Terrain » Fall 2003

Letters

Anouk MacKenzie — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:54:41 +0000

The article on herbicides in the Klamath National Forest (KNF) (Summer 2003) ignored the KNF’s reasons for spraying to control invasive non-native weeds which are destroying our biological diversity. When aggressive weeds occupy as many acres as they do today, employment of chemicals is often the only option left.
The article cited non-chemical community-based noxious weed control, as by the Salmon River Restoration Council. “It focuses on early detection of weeds, hand removal before weeds go to seed, mulching, and revegetation with natives.” Ahh, my vision exactly! This is where we should be heading. However, it is not where we are heading. Think of the yellow star thistle cited in the article — it occupies perhaps 22 million acres in California alone. Lack of public awareness of the weed problem is a major impediment, and your article merely demonstrates this lack. Both federal and state agencies are hard put for resources to cope with their manifold responsibilities. There is not enough money to hire staff for manual eradication, and for the California Indian Basketweavers Association (CIBA) or other critics to say that “toxics” are unnecessary is only displaying their lack of understanding of the dire situation.
Citing the Journal of Pesticide Reform doesn’t help CIBA’s case. Articles in this journal are not reviewed by scientific peers, leading to the suspicion that a given article may prove what the researcher intended to prove in the beginning.
Jake Sigg, Chair
Invasive Exotics Committee
California Native Plant Society

Anouk McKenzie responds: Groups like CNPS are doing invaluable work, but the issue of how to deal with invasives is threatening to polarize conservation groups.
The Karuks’ position is clear: they reject herbicides as a quick fix to control invasives. CIBA says the EPA’s testing of herbicide ingredients in isolation fails to prove they are safe. The Karuks’ intimacy with the land makes them more susceptible to any health problems pesticides cause. Proving the insidious effects of herbicides on human health is beyond the Karuks’ resources.
The Journal of Pesticide Reform is not peer-reviewed because it doesn’t publish original research. The publication disseminates information to the public from government sources, manufacturers, or journals that have themselves been peer-reviewed.
It’s not just biological diversity that’s under threat here but also cultural diversity. Who wants to eat or work with sprayed vegetation, or eat deer that browse on sprayed vegetation and have internal lesions?
Karuk representative Renee Stauffer says invasive weeds have not yet affected native plants in their area, making community stewardship feasible if they act now.

No Escape: Fish Farming is Not a Fix

Josh Wein — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:52:09 +0000

As global fish populations hover around ten percent of historic numbers, consumer demand for premium fish products continues to rise. If oceans can’t sustain further harvests, much of our seafood may be coming from places other than the sea.
Proponents of aquaculture — seafood farming — argue that raising fish in controlled settings would supply the market without impinging on wild populations. Fish farming also eliminates by-catch, which annually accounts for nearly 60 million tons of mistakenly killed and discarded sea life. So why is a California senator trying to pass a law that would ban fish farming before it begins?
Aquaculture comes with its own set of problems. A 200,000-fish salmon farm produces as much fecal waste as the untreated sewage from a town of 65,000 people. When this waste flows unchecked into the ocean, as it does in coastal net-pen farms, it overloads coastal areas with nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. You wouldn’t want to swim anywhere near these waters.
Then there’s the challenge of feeding farmed fish: According to a Stanford University-led study, it takes more than 11 pounds of wild fish, ground up into feed, to produce just two pounds of fish species such as tuna, cod, flounder, and seabass. Salmon convert a bit better — over six pounds for two pounds of fresh salmon. Although the poultry and swine industries are the largest consumers of fishmeal, demand for meal is rising fastest from the fish farmers. Meanwhile, harvesting fish from the ocean for fishmeal deprives wild fish of a major food source.
Other aquaculture pitfalls closely parallel those of agriculture. The larger the salmon farm, the greater the chance for disease and the need for antibiotics. The risk of escape drives the stakes even higher: Fish escape farms, particularly coastal net-pen farms, in great numbers — over 100,000 at a time. The possibility of diseased fish escaping and infecting wild stocks has made many fishers vocal about the dangers of aquaculture.
An obvious alternative is to raise the fish in giant inland ponds, where waste can be treated and the fish have nowhere to escape. But this technology will be expensive: Decent-sized ocean fish farms, such as those off the coast of Norway, contain at least half a million fish and produce about 10 million pounds of meat annually, a scale that would be difficult to recreate on land. “Salmon cannot be raised in a closed system,” argues Ocean Conservancy California’s Karen Reyna, who is skeptical that ocean conditions could ever be replicated in a land pond.
One proponent of ponds wants to add transgenic fish to the equation. Aqua Bounty Farms, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based company, has had an application to market its transgenic salmon — which grow twice as fast as regular salmon — sitting before the FDA since 1996. The company expects to sell its fish eggs and fry to fish-farming operations, which would in turn market the fish back to consumers.
Aqua Bounty says that its transgenic salmon, by growing faster than regular fish, would give inland fish farmers the economic edge to compensate for the high costs of inland ponds. But even Aqua Bounty Vice President Joe McGonigle concedes that the days of inland fish farms are a long way off. “It’s not clear that these [land-based systems] can operate efficiently at that level,” says McGonigle. And until they do, Aqua Bounty’s primary customers would likely be offshore farms.
But critics of genetically engineered foods charge that transgenic fish technology is much too dangerous to implement near wild fish stocks. An oft-cited 2000 study out of Purdue University found that transgenic fish were both more successful in mating and less likely to produce viable offspring — a formula known as the “Trojan gene,” which could lead to species extinction. Transgenic fish also mature faster, outcompeting wild fish for food supplies. Aqua Bounty has only sought FDA approval to sell sterile female fish, which the company says eliminates the possibility of transgenic fish destroying wild stocks. McGonigle also says that female transgenic fish almost never return to freshwater streams to breed. But critics like Joseph Mendelson at the Center for Food Safety aren’t reassured. “Almost never is not never, and sterilization is not 100 percent effective. You could still have a breeding female that would be producing spawn of these fish, with the genetic trait.”
When The Pew Oceans Commission, a nonprofit organization whose members include former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, NRDC President John Hamilton Adams, and Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations President Pietro Parravano, released its assessment of the state of US oceans, the report called for a moratorium on the expansion of finfish farms and on farming all transgenic and anadromous species until national standards are established. Whether the commission’s advice will be taken remains to be seen.
Here in California, Senator Byron Sher, a Democrat from the South Bay and Chair of the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, has been working to stop transgenic aquaculture before it can get off — or in — the ground.
“It’s like offshore oil drilling,” says Jeff Shellito of Sher’s staff. “We’re trying to stop something before it gets started.” An attempt at legislating a ban last year died in the state assembly after pressure from the biotech lobby.
This summer, SB 245, a new bill that would ban all finfish aquaculture in the waters off the coast, will be heard before the same assembly that killed SB 1525. This bill doesn’t single out transgenics or biotechnology, and Shellito hopes that a compromise will be reached so it will pass. While there is no finfish aquaculture taking place in California waters now, Shellito believes passing the bill is a necessary precaution.
In February, the California Fish and Game Commission adopted regulations that effectively ban transgenic aquaculture, making an exception for research. Meanwhile, states like Washington and Maryland are adopting more stringent bans on transgenic fish farming.
McGonigle dismisses these efforts as political maneuvering and paints a picture of an anti-biotech interest group lobbying in states like California to gain national support. “It’s kind of silly,” he says, “because you’re essentially regulating a product that isn’t on the market.”
Should its products enter the market, Aqua Bounty has adopted a policy counter to the likes of Monsanto, which fights keep its genetically engineered seeds unlabeled. According to a company report called “Biotech Acceptance: A Label Goes a Long Way,” the company plans to require all farms growing AquAdvantage fish to label the product as genetically engineered, despite the lack of any legal obligation to do so.

