Voodoo Vintners: Oregon's Astonishing Biodynamic Winegrowers

Chapter Ten: The Green Factor

136 chapter ten The Green Factor The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside the human being; they lie within humankind. —Rudolf Steiner In 1797, William Tuttle purchased three hundred acres of land in Freeport, Maine, and began to raise cattle and crops on it. For the next century, the Tuttle family continued to farm this piece of property until something strange occurred: patches of sand appeared on the earth. Today, the farm is gone. In its place, massive sand dunes rise as high as fifty feet, engulfing buildings and trees. The property has become a tourist attraction, called “The Desert of Maine.” As tour guides explain to some thirty thousand visitors each year, poor farming practices—the removal of trees, overgrazing by sheep, and the failure to rotate crops—eroded the topsoil of the Tuttle farm to the point where the glacial silt underneath was exposed. Freed from its fertile tether, the sand erupted and flowed like slow-moving lava until it covered the entire estate. What happened to the Tuttle farm is called desertification, and it continues to happen every day, all over the world. The removal of trees and bushes destabilizes the soil structure. Chemical additives such as fungicides break down the humus that feeds plant life. Overgrazing, overtilling, and strong winds strip this lifeless topsoil from the earth’s shell, leaving nothing but sand behind. On a grand scale, desertification results in environmental catastrophes such as the Dust Bowl, familiar to us from those iconic black-and-white photos of farms engulfed by sandstorms. This tragic transformation of farmland to desert is credited with causing the migration of some 2.5 million Americans from prairie states to coastal areas between 1930 and 1940. Oregon offered a forewarning of this disaster some three decades earlier. On a June Sunday in 1903, a two-story wall of water raged through the prosperous farming town of Heppner, destroying everything in its path. The Heppner Flood was the deadliest natural The Green Factor 137 disaster in Pacific Northwest history. Scientists later concluded that the tragedy had been caused partly by human folly. “Soil erosion was a major reason why the flood killed 245 people,” says Joann Green Byrd, author of Calamity: The Heppner Flood of 1903. “And most of that erosion was caused by overgrazing and plowing of the land.” According to Byrd, intensive farming had left the hills above Heppner rock-hard and devoid of vegetation. Lacking absorbent soil, the hills acted as a conduit, channeling the water from a fierce and sudden rainstorm down into the canyons above the town. “The water became compressed in these canyons and began picking up boulders the size of refrigerators, fence posts, cows, horses— everything that got in its way. It carried these things and used them as bludgeons. This tremendous amount of water would not have been able to run off those hills if the vegetation had still been there,” says Byrd. More than a century later, farmers know to work the land more carefully. Still, “there is concern about that occurring again,” warns Jay Noller, a professor of landscape pedology at Oregon State University. “That’s the whole reason we have soil conservation districts. We have government and non-government organizations that work on this year-round.” Of course, in arid eastern Oregon, it’s easy to identify soil that might enable a flash flood: it’s dry, brittle, and pale. In the Willamette Valley, we have tons of water—it once famously rained for thirtyfour days straight—and we have steep slopes. But the climate isn’t so conducive to flash floods. The rain comes down in a light drizzle and the earth tends to be spongy and verdant with groundcover. When a Willamette Valley winegrower worries about the consequences of his farming practices, desertification is not something that immediately springs to mind. Because the color of poor soil health here is far more insidious than the obvious ivory of sand: often, it’s an unremarkable green. “Moss is a primary colonizer, like lichen,” says Dan Rinke, viticulturist and winemaker at Johan Vineyards in Rickreall, Oregon. “It is the first thing you see growing on a rock with no microbial life. Seeing moss under vines? That makes me sad.” A bearded bear of a guy voodoo vintners 138 approaching his mid-thirties, Rinke wears a hooded sweatshirt and baseball cap and...