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In todays’ episode, join me as I chat with Justin Howard-Sneyd, a distinguished Master of Wine, wine consultant, and owner of the Domaine of the Bee winery in Roussillon. More importantly, Justin is a trustee of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation, where he’s been leading two-day courses in regenerative viticulture across the UK for the past two years.
Justin walks us through the essentials of regenerative farming, distinguishing it from organic practices and biodynamics. We’ll explore the certification process in this field and dive into the debated topic of whether to till or not. The crux of these decisions lies in maximizing soil health.
Discover fascinating insights into the importance of healthy soils. Did you know that the soils in the UK alone can sequester a staggering 10 billion tonnes of carbon annually? That’s equivalent to one year’s worth of global human emissions! The detrimental effects of practices like tilling and heavy pesticide use on soil’s carbon storage capacity highlight the urgent need for viticulturists to adopt regenerative methods.
This episode is sponsored by Wickham Wines, A small business themselves focusing on top quality wines. Do yourself a favour, and go check out their online store for their amazing collection! Use the code EATSLEEP10 for 10% off your first order.
If you want to skip ahead:
03.40: How Justin got into teaching Regenerative farming
08.54: The pros and cons of Tilling
12.05: The many people plough and believe it to be a positive
15.15: Toxicity of copper
17.23: Using different mulches such as sheep fleece
20.27: Work principles of regenerative farming
24.39: Regenerative certifications
30.26: Applied biodynamic practices
32.15: Soil health and resilience
33.32: Justin’s intro into Regenerative Viticulture
Do go to https://www.regenerativeviticulture.org/ to sign up to their mailing letters to find out about all events and news
Any thoughts or questions, do email me: janina@eatsleepwinerepeat.co.uk
Or contact me on Instagram @eatsleep_winerepeat
If you fancy watching some videos on my youtube channel: Eat Sleep Wine Repeat
Or come say hi at www.eatsleepwinerepeat.co.uk
Until next time, Cheers to you!
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THE EAT SLEEP WINE REPEAT PODCAST HAS BEEN FEATURED IN DECANTER MAGAZINE, RADIO TIMES AND FEED SPOT AS THE 6TH BEST UK WINE MAKING PODCAST.
[Applause] [Music] welcome to eat sleep wine repeat a podcast for all you wine lovers who if you’re like me just cannot get enough of the good stuff I’m Yanina door your host brand ambassador wine educator and smellier so stick with me as we dive deeper into this ever evolving wonderful world of wine and wherever you are listening to this cheers to you you hello wine lovers and welcome back to what is going to be a very interesting topic one that really matters but yet still many people are at odds as to what exactly is it and I am talking about regenerative vulture so in this episode I am talking with Justin Howard Sneed who is a master of wine a wine consultant the owner of a ruson winery called domain of the bee but in this instance most importantly a trustee of the regenerative vulture Foundation where he runs two-day regenerative viticulture courses in the UK and has been doing this for the last 2 years and so he’s going to run us through the fundamentals we’re going to explore the distinctions between regenerative farming and organic practices and biodynamics we will delve into the process of obtaining certification in this domain and tackling the oh very controversial debate to till or not to till now a lot of these decisions are based on how do we make our soils as healthy as possible and to give you some really interesting facts about soils and why we love them why we need them to be healthy did you know in the UK alone everyone in the world the UK is a tiny country it can hold 10 billion tons of carbon which is one year’s worth of global human emissions for me that is astounding and so those methods such as tilling or plowing and the heavy Reliance of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers if they’re weakening the soil’s capacity to store carbon that’s where I can understand it’s a really good idea if vit culturalists can find ways to change that and another fun fact what with most of The Vineyards dealing with droughts now but then others dealing with floods a healthy soil can act like a sponge just one hectare of land can store one and a half Olympic swimming pools worth of water and the UK soils alone can Store 130 trillion lers of water anyway mind blown so I hope this episode expands your understanding of Agriculture just that little bit more and its profound implications for the future of our planet and so if you’re looking for a bottle of wine to drink along whilst listening to this episode I can happily and safely recommend my incredible sponsor of this season wickhams wine I will leave the link in my show notes they have many wineries that are engaged in the sustainable wine making practices where they’re promoting biodiversity and reducing those CO2 emissions so look for domain Mai in the Rome Valley or in B there is moli and famil SC don’t forget to use my code eat sleep 10 for 10% off your first order and enjoy the episode okay so I need to ask you how did you get actually into teaching from the beginning of regenerative farming what grabbed you interesting question I mean I I had spent a reasonable amount of time in when I P the master wine subsequently as mws you you do a bit of time teaching students and I hadn’t Tau for a long time and I’ve forgotten how much I enjoyed it I actually started working for with the dartington trust in Devon helping them build a program of wine events they they have a wide range of courses arts and other other things and we decided