So Much for Setting Limits

Leah Messinger — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:51:06 +0000

On June 2, just one month after introducing groundbreaking legislation on suburban sprawl, State Assemblyperson Pat Wiggins (D, Santa Rosa) bowed to pressure from builders and realtors by gutting her own bill.
Assembly Bill 1268, which would have required cities and counties to establish boundaries to urban development, met fierce resistance from the California Building Industry Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Association of Realtors, and other groups. With such “stiff opposition,” said the Sierra Club’s Bill Allayaud, “we don’t have a lot of hope in the California legislature. This legislature doesn’t feel like it can grapple with urban growth.”
Wiggins requested the amendment that reduced her bill to a single sentence: “This bill would declare the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would address the issues of growth zones and housing.” The revised bill has passed through the state appropriations committee.
Builders and other groups have long objected to limits on city expansion. Urban growth boundaries (UGBs) “are a problem in practice,” says Richard Lyons, a lobbyist for the California Building Industry Association. “[They] are arbitrarily…drawn to be as restrictive and tight…as they can possibly get to keep growth out.”
Critics point to Portland, Oregon, as an example of a UGB gone bad. According to a 1998 article in Professional Builder, land prices in Portland increased 300 percent during the late ’90s, vaulting the city from one of the most affordable to one of the least. “There’s very little land available inside the urban core,” said Rudy Kadlub. “Any good developable site has long since been developed.” In Boulder, Colorado, a 35-year-old UGB limited residential development but not commercial.
But over 20 Bay Area cities, including San Jose, Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, and Novato, have already established UGBs which, says the Greenbelt Alliance’s Dan Fahey, have “successfully focused growth and limited sprawl.” Advocates know there’s still work to be done. Says Allayaud, who coauthored the bill, “Outside the boundary, rural stuff will prevail. But inside that boundary, we need to do a better job at densification, getting more housing built where services already exist.”
In the past, proposed UGBs have foundered on concerns that they would prove an obstacle to low-income housing. Limiting development within a boundary, critics argue, decreases the supply of land and causes higher housing costs. Wiggins’ original bill addressed affordable housing: about 20 percent of residential units built within UGBs would be affordable to low- and very-low income households. “The inclusionary program actually increases the supply of affordable housing,” said Dan Flynn from Wiggins’ office.
Wiggins and her supporters hope to reintroduce some of the original bill sometime next year. “It appears we’re dead in the water this year, but we’re not going away,” says Allayaud.
For another view of Portland’s UGB and more on sprawl, see www.sierraclub.org/planet/199704/growth.asp

When Big Oil Lives Next Door

Tracy Perkins — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:49:53 +0000

“We’re watching you! We’re watching you!” chanted activists as their colleagues were carted away by “police” in a role-playing exercise at Our Power Camp in Occidental, organized by the Ruckus Society and others, for more than 50 representatives from US and Canadian communities affected by the energy industry. “We’re coming out of this war in Iraq and seeing how oil, militarization, and global conflict are all interrelated,” explained Sarada Tangirala of Project Underground, an event sponsor. “But we also need to make those connections about how communities here are facing these issues every day.”
Delegates to the June event ranged from members of the Gwichi’n Nation in Alaska, who object to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to members of the Eyak Preservation Council, which has fought for years against a 1500-megawatt power station that drains water and takes coal from Navajo land. Air pollution (and how to document it) was a common theme. Juanita Stewart of Aslen, Louisiana, a small town 20 miles north of Baton Rouge, has been trying to get a nearby Exxon facility for over five years to cut emissions and reduce truck traffic. “The property line is at our playground. There are foul odors coming from the facility, a lot of [exhaust] when the trucks come through.” She taught campers about the Bucket Brigade, a low-cost way of sampling and monitoring air pollution. “There are so many different commonalities that people are fighting,” said Carla Perez of Communities for a Better Environment, “anywhere from the corporation to the type of exposure in their community, whether extraction, a refinery, or a power plant.”
Refineries, explained Tangirala, are often sited “in low-income areas, predominantly communities of color. Or the places these facilities are sited end up becoming lower-income neighborhoods. Either way, it’s communities of color that are predominantly affected.” Says Stewart, “we do not get the jobs, we have health problems, our property has depreciated. In the state of Louisiana, it’s not politics anymore, it’s politricks. They’re tricking us all the time.”
“We need to get together more and know what’s happening in everybody’s communities,” said longtime Richmond activist Ethel Dotson. “Be in one accord about what to do. It’s basically the environmental organizations that get funded. It needs to be the actual people who live in the community and suffer the pollution.”
Workshops covered how to site a demonstration and how to talk to the press. Leaders pointed out that there is no one-size-fits-all organizing technique. “We in the Bay Area see a lot of hard-core direct actions going on, especially in the antiwar movement,” said Tangirala. “But for a lot of people, that’s not how you get the attention of tribal council members or others in your community.”
The camp was the first of several planned to support energy activists.

