Each year, NRDC recognizes sustainable food pioneers across the United States through the Growing Green Awards. OnEarth is publishing blog posts from this year's four winners and two of the judges. All of the posts can be found here.
As a family, we at Benziger Family Winery think of our land much like a human body.
The soil and geology act like its skin and bones. Water functions like blood, the vines, gardens and insectaries are the lungs, and engineered wetlands for our water recycling ponds act as the kidneys.
For the entire organism to run properly and function at the highest level, we have to create a synergy between each of the parts. So we try to grow grapes and produce wine the best way we know how - with Biodynamic® and natural farming practices.
We didn't always approach our farming in this holistic way.
In fact, when we started farming our vineyard in 1980, we did it the way almost everyone else did, with machines and pesticides. It wasn't cheap, and we did it that way for years. Aside from the cost, there was something more disturbing happening on our property.
I remember walking through our vineyard and being startled by sheer silence. There were no birds chirping, no bees buzzing. The grapes were growing on the vines as they should have been, but otherwise it was an ecological desert - eerily quiet and devoid of signs of life.
So, over time, we made some big changes. We eliminated chemical inputs. We planted olive trees, cover crops and insectaries to create a healthy polyculture. We took out some of the vines so there was more room for other plant species. We started feeding the soil and plants with compost rather than chemical fertilizers.
And the results were miraculous: the birds and the bees returned. We let nature back in.
In 2000, we celebrated as Benziger became the first winery in Sonoma and Napa counties to be certified as Biodynamic. We continue to be very proud of that important milestone.
The Benziger family is honored and privileged to receive the 2010 Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council in the Water Stewardship category. Water is one of our most precious resources.
Water, after all, is at the core of everything we do as winegrowers.
We've done a lot to improve our systems and get the most out of every resource. By choosing the right varietals of grapes for the right soils and feeding the soil with compost rather than chemicals, we save up to 50% of the water we'd need for irrigation. We reuse over two million gallons of water each year through our recycling ponds and wetland, with gray water being filtered to irrigate the vineyards in the dry summer months.
And with cutting edge technology, we're saving even more. Using a new barrel steamer, we've gone from using about 24 gallons of water per barrel to under 5 gallons per barrel. That amounts to hundreds of thousands of gallons of water saved each year.
Sometimes, small adjustments can result in a lot of change.
This Growing Green Award reminds us to keep striving to be better stewards, managers and educators when it comes to our natural capital. We share the information we've learned over the years with other growers, winemakers and consumers because we believe being a good steward means helping others move in the right direction.
To receive this award from NRDC, a group rooted in education and environmental action, means a lot to me and my family. It's only fitting that we share this award with the people that make it happen every day in our vineyard and cellar. Joaquin Corona, our Estate Vineyard Manager and Jose Ortiz, our Cellar Master, have both been with us from the beginning. Joaquin and Jose and their crews are the reason Benziger can grow high quality grapes and conserve the way we do. We thank them for being the backbone of our winery.
Today, we still aspire to be better citizens of the earth. From our certified sustainable winegrowing program (called Farming with Flavors) for all of our sourced grapes, to continually looking working to reduce our carbon footprint, we never stop searching for ways we can use less and conserve more.
We keep trying to reduce the stress on the environment in the ways that we can.
Watch the full 2010 Growing Green Awards documentary, premiering April 29!
Perhaps "growing green" means not continuing to expand the large-scale, corporate production of food.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/05/population-overshoot-is-determined-by-...
Population Overshoot Is Determined by Food Overproduction
Even after more than ten years of trying to raise awareness about certain overlooked research, my focus remains riveted on the skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population and scientific evidence from Hopfenberg and Pimentel that the size of the human population on Earth is a function of food availability. More food for human consumption equals more people; less food for human existence equals less people; and no food, no people. This is to say, the population dynamics of the human species is essentially common to, not different from, the population dynamics of other living things.
UN Secretary-General Mr. Kofi Annan noted in 1997, “The world has enough food. What it lacks is the political will to ensure that all people have access to this bounty, that all people enjoy food security.”