to add wine to the list of courses and as I was going down there and realizing quite how inter regenerative culture they are farming and also um regenerative communities regenerating uh you know communities I started to learn a little bit more about the regenerative philosophy and how it and thinking about how it might apply to wine so we can see fairly early on that actually there was a real need for people to learn about what regenerative farming means in wine because it’s quite well practiced in agriculture but not so well in wine at all so we conceived a small course that we started running about three years ago and that went down really well obviously UK based mostly UK producers coming along to that but I was learning fast about regenerative and learning a lot from dartington and also reading listening to podcasts and so it’s probably three years ago I really started really boning up and it’s been an incredibly interesting journey and really interesting as someone who used to study a lot and hasn’t studied for a long time to go back to studying really fascinating it’s such a lot to learn and it’s such aort of inspiring world of of Interest so I’ve really enjoyed the the learning I’ve been doing well I’ve just being captivated by it myself so I said to you when we were talking before recording that only a few weeks ago I watched kiss the soil on Netflix and I just was absolutely shocked by how incredible our soils are at extracting the carbon and how this could be an absolute Way Forward to deal with our issues yet it’s not really something that you hear being spoken about and so okay before we get into healthy soils what would be regenerative vulture for anybody listening now how would you define it well it’s a very good question and it’s one that we are busy trying to make simple and straightforward please I know you you spoke to Jamie good recently and he’s got a definition which is the regenerative V culture is intelligent vitic culture and it evolves and adapts according to you know what the science currently says it is based on scientific understanding but it’s also based on I suppose an understanding that the complexity of what is happening in a complicated Network the soil food web under the ground is so complex it’s very very hard to test and learn in a purely scientific way so it’s you basically have to achieve a healthy balance of microbes and organisms living in the soil doing what they do feeding the plant feeding the soil feeding each other in order to cease to have to add a lot of fertilizer a lot of nitrogen a lot of phosphorus because the the soil biology should be releasing it for you and even micronutrients I mean sometimes you’re very short of a micronutrient and you have to add something to bring that back into balance it’s incredible how small amounts of micronutrients locked up in the soil can be released by the soil biology so essentially regenerative viticulture is focusing on allowing nature to do the hard work for you and actually doing less work yourself and just trying to set things up so that the system starts to balance and work by itself is very closely related overlapping with Organic and biodynamic ftic culture but it has quite a few differences one of the main ones is that in Organics and biodynamics one well certainly on Organics one of the main ways in which you control weeds is by plowing the big precept of regen and just rewinding a bit talking about regenerative in agriculture the Insight was that soils are lost and degraded and depleted when you plow and leave your soil bare what happens then is the when it dries out and the Wind Blows the the fine sand and the organic matter just blows away and when it rains it just washes away there’s nothing in the ground to hold it and you’re also gradually killing the organisms that are living in the soil because they got nothing to feed on so the big Insight is that what everything feeds on is the roots of plants pushing out carbon into the soil having photosynthesized and having decided that they’ve got most of the nutrients they need but some stuff they they can’t have access to unless they feed the soil biology soil biology then takes the carbon and then supplies the plant with what it needs and over millions of years billions of years this Evolution process has fine-tuned certain organisms providing certain nutrients for plants and this incredible symbiosis that we’ve only beginning to understand of what happens under the soil so essentially as soon as you plow the soil you disrupt all of that nice little ecosystem that’s setting itself up under the ground you invert the soil you take what was a foot below the soil and put it on the top you take what was on top and put it beneath it all dies and decomposes eventually then the soil carbon just depletes and every time you plow it you get less carbon and less soil life so plowing is is the sort of Enemy Number One of regenerative farming so you probably you may have heard of no till farming that’s very much using the same philosophy yes well this is a huge huge conversation right now and yeah I’m going to leave this to you to explain why tilling might be really really bad well exactly as I said so when when you insert a plow shf if you if you invert the soil you moving the habitats around so that the there’s all sorts of organisms that live in the soil some live you know we way deep down most of them live in the top you know few inches and if you bury those and put them underground they they can’t they don’t have what you need to survive so they they die and obviously plowing tilling in the first place was was um originally done in order to make soil to break it up and make it light so you could see put put seeds in and so in the early farmers would would you know make a Furrow in the soil and drop in seeds and that allow them to grow a crop but it’s because way of clearing