Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/62409
CLIFF OHMART Vineyard View Does Big Mean Unsustainable? t is easy to get the impression from media outlets and groups promoting sustainable growing that large-scale farming is not sustainable. Adjectives like "industrial" and "corporate" are used in front of the word "farming" to imply something very negative. Recently I was inspired to write this col- I umn when I saw a video on YouTube im- plying that the Chipotle restaurant chain buys their meats from small, sustainable farms. It is a very cleverly done animation, with no dialogue for the sound track— simply a song sung by Willie Nelson titled "Back to the Start." Yet there is no mistak- ing the message: Big farming is bad, and Chipotle does not source from big farms. This leads me to address the question, is large-scale viticulture unsustainable? As is often the case with simple messag- es like "big is unsustainable," they sound good and are memorable, but once you start to analyze them, a lot of questions arise. Usually the questions relate to defi- nitions of terms. When something is not well defined, it is easy for misrepresenta- tions to be made and arguments to ensue. As I have pointed out many times before, the fact there is no widely accepted defi- nition of sustainable winegrape growing is one of the challenges when discussing sustainable viticulture. How small is small? If big is bad (i.e. unsustainable), then it im- plies that the converse is true: Small is good. The first question to ask is what is a small farm? Is it five acres, 20 acres or 40 acres? The next question is what is large? Is it 100 acres, 500 acres or more than 1,000 acres? It turns out there are some "official" defi- nitions of a small farm, and they vary. Ac- cording to the USDA Economic Research Service, a farm is small if it does less than $50,000 in sales. On the other hand, the National Commission on Small Farms de- fines a small farm as one that has sales of less than $250,000. And finally, the Small Business Administration classifies a farm as small if it has less than $500,000 in sales. If a sustainable vineyard needs to support a family, a number of north American vineyards are unsustainable. If you are like me, you tend to think of winegrape growing in terms of acres. From an ecological perspective this makes sense, because the size of the land area devoted to growing crops is the physical footprint of the farm. Let's convert the dollar figures to acres of grapes. If a vineyard is produc- ing 8 tons of grapes per acre and selling them for $400 per ton, as is common in the Central Valley of California, then the above monetary definitions translate to a small farm being 16 acres, 78 acres or 156 acres. However, what if we are talking about a farm in the North Coast of Cali- fornia that yields 2 tons to the acre and grapes that sell for $3,000 per ton? In this case the above monetary definitions trans- late to 8 acres, 42 acres or 83 acres. This is quite a variation in terms of the "official" definition of small. When discussing big and small wine- grapegrowing, it might be informative to look at the distribution of the size of vine- yards farmed by the population of wine- grape growers in the United States. I was not able to find any government data. How- ever, Wines & Vines magazine maintains, for communication purposes, a database of about 6,000 winegrape growers in North America, and 4,888 of them recorded the size of their vineyards. As a group, they farm a total of 382,000 acres of winegrapes. This is such a large number that I am confi- dent the acreage figures in this database are pretty representative of winegrape growers in North America. Twenty-four percent of all winegrape growers in the database farm 10 acres of vineyards or less, and 88% farm 100 acres or less. Twelve percent farm more than 100 acres of vines, according to Wines- VinesDATA, and based on the definitions of small growers listed above, they can be con- sidered large growers. If we are interested in sustainable farm- ing on a landscape level, then another sta- tistic to consider is the percentage of acres of winegrapes farmed by the big farmers compared to the small farmers. It turns out Highlights • According to the Wines & Vines grower database, 88% of winegrape growers farm less than 100 acres of vineyards. • Small winegrape growers can implement some sustainable practices better than large growers and vice versa. • More than 85% of all the wine sold in the United States costs $9 or less per bottle; only large growers can produce this amount of wine at this price point and still be profitable. • A significant portion of winegrape growers derive less than half their income from their vineyards. Wines & Vines JAnUARY 2012 145