Power Plant Drains the Colorado

Josh Wein — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:49:41 +0000

Residents of Mesa Verde, a small town 60 miles north of Mexico, recently won official recognition of their protest against the second power plant in their community.
Mesa Verde residents have been living with poor water quality for decades on an aquifer that recently began supporting a 520-megawatt gas-powered plant, Blythe I [See Terrain, Fall 2002]. Blythe II, to be constructed next to Blythe I, would increase the water needed to cool the plants’ turbines to over 5,000 gallons per minute, pumped from the aquifer.
It’s not just Mesa Verde residents who would feel the suck. The California Energy Commission (CEC) and other agencies say the aquifer under Mesa Verde is part of the Colorado River recharge system. According to a recent CEC staff report, further demands on that system would have a “significant adverse effect on the waters of the Colorado.”
But Bob Looper of Caithness Blythe, which is proposing Blythe II, calls the data inconclusive and says California does not clearly regulate groundwater. Should the state choose to do so, Looper says, a “voluntary water conservation offset plan” would include fallowing local agricultural ground to offset the plant’s water use. Most of the town’s 2,300 residents depend on jobs in neighboring citrus orchards.
The distinction between ground and surface water is academic: “It’s a desert area with three inches of rainfall a year,” says Jeff Addiego of the Bureau of Reclamation, “and you withdraw one million acre feet and say it’s not the Colorado River? Give me a break.” Take from the Colorado River is regulated federally, which catapults both Blythe projects deep into California water politics. The draw from the Blythe projects, says Addiego, “would impact the amount of water that could be pumped by MWD [the water district that feeds LA]. MWD has the junior water right on the system; they get water after everyone else gets theirs.”
The CEC had planned to publish its first assessment of the application for Blythe II late this summer. This process is “considerably behind schedule,” due to water concerns and other issues.
Meanwhile, a lawsuit filed on behalf of community members alleging that the environmental analysis under which Blythe I was approved was flawed, may finally be heard in Riverside Superior Court. The suit was originally thrown out on a technicality in May 2001.
Contact Roberta Mendonca at the CEC: pao@energy.state.ca.us

The Price of Paradise

Ron Sullivan — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:48:50 +0000

Napa Valley is small and narrow, a geological wrinkle that both dictates and follows the course of a little river. Route 29 follows the river too, and traveling on it makes the valley seem even narrower. Roads have that effect: they take us from one place to the next, almost forcing us to ignore that we’re in a place the whole way there. When we’re driving, our lives depend on narrowing our focus and concentrating on what’s ahead and behind. We can’t spend time noticing the details that distinguish one mile from another.
Roads, like the evening news, also impose a sense of inevitability. It’s all marked out for us; the road goes from Here to There, and the fact that the road goes to it is what makes There a destination. Once we’re on the road, our choices narrow, sometimes right down to the binary of Stop and Go.
The first time I traveled Route 29, as a new Californian a few decades ago, I was treated to a standard of hospitality that amazed me. The scenery was as welcoming as the wineries, and the better I have come to know it, the more brilliant it looks. This valley is unassuming, its hills steep but rounded, its trees rounded too, their strength of the gnarled and complicated sort. Fascinating things lie hidden in its folds, revealing themselves only after the naturalist’s epiphany, the moment when the pretty wallpaper becomes dimensional, becomes distinct individuals, each trailing connections complex enough for years of study.
I’ve had the chance to drink some very nice wines over the years, too, and while I’m no expert I have learned the subtleties of that pleasure — a prosperous vineyard, a cool and must-scented cellar, red pouring into a glass. All by itself, wine is an earthly sacrament.
Wineries, many founded with money from the dot-com years, are experimenting, jostling each other for our attention with revelatory flavors that leave wine writers babbling. My, it’s good to be catered to, and it’s happening even at the low end of the market, where I shop. I really hate to think there’s a downside.
But I see that baroque valley landscape being wallpapered completely, as vineyards go from punctuation to monotony. It happens slowly, one place at a time, a pretty little estate and then another. It’s only the cumulative effect that’s scary. The voices of people who love what’s been growing here for millennia, wild and uninvented by us, get drowned out in a commercial chorus, as the very success of wine threatens the land that gives rise to it.
We hear we must choose between vineyards, cattle ranching, or suburban sprawl. Such an ultimatum is always suspicious. There are choices we haven’t thought of, and even the bogeyman might not be worse. Backyards don’t have to be a monoculture, and people do manage their gardens as mini-refuges. Cattle, run carefully and fenced out of streambeds, can be harmonious with an ecosystem that evolved with grazing species. Sonoma County’s new ag-preserve regulations, which privilege cows over grapes, suggest that some people have noticed this.
Still, it’s hard to talk about subtlety and complexity at the top of one’s lungs. As worried people do, we get perceived as “shrill.” Most people don’t see those individual lives — barely see them as wallpaper, let alone as wildlife. One can hardly fault their exasperated response: “Here, chill out, have a nice glass of wine. Look, we’re building a lovely chateau, and we’ll garden with lots of drought-tolerant lavender.”
Meanwhile, the market wreaks its own revenge. The industry is partly a victim of its own success, partly showing symptoms of terminal hysteria, as people dazzled by last year’s profit records rush to flatten more ridgetops into habitat for nothing but the Perfect Grape. Sound familiar? California has been through all this before, and not just with dot-coms. We practically define ourselves by the Gold Rush, and we’ve lately been treated to lots of relevant history lessons. One of the scariest is how the Gold Rush’s damage didn’t slow down as profits shrank.
Any industry, including the wine industry, gets troublesome at a certain size. We’re there, folks: The vine rows run all the way to the fences, wildlife is being squeezed out, and farmers — with notable exceptions — push their land harder and harder to bring in the crush of their dreams.
No one wants to deflate a dream, particularly one as marvelous as a great wine. We just hope the dream won’t crush the unnoticed lives around it or imperil the precious land and water resources we have left.
I don’t have any prescriptions. We might save what we can, by way of seedbank, founding line, and refuge for the renewal we hope for. Pay attention to wine makers’ practices and support and encourage the ones who do it with their unique place in mind. Make it our business to pull off the road, take a fieldguide, learn what’s growing on the edges of the vineyard. And then point it out to anyone within earshot.