everything out from what grew before starting with bare soil and planting the you know the crop you want the 100% crop you want to grow in the monoculture that has been the way of intensive farming over the last several hundred years and certainly intensifying since the since fertilizers and mechanization came along so because of that we have gradually been we haven’t been realizing that our souls have been depleting and getting worse and worse and lower and lower quality and we’ve been relying more and more on the bags of chemicals either to fertilize because there’s no fertility left in the soil or then to fix the problems that too much fertility causes rapid growth of plant cells means that they’re very vulnerable to pathogens so as soon as you give something loads of nitrogen it grows really quickly and then Falls over with the first disease that comes along we haven’t been farming very very wisely and in many ways viticulture sort of not been the big culprit in this because we do have a permanent crop in the ground The Vines don’t get plowed out every year they they grow and they grow every year but it is fairly clear that even in some very premium wine regions in the world the quality of the viticulture and the quality of the soil is pretty poor I think it was Claude bino who who I think it back in the 90s early 90s he he analyzed a lots of soil in burgundy and he said that actually in his opinion there was less soil life in the soils of burgundy there was in the Sands of the Sahara yes that is a famous quote that I’ve heard of I mean it’s shocking how as well I was reading up there’s a massive amazing quote in the film because the so where if you take a whole handful of healthy soil it has more organisms in it than human beings who have ever lived on this planet but I also read recently which is another way to look at it that literally one gram of healthy soil has 10 billion organisms in it and I find that really mindblowing to understand that there is so much going on under our soils apparently about half of all of the species that live on Earth are actually under our soils and yet we don’t really know anything about it and we haven’t put any Focus onto it so it’s it’s at least amazing that people are starting to to focus now you said with with Vineyards you know we’re not plowing so much because the vines are in the ground but we are tilling so am I right in the reason that people are tilling is generally as well for weed control so for instance it’s one of these things what’s the right way they don’t want to spray weed killer so instead they go go along and they till so that they don’t have to spray is that generally the main reason why someone would till yes I think there are a few reasons to till and that’s probably the main one in many countries and yes you do need to control competitive plants and you need to control plants that will grow into your canopy and crowd the grapes and cause disease issues and one of the challenges of regenerative verticulture is how do you do that there are mechanical means that you can do it by hand that’s obviously very expensive so you know is is our regenerative process is very easy to scale but I think one of the problems is that really good organic Growers have know that plowing isn’t a great thing to do and they do it as little as possible and they do it very lightly but it is a precept of Organics that that is an important thing to do one of the things that there’s a very um there a great French consultant called Frederick Tom who’s a regenerative agriculture consultant he helped me understand quite how working the soil is is of embedded in the in the French culture as something you must do something that’s positive because when you work the so you get a fertility boost and the plants grow better after you’ve worked it so there is a manra oh it’s the time of the year I must work the soil and then my plants will start to grow vigorously but he showed two pots one of which would have the soil heat treated to kill everything in it and they had exactly the same plant growing at the same time but one was really pushed in green and the other one was a regular plant not looking quite so so green and the one that actually had been heat treated was the one with the bushy and green plants and that’s because everything in the soil had died released all its nitrogen and given the plant lots of energy to grow and the plant had grown but you know you plant in that pot again the next year there’ll be less in there to fertilize so as you kill everything you get this enormous spike in microbial activity as the microbes break down what it is that’s being killed and then the microbial activity drops to half or a quarter of what it was before because most of the microbes now don’t have a home or anything to eat because it’s all it’s all gone so I think that is a perception that I’ve got to plow in order to boost my fertility to control my weeds and that therefore plowing must be good and and actually more and more organic farmers are beginning to realize that actually plowing is is quite negative but with the industrialization of Organics in France the growth has been extremely fast and there’s more and more Growers on large scales applying organic protocols but they’re they’re very much doing it by mass plowing and and not sensitively nurturing their soil Health whereas the very good organic Growers are already very far down the regenerative Road what they’re doing is very close to regenerative agriculture and certainly the ones who are diminishing or or stopping plowing and and being organic are pretty much ideal regenerative Vineyards so we know in no way do we see that being as an oppositional philosophy but it’s you know just because consumers around the world have learned that the word organic on a label is something to look for it doesn’t necessarily mean that mass scale