that all the trunk diseases. So I mean, you you think about hard places to grow grapes. It's like when I moved to California back in 2013 to work with the Vineyard Team I thought, man, how am I gonna help these grammars in California, you know, they've been doing this for so long, but they have problems just like anywhere else. In fact, I would argue I almost cringe at the say it, they have less problems. You know, the first as far as diversity of pathogens, at least, let's just say it's safe to say that than we do here east of the Rockies just because of those diseases that I've mentioned. Here, you solve one problem, and then you have five other problems that pop up that you didn't anticipate, and you then need to solve. So there's there's going to be, oh, five to 10 years before we know which of the UC Davis Any Walker selections are going to thrive in all these new environments that growers have not been growing grapes for very long and because of Pierce's disease, and now all of a sudden, you say, sure, you can grow grapes now, but there's a but but no one's done it yet. No one's done it yet. And you're gonna be a pioneer.
Craig Macmillan 10:50 You're a visionary, or you're a crazy person, you know, depends on which way it goes.
Fritz Westover 10:54 Those crazy people, they help the next person learn what didn't work and what not to do.
Craig Macmillan 10:59 Just what we're talking about Pierce's Disease, Pierce's Disease has turned out everywhere to be a very difficult thing to manage in a sustainable fashion. First of all, why don't you tell us what Pierce's Disease is?
Fritz Westover 11:10 I'm so glad you asked Craig, I was gonna say we should probably talk about what Pierce's Disease is.
Craig Macmillan 11:14 I think our listeners are probably pretty sophisticated.
Fritz Westover 11:17 I think so too. I think so too. But here's for that new vineyard manager fresh out of a place that doesn't have Pierce's Disease. It is a bacterial pathogen, and it's Xylella fastidiosa is the name of the pathogen, and it's transmitted vectored I should say, and transmitted into the vineyard from native grape vines. But the vector itself is the most famous is the Glassy Winged Sharpshooter. These were introduced to California many years ago and became the target of a large campaign to eradicate Glassy Winged Sharpshooter. But there's other xylem feeding insects that can also transmit this disease. So basically, an insect feeds on a wild grape that has tolerance to this bacteria and the bacteria are then moved into the vineyard. When the insect then flies into the vineyard and Glassy Winged Sharpshooters can fly a mile or more, they fly into the vineyard and they feed on the the xylem of that the nifer a vine that's susceptible and they transmit this bacteria into the xylem. It's a xylem limited bacteria that kind of clogs the veins like gives the vine a little bit of a plumbing issue. And there's toxins produced by it that cause symptoms like leaf scorch. leaf blades fall off leaving matchstick petals or petals attached to the vine, there's uneven maturation of the paradigm. And then there could be fruit shrivel. So I usually look for two or three of those symptoms before we rogue vines and pull them out of the vineyard, there's no cure for the disease, you have to pull the vines out so it doesn't spread, either replant or deal with the missing teeth, so to speak out in the vineyard. So it's a very big problem in the southeastern United States, you need cold weather to kill both the bacteria populations. Also, I guess, really just the insect vectors, they're also affected by these cold temperatures. So we found that, you know, you get south of pretty much North Carolina, Georgia, these areas are kind of in that transition where a good cold winter or two in a row will knock it back. But a warm winter to it starts coming back out in the vineyards. And so we see it even in the north Georgia mountains almost as far as Tennessee, it's it's really something that's that's moved around and found its niche. It's kind of working in the background, they're waiting for the right conditions.
Craig Macmillan 13:26 So what kinds of things are growers doing in these high pressure areas? And there's super high pressure areas in California as well, because of riparian areas where the insects hanging out, what are people doing? What are people trying, I can think of a couple of things that you could try. But I'd like to know what people are actually doing.
Fritz Westover 13:39 The most obvious we already talked about as growing tolerant varieties that Pierce's disease might infect, but it doesn't move around in his island and cause vine death, like it would to vinifera. So growers are used if they're growing vinifiera, or susceptible grape varieties, there's the possibility to use insecticides to control the vector. So you're a medical imidicloprid based products that are designed for either a spray, or most notably through injection through irrigation. And that's going to give a little bit more longer residual activity to deter the feeding. So the really, the plan is to know when those vectors are coming in. And there could be about 30 to 40 vectors in the southeastern United States. It's not like California that's got one or two major vectors, we've got, you know, 30 at any given time, so the pressure is really high in comparison. And so those insecticides would need to be time for peaking when the populations come in. And then you got to make sure you're careful about pre harvest intervals and things like that. So there's knockback sprays. There's the soil application that's done. These are not restricted use products, but they're certainly conventional products. They're not organic. Some of my growers who are trying to spray less conventional will use products like surround which is a kaolin clay and there's been some reported efficacy on on his island feeding insects. It disturbs them and they don't like to crawl around in the clay also I have some revers using that in hot hot climates also just to keep some shade or sunscreen on the grapes in the fruit late in the season too. But you know, correct when it rains during the growing season, you could put kaolin clay up one day, and it rains off after an inch of rain three days later. So we have those challenges too. And then of course, you know, there's there's trap crops you could consider. But I haven't seen anyone really successful using that just elimination of host grape vines near the vineyard, just trying to make the habitat less thriving for both the vectors and for the bacteria that live inside the wild grape vines. So we put a lot of focus on looking at the surrounding environment in addition to what we're doing in the vineyards.
And so people can actually go into those areas and rogue out host plants are ones that are popular host plants.
If you own the property and there's some muscadine grapes wild muscadine or rotundifolia growing in the woods, and it's right next to the vineyard on a fence line growing along the fence line. That's probably not a good idea. So yeah, you would want to go in and rogue those vines that are around the perimeter at the very least.
Craig Macmillan 16:02 What about setback well Glassy Winged Sharpshooter, this clearly isn't going to work? And I don't know if that's the primary, you said you had like 3040 factors. But when ideally it was been kicked around was not planting close to habitat. So leaving large barriers, now you're losing land as a result of that. Sure, or people tried that. And we didn't get exposed to that?
Fritz Westover 16:21 Yeah, sure. When you're when you're choosing a site for a vineyard, Craig, you're always looking to distance yourself from any problems, whether it be a floodplain, or possible vectors of disease, or host plants. So sure, but the idea is that eventually, an insect that can fly a mile is going to find the vineyard, you just need to know the symptoms, know what to look for, and be proactive at removing it. And testing for it. If you need to test I've gotten to the point where I can look at it visually, and I don't need to do testing anymore, which might McGregor's love, because it saves the money. But occasionally, we test to just validate that because every new girl I work with, we always do a test to show Yes, this is absolutely positive, we see the symptoms, and we've tested it. And now we're comfortable with calling that by because there are other things that can look like Pierce's Disease. And you know, we always talk about these as educators, you don't just talk about the problem you talk about, what are the things that it could possibly be, you know, when someone sees a leaf scorch, you know, well, it could be drought, it could be wind, it could be heat stress, you know, you could lose the leaf and have a matchstick pedal. If you have deer going to your vineyard eating leaves, they leave matchstick petiole symptoms, right. But that's only one of the four key symptoms. So yeah, we're going to be looking for the symptoms, and we're going to be roguing. And we're also going to be distancing, and we're also going to be trying to rogue the problem from the surrounding environment.
Craig Macmillan 17:38 So you got a lot of options, rather than just trying to spray yourself out of it. Yes, we've got a lot of tools, and they're not all chemical. There's cultural practices. Vigilance is always again, probably one of the key pieces to any pest management issue in any sustainability issue. I want to shift gears and talk about water. You know, my career has been strictly in California, where it doesn't rain. It does, like it doesn't rain
Fritz Westover 18:03 It Just doesn't rain as much as you want it to exactly when you want it to right.
Craig Macmillan 18:08 It's actually raining outside right now, we're almost done with harvest, but not quite. I heard early. And usually we get rain. This is like a record rain right now. Not a lot, but enough, but a lot of these other places in the United States, they get some rain, I was talking to somebody the other day about using undermined vegetation as a way of managing the increases in the water from the rains and trying to, you know, kind of have a plant help you out. And to get this dried out a little bit. You mentioned that like in Texas, for instance, if I understood correctly, you know, rain can come in any time. How do you manage that when in terms of like disease pressure or find bigger things like that? What What can you do? Is there anything that you can do that any management strategies for that kind of thing?
