Rosewood Hill Farm

Planting the Grape Vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard

2008-12-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

This morning it was 21 degrees. I need to wait for a few more weeks of cold weather before I start the winter vineyard pruning. I have to prune 120 vines at Rosewood Hill Vineyard, 330 vines at Castleton Lakes Vineyard, and then I am going to help Bill Gadino prune several thousand vines at Gadino Cellars. So today I am looking back to when I planted Rosewood Hill vineyard almost 7 years ago.

Spring 2003

Last weekend two friends came to the farm to help me plant grape vines. I had carefully planned to plant grape vines one weekend, walnut trees the weekend after that, and then Leyland cypress trees on the third weekend. But my carefully laid out plans were waylaid when UPS brought both the Walnut trees and the grape vines at the same time. There was no way I had time to get both planted so I took all the food out of my refrigerator and crammed 50 walnut trees inside. My girlfriend at the time took a photograph because she considered that such an odd site.

The idea was I would start with a small hobby vineyard and then when I got some experience plant a commercial one. I have since learned that I can make more money farming wine grapes for someone else. Large vineyards and small wineries are profitable but a small vineyard usually is not. In Virginia the rule-of-thumb is you need to plant 25 acres to have a profitable vineyard. For that you would need probably 10 employees and maybe a $500K investment.

My 65 acre farm has a couple of sites well-suited to growing grapes. Here in Virginia where it gets cold in winter the idea is to plant your vines on a slope above the late frosts of spring the early frosts of fall. An early fall frost kills the leaves, which stops the grapes from ripening and a late frost in spring kills buds which have just begun to grow thus cutting in half or maybe more this year’s yield of grapes.

The top part of my farm rises to 1,000 feet while at the bottom it is 565 feet elevation. I am grateful to Steve Critzer who talked me out of clearing off a vineyard site high up on the mountain where I had planned a commercial vineyard. He had already brought his bulldozer to the farm when we cancelled this job. The 15 degree slope up there would have been financially ruinous to work not to mention dangerous in the case of a tractor rollover. There are so many rocks up there I would have had to haul dirt up from the bottom or from construction sites. And in a drought vineyards need water, especially young vineyards. To have piped water up that hill would have cost thousands. And a vineyard surrounded by several thousand acres of uninhabited forest would have been devastated by deer, turkey, bear, birds, raccoon, in short every kind of predator. It would have been better to place such a vineyard in a frost pocket in some suburb in Fauquier County surrounded by a monoculture of pasture grass and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

Any farm is an ongoing operation which each year requires some capital improvements. At that time I had neither tractor nor auger so the only way to plant these vines was by hand. The soil in Virginia is not like other parts of the nation—here it is hard as a rock. When I augur fence posts with my tractor I wait until it rains because even with diesel power the posts won’t go into the ground. So I dreaded the idea of digging 140 holes for grapevines by hand, so I did what Tow Sawyer would have done: I enlisted help.

In California you can order live plants to plant in your vineyard but here in Virginia we order dormant root stock from nurseries in California or New York. These are grown for a season in a vineyard there and then grafted and tossed in the refrigerator for the winter. Then you take them out in the spring and plant them. The nursery starts by taking a dormant shoot from a native American grapevine, sticks that in the ground, and then it sprouts roots. This forms the bottom part of the new grape vine. Then they take a dormant bud from a European variety like chardonnay and graft that onto the American roots. Together this is called a “rootstock”. The idea is the bottom part of the plant is native to North America so it can withstand the attack of phyloxxera ad nematodes that would otherwise eat the roots causing the vine to die. Also you can obtain rootstock which tolerates high levels of sodium in the soil (as in parts of California) or rootstock which grows slowly so that your vine grows slowly developing a proper balance of fruit and foliage instead of some overgrown jungle canopy which takes much work to wrestle under control.

The grafted rootstock arrived in a UPS-delivered box from American and Lake County Grapevine Nursery. The owner, Joachim Hollerith. lives most of the year here in Madison County and had been for many years the vineyard manager at Prince Michel Vineyards. The graft union was dipped in paraffin wax so that it would not dry out and the whole affair was packed in damp saw dust.

The vines I had selected to plant were cabernet franc on 3309 rootstock, traminette on 3309, and viognier on 101-14. I didn’t know much about rootstock at the time so Joachim picked them for me. I had picked cabernet franc because it does well here in Virginia requiring less sunshine and heat to ripen that other red grape varieties. Viognier is the white wine grape having brought Virginia international recognition when Chrysalis Vineyards won the San Diego wine show and when a noted Napa Valley restaurant run by a former White House sommelier carried Horton’s 1993 viognier proclaiming it the best he had every had. Traminette I planted because I liked its European cousin the perfumed, highly aromatic gewürztraminer, but gewürztraminer does not do well in the heavy, humidity, and heavy rains of Virginia.

The way you plant grape vines is you dig a hole about 2 feet deep taking care to dig out all the rocks and then you position the plant where the graft union is a few inches above the soil. One hapless farmer in Virginia had planted his vines too low and when the soil settled the vines sank to the level of the dirt. When that happens the top part of the vine, called the “scion”, sprouted roots thus bypassing the American rootstock. His vineyard was thus subject to destruction from root-eating pests. The vines I planted already had had their roots neatly trimmed with scissors so I didn’t need to do that. You don’t want to cram too many roots into one small spot.

I takes much labor to plant 120 grape vines in one day especially when you are doing this by hand. I should have hired some hard-working migrant workers to help me but I resolved to do this work myself. So my friend Paul and I dug holes all day long while my girlfriend passed us vines while Paul’s 3 year old son played around the newly-erected trellises. Paul was overweight while I was merely out of shape. He worked as hard or harder than me in the heat and I worried he would fall over with a heart attack. Some holes were fairly easy to dig while in others we found rock or even hard-pan (i.e. impenetrable subsoil) that I hacked at with a heavy pike. We planted 105 vines in one day leaving me 15 to plant the next. I tossed them into the refrigerator with the walnut trees and reviewed my vineyard budget.

If you look at my actual expenses (graphic at the top of this posting, click on it so you can easily read it) for the first two year of my vineyard—not including the winemaking equipment I bought---you can get an idea of what is in store for you were you to decide to plant your own vines. I spent $3,500 not including the chemicals I bought to spray the vineyard, the lime, the fertilizer, and other stuff I did not include in my budget.

If you are a hobbyist contemplating a backyard vineyard I would say, “Don’t do it”. My work was the result of many years of going to seminars, working at vineyards in Virginia and Chile, and studying books. I took the pesticide applicator certification test and spent countless hours pouring over the labels of pesticides and fungicides. You cannot plant wine-quality grapes and forget about them. Every in agricultural paradises like Chile or California that are free of mildew-inducing rain you still have to worry about maladies like botrytis and sour rot. This is why you must spray grape vines constantly. Even organic vineyards do this. Because if you don’t your fruit will rot and the vines defoliate. More than disease there is the problems of the aforementioned pests. Twice I have lost most of my vineyard to raccoon that I have trapped and killed by the dozen and birds which of course are protected by law. About the only thing I don’t have to worry about is nosy neighbors eating my fruit because the nearest is a couple of hundred yards away.

Looking at some of my purchases the first year you can see that I started with the most fundamental: grape vines. These were $2.95 apiece while currently ENTAV certified vines cost $3.95. You need to buy grape vines from a reputable nursery because you don’t want them to arrive already infected with leaf roll virus or other problems.

If you plan to put in a vineyard plan on buying lots of trellis wire and pressure-treated posts. Take my advice and invest in a wire jenny. You use this to hold the wire so you can unroll it in an orderly fashion. When I cut the bands from the first of these very heavy rolls of wire it opened up line an accordion and tangled. I spent countless hours cursing as I untangled this mess one misery foot at a time. Had I to do it all over again I would have tossed out that wire and simply bought the wire jenny. But even the landfill would not take this wire saying it would foul their equipment.

Any vineyard in Virginia is going to need a deer exclusion fence of some kind. I started with an electric one with 3 zinc ground wires and a $105 electric solar powered charger. Put an electric fence requires constant maintenance. Now that I am farming goats maintenance is no problem. At the time I got rid of the electric fence after a couple of years because I got frustrated that the fence kept shorting out. I replaced it with a $400 plastic deer exclusion fence which works much better.

Vineyards in New Zealand put up bird netting because they have such a huge bird problem. In Virginia large vineyards just sacrifice part of their fruit to the birds or put up noise makers or balloons that look like an enormous eye. I bought $385 worth of bird netting which is still working after 5 years. I read an account of one grape grower who says he and his wife almost divorce each other every year as they install and take down the bird netting. Putting it up is tough enough. But taking it down is worse because the vines will have grown into the netting somewhat when you take them off. Veritas Vineyards uses netting which they install by tractor only in the fruit zone. But for a small vineyard you need to enclose the whole canopy as those greedy little starlings will push their way into any small hole.

