Sustainable Farming

by Tony on August 28, 2008

Hairy Fleabane

Crush 2008 is on! And that means plenty of work to do. And that’s why I have maybe 10 minutes of “spare” time to do some blogging before the press is finished with the 3.2 tons of pinot blanc we picked this morning. I’m in luck – the latest issue of California Agriculture sits on top of one of the many piles on my desk and a headline article catches my eye: Glyphosate-resistant Hairy Fleabane Documented in the Central Valley.

For those not up on Ag Speak, Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the world’s most important herbicide, Roundup, and Hairy Fleabane is a major weed in California. Roundup is commonly sprayed in vineyards to kill weeds between and under the vines. It’s been used (and abused) for many, many years. And that’s the problem. Weeds, like pretty much any organism, can and will eventually become tolerant of the poisons used to eradicate them.

The problem here is twofold. The first and more obvious problem is that once a weed becomes resistant to Glyphosate we will be unable to control it’s growth and development of other herbicides, probably even more environmentally unfriendly, will be necessary. Secondly, and much more alarming, is the fact that we simply just don’t know the limit of potential resistance. In other words, because of man’s reckless spraying the weeds are getting tougher and tougher. And what happens when our nemesis the Hairy Fleabane becomes impervious to any nasty chemical we can throw at it? It becomes a “Super Weed.” And there’s nothing super about that.

So what can we do? The problem is very complicated but here’s one thing we can start with – stop spraying Roundup.

The One-Straw Revolution

by Tony on August 20, 2008

“There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song.”
Masanobu Fukuoka

Tom Kisaichi, our Japanese-born enologist and my good friend, just poked his head into my office and told me the news — Masanobu Fukuoka has passed away at the ripe age of 95. For those of you who have not had the pleasure, Mr. Fukuoka is a farmer in Japan and the author of The One-Straw Revolution, one of my all time favorite books. In the midst of this ever-modernizing world of conventional agriculture, he taught the concept of “do-nothing” farming – a return to the old days when farmers had a real connection to the land and to the crops they grew. He believed the reason that man’s modern farming techniques (e.g., tilling, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent on them.

But its not too late. Getting back to a healthy, sustainable system of farming is simply a matter of perspective. The aim of natural farming is to trust Nature to do her work with minimal interference from us big-headed humans. Rather than asking ourselves “How about trying this?” or “How about trying that?” Mr. Masanobu encourages farmers to consider the questions “How about not doing this? How about not doing that?”