Farming

“THIS FARM RUNS ON GOOD ECOLOGY”

Our farming is organic, undogmatic, and responsive to our land and the people who work it. We are low-input as a matter of both ethics and economy.¹ When we can do something by hand, we do so, but we use machines when we need them (no oxen, yet).

We treat our farm as if it will be around in 100 years, because it just might. That kind of operational planning requires acquiescence to the order of things. We try to work with the tendencies of the ecosystem as much as possible, as in the final analysis it is vain to do otherwise. A proper organic farm understands itself to be a complex natural system, contrary to the “conventional” farms of the last half+ century, which tend to self-conceive and operate more like open air factories. We are keenly aware that our ecological relationships in a very real way include our economic ones. We rely on dedicated employees who have spent significant amounts of their lives on this land in order to grow food; everything made here has come out of a collective effort

There are more than one hundred varieties of fruiting trees & vines at Idiot’s Grace (we leave out the many vegetables, herbs, grasses, and flowers in this tally, and restrict our calculation to domesticated species). We grow wine grapes, cherries, and pears on a commercial scale. We just planted a small block of cider apples. The oldest cherry trees have been here for about a century, and those blocks are laughably outmoded in the context of modern fruitgrowing techniques and technology. But the fruit is very good, and the orchard has good character, so we keep the old trees where we can afford to. We run a u-pick stand every summer, open usually in the last few weeks of June.

We are certified organic, and that’s the only certification we’ve pursued. The language around agriculture changes much more quickly than the practices: we've been farming with the same ethic for more than 20 years, improving as we learn. We like to talk about farming (we do it a lot) and encourage you to ask us any questions you have about our practices.

  1. For example, most of our recently planted vineyard blocks make use of juniper stakes instead of steel trellises.

“The physical Universe is a self-regenerative process.”

Fuller, Synergetics, 220.05