you can be organic and have really healthy soil you’re plowing a lot and you’re probably using a lot of I mean let’s face it some of the products that are used in Organics against fungal diseases are effective because they are fungicides they happen to be copper and sulfur but those are still fungicides and they’re authorized by Organics because they’re mined from the earth rather than made by a human but they still are killing funguses and this is a big challenge for viticulture because Vines are very susceptible to fungal disease and I suppose this is the thing that I always mention to people or of course if you can stop using conventional sprays great if you’re throwing a whole load of copper onto your Vines for for instance I guess down milu which is something in the UK we have lots of in these humid conditions the issue with the copper and tell me if I’m wrong the issue with the copper is that actually it’s not you need to often spray more because it’s not as effective as for instance a conventional spray but then that means that the tractor is going through the tractor is pushing down and compacting the soil which is damaging the soil health and the organisms within the soil and equally you are spraying more and the copper is still remaining in the soil and the copper is affecting the microorganisms and it’s not very nice for our earthworms and we love our earthworms for soil structure for going throughout and increasing the nutrients within the soil is that your kind of understanding or is there actually even more to it or I’ve misinterpreted slightly no what you have said very well typifies someone who’s perhaps farming less well but organically believing that to be better but actually creating compaion problems and soil life problems because you know cop is also toxic to quite a lot of creatures that live in the soil and there’s a wonderful cubic meter that someone has arranged with little cotton threads illustrating where the the wormholes go through the a typical piece of soil and it’s astonishing quite how many wormholes there are in a healthy soil where the worms traveling and they’re also going up and down and they’re going up to the surface and they’re pulling things down below and they bring nutrients down deep and they bring nutrients up from the bottom and Incredibly good signal of a healthy soil and if you have compacted soil it’s very hard for the worms to move around so yes absolutely one of the great advantages of regenerative farming is that by working with so one of the principles is keeping the soil covered all the time if it’s a season where nothing is actually growing you can use mulches so you can cover with straw with wood chip with various different types of mulch and pros and cons are using each type and I’ve seen people using sheep fleeces around the basic sheep flu yeah no because they break down the Sheep flu breaks down and provides nutrients and it keeps weeds just under under the vine strip there’s plenty of interesting work being done but you’re keeping the soil covered is important and obviously you can do that in a in a season where things are growing using a crop of some sort so often known as a cover crop that sort of implies that you’ve planted a specific crop but often now people are planting complex mixes of seeds which have 20 species growing in them if you have deep rooted species like dyon radish they will help erate and and decompact the soil so if you have compacted soil you don’t have to decompact it with a subsoiler you can plant deep rooted tap rot plants that will help decompact and as they attract earthworms and the earthworms find the soil better to live in the soil will decompact itself but every time you drive your tractor on it it will compact it a bit and if you’re driving a tractor you know five or six times a year you can probably get away with it if you’re doing it 18 or 20 times a year it’s going to be quite compacted and that is one of the drawbacks of Organics is that you have to treat more frequently because the things you’re using are not systemic and they wash off and they therefore if it rains after you’ve just treated you have to go out and treat again and that does lead you to treating quite often and having compaction so in terms of actually you mentioned cover crops this for me is one of the options that to stop people from tilling who are trying to take out for instance the weeds by planting the cover crops one you mentioned the radishes really deep roots but all there’s I know that legumes are really good for fixing the nitrogen not sure of any anymore you can certainly I’m sure mention a few but is that one of the ways to not till to stop doing that plant more cover crops is that a feasible option if your tilling is to control weeds then the more you can plants that you want to have there rather than ones you don’t want to have there the more chance that they will grow and do what you want them to do and you won’t have weed plants growing instead and you know there’s lots of cases in Weeds are the first colonizer plants so if you have bare soil the first plant that arrives there and starts growing is what we tend to classify as a weed you have a rubbish dump or building site and you know the stuff growing there is thistles and and weed plants that colonize first and actually as soil matures and balance of the the soil changes then the weeds stop growing there and other plants come in and there is a whole science of what’s called indicat plants very experienced people can cast their eye over a field and look at what’s growing naturally in it and go you could have a little bit of a potassium problem there and water logging going on here because they can see the plants that are growing and they know why the plants are there so plants will often fix what the problem is there’s some great stories around contaminated soil soil with heavy