Crush

Dan Rademacher — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:46:22 +0000

At the top of the grape-growing pyramid, where Napa vintners balance on the shoulders of the almost-as-lucky folk from neighboring Sonoma and Mendocino counties, the world is as insular as the circus. The public is invited to jazz concerts, to charity auctions, to celebrity tastings. The public is not invited backstage into the reality of good guys and bad guys and wildly divergent fortunes — North Coast forests bulldozed for pinot noir, small Central Valley vineyards lost to low grape prices. Even self-described watershed activist Chris Malan, who has been labeled an eco-terrorist by some of her Napa neighbors, asked worriedly: “You’re not going to name names, are you?”
Texas-born Lee Hudson is one of the good guys. His land — 1,800 acres on the Carneros and Huichica creeks west of Napa — has just 180 acres in grapes — a mix of 13 varieties sold to 19 different wineries. Though he’s feeling what he calls “tremendous downward pressure” on prices, Hudson Vineyards remains profitable, no small feat among growers of grapes or nearly anything else in today’s farm economy. “We’re a niche business,” Hudson said. “We’re dealing with the very top end.”
Profitability has given Hudson and vineyard manager Jason Kesner the opportunity to move far along the road of what is often called integrated pest management or sustainable practices, the best of so-called conventional farming. Hudson himself resists all such labels: “There’s good farming and there’s bad farming. Good is good, and bad is bad.” But he’s proud of what he’s accomplished: major reductions in chemical inputs over the past decade or so, significant improvements in the health of the creeks on his property, a resurgence of oak woodlands on his land, and even a manmade wetland that has proved excellent bird habitat — I saw red-winged blackbirds, two mallard families, and some Canada geese and their goslings rooting among the reeds. “What we try to do here is export only our grapes, not our byproducts,” he said.
Like others pushing the bounds of conventional agriculture, he’s no idealist, but he knows his land well. One moment, he’s describing agriculture as “an industrial activity,” and a bit later, he’s proudly pushing aside 18-inch–tall exotic grasses to point out a tiny oak seedling coming up in the shade of its 200-year-old parents, something that could never happen back when this part of his ranch was owned by a cattle operation. “The creek, when I bought this property, was a disaster,” he said. “You could not find a steelhead in this creek, and now you can go down and see hundreds of them.”
As Hudson led me past a series of wetland ponds he’d created, it was hard to imagine that only 60 or 70 miles to the northwest, ridgetops were being sheared off to plant pinot noir. The trouble with grape-growing in California is money: Some wealthy, small-time vanity growers in the favored counties (with Lake about to join them) are willing to spend millions of dollars for the romance of vineyards that can never recoup the initial investment. At the same time, in the Central Valley, where agriculture is serious business, growers are tearing out thousands of acres of wine grapes. Location counts: Central Valley farmers received as little as $136 for a ton of grapes compared to almost $3,000 in Napa.
Three thousand dollars an acre is quite an enticement, but there’s no room on the valley floors and many of the trendiest varietals grow best on steep slopes. That has put forested hillsides in the sights of vineyard developers large and small, all eager to permanently clear land for grapes.
Hobby farmers are part of the problem. “One ten-acre vineyard is not going to create a disaster, but 200 ten-acre hobby vineyards will,” says Chris Malan. “Each project degrades the water quality and takes away wildlife habitat.” This spring Napa County officials were considering 120 applications to put in new hillside vineyards. Older operations on the valley floor are beginning to see the problems of development in the hills: as slopes are “recontoured” for grapes and drip systems, rain no longer percolates into the bare soil. Instead, it runs off in torrents, to flood the Napa River and carry away priceless valley soil.
The economic downturn doesn’t seem to be fazing large operations like Guenoc Winery, which has just proposed to put in an unprecedented 6,480 acres of irrigated vineyards on a broad swath of oak woodland and chaparral on the border of Lake and Napa counties. The project would increase the vineyard’s reservoir capacity by over 300 million gallons, diverted from Putah Creek, which feeds Lake Berryessa, a source of drinking water for Solano County. Because of potential impacts on fish and the loss of oak and chaparral habitat, the State Water Resources Control Board has called for a full environmental impact report, to be submitted by the end of the year. Malan sees impacts beyond the immediate clearing of land. “In all these vineyards, the key is water,” says Malan. “You have got to have water, because they don’t believe in dry farming anymore. If they get the water permit, then you bring in the roads, then you bring in the development, then PG&E and the rest of it. You’re one step away from houses.”
Further west, environmental activists like Chris Poehlmann are challenging hobbyists and industrial growers moving into coastal forests where timber companies are the traditional villains. Poehlmann lives on eight acres in Annapolis, a small North Coast town just south of Gualala. Next to him, a couple from Las Vegas, a lawyer and an optometrist, are putting in up to 30 acres of pinot noir on a 62-acre property that Poehlmann calls a “vanity project.” Nearby, a Spanish company called Codornieu, owner of the Artesa winery, wants to put in 105 acres of pinot noir, the largest of eight pending projects covering almost 400 acres of Sonoma County timberland.
For Poehlmann, a designer of museum exhibits and an activist with the Coastal Forest Alliance, vineyards are the death knell of the coastal coniferous forests. “It’s a classic battle of trying to save what’s left,” he said. “These forests are being hammered with unsustainable logging practices as it is. The wine industry is permanently deforesting these acres, which is actually the worst thing that could happen.” In Sonoma, according to plant ecologist Peter Baye, who lives near Annapolis, new winery development is happening on “Goldridge” soils, common to flat-topped ridges.