I also bought a German-built gasoline-powered backpack sprayer. In Germany vineyards are planted on steep slopes of riverbanks to avoid frost. It’s too steep to operate a tractor there. I still use this $814 machine but need a tractor mounted new one because I am planning to plant 3,200 vines at Castleton Lake Vineyards and certainly cannot spray those on foot.

The rest of the items listed below are other equipment needed to build the trellis and prune the vines. I have not included the cost of any fertilizer but in the acidic soils of Virginia you always want to start with putting down limestone and getting a soil report. You can read details about the soil report here.

The sun is coming up here now on this frosty morning so I have to go outside and break the ice from the goats watering pale and give them a bale of hay to eat. I am driving off the farm today so I won’t turn them loose into the forest. Fortunately they have not bothered the vineyard yet but I have thought that setting sheep lose there would be a good idea to keep the weeds and grass under control under the vines. You can’t do that with goats because they will stand on their hind legs to devour anything they can reach.

Grass-Fed Sheep at Touchstone Farm

2008-12-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

Alan Zuschlag, owner of Touchstone Farm in Rappahannock County, doesn’t specifically target kabob-eating, halaal-consuming immigrant customers for his grass-fed lamb saying, “Most of my customers are yuppies from the D.C. metro area, double income sort of gourmet type people.” Urban yuppie is the sort of person Alan was himself before he rolled up his sleeves and turned his weekend retreat into a working sheep farm. He says before he got into farming sheep, “[All] I wanted was a nice lawn that I wouldn’t have to mow.” His initial “lawn” of 25 acres has blossomed into a 108 acre farm that he purchased in sections from his neighbors and carved from a tangle of brambles, vines, and assorted brush that he brush hogged back to civility, fenced, and then grazed.

Alan says, “I had 25 acres and this was going to be a weekend place. I had no intention to farm at all.” But Alan is not the sort of fellow to sit idly around gazing at this rolling pastoral vista of fields and forest. In addition to serving on the board of directors of a local environmental group he is brimming with ideas for how to grow his farm and local sustainable farming in general by creating cooperatives of farmers and getting others to raise sheep. His business is such that he has grown from a one man operation to having recently hired a farm manager Jeremy Christopher who is well-know to area farmers having formerly worked at the Rappahannock Farmers Cooperative.

Alan makes money from his sheep farm selling breeding stock to farmers from as far away as Canada and selling frozen, packaged portions of lamb to buyers in Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C. He explains, “I sell to anyone who wants to try it. We sell whole and half lambs cut to their specifications.” Taking orders by web site, telephone, and returning customers he arranges processing of the animals at the slaughterhouse and pick up on the farm or delivery to the customers.

Standing in a pasture with a farm cat tagging along and a wild turkey walking along the edge of the woods Alan explains how he has turned beaten down, overgrown old pastures into newly rehabilitated grassland. He explains that, ‘Orchard grass is our workhorse grass here.” In this particular field he disked the soil to rip out roots which had grown up in this formerly neglected pasture whose former owner had grown too old to care for it. He adds lime to correct the acidity of the soil and then drills in a custom mixture of orchard grass, perennial rye grass, and white clover. Alan says, “Overseeding is going to change the composition of the grass. It will help thicken the grass. “

The experts would say that Alan practices “grass-based rotational grazing”. Basically this means his sheep are fed nothing but grass and they are moved from one paddock to another so that the pastures are not overgrazed and the forage quality is kept at its highest level. Using a cleverly constructed system of permanent fences with a moveable electric fence cutting the pasture into sections he moves his sheep from one square to another where they, “Graze 4 days at a time and only 4 days. Then they get moved to the next paddock over. After 4 days you start to get regrowth and they go back to the regrowth. They don’t come back to where they grazed until another 30 days. And that’s the rule.”

You can see this as you stand on the gravel driveway above one of the pastures where the ewes (females) are fenced in a square area guarded by a loud and somewhat pushy donkey. The grass to their left is several inches taller that the grass in the paddock on the right. When they graze this down Alan moves them to the next paddock rotating the whole affair through the grazing season and winter until they end up next to the barn when they are ready for lambing (i.e. giving birth to the little ones).

To say that your farm animals are grass-fed and naturally raised is very much in vogue today with all this talk of local sustainable agriculture. Alan explains what this means while touting the merits of his lamb. He says, “It’s not organic because my hay field has been fertilized. They get nothing but good old Rappahannock County grass and spring fed water and that it is. They are all natural. We are a member of the American grass fed association.”

With a hint of irritation at the uninitiated who don’t understand he says his sheep are, “Not organic because they have been wormed. That automatically disqualifies them because they have been fed medicine.” Of the rigid organic standards that cause many farmers to not even consider the government-monitored program he says, “I think it’s inhumane. It doesn’t make any sense but that is how strict the organic people are. It’s one thing to pick bugs off vegetables it’s another to let you sheep get full of insects or worms.” With one effective sound byte he sums up saying, “Do you raise your kids organically?”

Always thinking of ways to grow and improve his business Alan says he is ready to give up on delivery lamb to his customers and have them come to him instead. He says, “There is an organic market in Alexandria, for example, which wants me to have a drop off point there. It works for them because it gets customers into their shop. What we are looking to do is to have a place like Sunnyside Farms or E-Cow [local grocer] have the customer come in and pick it up there. Sunnyside is interested. Our customer can pick up their lamb while they are there.” Echoing Kenner Love, the local Department of Agriculture cooperative extension agent, Alan says the county needs a place for farmers to store their meat and produce for sale. If the county had that he says, “We would be all over that.” Industrial freezer space is USDA regulated and a significant cost for small farmers. Cliff Miller of Mount Vernon Farms, another local sheep farmer, has that, but his business is different. He sells individual cuts of lamb instead of whole, half, or quarter sections.

Turning to chase after a skunk who is threatening his penned-up chickens Alan says, “I am an economist by training and I do I cost/benefit analyst of everything. And basically this farm is run in a way that input costs are as low as possible. We retail directly to the end customer. It is the only way you can make any money. The farm pays for itself. I have to prime the pump by buying additional land but any farm improvements come out of the farm checking account. So any new fencing that comes out of farm profits. The farm pays for everything.” It’s a model that appears to be working for this thriving little business.

Farm Fowl Fiasco

2008-11-28T06:33:00.000-08:00

If anyone sells you a so-called “free range chicken” don’t believe them. Animal activists and organic farmers have spread the notion that it is cruel to cage birds. They say chickens should be free to roam and scratch cow pies turning them over and dining on the windfall of insects found therein. It is cruel to confine thousands of chickens in one industrial setting where they lay eggs onto conveyors and their manure is ferried out to waiting lagoons by rotating belt. Visit a chicken farm so described and the stench is horrible because all of the nitrogen in that manure ammonia gas escapes in volumes enough to make you run for the door. It’s the same with turkeys. I once worked at Berry Hill vineyard farming wine grapes. This 40 acre vineyard was placed on the side of one of the few high ridges in Orange County, Virginia. The hill’s one redeeming feature was its height so the state police put a tower there for their radios and Horton Vineyards planted a vineyard there high above the frost. The owner of this property also placed a confined turkey feeding operation high above his neighbors so the nauseating stench would not bother anyone, except of course the birds who have little to say in this matter. Think about this next time you carve into that Butterball breast for Thanksgiving turkey.

It was with visions of free range chickens wandering my pastures and gardens eating insects and scratching at the ground that I bought my first 40 chicks from McMurray Hatchery. Chickens, like honey bees which I also bought, arrive by the mails. I believe I paid $4 postage to the postman who probably burned up $6 for fuel driving up to my house to deliver the young birds. “Peep, peep, peep”, they make this delightful little sound as they stand there neatly aligned in little rows of downy feathers. They look like tennis balls with legs except they are much smaller.

When chicks arrive you are supposed to keep them warm. The rule of thumb is to keep them in 95 degree heat by hanging a heat lamp over their bedding reducing the temperature a few degrees every week until they are ready to move outside. If the chicks stand to far away from the heat lamp it is too hot. If they huddle underneath it is too cold.

McMurray Hatchery promised me an assortment of laying hens and meat birds. I had chicks that in 10 months or so would be laying white, brown, and even blue colored eggs. Or so goes the theory. Tossed into the mix was an assortment of what they called “meat birds”. These were Cornish and White Rocks hens. All of my new chickens were females.

Out in the pasture meanwhile I had had 4 hens and 1 rooster that had been laying eggs for some time. These chickens I had gotten from Pearmund Cellars. Chris Pearmund had moved off the property to a newly-built house so no one was taking care of them so he said I could take all 5 and a couple of bags of food too. So one morning before daylight I snuck into the hen house and plucked the hens from their roost and tossed them into pillow cases. I had read that this was the easiest way to capture chickens—i.e., get them while they are sleeping so I bundled them off blindfolded as it were like some kidnapping victims ala Secuestro Express. They clucked quietly inside the pillows as if this is something that happened every day.