metals and things in it and the plants that grow there actually diminish the contamination problem they’re the only ones able to grow there but they do grow there because they can take whatever it is that’s Surplus in the soil and diminish it there are plants that can remove Copper from soil I know I was with the Torres guys in in Catalonia a couple years ago and they’re experimenting with trying to plant plants that actually pull out copper what you then have to do is you have to cut the plants and remove them from the soil because if they break down into into the soil again after you’ve um you’re rep putting the copper back in yeah one principles of regenerative is you don’t take things out in the vineyard you keep them in as much as possible because you every time you remove anything grapes stalks skins prunings or your cover crop you’re removing nutrient from the vineyard and you’ve got to put it back again so precept of regen is very much to try and keep cycling your nutrients as much as you possibly can don’t remove obviously you’ve got to remove the juice of the grapes because that’s the wine we like that we definitely need to do that that but you know everything else provide there’s no pathogens in it and or you’ve composted it properly you can put back in again again so a lot of regenerative work is involved in using compost and trying to make sure you’re composting everything properly and even growing plants in your interos or around the margins that actually will benefit the compost there’s a whole lot of related things that when you start thinking my goal is not just a healthy crop that tastes good but it is that over the long term with healthy vines that grow in a healthy environment that means I can use less inputs and manage more on my own farm and drive by tractor less and use less diesel so you actually get into kind of virtuous cycle and because it’s early days in regenerative vulture there are not very many people who’ve been doing this for a long long time but it’s amazing how many people are really excited about it now and who having quite quick results as they start you don’t immediately necessarily have a result in year one because it takes a little while to build up the soil community that you need and every year is different so every year throws you a new challenge but it is quite fascinating how quickly you can see progress and actually have what we’re really all aiming for is a sustainable living you’ve got to be able to make great wine that people want to buy that tastes great that produces enough of it for you to live and that’s really important so I really like the concept of of regen it allows you to use what you might choose not to use if you could get away with it but you in this particular circumstance feel you have to use to solve a problem so we’ll talk a little bit I think in a minute about certifications but there are certifications that say you’ve got to also be organic and regenerative but you can certainly Stand start down the path of regenerative farming without thinking well I’m going to have to be organic if your environment and the UK is a good example is particularly tricky to be organic in so I think if you’re being intelligent about how you farm in occasional years you may need to use certain products that will protect your crop from destruction if that’s a pragmatic best fit decision then that’s allowable and it should be up to you the farmer to to make that decision in your long-term interest so in theory for anybody listening no you don’t have to be organic to be a regenerative vtic culturalist however if you are not organic you almost need to be a sensitive viticulturist as in being very very aware of the balance at all times I think is that probably a fair way a sensitive vit culturalist I think the Purity and the good thing about Organics is it is absolutely clear so there the things you can’t do and as soon as you do something you can’t do you you you know you can’t be an organic Club anymore and um you have to recertify and and you know there are plenty of people who’ve taken that decision because they found in their their area just too often they have a problem with mil for instance it’s a good example and you know if actually using one very carefully targeted modern systemic fungicide actually solves that problem entirely whereas spraying again and again and again copper on your Vines doesn’t solve the problem ultimately you’re going to crack and go no I’m going to use this in IC and that might sound like the wrong thing to do but on balance it’s probably better for your Vines your soil your environment and if the world could be brought to that conclusion that it was better they would completely back your decision but it’s a big thing to say I’m going to go away from Organics if that’s important to you and your customers we’re trying to say there are other ways to do things if you like Organics and Dynamics are a little bit like you know someone’s written down the Ten Commandments on a tablet of stone and then you have to just do that even though in modern times we found out that command seven and commandment eight they kind of bit past it now you know I like the idea that regen is continually revising what it thinks is the right thing to do according to what science tells us and what experience tells us okay so now you touched on certification so how many places can you go and get certified as regenerative now well good question and very topical I was at groundwell last year which is the farming conference for regenerative agriculture and it’s in June and it’s in a nice field up north of London and you can stay for a couple of nights there so you can camp and it’s become known as the glass and Bri farming and it’s okay place to hang out actually there’s some really interesting people there and lots of government ministers and lots of Radio 4 food program