All along the North Coast, vineyard developers bulldoze land in areas that get 60 inches or more of rain a year. As long as projects are proposed, many will be approved by regulators. Jill Butler, a staff forester with the California Department of Forestry, explained that her department has demanded full environmental impact analyses on only two projects, and both were withdrawn by the developers. In all other cases, the CDF issued what’s known as a negative declaration — which certifies that a project and its mitigations will have no significant impact on the environment. I asked her if the CDF, which must approve conversions of over three acres on lands with commercial timber species, would ever deny a project outright. No. “Our department has to balance protecting the environment, which is our responsibility, with allowing individual landowners to exercise private property rights.”
Poehlmann and others, including Baye and other scientists who have submitted public comment on the Codornieu plan, are most concerned about the cumulative impacts of many small projects that clear forests and put in fences that block wildlife corridors. “I’ve been wanting to stand up at one of these public meetings and start tearing bits off the edges of a piece of paper. At what point does it cease to be a piece of paper?” Poehlmann asks.
Groups like Poehlmann’s Coastal Forest Alliance and the Sonoma chapter of the Sierra Club are pushing to get restrictions on vineyard conversions into the county’s 20-year plan. The most far-reaching proposal, endorsed by the county’s citizen advisory commission in June, would protect nearly 200,000 acres of timberland from conversion to non-timber uses. That option awaits consideration by the county supervisors.
While Poehlmann and others battle new grapes going in on the North Coast, grape growers in the Central Valley are fighting to stay in the business. Many are losing. Down in Madera County, Stephen Schafer, chairman of the California Association of Wine Grape Growers, is a long way from both Hudson Vineyards and the North Coast pinot noir projects — geographically and economically. Schafer’s grandfather, who emigrated from Russia, grew Thompson seedless grapes for the table, for raisins, and for blended wines. His father did the same, and now he and his family farm 1,400 acres of almonds, and raisin, wine, and table grapes outside the town of Madera.
He’s pulling out 120 acres of Thompson seedless this year. “I’m planting more almond trees on some of the land. Some of it I replanted to more desirable varieties of grapes [like syrah],” he said. Schafer is just one of many Central Valley farmers pulling out grapes. Wine broker and industry analyst Barry Bedwell predicts that 40,000 acres are coming out this season statewide, while others put the number as high as 70,000 acres. In addition to almonds, some farmers are putting in alfalfa to feed California’s enormous dairy industry (the largest single agricultural sector in the state), and some are going back to cotton, one of few federally subsidized crops grown in California.
But in Schafer’s neighborhood, a lot of small-time growers, people in their sixties and seventies working on 20 to 40 acres, are simply selling their land for subdivisions. “They just threw in the towel and sold their land to someone whose intention was to develop [it],” he said.
To Schafer, that’s a truth of today’s farm economy. “You know that saying, ‘Inside every farmer, there’s a little developer waiting to get out.’ The only chance they have of retirement is selling their land for more than it’s worth as farmland.”
Once those small growers sell out, Schafer predicts a move toward bigger farms and bigger owners, especially for raisin grapes. His one hope lies with innovative new statewide sustainability standards developed by the California Association of Winegrowers. The 490-page code covers wine “from ground to glass,” according to the Winegrowers’ president Karen Ross, including water use, pesticides, green business practices, and employee relations.
The standards are in part an effort to improve the quality of grapes, and in part a move to raise the public profile of farmers — taking a page from the organic movement, so that buyers and consumers will shop for wines made by farmers working sustainably. Schafer hopes that the program, for now simply a self-assessment, will build enough credibility to spawn a rating system for wine labels. “So often, the farmer just ends up being this obscure person that nobody identifies with. Consumers have to know who we are.”
It remains to be seen how the state sustainability program will change things on the ground. The stakes are high, considering that wine grapes cover over half a million acres in California. According to the Pesticide Action Network, grapes of all types in 1998 accounted for some 34 million pounds of pesticide use. And, though the overwhelming majority of those pesticides are not on the state’s “Bad Actor” list, grapes still accounted for the highest number of reported worker poisonings between 1997 and 2000.
To activist Chris Malan, the jury is still out on whether voluntary farmer sustainability standards will be more than just marketing. “That chapter hasn’t been written yet. You have to give up something,” she says. “There are people genuinely concerned in the farming industry who want to do something, but they haven’t figured out what to do. They don’t like what the environmentalists have proposed, but they themselves haven’t come up with something to protect the trees, the water, the fish. How long do you keep talking about these things? Until they’re gone?” To farmers like Lee Hudson, a profitable crop like premium wine grapes may be the only place where farmers can afford to sacrifice part of their profits for environmental progress. Few farmers could afford to invest as he has in stream restoration and careful farming. “How can they be stewards of the land when they can’t even be stewards to their own pocketbooks, to their own families?” he asks. In the long term, Hudson would like to see federal farm subsidies, now bolstering commodities like corn and soy, go toward farmers’ conservation efforts.
The environmental credibility of vineyardists — good and bad — may ride on the fight over the hillsides of the North Coast. Poehlmann said his Coastal Forest Alliance is looking to get food pioneers like Alice Waters to bring the same conscience to the wine list that they bring to the table. Their first target for boycott would be Artesa, the label owned by Codornieu, but most of the vines in his area are so new that they won’t be producing grapes for two or three years. Poehlmann hopes that campaigning among restaurants and consumers would “put some pressure on end users.”
Ultimately, it may come down to naming names — and to redefining what kinds of environmental degradation trump the rights of private property owners.