I was not completely new to chickens because my father had had them on his 500 acre farm when I was a boy and his second wife’s parents had them too. But I only spent the summer with my dad and his new bride so responsibility for the taking care of the chickens rest with someone else, certainly not me. I think two of the sharecropper’s sons who lived on the farm took care of our flock because I don’t recall my dad doing the same. So I was a debutante chicken farmer and consulted a book.

My son loved playing with the 5 chickens that I spirited away from Pearmund Cellars. He did what we called “chicken tipping” whose name we borrowed from the sport called “cow tipping” which is what I imagine they do in places like Kansas where tipping over sleeping cows is the only game in town. The thing about chickens is no matter how you rotate them they keep their head pointed straight up. There have sort of an onboard gyroscope. So Nathaniel did not knock over sleepy chickens he just picked them up and rotated them.

I bought a book on chicken coop construction and built a cheap mobile one from some galvanized tin, chicken wire, and 1x1 lumber, staples, and an extra large pallet. The idea was to drag the chickens from one place to another so they would scratch at the ground improving the soil and put down fertilizer with their manure before I moved them to another spot. Chicken manure, also called “litter”, is higher is nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that manure from cows or horses. That is one reason so many local farmers here in Virginia buy chicken manure to spread on their pastures. It is cheaper than fertilizer. If it is composted then it adds carbon to the soil. If not then it decomposes in place in what is called “compost sheeting”.

Everything was going swimmingly out in the pasture. The chickens were happy in their mobile chicken coop. I installed an electric polywire fence that was also moveable around their hen house. This kept the Labrador retriever out. The chickens did not stay inside since they could all fly, but this did not bother me because they flew up in to the trees where I assumed they would be safe from predators. The chickens no longer trusted my hen house because I constructed it too light. I wanted it to be light enough so that I could easily move it around but it had the density of a lightweight, hobby aircraft. So it did what most airplanes do when the wind blows: it took off. More than once I came home in the afternoon to find my chicken coop upside down with a handful of angry birds standing on top staring at me. I learned to fix that problem by pounding stakes into the ground and attaching a heavy chain.

Back inside my kitchen problems were starting to develop. My house sounded like some kind of petting zoo as the chicks went “peep, peep, peep” whenever they were hungry which was pretty much all day long. I filled a plastic tub with oak sawdust shavings of which I had plenty since I had bought a whole dump truck full to make compost for the pasture. Then I set out some watering cans. But the meat birds quickly started growing faster than they laying varieties so I then divided the flock into two.

Most Sundays I would go to the grocery store and buy one of those roasting hens that have a thermometer inside. They mainly come from Perdue which has most of their farms east of me on the Eastern Shore of Maryland across the Chesapeake Bay and west of my across the Shenandoah Valley in Harrisburg. But now that I know what I do about meat birds I have pretty much lost appetite for the same.

White Rocks hens are bred to grow quickly. But the problem is they grow too quickly often ballooning to a weight for which their legs cannot carry them. The McMurry catalogue advised that the birds should be slaughtered at only a few months before they developed problems walking. To breed them with a deficiency seemed sort of cruel to me. Worse they got to this weight rapidly by eating. One would not say they ate “voraciously” they ate “compulsively” like mad men. Had they been humans they would have been confined to a hospital bed rising only to join one of those hotdog eating contests you see on the news.

The laying hens were happy now that I had moved them away from the White Rocks who fairly stepped on them as they clamored for move food. Soon the Rocks learned to hop since flying was not something they would ever be able to do with their heavy weight. They knocked over the watering cans and made quite a noise. I found it hard to talk on the telephone doing my day job. My house was beginning to smell. It was still winter but on sunny days I put them out for a little exercise and to air out my house.

I was glad when the icy winds of March gave way to the halcyon days of April and I could move my chicks outside. The laying chicks were still tiny so I put them in my unheated greenhouse to keep them out of the wind. The Rocks were waddling now and quite fat and smelly. I put them into the mobile hen house inside the polywire fence. The problem with the fencing was it was made to contain goats. The mesh was quite small and the fat little Rocks were able to push themselves out a jolt of 4,000 volts of electricity not withstanding. I dreaded walking down to the hen house because the Rocks would come racing out to meet me outside the safety of the electric fence when they thought I was bringing them corn. The dogs would not go outside and the cat had cut a back flip when she first encountered the wire. But outside the fence there was nothing I could do to protect them.

By this time my rooster had disappeared leaving only a pile of feathers below the spot where he had been roosting in the tree. All kinds of predators like chickens: fox, raccoon, skunk, possum, and of course my Labrador retriever. There was not much I could do to protect the chickens if my retriever was going to eat them and if they pushed their fat little bodies through the fence netting. Soon they were disappearing at the rate of 1 per day. In the day it was the dog and at night other predators. Worse Will my black lab taught Molly my livestock guard dog to chase and kill chickens. Molly is a Great Pyrenees which is a breed that is bred to live and care for animals. It was supposed to guard and not east chickens but will changed all of that. Soon they ganged up and hunted like a pack in their murderous charge across the farm

My herd of chicks dwindled to only a few and all that remained were a couple of Rocks and the adult birds I had gotten from Pearmund Cellars. So I slaughtered and cooked one of the White Rocks. It was so tough that I could not finish it. This is where I learned what others had told me. The only birds worth eating are those industrially-raised chickens whose feet scarcely touch the ground. So called-free range chickens might be good for eggs but their meat gets too tough if they get any exercise at all. Of course all my birds had muscles from running for their lives. This was no Kobe beef like meat.

Most everyone I know here in Rappahannock County has had the same experience with chickens. Too many predators are after them so the only people who successfully keep chickens here pen up their birds. This defeats the whole notion of “free range chickens” since chickens confined to one place are not really living in the wild. So I put my last birds in a small pen but then let them loose because my wife at the time, Gricel (long story), told me it was cruel. I let them all out and the next day found nothing but features.

Showdown with the Buck

2008-11-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I am going to buy one more doe. This will bring my herd to 11 does and 1 buck from which I plan to grow the herd to 40 animals and sell meat to immigrant buyers. (Gringo’s don’t understand goat meat so why bother trying to explain it to them.) Probably 8 of the does I have now have been bred by the buck and when I buy 1 more this should give me perhaps 10 kids (offspring) born in the spring. It’s difficult to predict the number of offspring this year because the buck has also been breeding with the yearling does which might or might not be able get pregnant and does which have never kidded usually have less offspring that those who have been bred before. Two of the does that I started my herd with have never been bred while three more that I bought from Steve Shippa have kidded before. A young doe or one that has never kidded before will deliver a single kid while a doe which has kidded before can have doubles or even triples. I wouldn’t call them “twins” or “triplets” because it’s not the same as people. I mean there are not going to all have the same freckles or the same propensity for mathematics or ballet. It’s just an ordinal number we are talking about here.

I had read in the goat instruction manuals—it makes sense to call them that since regardless of their title or whether they are books, web sites, or newspapers they all aspire to the same goal---to never turn your back on a buck for sure one is in the “rut”. Now this concept of “rut” has me a little confused. The old joke for humans—to wit, women need a reason to make love and men only need a place--applies to goats as well. Males the two-legged and four-legged kind are as Maureen Dowd says, “as predictable as a pile of wood”. We are ready to fornicate regardless of the calendar. Given that what exactly does the rut mean? The does come into heat ever 21 days so it would make no sense that the male only wants to breed in the fall which is when the rut occurs. There is a reason that deer hunters pile into the woods in November: this is the beginning of the rut. Any motorist can see this as well as the normally aloof and careful deer male looses his tendency to stay hidden from view and bumbles around the countryside crossing highway and byway completely oblivious to oncoming traffic. When he is looking for love he loses all sense of reason and this is when he is most vulnerable to the hunter’s weapons. The same thing happens to men of course. They lose the ability to think clearly when confronted with décolletage, the sight of a woman’s ankle, an hourglass figure, or the mane of her hair. Plato in “Phaedrus” says love is an illness that heightens one’s sensitivity. Otherwise stoic men become silly putty around women when they fall in love. Their pride is easily wounded and they are prone to sulk. So the “rut” must be the season when the otherwise easily aroused male is aroused all the time.

Maybe this was what was wrong with my buck one brisk day in November when this otherwise docile creature reared up on his hind legs and showed some aggression. The buck had been quite rough with the females knocking them about as he mated with them and lowing loudly but had never shown aggression toward me. But this day he started to rub his horns on the temporary shelter I had built for them and threatened to knock one side down so I moved in to put it back up and then he turned on me. He came at me with his 260 pound girth and shoved me to the ground as if I was an afterthought. I was still unaware what was happening when confusion turned to fright as he pushed me toward the electric fence. I pulled myself out of there unscathed and pondered what to do as he stood between me and the exit.

I don’t think I panicked but I forgot what I had read which is when the bucks starts coming for you grab his beard and hang on tightly. That was sort of difficult to remember as has shoved me around in the dirt.

