The Impact of Regenerative Farming

A few months ago I was writing about competition in the vineyard like a person who had read enough textbooks to be dangerous. Botrytis. Powdery. Phylloxera. The trash pandas. The tools at hand were the conventional ones, strong sprays, integrated pest management, the occasional well-placed curse. That post is still in the journal. I'm leaving it there because it is honest about how I was thinking at the time.

Going regenerative organic sits at the intersection of three things I have spent a year reading and arguing with myself about. The first is the immune system of the grapes themselves. We are planting Floreal, Voltis, and Itasca, the PIWIs, the stacked-resistance hybrids that make this whole approach not just possible in Missouri but defensible. The second is what livestock integration actually does for a vineyard's soil and pest pressure when you let the animals do the work the chemistry would otherwise. The third is the terroir thesis on a fractured limestone shelf, where the land gives you mineral nutrition for free if you let it.

Jamie Goode has been writing about this combination, PIWIs plus low-intervention farming, for years, and his book with Sam Harrop, Authentic Wine, is still the most honest book on the subject I've read. He is not a dogmatist. He is a scientist. He says: do less, watch what the system does, and intervene only where the science supports it. That is the voice in my head now when I am standing on the slope at Aaron's farm.

Here is what regenerative organic actually means, in practice, on this site:

• Sheep and goats in the rows. Sheep graze the cover crops. Goats handle the brush at the edges. Their manure feeds the soil. Their grazing replaces mowing.
• Cover crops as default. The space between rows is alive, clovers, vetches, native grasses, fixing nitrogen, holding soil.
• No synthetic herbicides, insecticides, or fungicides. The PIWIs do most of the disease-resistance work. We will use copper and sulfur sparingly when needed, the way every regenerative-organic vineyard does.
• No till. Soil structure is built by roots and worms, not blades.
• Composting. Pomace, prunings, livestock bedding, garden scraps. Closed loops where we can build them.

Will it work in Missouri? It is harder here than it is in Sonoma. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The humidity is real. The fungal pressure is real. The PIWIs are the keystone, without their immune systems, none of the rest is realistic. With them, this thesis holds. Western Missouri can be home to a serious regenerative-organic sparkling vineyard. We are betting that we are right about that.

We're aiming for Regenerative Organic Certified, the standard run by the Regenerative Organic Alliance. That is a path, not a starting point. We are not ROC today. We are working toward it.

The other side of all this, what happens in the cellar, is a separate post. The short version: the same philosophy. Native fermentations, neutral vessels, minimal intervention. I'll write it soon.

More to come.