This Tuesday, January 31, at 9 am, please come to support a County “freeze” on any new vineyard and orchard development in Sonoma County until June 1st of this year.  At that time, VESCO (Vineyard Erosion and Sediment Control Ordinance) will be updated to incorporate tree removal protection language.

This will be held in the Supervisors’ Chambers, 575 Administrative Drive, Room 100A, Santa Rosa.

Thank you.

Along one of the San Francisco Bay’s most valuable watersheds, healthy salmon runs will soon coexist, at last, with cabernet sauvignon.

The ambitious project to halt erosion in the heart of California’s premiere winegrowing region includes 40 landowners voluntarily giving up 135 acres of some of the most prized farmland in the nation, so riverbanks along the Napa River can be stabilized and salmon spawns restored.

“It’s valuable property, but we have to be stewards of the land and the environment,” said Regina Weinstein, of Honig Vineyard and Winery, which produces sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon in the heart of the restoration area. “We want the land to be here and be healthy in the future, so we can pass on the business to future generations.”

Many stretches of the 55-mile-long Napa River have filled with silt over the years as floodwaters and non-native plants took a toll on the banks. The river drains into the San Francisco Bay and is considered the most important watershed in the region for steelhead and Chinook salmon spawning.

“Giving up a few rows of vines is a small thing to do to help the big picture,” said Weinstein, whose bottles can fetch up to $75 each.

The first of five phases of the project, begun on a 4 1/2-mile stretch south of Calistoga called the “Rutherford Reach,” involves removing some rows of vines and trees to reshape the riverbank into a wide V-shape to lessen erosion. Growers from the prestigious viticulture area — including Opus, Frog’s Leap, Cakebread Cellars, Nickel and Nickel and Sutter Home — began planning the project more than a decade ago as part of a broader land stewardship program under the auspices of the Rutherford Dust Society, a group of growers and vintners that promote cutting-edge practices in the region.

The project is seen as a model for private landowners initiating environmental improvements before they’re mandated by the government.

“It’s being initiated from the bottom up, not the top down,” said Gretchen Hayes, the Rutherford Reach project leader.

The Napa River historically supported a run of 8,000 steelhead. They dwindled to 2,000 in the 1960s and to just a few hundred today. Silt washed from steeply eroded banks — in places up to 30-feet high — has covered the gravel where the fish lay eggs.

“A big part of the project so far has been to clean it out and make a pathway for them to spawn,” said Hayes.

Stretches of the riverbank now have been shaved down to a gradual slope easing into the river. Grasses and willows have been planted to stabilize the banks, and burlap-covered berms are in place to keep sediment from washing into the river. Resting places have been developed for the fish to take cover during times of heavy flows.

A mountain of soil excavated last year might have been some of the most expensive fill dirt ever. Land in Napa County can go for as high as $235,000 an acre.

The wine industry in Napa Valley generates nearly $11 billion annually and is the region’s largest employer.

The voluntary program has been paid for by the landowners, a local sales tax to improve the river and state and federal sources. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency planned to announce Friday details of $3.3 million in new funding to continue work on the project that is expected to cost $22 million and take until 2017 to complete.

The project is one of many that area vintners are participating in to reduce the impact of farming on the scenic region. Napa growers were among the first to adopt sustainable farming practices, including a reduction in pesticides and tilling. Many have converted to solar power and plant cover crops to bring in beneficial insects.

“We have some of the most biodynamic and organic growers in Napa,” said Davie Pina, of Pina Vineyard Management. “We are close to nature and we wanted to do something positive.”

Now the river that many once viewed as a burden because of all of the government regulations that come with farming close to it is becoming a source of tranquility and inspiration for the growers.

“It’s not just a drainage ditch anymore,” Pina said. “It’s amazing how the animals are moving back in. We have three or four beaver dams and the river otters are waiting for our first rainstorm because they know the salmon will start coming up. It’s changing rapidly, quite rapidly.”

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Click here for orignal article

Two California vintners want to cut down 2,000 acres of redwood trees and replace them with vineyards in the largest woodland-to-vineyard conversion in California’s history. Do I need to explain what conservationists think of this?

Under the proposal, reported by the Los Angeles Times and later tipped by High Country News, two Sonoma County pinot noir growers, Premier Pacific Vineyards and Artesa Vineyards, want to expand their growing operations by slicing into forestlands of Douglas firs and the state’s iconic redwoods. Premier also wants to develop 60 high-end estates—for members of the 1 percent, I assume—on adjacent lands that it already owns on the ironically named Preservation Ranch.