The more I thought about this the more I realized I could have been seriously hurt. Farming can be dangerous. This same week I had gone to the doctor because I thought I had gotten some fertilizer in my eye. The nurse put die in my eye and found no scratches or dust and then cleaned out my eyes. A couple of years ago I almost killed myself when a tree I was cutting down with my chainsaw fell on me, breaking my jaw on both sides, and pinning me to the ground in below freezing weather. When I had my bulldozer a pine tree I pushed over bounced off the roof of the cab. And finally I had quit climbing trees in a deer stand because I could imagine falling and hanging there in the wind, snow, and rain for weeks until someone came looking for me. So I phoned up Steve Shippa who sold me the buck and told him my problem.

Steve as I have already written is the one who sold me the buck. I admire him for his dexterity with goats. He showed me how to catch the females by squatting down and stretching your arms out wide thus making yourself look larger. Catching the animals is always a problem when you need to deworm them or give them vaccinations. Goats that you milk are generally tame. But meat goats do not get handled by people each do so they are more skittish. So I paid the neighbor’s kid $10 to help me the last time I did this but he just stood there without a clue what to do as he watched me dive to the ground trying to catch all the goats. Steve knows better what to do. He is sort of a wide fellow anyway. So when he stretches out his arms and squats down how he looks like Barney Rubble as he corners and cows the hapless creature. Animals are rather dumb. So the goal is to just make yourself look like a bigger animal. They don’t realize we are humans with all of our doubts, our fears, and our failings. They just look at us as either one of their herd, a passerby, or possible a threat.

This was made clear to one of Steve’s friends when he made the mistake of leaning over and showing his backside to a buck when does I heat were nearby. This fellow was a big man but his buck was even bigger. The buck charged him from behind knocking him to the ground and giving him a concussion. The only bit of luck here was he was farming goats and not some 2,000 pound cow.

Every American kid has seen those television cartoon depictions of the nativity scene where the wise men come to the baby Jesus with frankincense and mur (whatever those might be) wearing shepherd’s clothes and carrying a long hook. It turns out this 2,000 year biblical device actually exists. It’s sort of like the ancient basket wine press: elegant in its simplicity there is no need to change its design over the years however primitive. Steve has a goat hook and I am looking to purchase one. You can use it to reach out and snare the goat by the neck. So you corner them with outstretched arms and then snare them by the neck. In other words a six foot tall human gives himself another 6 feet of reach. Quite effective. This is how you catch a goat.

So Steve I knew would know what to do about my buck which had turned on me. He said none of his bucks had ever gotten out of hand because he had learned rather quickly to grab them on their smelly beard, jerk their head up, and look them in the eye. Goats, he said, are like dogs where pecking order is important. Either you dominate or you will be dominated. I needed to reestablish dominion over the herd. He told me to get a bucket of water and pour it right into the bucks face as they hate that.

This is what I did. I poured two buckets of freezing water into the buck’s face and he backed down. I would say he went running his tail between his legs except the goats tail always sticks up and not down. So this ruse is working and the gently giant has not challenged me since. But I have learned not to turn my back on him. Water works because goats hate water (rain). What is odd is they do not mind snow. One farmer from the Northern Plain states had written that he would look out across his pasture for his goats after a heavy snow and only see little humps on the horizon. He called his goats and up would pop up their heads. Still goats hate rain. Whenever it rains on my farm I can always find my goats in any of the small sheds I have built on the property. The stand together patiently waiting for it to quit raining.

That same week I had to confront the other danger on the farm: ticks. I had read in the newspaper that 20% of the ticks here in Rappahannock County were infected with lime disease. Lime disease causes arthritis-like symptoms in people and is a serious illness. A dozen years ago I had the human vaccine but they quit making it I believe because it was either not affective or it gave people the very problem it was designed to prevent.

It had never occurred to me that dogs could get lime disease. I spent all my time worrying about my kids when the same week I had fought with the goat my Labrador Retriever Will suddenly went lame. I thought he had broken one leg. He hopped around on three legs and climbed into my bed and lay there no even getting up to eat or drink water. So I took him to the vet and was surprised when he told me the dog had gotten lime disease. He gave me 21 days of antibiotics and some pain medicine. I find it quite remarkable that these bacteria could actually cause an animal to go lame. People I understand have a much harder time getting over this problem.

The Vineyard Gets Defoliated

2008-11-21T13:09:00.000-08:00

He who loves not wine women and song remains a fool his whole life long.—Martin Luther

Last night I was reading Saint Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince” in French. I read it every year so that I won’t forget the language of Voltaire which I spent so much time trying to learn. This book is elegant in its simplicity. The boy in this book is bothered that adults because, being adults, their thinking is muddled and cannot see what is clear to children. The boy draws a picture of a boa constrictor snake that has swallowed an elephant. From the side an obtuse adult would imagine it looks like a chapeau. He shows it to an adult who without hesitating pronounces, “This is a chapeau”. Bothered by the adult’s ignorance he then shows it to Le Petite Prince, the benevolent child-like creature who has dropped out of the sky. The Prince with child child-like innocence says, “It’s a boa that has swallowed an elephant.” This proves the point that adults are dense.

This year in the vineyard I learned an important lesson. Like most dimwitted adults I had to learn from experience. Emmanuel Kant would call this experience “a priori” which means I had learned from doing rather than thinking. Perhaps a clever child would have grasped this before me.

I had been on top of my spray program spraying the vineyard every couple of weeks and even every few days depending on the weather. Still both Rosewood Hill and Castleton Lakes Vineyards were defoliated. The leaves fell off so I had to pick the grapes too early. The white grapes were ripe enough to make wine but the red grapes had not yet ripened. There was enough sugar in the red grapes to make wine but with red grapes you need the seeds and stems to ripen otherwise the wine will be bitter. So instead of making red wine this year I made rosé.

The rosé that I made was fine. It was pink and sparkling clear. In the past I had made rosé which had turned orange like a California mass-market zinfandel rosé. Orange does not denote a flaw, but aesthetically it is not as pleasant as pink. So I would not repeat my mistake I took my grape juice over to Bill Gadino at Gadino Cellars and he checked the PH of the wine and it was 3.4 which is just right so I did not need to add acid. Bill told me to inoculate the wine and let it ferment overnight before pressing it off. This would give the wine more skin contact and thus more color and of course more tannins. (Tannins are a color preservative). The last time I had made rosé I had pressed the red grapes right away and then inoculated the juice. The resulting wine was not color fast.

I am one who is generally not able to keep secrets so I went around telling everyone I knew in the Virginia wine business of my troubles this year with the grape vine canopy due to all the rain. Plus I like to remind these guys that I am farming commercially so one of them will give me a job. I told Chris Pearmund of Pearmund Cellars, John Delmare of Rappahannock Cellars, and of course Bill Gadino. They all told me the say thing: for the 470 grape vines that I am farming I need to apply 30 gallons or more of water if I am using captan to control downy mildew. These men farm large vineyards with thousands of vines. So they have tractor mounted air blast sprayers. I was still using a backpack sprayer which looks like a gasoline powered leaf blower except it has a 2 gallon water tank mounted on the top. There is no way I could haul so much water. I would have had to pass through the vineyard 15 times in order to spray 30 gallons of water. I would have looked like Jean Cadoret the hunchback of Pagnol’s “Jeane de Florette” who kills himself trying to haul water to his parched farm. I needed to use much more captan but it was not possible until I bought a tractor mounted sprayer. That would be possible for Castleton Lakes Vineyards but at Rosewood Hill the rows were too closely place for a tractor to navigate. Merde. A priori once again.

I had been farming wine grapes for 6 years successfully without a problem but the weakness in my program manifested itself this year because in May and June we had torrents of rains, which infected the vineyard with downy mildew. All of this rain caused powdery mildew too which killed the yellow squash in my garden.

I felt not so bad when my vineyard friends told me of some other vineyards they knew of that had been similarly been defoliated. But I walked away from talking with the managers of one of those defoliated vineyards confused because he told me had had lost his leaves because of powdery mildew and not downy mildew. Now I was not sure which disease had overtaken the vineyard. It should be easy to tell the difference. Downy mildew causes the leaves to get oily looking and turn yellow. Powdery mildew causes the leaves to get covered with powdery looking spider-web-like growth. But now that the leaves had all fallen off I began to doubt my prognosis. This was a problem because one disease you treat with sulfur or hydrogen peroxide. For the other you use captan and other chemicals. The only good news was that the fruit had not been infected so I had at least maintained adequate control for that.

Legal and Illegal Migrant Workers in Virginia's Vineyards

2008-11-17T12:17:00.000-08:00

The Work

If you were to farm 30 acres of row crops like corn or soybeans people would say that is not much. But 30 acres of grapes is quite a lot of work because each individual vine much be visited several times per year and carefully tended by hand. There are some machines that one can use to speed the process like machines to harvest grapes and hydraulic pruning shears. But for the most part wine grape farming involves much manual labor.

As winter turns to spring dormant buds on the grape vine swell and turn to colors rose and gold. Green shoots begin to emerge and unfurl as the frosty winds of late March give way to milder weather in April. At first the vines grow slowly as the pendulum of weather swings back and forth between warm days and cold. But then June arrives and the shoots take off growing as much as one inch per day.

