Growing Forward: A Panel Discussion on Regenerative Agriculture

“Craig Camp, who has been heralded for turning around Troon Vineyards in Oregon’s Applegate Valley points out that in their replanted vineyards “biodynamics is the framework we integrated into our process. Regenerative organic is the next step.” Wine Industry Network.

Please join us for a panel discussion about regenerative agriculture with Paul Skinner, Paul Dolan and Jordon Lonborg and myself as we discus the future of winegrowing.

Interview on the Organic Wine Podcast

I spent a entertaining hour discussing biodynamics regenerative agriculture at Troon Vineyard and life in Oregon’s Applegate Valley with Adam Huss on his Organic Wine Podcast.

“Today we take a trip to the country to meet Craig Camp, the General Manager of Troon Vineyard in the Applegate Valley AVA of Southwest Oregon. Troon is a certified organic and biodynamic winery and estate vineyard that focuses on blends made from the grapes of Southern France, which seem to do extremely well in this northern area with a hot Mediterranean climate.

Craig was brought in to regenerate every aspect of Troon, and we had a very enjoyable conversation about everything that is happening there that he has helped implement. From soil testing and replanting and staff education to sheep dogs to organic vegetable gardens and more, even from the outside it’s exciting to hear about what he’s doing, and you can hear the excitement in the way he talks about it.

Craig has a personal story in regards to wine that I can relate to as well. He fell in love with wine far away from where it was grown, and over the course of his life and several career changes, he worked backwards toward an understanding of how the finest wine begins in a healthy, probiotic soil.”

— Adam Huss

Listen to My Interview on The Organic Wine Podcast

Demeter Certification

It started in a grown over abandoned cow pasture three and a half years ago and ended with Champagne on the patio at Troon Vineyard last week. 

The start was picking the site for the compost piles. The Champagne toast was to celebrate what we have achieved in these years in-between. Troon Vineyard is now one of only twelve wineries in Oregon to be certified Demeter Biodynamic® in both the winery and vineyard. To add a bit of icing to the cake, both the vineyard and winery are now also certified CCOF Organic. 

Searching with me for a compost site in an abandoned and overgrown pasture over three years ago was biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy. The new proprietors of Troon Vineyard, Dr. Bryan and Denise White had fully committed to the concept and investment required to transform Troon Vineyard from industrial agriculture to biodynamics. Now Andrew and I started the project forward. If you were standing there that day with Andrew and me and then came back to Troon Vineyard today, you would not recognize you were on the same farm. Only Grayback Mountain, still majestically towering over the Applegate Valley, would tell you that this spot was Troon Vineyard. The distressed, dilapidated and diseased vineyard that was Troon Vineyard in 2016 has been replaced by a living farm. Today, everywhere you look is activity and, most importantly, life. 

While media tends to focus on buried cow horns and other photogenic aspects of biodynamics, the heart of biodynamics is the people who practice it. A farm is not a natural occurrence in nature. Mother Nature does not plant grapevines in nice neat rows. Our goal and I believe the goal of biodynamics, is to let the natural systems of nature function as normally as possible in the rather unnatural environment that is a farm. 

It takes a village to achieve a goal like Demeter Biodynamic® Certification. Fortunately we built a dynamic team to accomplish this goal. Proprietors Bryan and Denise White have provided a solid foundation for us to build on. Biodynamic consultant Andrew Beedy and viticulturist Jason Cole provided the framework for our vineyard crew, led by ranch manager Adan Cortes, to transform not only the vineyard but the entire property. Our cellar team, winemaker Nate Wall and assistant winemaker Sarah Thompson fully embraced biodynamics and daily keep us moving forward as we expand and deepen our practice of regenerative farming and winemaking.

Troon Vineyard CCOF Organic Certification

For me, I will admit this is an emotional moment as I remember first seeing this vineyard in 2016. Today, when I stand in the same spot where I first surveyed this vineyard, surrounded by the majestic beauty of the Siskiyou Mountains, I can clearly recall feeling that this was a special place and a special vineyard. To see the possibilities I saw transformed into reality sometimes seems like almost a dream, but it is a dream come true.