people and podcasters and you know it’s more than just Farmers it certainly started as a farmer inviting his neighbors because he wanted to just chat about how they could Farm better and they brought a couple of experts in who doing the regen farming in America and that was what 15 years ago or something and it’s just grown and grown and grown so seven or eight thousand people I think go now and it’s it’s a thoroughly good event there’s lots of tents and lots of TS so you’re you’re you’re looking at physical demonstrations you’re looking at tractors very interesting you’re looking at uh hover crop trials where the the seed companies have come in and they like three or four months before they’ve taken their square meter and they planted it with what they want to plant and they’ve protected it so that when brv comes along they can go Tada look at my amazing seed mix which is still coming up now demonstrations of how to move your stock around your field without fences you can have collars on your cows that give them a little tickle when they go close to the boundary of where you want them to stay so they stay in a block and they eat that block and then you can say right five o’clock I’m going to move them onto the next block and the colors encourage them to move along One Direction and then not not go back and so you can basically move your clock around the field from your armchair with your cocktail in your hand no no no sorry your glass of wine in your hand yes your glass of wine in your hand yeah yes rather than driving around on your quad buck and your and your your sheep dogs lots of amazing things to see and robot trials robots that will zap particular plants and not others so no chemicals required just electricity to kill a particular plant or yeah very sophisticated interesting stuff there was a debate in one of the T about certification for regen and Helen Browning was talking on the panel and she is she runs the soil Association in the UK and she was sort of rewinding to the beginnings of Organics and saying at the beginning there was this group of people in the UK who are particularly be convinced that farming with chemicals was going to be problematic and using fertilizers was a bad idea and they should have a purity of farming but it took them a while to work out what the codification was and actually if they started in the 20s or 30s the certification really came around in the 60s or 70s she said it took 40 years to work out what they thought you know Organics should be and to certify it what she said about regen is it’s so new and so exciting and people are discovering so many different things that if you were to certify now you would produce that taet of stone with the Ten Commandments on it and you would stop the Innovation and the exploration that’s happening so her message was certification has a place and it probably there will be time for it but in her view let’s work out what actually we should be doing before we then codify into a certification that notwithstanding there are I think two years ago there were zero certifications in regen certainly three years ago and now there are five that we know of that are specifically describing themselves as regenerative certifications and the lot of other certifications of sustainability programs that have regenerative practices included so I think the first one was the regenerative organic Alliance based in the US but International and they have a certification Roc regenerative organic certified and Tablas Creek was the first certified Winery I think and that was maybe a couple of years ago in the states they they’ve got certified and Tablas are amazing folk and Jason’s an amazing guy who’s really leading lots of good work in the sustainability Arena and great people to follow just don’t find out what they’re doing and and how they’re doing it so big big sort of flag bearers for the regen movement and then there several more have recently popped up so there’s one that um was founded originally by the Torres guys in Spain but it’s so far historically been a kind of Spanish speaking focused certification but I think it is available internationally and that’s regenerativa vultura regenerativa and they have a certification scheme where you can enter the certification without being organic but I think to become fully certified you need to move to full Organics to get the high level certification and then Gabe Brown has a certification he’s the one of the leading farmers in the US who’s been pioneering regenerative farming and then there are there’s one called AG Greener World and they have a certified regenerative certification one called land to Market verified land to Market and regeni is the is the gay brand certification which he’s just launched so there are plenty of ways to get certified and we’ve actually just done on the reged fish culture Foundation website and newsletter kind of breakdown of the different certifications and what they mean and what they require of you um so there I think there plenty of ways to get certified if you want to go down that road and we’d say if you’re early in your regental journey maybe just don’t think about that for now just start doing some practice and learn what works for you and then eventually you’ll probably get to a point where you’re thinking okay well I want to get the credit for doing all this work I feel I know what I’m doing now choose a certification that works best for you and then move towards that if you feel that that enshrines what you want to be doing in your Vineyard I suppose like you said to kind kind of just to summarize the healthier your soils typically the more disease resistant your Vines are going to be and if your Vines are going to not need to be sprayed with fungicides and herbicides around because the soil is healthier then you’re not spraying stuff onto the soils to damage the