Organic Is Easy, Says Frog's Leap Vineyard Manager Frank Leeds in Post Film Discussion Following Screening of Documentary Filmmaker Brian Lilla's "Children of the Vine" in Sonoma

Napa filmmaker Brian Lilla (left) and vineyard manager Frank Leeds
(right) of Frog's Leap in Napa at the Sonoma screening

When Brian Lilla moved to Napa to have a family, he and his wife never thought about pesticides and spraying, until he saw ATVs spraying vines. Concern for the health of their two little girls spurred him to make a documentary about the widely used herbicide Roundup. The resulting film, Children of the Vine, debuted in Sonoma Thursday as part of the Sonoma International Film Festival. 

The documentary is a great introduction to what Roundup is, who uses it and the health concerns it can lead to. Lilla captured interviews with a who's who of the glyphoso-rati, the experts who testified in recent court cases and have studied the herbicide's main active ingredient–glyphosate–and Roundup as a formulated product. 

These include Carey Gillam, the journalist who tracked the Monsanto trials in 2018 and onward, writing the major book about the subject; Brent Wisner, the lead attorney for many of the plaintiffs in court cases; first hand stories from cancer victims and California families where cancers were shown to be caused by exposure to Roundup (the McCall and Barton families); medical experts and farmers. (There have not been any lawsuits involving vineyard workers, to date, that I have heard of–most of the people who got cancer used a lot of Roundup regularly to keep poison oak at bay or were farmers or landscapers fighting weeds frequently with Roundup). 

Local vintners Ted Lemon of Littorai in Sonoma and Frank Leeds of Frog's Leap, both of whom are organic, are both featured in the film. 

Monsanto is now owned by Bayer, which lost as much as 50 percent of its stock value as a result of the lawsuits. A widely anticipated St. Louis based lawsuit is about to start in April. Since St. Louis is Monsanto's former headquarters, many executives who have not been available to testify previously will be called to the stand. The proceedings will be televised on Courtroom View Network. The lawsuits were the result of Monsanto's failure to provide warning labels that the product could cause cancer, when internal company documents show it knew the product caused cancer, starting with initial studies conducted when the product was first formulated.

In 2018, the state of California reported that wine grape growers used 666,953 pounds of glyphosate-based herbicides on 402,184 acres of vines. (California has about 550,000 acres of wine grape vineyards). 

According to the Dept. of Pesticide Regulation, Napa used 38,870 pounds on 23,219 acres (out of about 40,000 bearing vines in the county) in 2018 and Sonoma used 60,492 pounds on 43,156 acres (out of about 60,000 bearing acres) that year. 

Source: Data from California Dept. of Pesticide Regulation, mapped by Tracking California (California Dept. of Public Health)

As Lilla said in Q and A with the audience after the screening, "The big question people always ask me when I've finished a film they say, 'What's your greatest hope? What do you want to do with this?' 

"My goal with this project is just to generate dialogue."

And action.

Lilla shared that a group of teenagers in St. Helena found out that their high school was being sprayed with Roundup. "They went to the school board, and, long story short, they now ban it throughout the entire school district," he said. "My hope is maybe someone from Bayer might see this and say, 'Hey, maybe we should rethink our product?' Or maybe a farmer might see it and maybe just start thinking about other ways to go about it. And so my role is not only the storyteller, but get the story out there."

To help educate people about organic farming vineyards, the alternative to using Roundup, vineyard manager Frank Leeds of Frog's Leap winery in Napa was on hand to provide authoritative answers to audience questions. Frog's Leap has been the organic poster child in Napa since the 1990's. 

One audience member wanted to know why more vineyards weren't organic. 

Said Leeds, "A lot of it has to do with the perceived costs, but those are changing. There's a lot of information out there on how to farm organically. But a lot of our universities don't even have classes. So that's problematic. 

"Another issue is so many of our major Napa and Sonoma vineyards are run by management companies. And they perceive it [herbicides] as being short term cheap. They don't use mechanical weed control."

Leeds, who advocates for tilling vines, isn't a fan of what is being called regenerative farming (which often includes no till as a defining characteristic) these days. 

