Organic farming

Edward Bolland

Edward Bolland

Location
Staffordshire
I don’t grow grapes, but farm a variety of arable crops. I’m not dismissing organic farming, and I have great respect for growers that do it successfully. However, the judicious use of glyphosate allows me to farm in a way that in my opinion is more beneficial to soil health and the general ecosystem than I could without it. No-till massively reduces soil erosion and this is only workable with a means to destroy the previous crop. The holy grail would be organic no-till and robotic weeders may be the solution in the future.
 
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Tom Mann

Location
Lancashire, UK
Alex Lake said:
There's no way a helicopter could aim weedkiller that precisely. Maybe a small drone, though...
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In this particular section of the vineyard it's quite close to the main road and there is a decent sized path behind so they probably do it by hand. However as you go up and/or across the slope you'd definitely have to use the helicopter. It's pretty small apparently. We also did see another vineyard which is only accessible by boat!
 
Edward Bolland

Edward Bolland

Location
Staffordshire
Tom Mann said:
In this particular section of the vineyard it's quite close to the main road and there is a decent sized path behind so they probably do it by hand. However as you go up and/or across the slope you'd definitely have to use the helicopter. It's pretty small apparently. We also did see another vineyard which is only accessible by boat!
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I’m amazed that the application of any type of pesticide is allowed by helicopter. The amount of product ending up where it’s not intended must be very significant.
 
Edward Bolland

Edward Bolland

Location
Staffordshire
Russell Faulkner said:
It seems pesticide spraying by helicopter has stopped a while ago, just fungicides now.

Some relevant sources.

Organic Spraying in the Mosel Valley – Lars Carlberg: Mosel Wine

An online guide to the wines of the Mosel, Saar, and Ruwer, with in-depth producer profiles and articles, as well as an extensive glossary of terms.
www.larscarlberg.com

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I used the term pesticide to include insecticides, herbicides and fungicides. New thinking is that fungicides might be the most environmentally harmful of all the plant protection products, not the most benign as is a popular concept. Fungi are probably the most essential part any ecosystem.

This book below is a good read.

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Leon Marks

Leon Marks

Location
London
A bit of a thread diversion but I’m in the middle of a wonderful book called “The Fish that ate the Whale” about the history of the banana industry from the late 1800s to the mid 20th century. One particularly wonderful fact came out was that most bananas used to be of a variety called “big Mike” which had very moist, and therefore slippery skins. Given the appalling state of street cleaning a century or more ago, this meant that slipping on a banana skin was a somewhat common danger. The trope of banana skins being slippy entirely comes from this time - most of us having rarely if ever having slipped on one.
 
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Sean Howe

Location
Australia
Edward Bolland said:
I don’t understand why herbicides are needed in a vineyard. Mowing between the rows surely suffices.
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In a dry climate weeds are a significant competitor for nutrients and water. I have used a mown undervine to reduce vine vigour. There is no need to cultivate midrow other than to level the surface. Weeds growing up into the canopy is never desirable. Depending on the cordon height tall weed stands in general reduce airflow and can condribute significantly to increasing canopy humidity, leading to fungal issues. Drone mowing technology will be a game changer in the next 20 years
 
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ian clarke

Location
Yorkshire
I’ve followed Daniel since 2006 , The Goldgrube wines are terrific and exceptional value. The wines seem to be improving with every vintage particularly the Spatlese a favourite.

I remember speaking with the agent at OW Loeb who informed me that the Goldgrube vineyards were so difficult to work due to their steepness, that the cost of maintaining the vines was unsustainable, particularly when German wines were a hard sell.
This resulted in many vineyards simply being abandoned.
This was an opportunity for Daniel to purchase a prime site at an attractive price.

Ive never seen the vineyards until Toms picture which confirms the steepness of Goldgrube
I image maintaining such a vineyard is incredibly hard work especially by hand.
 
Jonathan Hesford

Jonathan Hesford

Location
Trouillas, France
TBH neither vineyard looks to have that healthy bines but it could be the time of year and variety.

Whenever Organic farming comes up, too many people like to think of it as the polar opposite of non-organic, which they describe using terms like blitzed, drenched, devoid of life and dead.

While it is true that there are vineyards treated badly by growers focused on high yields with minimal effort, nearly all the vineyards which make the kind of wines we like are treated with respect and care. Some growers, for various reasons, choose to follow the Organic certification route but many prefer to follow other guidelines.

Copper Sulphate is the bugbear of organic viticulture because it is the only effective fungicide permitted against downy mildew, a very serious threat. People supporting organics may state that lower amounts are permitted for organic certification but the elephant in the room is that copper sulphate is the only thing they can use, so they have to use it. There are numerous modern, synthetic fungicides that are far more effective and have no known environmental downsides that are available to non-organic growers.

The organic promotion organisations have launched a culture war against the use of synthetic pesticides in order to frighten or persuade consumers that Organic produce is safer for their health. They have released and publicised loads of semi-scientific reports on pesticide residues detected (usually in amounts far below the safe limits) and linked those to potential or possible risks of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and various other neuro diseases. A jury in California was sufficiently influenced by such stories to find an agri-chemical company liable for a farm worker contracting cancer, ignoring the scientific evidence presented to the contrary. So now the organic lobbyists use that case to prove that synthetic pesticides cause cancer.

Going back to environmental issues and whether sticking to organic rules produces better fruit, and therefore wine. Organics prohibits any form of synthetic herbicide. They can use chemical weedkillers but it has to be something like vinegar or a salt, which are not very good for the soil.