Left to their devices grapes vines would grow in all directions. The shoots would flop onto the ground and the canopy would become a deep tangle into which neither sunshine nor agricultural spray could penetrate and humidity would build. The resulting fruit would probably rot and if it ripened at all the immature green seeds would make foul tasting bitter wine. So the farmer trains the vines to grow on the trellis which holds the grapes aloft and allows air and sunshine to penetrate the leaves.

To make the best possibly fruit the farmer works from April to August to snap off laterals, pop off excess shoots, drops fruit that shows no possibility of ripening, and even pluck off individual leaves to improve the air flow around the grapes. In September through November the grueling work of harvest begins and the farmer crawls beneath the vines to snip off the fruit and dump it in plastic bins. Winter offers only a couple of months of rest as the dormant vines must be pruned. In January and February these wooden canes slap the farmer on his frozen face as he works with numb fingers to cut off last year’s growth and make ready for the new year.

All of this takes much labor. One single person working full-time could farm perhaps 5 acres of grapes. But if the farmer owns 20 acres of vines or a even winery he or she has to spend time at marketing, filling out tax forms, tending the tasting room bar, and of course making wine. So there is a need for full or part-time labor depending on the size of the operation. Enter the migrant worker who for generations in California and more recently in Virginia has a desire to work which meshes neatly with the needs of the farmer.

Enrique Reyes Vasquez

Asked whether her husband will be deported back to Mexico, Maida says, “It depends upon the judge”. Standing in her trailer home in Winchester, Virginia clutching legal documents she and her husband barely understand Enrique Reyes Vasquez, 51, and his wife Maida, 36, relate the tale of how Enrique spent 4 months in jail for driving on a suspended license and violations of immigration law.

In 1996 Enrique and his wife climbed an 8 foot wall at the border town of Laredo, Texas when Maida was 5 months pregnant. Then he made his way to Rappahannock County where he worked for a cattle rancher who Enrique says “was crazy”. He beat Enrique twice, once when he broker a spine on the hay baler, and withheld his wages. Then Enrique found work planting grapes in Flint Hill. He and his wife both worked in the vineyards earning $7 per hour and working 10 hours per day. Each day he earned more than he would earn in one week working as a carpenter in Mexico. Soon he found regular work with a local grape grower that lasted for 12 years. On any day when there was not enough work with his regular employer Enrique would work for any of the two farm labor contractors that he knew. These are men whose dexterity with the English language have enabled them to make contact with the gringo vineyard owners and arrange work for their employees most of whom are illegal immigrants.

One of these contractors is Javier Martinez. Enrique worked for Javier in 1998. Enrique says, “He pays on time” and that he “always had 10 to 20 workers”. Another farm labor contractor is Rito Garcia. Enrique says, “Rito Garcia had problems because he did not pay the workers and kept them locked up like hostages”. He said if they complained Rito would threaten to call la migra (i.e. the immigration officials).

At first glance Enrique’s life here in the USA would appear to include all the trappings of the American Dream. He saved $7,000 to buy a trailer home for his wife and their 4 kids---all of whom are US citizens by virtue of their birth here. His children speak English with no accent. His young wife no longer works. Their trailer is air conditioned and smelling of cilantro and other spices while tomatoes and roses decorate the front in this modest albeit well-maintained barrio of mobile homes.

But Enrique’s world is quickly unraveling for he has run afoul of the law. Last year the police stopped him after he had been to a party in Warrenton where he said he drank 5 beers. So they suspended his license. But Enrique needed his license to drive to work so he drove anyway and got caught in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The police asked him for his green card and social security number and he showed them his Costco membership card and his Virginia Driver’s license. Latinos use two last names: the last name of their father and the last name of their mother. This of course does not fit into the gringo’s computer system so the Costco card said one name and the driver’s license another. This Enrique understands to be the reason he was charged with “providing false information to the state police.” He spent 32 days in jail in Martinsburg and upon his exit the judge packed him off to a federal detention center in York, Pennsylvania and Raymonsville, Texas for three months. Now he has a court date with an immigration judge in Arlington, Virginia.

Immigration has been in the news a lot lately, but Mexicans have been coming America for generations to work in agriculture. Enrique’s father came here to work in watermelons and cantaloupes fields under the now defunct Bracero guest worker program. Writing in 1961 about the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Octavio Paz, the Mexican Nobel Prize wining poet wrote, “Despite these accomplishments [land reform], however, thousands of our rural citizens live in dire misery, and other thousands have no recourse but to emigrate to the United States each year as temporary laborers.”

Carmelo

Standing in the wet end of a Chardonnay vineyard repairing a deer exclusion fence Carmelo is another Mexican migrant working in Virginia. We cannot print his last name nor the name of his employer for Carmelo is an illegal alien and could be deported if he were to, say, venture into Prince William county where the police check your status or happen into any office of the IRS for he does not pay income taxes.

Carmelo says, “I crossed [the border] in 1990.” He like Enrique paid a coyote, a human smuggler, to help him across the border in Arizona. Today he drives a pickup truck and carries a cell phone that he uses to find work on the weekends—during the week he works full time at this winery. Carmelo and his friends do not stand around on street corners looking for work like some newly-arrived campesinos (peasants). Instead they have built up relationships that keeps them employed most of the time. He works hard and often. He says that when he prunes apple trees he “can do the work of 4 men”.

Carmelo is a smiling and seemingly happy man but he has suffered a great tragedy. He and his first wife are separated and he sends money home each week to his children in Mexico. Two years ago he paid a coyote $3,000 to help his second wife, her brother, and three children cross the border into the Arizona desert. Relating the tale whose date he cannot forget he says, “On July 15, the coyote abandoned them in the desert because my brother-in-law was sick and the coyote did not want to help them. I do not know if they are alive or dead.” He shudders as he says this as his Latin machismo gives way just for a moment. His wife had been with him in Virginia but had gone back to Mexico because her mother had been sick.

When Carmelo first came to Virginia he worked in a vineyard in Leesburg. His friends had told him that there was a lot of work there. He lived 5 people to a room in an apartment. One day his friend invited him to work in the garden of another vineyard owner. The owner was trying to fix his tractor and Carmelo says he did not know what he was doing so Carmelo lent a hand. Carmelo had worked in Mexico driving tractors and trucks for 250 pesos per week ($25 per week). The owner then asked Carmelo if he wanted to work the harvest for two months. That was two years ago and Carmelo is still gainfully employed.

Carmelo earns $10 per hour for which his employer pays him in cash. He pays no social security nor income tax and the employer obviously saves the expense of paying social security tax on his wages as well. The vineyard owner said he would like to pay taxes but the government would not allow him and it has become more difficult for illegal aliens to obtain a false social security number as had been the practice here-to-date.

Although he lacks papers he has a drivers license. Like several other migrant workers interviewed for this article Carmelo got his drivers license in North Carolina. He says, “I went to North Carolina in order to get a drivers license with my passport and birth certificate.” As for his truck he does not need a license for that since he has plates that say “farm use only”.

Barboursville

At Barboursville Vineyards two Mexicans have taken a tractor apart. They are working on the clutch which powers the PTO (power take off) and need to divide the tractor neatly in half to get at the other clutch which connects the wheels to the transmission to the engine. Vineyard manager Fernando Franco explains that it is better to do this work themselves rather than ship it off to the New Holland tractor dealership for they would keep the machine for 3 weeks in this the busy growing season.

Standing in a block of cabernet franc vines, Fernando explained the he came as a student from El Salvador to Virginia in 1981. He overstayed his tourist visa and was granted legal status under Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program in 1988. Fernando is different from the many men he manages for he has a university degree. Educated in agronomy, when he came to Virginia he took university courses at Germanna Community College and Virginia Tech where he learned to speak English.

Fernando made friends with Joachim Hollerith of Prince Michel Vineyards who is well known to long time grape growers in Virginia as one of the early pioneers here and for his grapevine nursery business in California. Fernando says, “We became friends and he asked me to work for him.” There he honed his talents in East Coast viticulture and commuted back and forth to California tend their vineyards there. Then he was offered a job by Barboursville ten years ago. Fernando asked the Belgian Duke who owned Barboursville permission to leave and interviewed with Luca Paschina, the general manager of Barboursville, and Gianni Zonin, the owner.

Barboursville has a lumbering automatic harvesting machine because Fernando explains even his many workers could not possibly harvest 600 tons of grapes by hand although they harvest much of it manually. Some Virginia vineyards employee undocumented workers on a spot basis; a few offer them full-time work; and some vineyards hire no migrant workers at all. Barboursville is different for their crew of full-time migrant workers are all legally employed here under the government’s H2A visa program. Of his many workers Fernando says, “First they are my friends and second my workers.”

On CNN Lou Dobbs rails against illegal immigration nightly while business and agriculture clamor for a guest worker program. But one worker program is already in place: the H2A visa program whose every step is highly regulated by the feds. Of the visa program and his workers Fernando says, “[it is] totally worth it. Some of these workers have been here already. They know what to do. They do not need much supervision. There are no people here who want to work.”