Certification was a goal and now it is a goal achieved. It fact it just means that we have arrived at the starting line. So much of the work over the last three years has been repairing and restoring and we are far from done with those jobs. Now the goal is to more deeply understand this vineyard, this farm, and to make the practice of biodynamics our own. To achieve certification you are given a set of rules to follow. If you check off all the boxes you achieve certification. Now, as a jazz musician must master the scales before they can improvise, that we have learned to work within the framework of biodynamics, we must learn to go beyond that framework and discover the natural system of this farm. That will be our ultimate goal. Our job is to learn what this farm needs and then do our best to provide for those needs. The next years will be focused on building biodiversity. We will be welcoming some new members to our biodynamic team as next spring a flock of sheep, more chickens, and the requisite guard dogs (Pyrénées of course!) became part of our farm.

We celebrated our certifications with a Champagne toast. We toasted not only to what we accomplished, but what we will accomplish in the future. Becoming one of the few Demeter Biodynamic® Certified wineries and vineyards is a true milestone. Now, on to the next one. 

The Smell of Biodynamics

I remember the smells well and they always take me back to my childhood. That warm, earthy pungent smell can only come from one thing. I grew up in a small rural town in northern Illinois on the Wisconsin border . My grandfather and grandmother, Chester and Goldie Camp, were small dairy farmers, a type of farmer that rarely exists anymore. They were organic farmers, but did not know it.

My grandparents, Chester and Goldie Camp

I stayed with them often as a child, rising with my grandfather before dawn for the morning milking. I can remember looking up at him while he shaved as he lathered up with a brush swirled on a bar in a cup - yes, he shaved before milking. Then out to the barn for what, in those days, was the very hard physical job of milking. You carried the pails of milk to the tank one-by-one. I would wander among the cows while the men worked - avoiding their back-ends and hoofs due to the stern admonitions of my grandfather. The rich, warm aromas of the animals, the feed and, of course, the manure filled the barn while the twang of country music pushed by 50,000 watts from WJJD in Chicago tinnily played from an old and very dirty radio. After the morning’s work, my grandmother would have a huge country breakfast waiting with, of course, a glass of fresh milk, cream and all, straight from the milk tank. 

These memories came flowing back to me as Troon’s vineyard foreman, Adan Cortes, dumped the first load of cow manure onto our new biodynamic compost pile. Soon more will follow. We are lucky to have the Noble Family Organic Dairy as a next-door neighbor - an unlimited supply of organic manure from the thousands of happy, healthy cows they milk three times a day. 

Compost is the cornerstone of a biodynamic program. While organic regulations may be focused on what you can’t use, the Demeter Biodynamic Certification follows all the USDA Organic rules, but the discipline of biodynamics takes things further with the biodynamic preparations and the concept of the whole farm. Biodynamic compost is the main vehicle that brings health to your soils and therefor your vines. Strong vines can fight off threats while weak vines require chemicals to survive. Of the nine biodynamic preparations, only three are applied to directly to the vineyard - 500, 501, 508 - while the other six - 502 to 507 - are applied to the compost piles. We began our biodynamic compost program in earnest last week starting with manure from our neighbor organic farmer, Noble Dairy. The Noble family has been farming organically since 2004. We layered this rich manure with organic hay from another neighbor and the remains from last harvest’s grape pressings to create a pile about 150 feet long and five feet high. Then our vineyard foreman Adan Cortes applied the biodynamic preparations to the new pile. It was an exciting and emotional experience for all of us at Troon. Next week we are building a second pile and this fall will be creating four more based on our grape pomace from this year’s harvest. From now on nature’s circle will be unbroken with each vintage producing the compost to feed our vineyard soils for another year.