The problem vignerons have, especially in dry regions where irrigation is not permitted under the AOP rules, is that it becomes more and more difficult to remove unwanted "weeds" growing under the vines. You'll often see a vineyard undergoing organic conversion which looks just as "clean" as before for the first couple of years but then perennial shrubs and pervasive plants start to take over. No inter-vine plough or mower can remove them so it comes down to doing it by hand. A wealthy grower, or one in a poor country, can afford to hire teams of people to dig and hoe the vine row but the majority of growers can't. So they become trapped in a system of increasing their wine prices to make up for the loss of yield.

We have all heard that lower yields equate to higher quality but this is only within a certain range, where th e high yields are causing uneven ripening of fruit. Once you are below that level, lower yields don't improve grape quality. My eyes start rolling when I hear growers talking about the merit of frighteningly low yields. I know because I have some vineyards like that. They have a lot of missing vines, old ones that are past their time and ones which harbour viruses. They also have low yields because they lose a lot of fruit to disease and insects, which does not make the remaining crop any better.

Ploughing the vineyard row is increasingly being seen as detrimental to the soil if it is only done to suppress weeds. Some soils can support a cover crop, which can be mowed, but some cannot because they are either too stony, too steep for tractors or just too dry. Different climates and different soil-types require different methods of management. Judicious use of weedkillers is one of those methods and the use of glyphosate should not be immediately linked to a bare vineyard where nothing else grows. (The vineyard in the right of the photo does not look like glyphosate to me, by the way).

All the points I'm making above are to point out the error in judging a grower or estate on their organic certification or even on the basis of a photo of the vineyard at one particular point in time.
 
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Tim Carlyle

Tim Carlyle

Location
Banbury
Its interesting what Edward says about fungi - I did some studies back when I thought I was going to have a proper job into the effect of different pesticide treatments on various microbial life in soil, measuring soil aerobic capacity, organic matter breakdown and petri dish experimentation with individual strains or groups of strains and seeing how they react to different treatments.

It was quite a long time ago - 25+ years ago, but every spray had an effect on soil health - however the thing that cause the biggest impact overall to the health of soil was copper compounds, which are used as fungicides for mildew but which when they hit the ground a really very destructive to soil health. And yet - these compounds are permitted in both organic and biodynamic viticulture - albeit in smaller doses than in 'conventional' viticulture. Its one big reason I'm in favour of a move towards sustainable viticulture, or regenerative viticulture because in the cases damage done can and is then repaired - organic is often better but not necessarily so.
 
Tim Carlyle

Tim Carlyle

Location
Banbury
Just seen Jonathan talking Copper - this really is the elephant in the room. I did these experiments in 1994/5 and it was known copper was a problem but only in the last few years are people talking about it quite as much - which I find incredible.
 
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Russell Faulkner

Location
Bordeaux
Copper (Well mildew prevention/treatment), cost of ‘membership’ and lack of potential flexibility are the reasons I hear for not certifying. All perfectly logical for me. I don’t know of any specialist retailers who insist on certification, beyond supermarket sections where quality certainly comes second).
 
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Russell Faulkner

Location
Bordeaux
Jonathan Hesford said:
Copper Sulphate is the bugbear of organic viticulture because it is the only effective fungicide permitted against downy mildew, a very serious threat. People supporting organics may state that lower amounts are permitted for organic certification but the elephant in the room is that copper sulphate is the only thing they can use, so they have to use it.
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There are of course many organic certified and uncertified producers who use little or no copper, preferring nettles, milk and a host of other treatments. So it's not the only thing they can use. How effective or cost effective it is is perhaps a different question, but then they are not generally farming on an industrial scale.
 
Jonathan Hesford

Jonathan Hesford

Location
Trouillas, France
Russell Faulkner said:
There are of course many organic certified and uncertified producers who use little or no copper, preferring nettles, milk and a host of other treatments. So it's not the only thing they can use. How effective or cost effective it is is perhaps a different question, but then they are not generally farming on an industrial scale.
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Nettles, milk, mandrake root and other potions found in the works of JK Rowling don't work. That's why organic and biodynamic growers rely on copper to protect their vines from mildew. If those things worked, they would be commercialised by the agro-chemical companies.
 
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Sean Howe

Location
Australia
One thing to consider is that powdery mildew and downey mildew originate in North America, and weren't present in Europe until the 19th century. Downey in particular was considered equally ruinous to the wine industry as phylloxera at the time. The idea sometimes expressed that "they didnt use these pesticides ' in some halcyon past is quite correct, but then they didnt have the pests.
 
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Adam Bruntlett

Location
London
Sean Howe said:
I cannot imagine anyone in a vineyard spraying herbicide by a helicopter, fungicide maybe.

The issue with organics is that it is exclusionary. A bit like advocating the use of sulfa drugs, when modern alternatives are more effective.
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Roundup would be sprayed by hand with a backpack in the same way as municipal workers might do to remove weeds on streets. It needs to be applied "carefully" so as to kill the weeds/grass but not the vines. Interestingly, my local Borough Council (Waltham Forest) stopped the use of all roundup by their Street teams from last year and asked residents to assist with manually removing them. A great policy, IMO.

Also, as mentioned, roundup and Bordeaux mixture do different jobs and aren't interchangeable. Organic viticulture and the continued permitted use of copper in particular is a thorny issue, and many who are organic certified are now questioning whether they might be better off using a more efficient, non-organic but less toxic product. Copper and sulphur are contact products and get washed off easily with rain, so in wet years it requires many treatments, which means lots of soil compaction too because of the repeated passes through the vineyard in tractors. As ever, it's not black and white!
 
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Adam Bruntlett

Location
London
Tom Mann said:
In this particular section of the vineyard it's quite close to the main road and there is a decent sized path behind so they probably do it by hand. However as you go up and/or across the slope you'd definitely have to use the helicopter. It's pretty small apparently. We also did see another vineyard which is only accessible by boat!
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I'd be astonished if herbicide was sprayed by helicopter.
 
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