Fritz Westover 18:47 Sure that you know, Craig, there's lots of management strategies and they all start at dormant pruning, just like you know, you know, any good vineyard management starts with pruning, to get the right spacing of your shoots and positioning. And then it goes into your thinning and other practices that we all know and love and viticulture, and if you keep on top of that, and can create a microclimate and when we say microclimate, we mean the real scientific microclimate that area right around the grape cluster, right? Not the site, not the misoclimate, like commonly is called the microclimate. But, but that area, right?
Craig Macmillan 19:21 I've given up on that. By the way. It's same thing I was trained and it's like it's not microclimate. It's a misclimate. It's a music climate. And now I'm just like, whatever.
Fritz Westover 19:28 Yeah, after a while you get kind of worn down. It's like trying to describe the difference between grape varietals and grape variety. Because, you know, yes. Oh, yeah, that drives you crazy as a plant person. So it's been I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. It's a variety of grape varietals. That's the wine. So we digress. We digress. We digress. I have to remind me the question now, Craig, you'll have to remind me.
Craig Macmillan 19:50 You get rain at different times of the year. Yeah, some of it during the growing season. This creates its own kind of management problems. What kinds of things can you do and I know it's going to depend on the storm and what's out there and when it happens, but I have no experience with this. I'm very interested in you just pray. I mean...
Fritz Westover 20:08 Well, let me give you an example. Yeah, the northern Georgia grape growers this year had over 50 inches of rain from bud burst. And they're in their inversion, the pasteurization, they're at 18 to 20 bricks, maybe two weeks away from harvest, they've had over 50 inches of rain during the season at random times, sometimes raining for five to seven days in a row, sometimes raining for 10 days in a row. And I was just there visiting all the vineyards looking at dissecting and reverse engineering all of their spray programs there canopy management, there are some venues I walked into that were completely clean. I mean, no fungal disease, no downy mildew, no powdery mildew, maybe a little bird pecking here and there. And then there were some that were absolutely devastated. And so you know, why? Why was that the case? Well, I talked about, you know, good canopy management pruning, it starts at the beginning of the season, you know, when you're working in an environment that absolutely has a high fungal disease pressure, which is the number one thing all other overlying factors aside that we talked about, like Pierce's Disease, or freeze or climate, if you have the right variety match to the right side, but you've just got to control these fungal diseases that grow in the leaves and fruit. It's all about the timing on the applications. And this is true, whether you're a conventional or an organic grower, or whatever you may practice, yeah, it doesn't matter. I mean, you have probably less modes of action as an organic grower because your products are not moving systemically into the plant or into the vine itself. So your reliance on maybe even more spraying, because context sprays like a lot of organic products, or they can get washed off. So what we really hone in on is the critical period for your disease, which is two weeks before Bloom to about six weeks after fruit set. And what we find is if you can control disease on the fruit and the majority of the foliage, and when I say the majority, I mean those bottom leaves all the way up to the top of your VSP wires, if you're doing vertical, shoot those first 10 leaves on the shoot, if you can get those through to verasion, and you can get the fruit through verasion and keep it clean, it'll typically stay clean, and the leaves will have this oncogenic or resistance to disease at that point, they get more leathery, right, they get more harder to infect by a lot of these fungal diseases. So if you can get to that point, you can kind of pull back a little bit and get to the end of the season. Well, timed sprays just before bloom, right after fruit set, keeping in mind matching the product to the disease, right? If we're trying to control detritus, we want to hit that before bloom, and right after fruit set, and then probably again, right before a bunch closure. And if we have challenging conditions from verasion to harvest, we might need another spray from verasion to harvest. And again, conventional or organic, whatever that product is, the timing is still the same. I think what the growers who are most successful have been able to do is really not drop the ball during that critical period, that eight week period, they learn the modes of action of all of their products. Is this systemic? Is it contact, how much rain will wash this off before I have to go out and apply it again, the number one question I get from new growers is, why would I spray right before the rain isn't the rain is going to wash the product off. And the whole point of having that product on before the rain, we always explain it so that it protects the plant tissue or the grapes throughout that wet period. So that an infection doesn't get established. Because once you have an infection in the vineyard established, it is so much harder to go in and eradicate you've got to use different strategies for that. And it cost more. And that disease can linger all the way through harvest, causing loss and leaf area that's going to cause delays and ripening possible quality issues and fruit, you name it. So that's really where I think the successful grower, the one who you know does all the things you're supposed to do in a sustainability program, for example, to keep good records, track the weather data, record how much rain you get, and when and then just be proactive about about the spray program not reacting always. And coming in after after you see an issue or after it's been raining already.
Craig Macmillan 24:04 Now, if I am in an area where I'm getting rain during the growing season, do I still need to irrigate?
Fritz Westover 24:11 Okay, so good question. And, you know, I always recommend vineyards in areas that don't reliably get their 20 to 30 inches of rain in a calendar year, which is, you know, common in the East Coast, for example, that they put in irrigation and I get some kickback from some growers thinking gosh, it rains here, I just want to turn off the irrigation and take the water and we were planting cover crops to remove water from the system. But the irrigation system is not just there for when you're establishing the vines. That's the number one thing if you have a drought year, the year you plant, you could be in trouble. It's a lot of work to water those vines. Number two, you're going to be able to put fertilizer out through drip irrigation system. So whether it be organic or conventional, again, doesn't matter. There's lots of products that are designed to go out and your drip irrigation and that's one of the most efficient ways to deliver a small amount of a product or fertilizer to a vine in a very precise and measured way, which will save costs in the long run and create less runoff and pollution, if you're targeting the grapes, so, so in terms of sustainability, that's really a big tool in my book, and I wish more growers would consider putting in irrigation early in the process. And especially if you're in a Pierce's Disease, high risk area, and you're growing vinifera, then that is one of the major ways to deliver some of our best control measures for Pierce's Disease.
Craig Macmillan 25:30 I'm going to put an irrigation obviously, I'm going to be drawing on some groundwater, groundwater quality varies infinitely from place to place. What are some of the experiences that you've had that caused viticultural issues down the line with different kinds of water quality problem? And were there things to do to improve those because again, well, I had a vineyard once where we were, we had a magnesium problem, we were watering off of a municipal watering system, which was great drinking water. Wonderful. Well, one day I get the report, and the magnesium level in the water was through the roof, not a threat to people, but I was just making a brick, right to the watering more and watering more and watering more, and it was just getting worse. What kinds of things have you seen? And what could you kind of do about it?
Fritz Westover 26:13 Yeah, it's a really good question. As you know, I'm familiar with the a lot of the problems on the central coast there where were you and I both worked, you know, in terms of getting into some Paleolithic waters, that earthquakes now have changed your your water quality and your site that was very good before that occurrence happened. So you have boron, you have high salts, sodium and other salts as well in Texas. And I'll come here because this is the area I live in work in the most, we see issues that are pretty similar. We see boron being high. In some areas, certain aquifers and water sources are high and boron, we see high SAR sodium absorption ratio, that you know, if your SAR levels above six or seven, and you're relying on irrigation water, you're gonna see issues in the leaves, saltburn and decline of the vines, and we can hit 20 or 30 on a SAR in some areas of North Texas. And I've seen in drought years, this was a drought year for Texas. This is a real I mean, it rained in October, November of 2021. And then didn't rain in parts of Texas until about a month ago. And so right now, as we're recording this, we're in September. So until really about variation, no rain. So if you didn't have good quality water, and you're relying 100% on your irrigation and didn't have any rain in the wintertime to flush out salts or leach boron or other things that are a problem that build up in the soil, especially from frequent shallow irrigations. It was a problem. So boron symptoms were showing on leaf margins. So some growers were trying to capture rainwater to alleviate their irrigation issues. But if it didn't rain, that approach did not work. So they're trying to do longer irrigation set so that they don't build up salts in the shallow part of the soil. So that's one strategy, using the wheats leaching fraction, for example, that to push water below, or occasionally do very long sets. And I know, you know, sounds counterintuitive. We have bad water, less water more with it. And with water more, right, yeah, but the thing is, you need to push the salts down below the root zone, if you can, and watering on long sets can do that. So that was the strategy through you know, there's really no solution that I'm aware of for high boron levels, I wish there was one that was reliable, and that that someone could present to me for the salts, we use the irrigation strategy that I just mentioned, to try to push it down below the root zone as much as possible. But there's really beyond that not a whole lot you can there's course there's some soil amendments, I shouldn't say there's nothing some growers tried to displace sodium with gypsum or calcium additions, or by adding organic matter to the soil to try and bind it up or you know, and still have other cations available on the cat on exchange. Some growers are injecting acid using acid injection to try to help with nutrient uptake that sodium sometimes is blocking. There's other things that go well beyond even my understanding of all the chemistry behind it. But I think it's fair to say that the growers who have the worst problems and have that proactive kind of frame of mind have been have been doing some of these things to try and combat it. But really what they're doing Craig is they're saying why isn't it raining? Like it usually does. That solves the problem for me. And it just hasn't happened in the past year here. And it's not to say we won't get back on the normal pattern. We'll just have to see.
