Newsletter Archives > Wine Industry

The Politics of Protecting Small Farms

Creating a New Paradigm to Save a Heritage and the Future

Harry in March 2005 with the US Secretary of Agriculture and his staff, discussing ways to fund viticultural research and promote sustainability and rural, value-added farming initiatives, which the USDA has recently piloted.

Wines are an ultimately sophisticated and refined luxury product, and yet an agricultural by-product. From the most basic of farming, no matter how technically complex those basics, we get in wine the purest reflection of time and place I know. Great literature conveys some complexity and a sense of other places and times, but not nearly as well as wine. Wine has the immortality of recorded thought and observation, but with an emotive and sensual dimension great writing lacks. The written word is two dimensional, wine three and four dimensional—more senses revealing greater richness, reflecting the time and place in which it was grown, the hands that made it so.

Yet despite such power, wine growing and the small, value-added farm family to which it belongs, are at risk. Assaults on land-use planning regulations are part of it, even in highly-vaunted farmland protectorates like Oregon where Measure 37's passage in November acknowledged Oregonians' preference for personal, short-term rights to make a buck over the responsibility for caretaking the natural resources we were handed—greater greed over the greater good. Passivity on environmental and resource depletion issues is also part of it, approaching obstructionism at times when politics and corporate profits wield their clubs.

Wine, tied to the earth in all its intricacies, with such a sensitivity to climate, annual weather, and geographical differences, may be the best measure of our culture's growing insensitivity to the finely balanced world we inhabit, may be our canary in the mine.

There is no simple answer to manmade challenges of sprawl, resource depletion, climate change—in short, fouling our nest—but a serious dialogue must ensue, realizing dialectic tension is helpful to effect change. And then we need to work at it deliberately, one small step at a time.

Corporate Imperatives and The Environment

I am an optimist at heart, and that despite having digested reams of sobering data on global climate change, resource depletion, falling water tables, dangerously polarized haves and have nots, and the new world order of Business States replacing Nation States being just as unstable and callused as before. The Gold War is just as perilous as the Cold War.

The dysfunctional dynamic is not supply-and-demand or the capitalist system, for I support their wisdom and utility, but rather with unbridled power and a selfishness that disdains the "greater good," power this time not in the hands of blood-thirsty warlords or megalomaniacs, but in boardrooms' CEOs intent on dominance in their own sphere. Where we go wrong is in not reexamining the bigger-is-better mantra by which most live, especially our institutions. Feeding the insatiable appetites of the corporate animal for growth and quarterly profits can, lacking the restraints of public outcry, reach the same arrogance and insensitivity that harms peoples, environment, climate, and heritage.

And yet progress doesn't have to be at the expense of the earth or future generations.

Vineyards and Wineries

Grapegrowing and winemaking are microcosms of this general challenge. As in most businesses, the wine business has seen great consolidation, creating almost monopolistically sized international vineyard and winery companies (e.g., Constellation, with $3.8 Billion sales annually), distributorships (where 4 or 5 companies in the US control wine sales) and huge Ag suppliers with big dollars to influence policy and fund their brand of research. Inordinate impact is given to companies based on size alone when dollars speak. But when consumers know the difference and demand accountability, whether for environmental stewardship or consumer access or migrant labor concerns or maintaining regional brand integrity (e.g. no Chablis being grown in California) or for quality in general, restraint is seen and balance results.

Small businesses, wineries, vineyards and farms are attractive and vulnerable now. They offer large businesses a quick buck, either in consolidation for greater efficiencies (which often results in a sameness); or as a raw material for development, as sprawl and suburbia becomes a commodity crop; or for purchasing the special branding that comes with small, driven operations. Vineyards are a high value crop, with impeccably good looks, long-term aesthetic and business stability (as much as farming can give), and are magical places that provide the rural homecoming many need—Napa, without vineyards and the regal sense of being both an intellectual and natural resource, would be an autoparts store--Sideways would be Upside Down without Pinot noir winecountry.

Small, Value-Added Farms

The Oregon wine industry is composed almost exclusively of small, family farms adding value to a harvested crop, producing a product valued because of its expression of regional characteristics—bright, fresh fruit of great complexity and authenticity. The vineyards are dispersed, small, aesthetic and value-adding in their own right, just ask neighboring towns with elevated residential values reflecting the perfect bucolic, scenic assets that speak to a balancing of nature, industriousness, neatness and an international knowledge of this place.