My grandparents were organic farmers and didn’t even know it. My grandmother prepared and canned organic vegetables from her organic garden. On Sundays, they ate free-range, organic chicken - that my grandfather killed the day before. Note my grandfather could only kill the chickens my grandmother had not named. They fed their dairy cattle organic hay in the winter and they grazed on organic grass in the summer. They were either blissfully unaware of the latest chemicals or could not afford them, or both. Michael Pollan wrote in his excellent book, In Defense of Food, don’t eat anything that your grandparents would not recognize as food. Certainly, good advice in my case.

When you grow grapes for wine you are growing food and Pollan’s recommendation can easily be rewritten to don’t drink wine that your grandparents would not recognize as wine - not that my grandparents ever had a sip of wine as far as I know. Pabst was my grandfather’s drink of choice.

The direct connection of memories of my grandparents to our building our first compost pile was a warm, emotional experience for me. Agriculture is a seasonal and circular experience, if you are not emotionally connected to the past you will always struggle. Emotions and good feelings very much describe the process of converting to biodynamics. You feel good about what you are doing. While we have practiced sustainable agriculture for years, this is different and you can feel it.

It feels right. Chester and Goldie would approve.

Get Set, Go!

This is the spot that will become the most important place of the vineyard. We’ve chosen the spot for the compost piles.

There is a day that dreams, plans and goals become a reality. On your mark, get set, go! As we crossed the starting line this week, we were firmly aware that we were starting a marathon, not a dash. This week we took our first steps to converting Troon Vineyard to organic and biodynamic agriculture. We have our eye on 2020 to achieve our first organic and biodynamic certification, but that will not be the finish line. In agriculture, there is no finish line.

We had already taken some steps forward as we had received our L.I.V.E. and Salmon Safe sustainable certifications, but we have now committed to biodynamics as our vision for the future of Troon. Our first big step was to secure the services of Andrew Beedy ([https://www.andrewbeedy.com]). Andrew's speciality is designing a complete plan that looks at your property as a whole, not just as a vineyard. Andrew has spent his entire life immersed in biodynamics as he was born on a biodynamic dairy farm in Pennsylvania. He attended a Steiner elementary school that was attached to a biodynamic farm. As a teenager, he worked on an organic farm in England. After university, he moved to California, where he worked with his mentor, the famed biodynamic consultant Alan York, who also was the biodynamic consultant for our neighbor, Cowhorn Winery, here in the Applegate Valley. Today, Andrew’s clients span the entire nation coast-to-coast.

After walking for hours with Andrew through our vineyards and our entire farm property, you can feel your perceptions began to change as you start to look at your farm as a whole rather than as simple blocks of vineyards. This extends beyond our property lines as you understand that the Applegate Valley itself is included in a whole farm, holistic plan for farming.

With conventional agriculture you identify problems and then apply various applications. Many, many of these applications are nasty indeed. While they may solve one problem, the collateral damage they cause slowly, but surely kills your soils. Soil is the plant’s foundation, and dead soils cannot produce great wines. When you farm biodynamically you eschew these chemicals, which means you have to deal with the threats to your plants before they appear. In other words, biodynamics is all about prevention. A healthy plant can better resist diseases and pests than one living in dead soils relying on chemical fixes to deal with each and every problem.

Our new compost piles will be the heart and soul of the vineyard as this is how we will be bringing our soils back to life. One way I like to explain biodynamics is that it is organic agriculture with probiotics. It is the bacteria and fungi surrounding a plants roots that allow it to take nutrition from the soil. Conventional agriculture destroys this natural system. The power of biodynamics is that it brings the microbiome of your farm back to life, which brings your soils and plants back to life.

I will be chronicling the process of bringing Troon’s soils back to life here on this blog. Over the next weeks, we are evaluating our soils and the microbiome of our vineyards, and we will be carefully monitoring and documenting the changes in our soils and vines as we practice biodynamic farming over the next years. It is a story I am very excited to be sharing. It is a process that will change our farm, our vines, our wines and us.

It will be a steep learning curve. Could anything be more exciting?

Here is a link to the Demeter Biodynamic Farm Standard for certification.