“In exchange,” reports the Times, “the developers promise to restore streams, add more than 200 acres to a county park, plant 1 million redwoods and Douglas firs and make other environmental improvements.”

But environmental advocates aren’t appeased by these offers: “I don’t see a need for more deforestation to have a great wine economy, because there is a lot of cleared land already available,” said Adina Merelender, a UC Berkeley conservation biologist.

“The big issue for us,” added Jay Holcomb of the Sierra Club, “is that redwoods-to-vineyards conversions are worse than clear-cutting because they are permanent.” A Sierra Club website that has detailed information about Preservation Ranch suggests that its moniker was a greenwash from the get-go:

The project was named “Preservation Ranch” by its proponents to disguise its essential nature as a speculative for-profit venture which targets the steep, undeveloped redwood and oak woodlands of coastal Sonoma County.

A county official acknowledges that the proposal is “controversial from beginning to end,” so approval is by no means certain. One thing is sure, though: If the deal goes down, the resulting pinot noir, regardless of its flavor profile, will most certainly have a bitter, acrid finish.

UPDATE 11/9/2012: Premier Pacific Vineyards has been terminated as the manager of the vineyard investment portfolio held by the California Public Employees Retirement System, or CalPERS, according to North Bay Business Journal and Wine Industry Insight. It’s unclear how this affects the company’s proposed vineyard expansion in Sonoma County. Sources: Los Angeles Times, High Country News, Sierra Club Redwood Chapter Image by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos, licensed under Creative Commons.
http://www.utne.com/Wild-Green/Chopping-Down-Redwoods-to-Make-Wine.aspx

Russian River Watershed Protection Committee (RRWPC) has closely followed Sonoma County Water Agency’s (SCWA) Estuary Management Plan process for many years. We are quite familiar with the issues addressed by Supervisor Carrillo in the Close to Home article entitled Myths about sandbar plan that ran on Oct. 18, 2011 in the Press Democrat. We disagree with many of the article’s assertions.

The article defends the project by stating SCWA will not close the sandbar; they won’t add pollutants to the river; they will assure recreation and seals will continue, and it will save threatened fish species. The article specifically blames failing septics for existing pollution in the river along with “other” sources. The article credits SCWA for hiring consultants to conduct extensive studies.

Carrillo then goes on to paint SCWA as the heroes in this matter for doing all this work for the fish, when they are merely doing their jobs. It is their responsibility to assure a healthy and sustainable river, and are paid well to do so, but there is a lot more that could be done.

RRWPC concerns about this project have been extensively documented in our comments over the last several years (for more information visit www.rrwpc.org).

The Estuary is a magnificent force of nature not suited to being controlled. This year the mouth did not close once during the project period and SCWA was unable to conduct the project. Last year they tried, but the mouth reopened within 12 hours and they had to stop. Most river mouths north of the Russian never close.

This is a management plan and project features have only been estimated. Many factors are unknown and public comments were necessarily limited. The project is an experiment. Consultant studies only revealed “tip of the iceberg” impacts. We don’t know water quality impacts if mouth is closed for five months and existing pollutants get to fester in the water all that time. How will fish be affected if they are residing in mercury-laden waters for long periods?

Seals always leave the estuary haul out when the mouth is closed. If lengthy closures occur, we may never see seals there in summer again. We have no idea how this situation will affect them and they are a protected species also.

Heavy equipment will work on the dunes as many as 36 days during the summer season, greatly affecting access at the most popular beach in Northern California. State Parks is so concerned about this that they would only give the project a one-year permit rather than the 13-year permit requested.

SCWA has separated the Estuary Project from the “low flow” project (proposal to lower minimum flows at Hacienda by 44%), but they are closely related and should have been considered together. The only reason given for lower flows at Hacienda is to avoid flooding of a few properties in Jenner, the lowest of which is the Visitor’s Center, flooding at 9 feet. Since the project will be maintained at 8 feet, and surplus water can flow into the ocean, we fail to see necessity for low flow project. Furthermore, in a private meeting, we were told that the project could be managed at normal flows.

Finally, to single out failing septics as the main source of pollution is a travesty. Agricultural practices, timber harvesting, gravel mining, wastewater discharges, dewatering of the tributaries, urban run off and extensive use of pesticides and herbicides, all contribute heavily to river pollution. It is the County’s responsibility to strictly enforce Storm Water Runoff and other programs to control all pollution, instead of playing political favorites with certain polluters over others.