Under the Skin

Linnea Due — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:43:28 +0000

“I don’t see us ever gaining organic status,” says Jason Kesner, manager of Lee Hudson Vineyards. “Our economic viability on a year-to-year basis can be seriously threatened by a pest.” Then he adds a familiar refrain: “It’s hard to be green when you’re in the red.”
The adage seems odd coming from Napa Valley native Kesner. He and owner Lee Hudson are in an enviable position with their long-term contracts with wineries. And Hudson’s composting has built soil so deep some blocks can be dry-farmed.
But enviable doesn’t mean easy. Kesner, relaxed with people, is a perfectionist in his work. Accompanied by his German Shepherd, Topper, he ceaselessly walks the fields, eyes sharp for pests and disease.
“Before World War II, everything was organic,” he says. “Then came the fertilizer industry, then the herbicides. People sprayed prophylactically — every six days they were out there spraying. Now we look at the pest pressures, and we use as little material as we can. I want the least toxic approach. I live here, I care about the families who work here.“
Still, Kesner must bow to business realities. “Our number-one problem is weed control,” he explains. “We have to care about the aesthetic.” Winemakers coming to check on the progress of their grapes may see “unkempt” fields as evidence of careless management. “The herbicide issue is one of the biggest challenges we wrestle with.”
Educating buyers is a continuing process, as is experimenting with green manures, alternate-row cropping, and 100 percent cover-cropping. Careful records are kept block to block and even row to row.
Lee Hudson can afford to retain workers as permanent employees. Kesner has experimented with assigning blocks of vines to workers who care for them year-round. The men get to know the cold spots, wind zones, even individual vines.
Besides keeping detailed records that support the use of composting and cover crops, workers monitor the vines to determine when the pest pressure becomes high enough to warrant spraying, which greatly reduces pesticide use.
Pruning takes place in January, then again in late March, when well-positioned shoots are selected and the rest pruned out. Vertical trellising in May and June gives good light penetration and leaf exposure; then a machine comes through and tops the vines, slowing them down.
Later a crew pulls leaves to expose the fruit, as soon as possible after set to accustom the tiny berries to the sun. This results in fewer fungal diseases and adds character only the sun can give. Then it’s time to thin again. Whole clusters go; smaller fruit gets to stay. “We want greater skin-to-juice ratio,” Kesner says. “That gives you more intense wines.”
Finally it’s time to pick, first the pinot gris, then the chardonnay. “We pick under lights. Ninety percent of our chardonnay is picked at night. It’s easier on the workers — even if it’s only 80 degrees, picking in the sun is brutal — and it’s better for the wineries, which need to cool the grapes. We’ll be at the winery at 5AM, waiting for them to open.”
In December, Kesner’s workers drive home to Mexico in vehicles filled with presents. “It’s a month of fiesta,“ Kesner explains. “They come back heavier and ready to work.”

Muddied Waters

Alexa Dye — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:42:35 +0000

Water wars in California usually pit north against south, but on the North Coast, grapes suck up groundwater like never before. As water becomes scarce, some communities are finally starting to do something about it. A 2002 state Department of Health Services report reviewing Mendocino County water districts calls vineyard expansion in Redwood Valley “nearly totally” responsible for a 39 percent increase in use of the Russian River District’s water rights there. The same report points out that the Hopland 1,500 consumers use 83 percent more district water than do Ukiah’s 15,649 residents. Hopland’s water district covers a small unincorporated village and a valley dominated by wine grapes, including Fetzer’s and Brutacao’s vast vineyards.
Surprisingly little is known about the amount of water diverted from ground and surface resources across Northern California’s primary wine-producing regions. That, says Chuck Bonham of Trout Unlimited, is the major obstacle to protecting fisheries like steelhead and coho. “Knowing more about stream flow, who is diverting and when, if dams exist and where, whether people are taking without a permit … this is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.”
Only recently have agencies tried to record how much water fisheries need. Previously, the cumulative effect of small-scale projects was not studied. When hundreds of start-up vineyards mushroomed in Lake, Mendocino, Sonoma, and Napa counties over the past decade, all their 5-acre-foot ponds together contributed significantly to the fisheries’ decline, says Trout Unlimited’s Stan Griffin.
There is also the problem of unauthorized diversions. Flyovers of the Russian and Navarro river basins in the late ’90s revealed around a hundred illegal diversions in each area.
Julie Gantenbein of the National Heritage Institute asserts that many vineyards file for permits only after building their irrigation systems and, she says, “new vineyards are the most water-intensive.” Officials at the state Water Resources Control Board confirm that there is a “common practice of pre-constructing projects before water-right permitting.” Most applicants are vineyards already irrigating with the water they’re applying for. The agency acknowledges it merely requires unauthorized diverters to file for a permit. “They know about all these unauthorized diversions,” Griffin says, “but to the best of our knowledge, they haven’t done anything and don’t plan to do anything in the way of reparation. Generally, the water board will excuse them if their permit goes through.”
While the board has declared the entire Russian River and its tributaries “fully appropriated” from June through October, diversions, dams, and permit applications continue. Since 1995, Griffin has filed 85 protests of water rights permits on behalf of the coho salmon. Juvenile coho stay in the tributaries all year, so if the water warms or dries up, an entire year’s population is lost. “Meantime,” Griffin says, “there is plenty of water behind the vineyards’ dams. The state spends millions of dollars each year on salmon recovery projects, but what good do those do if there is no water?”
Poorly engineered reservoirs or carelessly constructed hillside vineyards can let tons of topsoil wash into waterways. Rector Creek watershed in Napa is estimated to be about half vineyards, after extensive vineyard conversion in recent years. Locals say its drinking water reservoir receives so much excess sediment that it has had to shut down during heavy rain. The new vineyards are mostly in red volcanic soil that does not support cover crops that retain topsoil. Recontouring the land for these vineyards prevents rainwater from percolating into the aquifers. Instead, the water runs right off, flooding the creeks with more and more sediment. Locals blame factors like these for the contamination of reservoirs such as Rector and Friesen Lakes, recently rendered unusable when the equivalent of 100 dumptruck-loads of soil ran off a one-year-old vineyard into the lake.
Still, many growers are taking waterway conservation into their own hands. Efforts vary widely, depending on regional climate, eco-mindedness, or the desire to enhance grape quality by underwatering.
Regulators and conscientious growers are hampered by the lack of an historical record. In Sonoma County, where neighbors blame vineyard expansion for drying up their wells, and vineyards blame urban development for the same, the county has just passed a resolution to monitor groundwater. Even better, the county is considering restricting both development and vineyard conversion on nearly 200,000 acres of timberland.