Explaining the process he says, “We need to go through the Department of Health; second, the Department of Labor; third, INS; fourth, The Department of Homeland Security; then the State Department; then the visa is issued.” Barboursville is required to pay an “adverse affect wage” of $9.05 presumably for its adverse affect on the local workers. But local workers rarely apply for these jobs for which Barboursville is required to place advertisement in the newspaper. Fernando says, “First and foremost we have to advertise in the papers and radio that these positions are available. A couple come. They last about a week and then they go.”

In Mexico there is a network of recruiters who know who in the local villages wants to work in the states. Fernando says, “They have to pay a quite a bit of money in embassy fees. They borrow the money and then they pay it back once they are here.” Fernando buys them an airline ticket, provides them with housing and transportation. They arrive in February and go back in October. One can imagine their bewilderment as they are dropped in the modernity of Dulles Airport from the rural Mexican countryside.

On a wooded lane at the sprawling vineyard is a relatively new modest house that looks like it could belong anywhere in suburbia. Here a dozen dark-skinned men live and eat together piling out of a van where they have came to gather for lunch. Each of them has a story to tell.

First is Francisco Martinez. He says, “In Mexico I was working in agriculture and construction where I was earning 150 dollars every week.” He explains that he has 2 daughters and 1 son. Since 9/11 Virginia has made it more difficult for foreigners to obtain a driver’s license here. So Francisco like the other works has no license but relies on the chauffeur employed by Barboursville who drives him to the local Mexican market where he sends money to his family every week. Here Francisco works in the vineyard and with the tractor. He first came to Barboursville in 2004. Asked whether he likes wine he says a little but he prefers beer.

Sitting next to him at the table in the kitchen is his brother Rogelio Martinez. He says, “I came to Virginia because here there is stable work. In Mexico there is only sporadic work. Here there is a good opportunity to work for 7 months.” In Mexican state of Zacatecas he too worked in construction and on a farm growing corn, potatoes, onions while planting beans and corn for his own family. He explains that some of his friends in Mexico have come to the USA to live as illegal aliens and stay for 4 or 5 years because the trip is difficult, dangerous, and expensive but while they are here they earn a lot of money. He explains that it costs him $400 each year in fees to obtain a visa to come to the USA.

Jose Luis Arocha is one of the men who was working on the tractor. The other men here are all Mexicans whose dark skins shows their Indian heritage---each of them look as is they are offspring of Malinche, the Mayan mistress of the Conquistador Cortez. With his glasses and Caucasian features he looks like he could be an American college professor and the other men laugh when this is pointed out by the visiting journalist. Jose Luis is from the north of El Salvador in an area called “Sonsonate”. He explains that learned here in Virginia from Fernando how to take apart the tractor. He works in the vineyard, at the harvest, and of course with the machinery. Rural Salvador must be poorer even that Mexico for he says he was working as a driver in agriculture earning 200 dollars per month. He found this job at Barboursville through a friend who used to work here. He does not pay taxes on his wages here in Virginia nor in El Salvador. He does no know whether his wages are deducted for social security or other taxes. (They are not.) Fernando says they pay no taxes including social security taxes for they are required to go back to Mexico and thus will not receive a retirement pension in the States.

The Three Cousins

Rolling through Fauquier County a winding mountain road is lined on both sides by rock walls that could be a hundred or more years old. Climb a steep driveway up to a vineyard and a handful of men are snapping off laterals and positioning shoots. Three of these men are cousins.

The three men sit around a table in the winery telling their tale. The winery owner explained that the men are for the most part shy and reluctant to tell their stories but they warm somewhat to the odd sight of the Spanish speaking gringo journalist who has placed a tape recorder before them.

Geraldo says he came from the Mexican state of Chihuahua in part because his sister was already here in Strasburg, Virginia. He first worked pruning apple trees in a Flint Hill orchard. He has a difficult time recalling when he came to Virginia but when given the reference point of who was president then his memory recovers and he says it was 1988---“more or less”. During the harvest the rank of winery workers swell because extra hands are needed to bring in the grapes so Geraldo asked around where he could pick work picking grapes. He found work here at this winery. After the harvest the owner asked him to stay on full-time.

Geraldo and his cousin Guadaloupe came to Virginia prior to the 1987-1998 amnesty program and started working at this vineyard full-time in 1991. Eloy, the third cousin, came to the USA 4 years go. Geraldo is a US Citizen now and he is working to bring his wife here after two years of filling out forms—part of the delay is he made a mistake in the procedure and had to start all over this time with an attorney.

Eloy has been here only 4 years having worked all of this time with Geraldo so he of course is illegal. Is it somewhat ironic that he lives in the wealthy enclave of Middleburg. He says, “A friend in the church helped me get my driver’s license using my Mexican identification documents.”

Guadaloupe came to Virginia in 1988. He has 1 daughter and a wife. He says he sends $700 to Mexico each month and saves $600 for himself. It costs him $12 each time he wires money to Mexico. Guadaloupe does not have a driver’s license and says he has already been stopped by the police one time and is worried about being stopped again.

Guadeloupe pays taxes. He got a work permit in 1988 and a social security number. Each year he went to renew his work papers but the last time he went for renewal the government told him “no”. So he went back to Mexico for vacation and to get the other papers that the government was asking for in order to obtain amnesty but he could not find all the required documents, plus he did not understand what else they were asking for. Also those he did find were lost in the mail that he sent to the US government. So the amnesty date came and passed.

Geraldo says the men are happy with their work here. He says, “On this farm we work the hours that we want to depending on the weather. We never work too late. In summer we work 10 hours from 7 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. In winter 8 hours or 5,6,7 depending on the weather. If there is much rain or snow we work in the winery.”

Mexifornia

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist at California State University and writes often for such publications as The Wall Street Journal. He has written several books on agriculture including “Mexifornia” and “Fields Without Dreams”, a bitter memoir of how his family of 5th generation farmers lost everything farming grapes to make raisins. His experience comes from having grown up in the Central Valley of California where migrant workers have been coming to work for generations and where he was one of the few white children in the public school there. Hanson points to a darker side of the Mexican migrant worker experience echoing the same refrain as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. What he says today portends a possible future in Virginia some generations hence. To wit, the Mexican can never really feel at home here preferring to live life as an internal expatriate as what Octavio Paz calls “pachucos” . He never really assimilates into the American culture retaining his language and foregoing citizenship in many cases always wanting to go back to Mexico. The hard-working Mexican immigrant does not understand why his children, the second generation, do not want to work in the fields and instead prefer to shave their heads, get tattoos, or worse join street gangs. At 20 and 30 years of age the Mexican worker “is smiling and fairly skipping” through the vineyard. But at 40 and 50 years of age his bones are old and his demeanor bitter as he ponders the world around him while the employers bypass him for the younger, stronger men. The migrant worker might mow the lawns of the wealthy but never can really become one of those “pink persons in a bathrobe” lounging by the pool while some immigrant vacuums for leaves. On the one hand America is a better place for here one is not defined by their parentage or the darkness of their skin as they are in Mexico. Here the gringo owner will chat to you inquiring about your family unlike feudalistic Mexico where the patron will not even acknowledge your presence. The Mexican migrant worker longs to return home to Mexico but never quite does so having become trapped between one culture that tolerates him and another, the Mexican culture, who which he can never really return.

Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

2008-11-10T03:14:00.000-08:00

Dr. Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, is a frustrated man. He is frustrated that his organization, focusing on organic farming, is outspent by Monsanto, that evil agribusiness whose Roundup glysophate herbicide, he says, is poisoning the soil and whose genetically engineered, patented seeds cannot be reused. He is frustrated that while small and local farmers have embraced the organic movement the vast majority of commodity corn and soybean row crop farmers and the vast majority of acreage have not and probably will not. For they have no incentive to change as they are propped up by a system of subsidies that encourage what he calls a monoculture of agriculture that fattens our children with sugar they do not need while delivering food which is low in nutrition—the ideal here being what organic producers call “nutrient dense” food. He is frustrated that the price of gasoline is “only $4 per gallon” thus delaying the great upheaval in the culture that would cause policy makers to finally embrace his idea of paying farmers not by the number of acres they plant but by the tons of carbon they return to the soil. This idea is called “carbon sequestration” and was the topic upon which he spoke at the RCCA (Rappahannock County Conversation Alliance) annual meeting at the Link yesterday.

Perhaps one reason he cannot sell his ideas to the great unwashed masses is Dr. LaSalle runs with an elite crowd. Instead of delivering his stump speech at county fairs and agriculture conventions to people who actually farm for a living, this PhD arm-chair agronomist puts forth his ideas to people who with visions of Wendell Berry hold up farming as some kind of ideal way to slow development and preserve open space without having actually to make a living trying to do so. In front of a well-heeled crowd in Rappahannock County—the whole county of course can be called that---he spoke yesterday of sharing his ideas with fellow elitists Al Gore, a part-time farmer who made his fortune with Google stock and Leon Paneta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Dr. LaSalle zips around in his rented Toyota Prius from one model farm owned by a Carnegie to that of a Rockefeller. This is farming not as a livelihood but as prototype where profits do not matter and where produce is held up as some kind of artifact to be photographed for the magazines. Dr. LaSalle knows this and for this reason he is frustrated.