Craig Macmillan 29:18 We're running out of time. Unfortunately, we could go on forever. Lok forward to seeing you here in the future. We have the Sustainable Ag Expo. It's put on by Vin, your team coming up in November and you are going to be here for that I believe you're presenting Yes. Yeah. hoping we can connect. I don't see why we can't in just a couple of sentences again, thinking like you're on stage. What one piece of advice would you give to a grape grower in the realm of how to improve the sustainability or how to farm a sustainability as sustainable as possible? And what's your one piece of advice?
Fritz Westover 29:51 But wait, we're not on the stage here. This is a podcast Craig This is one of the largest stages you can get without actually being looking someone in the eye right? This isn't acing who invented this stuff. It's true. So so when I am at Sustainable Ag Expo, my talk is going to be about the long term view on sustainability, it's going to be about things that you can do from the beginning onward, moving the needle a little bit on on some of the fine points that we tend to overlook on a daily basis, because we're focusing on more big picture stuff. So my focus for anyone who wants to start off, and they know that they want to be doing things the right way, 10 years down the road, and they want things to be a little easier for them, it goes back to what you and I've been talking about earlier, the beginning of our conversation, choosing the right varieties, making sure your site selection is all going to work out if you don't have the expertise to do that, you should really find someone who specializes in that, you know, I've drawn upon soil scientists that come out and look at sites and map sites, on projects that I'm working on, you know, we need to bring the team together that can make the right decisions from day one, and choosing your varieties and your rootstocks and making sure your vineyard design is done in a way where you reduce erosion and foresee some of the issues that are going to come up the other thing that that I'll touch on quite a bit at the Sustainable Ag Expo is the the smaller detail things after the vines go in the ground, how we train our first and second year vines, where we make the cuts on those vines for die back and proper healing and preventing infection by by diseases that want to get into our trunks early on and establish and then all the way through to the young vine care. What are some of the things that I see growers making mistakes on that we could be overcoming. And it's really I don't want to say to viticulture 101 because it downplays the importance of it a little bit, when you make it sound. So basic the challenge is, sometimes we know what we need to be doing. But we have trouble conveying that to the workforce that we're using to the contract labor that we're using to our own team. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about a combination of those things about what's important, what shouldn't be overlooked, and how we can make sure we don't overlook it and put a team in place to get it done. Because the establishment will just umbrella that term with the vineyard establishment that first three to five years of getting your cordons developed. Or if you're in a cane pruning system, establishing your renewal zone and, and everything else. I'm super excited about it. I'd be lying to you to say that my talk is ready as of today. But I've got it outlined in my in my mind, and I've got the ideas already in my head that I clearly would love to share.
Craig Macmillan 32:22 And hopefully that will spread. Where can people find out more about you what you do?
Fritz Westover 32:27 Well, I'm available on social media through Westover Viticulture, on Facebook and on Instagram. And as you know, I also do an online vineyard advising and education community that I snuck you into, to kind of see behind the scenes on that and that is known as virtual viticulture Academy. That's really where I share all of my information with growers who are not necessarily my clients that I consult for on a one on one basis. You know, you have all this information, you want to share it with other growers. I know that's my passion is helping growers. And I've been doing that for my whole career. So through Virtual Viticulture Academy, I have a way to get together with that community. For this, those who join and answer their questions in the vineyard and share some of the trials and tribulations the what works and what doesn't work, and give some direct feedback to a community of growers. And what's awesome about that Craig is we didn't just do Virtual Viticulture Academy because of the pandemic. We're in our fifth year, you know, a lot of people went virtual and went online and found new innovative and creative ways to reach their audience, whether it's a grape grower or winemaker in this industry. We've been doing that for five years. And when the pandemic came on, and we weren't visiting sites as much or doing things in person, we just kept on going and kept on teaching and trying to try to make an impact. And just like the Vineyard Tam has been doing with all their great online programs. So so that's one of the things that I've been working on there. And then I'd really letting the cat out of the bag here a little bit. But I think by the time this podcast is released, I'll also be releasing a podcast known as Vineyard Underground podcast. And that's going to be just where I hang out like this and share information through the ear buds about grape growing very similar to what you're you're doing there. Our goal is to have some quick wins that growers can take back to the vineyard. Some practical advice for the everyday grower. Well, we'll get into the science of grape growing but we really want to focus on the how to interviewing growers and getting down into the dirt a little bit into the underground, where things get a little bit hidden and overlooked.
Craig Macmillan 34:26 That's awesome. Our guest today has been Fritz Westover viticulturist with Westover Vineyard Advising, of course, the Virtual Viticulture Academy, and the upcoming Vineyard Underground podcast. Thanks so much for taking the time. This has been really fun. There's going to be links to all the things that he's mentioned in our notes regarding this, this little show here and we hope that you check them out tons of great stuff. One thing that Fritz does really well is communicate to the world. He's got he's got the Twitter, he's got the Instagram, he's got the Facebook, he's got the website really easy to find really great information super useful. We really appreciate everything that you're doing. I think one of the things I just want to say personally is that you know, to the public Fritz has been a an asset to the viticulture community throughout the United States in a way that I can't think of very many other people have been just speaking personally, I really appreciate that because you people who are really passionate about it and are really knowledgeable about it, and here's the piece that are willing to go out, who are willing to get on a plane or willing to get in a truck and really go out and meet one on one with people and then stay connected, whether it's virtual or otherwise, I think is really fantastic. And so you should be applauded for that.
Fritz Westover 35:38 Thank you, Craig, so much for having me and thanks to the vineyard team as well.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||
| 279: 3 Ways to Improve Your Customer Experience | Marketing Tip Monday | 28 Jul 2025 | 00:03:16 | |
Why do most tasting room guests show up? It's not for the wine. Dan McCole (Michigan State University) shares research-backed tips to elevate customer experience through atmosphere, staff engagement, and showcasing accolades. Resources: Vineyard Team Programs: | |||
| 154: Is Wine Certification Worth It? | Marketing Tip Monday | 24 Oct 2022 | 00:03:04 | |
The number of winery businesses has grown, on average, 4.5% each year for the past five years, with over 7600 wineries currently operating in 2022. Among the dizzying sea of wine options, having a certification differentiates your brand! Welcome to Marketing Tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry, these twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing so you can show your customers that you share their values. Today we look at how adding a certification logo to your label can increase your wine sales. When wine shoppers pick your bottle from the shelf and see a certification logo like SIP Certified, they can feel good knowing that they are supporting a system of winegrowing that is done with conscious care for the people and the planet. Consumers are looking for SustainabilityIn terms of where consumers believe sustainability is the most important, unsurprisingly, it's the industries that are part of their everyday lives -- especially products as opposed to services. According to Morning Consult's 2022 Sustainability Report: What Sustainability Means to Consumers, when asked about the importance of sustainability in a variety of industries, over 80% of respondents said it's important in the food and beverage industry. If you are a SIP Certified wine brand, you fit the ticket! Since you're doing all of the hard work to become certified you can easily take the next step to put the logo on your bottle. Why Certify Your Wines?If you're going through the process to certify your vineyard or are sourcing sustainable grapes, you may wonder why you should take the time to add the logo to the label and certify your wines. The answer is simple: consumers seek easy ways to find and identify sustainable wine. Wine labels are one of the most frequently used sources for identifying sustainable wines -- which makes sense! Unless a consumer knows where you source your fruit or that the vineyard named on your wine label is sustainable, how else would they be able to know that your wine was produced with sustainably grown grapes? Putting a certification logo on your bottle is the best way to ensure your product can easily be identified as sustainable by consumers when you aren't there to tell them. Are you eligible to use the sip certified logo on your label?Any wine made with at least 85% SIP Certified fruit -- estate or purchased -- can bear the SIP Certified seal. All you need to do is complete a Wine Application and send it to a Wine Inspector. The inspection is all done remotely via email exchange of chain of custody documentation. Visit our Get Certified: Wine page to read more about wine certification, and email whitney@vineyardteam.org if you have any questions. Check out the show notes for links to this article and all of the consumer research resources mentioned and to sign up for our biweekly Marketing Tips newsletter. Until next time, this is Sustainable Winegrowing with the Vineyard Team. References: | |||
| 153: The Role of Nematodes in Soil Health | 20 Oct 2022 | 00:26:59 | |
Think most nematodes are parasitic? Actually, the majority are beneficial and can provide biological control for bacteria, fungi and other nematodes. Deborah Neher, Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont explains that the name nematode in Latin means roundworm. But do not confuse these worms with the common earthworm. They have a very simple anatomy that is purely dedicated to eating and reproduction. The microscopic, aquatic organisms live in water films that surround soil particles. Nematodes are the most numerous soil-dwelling animal and can live in extreme conditions. Listen in to learn how nematodes fit into a healthy soil system. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 And with me today is Dr. Deborah Neher. She's a professor at University of Vermont and has done some really, really interesting work on soil health in particular, micro organisms and what role they play. And so today we're gonna talk about nematodes. I'm excited.