Greening the Vines

Amy Standen — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 06:40:30 +0000

Of the twelve children of Paula and Beba Frey, two Brooklyn-born medical doctors who moved to Mendocino County in the ’60s, about ten can be found at any given moment at Frey Organic Vineyards in Redwood Valley. From time to time one or two of the Frey kids may be “burned out and doing something else,” says Paul Frey, but for the most part, they’ve returned to the vineyard, where they and their families now make up most of the winery’s work force.
Touring Frey Vineyards on a recent summer day, I understood the draw of the place. The vineyards surround a bucolic rural outpost of funky Swiss Family Robinson-esque shingled buildings, including a ramshackle barn that houses the winery’s stainless steel storage vats, all assembled from reused parts. An old bicycle leans up against the side of the tasting room. The main vineyard, reached by a dirt road, was cleared in the mid-19th century by the US Army. Paul says the cavalry used the land as an outpost for protecting embattled Pomo Indians.
The Frey family has been producing wines here since the early ‘80s. Two decades of experimentation have left the land in a state of creative laissez-faire: clover, vetch, and other nutrient-rich cover crops thrive between the vines, abuzz with wasps and pollinating insects. Paul explains that the wasps keep the aphids and leafhoppers in check. But even leafhoppers, in moderation, can be “a good thing,” he adds. “You’ll have some farmers who pay people to thin leaves, when the fruit needs sunlight.” Frey’s leafhoppers do their own leaf-pulling. “Right when the grapes are ripe, the leaves that have been nibbled on fall off easier.” Meanwhile, owls and hawks in the oak forests ringing the Frey estate prey on gophers and other troublesome rodents.
Besides producing organic wines, the Freys also help run a small produce business called Mendocino Organics, which sells watermelons, olives, garlic, and other vegetables that thrive alongside to the vines. They’re also involved in a apprenticeship program in biodynamic farming and animal husbandry. It’s a far cry from the vast expanses of geometrically uniform rows of vines in Napa and Sonoma counties.
The diversity of life here is critical to the organic process, says Paul Frey. A natural ecology, left largely intact, keeps wine pests at bay, obviating the need for pesticides and herbicides. “Here in Northern California you can grow organic wine grapes brainlessly,” he says. “It’s the logical way to go in this climate.”
You’d never know it by scanning the labels of California wine at your supermarket. The Wine Institute estimates that of the thousands of branded California wines, only five or six are labeled organic. Maybe a dozen more use the phrase “made with organic grapes,” a distinction acknowledging that while the grapes are organic, non-organic sulfites were added to make the wine.
But far more vineyards are growing organic grapes than the labels let on. In 2001 in California, about one percent of California wine grapes were officially grown organically: 6,477 acres of wine grapes out of about 570,000 acres overall, according to California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), a nonprofit organic certification organization. But that doesn’t represent the true tally, which would include the many grape growers who don’t bother with the certification process, thereby forgoing the opportunity to label their grapes as “organic.”
“I’ve talked to a number of restaurant owners who would like to include a section of organic wine on their list. But they’re finding that the best producers aren’t labeling,” says John Williams, owner of Frog’s Leap Vineyards. Frog’s Leap itself is a good example: the winery grows all its grapes organically but makes no mention of it on the label.
Unlike other commodity growers who jump at the chance to claim organic status, the wine industry, for the most part, has kept its sustainable farming practices under wraps. Remember last February when the Georgia poultry company Fieldale Farms won — and then lost — the right to stick the organic label on chickens raised with hormone-packed feed? Wine grape growers take the opposite tack: they grow organic but shun the label.
“We had to deal with the ‘O’ word a bit,” says Williams, recalling his early days in the industry about 15 years ago. “Organic wines were at the bottom of every shelf. There was no positive image with respect to organic wines. [Organic meant] moldy carrots at a co-op somewhere at three times the price, and hippie farmers going out of business.”
Organic’s bad rap “is something Fetzer has worked through,” says Ann Thrupp, a former EPA scientist hired by Fetzer Vineyards this year. Fetzer is the North Coast’s largest producer of CCOF-certified organic wine grapes, and the company has launched a campaign to get all of its contract grape growers certified by 2010. Fetzer’s also got solar-powered administrative offices, and a comprehensive recycling program, and it packages its bottles in 100 percent post-consumer recycled cardboard boxes. In 1993, Fetzer was also one of the first wineries to give its wines an organic label, but it launched a new division, Bonterra, to do so. The other Fetzer brands make no mention of the “O” word.
Why are wine makers so wary of the organic label? What you’ll often hear is that the early organic wines — especially back when vineyards like Frey were experimenting with a sulfite-free process — just didn’t taste very good.
“In the beginning we got a bad rap,” concedes Phillip LaRocca who grows organic grapes for Fetzer as well as for his own wines. “One of the problems was that because we weren’t using sulfites, we had nowhere to go for help. It was just a handful of us doing it and we had to figure it out, to be an artist and a scientist at the same time.”
Sulfites act as an antioxidant in wine. By preserving the juice from oxidation, they allow the wine to age, adding a complexity of character that some vintners and wine connoisseurs say is essential to fine wines. Though no-sulfite wine producers may disagree, some wine experts recommend special handling for sulfite-free wines: scrupulous storage in a cold, dark place and a slower decanting than conventional wines. They also say that non-sulfite wine, left open for more than a few days, will turn to vinegar.
“Sulfite-free wine tastes different,” says Thrupp. “It’s not like regular wine.”
In Paul Frey’s view, it’s a matter of taste. “The sulfites have a kind of steely, metallic flavor,” he says. “A lot of people [who are accustomed to sulfited wine] think it’s a natural constituent of the wine. But after drinking non-sulfite wines for 25 years, it really does stand out.”
Until recently, there was no guarantee that the organic label meant that no sulfites had been added in the wine making process. Though the CCOF made the distinction on wines it certified, other certifying agencies followed different rules. That all changed in October 2002, when the USDA issued national standards for wine.
