Dave’s Space

December 27th, 2011

A few years ago I bought a dusty hardback in a dusty bookstore and put in on my shelf–where it remained.

Chris Maser.

The Redesigned Forest.

Over the solstice holidays, I finally read it cover to cover. As I was reading a gift from Rebecca: The Sister Brothers.

The Maser book was clearly influential but is out of print. You can view the contents and many comments.

There is a pattern he makes very clear–which is also the hidden pattern in Sister Brothers: rational thought + technology + human instincts leads to a state all too familiar, where we seem to know what we are doing, but do not. The poisoned black swans rise up and peck out our livers while we sleep.

Let’s look at some current examples, which match the Maser case in regard to forests.

If there is one diversity indicator we favour it is the pacific tree frog, a wonderful soft green creature with amazing habits.
The question is: how does one measure the quantity of such a small creature spread over  60 acres with at least five substantial water sources.

At the moment, perhaps the only way would be to run a decible meter at night fairly constantly over the mating season at various locations. This would not translate into a specific number of frogs, but would provide a relative figure over the years.

11/28/07

The first snow came last night.

The home vineyard is always slightly warmer than “down below”  in the summer and slightly colder in the winter, so the snow which quickly fled from most of the valley stayed all day here around the vines and on the thin, fragmented ice of the big pond.

It’s always daunting to start the pruning because the vineyard in winter seems to stretch endlessly into what is often a dark and forboding horizon, but I had the first two rows of Foch done before the snow, in days of dry sunlight, and I was determined not to break the pattern.

This year I’m plowing as I go; doing a half-acre or so and then pruning that; then doing another round of plowing; then pruning. I’ve decided the Foch is past its adolescence. With a few exceptions, each of the original plants is well established so I’m being rigorous. 20 shoots is all you get: five up and five down on each side of the trunk. And a good clean break between plants. No crossovers. No Vermont shoots for safety. 2007 was awful, I say to the row in general, but you did well. A solid crop, perfectly ripe (by Guy Fawkes Day anyhow). So 2008 will be just like 2006 and you’ll have no struggles.

The rows of trunks are well mounded now. The shoots I trim are brown and clean. My ploughing method this year is to go down the west side of each row and up the east side. With a two furrow plough set deep, this adds nothing to the mound (which is high enough) but sets a small terrace between each mound and the square swale which the double ploughing creates down the middle of the row. 160 rows. 320 terraces.

I make good time on row three. I’ve decided this year that all the carbon stays in place, which means I spend almost as much time chopping up shoots as I do removing them. 15,000 plants, with 20 shoots per plant, means at least 300,000 chops. A good workout for the fingers and wrists over the winter months. But to keep the shoots from clogging the cultivator, they need to be reduced in size. So let’s say closer to a million squeezes this year. Daily maintenance on the secaturs for sure. Perhaps even fresh blades at the half-way mark.

I start around eleven so I can reward myself with late lunch when I finish this crucial third row. By the weekend I want to have the Foch complete so I can start on the Pinot  Noir. Three acres there. Right in the middle. When that’s done before the New Year, you can be sure the rest is less daunting. Pick a side: two acres to the west or six acres to the east. Divide and conquer.

Ploughing reminds you of the terroir, in detail. With all these plants, you can never remember what you thought you would remember for sure last time you gave this particular one its haircut. What were you thinking to leave three buds on that one spur? But you can remember the heft and give of the soil in each part of each row as you came through. Although it slows me down and keeps me from lunch, I bring along a shovel and can’t resist levelling the terrace and burying the last grasses on the mound as a counterforce to all this brain and hand work. This is our ninth year of bringing the soil back to life and it lifts from beneath its white comforter almost like cocoa; it’s wet, but it’s still full of air and it takes little force to slide the shovel into what the plough has turned up and it spreads over the grass and snow almost like barley.

The rain turns heavy just as I start down the slope to the small pond that separates the Foch from the Gamay Noir. Mr. Maltman’s pond I call it, although it hardly desrves such an August title. Barry cleaned it out this summer; tripled the depth and even the sides and removed all the alder and cottonwood that had sprung into being since ‘99. But I hang in. I have four layers between me and the rain. The plants are heavy here because all the nutrients from the crest have migrated here with the water flow over the years and we probably get three or four bottles of wine per plant from these last three blocks. But I’m rigorous; I want to analyze cause and effect. Each plant in the vineyard gets four feet of width and eight feet of heighth and all the terra firma it can lay claim too. In one year, some of these new shoots here are almost as thick as my thumb, but size does not gain an exception. Down they come like all the others: five up, five down (trunk) five up, five down.