soil and it’s going to go around and around in that wonderful cycle where we let nature do what it does best right that’s all very well in theory and I think that is the expressed goal and I think the experience of quite a few practitioners who’ have been doing it for a while and I think the same’s true from talking to people who’ve applied biodynamic because I think in the biodynamic practices there are quite a lot of things that are extremely beneficial for soil health and some of the overwintering of compost starters yet allbe in a cow’s horn maybe buried at a certain stage of the Moon maybe those things have no effect maybe they have some effect but you’ve definitely got a really good compost starter and then a very good practice to then work up into a really fertile compost that you’re then applying to your to your Vineyards there’s definitely a lot in it and I know of people who have started in B Dynamics and took them a while to get to a balance where their Vines felt healthy but from then on they seem not to get the same diseases that their neighbors easily get because their Vin somehow more resilient now one thing that’s certainly true in any form of agricultur people will won’t tell you about their disasters as easily as they will about their successes going on radio for complaining about wanting subsidies generally speaking if you know if you’ve have if You’ been wiped out it’s not something you want to admit to so there quite possibly are serious problems that are happening that are being caused when you know allbe it using your best practice something comes in one year that causes you a problem that’s true of all agriculture so I don’t think we can promise that every particular farming method is so resilient that nothing can then touch you but yes I think you can get your system working in a way a little bit like human health I mean if you do yoga and you keep yourself exercised and you you know you’re a healthy well-balanced person mandra and I spent last weekend doing Wim Hoff breathing which apparently is extremely good for your immune system well done I’m a massive believer in that were you in you know five degrees uh water breathing yeah well done there’s a lots of science backing up the fact that if you’re if you’re exercising your immune system you’re testing your circulation by making it hot and cold alternately you’re really building up your resilience and health and the more healthy and resilient you are the less likely are to get diseases so I suppose what we’re trying to Advocate is a way of growing vines that keeps the vines as healthy as possible and therefore they will have less or fewer diseases but in certain climates in certain years you will have disease pressure and your choice is to whether you if you’re going to lose your crop because of a disease and you choose to use a particular fungicide in order to combat that then that’s probably a sensible decision in the long run and you may have to spend a year or two recovering from that shock but if if you saved your crop and saved your business then I think that’s an important decision to be allowed to take lovely well let me finish off our fantastic chat with asking you about your two-day introduction into regenerative vulture because you run these in the UK sadly sorry for all of my us listeners but is this for people who are farming and actually planting vines or could somebody who’s just kind of interested in the whole setup and understanding healthy Souls come definitely and and that’s a very interesting question and we started doing this three years ago and this has been for the first three years down in in the dartington trust actually it’s moving this year and I haven’t completely finalized the new venue but there there should be a new venue being announced in the next month or so and of course we hope to run in September and we when we launched it we weren’t sure who was going to come we thought there were viticulturists in the UK who would like to know this but we also thought there were hobbyists and interested people who come in from other disciplines and the first course was a wonderful mixture of people we had a couple of trade folk who were trying to understand what regenerative means for their producers and trying to see whether that was something they might steer their producers towards there was a market Gardener who was just interested he likes regenerative growing and wanted to know how worked in Vines we had a couple of people who one had planted a 100 Vines and just wanted to know a little bit about how to grow them in fact on my second course Mike from b 2 and padto who’s got 70 Bard he came along and we had a smellier um we had really interesting mix of people plus two or three quite heavy hitting VC culturalists from a couple of the UK’s bigger bigger producers were coming along to find out what is this about so it was very much an introduction of very much to say you can start without knowing very much we didn’t really want someone who had no interest in or no care for growing anything and didn’t know that you way around to put a plant in the pot because it sort of implied that you want to know better about growing we don’t start from absolute Basics when it comes to photosynthesis and trying to explain how that works but it is absolutely of course that you can do if you have a a moderate knowledge of some of those things if if you’ve studied to diploma level and and covered the viticulture required you’d absolutely have enough to come along and join in on this and yes hopefully we’re announcing some dates in September and would love to have people coming along and probably the way to find out about it would be to go into the regenerative vulture Foundation website and join the mailing list there and we’ll make sure that anyone on the mailing list gets told when we’ve announced any of the courses and events