For more information visit www.rrwpc.org

Natural Diversity date base showed endangered plant here prior to clearing, stripping, and stump removal.  CalFire is paralyzed even though the buyer of this property approached Ag Commission and was told that if he bought it for grapes it would need a THP/TCP.  He was apparently in escrow on the property about 3 weeks ago.  So it is being cleared by the the current owner under the claim that it will not be sold for vineyards, as the For Sale sign was advertised.

–Larry

Below:  The tall tree that will remain when everything else has been ripped from the earth will be a fake tree, actually a transmitting, receiving tower.

Trees were removed from a parcel on Highway 116 north of Sebastopol last week, triggering outrage from some neighbors and at least one county supervisor.

Bulldozers scraped the trees off another parcel on Highway 116 north of Sebastopol last week for another vineyard.

Supervisor Efren Carrillo has expressed outrage at this flouting of environmental rules and regulations. Even as chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, Carrillo could do little to immediately halt this recent devastation, other than calling in the District Attorney’s Office after the fact.

It is no coincidence that this land on the corner of Vine Hill Road is in escrow, apparently being sold to the same grape-grower who used questionable “legal” tactics to take land further south along Highway 116 away from landowner John Jenkel and then ripped all the trees out before anyone could stop him.

But the problem isn’t the occasional bad apple. In recent years, the county rules governing land use have been slanted in favor of conversion to grapes and other development. The result has been large-scale clearing of the land that is alarming the public and which the county now seems unwilling to stop. Stripping parcels of all vegetation is allowed with little or no regard for the direct and cumulative impacts on neighbors, creeks, trees and wildlife.

A comparison of Friends of the Gualala River and Gualala River Watershed Council

Two very different organizations

Friends of the Gualala River (FoGR) GualalaRiver.org

Gualala River Watershed Council (GRWC) GRWC.info

FoGR is a leader in environmental advocacy and action dedicated to protection and recovery of the Gualala River and its watershed, defending against threats like:
• industrial water diversion and export,
• mass agricultural conversion of forestland,
• destructive logging in the river floodplain,
• clear-cut logging in slopes above the river,
• pesticide pollution, and
• invasive non-native species.

GRWC is a forum for landowners and others to “communicate about the ecology of land use in the Gualala River watershed” for “engagement of the community” and “stakeholders” and “landowners.”
GRWC’s mission statement precludes environmental advocacy and favors flexibility of landowner land use options.

FoGR’s steering committee is composed of all volunteers with no financial or political conflicts of interest in timber, agriculture, or water diversion, including representation of recreational fishing, public river access, park expansion advocacy, professional conservation biology. GRWC’s chair and vice-chair are timber industry professionals, secretary / treasurer is an agriculture industry professional; board members represent timber and agriculture interests, “stakeholders.”
FoGR is a grassroots environmental organization funded by public citizen donors and grassroots environmental foundations. GRWC is funded by state grant programs aimed at landowners, and private corporate sources.
FoGR uses applied science and environmental law in the service of conserving public trust resources – fish, wildlife, streamflow, groundwater, water quality, public access to the river – all published on FoGR website, which is updated frequently. GRWC uses applied science in the service of monitoring and mitigation of land uses including logging and vineyard conversion; no data available on website; published reports available by request only. Website unchanged 2004-2011.
FoGR protects the entire watershed, regardless of ownership, to promote natural ecological recovery processes of the river, its tributaries, and forests and woodlands of the watershed. GRWC implements engineered habitat restoration and rural road improvements on lands owned by employers and clients of GRWC officers, using public funds.

Who do you support?

Over 90 percent of our cultivated land is vineyards, causing cries of ‘monoculture.’ But what is monoculture, and why is it such a bad thing?

DIVERSE THINKING: Lou Preston, at Preston Vineyards in Cloverdale, has removed 40 percent of his vineyards to make room for peaches, walnuts, olives and vegetables.

In 1974, growing plums was still a viable means of making a living in Sonoma County, but farmer Lou Preston foresaw a better way to harvest an income. So he pulled out his 200 acres of prune trees from his family’s Dry Creek Valley property and replanted the acreage with wine grapes. Preston was ahead of the times, doing what hundreds of other landowners would do 10 and 20 years later as California’s wine industry exploded. By 1980, Sonoma County’s prune industry was essentially gone. Olives and walnuts were also on the way out, and the county’s apple orchards were shrinking.