Deborah Neher 0:15 Yeah, it's great to be here. nematodes get me excited too. Been working on it for like 30 years now, believe it or not.
Craig Macmillan 0:22 I believe it. First of all, let's drop back a second. And we're talking about healthy soil soil health, the role that these organisms play in that. What is your definition of a healthy soil, I think that's kind of a tough thing.
Deborah Neher 0:33 Sure. And I know everybody has a slightly different version. But just to keep it really short and succinct, it needs to be porous, it needs to be chemically balanced, as well as containing organic matter. Let me just elaborate on those briefly. We need a range of pore sizes in soil to help give it good structure and that also allows for a balance of water and oxygen, so that the plants and the microbes can live and have air to breathe. We need a chemically balanced both the nutrients as well as a pH. And as far as organic matter it plays a number of different roles. It can hold moisture and nutrients kind of like a sponge. And that's also where we have the biological activity happening. And organic matter has negative charges on its surface the nutrients have positive charges so they can attract you know like magnets with opposite charges. You know, organic amendments usually come with microbes as well as nutrients so they're bringing the life into soil and supporting that.
Craig Macmillan 1:31 And speaking of life, that's what a lot of your work has been the the soil microbiome plays a huge role and how that functions obviously and different organisms have different roles. So we have bacteria, fungi, we have protozoa, we have nematodes, am I leaving anybody out I don't want to leave anybody out.
Deborah Neher 1:49 Micro arthropods is another big one like mites is another one.
Craig Macmillan 1:53 Oh, yeah, that's right. When we do we don't talk about that much at least in my experience is the nematode part of it. What exactly is a nematode? First of all.
Deborah Neher 2:01 So the term nematode might be a bit foreign, it is a Latin word. If we translate it into English, it means round worm. And they are different than earthworms. They are different taxonomic phyla, so very different. One thing you will notice when you look at a nematode is it moves very differently than an earthworm. It has kind of a snake like S shaped movement, and that's because it only has longitudinal muscles, so it's not very coordinated. Nematodes are the most numerous of all soil dwelling animals. There's a great quote about how abundant they are. This quote is by a famous nematologist about 100 years ago, his name was Nathan Cobb, and he said, nematodes are so numerous that if you were to zap the earth, and just leave the nematodes representing the structure there, went outer space and looked back, you would be able to see see the Earth and the contours of the earth based on where the nematodes are. If you knew the associations of those nematodes and plants and animals well enough, you'd even be able to tell which plant and animal communities were wher. Back to kind of what they are there, you know, the very minute the soil nematodes are microscopic in size, one millimeter would be a very large one, you'd be able to see that kind of with your naked eye, but we usually have to look at soil nematodes, through a microscope. These tiny round worms, they basically are aquatic organisms, they live in the water films that surround soil particles. So I like to refer to them as the other aquatic organisms. And they're so tiny that they're forced to really navigate within the existing pore structure of soil within those water films. They are different from earthworm. Earthworms can move soil particles, these guys can't. Another kind of interesting thing, if you looked at their anatomy, it's very simple. They basically their whole anatomy is only about getting food and having sex, okay? They don't have any eyes, they don't have any appendages. They're determining where they're going based on kind of touch and smell chemical cues, as I'd like to say they've just got life down to the basics, just eating and having sex. And their whole whole body structure is based on that.
Craig Macmillan 4:28 They are relatively simple. What are some of the major categories of nematodes because there's a huge array of different even beyond genus just types and categories and do all kinds of different things. What are some of the major categories?
Deborah Neher 4:41 Yeah, I like to think about the categories we call them kind of feeding groups or trophic groups would be a way to think about it. Most people when they think of nematodes they automatically think about plant parasites, and that is an important, you know, group of nematodes but that's usually a minority. The majority of nematodes are actually beneficial. And they can be categorized into groups. One group would be bacterial feeding nematodes, another one that feeds on fungi. Another group that's actually predacious. And those can actually feed on protest or other nematodes. So they could have like a biological control component. And then we have some that we call omnivores, meaning they eat a variety of food sources. But those predators and omnivores are kind of higher up on the food chain than those that are feeding on the microbes. So you kind of almost have a whole food web just have nematodes.
Craig Macmillan 5:40 Wow, that's a that's pretty, pretty amazing. They also though, were parasitic to animals, their animal parasitic nematodes as well, right?
Deborah Neher 5:48 Yes, there are animal nematodes. These tend to be much larger than the ones you see in soil. They're not you know, restricted to going between the particles of soil. They're actually in the cavities, you know, the digestive cavities of animals. So examples like intestinal roundworms, pinworms, hookworms, those would be examples of nematodes that can be inside vertebrates, and those are very serious parasites.
Craig Macmillan 6:11 Yeah. And so that kind of where I was going for, which you've been very helpful was it's a type of organism that is incredibly diverse, all aspects of life on Earth are connected to nematode in some fashion. Now going back to soil specifically, so what are the roles that different kinds of nematodes play in the functioning of the healthy soil?
Deborah Neher 6:31 I'd like the fact that you pitch that as what is the function, because this is something I think about is it's really more important thinking function than just the specific organism itself. And that's why I study them. And that two major ecosystem functions in soil one is decomposition. And the other is nutrient cycling. Nematodes are really tightly linked with nutrient cycling, and particularly nitrogen, okay, and they're not feeding on, you know, the decaying organic matter, they're feeding on the microbes right. Their link in with nitrogen cycling is kind of both direct and indirect. Directly, they actually the food they take in any extra nitrogen they have, they excrete it in the form of ammonium as a byproduct. And that happens to be a nutrient or form of nitrogen in that plant can take up. So that's one way. And the second way indirectly is by feeding on bacteria and fungi, they can, you know, decompose the tissues, the body tissues of those microbes. Let me back up one moment, because bacteria and fungi are all especially bacteria, very important in nitrogen cycling, all the different stages. And nematodes can are a predator on those. And when you have a predator on a prey like that, you know, it kind of culls out or removes the sick, the weak, the old and keeps the most active ones going. And it ends up by that grazing activity on those microbes, that it makes nitrogen cycling more efficient, they can release more nitrogen per unit of carbon. So they don't take as much energy to kind of keep this nitrogen cycle going. So they're kind of keeping that bacteria in a healthy state, you know, in terms of their role in nitrogen cycling, but as I mentioned before, they also excrete ammonium. So we've estimated based on in my research that they contribute about eight to 19% of the nitrogen mineralization in soils, which is much higher than it's been reported in the past. So very important.
Craig Macmillan 8:46 That's incredible. And so what they're doing is they're consuming something and they're digesting it. And so it goes, it comes in in one form and leaves in another. Yes, it makes it in a plant available form.
Deborah Neher 9:00 Yeah, so you know, when they're ingesting bacteria, fungi, those are all their proteins and their bodies are comprised of amino acids. And when you digest an amino acid, one of the products is ammonium. And when the nematode gets more nitrogen than it needs for its own maintenance, the excess is then excreted as an ammonium. And that's a form plants can take up.
Craig Macmillan 9:26 And again, like they like that ammonium is going to be in solution in water on a soil particle and a root is going to grab that water and pull it up into the plant.
Deborah Neher 9:37 That's exactly right. Yeah, any nutrients have to be in water solution to be able to be transported into the plant through the roots.