that we do and we do do events in the UK and around the world so we will publicize anyone’s events but because a couple of us are physically based here I’ve been leading a small group of UK regenerative Growers and having informal Gatherings on each other’s Farms to just see what each other are doing we had one of those with Henry and Kay from Haro and hope last year and I think the first one is is going to be everlight with Luke scalding who’s great I think it’s 20 quid just to cover a bit of lunch and some teas and coffees to come along and bring a couple of bottles of wine okay that that’s a good requirement on to give to Luke our host as a thank you and want to taste as a after end of afternoon tasting so it should be a lovely day and again that should be available to you if you join the mailing list and we can tell you how and when to book that lovely that’s fantastic so for now everyone just you know make sure you have soil where you can have soil put good stuff in it try not to spray stuff compost where you can no tilling we move forward and extract some of that carbon back into the soil and actually if you have a garden or a flower pot you know you can you can start to apply some of these practices 15 years ago we got a wory at our house we had we had a tiny garden and we had no real way to compost and and we thought we need to do something with our food waste we read about wormeries Amanda got some worms sent to her office and with caution live worms written on it she was not very popular with a reception team who were little worms like escap but we had um I don’t know 10,000 little wrigly worms in in a kilo packet and we brought them home brought this lovely black plastic L thing with little slats between the Lays put in lots of potato peelings and things and off the worms went and the I don’t know great great great great grandchildren of those worms are still working for us in our wormy the same wormy and we just feed them food scraps and they produce Brown o which is lovely for the plants so you can do an awful lot in your own garden you can plant a little a little Vine you can just get into it in one way or another mulches there’s lots to learn and I would encourage everyone to read about it because it’s and as you said watch kiss the ground or the biggest little farm which are two fantastic films that give you a little insight into what regen is and I think that’s a great way a great way to start thank you so much Justin honestly I hope people are feeling inspired because actually we can all do a little something and it’s also nice for those listening who are drinking wine to start asking those questions maybe putting the pressure on wineries that they like or that are nearby to them that they notice aren’t doing things because it’s all if we at the very very least if we’re talking about it things will start to change absolutely and asking the question is a great and and you know putting pressure is difficult because Farmers have tough life and they’ve been told they that and until they got to do this and got to do that by lots of different people they get quite annoyed about that and they sometimes see them some them rolling their eyes going what is this new thing we’ve got to learn about but it is a very positive and exciting message and if you if your Farmers asking questions of the way they farm and changing what they do they will find their way towards some of these practices because they’re just good sense and whether they become fully certified regenerative or just incorporate some cover crops and some animals in in the winter know all things that they could do are good so we’d love you know you to ask the questions of them and for them to realize that people care people are interested and want to hear the stories beautiful thank you I’m going to put loads of information the links where people need to go in the show notes and I appreciate your time Justin it’s been a real pleasure thank you so much for for asking and asking such sensitive and intelligent questions oh well thank you now I don’t know about you guys but this topic genuinely resonates deeply with me and so next week we are going to continue our exploration of regenerative vulture but this time delving into a more personal perspective I’ll be in conversation with the co-founder of the boutique Winery ambriel now they’re nestled amidst the picturesque South downhills in West Sussex now she will be uncovering the intricacies of managing Vineyards for a greater by diversity so make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast and you’ve pressed the Bell on your podcast app so you don’t miss next week’s episode and of course please leave a review and some the nice little stars if you have a few moments cuz it does make the podcast more discoverable but as always to finish off I have a famous quote from New Zealand wine grower James Milton and he sums up this episode so well when he said we are not standing on dirt but the rooftop of another kingdom I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again if you can pick up a handful of soil and it has more organisms than people who have ever lived on this Earth this is something that we must fight to keep the health of our soils so thank you as always for listening I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and are eager to listen and learn more for The Following episode wishing you all a very Serene week ahead one where you reconnect with nature perhaps walk in the forest without your shoes on inhale that crisp air allow nature to ignite your spirit and then when you reach for that glass of wine may it be from a winery that not only crafts exceptional flavors of course but is prioritizing the protection of our precious lands for all the generations to come and so wine friends until next week cheers to you and to sustain ility and the beauty of our planet