If you feel bad, imagine how the dirt feels
This is not (just) for farmers or scientists.
You know how right before I sold my businesses I felt outrageously burnt out, despair-ridden, resentful and wholly incapable of pretty much anything? (I might have kept that secret. Oops. Now you know!) I’d spent the past 20 years of my life hustling, producing, optimizing, giving every molecule of myself to everything and everyone else, and I had nothing left.
Well. If you think that (or perhaps how YOU feel these days) is bad, imagine how the soil in our farms must feel.
Huh!
Until I got into wine, I knew nothing about farming. We had a garden growing up, but I wasn’t really a child who played in the dirt, and I just assumed any soil + water + sunlight would invariably churn out a tomato or two in the summer. Meh. “Big whoop,” I rolled my tweeny eyes.
When I started writing about and selling wine as a young adult, I quickly discovered that, invariably, all the cool wines came with pointed (semi-obnoxious) mentions of their farming. “It starts in the vineyard,” they’d always say.
“Everything starts in the vineyard.”
“All our important work happens in the vineyard.”
Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, I remember thinking originally. That’s what they all say. But what’s so special about farming? “Big whoop.” I liked shiny things!
It took me a few years and a few visits to vineyards to start to see: The cool wines (and most delicious ones) really did have something special happening in the vineyards, where the air seemed to buzz literally and figuratively, both with bugs and bees but also with energy. Where stuff wasn’t shiny, but the dirt smelled real good. Where the winemakers — who turned out to actually be farmers! — spoke and walked with reverence, touching the vine tendrils and swelling clusters tenderly, like they were their cherished children. It’s no exaggeration for me to say that I learned, through loving wines, to tune into the energy and emotion of a place, and suddenly I was overcome with the conviction that there’s much more than physical matter — than grape variety or yeast strain or oak barrel type — that makes up a wine… there’s so much more than physical matter that makes up us.
This farming-is-important revelation was all fine and good, sufficiently enticing and intriguing to my wine-loving self, for at least a decade and a half. Then, right around the time I started to feel really, really drained and incessantly irritated with everything, the universe bestowed upon me a pivotal conversation at Napa RISE with Morgan Twain-Peterson MW of Bedrock Wine Co. “We discovered that our soils were totally denuded,” he told me.
Denuded. As a writer, I like words, and I liked that one a lot. It had a certain ring; it felt ominous and significant. But I didn’t know what it meant. “What’s denuded?” I asked Morgan.
“Like, stripped. Deprived of everything; of all its nutrients,” he told me. “I don’t think most of us realize how completely denuded most of our soils are,” he continued. “So now, at Bedrock, we’re trying to build them back.”
I left that day and never stopped thinking about this. Maybe I, too, was completely denuded. And because the universe is powerful and magical and all-knowing, it began sprinkling the notion of regeneration and regenerative farming into myriad aspects of my life. Maybe if you are reading this, now, the universe is doing that for you, too, because it knows you need to hear this.
re·gen·er·ate
/ri-ˈje-nə-rət/
adjective
formed or created again
spiritually reborn or converted
restored to a better, higher, or more worthy state
(I want all of this for me. For us. For all of humanity.)
The basic idea of regenerative farming is to restore the soils and our land. To build them back from their denuded state. Like those winemakers all kept saying: Everything starts in the vineyard. But taking it a step further: Everything starts with the soil.
Steve Matthiasson explains it absolutely perfectly: “All of life, literally, grows from it, and so it’s imperative that our winemaking process starts with our grapevines growing in healthy, living soil.” If you want to get really, really nerdy about this, you should speak with Chuck Schembre, Regenerative Ag Consultant and Certified Professional Soil Scientist, who geeked out hard-core at last month’s Napa Green Growing Regenerative Viticulture seminar at Opus One. He will bomb your brain with science words like mycorrhizal fungal hyphae and explain that “Healthy soil releases more CO2, which drives more photosynthesis, which delivers complete protein synthesis, increased lipid synthesis and increased PSM synthesis.” And if you are a writer and hospitalitarian, like me, and not a soil scientist, you will be like “Riiiiiiighhht, Chuck.”
The TLDR I took away from that day, from listening to Chuck, raising my hand constantly, and also from my conversations with Steve and Morgan and my additional thirsty reading, are this:
Healthy soil is full of an awesome and diverse network of roots and fungi and decomposing organic matter. You can see, feel, and smell the difference in healthy versus denuded soil. It is remarkable.
All this sundry stuff in the soil feeds each other as well as feeds the plants growing out of it. Basically there’s a symbiotic relationship between all the bits, and in healthy soil, everything rather idyllically self-sustains and balances each other.
But wait, there’s more! The awesome network of roots and fungi and decomposing organic matter in the soil also create a physical armor for the soil, like tiny organic chain mail, that both allows better water absorption and deeper, more thorough percolation and infiltration of water into the ground WHILE simultaneously preventing erosion and runoff!
The plants need those nutrients and bacteria and fungi in the soil in order to build their own immunity and to produce good, nutrient-filled, tasty produce.
The fruit that comes off of vines that are growing in healthy soil literally has more nutrients and is organoleptically perceived as better in double blind tastings.
When you add chemicals (any kind of pesticide, herbicide, fungicide), or when you constantly pummel the soil with tilling, or when you insist on the soil only growing one single thing forever and ever at maximum output (sounds familiar!), you kill off biodiversity; you kill off components of the aforementioned balance, and then things get out of balance, and some other thing proliferates, and soon you realize you have to kill or temper or fix that, too, and… it’s a vicious cycle. It can happen fast.
But regeneration can happen fast, too. Tangible, visible, measurable improvements in the soil can be measured after just one year of regenerative farming practices. Which is why the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation’s One Block Challenge asks you to measure the delta in a handful of data collection components from the beginning and end of one simple year.
Next week, I’ll outline what those regenerative farming practices are and a bit about how they’re measured (“Regen Indicators”), so if you’d like to participate in the One Block Challenge (even if, like me, it’s just in a tiny corner of your home garden!), you can.
Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking about how I might integrate metaphorical cover crops and grazing sheep onto my physical body to help regenerate my personal soul. I figure I basically need to plant a bunch of legumes and native grasses on my skin, then recruit the equivalent of a medium-size hoofed animal that likes to graze and whose saliva and poop and pee can naturally fertilize my spirit. I’ll get back to you.
You are also cordially invited to jump into the Napa Green Zoom session this Thursday with Caine Thompson from the RVF, going over the specifics of the Napa One Block Challenge:
December 11, 9-10am — Register Here