Craig Macmillan 9:46 And this just occurred what are the conditions, soil conditions that promote different types of nematode populations and what are so conditioned that maybe limit them?
Deborah Neher 9:56 So that's a great question. What are the reasons that I got and to study nematodes in the first place is because they are distributed everywhere in all kinds of ecosystems, all types of vegetation. So that by saying they're everywhere means that they can also withstand some extreme conditions. I mean, we find them in extremes for temperature for cold for dry. Some groups of nematodes have an ability to go what they say in a kind of a cryobiotic state, or if it's for dryness and anhydrobiotic state, meaning when it's super dry, they can change into kind of a suspended animation or a dormancy where they can just kind of shut down, they survive, but their metabolism goes way, way down. And they have a way to kind of change their chemistry within their body so that they can stay alive and not damage their tissues. You know, I've studied nematodes in desert soils, where it's 60 degrees Celsius, so like, you know, over well over 100 degrees, and they're hanging out in there. Now, some of them are gonna get triggered into this other stage when it gets harsh. Okay, so one thing that would not be good for nematodes is if you would deplete the oxygen, they do require oxygen for survival. So if you had a situation where it was say flooded, for a long period of time, and all that oxygen got used up, that would be that would be very harmful to nematodes. The other thing that we can see is if you use very intense, general biocides, let's just say application of methyl bromide, for example, that pretty much wipes out everything.
Craig Macmillan 11:38 That'll take care of it. Yeah.
Deborah Neher 11:44 I mean, there are different species that that are adapted to different kinds of conditions. So if you have, you know, a tropics versus agricultural land in the temperate zone versus a wetland, they're gonna have different species just because they're adapted to those unique conditions.
Craig Macmillan 12:01 So you can tell a lot about a location. You can almost guess location like like constant I'm guessing that particulars species or perhaps genus, I'm not sure what level would be the important one, but you probably could or should identify these specific organisms, these specific types of organisms. How do you do that? We're talking about microscopic things that are distributed around soil. How do I find these little guys? What how did nematologists do it?
Deborah Neher 12:31 Yeah, no, that's a great question. First of all, address your species versus genus query. One is when we're looking to plant parasites, everybody identifies them to species, and sometimes even more precise than that there's actually races or, you know, subspecies, we would say. When we're looking at free living nematodes, we're happy if we can get to genus. We don't even have the knowledge to go to species for many of those. And part of it, there's so many different kinds, because I might find 50 to 100 different genera in one soil sample. So how do I get there, you get there. The first step is you have to get them out of the soil. And what we do is make a water slurry. So we'll take the soil, and we'll mix in water and stir that. And that will allow the nematodes to kind of swim out of that soil and into that water. And then we will run those through a series of sieves. So we start with kind of a coarse or large opening, go through that one first and make it successively smaller and smaller, until we can collect just we can get rid of the soil particles, and just have the nematodes on the final sieve. So that's one approach. But there are other methods that can be used to in terms of like cleaning them up as we can. I've used techniques where you can put them in a tray that has some kind of filter holding it up and having water and they'll swim out of that and you can collect them in an outer tray. And another cool technique is we can use a sugar flotation when you put this liquid into a tube with sugar, and spin it in a centrifuge, they're going to float because they're less dense than sugar. So if you're trying to concentrate them, you can use this method so that you can just pour the top part of that onto a serve. Now one tricky thing with that technique is you can't leave the sugar on very long, you got to get them rinsed off or they're just gonna shrivel. It's gonna make identification impossible, and it's also just a sticky mess to work with. So, people have been steering away from that. So I think of kind of a sieving methods giving a water slurry. The method I described with the sieving and flotation method is the one that I use for looking at entire soil communities. If one was interested in only the plant parasitic nematodes, there's another technique that's called an an illustrator, or semi automated method, and faster for like a diagnostic lab. And this is a technique where they use a sieve and they run water over it, and then there's some movement of that water and they can collect it, it's just a way they can try to process multiple samples. An illustrator is is a faster method, kind of what we call semi automated will allow a lab to process more samples within a day. The one downside with it is it's not as efficient with clay soils can miss some of the nematodes and under represents these predators, and the omnivores. It works great when you're just looking for a particular plant parasite, for example, that's fine, because you kind of know which needle in the haystack you're looking at.
Craig Macmillan 15:58 At least you know that.
Deborah Neher 16:02 Once you get the sample out, then it's usually in a water suspension. And we usually just let those settle for a little while and ends up that nematodes fall with gravity about one inch per hour, wait till they settle and we can concentrate them and then we'll first of all count how many nematodes we have in that volume of sample. And then we'll take a what we call a mass mount slide a slide that has a cavity, some depth, put some in there, and then we'll do the identification of those and we have to go to about 200 times magnification using a light microscope. Features that one looks at are some of the mouth features those that are at the feeding so you can understand the feeding, but also the the esophagus, within it and nematode you can see straight through there transparent. So and think about it is that you don't need the pigments if you're in soil because you don't have light. So these organisms are you don't need sight you're not seeing and they're you know, they're transparent. And so you can see straight through them. One of the challenges is, they are 3d. So sometimes you have to do a lot of focusing up and down takes a really good microscopists to do that. Some people will actually try to fix them or you know, kill them to hold them still. But sometimes you lose characters like how they move and swim can also be a character sometimes that helps to identify.
Craig Macmillan 17:31 And that quantification and identification has been important to another topic you work on, which has been around the idea of nematodes, as bio indicators might tell you something about what's going on in the environment, just whether they're there or not. And who. Can you tell us a little bit about that work, because fascinating stuff.
Deborah Neher 17:47 Sure. First, let me just give you a perspective, I consider myself a community ecologist. So I use a community ecology approach. So I'm looking at the community structure, or the community composition, and how that changes under different land management practices. The type of index that I found works the best is one that really looks at what the life history characteristics of different species. That means how sensitive or tolerant they are to disturbance, you know, how many offspring they have with their generation time is. So just to give an analogy, you know, it's kind of like comparing rats and elephants or carp and trout. Rats are the kind of what we call early stage, you know, they come in, they can tolerate a lot of stress where an elephant is going to be very sensitive, they have a long generation time. So if we apply that in nematodes, we have those that are early colonizers and those that are later in succession. We can tell the type and severity of disturbance based on the composition of that community. And as we learn more than we'll be able to even tell, you know, was that disturbance due to cultivation? Or was it disturbance due to heavy metal contamination, or perhaps even just a lot of additional a lot of fertilizer, that can actually shift a community to a very early successional stage. It's kind of an indicator of ecological succession. So you know, if you're in a forest, and you have a clear cut, and you want to progress gradually to a mature stand, old growth, you know, there's a lot of changes in species composition. So if there's no disturbance, you'd get to the old growth where there's, you know, the ultimate would be if you clear cut it, you can see the same kind of patterns in nematodes. So you can tell the kind of disturbance and where it's at on their trajectory. So that can be helpful to know the level of disturbance. It can be a tool for monitoring if you're trying to restore an environment as well. Now one thing that I just want to kind of address a myth is the idea of diversity. Most people think more diversity is better. And yeah, in general sense, but we have to be a little careful because diversity is just a mathematical equation. And it doesn't tell you who is there. You could have a diversity of invasives. Right? So we need to get to know who is there, it's just not how many different kinds are there. The other thing, if we're thinking of that analogy of a clear cut to an old growth is the most diversity is actually in the middle in the intermediate, because you're kind of in a transition between an early phase and a late stage. So you have overlap of species. For both of those. When you're at either extreme of the continuum, you actually have lower diversity, we tend to like to think about biodiversity, but we have to be a little bit careful in terms of that. And that's why I prefer an index that just looks at the community structure where it is on the whole continuum, rather than limiting it to just diversity.
Craig Macmillan 20:59 So is this something that a grape grower could use over time to see I'm using these practices? Is the community changing? is a community changing? In a good way? Are there things that I do that have suddenly you know, like you said, knock backwards and successional progress? Is that Is this the kind of tool? Is this the kind of measurement I can use to make decisions?
Deborah Neher 21:21 That is exactly it, it works best if you're doing it through time, you need to start somewhere and get a baseline. And then it's how is that changing through time, and it gives you feedback back on, am I on the right track or not? It's using this index where I really learned the cultivation or the physical disturbance of soil has the greatest impact on the soil foodweb. And it will set that back further than say, applying, you know, whether it's a chemical disturbance, whether that's a pesticide or fertilizer, for that matter. So the physical disturbance is really the most destructive to soil foodwebs.