And vineyards took over. Today, Sonoma County is planted with 56,522 acres of wine grapes, according to Sonoma County’s 2010 crop report—up from about 12,000 acres in 1970. Other crops, including walnuts and prunes, have virtually vanished from the region (in 2010, there were just 79 acres of walnuts in Sonoma County, and 39 acres of prunes), and wine grapes now make up more than 90 percent of the cultivated land in both Sonoma and Napa counties. Though prices of grapes have fallen some in the past several years, farmers still have a huge incentive to keep growing grapes; at about $2,000 per ton on average, local wine grapes are by far the region’s most valuable crop.

But Preston, who founded Preston Winery in 1981, has taken a dramatic—and voluntary—step backward. Though he and his family helped spark the region’s vineyard explosion, they are now converting their property into a diverse farm, and to do it they’ve removed 40 percent of their moneymaking vines and replanted the acreage with fruit trees and vegetables.

For Preston, the change came when he started farming organically about a decade ago. In doing so, he says he simply became cognizant of better ways to manage the land. He saw the sustainability issues in monocropping, especially in using petroleum-based fertilizers to replenish the soil every season and in using poisons to kill insect pests.

“We began to wonder whether we ought to be a monoculture,” he says. “It’s not good for the land, and it’s not good for the ecosystem.”

Preston now grows 50 acres of peaches, walnuts, olives, pineapple guavas and many annual fruit and vegetable crops among his grapevines. He also has grazing animals and chickens roaming the farm. Fruits and vegetables are sold at a produce stand outside the tasting room, while some of his harvest goes to farmers markets and another portion goes to area restaurants.

Wine sales still pay the bills, Preston says, and quantifying the virtues of his business model is difficult. Preston says that “the land seemed to respond positively” to the diversity of crops after he began converting his vineyards. For one thing, the diversity of plants now hosts insect populations, which keep each other in balance, and he says that significant pest outbreaks haven’t occurred since he diversified his farm. “It feels right,” he says. “It seems like a perfectly natural way to manage land.”

For Kevin McEnnis, co-owner of Quetzal Farm in Santa Rosa, crop diversity provides security against harvest failure of one crop or another. His eggplant crop, for example, failed last year due to cool weather, but his dozen other crops did not. “If we’d been an eggplant monocrop, we’d have needed crop insurance,” he says.

At Orchard Farms in Sebastopol, owner Ken Orchard says this spring produced his first good spinach crop in six years. “If I’d been depending on spinach alone,” he says, “I wouldn’t have done well.” Orchard, who farms organically, also says his wide array of about 50 fruits and vegetables attracts shoppers at local farmers markets in Sebastopol, Santa Rosa and San Rafael.

But on the macro market, the forces of economics pull in a different direction and have drawn much of the world into a system of monoculture. The grain fields of the Great Plains are a monoculture. So is the almond industry of the Central Valley. Citrus groves in Florida, banana farms in Ecuador, olive orchards in Spain, coffee plantations throughout the tropics and alfalfa fields in Southern California’s Imperial Valley also amount to monoculture.

As do the North Bay’s grids of grapevines.

“A monoculture is a factory model,” explains Frederique Lavoipierre, coordinator for the entomology outreach program at Sonoma State University and the manager of the school’s organic garden program. Monocultures, she says, allow for a streamlined industrial use of the land, which can be planted, sprayed or harvested all at once, with the crop sent en masse to local processing plants. “There are obvious cost benefits to farming that way in the short term,” she explains, “but we know it’s not sustainable.”

Soil quality suffers, for one thing. In diversely planted areas or in those where crop rotation occurs, essential soil nutrients can be maintained naturally in the soil via photosynthetic processes. In most large-scale farming scenarios, though, heavy use of petroleum-based fertilizers is the norm. These, in turn, can have negative impacts on a region’s ecology. So-called oceanic dead zones, like the sterile region in the Gulf of Mexico, result when fertilizers washed to sea via rivers cause algal blooms that in turn use all the oxygen in the water, depriving other organisms of life.

Monocultures also render croplands vulnerable to massive pest outbreaks—the answer to which is the use of pesticides and fungicides. Honeybees, too, may starve if left to live in a monocropped region, where nectar flows occur only several weeks of the year.

Still, it isn’t feasible to grow everything in small, multicropped plantations. As McEnnis says, “Small-scale wheat is really neat, but, boy is it expensive. So we may need monoculture farming at some level.”

Ted Lemon calls petroleum dependency and chemical contamination “the hidden costs” of maintaining the modern agricultural model. Lemon and his wife, Heidi, own and operate Littorai Wines west of Sebastopol. Lemon farmed conventionally for about 15 years before, as he says, he “became frustrated with the Western agronomic model, which is essentially based on mineral fertilizers.” He tuned in to the practices of biodynamic farming, and today, the Littorai vineyards are surrounded by companion plants, hay and woodland, with animals grazing over certain quarters.