The USDA organic rules, which replaced a hodgepodge of state and local regulations, were as hotly contested in the wine industry as they were among chicken producers and everyone else. A central debate among the vintners is this: How can we differentiate between the sulfite users and the non-sulfite users? Sulfite users who made wine from organic grapes felt their product was sufficiently organic to deserve the USDA organic label and that by excluding them, the USDA was ignoring a basic fact of winemaking.
“Sulfites were developed by the Romans,” says Brian Fitzpatrick of Fitzpatrick Vineyards, recounting a line of history echoed by almost every sulfite-using vintner I spoke with. “It’s something that’s been used for hundreds of years. The majority of people feel that to make quality wine, sulfites are an absolute necessity. I tried to make wine with little or no sulfites, and it just about ruined my reputation as a quality winemaker.”
Meanwhile, the no-sulfite users argued that allowing sulfites in the standard undermines the organic concept.
The USDA rules, says Bob Canard, an organic grape grower who also grows produce for Chez Panisse, are “a push to compromise. The sulfur kills the life of the wine. A living wine is variable. It needs to be decanted and harvested with respect. One needs to honor those flavors, not just desire this commodity-type product that is always the same.”
Eventually, a compromise was reached: Vintners who used all organic grapes but also added sulfites during the wine-making process could use the phrase “made from organic grapes” on the label, while those who didn’t could use the term “organic wine.” A third class of “biodynamic” wine-grape growers, who farm according to an ultra-organic philosophy developed by 19th-century social theorist Rudolf Steiner, may seek separate, biodynamic certification, in addition to the CCOF tag. But finally having a designation that separated them from the non-sulfite crowd didn’t convince a lot of those closet organic grape growers to jump through the USDA certification hoops.
The USDA regulations, says Frog’s Leap’s John Williams, “were designed by very large potential organic producers to coopt the organic movement away from smaller growers. The [certification] fees make it difficult for anyone who isn’t making gobs of money.” CCOF certification application fees run about $800 and require yearly inspections, as well as an annual fee of 0.25 percent of the product value. Compliance is also costly and time-consuming: Vintners must keep meticulous records of their winemaking and grape growing process and pay additional review and certification fees every time they make a change in production or add acreage. On top of the CCOF fees, organic growers must register with the state organic program, which has its own forms and fees.
“I do often find it ironic that these farmers that are more or less farming to not harm the environment are the ones that have to pay certification costs,” says John McKeon of the CCOF. “Oftentimes for farmers [not certifying] comes down to the costs, even though their methods are sound and they’ve been doing it for years.”
Williams agrees. All this money and paperwork, he says “may not be a disadvantage if you’re making a substantial margin difference by marketing organic, but if you’re not, it may be the amount that tips the balance.”
For many winemakers, that’s the crux of the issue: just because you’ve got the “O” word on your label doesn’t mean you can charge more. If anything, say some dealers, the term only provokes confusing questions about sulfites, taking focus away from the overall quality of the wine.
“It’s really confusing to people. It’s one of the biggest bugaboos I’ve ever encountered in the wine business,” says Joe Euro, a wine dealer in Port Townsend, Washington. Euro says customers who come in seeking organic wines usually object to sulfites and tend to buy cheaper wines. He believes that if the winemaker uses sulfites, putting “organic” on the label can be “shooting yourself in the foot. You certainly don’t want good quality wines lumped in with the organic group.”
Making the organic designation even less attractive, says John Williams, is the fact that new USDA standards are far less rigorous than those he and other organic growers have been farming under for years. So not only is the certification expensive, but they have to share it with growers who adhere to a far lower standard. “The regulations say little about maintaining watersheds or building soil or providing living wages for your workers,” Williams complains. “All this boils down to people like myself saying ‘I know what I consider to be the highest standards, and I’m just going to continue to do them, and hope that I can stay in business using good responsible techniques.’”
Until the USDA updated the federal standards, the CCOF was largely able to set its own rules for how CCOF-certified organic growers could farm. Today, they’re firmly under the USDA jurisdiction. And while CCOF officials are diplomatic on the subject, it’s clear they have indeed been forced to lower the bar. “The standards [under the USDA] are pretty similar to what the CCOF required before the national laws, but what we can do to define those standards for growers is pretty limited,” says McKeon. “Like a buffer zone, for instance. CCOF would have required a buffer between [organic and conventional] fields; we could have said we want it to be 25 feet. Now a farmer submits a plan and it can be anything he designates, and we basically have to approve it.” CCOF officials say they’ll continue to lobby for tighter organic laws, as well as more federal funding to reimburse farmers who seek organic certification.
After visiting the Freys, I got the sense that being able to put “organic” on a label isn’t the point. Paul Frey’s enthusiasm for the art of sustainable farming is almost an end in itself. “We’re doing biodynamic, now, but someday we’d like to go even beyond that. Soil science is in its infancy,” he explains, and then launches into an impassioned discussion of soil chemistry.
Over at Frog’s Leap, Williams, too, approaches organic farming as a compelling experiment. His vineyards are certified, but he says he can understand why other wineries, even those that grow organically, skip the certification process. In his view, the marketing advantage is the quality of the wine, not the way it’s produced.
“Growing organically, dry farming, these traditional farming methods have been a direct path to increasing quality,” says Williams. “Once that became evident to us, it became less important to use organic as a marketing strategy. We accept that the Holy Grail of winemaking is to make wine that connects to the soil and to the place that the grapes come from. The natural flavors that arise from good farming will always be the best.”