Craig Macmillan 22:00 And that actually brings up another question, when we think about soil foodwebs. Are we talking about the first four inches? Two inches, six inches? Is there stuff happening in a foot that I should be interested in? Is there stuff below that, that I should be interested in? Because I got roots that are down at you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7? Feet? Where should I be putting my attention Deborah tell me please? Where should we put my attention?
Deborah Neher 22:20 Well, that's a great question, because so much sampling focuses on the top eight inches, because that's the plow layer. But that's a problem. Because really, the biology is going to be as deep as the roots. You know, the biology tends to be the most abundant near the surface and decreases as you go with depth. The other thing with roots is you have to think where are the actively growing roots. And when you're dealing with trees and woody plants, the biggest roots are not necessarily where all the activity is, it's really where the new roots are. And that's where the most biological so thinking about where is that happening? That would be the right place to look. Right. And usually that's a little closer to the surface, but there could be some of it deeper. So I usually like to think think about where the roots are. And that's where you should be sampling.
Craig Macmillan 23:07 Well that is some really good advice. And thank you for taking a topic that I personally have found very confusing over the years and giving it some clarity for me and also helping me see how we can what it means but also how we can use it and and how we should monitor it, which I think is great. So I want to thank you for being our guest, Dr. Deborah Neher Professor University of Vermont and plant soil science.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
| |||
| 151: The Role of the Soil Microbiome in Soil Health | 06 Oct 2022 | 00:33:53 | |
Soil is alive and we want a lot of life in the soil. According to Deborah Neher, Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont, healthy soils have three components. These are a range of different pore sizes to help with structure as well as balance water and air; balanced pH and nutrients; and organic matter to hold moisture and nutrients as well as provider microbes. Soil structure is created by mineral particles, bacteria, fungi, and plant roots. What determines a good quality soil depends on the ecosystem – a forest has different needs than active farmland. Bacteria and fungi are the life forms most associated with soil health. Some tests show the number of fungi and bacteria and their ratio to one another. However, they are not showing what is in the soil and there is still limited research on what these fungi and bacteria are doing. Often bacteria are associated with negative health factors. But there are many good bacteria that promote plant growth by producing nutrients or making nutrients more available. Others provide biological control. And others convert nitrogen in concert with legumes. Fungi can also be good and bad. Their structure is like linking pipes so they connect plants. This can help cope with drought conditions by pulling water from faraway sources. Deborah also touches on how to properly compost to kill off pathogens and weed seeds. Through research, she found that the process is more complicated than knowing the nitrogen to carbon ratio – the type of carbon matters! Her lab tried the same nitrogen to carbon compost "recipe" in three different production methods: windrow, aerobic static piles (ASP), vermicomposting. Each final product had completely different fungal and bacterial communities. Listen in to learn what kind of carbon is best for disease suppression. References:
Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org. TranscriptCraig Macmillan 0:00 I'm your host, Greg McMillan and our guest today is Dr. Deborah Neher. She's a professor in the Department of Plant soil science, the University of Vermont. And today we're going to talk about soil health. Welcome to the podcast.
Deborah Neher 0:10 Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Craig Macmillan 0:13 Before we get rolling, I understand you grew up on a farm, you have some background in agriculture.
Deborah Neher 0:16 I do. I grew up as a fourth generation family farm in Northwest Kansas, where we grew wheat and sorghum and had some livestock. And as far as my educational background, I have formal education in environmental science, as well as plant ecology. And I did my PhD at UC Davis in plant pathology. Since then, I've kind of merged to the ecology and the agriculture and I consider myself a soil ecologist. So my area is biology, but I work in soil.
Craig Macmillan 0:44 That's awesome. Because there's a lot of life in the soil. And we're about talking about everybody's interested in healthy soils. We have government programs now about topic. We have conferences, we have articles, we have books, but this is one of my favorite questions. When I talk to people about this topic I started with, what is your definition of a healthy soil?
Deborah Neher 1:03 That's a great question. And I know there's a number of definitions that are out there. But as a biologist, I want to first emphasize that soil is alive, and that we want a lot of life in the soil. A healthy soil would be one that's porous, that we have a number of, you know, range of different pore sizes, which give the soil structure and this also helps balance air in the water and soil. We need a chemically balanced soil, one that's valid for pH as well as nutrients in the soil. And then we need the biological part. And that's usually relates to organic matter, living plants. And plant roots are an important piece of that, too. Organic matter is kind of unique on the surface of organic matter, it's got these negative charges, and that attracts nutrients that have positive charges, like magnets, you know, opposites attract, yeah. But in addition to that nutrient holding capacity, it also brings in the microbes, and that's really a source of the microbes into the soil. Plant roots are also a source and support of the microbes in soil. So healthy soil, it's porous, it's chemically balanced, and it contains organic matter.
Craig Macmillan 2:10 The actual parameters for that are probably going to vary depending on the ecosystem, right? So what are the challenges for us? But how do I know like, how do I what do I manage? What do I look for? And obviously, I think, from what I can see, for different crops, I think the ranges are still kind of being figured out. I think what most people would like as well, I've got a five on this variable, do I need a 10? Or am I okay? And it doesn't seem to be that simple.
Deborah Neher 2:33 It is not that simple. It's really unique site by site, you know, one number can't really be applied to everything. When you get a number, you have to think well, what's good for what? And so a number for a good agriculture system might be a different number or a bad number, say, for a forest system, or for a functional wetland. So we have to really think about what is the the type of ecosystem? And what kind of land management practices are we interested in? That really depends and also what types of soil we're on, you know, what is good on a sandy soil might be different than if it's in a clay soil, heavy clay soil, for example.
Craig Macmillan 3:12 Exactly. And so today, I want to focus on the microbiome aspect of this. And we do you have a number of different types, classes, find ones even of organisms, bacteria, fungi, actinomycetes, silicates, nematota, there's probably others that I'm forgetting. But today, I want to focus on the bacteria and the fungi, because those are two things that you can send to you send a sample to a lab, and you will get some measures of those. And it's like, okay, cool, but what are they doing? Right, so what role do different kinds of bacteria play in the functioning of a healthy soil?
Deborah Neher 3:44 A great question. And I'll just start with, I think we have to be really careful not to over generalize and say all bacteria are alike, or all fungi are alike. Because there are such a broad diversity. There's 1000s of 1000s of species, and different species do different things. And I also like to think of microbiome kind of like an orchestra, you need all the different players and working together. You don't just want specialists and soloist, you need the whole ensemble, right? If we go back to bacteria, there's a lot of different bacteria there are people often think about pathogens, that's the first thing on the mind is the bad guys. But there's a lot of beneficial bacteria, as well. There are bacteria that we call them plant growth, promoting bacteria, they're producing chemicals in the soil that are stimulating plant growth, the plant might perceive them as kind of like a plant hormone, perhaps or it could be converting a nutrient that makes it more available to the plant. There are some bacteria involved in biological control. For example, there's a bacillus subtilis that's a known as a biological control. And they can do that by just through their own natural defenses. You know, they're going to antagonize or compete with other microbes. There are also bacteria that are involved in nitrogen fixation, that are associated with legumes in the nodules of the legume, they create like a little factory in there, where they're converting nitrogen gas from the atmosphere, and converting that into ammonium, which is a form that the plant can take out. And one thing we have to be careful in bacteria is not to think they're all alike, as I mentioned, and even, we go well, then let's get down to family or maybe get down to genus, but you even have to be careful. Not every species within a genus is the same. For example, there's one called Pseudomonas and there's one species of Pseudomonas Pseudomonas syringae. That's a pathogen. There's another species of Pseudomonas Pseudomonas fluorescence, that's a well known biological control. Now, fungi, fungi have equally different, you know, variety of lifestyles or things they do. There's also fungal pathogens, there's those that are decomposers mycorrhizae. That's a popular topic these days, that's a type of fungus. The cool thing about them is they're like a big plumbing system, they have this body structure that's like long pipes. They're called hyphae. And they can connect between different plants and go long distances. So they can be helpful to help plants say cope with drought, for example, because they can pull water from a great distance and pull that into a central use. I also mentioned the that an important attribute of healthy soils, I think, is aggregate structure. And these aggregates are really a composite of not only the mineral particles of soil, but it links in the bacteria that produce sugars on their outside their sticky, helping those hold together. And the fungal hyphae, which act like threads that weave these together and then plant roots to they're really working in concert with that soil to help provide this structure. Aggregate stability is I think, an excellent indicator that we can measure of soil health.