The Rodale Institute for many years been researching and writing about organic farming to conventional farmers who mock them as a bunch of granola crunching hippies. As if to make that point exactly at the end of Dr. LaSalle’s speech a woman who in her youth probably was a granola crunching hippy stood up and delivered a 5 minute impassioned, somewhat awkward diatribe of her definition of “organic”. Dr. Salle addresses that head on when he said that, “This is not a bunch of granola crunching hippies. It is science.”

Rodale is trying to cast wider its net of influence by speaking of organic farming as a way to reduce green house gases and return carbon to the soil. His timing is good because global warming of course is in the news and that crisis which he longs for is perhaps upon us. The Kyoto accord (which he would like to see renegotiated) is affecting policy in Europe and Japan. But it’s difficult to see Iowa corn farmers or California growers, who of course farm everything, stop using fertilizers simply because Dr. LaSalle wants them too.

Dr. LaSalle laid out his ideas in a presentation and in his paper “Regenerative Organic Farming: A Solution to Global Warming”. At the Robert Rodale Reserve in Pennsylvania 29 years ago they laid out side by side test plots of conventional chemical farming plots next to those that were organically farmed. The chemically farmed plots are no-till drilled with corn and soybeans using paraquat, glysophate, atrazine, and presumably some cultivation to burn down, rip out, or suppress weeds before sowing seeds in the soil. The conventionally farmed fields are then treated with postemergence herbicides to control weeds. In the organic fields there is no tillage nor chemicals. Instead a roller crimper is used to kill the cover crop of rye or the legume hairy vetch. Vetch adds nitrogen to the soil and rye and vetch both create a dense matt through which weeds cannot easily grow. Corn or soybeans are then drilled into the mulch and grow relatively weed free.

A byproduct of all of this 29 years of research, much to Dr. LaSalle’s satisfaction, is that the organically farmed soils over time have seen their organic matter increase. “Organic matter” is of course carbon. This is the carbon sequestration of which he talks so passionately. Soils that are high in organic matter are better able to tolerate both drought and flood because the humus--which acts as a sink to soak up all of this carbon dioxide which is causing global warming--also soaks up and retain water. If only he could convince the US Army Corp of Engineers, he says, there would be no more Mississippi River floods.

Rodale’s idea is that farmers can forgo fertilizer if they build up the soil using no-till organic practices. Row crop farmers in Virginia would tell you they already use no-till practices and have been doing so for a generation. Deep tillage of course is the culprit that destroys organic matter in the soil and releases it into the air in the form of carbon dioxide. But they still use too much nitrogen. When they grow corn they inject liquid nitrogen right into the soil. It would be better to plant legumes like clover which naturally add nitrogen to the soil. Manufactured nitrogen is problematic in two ways. It takes lots of natural gas to extract nitrogen from the air. (Chemically air + natural gas = anhydrous ammonia. Ammonia is basically nitrogen. You then take this ammonia and add carbon dioxide to create urea which is another form of nitrogen). And nitrogen destroys soil microbes and burns roots. These soil microbes help break down compost thus adding carbon to the soil. But it is unfair of Dr. LaSalle to characterize all fertilizers as “chemical fertilizers”. Plants need large amounts of phosphorous and potassium too. Those are made without petroleum. Phosphorous is made by using strong acids to release phosphates from rock phosphate which is mined from the soil. Potassium is also made from mined materials using acid to release them. Nitrogen is just one component of the fertilizer troika “N,P,K” which is respectively nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium.

Dr. LaSalle says that much of his research is not relevant for the rolling pastures that dominate Rappahannock County for we don’t grow corn here except for those few farmers who feed it to their own cattle. Here our cover crop, grass, is basically our only crop so it would not make too much sense to kill it with a roller crimper and try to drill seeds into the resulting mulch matt. Those seeds would not even germinate since they require soil contact not to mention that is would be cost prohibitive to tear up your pastures every year. Instead Dr. LaSalle says the way for Rappahannock farmers to return carbon to the soil is loosen up the compacted soils—compacted by the heavy hoof of the cow--with a yeoman’s plow and practice rotational high density grazing. This is a practice where cows are shepherded from one plot to the next for often only hours at a time where their manure drops onto the soil in high enough quantities to form a layer of compost which improves the soil by adding organic matter and of course sequestering carbon. Lots of farmers here read about and believe in such practices but maybe only Cliff Miller is actually doing this since it requires lots of fences and lots of time spent moving the herd.

As for logging Dr. LaSalle simply says we cannot have any of that. He says the forest holds twice the amount of carbon below the soil as above it and felling a tree releases much CO2 into the air. Anyone who owns timber land in Virginia knows if you simply forget about your forest eventually your trees will fall over dead. Not all of us are so rich with university grants that we can simply let our most valuable agriculture product just lie there for others to marvel at. All of what Dr. LaSalle says makes sense. He just needs to find a way to communicate his ideas to those who wear overalls instead of pullover sweaters.

The Rutting Buck

2008-10-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

My kids joked that my goat farm has gotten off to a slow start because the first few goats I bought were gay. This is not entirely true.

I bought my first two females, Allison and Michelle, from Larry Grove a goat farmer in Rappahannock County. They were 4 months of age. Both were Boer and Spanish crossbreds—they are by temperament and milk producing ability designed to be meat and not dairy goats. Dairy goats produce enough milk to share with humans. Meat goats produce enough only for their offspring.

When my does reached 8 months of age I went to Bill Segrest, another Rappahannock County farmer, and bought a young buck named David. Bill told me David had one flaw: he was born on the coldest day in February so his right hoof froze and fell off. Nature is indeed cruel to animals. Still in my naïveté I thought David would make a fine sire. Little did I know that a goat needs to be large enough and have enough strength to mount and copulate with does so by definition he should be bigger than they. So for goats, size does matter.

After 5 months when gestation should have been complete my does were still not bred. I phoned up Mr. Segrest and he exchanged David for a larger male. With ranching one cannot be shy about sex. So I took a look at his testicles and notice that he had only one. Bill’s son-in-law told me he should still be able to do the job. Five months went by and my does had grown to huge proportions so I assumed they were finally pregnant. The veterinarian came around and inspected them with his sonogram and pronounced them, merde, without kids—they were simply fat from gorging on the spring flush of pasture grass. It turns out that Mr. Segrest had tried to castrate his goat—to make what goat farmers call a “wether”—but botched the job. He had not properly fastened the rubber bands used to castrate farm animals around both balls, so only one fell off leaving an impotent male.

So I exchanged this second sterile buck for two does and one buck only a few months old. Then I bought another very young buck from another farmer. Bad luck prevailed. I backed over with the first buck my pickup truck and the second one died when all the goats climbed atop a mobile pasture chicken coop which then collapsed on top of the hapless little fellow. This is where I made my second mistake: if you are looking for a herd sire start with a proven performer, an adult. I thought I could raise my young bucks to adulthood and then they would breed. After all they reach puberty at 2 months and at that age are air humping like a couple of teenage boys watching Penelope Cruz.

Now I was really mad. I had begun to receive phone calls and emails from customers who wanted to buy goats but I still had none to sell. My does were anxious to get going too. Their tails were twitching and they were mounting each other—an obvious sign they were in heat. This is when I met Steve Shippa who runs boergoatblog.com.

Steve is one of those upper middle class people who also farms. In California and Kansas people farm to make money and go to the bank for loans. In Virginia farming seems to be a past-time for those who have made their money elsewhere. Still Steve is a heck of a nice fellow and extremely knowledgeable about his 100-head herd of Boer goats.

Steve said I could buy his herd sire for $300 which was $50 less than I had budgeted so I said “OK”. I drove over to his farm in Berryville and came head-to-head with a raging, snorting, 260 pound buck in full rut. This goat like most males smelled terrible. A buck in the rut urinates all over himself and secretes must from his glands to woo the female. This foul odor for goats is some kind of cologne. Steve had locked up his love struck buck alone but within eye sight and downwind of a herd of does who too were primed for romance. The buck was as horny as an aircraft carrier full of sailors on furlough and just as dangerous. He pounded his massive head against the fence which strained to contain him and bent the steel latch which held the gate shut.

Steve and I wrested this animal into a cage in the back of my truck and I drove back to Rappahannock drawing stares from motorists on the highway. At a gas station a couple of men walked over to look for they had never seen an animal so large. I explained that the Boer goat breed had been imported from South African some years ago for their large size and docile demeanor except of course when the un-castrated male is within the vicinity of does in heat. I told these men that this goat was the grandson of a goat which had sold for $45,000. Boer goats until a few years ago were hard to come by in the USA so had sold for a premium. Now instead of being ridiculously expensive they are just downright expensive.

