Last Friday the vineyard got 40 mm of rain (~1.5 inches) in 30 minutes. That is a decent down pour for sure, but should not cause too much havoc.
And yet it did...
Felton Road relies pretty heavily on cultivation (plowing) in between the rows to reduce weed pressure and to get cover crops planted. Cultivation causes all kinds of bad things to happen, from erosion due to loss of soil structure and loss of organic matter, to the loss of ~25-40% of the stored water in the soil due to opening up the soil profile. Additionally, it can create a hardpan of compacted soil which prevents water from soaking deeply into the soil. All in all, cultivation is pretty terrible, and should be avoided if possible.
So, my first question when I saw how much Felton Road cultivated was how they dealt with these issues. The reply was that they were really not issues that Felton Road experienced...
Enter 40 mm of rain on a heavily cultivated vineyard on a hill, exit 1 METER of top soil...
Yeah, I wish I had pictures of it, but there were 1 meter deep channels cut into the vineyard. They have since scraped top soil from elsewhere in the vineyard to fill in the damage. When I asked about it, they said it was really just bad timing and a freak storm, but nothing wrong with their methods. Interestingly enough, neighboring vineyards that were not cultivated did not experience any erosion. Felton Roads cultivates to reduce competition for water, which is interesting considering how much of the stored soil moisture they lose every time they do.
Felton Roads prides itself on its sustainable practices, but they have a lot of the same problems that discouraged me from organic farming in the states... Lots of hopeful belief in what they are doing, but a certain blindness or failure to accept that they might not be doing as good of a job at it as they hope. I keep seeing it over and over in sustainable and organic agriculture. It is almost that they believe so strongly in what they are doing that they cannot look at their actions critically.
I might be being a bit high-and-mighty about all of this, but this episode really made me think about what interested me, and why I got into agriculture in the first place. I started this whole pursuit because I wanted to help people and protect the land. I remember reading The One Straw Revolution and feeling that I wanted to explore growing crops at that skill level. (The book is written by a Japanese man who dedicated 30 years to learning how to grow rice. It describes how he learned to grow rice in an almost Daoist approach... Like the flapping of a butterfly's wings to cause a hurricane, he discovered the timing of small interventions that would lead to a balanced ecosystem that supported yields greater than "chemically" farmed rice with only ~1 hour a day spent farming.)
So, NPR had an article on The Land Institute, a group of plant breeders who have been working to the last 30 years to revolutionize cereal farming. They are trying to reverse the last 10,000 years of farming by developing perennial cereal grains rather than annuals, with the idea that those grains would be closer to native grains and would be more efficient at using limited water and would not need chemical inputs or cultivation.
And I found that I was really excited about this... More excited about it than anything I have been doing at Felton Roads or even the last 2 years of organic farming. I guess it was good to remind myself why I had started this whole thing, and what really excited me.
I am excited to return home... excited to start a new adventure. When I return home, I am going to explore plant breeding.
Grad School, here I come! (Please don't worry mom, I promise I will not spend my whole life in school!)
~ matt