"The minute you start not tilling in the vineyard, it is very hard to manage weeds. So you see a lot of vineyards that won't mow the centers of the vine rows and then use herbicide and then just pour water on to try to get them to grow. So it's a totally different way of farming. Why they're going that way–I mean, in Napa Valley, it's the most expensive cropland in the United States. It's the highest value crop that you grow at scale."

While Sonoma's marketing machine prominently promotes "sustainable farming," Leeds says sustainable as term is misleading. "You might as well forget when you hear 'sustainable, because it doesn't mean much," he said. He's even on the board of California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, the sole organic guy. "When there's a vote, I am always the one in every 12 to one vote," he said.

"Basically, there's a small list of things you can't do to be called 'sustainable.' So they talk about cover crops and not tilling the ground and using drip irrigation. They'll talk about all this stuff. But they don't talk about organic in sustainable–that is zero part of it.

"So when you hear 'sustainable,' it doesn't have anything to do with organics.

"A lot of organic growers will ensure that they're not labeled sustainable," he said.

Lilla said he was not prepared for the answers he got on a recent Napa winery visit to a sustainable winery. 

"A few years ago about I went wine tasting with my wife, and we're at this vineyard, and they had this certification and it said 'Napa Green. 'And I was like, 'Oh, this is great.' And so we're walking around with the winemaker and it was wonderful. So I asked, 'you guys can't use Roundup, right?' And he kind of looked away and said, 'Actually, we do use Roundup.' 

"And I said, 'Well how do you have a Napa Green certification?

"He goes, 'well, we have solar panels on the winemaking facility.' 

"That was a real eye opener for me."

"So sometimes we see these labels, and there's just a lot of greenwashing, I guess you could call it."

Leeds, who is one of Napa's most experienced organic vineyard managers, farms 200 acres in Napa. In response to audience questions, he explained some of the nuts and bolts of organic farming. 

"Farming organically isn't a big financial burden, if it is done correctly. The biggest cost in grapevines is the distance between the row. As you narrow that distance, it requires more trips with your tractor. If you've got a five foot row with 1,500 vines or 2,000 vines, this is a big, big expense. It gets comes very, very hard to manage that area under the vine when you're having these narrow vineyards.

"And then you start irrigating all summer long and then you've got all this weed pressure. 

"So what we do is when our vines far enough apart–you need about 50 square foot per vine in North Coast–so that gives you about 850 max–about 850 vines per acre–and enough room between the vines so that you can mechanically work under them, take care of those weeds under the vines. Then the cost is all driven by the amount of tractor passes and everything. It just gets insurmountable. And the amount of stakes and the amount of vines, and you don't end up with any more grapes. 

"We do it organically with the 600 to 800 vines per acre."

Irrigation is another issue for Leeds, who dry farms. 

"I don't know how everybody got hooked on drip irrigation or irrigating grapes, I don't get it. Because grapes want to go deep. But instead, the current way of thinking is, you plant on a special rootstock that doesn't want to be deep, so that you can control the moisture. So the vine doesn't ever really get down deep and have a nice big root system. 

"And then you have health problems. 

"The vineyards don't last as long as they used to. I mean, a lot of guys have trouble getting more than 20 years out of a vineyard.

"I don't get it. When we put vineyards in we're looking to get 40  years out of it."

Napa has about 10-11 percent certified organic vineyard acreage while Sonoma has roughly 3 percent.

Lilla's film is available for group screenings. Find more information at his website or see the trailer here.

The biggest known health risk in terms of exposure is from dietary consumption–eating foods which Roundup has been sprayed on. Here's the latest study on that topic. 

The highest risk foods are generally potatoes, grains and wheat based products which are often sprayed right before harvest. 

While the film includes findings that glyphosate has been found in organically grown wines, experts say that is because glyphosate is now found even in rainfall, according to studies including from the U.S. Geological Survey. (Here's one.) 

While it is true that trace amounts have been found in organic wine, conventional wines have been found levels of glyphosate that are 50 times or more than the levels in organic wines. So far, none are above the limits the EPA in the US has deemed safe although experts are questioning those standards as new studies show glyphosate impacting the gut bacteria and subtly changing DNA across generations.

A bottle of Gallo Pink Moscato was found to have levels of 49.24 ng/ml. versus a Bonterra Sauvignon Blanc (organic) at 0.38 ng/ml.

Studies have found that switching to an organic diet can reduce glyphosate intake quickly.