However, the rain has found the back of my neck. So I skip the terrace work and finish these in no more time than I spent on the others. I walk back up the terrace and don’t look back. I’ll finish the shovel work tomorrow before I start on rows four and five. In the distant fog, a hydro helicopter inspects the power line. Something is wrong there; it hovers and returns and even sets down. But here, in my small world, all is well. Row three is ready for April. The rain is melting the snow in the very centre of the row. Hundreds of short chunks of Foch shoots fill my (irregularly) square swale and my terrace just below the mound is just the perfect width for a human to walk upon and contemplate the morrow. Rows four and five on Thursday; three a day on a long weekend; then the Foch will all be ready for April and I can spend a day reconnoitoring the Pinot Noir.

DAVE GODFREY

There are many images from  eras when vineyards were less industrial and sounder ecologically: in these, vines grow on olives & nut trees, roses help repel pests and wheat thrives among the trees.  Today, however, it is hard to find living examples.

After a decade of growing grapes in the rain forests of Vancouver Island, I have come to question most of the fundamental vineyard principles I acquired during those ten years from books, experts and neighbours . The common wisdom is shaped by success stories from far away: if you think Napa, Piedmont, Sancerre, Bordeaux, Chianti, your image bank is full of hills and valleys full of manicured rows of vines: similar vines usually, often by regulation and cloned vines in almost all instances. Indeed there are few examples of an agricultural crop that has been more ‘industrial” and “invasive” for a longer period of time. What you do not see in these images is the annual addition of 52,000 tonnes of sulphur to the vineyards of the EU alone.  http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/markets/wine/studies/vine.en.pdf

After four or five years of “managing” my vineyard with the “best principles” that I could find, I had excellent crops—at a substantial cost per litre– and I began to experiment with reducing costs and following nature more closely by spraying less often and mowing rather than tilling. 2005 and 2006 were wonderful years. 2009 was “average” and 2010 looks like a repeat of 2008 & 2009.

Rather than tinkering with methodologies (should we buy 12 acres of plastic and tent?) I am now rethinking the whole process. And here are the fundamental questions.

Why are all vineyards a monoculture?

Why grow any crop when you need to spray it with chemicals ten or more time a year?

If a vineyard were not a monoculture, what would it look like?

How do you apply the general principles of permaculture to the wine growing process?

The way to begin on this new path is through experimentation and analysis of the past. There is no easy fix. What is probable is that the sale of wine produced in a very traditional context—although within a rain-forest—may fund a new model of production which bears very little resemblance to the means of production we use at the moment.

One of the more interesting terms you quickly run across is “global hectare”. Various groups, with various methodologies, are presenting analysis based on the notion of a global hectare (GH). This theory assumes one quarter of the biosphere is “productive” and then declares the average productivy of these 11.4 billion hectares as a “global hectare.”  Any given real hectare has more or less productivity that the benchmark GH, perhaps a great deal more. A given national “footprint” is expressed in terms of GH. For example, the UK footprint is 5.35 global hectares per person, while Bulgaria’s footprint is only 1.84 GH. This provides a clear indication that for most individuals in North America and Europe, we need either to consume a great deal  less (and thus reduce our average production of CO²) or to be involved in recycling CO² back into storable carbon. Estimates for individuals in the first world are that it would take at least 3 planets and perhaps as many as 5 if the world’s whole population consumed and traveled at our rates.

Thinking locally, how much carbon does our 105 acres sequester now? How much could it sequester if we changed our methods or our mix of plants? And could we both increase productivity and reduce emissions?

Vines, of course, do not come with meters attached. Nor do trees. The results of various studies on agriculture and sequestering of carbon show an enormous range. Many seem to believe that  non-mature forests are much better in the role of “carbon sink” than grasslands, orchards and vineyards. Others prefer deep-rooted grasslands.

The trick in much of the analysis is that you need to consider what’s in the ground as well as what is above above ground. Perhaps the lowly yellow broom, with its quick growth and deep tap roots is better for the planet than we think.

Of the many things we hope to enjoy doing in 2007, key is gaining some accuracy about our role as supporters of sustainable farming. For vineyards like ours, global warming, at the moment, is quite positive; we can ripen varieties that earlier trials showed to be very difficult. Some predictions show that the entire pacific coast area of Vancouver Island, Washington and Oregon will be able to support cool climate vineyards within 50 years. However, the costs of that “benefit” for us would be enormous for other regions, so we really would prefer for the whole planet to remain more stable.

Pragmatically, we assume that maintaining diversity, logging on a hundred year cycle, recycling as much as possible and working hard to move off the grid is going to keep us at the very least neutral and hopefully positive in terms of carbon sequestration and reduction of carbon emissions. But is that accurate?

With the two farms, we now have approximately 25 acres of vines and their cover crops, 40 acres of fairly mature third-growth forest, about 35 acres of pasture,  more than 3 acres of ponds, creeks and silt catchments (in the winter), and almost 3 acres of roads, barns, houses, parking and sheds. The basic question is do we contribute more CO² through producing 2,000 cases of wine then we absorb through growing everything we grow?

Seems like a quite simple question. But once you start reading the studies, it becomes less and less clear that you can be totally accurate. A little knowledge is usful; more knowledge is perplexing.