Please examine the probability that humans are producing too much, not too little food; that the global predicament humanity faces is the way increasing the global food supply leads to increasing absolute global human population numbers. It is the super-abundance of unsustainable agribusiness harvests that are driving population numbers of the human species to overshoot, or explode beyond, the natural limitations imposed by a relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably damaged planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth.
The spectacular success of the Green Revolution over the past 40 years has “produced” an unintended and completely unanticipated global challenge, I suppose: the rapidly increasing supply of food for human consumption has given birth to a human population bomb, which is exploding worldwide before our eyes. The most formidable threat to future human well being and environmental health appears to be caused by the unbridled, corporate overproduction of food on the one hand and the abject failure of the leaders of the human community to insist upon more fair and equitable redistribution of the world’s food supply so that “all people enjoy food security”.
We need to share (not overconsume and hoard) as well as to build sustainable, human-scale farming practices (not corporate leviathans), I believe.
For a moment let us reflect upon words from the speech that Norman Bourlaug delivered in 1970 on the occasion of winning the Nobel Prize. He reported, ” Man also has acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas.”
Plainly, Norman Bourlaug states that humanity has the means to decrease the rate of human reproduction, but is choosing not to adequately employ this capability to sensibly limit human population numbers. He also notes that the rate of human population growth surpasses the rate of increase in food production IN SOME AREAS {my caps}. Dr. Bourlaug is specifically not saying the growth of global human population numbers exceeds global production of food.
According to recent research, population numbers of the human species could be a function of the global growth of the food supply for human consumption. This would mean that the global food supply is the independent variable and absolute global human population numbers is the dependent variable; that human population dynamics is most similar to the population dynamics of other species. Perhaps the human species is not being threatened in our time by a lack of food. To the contrary, humanity and life as we know it could be inadvertently put at risk by the determination to continue the dramatic, large-scale overproduction of food, such as we have seen occur in the past 40 years.
Recall Dr. Bourlaug’s prize winning accomplishment. It gave rise to the “Green Revolution” and to the extraordinary increases in the world’s supply of food. Please consider that the sensational increases in humanity’s food supply occasioned by Dr. Bourlaug’s great work gave rise to an unintended and completely unanticipated effect: the recent skyrocketing growth of absolute global human population numbers.
We have to examine what appear to be potentially disastrous effects of increasing large-scale food production capabilities (as opposed to small-scale farming practices) on human population numbers worldwide between now and 2050. If we keep doing the “big-business as usual” things we are doing now by maximally increasing the world’s food supply, and the human community keeps getting what we are getting now, then a colossal ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort could be expected to occur in the fairly near future.
It may be neither necessary nor sustainable to continue increasing food production to feed a growing population. As an alternative, we could carefully review ways for limiting increases in the large-scale corporate production of food; for providing broad support of small-scale farming practices; for redistributing more equitably the present overly abundant world supply of food among the members of the human community; and for immediately, universally and safely following Dr. Bourlaug’s recommendation to “reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely.”
Steve Salmony is a self-proclaimed global citizen, a psychologist and father of three grown children. Married 38 years ago. In 2001 Steve founded the AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population to raise consciousness of the colossal threat that the unbridled, near exponential growth of absolute global human population numbers poses for all great and small living things on Earth in our time. His quixotic campaign focuses upon the best available science of human population dynamics in order to save the planet as a place fit for habitation by children everywhere.
NRDC's 2010 Growing Green Awards winner in the Water Steward category, Mike Benziger is a leader in the Biodynamic farming movement. He founded Benziger Family Winery in Glen Ellen, California, which utilizes an innovative constructed wetland and pond treatment system to
...NRDC's 2010 Growing Green Awards winner in the Water Steward category, Mike Benziger is a leader in the Biodynamic farming movement. He founded Benziger Family Winery in Glen Ellen, California, which utilizes an innovative constructed wetland and pond treatment system to recycle an average of two million gallons of water per year. Benziger decreases water inputs using new grape sorting technologies, water sensors and cover crops that reduce runoff. He actively educates winegrowers across the country about how to nurture the environment while producing character-rich, high-quality wines.
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