Craig Macmillan 7:04 Is that's related to bulk density?
Deborah Neher 7:06 Ah, good question. Indirectly, aggregateability can be related to bulk density. Usually, if you have more aggregates, you actually have lower bulk density. Okay, because an aggregate is going to have open spaces, it's going to have a balance of air and water. So bulk density would be just thinking about the solid particles per unit volume. So if you fluffed those up with more spaces and voids, within that aggregate, you'll have less bulk density.
Craig Macmillan 7:36 Is there is there a way that I can can measure or investigate aggregates?
Deborah Neher 7:41 Yeah, that's a good question. As far as aggregate stability, there are some really fancy advanced methods that organizations like NRCS, the Natural Resource Conservation Service do and if you're a soil scientist you get into there's also some really simple things that you could do. The simplest one I ever saw was taking an egg carton and in the base of those putting clumps of soil and then adding a little bit of water into each of those and see how much that disintegrates once you add water. If it just all crumbles and become small particles, you do not have very good structure. It should stay fairly intact when you're dripping that water on there.
Craig Macmillan 8:22 Interesting interesting. I'm just thinking about clay so we have a lot of a lot of vineyards are in clay, clay, gravelly clay, loams, etc on the Coast California and and other places. And how hard it is the water to go in to those clay soils. So I'm thinking about like dropping putting water on a chunk of clay and and just seeing it kind of get slimy.
Deborah Neher 8:44 Yeah, clays are tough clays are really tough.
Craig Macmillan 8:47 Are there ways to at least get a sense of how much life there is in this the soil? I mean, I know that that like, oh, that's got to have this or that. But other kind of metrics that are ways of investigating or anything that I can do. So for instance, I've been looking at some lab reports recently where they give us a total bacteria to active bacteria ratio, and they give us some ranges, then they actually will give us some actual identifications of particular nematodes that are found total funded active. Okay. So I've been trying to figure out kind of how to interpret that. But then I'm also curious, so how do you cope with that kind of thing? Is this a gene sequencing thing? Or is it a mass based thing or you pour the reagent on and it turns blue?
Deborah Neher 9:29 Great question. And I've worked with some of the methods, those measures that you're talking about are really, I think, defined as total and active bacteria, total and active fungi, right? Those methods, at least when I've used them involve a stain, kind of a fluorescent stain that you put on. And then you're actually making those into onto microscope slides and using the microscope so you have to spend time behind the microscope and you're counting, you know the number of cells or the number of hyphae that are crossing, you have a grid there, a grid pattern, and you're counting it. And that allows you to be quantitative. It's a laborious method, I would say it is the gold standard, if you want to actually get an estimate of total microbial biomass and activity, however, it's very tedious and very laborious. Another approach that people have used is one that's called PLFA phospho lipid fatty acids. That one is an easier method to get an estimate of biomass and activity. These are giving you some estimates. But this is where I say we have to be careful about overgeneralizing because this tells us nothing about who is there or what they're doing. We just knows there's a lot of them. And that's step one. Sometimes we hear a generalization about what about the ratio of fungi to bacteria, for example, and it's been touted that we want to strive for a higher ratio of fungi to bacteria. I'll tell you this concept really comes it from literature and science that was done in the 1980s. Really, the focus was on the effect of cultivation and tilling the soil. That's what it's really representing. Because when we go and cultivate and till soil, in fact, that's probably the most destructive thing we can do to the soil biology, you're just like ripping their house in their habitat into shreds. You're wrecking that pore structure. But anyway, so in cultivation, when we have highly tilled soils, that tends to favor bacteria. I mean, if you think about it, lots of threads, you know, for the hyphae. If you're slicing through there with knives, you're breaking those up. So that's deleterious to fungi. It's also deleterious to earthworms and also deleterious to other micro arthropods and larger organisms. So with cultivation, it's known that those tend to be fairly bacterially dominated soils. And so the thinking is, then if you go with a reduced till, or no till you're going to have more fungi. And so you'll start to see that ratio increase that, you know, tells us something about cultivation. I guess being trained as a plant pathologist, my first thing is we need to know at least who is there? Are we talking about pathogens? Or are we talking about beneficials? If all of those and most of them are pathogens, we don't want them? That's not necessarily a good thing, if all those fungi are pathogens, like ferrocerium or verticillium, or yeah, so we need to know who they are. That's the tip of the iceberg, right?
Craig Macmillan 12:38 You're working on related work, you actually do go down to the species level, when you do figure that out to describe the community in whatever system it is you're looking at. How do you actually do that?
Deborah Neher 12:47 Traditionally, we we use agar plates, and we try to culture these organisms. And it took very specialized media, some organisms grow faster than others. So we put things on there biocides to try to inhibit the ones we didn't want and allow the ones we did want, we call that a selective or a semi selective media. But then we learned only about 10% of microbes can live on a petri dish. So we were just looking at a subset of these organisms that did well. And consequently, we are missing a lot. But that's where the molecular techniques have come in, and helped us discover all those organisms that are not able to be cultured on a petri dish. There are techniques where you can take a soil and you can extract the DNA out of that. And then we use a series of steps, we call it amplicon sequencing, we put out what's called a primer on there, and it's going to copy a specific region of that DNA. And it's usually a region that's highly variable between species. And then once we extract that DNA, we can go through a process called a PCR Polymerase Chain Reaction just makes lots of copies. And then we can look at the sequence and there's databases that have sequences, and that helps us match to who is there, you know, the technology keeps improving, the longer the pieces we have, the better resolution we're gonna have. If they're short pieces, we may only get to family or genus longer pieces, that technology keeps improving. So we'll get more species.
Craig Macmillan 14:27 Do you think this kind of technology is going to find its way into the commercial realm? Or is this a strictly an academic thing at the moment?
Deborah Neher 14:34 Oh, I think definitely. And the price keeps coming down. So it's getting cheaper and cheaper to do. What I mentioned is who is there? What technology we still have to develop is what are they doing? That's a different kind of technique, and that's still at the academic level, and uses some different methods where we actually have to look at the genes and link them into a function. Are they fixing nitrogen? Are they producing say an oxidative enzyme. Antibiotic? What are they doing that part's academic. As far as who is there? I think this is where we have to understand their ecology, we need to know who and a little bit what they're reflecting, or is knowing that say, a lot of E. coli is there, that might be telling us do we have a contamination problem, you know, for example, if we know that's it, then we can prepare like a probe, a little tag that says, I want that organism and we can actually go fishing for it, pull it out and quantify it and say, this is how much we have. And then we could develop a model and say, once you're above a certain threshold, this could be risky. But we have to link it to say, a land management practice, or some known contaminant or something about land management, so we can help interpret what that means.
Craig Macmillan 15:52 So it sounds like to me, at the practitioner level, or at the industry level, we have some broad categories of things that we can find out. But there's a lot behind the curtain, we are guessing a lot. And so what's your advice, if I'm in that kind of situation where I have some information, but I don't have the kind of maybe I would like from a science standpoint, it's gonna be very important, obviously. But you've said different microbes do different things, what's kind of my best bet in terms of how I should proceed, or their techniques or things changes maybe, or the things that I might look for. So for instance, you talked about pathogens, I should be taking the top, I should be taking the top of the plant the plant part and evaluating it in relation to the soil health. So I might, for instance, have a high, I don't know, total active fungi, but maybe they are deleterious. And so I should be looking at the plant, seeing how the plants reacting that just simply what I'm getting out of the analysis, because it's kind of like what you want kind of what the grower wants, this is my take what a grower wants to say, okay, I'm gonna take a sample of soil, and what set it off? And then I'm gonna get a report back, and they're gonna tell me, yes or no, do this. Right. That's kind of where we're at at the moment. And so do you have any advice for how I can work with that? I guess I'm looking for some help on like, okay, gonna report back what I do next thing is just kind of kind of fishing for something here.
