On the frontier of the regenerative movement: organic and regenerative leader Lonborg shared insights on an expanding, ecofriendly movement gaining a toehold in Part 1 of our WiVi regen panel coverage
What can growers do to be better farmers, preserve vineyard longevity, maintain yields amidst heat and drought challenges and apply new techniques to help them gain an edge?
RVF Cites UN’s 2014 Warning: Only 60 Harvests Left
“We need to relearn how we farm,” said British born Stephen Cronk, co-founder of the London based Regenerative Viticulture Foundation (RVF), a global movement created to put soil health first in vineyards.
Cronk moderated the panel Beyond Sustainability: How Regenerative Farming Drives Quality and Growth Case Study held March 12.
The RVF approach is a lower risk path than organic, encouraging a starter kit, toe-in-the-water approach it calls the 1 Block Challenge to get growers to recognize the inherent water saving and heat resilience building benefits of trading compost for fertilizer, reducing or eliminating tillage and using diverse cover crops as forms of biological control.
RVF describes regenerative as: (see Substack post)
Other flavors of regenerative–ROC–require organic certification in combination with regenerative practices.
Cronk reminded the audience that in 2014, the United Nations warned that farmers have only 60 harvests of soil fertility left.
Sustainable Versus Regenerative: Central Coast’s Regenerative Leader Jordan Lonborg Weighs In on Soil Health Frontiers
Jordan Lonborg, regenerative consultant at Coastal Vineyard Care, knows a thing or two about regenerative, biodynamic and organic viticulture, as the former vineyard manager at Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) poster child Tablas Creek, which in 2020, became the first vineyard to be certified both organic and regenerative by the Regenerative Organic Alliance (which oversees the ROC certification program).
The roots of the regenerative organic movement have significant overlap with the organic and biodynamic movements that preceded it. The non-organic regenerative movement is a newer development aimed at galvanizing more growers to improve soil health and adopt better practices.
In the Central Coast, where “sustainable” viticulture far outnumbers regenerative or organic, Lonborg diplomatically compared two different systems.
Sustainability “forced farmers to think about farming in a more thoughtful way, thinking about the process itself, reducing inputs, trying to use softer chemistry when needed, and even a social aspect…” he said. “There’s a lot of crossovers between what sustainable is and what regenerative is. Whether you’re talking about cover cropping or compost additions or biodiversity, these are all pieces of both practices and philosophies.”
Lonborg: A Checklist (Sustainability) Versus a Systems (Regenerative) Approach
He explained there are distinct differences between the sustainability mindset and the regenerative one.
Sustainability programs. widely adopted by large scale producers, and therefore popular among Central Coast growers and corporate wineries, do not meet the standards and goals of the emerging regenerative movement, which is raising the bar for soil health. But the regenerative approach offers all growers the opportunity to benefit from improving soil health, he said.
“Sustainable is a checklist,” Lonborg said. “It does not necessarily take into account whether or not you’re putting down the right compost. You don’t know whether or not that cover crop you’re using is beneficial for your soil, or if it’s actually using some of the carbon or the nutrients that you had stored up for your grapevines.”
“Regenerative is is a systems based approach where life is the most important thing, promoting life and growing life through continuous improvement.”
The system approach never ends, he said, and requires a lot of ongoing data collection.
“You’re never ‘done’ as a regenerative farmer. You don’t check any box. You have to keep improving. You have to keep measuring your soil, you measure your carbon, you measure your organic matter. Year after year after year, and a lot of the time you’ll figure out that maybe some of these practices that you thought you had the best intentions of performing on your property might actually be harming your soil.”
Sheep grazing, for instance, is one of those, he said, characterizing the use of sheep grazing in vineyards as “a trendy thing.”
“If done poorly and if done incorrectly, without the context of actually building biology in your soil, you can burn carbon, you can create compaction,” he said.
Look to the Biology, Not Just the Chemistry
The intellectual roots of modern chemical viticulture come from Justice von Liebig, who in the 1840s came out with the law of minimums, Lonborg told the audience. “This is the concept of NPK, right? That’s all you cared about. As a farmer, what you take out of the field you have to put back in.”
“What he didn’t take into account was the role that biology plays in this system.”
The Advent of Rhizophagy: Studying Symbiosis and Its Benefits
Lonborg lauded recent advances in plant biology championed by John Kempf, a global leader in regen ag.
“What we’re finding out, and I think as recently as maybe 2019 or 2020, a process called rhizophagy…And this process shows us and tells us that plants are intelligent. They speak a language. They communicate with the bacteria and the fungi in the soil. If you preserve that relationship, the symbiotic relationship, you are going to create a truly healthy plant, which in turn will fight pests, fight virus, fight disease.”
He criticized the western approach of “see the bug, kill the bug. We’re not asking ourselves, why is the bug there in the first place?”
“We’re able to now measure a lot of these data points. We’re watching bacteria be consumed by plants that bacteria has absorbed certain minerals, certain nutrients, and the plant is telling that bacteria where to go within the plant and where it’s deficient. That bacteria then moves back out of the plant and starts mining nutrients again. So this plant is communicating with the biology in the soil, the reward system we talk about photosynthesis, right?”
A Different Lens: Be The Puzzle Solving Participant, Not the Puppeteer
Lonborg said the process of improving photosynthesis leads to a virtuous cycle.
“The better the photosynthesis, the more carbon it releases; the more carbon it releases, the healthier the biology,” he said. “What we’re what we’re seeing across crops of all types right now is that we…need to think about fertilization and fertility through a different lens. We’re not recognizing that how intelligent this natural design is, and if we step back and say, ‘Hey, maybe we can just be a piece of this puzzle, rather than the puppeteer, we can create truly healthy crops and truly healthy vines.’”
Using the mealy bug infestation as a data point, Lonborg pointed to synchronicities that may suggest causal relationships–and solutions.
“I think it’s a very interesting coincidence that when we started using systemic fungicides and systemic herbicides, not long thereafter, we started seeing explosions of red blotch. We started seeing explosions of mealy bug. We started seeing explosions of leaf hoppers. I think they are synonymous. I think there is a relation here.”
“And I think that there is through regenerative practices and regenerative inputs that we may be able to reverse or withhold or withstand some of the pressures that we all deal with as farmers.”
Stay tuned for Part 2 which features more coverage from regenerative leaders speaking on the WiVi conference panel.
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