We’ve Been Doing Regenerative Wrong

The First Principle of Regenerative Viticulture

When most people talk about “Regenerative Viticulture” they think of soil health: how we can use various practices to protect it, build it, grow more delicious wine in it, and sequester carbon in it.

I think if we took a random survey of regenerative practitioners and asked what they thought was the most important principle of regenerative viticulture, or agriculture in general, they’d say,

“Not tilling,” or maybe, “Minimizing soil disturbance.”

“Planting cover crops,” would probably be next, followed closely by, “Integrating animals,” or, “Planting a diversity of species,” or, “Always keep the soil covered.”

We might differ on what we think is the most important principle or practice, but we’d all be essentially talking about rejuvenating our soils.

After years of learning about and practicing regenerative agriculture, I’ve come to believe that we’ve been wrong. While this initial approach to regenerative agriculture was a necessary and important reaction to the degradation of our farmlands from industrial, conventional agriculture, we have merely been treating the symptoms and not the illness that led to them.

I think that the first principle of regenerative agriculture is not soil health, but community.

Survival of the Most Symbiotic

In 2021, a forest ecologist published a book that may have the most significant impact on our understanding of life on earth since On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. The forest ecologist is Suzanne Simard, and she titled her book, Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering The Wisdom of the Forest. It tells her personal journey as a female scientist navigating the male dominated discipline of forestry, and relates the results of multiple world-view-changing studies she conducted on forest ecosystems.

I can’t do justice to this book in a brief summary, but one of the most important truths she discovered was that there is just as much collaboration as competition happening in nature. It turns out that the biggest, strongest, and fastest does not equal the fittest for survival. Resilience comes from social engagement.

Studies have shown that the more connected you are to your community, the greater your chance of weathering disaster. In many animal and human groups throughout the world, might does not confer power and influence as much as the ability to be of service to the community and build coalitions does.

Our conception of regenerative agriculture has grown out of our disconnection from the community of life, out of an idea of separateness and the preeminence of competition. We humans see Nature as something apart from us that we can visit and interact with as tourists, or use and exploit to extract goods that meet our physical needs. We define “natural” and “unnatural” in terms of the absence or presence of human influence.

(“Natural wine” anyone?)

We have excommunicated ourselves from Nature. This is the break that must be reconciled, the relationship that needs to be regenerated.

As it turns out, we only left Nature in our minds. In an ironic, reverse-Matrix twist, we’ve thought ourselves isolated from nature, living out our lives in unnatural cities and towns, disconnected from the real, dirty world of Nature. But all along we have been not only deeply embedded in the systems of nature… we ARE nature. The horror of waking up after taking this red pill is not to discover that we’ve been enslaved by machines, but to discover that we have been the enslavers of ourselves.

The Example of the Vines

I actually don’t like the term “Nature.” It’s kind of meaningless once you stop seeing yourself as separate from it. I’ve begun replacing it with “My Community.”

It never resonated with me to think of myself as a “steward” or “manager” of land. On the other hand, when I began to see myself in a relationship with my community I began to give the other members agency and equal standing with me in decision making and direction. I began to listen better, because community implies dialogue with all stakeholders.

This growing season I got to see a lot of different approaches to viticulture, many claiming to be “regenerative” because of their practices around soil health.  Yet many of these same approaches neglected or did the bare minimum for the well-being of the human, animal, or other communities that were part of the same land. They weren't engaging with their community, but merely imposing their viticultural whims on a piece of land... "regeneratively."

This kind of regenerative winegrowing seems hollow to me, and destined for failure when the money runs out, or when the fossil fuels run out, or when the trendiness wears off.

Yea, though I fathom all the mysteries of the soil food web, and comprehend all scientific studies of the soil microbiome, yet have not love, I am nothing.

Resilience and regeneration seem to me to come from investing time and resources into the health of the entire community. This means that we can’t slap some soil health practices on an otherwise conventional system and call it regenerative. We need to rethink our systems with a new vision of interconnectedness to everything – the whole community of humans and nonhumans – and rebuild them from the ground up, allowing the rest of our community to weigh in on how we do this.

The humbling thing is that grapevines and other plants, the elders in our community, have been trying to give us an example to follow since we humans came onto the scene relatively recently. They have learned to use up to 30% of their energy to feed the members of their community who share the soil with them; they serve the above ground communities by creating the air we all need to survive; and they are in constant communication and collaboration with the diversity of lives they touch.

30%... that’s not a tithe. That’s an investment.

Radical Indigenization

The term “community” may resonate in our minds in a very human-centric way. We may think of community as the people near us. While focusing on the human members of our community is important, that isn't where our kinship ends.

What if we expanded the idea of community to include all of the aspects of the world on which we are dependent for our own lives? What if we thought of community as that to which we owe gratitude for our existence?

That would mean that the microbes in the soil would be part of our community, as they make our food and wine possible. But also the plants, trees, vines and their pollinators and propagators… birds, insects, animals… they provide the food and wine and oxygen that makes us possible. The sun, sky, rain, oceans, and rocks are all necessary to create the soil and grow the plants and sustain all the lives that enable us to live. I feel grateful to have them in my community. The moon and stars and the balance of all the forces of the galaxies that have held our planet in just the right spot to enable life to emerge as it hurtles through space… the entire connected universe – Nature – is our community.  

The Thanksgiving Address (the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen) is the central prayer and invocation (not related to the US Thanksgiving holiday) for the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois Confederacy). It reflects their relationship of giving thanks for life and the world around them.

The Haudenosaunee open and close every social and religious meeting with the Thanksgiving Address, and I got to hear this in the Onondaga language on the Onondaga reservation this past Indigenous Peoples day. It is worth reading the translation linked above, or search and find one of the several versions online.

It is also said as a daily sunrise prayer, and is an ancient message of peace and appreciation of Mother Earth and her inhabitants. The children learn that, according to Native American tradition, people everywhere are embraced as family. Our diversity, like all wonders of Nature/Our Community, is a gift for which to be thankful. 

This prayer of thanksgiving is referred to as The Words That Come Before All Else.

I think that this kind of gratitude is a great first step to re-indigenizing ourselves, to re-envisioning ourselves as part of our community and regenerating our relationships with all the members of it.

Thank you for being part of My Community!

Adam

PS: If you're interested in learning about some other big lessons I learned this growing season, check out the 4 part mini-series I did for the Beyond Organic Wine podcast, titled Death In The Vineyard (or, Part 4, Beyond Death In The Vineyard). It has generated some pretty big buzz in the wine community and beyond.