Monocultures may come in varying sizes, and Lavoipierre notes that defining a monoculture is a tricky matter.

“At what point do you call something a monoculture?” she asks. “Is it 10 square feet or a hundred square feet or an acre or a hundred acres? I would say that something isn’t a monoculture until we begin seeing negative impacts.”

In the North Bay, we may have passed that point. According to Lavoipierre, problems associated with Pierce’s disease, devastating for grapevines, could have been largely averted had more grape growers left vacant buffer zones between their vines and riparian stream zones, where the bacteria’s vector insect naturally lives.

Beekeepers also say that monocultures have negative effects on bee populations and are perhaps even a major cause of the much-discussed phenomenon of colony collapse disorder, or CCD, which has seen the decline in numbers of bees worldwide. Healthy bee populations, so essential to many food crops, depend on landscapes that are botanically diverse, producing flower blooms year- round.

“Vineyards are basically starvation zones where the bees can’t get any food,” says Liz Russell, a beekeeper in Forestville. She and her husband, Joey Romo, have found it increasingly difficult to maintain their bee colonies and have had to move their hives twice in the past four years, in each case because a small, multicropped organic farm was converted into a vineyard.

Rob Keller, a beekeeper in Napa, says farmland, especially of the monoculture sort, makes notoriously poor habitat for bees, while urban areas provide the diversity of flowering plants that can keep bees fed all year. The problem with this counterintuitive paradigm is that urban gardens and greenways occupy just a small portion of the overall land area, severely limiting the regions in which bees can thrive.

“Basically, the further out of the urban area you go, the harder it is to be a bee,” says Keller, who recently watched female worker bees forcibly eject male drones from several hives he was keeping among some vineyards, a sure sign, he explains, that a bee colony is short of food.

Keller says two acres of fallow, wild land for every 10 acres cultivated would provide plenty of food for bees. He says the Napa Valley Reserve in St. Helena is a rare example of a bee-friendly vineyard. Here, buckwheat and safflower, hundreds of fruit trees and vegetable plots grow between the grapevines. The vineyard’s manager, Mark Griffin, is transitioning the property to organic and keeps 20 beehives on the land.

Griffin uses some organic pesticides but says he prefers maintaining a diversity of insects, which feed on both flower nectar and on each other and, in effect, bring populations into balance naturally. Such a system, though, will always include some pest insects.

“When you’re using biological controls, you have to have some threshold for damage,” Griffin explains. “Some people have zero threshold for damage. They say, ‘Oh, I have a spider mite. Let’s bomb this place.’ Then you might not have a spider mite anymore, but you have nothing else, either.”

Lemon at Littorai Wines says the North Bay’s wine country is nothing like the severe situations seen elsewhere in the world, and that the use of the word “monoculture” must be used carefully.

“This is not Iowa,” he cautions. “This is not an uninterrupted landscape of corn as far as the eye can see. The heart of our grape industry is, what, the Napa Valley, and that’s maybe five miles across?”

Still, Lemon believes that diversifying our agricultural landscape is a requirement for the future, but the change, if it ever comes, will be a slow one. “It will depend on the locavore movement,” he asserts, “which needs to convince people to support an agriculturally diverse landscape with their dollars.”

Food grown in small quantities, as any farmers-market-goer knows, is relatively expensive, a function of a downsized farm system and increased dependence on manual labor. Preston, too, knows the challenges of marketing small-production food crops. “There aren’t markets in most places for small-scale produce,” he explains. “What do you do if you have a tenth of an acre of strawberries?”

Sell them at a farmers market, of course. This venue, in fact, may be the chief hope for sustainably farmed, locally grown and sold food. Preston believes so, as does Orchard, though McEnnis says Quetzal Farm has successfully cultivated relationships with numerous small retailers and even Whole Foods.

Though diversification efforts of small farmers like Lou Preston deserve honorable mention, they may be offset by ever more opportunistic vintners and the county governments that abet them. Witness vintner Paul Hobbs’ controversial expansions in Sebastopol and Guerneville; or the proposed 154-acre redwood clear-cutting in Annapolis by Codorniu Napa’s Artesa Vineyards for even more Pinot Noir; or the 1,769 acres eyed for vineyards by Premier Pacific Vineyards in the northernmost part of the county, and one sees examples of the continued growth of the industry.

Statistics tell a story, too. Of the 101,000 acres of vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties, more than 5,000 are nonbearing young vineyards recently planted. And though the value of grapes is dropping in both counties, the planting of them goes on and on.