“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, a matter of both ethics and economy. For example, our most recently planted vineyard blocks use juniper stakes instead of steel trellises. 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: perhaps it will. That kind of operational planning requires acquiescence to the order of things. We try to work with the tendencies of the ecosystem here 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. But we do not fantasize too much about self-sufficiency, either. There is no such thing as an isolated system, and in addition to our ecological relations we are keenly aware of 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.

Along with wine grapes, we grow cherries and pears on a commercial scale. 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, so we keep the trees. We run a u-pick stand every summer, open usually in the last few weeks of June.

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). In addition to grapes, cherries, and pears, more than twenty are apple varieties, a dozen are quince, about as many perry pears. Above the winery there is a block of prunes, a mobile orchard of potted olive trees, a medlar, &c. We diversify when we can afford it, and what we sacrifice in profit we make up for in flavor. There are practical reasons to believe that living DNA repositories like Idiot’s Grace will become important in the coming decades.

“Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.”

Emerson, Experience

“All production is appropriation of nature by the individual within and through a definite form of society.”

K.M.

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

Fuller, Synergetics, 220.05