Sustainability is the arena of speculation

These days sustainability is the buzzword of the agricultural industry. The biggest agriculture industry in North America is California. It's also the capital of the organic agriculture movement with more organic farmers and acres under organic commercial agriculture than anywhere else on earth. California is also home to a robust and growing winegrape industry. So is it any surprise that sustainability is a growing concern of grape growers and winemakers in California? And if you've followed the development of popular culture over the past half-century, you'll know that what happens in California soon creeps up the coast. California wine-growers are very involved in sustainability, which means BC wineries will soon be occupied with sustainability. So let's take a look at sustainability as it applies to grape-growing to find out if it's just the latest trend from California or, well, sustainable.

The first thing about sustainability is that unless it's measurable it's totally subjective. And how do you measure sustainability? Because humans cannot accurately predict the future and human-built mathematical models for predicting the future are notoriously distortive, the only way we can guarantee sustainability is if something has been with us for centuries; in other words it already IS sustainable. Anything else is purely speculative.

That means sustainable is not an ABSOLUTE term; rather it is a quantitative term. That means things can only be made MORE or LESS sustainable but the only way to prove it is time. So as long as we know we're in the realm of GUESSWORK we can proceed.

The vineyard has three elements that need to be sustained--air, water and soil. Air is threatened by pollution from the tractor, so sustainable farming would involve the most efficient tractor possible used as few times as possible. The tractor is used in the vineyard for spraying and cultivation. Obviously the sprayer used must be the most efficient possible to do the work of placing protective compounds on the vines with the fewest possible passes. For instance, at Morning Bay we use a particular type of tower sprayer that, because of its design, is effective with about one-half the product of other sprayers. That means we get protection with fewer passes. I assume that's more sustainable by having a lower impact on the air. Why not completely stop all spraying? Because the crop would be destroyed by powdery mildew and my vineyard would not be sustainable.

Water sustainability is especially important in vineyards as they are often in very dry areas. Therefore drip irrigation, which delivers an exact amount of water directly to the roots of the plants, is more sustainable than sprinkler irrigation. And collecting water from the groundwater table, and not pumping it from the deeper aquifers, would also seem to be more sustainable. We do both at Morning Bay--drip irrigation and groundwater collection.

Soil is the final element that needs to be sustained in a vineyard. Erosion is a challenge, especially on a steeply-sloped vineyard such as Morning Bay. The most important aspect of soil management is to manage the tilth of the soil. We cultivate our soils bare in the summer to increase heat and decrease mildew in the vineyard. However bare soul erodes more easily than soil covered with grass so I would judge bare-soil cultivation to be LESS sustainable. But we need to do this to improve the quality of the crop. And I would say improved crop quality makes the vineyard more sustainable by increasing the quality, and presumably, price and demand for the product. But we need to do this sustainably. So we make sure we only cultivate in the summer when rain and wind are rare, and that we let a nice thick carpet of green grow in the fall that covers the vineyard all winter, preventing erosion. And anywhere that carpet fails to establish in the fall we mulch with straw to protect against erosion. Also during the summer we only cultivate three or four times, letting a good growth of grass re-establish between cultivations. This increases the amount of organic matter in the soil, increasing the soil's tilth, making it less vulnerable to erosion, and improving the farm's carbon footprint by putting carbon back into the soil.

Whew that's a mouthful, and we've really just scratched the surface, so to speak.

What about the winery? The first considerations are how the building was designed and constructed. Does it use local building materials? Does it use natural processes, such as underground cooling, natural light and gravity? A properly-designed sustainable building design would do all these things. For instance, at Morning Bay we dug our building into the north slope of a hill taking advantage of the natural cooling of the earth. We poured ourselves a concrete cellar. Now concrete is a particularly non-sustainable material, but in our case it was the most sustainable material we could use because its mass and the fact it's up against the cool earth mean we need no artificial cooling to keep our wines at the right temperature, which is a huge advantage over wineries in hotter climates that have to use artificial cooling.

When we built our building we also included a lot of windows so we could work in natural light whenever possible. But if those windows let a lot of sun in it would be defeating the purpose by letting all sorts of heat into the building. So, whenever possible the windows are either on the building's north face or protected by wide roof overhangs.

Water use is a consideration. We draw our winery water from the aquifer with a drilled well. Many California wineries, where water is in dramatically short supply, store, treat and recycle their used water. That may be our next sustainability improvement.

Of course efforts to make vineyard and winery operations more sustainable are on-going, and as more is learned about achieving greater sustainability, it's clear that wineries everywhere, being very susceptible to public relations, will work hard to make their operations more sustainable. I know we will.

Cheers!

Keith

Keith Watt is co-owner of Morning Bay Winery on Pender Island.