Small farms, including sites such as our Corral Creek Vineyards, are in danger of sprawl engulfing agricultural land, especially as protections are lifted through initiatives such as Oregon's Measure 37.

And, it isn't just wine, it is produce and meats and seafood and orchards and fruits, or what are called Specialty Crops to differentiate them from the large, corporate farms which notoriously may yield as much profit in subsidies as in Commodity Crop sales. Large farms are valuable and have seen 3X yields in grain production in the last five decades, so I don't dismiss them. However, like in most areas of life well-lived, we need a balance of focus, small and large, with attempts to continually do things better—higher quality, lower cost, better benefits to employees, the land, and customers. Small scale, value-added agriculture helps to sustain rural communities, keeping them robust financially, resistant to boom-and-bust cycles, and fostering a culture in tune with the earth and long-term issues. Currently, specialty crops outsell commodity crops nationally 52 to 48%.

There needs to begin a better urban-rural dialogue, so that both spheres respect contributions of the other. There needs to be better education on where food comes from, what healthy food is; why farmland needs to be protected from sprawl while denser footprints create urban neighborhoods of richness; rural and culinary tourism needs to paint for urbanites a picture not just of how grandparents lived, but of a sense of seasons and ecology, of preservation of environment and lifestyle. Migration of urbanites to the country to take-up agricultural roles their grandparents left exists and needs to be encouraged, supported legislatively with easier inheritance laws for farms, low-interest loans for next generation farmers, possibly going almost to the point that Bethel Heights' Pat Dudley describes as a "New Homestead Act."

Currently a cross-disciplinary group in the Oregon is creating such a vision, to help craft novel approaches to the staid national and local farm protections and incentives, and to excite the dialogue that needs to happen. Of course, this augments progressive movements such as Slow-Food, The Cascadia Culinary Conference (Whidbey Island), Organic farming and viticulture movements (Oregon Tilth, LIVE, Salmon Safe, and the like) and the general Sustainable Businesses approaches.

As a winery, Chehalem is beginning to investigate and assess ourselves on several fronts of sustainability and will report to you on our progress, from viticulture to size optimization to recycling and friendlier environmental approaches.

What We Can All Do

As consumers, we all hold the key to intelligent and forward-thinking decisions by businesses of any size. We can do small things to hold ourselves, and those we buy from, accountable. Small numbers of the right people, saying the right things to other right people, can effect change more easily than we might imagine, can bring us to a "tipping point" where it makes a difference. Principled agreements between consumers and business can create strong alliances that fight the ills of size, ignorance and conflict of interest.

Recently, the cooperative of dairy farmers in Oregon who make and market Tillamook cheeses showed how it's done, by listening to what their customers wanted, searching their own principles and refusing to permit the use of hormones in their feeds, despite the onslaught of Monsanto, the supplier with the most to gain financially. Consumers and future generations will gain from sensitivity like that.

To help understand what's at stake, I recommend you investigate different sources (see a reading list below), including a powerful book by Pulitzer-winning author Jared Diamond entitled Collapse, which paints a sobering portrait of cultures who did not heed imperatives, especially those of environment, and paid cataclysmically for it—read it not to become pessimistic, on the contrary to wake us up to actions we must take. The arrogance and hubris that comes from us feeling an entitlement to success, must not blind us to new challenges which will ultimately define our place in time more than daily headline topics.

Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown has interestingly simple approaches to avoiding possibly disastrous scenarios based on over consumption of resources like water, energy and naturally occurring food sources—our natural capital—all at a time we are sullying the environment and changing the delicately tuned climate.

We should all demand fact not rhetoric from our leaders, returning to scientific rigor in deciding scientific questions, not politics or religion. We must assiduously avoid short-term decisions that steal from our children in order for us to live in a new tract home on what used to be orchard. We must develop a "real" cost for our purchases that include full life-cycle costs from primary resource extractions, people issues, environmental impacts, disposal issues and the like for our products and the products we use. Those costs must dictate our policy and priorities.

We must fear explaining to our great-grandchildren more than to the corporate board and shareholders. Indeed, the corporate board needs to view actions through the wise eyes of future generations.

Reading List

Gregory Jones, PhD, "How Hot is Too Hot?," Wine Business Monthly, February, 2005.