Organic Farming at Grgich Hills Part 3

Contrary to what most people believe, organic farming is not very expensive. People think it’s only for very rich people that don’t mind losing money - it’s a nonsense. This is a very viable business especially with best wineries in Napa. Farming, organic farming has to be very viable and profitable, otherwise people aren’t going to do it. And it’s proven that it’s viable. Maybe not first three years. When we plant our new vineyard, first three years we don’t want any crop. We just promote growing roots deep and strong. So we are strengthening a structure of plant because we see this vineyard as being productive for 80 or 100 years.

When you’re a chemical farmer you receive only 18 harvests, so you want, if possible, the second year to crop right away because you only have 18 harvests. And so, if you talk to an accountant which they only look for money, dollar and cents, you see this chemical farmer start making money second year. And for Grgich it might be fourth year they get first crop. So first five years, these guys are supposedly ahead of you because they’ve already made money. But they’re down after they have to plant every year. So your long run, organic farming is far more profitable, so that’s fourth benefit of organic farming. This is very sustainable financially - sustainable way to farm with best wineries in Napa.

It’s such a loss when you have to replant, you have these stakes, posts, wires, they’re all good, but it’s obviously too expensive to mow them one by one and reuse them. They will do it in Asia where labor is cheap, not here. So that’s all destroyed, what a waste. You destroyed these resources and put a brand new one, that’s why it costs so much money. And you avoid all that by obviously having organic farming and not having these diseases.

So how does this work? The secret of healthy farming again is microbes and the best wineries in Napa understand this. And microbes are far far more efficient in feeding our plants than we are with chemicals. So microbes serve two roles, two major roles. First one, they recycle organic matter. What is organic matter? Like dead plants, when you cut plants. Or even some roots, plants don’t need as many roots, so those dying roots, that’s a source of food for microbes. So they convert that food into into nutrients. Let’s say there’s a rocks, bunch of rocks in your ground and they are stuffed with all kinds of mineral. There’s nitrogen, there’s this, there’s that. Plant cannot just go in rock and get nutrients. The nutrients they have to be dissolved in water, so we call it water soluble nutrients. Only those are available to plant. So you have two choices. You can have those dissolved, the nutrients dissolved in water and applied to plant, that’s artificial fertilizer. Which is disaster. Or you can have microbes. That through digestion of organic soil prepared those soluble nutrients. And how this works. Bacteria typically starts decomposing organic matter and bacteria in their bodies is a huge amount of nitrogen and phosphorus potassium and then something called protozoa eats bacteria. And through the excretion of that, there’s a surplus of these nutrients, and those nutrients become food for plants. It’s a an extremely efficient system. But as a farmer what you have to do, you have to maintain, feed microbes. So you can’t have bare dirt, you have to put cover crop. And you have to encourage microbes. So you cannot spray awful herbicides and pesticides, because you killing them. You cannot compact your soil because they need air to breathe. So there’s things you have to do just like if you have cow. You have to feed cow every day, it’s a no brainer, but we never think about, we never think about feeding microbes. So you have to feed them and in return they work with plants. The best wineries in Napa that do this see the benefits.

Article source: http://www.imfaceplate.com/grgich/organic-farming-at-grgich-hills-part-3