I took my buck home and turned him loose with my 6 does. Goats normally make a soft bleating sound something like the familiar “bah-bah-bah” of sheep. This was how my 50 to 80 pound females had behaved. They were gentle to the point that I let my friend’s 7 year old daughter feed them from the palm of their hand.

But the rutting buck snorted and sniffed and howled like some kind of small dinosaur “oooh—aaaargh--woooo”. My neighbors were ½ mile away at the closest point and I am sure they thought I must have been conducting some kind of mass slaughter for he howled as he circled the does and thoroughly cowed my otherwise large and frightening 120 pound Great Pyrenees livestock guard dog.

The frightened does scattered but the buck was relentless in his pursuit. He went first for Allison, the dominant doe in the pack, and had soon mounted her after knocking her around a bit. I was fairly frightened and fascinated at the same time as he went for my timid little doe with his tongue hanging out and mounted her with such force he pushed her to the ground. It reminded me of high school and college. Back then if you wanted your date to put out you fairly wrestled her to the ground.

The doe put up a fight for a while then relented. Soon after that she began to nuzzle up to the foul smelling beast. Within an hour the buck had moved onto the second largest doe in the herd and she too became part of his love circle. The two does fell into his harem as sycophantic groupies and the embraced each other in an agrarian ménage a trois. As I write this essay the buck had already bred a third doe and three more remain.

Breeders have told me I can breed my does three times in two years. I hope to buy three more does next week to jump start my late developing herd so by next year I do not have to turn away so many customers.

Fall Planting at the Goat Farm

2008-10-10T10:19:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago my son asked me to help him with his high school algebra. The time could not be better for I had recently begun to study again the calculus text that I waded through in college. (When winter rolls around and farming slows down in the vineyard I need something else to pour my energy into so I study.) Still I was not able to explain to him—to my satisfaction—how to use Newton’s iterative method for approximating square roots. Newton’s theory is based upon a series that converges i.e. a sum ∑ that sums to some number.

It was with this puzzle in mind that I went to Borders bookstore as I do practically ever Wednesday with my children. There I went looking for something written by David Foster Wallace. I had just read in The New York Times that this genius, who was characterized as the most important writer of my age group, had died.

So I picked up Mr. Wallace’s book on mathematics called “A Brief History of ∞”. It is a fascinating read. With his vast knowledge of ancient philosophy, Greek, an of course mathematics he walks the reader through the theories of Pythagoras, Zeon, and Euclid. He writes that it totally upended the well-ordered world of the followers of Pythagoras when they found that not all numbers could be expressed as a ratio of two integers the most famous of these of course being the length of the hypotenuse in an right triangle whose measurement could be calculated by the Pythagorean theorem. Peering into the boundless world of mathematics was too much for some people as the boundary between genius and madness is slight. Mr. Wallace writes that some of these scholars lost their minds and went insane. After he wrote that David Foster Wallace lost his own mind then hanged himself. Reading that I needed to go back outside and work on the goat farm before I too became unhinged.

Yesterday I took delivery of 20 cubic yards of grape skins from D & M container company. They haul away the grape skins at The Winery at LaGrange and Pearmund cellars after the wineries are done pressing them into juice. I had the truck drop this next to the dump truck load of sawdust that I got from Ramoneda Brothers, a local company that cuts oak trees into staves used to make wine barrels. I plan to use these two steaming mountains of raw material to make compost. Compost is humus or carbon in its most basic form which I will use to apply to my pastures to boost the organic material in the soil. The grape skins are steaming now because fungus, yeast, bacteria are doing the work of breaking this down to compost--as they do so it generates heat. The sawdust is not steaming anymore but if you plunge your hand into the middle of it the temperature is well above 150 degrees and steam gushes forth and the air fills with the smell of ammonia letting you know it is still breaking down. You are supposed to let it keep decomposing until the smell of ammonia is gone. At this point the compost can decay no more and it will smell like earth, dirt, potting soil.

I will use the sawdust on my existing pastures. The grape skins are for the new pastures and for spring application to the others. Last year I bought a bulldozer and used it to clear away 6 acres of ragged forest. I say it is “ragged” because there was no merchantable timber there—a logger working on my farm this year completely passed it over. I wanted to expand the 5 acres of pasture I had to 11 to provide more room to plant more forage for my goat herd.

The pastures that I currently have were used for many years to produce hay and I am still producing hay there for my animals and for my neighbor's cows. Each year the grass that grew there is hauled away thus taking with it all of the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and trace materials that were taken up by the plant. Since I had not been adding fertilizer to the soil the soils were severely depleted. So this year as I started to contemplate how to turn those 6 acres of forest into pasture I started looking at how to improve the health of the soil of the overall farm.

I started where you are supposed to start and that is with a soil report. The PH of the soils in my pasture was 7 which is fine since I had been putting on lots of lime. But the PH in the new pasture which had been woods was 4.8. I scarcely has 4 pounds per acre of usable phosphorous and not much potash at all. I broadcast some buckwheat seed after I finished cleaning the trees off the new pasture but it would not grow in soil that was 100 times as acidic as the existing pastures. So I called the farmers cooperative who came out and spread 2 tons of lime per acre with their truckers and then waited for cool weather to seed grass.

When the weather cooled I used a land rake to smooth out the soil and then broadcast 3 bags of MaxQ fescue grass seed along with 150 pounds of MAP (10-52-0) monoammonium phosphate which is phosphorous with a little nitrogen. I wanted to put down rock phosphate too but I had already spent too much money so put that into the budget for next year.

Then I went over to Farfelu Vineyard to see about buying their manure spreader. A manure slinger spreader is a wagon with a chain that is pulled along as the tractor pulls the spreader. The chains push the manure or compost onto sprockets which then fling the compose up and out in an even shower of fertilizer. It’s a costly machine, $3,600 new, but I bought theirs used for $2,500. Fareflu had been one of the very first wineries in Virginia but had recently gone out of business finding no buyer for their operation and no winery interested in their crops of baco noir and other old fashioned grape varieties.

My new pasture planted with fescue, the next project at the goat farm was to build an electric fence to keep in my does and buy a new buck to grow the herd. A goat fence—any goat farmer will tell you---is only a rough approximation of where the goats might be at any given time. My goats for the most part had become tame and had gotten used to roaming around my farm. They were happy climbing on top of my pickup truck, sleeping under the tractor, and following my great Pyrenees guard dog around the farm and on occasion off the farm. If it were not for the dog suffering from wanderlust I could have let the goats roam indefinitely on my 65 acres since they stayed on the property. I soon grew weary of having my neighbors call the animal control officer who in turn would call me and show up with his flashing blue lights to help me shepherd the herd back onto my property. I was particularly annoyed that Mrs. Coughlin, who owns the farm next to me, didn’t just call me because everyone in the neighborhood, including her, knew who owned the goats. So I finally decided to fence them in.

Goats, given a choice, prefer to eat tree leaves and vines than graze grass. They will stand on their hind legs and nibble leaves. This is why goats are used to clear brush. Leave enough of them in a small area and what had been jungle will soon look like a city park except of course the leaves they cannot reach will still be hanging. It makes the woods look like you cleared them out with a landscaping service that only employees midgets. But if I was to grow my herd to 40 or 50 animals I needed to fence them in especially since I wanted to practice rotational grazing techniques meaning move them from paddock to paddock as different varieties of forage were ready to be grazed or grasses at different stages of growth. That is the best way to improve the health of the farm and the animals at the same time and the practice followed by the best of the grass fed farmers, especially those calling themselves "organic".

So I strung electric wire around 2 acres of land which I had cleared with the dozer. Half of it was cleared well enough where I could plant winter rye, Austrian peas, rape seed, triticale, and turnips which would grow into the looming cold weather. But the other half was a tangle of trees which I had pushed over with the dozer which broke down for the last time before I finished the job. So I left that side to the goats to clear out and got rid of the dozer.

Winter rye is for me a green colored cure for the misery of winter. In the winter the ground and the sky take on the same grey colored hue when the sky is cloudy. This misery can last for a few weeks and one can understand why people in places like Finland, Toledo, Siberia either drink heavily in the darkened days of winter or sun themselves under sunlamps. A better cure might be to plant something that stays green for much of the year. In Finland I think they grow pot indoors to provide some color. In Virginia I wanted to grow winter rye especially as the police here in Virginia frown on growing marijuana.

In Virginia fescue goes dormant when the north wind turns icy. It does not turn green again until 4 months later. But winter rye as the name implies grows later in the year and comes out of dormancy earlier. So it’s bright green in December which is a cheery hue compares with the monochrome of the rest of the landscape.

My new pasture is now green with 4 acres of young fescue growth and I have 2 acres of winter cover crops growing. The goats after much effort have learned for the most part to respect the electric fence while the goat dog still goes in and out as she pleases. The next activity for me after I pick up my new buck next week will be in April when I use the rotavator plow to till in the cover crops and plant summer annual perl millet. I see so many goat farmers feeding their animals grain and buying expensive hay. Rotational grazing and planting the highest quality forage is the way I plan to build up my herd and goat business.