Deborah Neher 17:14 I think the first step is you always want to be scouting your plants. Do you see some kind of symptom? How well is it growing? Is are those leaves yellowing? Do I see lesions? Above ground? Is there something below ground? I mean, I think that's step one. So am I expecting there to be a problem? Those are some factors that we'll look at, is it a disease or not? Or is it an insect? You know, it could be that kind of thing. So we need to see, are there lesions are there root nodules? Are there something that doesn't look very healthy? That's step one. And I was gonna say for sure, if that's the case, then I would send a sample could be soil, or it could be part of the plant that has the symptoms into say, maybe a plant diagnostic clinic, but a lot of land grant universities have these available to growers that would help you identify a disease. There is interest in just general microbial activity, because everybody's trying to increase the activity and the diversity, etc. Commercially, there's limited types of tests available. The ones that are available are going to do like you said, the active and total bacteria or fungi, there are some estimates of respiration, which is another measure of activity, right. And there's another method that's fairly new. It's a per manganite method. It's a different chemistry method, a different way of looking, I can get your reference for the, you know, at the end, this per manganite method is is really linked in with management practices, and has been shown to really link nicely with that rather than just respiration. The problem with respiration is that you don't know who is respiring is it fungi, bacteria, it could be the plant roots itself, too. So it's really difficult to interpret. That's the really hard thing is it's so general, you don't know where it's coming from. On the beneficials and looking at the overall community. There are not very many commercial labs available yet. This is something I really would like to see. And I keep pushing it. One of the challenges is trying to get enough people that are trained to actually run these tests. Yeah, yeah. Like I've worked with some nematode communities, and I don't look at just pathogens but beneficials and there just aren't enough people in the world trained to do that. However, I keep if we can narrow down a particular like a dozen or a couple dozen organisms that are really like sentinel species are really tell us something important. Then we could develop molecular probes to those that specifically pull those out and help us interpret it. But that is still really at the research phase. Those are some of the things I'm going to do. But I need more people like myself so that we can accomplish this faster and maybe in my lifetime.
Craig Macmillan 20:12 Yeah, that's, that's a whole nother show the state of science and encouraging scientists of the future. You know, you don't even think of like little Jenny at age 10. Hey say, Jenny, what do you want to be? I want to be an ecologist, you know, it's not very normal and get that all the time. But we need more kids like that. Right? Right. Because nematodes are incredibly fascinating. They are just mind blowingly fascinating. Before we before we talked about that, or if we have time to talk about that. I wanted to get to compost recipes. You've done some interesting work where you studied different compost recipes, including what the manipulations of the windrose were, and then what the impact was on soil and fungal communities coming out of that. What kinds of things did you learn?
Deborah Neher 20:56 Sure, let me just tell you how I got started on compost. Yeah, so there was a year, a couple years here, I'm in Vermont. So there were a couple of years here that we had some major epidemics called early blight, or late blight, and these affect solanaceous, crops, potatoes, tomatoes, it was just bad year bad weather for this particular epidemic. So the farmer said, What do I do with my disease plants? Well, the extension agent said, throw them in the landfill. And I'm like, you know, the idea is you want to have keep the organic matter and the nutrients on your farm, we're not throw them in the landfill. So I said why if you compost these properly, you should be able to kill those pathogens and those weed seeds. So I set up a demonstration project. And we demonstrated that, okay, it works. Now the catch is you've got to really do a particular type of composting, it's got to be really monitored, it's what we call a thermophilic composting. It's got to reach high temperatures, and it says high temperatures that really helped kill the pathogens and weed seeds. Okay, that part is pretty well defined guidelines for that are, you know, outlined by the National Organic Program. And those work, the thing that it doesn't do is tell you what comes after the composting, they tell you the guidelines how to reach the thermophilic. But you don't want to stop there. Because if you let that cure and mature, you're going to have a lot of recolonization by beneficial microbes, and micro arthropods that are going to help you manage diseases. But you got to let it you got to be patient and allow this recolonization it happens naturally. These rules that are guidelines that are developed by say National Organic Program tell you use a carbon to nitrogen ratio of say 25 to 40 to one, so that many units of carbon two per unit of nitrogen, but they don't tell you what kind of carbon and carbons come in different flavors. There's carbons that are like carbohydrates that are like sugars, starches, they're really easy to decompose. And there are those that are like lignans and cellulose that are more difficult to decompose. We took some recipes where we could keep carbon to nitrogen ratios constant, but just changed the type of carbon, we follow the recipe. But what we found is you get completely different outcomes, that the type of carbon will completely change the micro, the bacterial and the fungal communities. So they're very unique. So as I say, recipe matters. You really need to think about what are you putting, hay, are you putting softwood you know, wood chips you puting some hardwood bark? What is it? As far as disease suppression they found out, you know, including some wood chips in that the bark and they're generally support a product that has more disease suppressive qualities.
Craig Macmillan 23:56 Okay. Is there a reference or a compendium or a book, for instance, that might have some more need to have information about these techniques. So people can try different things.
Deborah Neher 24:10 I have a peer reviewed scientific articles that outlines the actual research. But I've also just summarized a very large comprehensive chapter on disease suppression and using compost for disease suppression that just came out in a new book called The A Composting Handbook that was published in December 2021. And that is now available for purchase. I think it's about 1000 page book. So it's very comprehensive. So I've got a chapter that's almost 40 pages long in there, but it includes tables of which kinds of pathogens can be managed with compost, which kind of diseases you know, that's that's one of the features that I think will be useful to people that want to use composting.
Craig Macmillan 24:55 And I'll put a link to that in the in the show notes.
Deborah Neher 24:58 Great.I have one other thing I wanted to do. mentioned that I tried it, because you mentioned about the process and what's going on in the windrows. So we tried another thing, there's different means of achieving this thermophilic pile, you can have a windrow, where you can be turning it or you might keep it if you're trying to save land space, you have aerobic static piles. ASP is another method, just forcing oxygen into that. And then so those are two methods. And then there's a type of vermi-composting, working with earthworms that can also be used. Now, the thing with earthworms if you get too hot, it'll kill the earthworm when we're trying to do compost that can be meet qualifications for certified organic, it has to be shown and demonstrated that you've reached the temperatures. Long story short is we came up with the same recipe and tried curing it three different ways through the windrow the ASP or the vermi-compost. Start the same recipe, different curing process, completely different fungal and bacterial communities. So when people say, oh, just throw stuff together, I'm like, No, you really need to think about designing that compost. It leads me to think that eventually we need some designer compost, some that are made unique for different applications. And there's also a need to have a little bit more standardization and labeling of these products. So a consumer knows what they're getting. If you're gonna pay more, you want to know you're getting something better. Yes. You know, than if you're going low bid.
Craig Macmillan 26:37 Yeah, exactly. And in the in the vineyard world, I've been very pleased to see the composters, at least in our in a separate press California, you know, being able to demonstrate their techniques and give you the analysis and allow you to compare products pick like well, what I'm looking for here is I'm looking for nitrogen in some form. Okay, here's an analysis of nitrogen, because I'm less interested in and I'm more interested in carbon in some form, what kind of books organic carbon, so we fortunately, we're getting some of that, you know, so we're getting there. But obviously, there's way more work to do, like you said, designer products for particular situations, particular paths. And it's exciting. I think we got a long way to go. But we're doing really well. And I think people just generally interested in compost has a really good thing. And they're interested in, in learning more, I think is there. I think a long time ago was a hay compost is good. Like that was it. You know, compost is good. And then as time has gone on, we've got more experience, we've learned, hey, I need to be a little bit more sophisticated than that. So we're kind of out of time. But is there one thing regard to soil health that you'd suggest to our listeners, if you want to prove the health of their sauce?
Deborah Neher 27:43 Well, I think to me two biggies for really improving soil health is you want to keep plants in the system, and especially perennial plants, and that applies very much to vineyards. That's, that's good and also to reduce the tillage. So if we can keep the ideas, keeping plant roots in there all the time, and reducing the tillage that's going to really favor a more robust, active, resilient soil community and thus better soil health.
Craig Macmillan 28:13 That is good advice. I think there's a lot more to talk about, which I would love to do. We'll see if we can do that in the future of there's so much going on here. Where can people find out more about you?
Deborah Neher 28:23 Well, I will provide some links, you know, that will be available to you at the podcast site, some links there. I also have a personal web page that I make available, my various references as well. If you just search by name on Google, you'll find me everywhere.
Craig Macmillan 28:40 Yes, I noticed that. And yeah, I've got we will have a link to the lab, the near lab webpage as well, some other things and then a ton of links to various articles, podcasts, chapters. You've done a great job of getting out there. I really appreciate that a lot of folks do work kind of in a closet. And you very much had been doing some extension work and getting the findings out there.
Deborah Neher 29:01 My father would always ask me, well, what good is this for me? So it always kept me thinking I owe everything I learned in do I need to come back around and think about the application.
Craig Macmillan 29:13 I want to thank our guest, Dr. Deborah Neher, Professor of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai | |||