251: Vine SAP Analysis to Optimize Nutrition

[00:00:00] Beth Vukmanic: Have you ever. Wondered do third-party certifications matter to consumers? [00:00:05] Welcome to marketing tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know that consumers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer form episodes help you learn about the latest science. And research for the wine industry, these twice monthly micro podcasts. will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing. [00:00:24] If you've wondered about third-party. Certifications. You're not alone. This question has. I also crossed the university of Portland's Sam Holloway's mind. In this week's marketing tip learn about Holloway's qualitative. Research findings. And what they mean for your sustainable wine brand. [00:00:40] Holloway was interested in learning. How supply chain certifications are perceived by consumers. Impact purchasing decisions. And impact brand loyalty. In interviews and focus group discussions, his participants revealed that they were more likely to trust products bearing. Recognized certifications. [00:01:00] They viewed certified products as offering a higher value. And they were more willing to pay a premium for certified products. After coding and analyzing participant transcripts Holloway notes, that certifications quote. Enhanced brand loyalty by aligning with consumers ethical values. And beliefs. End quote. [00:01:20] While, certified products were associated with increased. Brand loyalty. Holloway's participants noted that lack of transparency could lead to skepticism. And diminished trust in brands with. Certifications. But there's an easy solution. transparency and clear communication remedy these issues before they arise. [00:01:39] Holloway's participants also emphasized stringent standards and third party verification as important factors. That enhanced their trust. [00:01:48] By sharing your story, you can connect with your guests over shared values. And spread awareness of sustainable wine operations like yours, that work. To protect the people and the planet. [00:01:58] And if your SIP Certified. You can add the SIP Certified logo to your wine labels for any wine made with at least 85% SIP. Certified fruit, whether that's estate or purchased. Check out the links in the show notes. To get your wine certified today. [00:02:13] Until next time, this is sustainable. Winegrowing with the vineyard team.   Nearly perfect transcript by Descript. Resources: *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course *** Apply for SIP Certified Wine Join ReSIProcal February 2025 Marketing Tips eNewsletter Sustainable Story | Print Sustainable Story | Electronic What's your Sustainable Story? Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Monitoring vine nutrition is critical for pest and water stress resilience and the efficient production of quality grapes. Jenny Garley, Chief Science Officer at NEWAGE Laboratories discusses the differences between SAP analysis and tissue tests. SAP measures real time nutrient availability in vascular tissue. While tissue tests look at the nutrients stored in the leaf; some maybe available but most are not. Learn how SAP analysis can improve your nutrient management program, from reducing nitrogen inputs to managing trace elements for optimal plant nutrition. Resources:         115: Examining Plant Nutrient Mobility with SAP Analysis Grape growers turn to sap sampling to monitor crop NEWAGE Laboratories – SAP Analysis The Difference Between Leaf Tissue and Sap Analyses The Grower’s Guide to Plant Sap Analysis Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript [00:00:00] Beth Vukmanic: Monitoring grape vine nutrition is critical for pest and water, stress resilliance and the efficient production of quality grapes. Welcome to sustainable. Winegrowing with the vineyard team. Where we bring. You the latest in science of research for the wine industry. [00:00:19] I'm Beth Vukmanic executive director. Since 1994 vineyard team has brought you the latest science-based practices. Experts growers and wine industry tools. Through both. In-field. And online education so that you can grow your business. Please. Raise a glass with us as we cheers to 30 years. [00:00:38] In today's podcast Craig Macmillan, critical resource manager at Niner wine estates with a long time. Sip certified vineyard and the first ever set certified winery speaks. Speaks with Jenny Garley chief science officer at new age. Laboratories. She discusses the differences between SAP analysis. Alesis and tissue testing. SAP measures real. Time, nutrient availability in the vascular tissue. While. Tissue tests. Look at nutrients stored in the leaf. Some may be available, but most are not. Learn how SAP. Analysis can improve your nutrient management program from reducing nitrogen inputs to managing trace elements for optimal plant. Nutrition. [00:01:21] Do you want to be more connected with the viticulture industry, but don't know where to start. Become. I'm a member of the vineyard team. Get access to the latest science-based. Practices experts, growers and wine industry tools through both in-field and online education so that you can grow your business. Visit vineyard team.org. And choose grower or business. Business. [00:01:43] To join the. Community of sustainable wine growers today now let's listen in [00:01:47] Craig Macmillan: our guest today is Jenny Garley. She is chief science officer at New Age Laboratories. And today we're going to talk about plant sap analysis and the idea of nitrogen conversion efficiency percentage. Welcome to the podcast, Jenny. [00:02:09] Jenny Garley: Thank you. Actually, thank you for having me back in your team. It's always lovely to speak with you guys and be a part of this. [00:02:19] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, we're glad you could come back. This is really great. I've heard about sap analysis in the past, a long time ago, and didn't really know anything about it because I was a dinosaur and when I was farming, I just did what I'd always done, what people told me to do, basically. That is, monitoring the nutritional status of vines is critical, obviously, for making fertilizer decisions, but also for making sure that they're happy and healthy. [00:02:39] You know, a vine that's in good balance is going to be resilient, going to tolerate different kinds of stresses, as well as basically be efficient. You know, it's going to produce a crop successfully. And with sustainability in mind in particular, our fertilizer decisions need to be directed. Now, traditionally, um, growers have used leaf tissue analysis of leaves and petioles, usually in the spring or at brazen. [00:03:03] Leaf sap analysis is another way of monitoring plant nutritional status. It's a very, very different way of going about it. What is the difference between the two methods? [00:03:10] Jenny Garley: I'm really glad you asked, because everybody asks this question, and it's very, very important, actually. Even though people use SAP and tissue sampling interchangeably, they are actually quite different from one another. So SAP measures the nutrient availability of the nutrients flowing in the vascular tissue, which is It's basically the xylem and phloem. [00:03:34] It provides a real time analysis of the nutrients that are available in the plant. And that is really one of the most important takeaways between sap and tissue, because tissue looks at the nutrients that are in the brick and mortar of the leaf that have gone into the leaf. Formation and development, the total nutrients, both available but mostly unavailable. [00:04:04] So those are huge differences there. Other differences is that tissue is taken from a singular aged leaf, just one. And then it's placed in a paper bag because that sample needs to be dehydrated. And then it needs to be ground, and then it needs to be ashed, and then it uses strong acid to form that analysis. [00:04:31] For SAP analysis, they only use linear pressure. No heat, no acid, no dehydration. Sap analysis, you need to sample a new yet fully developed leaf and an older yet functional leaf. And that is two points. And when you measure two points on a vine, that can give you mobility. And that is the second, uh, large difference between sap and tissue, is that one, sap gives you mobility. [00:05:04] And that it gives you available nutrients. Tissue gives you total nutrients from a singular age leaf. The way the analysis is done, there's heat, there's grinding, there's ash, and there's acid. What you lose in that is you lose, amongst many things, is sugar. No mobility. [00:05:27] Craig Macmillan: And when you're talking about BRICs, you're talking about carbohydrates that are in the SAP. So there's things that you can learn using SAP analysis that you wouldn't be able to learn using traditional, um, tissue analysis. [00:05:36] Jenny Garley: We're talking about leaf bricks, which is carbohydrates and soluble nutrients. When we're talking about bricks of the berry, of the grape, that's almost all sugar and quite different than a leaf brick. Thanks for bringing that up. [00:05:50] Craig Macmillan: So there's advantages then, because of the information that you get. What are the differences in terms of how you might interpret results from one to the other? Where, what I'm getting at is, let's say I've been doing traditional tissue analysis for, you know, ever. And then I go, yeah, the SAP analysis thing sounds pretty cool. [00:06:08] Am I just starting over? Is there any way I can connect the dots between the past and the present and make predictions about the future? [00:06:16] Jenny Garley: That's a good question. And we have people trying to do that all the time. Again, tissue is total nutrient analysis available and unavailable. SAP is what is available right now. So. Taking both tests, a lot of people do that, being able to equate them, that is different, they both give you different answers. [00:06:41] I wouldn't say starting over, I would just say giving more information, giving you another layer, a deeper understanding. Is how I would, I would put that I would just say you can only go so far with tissue and would you like to have a deeper understanding? Would you like to try to cut back on nitrogen? [00:07:03] Are you thinking that there could potentially be? An excess of nitrogen somewhere in your fertilizer program. SAP analysis can help you with that just as much as it can help you look at hidden hungers and or deficiencies. So if you want to talk about interpretation of SAP, we'll keep with the example of nitrogen since that's, um, the topic a lot. [00:07:28] Of today, nitrogen is highly flow mobile, and so when you see a physical deficiency on the vine, that means there's in nitrogen, that means there's been a prolonged nitrogen deficiency, and you see that yellowing in the older leaves, which is due to decreased chlorophyll synthesis. SOP analysis, taken early, can help you see those deficiencies in the report long before a physical symptom occurs. [00:08:01] Gives you time. SOP analysis gives you time. Some time, so the reason why SAP analysis can show you that is because again, we take a new yet fully functional leaf and an old yet viable leaf. So on a SAP report, when there is higher amounts of nitrogen in the new leaf as compared to the older leaf. That means those vines are trying to meet the greater demand in the new leaf. [00:08:30] They're not being given enough nitrogen, or they're not being able to take it up. So they're having to strip it out of the older leaves to meet that demand. And when that nitrogen moves out of the old leaf to the new leaf, that triggers a deficiency. That you can see on a report many times before that older leaves turn yellow. [00:08:53] Craig Macmillan: Which reminds me of something is the, what is the best timing to take samples for SAP analysis? [00:08:59] Jenny Garley: Again, great question. A lot of people like to think of sap, again, like tissue. And so they want to take just one or two samples. But sap is movement. It's flowing. It's nutrient uptake. Therefore, sap analysis is really made To be taken throughout the season and if you want a minimum amount if you're going to graph the nutrients over a season and really trying to Say cut back on nitrogen or say potassium. [00:09:33] You're going to need to have to graph that three points is the minimal amount of Data that you need to create a graph. So the minimum would be three I really like to say five. You can always cut back When the starting point usually for somebody that has never been involved in self analysis before would be a new leaf only. [00:09:59] And the reason I say that, you won't be able to see mobility, you will be able to see. cation and anion imbalances. And if you have a field with historical differences, um, than, than your other, than your other vineyards or problem areas, I highly recommend taking that about fifth leaf down on a brand new, in, in the springtime. [00:10:24] Because if you have a problem that you're trying to look at, Fighting it early is really the only thing that you can do. Waiting all the way until flower many times is, is too late to try to fight a deficiency and especially a toxicity. Really difficult to take the nutrients out of the plant. [00:10:46] Craig Macmillan: On the other end of the, uh, shoot, shall we say. The last fully functioning leaf, without like a Li Cor device or something like that, how can I pick which one of these older leaves is still really a functional leaf? And by that, do you mean in its full photosynthetic capacity? Because you've got what, it's about what, 40 days? [00:11:09] Um, is where the peak is? Something like that? Is it, are there visual signs? Is there something textural about it? Is there color about it that I can go, oh, I need to go five leaves up, or? Four leaves up, or whatever. [00:11:21] Jenny Garley: We provide pictures and protocols for taking a sap analysis, especially for vines. We have a beautiful picture of a vineyard, a vine, and where to take your new and your old leaf. Many times those older leaves are thicker. They're definitely darker in color than the new leaf, but we don't want to have a lot of crunchy edges. [00:11:45] And the reason I say that is because sap analysis, again, is a liquid, and if you send in leaves or somebody sends in leaves that looks like they've been raked up off the ground, that's essentially going to be a tissue test, not a sap analysis. That would be considered dead weight. We need about 90 to 100 grams per sample. [00:12:11] And if you. sent in a sample with a whole bunch of yellowing, crunchy leaves. That weight doesn't matter because we won't be able to extract any volume from it. So you'll need to go one to two up. That's why we say oldest yet viable leaf. We like to have some moisture in there. We need to be able to extract, um, a volume of sap from the vascular bundles. [00:12:40] So in a vineyard on a. Absolutely brand new, very healthy vineyard that the old yet viable leaf could be the oldest leaf, but on an older vineyard, maybe diseased, fighting something, having trouble taking up nutrients, maybe have some root issues, that oldest viable leaf might be the third up from the oldest leaf. [00:13:07] Because we do need a viable green leaf with moisture in it. [00:13:15] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, I'm kind of thinking about, um, the directions are good, and you have, uh, some resources to help. I'm also now thinking about, like, just touching, squeezing, breaking some of those older leaves. You can pop them off real easy. There's already an incision started, and you squeeze it, and there's nothing there. [00:13:29] And then other ones you can take, and they're nice and green, and you can rub them in your hands, and your hands turn green. You know, and you go, okay, that's probably the one that's gonna work. It's easy enough to do. So we're talking about nitrogen, but also you mentioned something else that made me think of something, and that is, what about other nutrients, including like, micronutrients? [00:13:44] Do those show up in SAP analysis, or is this just for nitrogen? [00:13:48] Jenny Garley: Absolutely. We have a whole trace element. area on a report. It goes in alphabetical order from aluminum, which is actually toxic. It's a heavy metal. We do provide that analysis for you going all the way down to zinc. The majority of trace elements are semi mobile to non mobile except molybdenum and nickel. [00:14:15] Those are mobile, but they're in very, very, very, very small quantities. So reading those on a SAP analysis is reading the parts per million. And not necessarily comparing the new to the old. [00:14:29] Craig Macmillan: So I can use this to make micronutrient decisions. You know, traditionally we take, um, Petio samples around Bloom set and then make decisions for applying some micros a month or so later, which has always been interesting to me because they need the micros earlier than that, but that's always been the way that was like, you just can't, well, okay, let's put it on there and hope for, hope for some, something next year, but that's the way we've always done it, it seems like we're kind of hoping that there'll be something there next year. [00:14:53] Now, SAP analysis, you had mentioned you can do quite early. So might I be able to do SAP analysis well before Bloom? Like you mentioned, like maybe once I have four leaves and I'm still in the elongation stage, the cluster, and get my readings and be able to make my micro decisions a little earlier. [00:15:10] Jenny Garley: Absolutely. Absolutely. And what you brought up is taking a traditional tissue test later after flower or even the veraison. You're right. You've missed the whole entire window of applying trace elements. Because trace elements, are so needed for photosynthesis and the plant really, really needs to photosynthesize, especially very early on to create energy for the vine, especially when they're trying to actually create leaves on that vine. [00:15:41] Trace elements are needed. Trace elements needed for enzymatic Actions and functions in the plant. And they're also basically there to help the macronutrients work better. All of those things need to happen very early on in the, in the plant. So yes, using SAP analysis to see how and if micronutrients are being taken up into the plant early on is vital in my opinion, [00:16:10] Craig Macmillan: That makes sense. Your lab has an interesting way of reporting Nitrogen because it takes different forms and you will see that in Tissue reports, but you have a whole different way of kind of expressing and interpreting them That's the nitrogen conversion efficiency percentage the nice percentage. I believe that's what you call it Tell us more about that. [00:16:32] I think I think it's an interesting concept [00:16:34] Jenny Garley: I have been talking about this for years and was doing the math for individual clients and companies. And I thought, you know, we should just put this on our report. Most people start on their SAP analysis path with nitrogen. There's a lot of interest in that. On a SAP analysis report, the lower the measurable N in nitrate and N in ammonium. [00:17:04] means that the plant taking up and converting the majority of nitrate and ammonium into amino acids and proteins. If there is high measurable nitrate or ammonium, the plant is having a conversion problem. And when the plant has a conversion problem, Before a grower goes and tries to add more nitrogen, they may want to figure out why their plants are unable to convert the nitrogen that the plants were already being given. [00:17:37] It's very, very important when sap analysis samples are taken that they are put in a cooler because in tissue, there's heat and grinding, which makes ammonium and nitrate volatilize. Which is why sap samples need to be kept cool in order for our NICE number to be the best it can be, to give the very best data. [00:18:06] When leaves get warm, you can no longer measure. Nitrate and ammonium. So, keeping those leaves cool and following those protocols, and I know I bring this up during nitrogen conversion, but you really do need to have cool leaves in order to have very, very good nitrate and ammonium numbers so that we can compare it to total N and give good, informative, nice percents. [00:18:32] Craig Macmillan: If I'm seeing and if I'm understanding this correctly if I have high Ammonium high nitrate that means we were not converting nitrogen into the forms that the plant needs, in terms of proteins, amino acids, things like that. Are there recommendations or practices or things that I might think about doing to influence that? [00:18:54] Jenny Garley: The first one, if the NICE number, the Nitrogen Conversion Efficiency percent, is low. So, low for grapes would be under 90. Grapes are actually fairly good at converting. If you were to look at corn or another crop, corn is actually very inefficient at converting. So, when we're talking about grapes, The nitrogen conversion efficiency percent really should be around 90 or above. [00:19:20] If it's not, and you're falling into the 80s, even getting into the 70s, the first thing I would look at is your total N, and is it excessive? If it's excessive, stop right there. Stop sign. Because the plants can only convert so much nitrogen in a 24 hour period, and if the plants are being overfed, that is number one on the list to Stop doing that practice because it's, it's creating poor conversion. [00:19:49] So that right there costs no more money for fertilizer. Just actually stop putting on nitrogen. And I would take another stop sample, get your report and see if. The new and the old leaves are actually, uh, very close together, very balanced. Because if you have a lot more nitrogen in that older leaf, that could be the problem for your nitrogen conversion right there. [00:20:14] Step two would be looking at your macronutrients that are involved. That would be sulfur, that would be magnesium. One people forget a lot is phosphorus. Phosphorus creates ATP. If you're putting a lot of nitrate in, your plants actually need more energy to convert nitrate into amino acids and proteins. [00:20:36] So that's another one to look at. The nitrogen conversion efficiency process actually means water. So looking at your water levels and are the vines getting enough water actually comes into play. One nutrient that people don't talk about a lot is calcium. Calcium is actually the master communicator nutrient, and so if calcium is quite low, the plant is having a hard time communicating for its needs, um, especially for nitrogen conversion. [00:21:10] And then going into your trace elements. Zinc, manganese, moly, copper, iron, those are all nutrients that are needed for good nitrogen conversion. [00:21:22] Craig Macmillan: So this would influence maybe my formulations, my choices. Sounds like my timing also might be influenced. [00:21:30] Jenny Garley: Yeah. Nitrogen conversion is very influential on other nutrient application timings. If you're because of the way some people have very large vineyards and they're not able to spoon feed nitrogen as much as they would want. So understanding what type of nitrogen they're putting out and putting other fertilizer that could help convert is, is huge. [00:21:55] Craig Macmillan: Which actually touches on another idea of talking about timing. I don't hear people talking about in season fertilization that much. Usually that's an end of season thing, and I think the philosophy is the plant's going to pull that up as it goes dormant, and it's in storage there in the trunk, ready to go for the spring, and then the plant will take it from there. [00:22:16] Obviously there's a big nitrogen demand during the growing season, SAP analysis would help you identify whether that demand is being met, or whether it is too great, or whatever. So this would be a way of fine tuning your fertilization program, potentially with a little spoon feeding in the middle of the season. [00:22:34] Does that make sense? [00:22:36] Jenny Garley: Oh yeah, that makes sense. Again, taking that SAP analysis as early as possible to really see, are you going deficient early on? You really don't want to go deficient early on in the season, especially if The majority of your nitrogen applications are in the ball. And how can you help the conversion if you are getting enough nitrogen but the vines aren't converting it very well. [00:23:02] So that really looks at dollars at that point. If you want to look at conversion, if you get down to the 70 percent mark, it means every dollar of nitrogen you're putting out, the plants are using 70 cents. So if you would like to make that 80 cents or 90 cents and actually try to pull back on your nitrogen, In order to do that, the plants have to become very, very efficient at the nitrogen they are being given. [00:23:27] And then people are really starting to be able to cut back on their nitrogen when their efficiency gets very good. And that's when people start pulling back 10 to 15, even 20, 30 percent, when they consistently have nitrogen conversion efficiency in the 90 percent. [00:23:46] Craig Macmillan: And it sounds like that's, um, influenced by some of these other micronutrients, um, like calcium, for instance, and phosphorus for the production of the ATP. Do you have some examples of clients that you've worked with that have adopted this technique and some of the changes they might have made? [00:24:02] Jenny Garley: The majority of people that start with SAP want to look at their nitrogen efficiency. They are somewhere in the middle of trying to make a decision on cutting back. And so I highly suggest, if that's where you are or somebody in the industry is looking, to take as many samples as you can for the first season and graph it out. [00:24:26] And you can see where the vines are taking up the most amount of nitrogen and where they actually start pushing it down to the older leaf. And right when they start pushing it down to the older leaf, that's a trigger for somebody that can make a management decision of, we add nitrogen and the plant is pushing it down to the, Older leaf, first of all, then vines aren't using it anymore. [00:24:51] Secondly, that's throwing away money because the plant is not using it. It's storing it. If you are going to use that nitrogen when the leaves. fall and try to incorporate that into the soil, great. But if you're going to prune it off, that, those are the decisions that you can make from that, that type of scenario. [00:25:15] Some folks are looking at, um, using this when they have high nitrates in their irrigation water, which is really problematic. And how to utilize the nitrogen that they already have during irrigation to convert it into amino acids and proteins so it doesn't affect fruit quality. That's another avenue that people have. [00:25:38] They already have the nitrogen there, they just need to convert it, they just need to utilize it. [00:25:42] Craig Macmillan: That's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it that way, but that's true. What would be the one thing that you would tell a grape grower regarding this topic, in terms of the benefits of sap analysis or tissue analysis, or around managing your nitrogen and measuring what the conversion rate is? [00:25:58] What's the one piece of advice or one takeaway you would give a grower? [00:26:02] Jenny Garley: A lot of grape growers, wine grape growers, I talk to have a lot of vine stress. And if that's the case and you're using sap analysis to try to mitigate that, then you actually do need to look at your aluminum. And very few people do because when high amounts of aluminum are taking up, there is a stress. [00:26:23] Trying to mitigate that and looking at sap analysis And trying to see when that stress occurs. So, when your aluminum starts to go over one part per million, the vine can be starting into a stress. And sap analysis can see that early. Anything lower than a part per million, I call that background aluminum, because aluminum is in every single soil. [00:26:47] You're not going to get away from it. It's there naturally. So, When you're starting to see stress, then you need to look at other parameters such as E. C. electrical conductivity. A lot of people don't look at that either, but when elect electrical conductivity gets very high, the roots could actually be burning. [00:27:06] And that's not really a nutrient source. situation that is a watering situation that is a high salt index fertilizer situation. Those are things that can be seen in a SAP analysis early on and decisions can be made to try to mitigate stress and keep our vines happy and healthy longer. [00:27:28] Craig Macmillan: That is great advice. I just want to thank you for coming back. This is really great. And thanks for sharing your work, your insights. Our guest today has been Jenny Garley. She is Chief Science Officer at New Age Laboratories. Thanks for being on the podcast. This is really fun. [00:27:44] Jenny Garley: It was fun. I enjoyed. Thank you. It is. It is. [00:27:51] Craig Macmillan: That's what we're all about. Oh, and where can people find out more about you? And [00:27:55] Jenny Garley: on LinkedIn quite a bit. Jenny Garley. Uh, I also have my first article that I wrote in the Progressive Crop Consultant magazine, the January, February issue. And that is the difference between leaf tissue and sap analysis. And then, of course, New Age Laboratories, our website. [00:28:17] Beth Vukmanic: Thank you for listening. Today's podcast was brought to you by . Guillaume, grapevine nursery. Looking for top tier vines, Guillaume greapvine nursery pioneers in the nursery business since 1895 and serving Northern California since 2006 offers premium selections backed by generations of French expertise, providing the best genetic material for healthier growth and superior fruit to quality. Elevate your wine. With certified plants, you can trust. [00:28:52] Make sure you check out the show notes for links to Jenny Her article this this year and her previous interview on the sustainable wine growing pods. Podcast 115 examining plant nutrient mobility. With SAP analysis. If you like this show, do us a big favor by. By sharing it with a friend. Subscribing and leaving us a review. You can find all of the podcasts at vineyardteam.org/podcast. And you can reach us at [email protected]. Until next time, this is sustainable Winegrowing but the vineyard team.   Nearly perfect transcription by Descript

[00:00:00] Beth Vukmanic: We. Often talk about sustainability in the vineyard, but that doesn't account for the whole picture. An important theme of sustainable wine production is the ability. To elevate the practices as a whole, from block to bottle. [00:00:12] Welcome to marketing tip Monday with sip certified. We know. That customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer. , form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry. These twice monthly micro podcasts. We'll help you share your dedication. to sustainable wine growing. [00:00:30] After months of careful cultivation in the vineyard. The grapes still have a lengthy journey ahead. It's no secret that the. The journey takes place in the winery, but what exactly does it take for [00:00:40] in this week's marketing tip. She shares four ways. Ways. That you. Can approve the sustainability at your winery. [00:00:47] Number one is to sanitize smarter. Safe cleaning and sanitation practices are essential in wine-making, . But the financial. And environmental impact of sanitation products can add up and lead. A sustainably minded business to look for better solutions. [00:01:03] Cambria periodically runs trials and explores. Floors alternative products to see if they can sanitize in a more eco. Eco-friendly way. [00:01:10] When testing paracidic. , acid. Abbreviated PAA an organic. Peroxide based sanitation, liquid, commonly used in food and beverage industries and health care facilities. Cambria's, his team had two questions. One, could they lower their solutions, concentration and maintain effectiveness. And two could they reuse a batch of the PAA solution more than once. [00:01:34] To answer the first question, they mixed up a range. Of PAA concentrations and got to sanitizing. When. They used ATP swabs to test the bacteria and yeast on. They're sanitized areas. They found that they could use less of the product. Product to get the same results. [00:01:50] The answer to their second question was also a yes, they found. And that they could use. Certain PAA concentrations up to three. Times with a hundred percent effectiveness. Samantha says. Says, researching and trying different products can lead to a cost. Cost benefit and possible switch to a more effective, less impactful. Product. [00:02:10] G Help them reduce. Both product and water while still maintaining a safe sanitation. Practice. [00:02:17] Tip number two is to recycle your lab. Plus. Plastics plastic is one of the hardest materials to dispose of. In an environmentally responsible way. Wineries know this well, because. Because commonly used lab plastics, can't be recycled in the normal stream. [00:02:32] Cambria works with Polycarbin, a platform. For recycling and . remanufacturing lab plastics Polycarbin takes used. Scientific plastics and re manufacturers them into more tubes. Pipette boxes and pipette tips. Their system creates. A closed loop, supply chain. That ensures that Cambria's has plastics don't end up in the landfill. [00:02:56] To make the deal even sweeter, Polycarbin tracking software. sends Cambria, a monthly report on the impact of the recycling practices. [00:03:05] In March of 2024. They recycled 24 kilograms of plastic reduced 144 kilograms of CO2 emissions and preserved 220 cubic meters of water. And that's only for one month. [00:03:18] But Cambria doesn't stop at recycling. Their lab supplies. They also work with TerraCycle, a recycling company that collects. And recycles materials that are not generally accepted in the traditional recycle. Recycling system. [00:03:32] For example. Example TerraCycle sends Cambria boxes for disposable coveralls. safety glasses and ear protection so that they can be sorted. Cleaned and sent it to third party partners to be produced into. Into usable forms. [00:03:46] Tip. Number three conduct, yearly audits. [00:03:50] While, responsible waste management is the goal. For any sustainably minded business, Samantha notes, you don't know how to improve if you don't know where you're starting from. Annual waste. Audits help. Cambria . Analyze their waste. And how it's being disposed. Samantha tells us they collect. They're trash and recycling separated out and see if things are being disposed. Of correctly and assess if staff training is needed. Keeping stock. Of the type and quantity of waste and where it's going is key to. Making decisions that have less impact on the environment. In fact. This is exactly how they transitioned to recycling their lab plastics. [00:04:27] Samantha tells us . While they're lightweight. There's a lot of it. We looked into how we could improve this and ended up finding. The plastics, recycling options. [00:04:37] And tip number four is to get involved. Jackson family wines. Cambria's has parent company take sustainability. To the next level with their program rooted for good a roadmap. Map to 2030. It's a 10-year sustainability and climate. Action plan that outlines the goals and initiatives designed to. Lead climate solutions. Create a positive social impact. And support the Jackson family's long-term vision for a sustainable. , future. [00:05:03] Part of. Their plan centers around social responsibility and their employees. Play a significant role through volunteerism. Every employee gets. To paid. Facility. Volunteer days per year. To head out and do good as a group. Plus one to two paid personal. , volunteer days to find other opportunities that align with their values. [00:05:24] They help their communities by volunteering for local events. Cleaning up trash at beaches and historical sites and much more. [00:05:31] Their staff have volunteered over 6,000. hours. That's the equivalent of one person working nearly three. Years of 40 hour work weeks. [00:05:40] With the business behind the team and supporting their. Community. It's no surprise that everyone really enjoys. . Community service days. [00:05:46] Let us know how you have made your winery more sustainable. [00:05:50] Listen up sip certified members offer your club members. . The chance to experience yours and other SIP certified brands in February. 2025. ReSIProcal February is an annual month. , long event that offers tasting rooms, the opportunity to increase their traffic. And connect with like-minded wine enthusiasts who value sustainability. . We're enrolling participants now just go to sipcertified.org/join-resip-2025 to. Get signed up. You can also find that link in the show notes. [00:06:23] Until next time. Time. This is sustainable wine growing with the vineyard team.   Nearly perfect transcript by Descript. Resources: *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course *** Apply for SIP Certified Wine Join ReSIProcal February 2025 Marketing Tips eNewsletter Sustainable Story | Print Sustainable Story | Electronic What's your Sustainable Story? Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member

NASA has connected data about the Earth’s surface since 1972. One of the first applications was for agriculture. Alyssa Whitcraft, Executive Director of NASA Acres grew up in the wine industry at her family’s property, Whitcraft Winery, located in Santa Barbara California. Her goal is to make it easier for people and organizations to use satellite data to improve agriculture. Alyssa explains how different types of satellites including polar-orbiting and geostationary collect information that can be calibrated against crop-specific data to develop predictive models. Farmers can use these models to identify viral, fungal, bacterial, water, and nutrient stressors and forecast harvest. While this technology is being used in commodity crops today, there is a huge opportunity for specialty crops.  Resources:         129: The Efficient Vineyard Project 199: NASA Satellites Detect Grapevine Diseases from Space 233: The Gap Between Space and Farm: Ground Truthing Satellite Data Models Alyssa Whitcraft Group on Earth Observations Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM)  NASA Acres NASA Harvest Whitcraft Winery Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript [00:00:00] [00:00:04] Beth Vukmanic: NASA has collected data about the earth surface since 1972, One of the first applications was for agriculture. Welcome to sustainable wine growing with the vineyard team, where we bring you the latest in science and research for the wine industry. I'm Beth. Vukmanic executive director. Since 1994 vineyard team has brought you the latest science-based practices, experts, growers, and wine industry tools through both in-field and online education, so that you can grow your business. Please raise a glass with us as we cheers to 30 years. [00:00:39] And today's podcast Craig Macmillan, critical resource manager at Niner wine estates with long time sip certified vineyard and the first ever sip certified winery. Speaks with Alyssa Woodcraft, executive director of NASA acres. She grew up in the wine industry at her family's property. Whitcraft winery located in Santa Barbara, California. [00:01:01] Alyssa's goal is to make it easier for people and organizations to use satellite data, to improve ag. Alissa explains how different types of satellites, including polar orbiting and geostationary collect information that can be calibrated against crop specific data to develop predictive models. Farmers can then use these models to identify viral, fungal bacteria, water, and nutrients stressors. And forecast harvest. While, this technology is being used in commodity crops today. There was huge opportunity for specialty crops. [00:01:35] Alyssa is involved in numerous organizations and projects. So I highly recommend that you visit our show notes. And check out her website. [00:01:43] If you want access to more viticulture research and technology from the world's top experts, then you won't want to miss the premier Winegrowing event of the year. The sustainable ag expo enjoy the perfect blend of in-person and online learning. Speak directly with national experts. Earn over 20 hours of continuing education and explore sustainable ag vendors. It all takes place November 11th through 13th, 2024 in San Luis Obispo, California. As a listener to this podcast. Make sure you use discount code podcast 24 at checkout to take $50 off of your ticket. Register [00:02:19] today at sustainableagexpo.org. Now let's listen [00:02:27] Craig Macmillan: Welcome to Sustainable Wine Growing with Vineyard Team. Our guest today is Alyssa Whitcraft. She is Executive Director of NASA Acres, and we're going to talk about all kinds of exciting stuff that she's involved with, and I'll let her explain those. Thanks for being on the podcast, Alyssa. [00:02:43] Alyssa Whitcraft: Thank you for inviting me. [00:02:45] Craig Macmillan: You're involved in a whole bunch of different projects and consortiums and programs mostly around remote sensing and agriculture. [00:02:53] And you're excited about a number of different things in your field. What exactly is your field? I think it's a good place to start because I think a lot of people don't understand what it is. [00:03:01] Alyssa Whitcraft: I'm a geographer, which is basically the world's oldest discipline. We use the lens of space and place and location to understand the world. And knowing that things that are near to one another tend to have more in common than things that are far from one another. And similarly, we know that where you are in the world matters for all sorts of different things. And that's really the lens through which I see and understand the world. Specifically within geography, because geography is a very broad discipline, my expertise is in using satellite data and other Earth observations to understand what's happening across the world in principally agriculture. I've done work in the past in forestry as well. [00:03:47] Craig Macmillan: What kinds of things does this field have coming in the future? What are the things that you're most excited about in terms of all the different work that you're doing? [00:03:55] Alyssa Whitcraft: Would it be helpful if I gave a little bit of history, or is that too much info? [00:03:59] Craig Macmillan: . Please, please. [00:04:01] Alyssa Whitcraft: Sure. So a lot of people don't realize that satellite data has been collected of the Earth's surface since 1972. NASA launched its first satellite back then, and one of its first applications was agriculture. It was really for looking at global forecasting, production forecasting, and things like that in areas where We couldn't gather statistics like the USSR, for example. And so that was very early. [00:04:29] They thought, hey, we really need to understand what's happening with the global food production, global food supply. What kind of prices are we going to be able to get? Those were the very earliest experiments. And a lot of years have passed since then. It's 52 years now. That particular satellite was called Landsat. Well, it's called ERTS 1. It's been, renamed Landsat 1 in hindsight and they've just launched Landsat 9 two years ago. So we've really, we have a lot of series of it now with continuity of data for 52 years from that satellite, that mission alone. there's a huge plethora of other types of data though that are also collected. Landsat, for example, its characteristics are, it passes over the same place every 16 days at about 30 meter resolution. So 100 feet by 100 feet, about a football field, and then there's other satellites that pass over every day and they might have much coarser spatial resolution. So 250 meters by 250 meters, for example. And then there's also recently, because storage is cheap and the Internet is fast, there's a proliferation of these very fine spatial resolution satellites where you can tell almost down to the plant level. [00:05:38] Definitely tree level, what you're looking at, that's quite fine in resolution and still have some degree of rich spectral information. And what I mean when I say that is basically everything around us is reflecting light all the time or emitting light. And we only see a little tiny piece of it, the visible spectrum. [00:06:00] That's why it's called the visible. But there's so much richness, on both sides of the visible spectrum. So longer wavelengths and shorter wavelengths, and they tell us all kinds of things about what's going on with a surface. we see vegetation as green because that's what it's reflecting. But there's other things in near infrared that can tell us about vegetation health. Or sort of mid range infrared that can tell us about water stress, things like this. And so now we have more and more spectral information, more and more frequently and finer and finer spatial resolution. [00:06:35] So our ability to see a great deal of detail has come a really long way. And still just like kind of any instrument you use, your ability to do something useful with it is contingent upon its quality and also the quality of the kind of science that you use to interpret the data and turn it into information. [00:06:58] Craig Macmillan: What kinds of information is this data being turned into? And on what kinds of or agrosystems? [00:07:06] Alyssa Whitcraft: All over the world. There's two broad classes of satellites. One is called polar orbiting. So it's going around the poles and it returns to look at the same spot every, you know, it's governed by its orbit and a couple of other things. I said Landsat was 16 days, for example and others can be much more frequently or even longer. So that's one kind, polar orbiting. The other type is geostationary, which means that as the earth turns, it's always looking at the same spot. And that's what most of the sort of weather satellites are. So that's why you can get really like frequently every 15 minutes, like a radar image, for example. all that's to say, like a lot of the satellites we use are polar orbiting, and that means it's not biased toward only collecting data over the United States. [00:07:48] It's collecting data all over the world. In the past, because. storage was expensive. There wasn't very much storage capacity on the spacecrafts. You couldn't store it all. They used to have to select which images they were going to capture. So it might be passing over a surface, but it wouldn't turn the camera on. And only about, I want to say 2012, 2013 was when Landsat started acquiring almost every single opportunity. And not just capturing something like A third of the daylit scenes that could capture every day. so all that's to say, we now have like so much rich coverage the last 12 or so years with that kind of satellite. So that means like we're getting observations of the earth's surface where everywhere agriculture is grown at least every day, depending on the type of satellite you're talking about. And even for the finer resolution ones, you're getting it every day. 10 days, maybe once you are to 20 days once you account for cloud cover in a lot of areas. [00:08:44] Craig Macmillan: what kinds of decisions can people make regarding how they farm based on this kind of information? And my understanding is that this is public information, is that correct? [00:08:53] Alyssa Whitcraft: What I talked about was sort of where you can collect information. It's all over. It's not you know, biased toward any particular region per se. By virtue of that, it's not necessarily biased toward any one crop because it's collecting all those data. So those observations exist, but our ability to turn them into information is contingent upon how much we've studied that, that item. And, and how much what it, the light that it reflects in the satellite picks up on is related to whatever it is that we're trying to study. So that's to say if a satellite only collects visible information, then we're not going to be able to talk about sort of some of the items associated with chlorophyll content and like health of the plant. Or if it doesn't collect the long infrared or mid infrared you're going to miss out on information about water, things like that. [00:09:41] And that's just kind of a simplified answer to that piece. And so we're able to collect all kinds of variables. In my work, we've called them essential agriculture variables. they're basically core building blocks, variables that we can measure and infer about the earth based on satellite data about the state, what the change has been over time and what the forecast is to the future. [00:10:02] We can look at, Hey, what kind of crop is being cultivated here right now? We can see how has that changed over the last 10 years? We can look at, okay, this is the current condition. What's the forecast for harvest this year? different things like that. We can also do within season detection of certain stressors, biotic and abiotic stress. [00:10:22] So you know, can be viral, fungal, bacterial diseases water stress that can help with precision kind of irrigation scheduling. We can also look at you know, when you couple that with like short term weather forecasts, you can see, okay, there's going to be really high demand evaporative demand. And so we need to think about maybe irrigating or doing something in advance to prep the vegetation for that. You can also use it for nutrient applications. So, this is primarily in row crops so not really vineyards per se. But, we can take a look at what the current nutrient status is. Nitrogen, if it's nitrogen deficient, then you are only applying what it needs and not too much. Same goes with pesticides. You're not just doing blanket spraying. You can do early detection and mitigation. With nitrogen, you only apply how much is needed and where it's needed, which has important environmental benefits. It also helps the farmers sort of bottom line, not wasting money. And also in terms of a fertile excess fertilizer being applied and also not leaving money on the farm by not applying enough. It can be really helpful in kind of zeroing in on what intervention needs to be done and what you can prepare for at the end of the season. [00:11:32] Craig Macmillan: I'm just thinking through this, so you would have to have some crop specific, and maybe even region specific on the ground work in order to make the connection, the correlation between, I'm getting this reading, and then this is what's going on with the plants. [00:11:47] Alyssa Whitcraft: Yes. Yep. That's completely accurate. And I'm really glad you said it because there is a perspective on satellite data that it's magic, that you just take the image and you have the information. And that's just like not really how it works. Now we're getting more and more sophisticated models out there, but all models have to be trained on something. And just because I've trained it on a ton of corn in Iowa doesn't mean it's going to work on corn in Argentina. Like that's just not necessarily how these things work. some people call it ground truth. I prefer to call it training data, validation data. you know, in situ site data, things like that, comparison data. And the reason for that nuance is just to say that there is error in all measurement. So just because if your scale is calibrated wrong and you say, this is, this was my harvest, this was my yield, then that's not necessarily ground truthed see what I mean? So, and I think that that's an important point to make because we're trying to add an additional piece of measurement to the picture, right? [00:12:48] It can give you more frequent. more coverage deeper spectral information. It can a lot, but it's a piece, it's a component of a multi source decision support system. We say like garbage in garbage out on the remote sensing side of things. Our observations are very good, but you know, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of engineering in the sensors and the satellites to go up into space. So those are incredibly high quality and the space agencies who fly them they do a lot of expensive CalVal, it's called, so they go and they make sure that the instruments like, you know, The analogy in your kitchen would be you stick your thermometer in boiling water to make sure 212 Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius is exactly what your thermometer is picking up, right? So we do the same thing with satellites. that's great for the reflectance or for the wavelengths, but that's not information. So then what we go out, we might take some tissue samples. To understand what's happening with nutrients with pest and disease stuff, some soil samples for that purpose. Or for some of the more like workhorse, what we've been doing with satellite data for a lot longer, those are more novel applications. The lot much longer is what's growing where where it is. What's the season. Like why is it. Kind of just at the early part, is it flowering, reproductive, is it toward harvest and then also yield. [00:14:09] And so we go out, we take crop cuts, we do things like that, then we calibrate our observations or our models against those data, and then we can run a predictive model that can tell us for the same site in another year, or more commonly you take it from that site and then generalize it. to where you have satellite data that are continuous, like so you have a whole an image, but you don't have any training data from this vineyard over here. So you take the training data from this vineyard and see if you can use it to identify what's happening in other vineyards. And then you assess, how well did I do off of another set of data that's from the ground. [00:14:46] Craig Macmillan: And so I would imagine that that kind of work is done extensively in agronomic crops, or what we might call staple crops, you know, rice, maize, soy, things like that, wheat. But you can do this with specialty crops as well. You mentioned vineyards. If there is interest and if there is funding, we can do this kind of work and bring vineyards into this this, this kind of process, this kind of science. [00:15:11] Alyssa Whitcraft: Yeah. I mean, you're spot on. Like I said earlier, the earliest applications of satellite data. Were in kind of global production forecasting with the reason being that wheat prices, for example, are incredibly correlated with conflict. So as wheat prices go up, you see more human conflict. And so these are the huge drivers of global trends in prices, in food security, all these kinds of things that are really important to track. And so the, you know, the early app applications were really for that type of crop and for very large scale forecasting in the sort of 80s, 90s was when you started to see some of the precision management. So on farm information but perhaps not as much as people hoped for in in this kind of satellite world, there was a lot of unsuccessful startups and, and things like that. I think the big reason for that is like, if you're going out and scouting your 10 acre vineyard, like you can generally walk it. It's not a big deal. You're not driving a combine through. My family's in the wine business and I grew up walking vineyards with my dad and taking tissue samples and taking fruit samples and doing things like, it was just a part of the day, you know, if you're farming 10, 000 acres, that's not viable. [00:16:30] And so you're, you have, million dollar combine to these days and things like that. That's something with autonomous driving, you can program a great deal of information into it. sort of like historically, there just wasn't necessarily the, like. The demand for what satellite data could offer, you know, it was focused on kind of like yield and nutrients and water. [00:16:49] There just wasn't the same use case in, in specialty crops. In a lot of ways, especially since some of them are growing greenhouses. So like, we're kind of out of luck with that. And so, yeah, whoops, but that things have just changed. We have better satellites now that collect more information more spectral information, higher spatial resolution, more frequently, we can process so much more data now, which means. [00:17:14] we can kind of just keep throwing more and more data at a model until it picks up some signal that we never could have anticipated. That's kind of the basis of machine learning or artificial intelligence is that you just keep going like feeding it until you see if something comes out. That also has its own problems. [00:17:31] Pretty funny fails AI. I think we've seen before the models get overtrained and it's very. clear that they don't work once they're over trained. They, they spit out like a baby with three hands AI image. And you're like, that's not, that's not right. Or I saw a matzah ball on a plate. It was like, rather than like a soup dumpling, it was like a tennis ball that was like matzah colored. I was like, that's not right either. You know, it's funny things like that. So the same thing can happen when we're looking at, you know, the earth's surface as well. [00:18:00] Craig Macmillan: you are executive director of NASA Acres. That name has come up in a couple of other interviews. Could you explain, , what NASA Acres is and what you folks do? [00:18:09] Alyssa Whitcraft: Yeah, sure thing. [00:18:10] So NASA Acres is NASA's U. S. focused Applied Sciences [00:18:15] So why, that's kind of a long title, NASA is principally a research agency. Now, it's not it's not USDA where it does farm services or loans or reports on statistics and agriculture. It's famous for people putting a man on the moon and missions to Mars, but NASA has this whole huge earth science division. within that, there's you know, the, the component that's dedicated to launching the satellites and making the data really high quality. And then there's an accessible data, high quality and data accessible. And then there's sort of like the core foundational research, which is. We've never used satellite data to measure this thing before, or we have used satellite data, but now we're just going to apply it elsewhere and do a study that results in a paper. [00:18:56] So we learn a thing. That's research and analysis in NASA, and then there's applied sciences and earth action, which is, it's kind of new manifestation in NASA, which is like trying to take this data and really make an impact, really get the information, the data, the tools in the hands of people who are addressing, in our case, agricultural challenges. [00:19:19] So that's farmers, that's ranchers. That's people in the ag value chain that's ag retailers, all the, I mean, there's a whole bunch of people in here who can benefit in some way from this data. And our job is to work with them to advance the science as much as possible because NASA's brand is really like quality, right? [00:19:39] And then, but also neutrality. And so we kind of just try and lift. the floor, so to speak, make the quality as good as possible, advance the science, and then hope that the private sector that's out there that's serving people in agriculture can sustain the services or, and, and really be adding value to people in agriculture long, long after our projects end. [00:20:00] Craig Macmillan: And so that, that's going to be where the next link is, is the private sector picking up this information, this data, and then figuring out how they can use it for their client base, maybe for a specific crop or a specific region, and then we can we'll see some development there. we've seen with like material science, I think is a classic example of that, you know the space program resulted in a lot of advances in materials that now we don't even think about. They're part of our everyday life, [00:20:27] Alyssa Whitcraft: Yeah, like the blankets run a [00:20:30] NASA, more than just Tang, you know, when I'm trying to like get across to people that, the planet we study most is Earth to quote Karen St. Germain, who's the Earth Science Division Director for NASA. I mean, material science is a really good example, but we have it so much in all these things that like, be them weather and climate services That's, you know, Noah's job principally to create the kind of forecasting models that are pushed out when we're talking about the United States. [00:21:02] There's people all over the world doing it and then like weather channel or weather underground or whatever, build services on top of that. And then that's like what faces the consumer. So it's all kind of a part of an important chain. And in fact, NASA is in the background collaborating with Noah on this information as well. for us in the agriculture side of things NASA harvest, which still continues today as NASA's global agriculture applied sciences program. But from 2017, when it started until 2022, it was the whole kit and caboodle. So both us global international, the whole thing. And then they split the programs. [00:21:39] So into Acres and Harvest. I was the deputy director and program manager for NASA Harvest from when it started until I took over the helm and founded NASA Acres in 2023. NASA Harvest, there's a great example of commercialization or of, of really strong collaboration with the private sector. Which is when the Ukraine war began there was obviously a huge hole in information all of a sudden about what on earth was going to happen with the food that comes out of Ukraine, which between Russia and Ukraine, it's 30 percent of the world's wheat, wheat's very correlated with conflict to begin with. And there's certain partners who are a hundred percent reliant upon imports from Ukraine and or Russia of wheat. , you don't just go drive down the street to the next grocery store and pick up your wheat. Like this is billions, trillions of dollars of movement that can't pivot overnight. So the potential implications were massive. And the more information you have earlier to plan for that, the better. And that's where satellite data came to bear. You couldn't send field agents out when there's an active war happening to be like, what was planted? Is it growing? Are farmers? Applying nutrients. [00:22:50] Is it going to be harvested? Things like that. NASA Harvest partnered with a number of organizations, but one was a private space company called Planet who collects sub meter and three meter data. daily with they have many, many small satellites and so they're, these are not the three, 400 million satellites that NASA flies. [00:23:08] These are much less expensive and they can fly way more of them. They're much smaller. They're a very different satellite. But they're great for getting high spatial resolution often. And when you can't go out and collect ground data. to do training on your images. Was this planted? Was this not planted? [00:23:25] This appears to be this crop. This appears to be this crop. Satellite data of that kind are very helpful. And so then we would use that to train some of the other satellites that have perhaps richer spectral information or other qualities that we might look for in a certain analysis. [00:23:40] And because we had this partnership with Planet, they were going out and collecting the data. We were able to do this analysis. talk about, you know, what we expected to see in terms of wheat harvest that year and sunflower and corn and rapeseed and all these really critical crops that Ukraine exports and help us prepare and mitigate any potential food security crisis and then Planet. [00:24:03] On the flip side, they've suddenly made a huge impact with their data. And they've additionally been able to, you know, we do a lot of work on the. nitty gritty of the engineering of radiometric calibration and things like that. We also can support them in improving their imagery. And then now they have a use case in agriculture and all these different kind of things by partnering with us. But we've also advanced the models and the science and the knowledge that's all a public benefit. And so that's like a really lovely investment from the federal government that kind of has this big societal benefit, but then also supports the private sector and continued innovation and services. [00:24:37] Craig Macmillan: in this case, it allows for the prediction of what may be available right? [00:24:43] Alyssa Whitcraft: Yeah. In that example, for sure. The war broke out in February and the winter wheat harvest would have been, gosh, like may to June. You're looking to see how was the, was this coming back after winter? We're, what was the condition of the crop at a baseline? Were people able to apply nutrients of any kind? And once harvest time came. Were people able to go down in the field to harvest or did they not do it because they had been killed or evacuated or because there's unexploded ordinances in their field and things like this. [00:25:13] And so that was really the beginning of the analysis and then it, it continued for other crops into the future. And it's a really rich ongoing project about which you can find copious resources online. [00:25:26] Craig Macmillan: how are we doing on, on those areas? Are there people that are stepping up in the private sector to work on that. [00:25:31] Alyssa Whitcraft: Definitely. Yeah, there are. The public sector, you know, my side of the house is too. but it's interesting. it's an interesting point because we focus so much on agronomic crops. We've done that because there's a really clear reason to invest public dollars. I think the very early stage collaboration with the private sector for specialty crops is much more critical than it was for these kind of big agronomic crops. So that means from the odd outset. the projects need to have very engaged partners from the private sector. It might be in the form of just working directly with the vineyard so that they can kind of maybe collect some of the ground data or if we're developing a tool, they can kind of like test it and provide feedback, things like that. [00:26:14] But then there's going to be other circumstances where we might be trying to use a compendium of information. So you might be using some soil sensing to look at water status. But it's like, you can't place a million of them in your field. So, you know, you might take the benefit, the accuracy, the depth that you get from those expensive and ground instruments, and then try to pair them with the satellites and then build like kind of a hybrid measurement system. [00:26:41] You get the benefit of the update frequency the satellites and the spatial coverage, of course. And then you get like the really good quality. measurements within the field. we've seen a lot of burgeoning partnerships in specialty crops and of course also agronomic commodity crops as well, but where we're trying to look at a hybrid network of in ground sensors or canopy sensors or drones. side canopy robots that my colleague Katie Gold, who was on your, podcast before, she uses these robots, Katie Gold and Yu Jiang, her collaborator at Cornell to, to sort of build toward the long term adoption of, of these, actually not even long term, to build toward the short and medium term adoption of these things, because that's real, it's really going to sustain them, NASA projects. typically three years acres and harvests are each in five year kind of increments harvest was renewed and For its global work and spit off its domestic work. And so hopefully we will be renewed as well But it's not the design of federal research to like provide every service forever We need to work with the people who need the information Because they're gonna tell us what to do and what like what matters to them You and then we need to work with the people who can kind of own the services long term and maintain those high touch relationships with their customers, growers, ag retailers, whomever it might be. [00:28:04] Craig Macmillan: Spain, places like that Australia? [00:28:06] Alyssa Whitcraft: You this is an area I'm definitely less comfortable talking about. within NASA Acres, we really only have Katie and you's project that's in specialty crops. And that's principally just by virtue of all the things I described. It's really only been the last four or five years that this stuff has started blossoming. And even within Katie's project. She's not using satellite data really, right now, she's done some demonstration stuff. We're preparing for a NASA instrument to launch in 2028. And we're doing years of preparatory work. NASA has an airborne fleet. People don't know that. And it's collecting very similar data to what will on this satellite SBG. Also, there's a sensor mounted on. The International Space Station called EMIT that also collects similar information. So we're already using that, but we're kind of like priming the pump for primetime, right? So Katie is very, Katie is like a very kind of ahead of the curve kind of situation person. The spectroscopy of the laboratory stuff, we all, we all know that it's been around for a long time, but the imaging capability to do it outside is novel. And so she and Yu are kind of working together on that. I don't have another project in my portfolio that does that right now. We are looking at using those data similarly, the hyperspectral is what it's called, data. We're starting to try and build use cases in rangeland monitoring as well for rotational grazing. [00:29:33] So looking at forage quality, it's not just a matter of whether the biomass comes back, it's whether it's the right biomass, so the right mixture of different crops. If you've overgrazed an area, you'll just get like the one dominant. type of grass will come back, and that's not very nutrient dense, and it's not very sustainable, it's not very regenerative. If you don't overgraze an area, then things will grow back in a more balanced way, and that's something that we're trying to explore, how well satellites can pick up that heterogeneity in the landscape. That's an example there. I'm aware of some work in sort of olive groves in Spain, in Italy And I know there are some companies who have attempted to do kind of proxy measurements of shade coffee and cocoa. Very high value crops, but you can't see them because they're under the canopy of another tree. And there's been a lot of different experimental ways of trying to get at that. But in terms of my understanding of how successful those different cases have been. It's a little outside my wheelhouse. It's pretty novel. and yeah, I mean, I, the, the thing about being an applied sciences program, we're not the foundational research RNA. So what that means is like, we've got to kind of see the science demonstrated fairly firmly for it to move into a major part of the portfolio. [00:30:53] That said, like there are some projects in my portfolio that are higher risk or that like, you know, that delivery might be a few years off because of the lack of instrumentation. And there are some stuff that's more experimental, but where those are the case like that Rangeland project or Katie's project That's because we have super engaged users already. So there's ranchers who are at the table for another purpose. Katie is, you know, an extension agent for Cornell working with grape and apple growers, and they want to know how to manage this. [00:31:23] So she already has engaged parties. So having the satellite stuff be like maybe a little bit more nascent and its development cycle is okay versus, you know, where we don't necessarily have the strongest user. identified and partnered already, we're kind of relying on the more mature applications and starting to kind of transition that stuff out more quickly to broader audiences. [00:31:45] Craig Macmillan: How can the wine grape industry or other crops, support this and encourage research in their particular area? [00:31:54] Alyssa Whitcraft: There's legwork on both sides meaning that we need to be with the communities we live and work in. Thank you. to get those people involved in what we have to offer. So it's like there's a trust building component, there's an awareness building component and then there's also just the participate if somebody contacts you about being in a study or, you know, by word of mouth, Oh, this vineyard down the road is doing it. [00:32:17] Like, maybe we'll do it here. I trust that person's discretion, so I'll do it here. Collaborating and being active in that research from the NASA acres perspective is, is really important. And more than just really from the NASA acres perspective, from really the kind of, you know, we're neutral, we're trying to build quality, we're trying to raise the floor. [00:32:36] So even if you come, you know, you come through us, we hopefully make things better, which feeds back benefits to you in your, in your operation, but also to your kind of broader industry. So there are some vineyards, for example that I have personal relationships with from my whole life. And when Katie and I started collaborating and, you know, just generally sharing passions for a number of things, including wine and remote sensing, She asked if I had any, you know, friends who would let her take tissue samples who thought they might have particular diseases or were just curious to collaborate so that she could kind of do this proof of concept of these technologies and do these studies. And I was like, yeah, probably. So I just shot a couple of friends text messages and they were all like, sure. And the thing is, is like, they know me, right? And so they know that I'm not going to Never do anything intentional to bring harm. And I certainly would also go work very hard to make sure that even something I hadn't foreseen was protected. And I think that that's actually so critical, probably in every industry, but I'm most comfortable in agriculture. Like these are strong communities of trust that are built up. You know, you knew my dad and when I was 15 he had a major surgery in kind of mid, late August which coincides nicely with harvest, the beginning of harvest. [00:33:57] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, the wine grape harvest in california. [00:33:59] Alyssa Whitcraft: exactly. My dad was a winemaker in in Santa Barbara County, and that's where I grew up And I grew up in the winery so yeah when I was 15 He got he got really sick And he had to have a surgery and he was in the ICU for like a week and after that like it takes a while to recover so people that he had mentored, people who he had been close with for, you know, 20 odd years, 25 years in, in the region just kind of stepped up and processed his fruit, you know? [00:34:28] So one, you miss one harvest, you're donezo, you know? Like that's just not how things work in the wine business. And my brother, who's now the winemaker, was only 19 at the time. So like, technically he wasn't even old enough to drink wine legally, but like, you know, he was there kind of. Running the ship with, you know, the huge support of these family friends who made it happen. So all that's to say, like those trust networks are everything in, in agriculture and everything in sort of agri food and like I said, probably other industries too, but I just don't know them. That's certainly the case in agriculture. And we're not going to make any like progress unless we build those trust relationships. [00:35:08] And then since we can't meet everybody face to face, we need you know, those people to then be the hinge points to bring their, their kind of collaborators, colleagues, friends business partners, whatever, to the table to tell us what they need, to tell us what they want, give us feedback on what we've done and then work with us if they see value. [00:35:27] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, I'm thinking of there are a number of organizations in the United States, in the wine industry, that fund or promote research on particular topics, and I can see there might be an opening there. you know, talking about trust, folks that have gotten awards, farmers that have been collaborators on these projects. I think it's a good place to start. For these new technologies. I think it's an interesting idea. I hadn't really thought about it that way. And I'm definitely going to take, take that away with me when I go to some of, these meetings. , and some of these, , some of these, , review, , committee [00:35:57] Alyssa Whitcraft: Related to that, so one of the things we're just beginning to kind of explore the logistics of how we would implement it is identifying sort of farmer champions or kind of innovation partners. I don't know exactly what we want to call them, but they're people who are like amenable a collaboration [00:36:17] , everybody only has so much time. So it takes time to do these things together. So if you have like a real passion or a real interest, it's something you might more willing to do. It helps us do it. the most good the most quickly. , so we're kind of looking at creating this kind of collaborator farmer innovation partner kind of thing where we work, you know, on their farms, they kind of give detailed feedback. [00:36:38] They serve as different kind of hinge points, , to meet people in their community and really be champions we're doing, but also like not just be our hype guys and hype girls out there, but just be like, Hey, what you're doing makes no sense. Or like your aunt, you know, that's great that you created this capability. [00:36:55] That gives me a forecast every week. I need it every day. Not useful to me. Things like that. So the frank feedback, , early adopters, but high touch early adopters, people who really are passionate about benefiting their industry and communities. [00:37:10] Craig Macmillan: the state of the, world right now you've mentioned nations, lots of different crops, lots of, different technologies in your work and also kind of in the future, what's happening now to move all of this forward and where do you see it going? [00:37:23] Alyssa Whitcraft: not to you know, date myself, somehow I'm one of like, the more se, I don't know senior is the right word, but like I'm no longer the young in this world. And so I've been around long enough that I started remote sensing in remote sensing of agriculture before. [00:37:39] was really on an upward trajectory. Things have changed the last 15 or 16 years. But when things were really was the food price spikes in 2008 and 2011 that led to huge, push over a billion people into chronic food insecurity. It's horrible. So let's launch this called GeoGLAN Geo Global Monitoring that's going to use satellite data to give us information about, crop production globally. [00:38:05] Some 40 odd years passed when. NASA first started doing it with Landsat. Within that GeoGLAM initiative, I was program and still in program scientist one of them. And my specific role is I work with the different space agencies in the world on developing new missions for agriculture. [00:38:20] I basically advocate for the agriculture community to make sure we get the observations we need to do our analyses. what started out is very much this like food security, markets and trade kind of stuff. Segwayed over time, as the field grew, changed, ag tech blossoming, whatever it might be. [00:38:38] And around 2019 2020 was when my specific focus started turning a little bit more, not stuff, but started zeroing in on the kind of farm level stuff. Because I got really interested in the way my discipline, my methods, my tools increasingly being used in the sort of sustainable ecosystem services marketplace. [00:39:01] Without there being a whole lot of kind of methods, development, calibration, validation, like, yeah, we can, you know, create a map, but is it any good kind of thing? Or yeah, we can create a model, but does it work? People were coming to us with the NASA harvest name and the NASA kind of name and saying, can you validate this? [00:39:17] Can you do And we all felt pretty strongly that our role was really to lift. votes for everyone. That's where we zeroed in on that topic wise in the Harvest Sustainable And Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, which we call Harvestera. I'm also the executive director of that. all these tools have advanced. [00:39:35] The need has advanced. The audience's kind of openness has advanced. The kind of critical need for us to use agriculture as a tool belt to restore ecosystem health, soil health in rich communities and fight climate change, it all kind of needs to start at a baseline of understanding where we are and where we can go. [00:39:54] And so I see satellite big part of that. This is all kind of coming together now. We still need the public sector's investment in terms of high quality observations. access, the lifting of the science in order for that to really take flight and be reliable and be good. that work that I've done for 12, 14, something like that, 13 years now through GeoGland with the space agencies has recently been morphing, into not just advocating for food security and market applications, but also saying, you guys, we got to think about ecosystem services. [00:40:25] We have to think about sustainable management. Got to think about the precision. And so the space agencies are now receiving this message that there's a whole new set of value propositions for their data, but also the public sector pushing that direction. [00:40:39] And then we like kind of push together. Toward impact. [00:40:42] Craig Macmillan: one message that you would want to tell wine growers regarding this topic? [00:40:46] Alyssa Whitcraft: Gosh, one message. [00:40:48] Craig Macmillan: Two? [00:40:51] Alyssa Whitcraft: Oh man, I guess you know, I think what a lot in my field don't think a lot about is quality Of the crops. We tend to think about quantity. Of the crops. and as a result, we can kind of answer use the wrong, use the wrong approach, answer the wrong question. And for specialty crops and I think, you know, what's finer than fine wine in, in terms of how much finesse you have to have from the 25 plus year old vines through bottling. [00:41:20] What kind of needs a higher attention to quality I think that. for the grape growing community, particularly for wine and fine wine. they could maybe help shape this and push this, put out the demand there and say like, I don't need you to tell me how to absolutely maximize, make the like juiciest, wateriest, highest volume of berries. [00:41:40] Like I need to know how to make the best quality. I need to know how to prevent losses related to extreme weather. I need to make sure I don't have my die that, I've been cultivating for so long to build these beautiful old growing and all that, they're more important than maybe they realize they are in this space and could push to really move our science and usership toward quality more than perhaps we have historically. [00:42:03] Craig Macmillan: and I really appreciate you sharing that. This has all made me think about an interview that I did recently with an extensionist from Texas A& M we were chatting after the interview actually about climate change. She said, there is not a single grower in the state of Texas that is a climate denier. [00:42:22] Everybody sees it. It is getting hotter. And things are changing and they're going to have to change. There's no doubt about it. And that reminds me of changes in other agro systems. over time whether it's changes in the way the soil fertility is, or changes in rainfall, or changes in disease patterns. I think there's applications, especially in areas that are suffering extreme stresses now, that'll apply to places that'll suffer extreme stresses, maybe a little bit later. [00:42:49] So I think that's a great message that we can bring to These programs say, Hey, we need. And here's maybe how can we do it? How can we benefit from what you're already doing? I think that's a great message. Where can people find out more about you? [00:43:01] Alyssa Whitcraft: if you want to find out more about NASA acres, you can go to org. If you want to find out more about the Harvest Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, that would be HarvestSara. org basically any program I've said today, you can just put a org at the end and it'll work. And if you want to learn about my family winery, it's WittcraftWinery. com And just shout out to my dad, my mom, and my brother for kind of sparking and maintaining my love of and interest in food and wine. [00:43:33] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, And just on a personal note your dad, Chris was a mentor of mine. It was one of the first winemakers That I worked side by side with and had a huge impact on me. Especially around the idea of quality. [00:43:43] Alyssa Whitcraft: Okay, so not to totally digress here, Maybe it's germane to the topic, which is I was pre med at UCLA. And I took a a geography general ed course called people in Earth's ecosystems just to fulfill a gen ed requirement and fell in love. And that professor bonded. and he did a lot of remote sensing of tropical I took his remote sensing class. We were supposed to. pick a and design it. And the picked was trying to. Compare every single metric that we could derive from satellite data for Conti, with, with some vineyards that my dad sourced from at the time so like Bien Nacido. Obeying these different vineyards and trying like in compare, I mean, it was the polar opposite of a robust study. I was like 20 and it was my first remote sensing class, but it really like capped my interest because trying to understand. Obviously there's the climate pieces to some degree, there's the soil pieces, but you know, my dad was the first or one of the first at least to do the blocks designation in wine. [00:44:45] So he had N block and Q block and Bien Nacido. And I was like, well, what was it? characteristic that made them sort of different? Could you come up with that in a way, not that we should quantify and sanitize everything because there's certainly a je about these things, but like, what is it that creates quality, ? [00:45:01] , and what of it is sort of biophysical in nature and could be measured and that kind of really sparked the interest that shaped the rest of my career. [00:45:09] Craig Macmillan: That's fantastic. I really want to thank you for being on the podcast. Our guest today was Alyssa Whitcraft. She's executive director of NASA acres, fascinating conversation and tying together some pieces from previous podcasts. Yeah, just thanks for being a guest [00:45:24] Beth Vukmanic: thank you for listening. Today's podcast was brought to you by, Baicor. A manufacturer of fertilizers, specializing in liquids for foliar and soil applications. By course, plant nutrients are 100% environmentally friendly and organically based. Each is specifically formulated to provide the optimum level of nutrients, plants need. Baicor's products. Are created from organic and amino acids found naturally in plants and in the soil. They use the finest natural materials. Blended scientifically to assure quality and effectiveness. [00:46:02] Make sure you check out the show notes for links to Alyssa NASA harvest NASA acres plus sustainable Winegrowing podcast episodes 199 NASA satellites to detect grapevine diseases from space. And 233, the gap between space and farm ground-truthing satellite data models. [00:46:21] If you'd like the show, do us a big favor by sharing it with a friend subscribing and leaving us a review. Until next time, this is a sustainable Winegrowing with the vineyard team. Nearly perfect transcription by Descript

[00:00:00] As a member of a sustainably minded ag business, you have the potential to shape the way people view our food system. [00:00:07] Welcome to marketing tip Monday with SIP Certified. We know that customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer-form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry. These twice-monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable winegrowing. [00:00:27] There is a dramatic difference between how consumers and producers understand sustainability. While, both groups have positive perceptions of sustainable agriculture. The general public has a much more limited understanding of it and even ranked sustainability as one of their top four least understood terms. [00:00:48] Fostering a shared understanding from farm to table is key to turning sustainability into the norm. With that comes a healthier future for people and the planet. Part of the problem is that farmers themselves often don't have the time. Or the platform to communicate directly with consumers. But an educated and informed hospitality and sales team that's you can bridge the gap. And an easy way to start is by educating your team on what it means to be a sustainably minded business. [00:01:19] Tolosa winery in the Edna valley of San Luis Obispo, California created a unique way to both teach their team about sustainability and involve them in their efforts. This week's marketing tip tells their story. [00:01:33] With Tolosa is three PS groups. Employees were given the opportunity to experience sustainability firsthand. [00:01:40] Each person could join a group that focused on one of the three pillars of sustainability people, planet and prosperity. [00:01:47] Each of the groups would take their area of focus and work together to find ways to improve the businesses practices. [00:01:53] First off the people group. [00:01:55] This group focused on encouraging staff. Engagement safety communication and more. They looked into wage scales to ensure the staff was receiving fair pay And analyzed and improved safety procedures. [00:02:08] Second up is the planet group. [00:02:10] This group taught Tolosa's staff, new methods for recycling and composting, both at work and at home. When the company wanted to expand its solar field, the planet group researched soil profiles and growing conditions. On the company's property to identify the area that was least hospitable to vines. So it could be used for the expansion. [00:02:30] And thirdly, the prosperity group, [00:02:32] thanks to this group Tolosa, reduce their water by hundreds of thousands of gallons. Member's designed a water nozzle that eliminated the wineries open hose, water use. In fact, the nozzle is so good. It is now mandatory. Josh baker CEO says on average, this one small change resulted in some 380,000 gallons of water savings annually. [00:02:56] While, participation in the groups is always optional. Employees were enthusiastic to join Josh notes, that the level of staff involvement. Was a bit of a surprise. People chose to take the extra time to be a part of it. [00:03:09] Listen up SIP certified members offer your club members the chance to experience your and other SIP certified brands in February, 2025. ReSIProcal February is an annual month long event that offers tasting rooms. The opportunity to increase their traffic and connect with like-minded wine enthusiasts who value sustainability. We're enrolling participants now just go to sipcertified.org/join-resip-2025. To get signed up. You can also find that link in the show notes. [00:03:43] Until next time, this is sustainable. Winegrowing with the vineyard team.   Nearly perfect transcription by Descript. Resources: *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course *** Apply for SIP Certified Wine Join ReSIProcal February 2025 Marketing Tips eNewsletter Sustainable Story | Print Sustainable Story | Electronic What's your Sustainable Story? Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member

If you are dealing with vine mealybug in your vineyard, you are not alone. Kent Daane, Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California Berkley studies different types of mealybug populations across the globe. Kent covers organic and conventional strategies, ways to increase the presence of generalist and specialist natural predators, and the importance of establishing refugia for beneficials. His latest work focuses on area-wide management tactics. Looking to the European Grapevine Moth eradication program as an example, Kent sees an opportunity to decrease vine mealybug populations through neighborhood driven monitoring, trapping, coordinated sprays, and mating disruption. Resources:         119: Vine Mealybug 101: Species Identification, Lifecycle, and Scouting to Create an IPM Program 130: The Biological Control of Vine Mealybug Using Mealybug Destroyers and Anagyrus Wasps Biology and management of mealybugs in vineyards Ecology and management of grapevine leafroll disease Impacts of Argentine ants on mealybugs and their natural enemies in California’s coastal vineyards Insecticides for a mealybug and a carpenter moth on vine trunks, 2023 In-season drip and foliar insecticides for a mealybug in grapes, 2023 In-Season Drip and Foliar Insecticides for a Mealybug in Grapes, 2021 Kent Daane Mealybug transmission of grapevine leafroll viruses: an analysis of virus–vector specificity Sustainable Control tools for Vine Mealybug UCCE Napa Viticulture Extension Leaf Hopper site Vineyard managers and researchers seek sustainable solutions for mealybugs, a changing pest complex Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript [00:00:00] Craig Macmillan: Welcome to Sustainable Wine Growing with Vineyard Team. Our guest today is Kent Daane. He is a Cooperative Extension Specialist with the University of California, Berkeley, and he works primarily out of the Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center. And today we're going to talk about a number of topics. Thanks for being on the podcast, Kent. [00:00:17] Kent Daane: Craig, thanks. I'm happy to be here. [00:00:20] Craig Macmillan: Let's dive in on one pest that everybody's interested in, continuing to be interested in, and you may have some new insights or newer insights on this. Let's start with mealybug management. Kind of what's the state of the art in that topic right now? [00:00:33] Kent Daane: Yeah, that's been the number one question I've been getting for many, many years now. It is an invasive pest. We know it came in, probably being brought in by a grower down in Coachella Valley. It has since spread into the San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast area where you are, Napa Sonoma, and it's been found now in Oregon. Just like Napa, Oregon has attempted an eradication program. And probably just like Napa, most likely it's not going to work. It's a very, very difficult insect to kill 100%. I mean, I can come up with all kinds of different programs, soft programs, hard programs, expensive programs, inexpensive programs, where I can suppress that insect pest. It's very difficult to remove it from a vineyard. And that becomes important when you think about the kinds of damage we're worried about in Central Coast wine grapes. Pretty much anywhere where they're looking at grape quality. But especially in the cooler regions. So, this insect, this mealybug, is one of many mealybug species. that is a vector of grape leaf roll associated viruses. And this is the primary reason it grows to such high pest status. So for the most part, the growers can knock its levels down far enough that it's not in the grape clusters or it's rarely found in the grape clusters. That's more of an issue for table grape growers. It's a cosmetic pest. When you look at some of the Regions in the San Joaquin Valley where they're growing a lot of table grapes Kern, Tulare, Kings, Fresno, counties, there's enough heat accumulation and these grapes are harvested early enough in the season that they can still build up their Brix. They can still get a very good grape to market. Even when there's some vinely bug on the vine, they just don't tend to be as impacted by this leaf roll pathogen as our wine grapes. When you get into regions like San Luis Obispo, Napa, Monterey, Oregon, where they really are trying to hold those grapes on the vine for a longer period of time, trying to build up the bricks levels. That's where this. pathogen causes so much damage. [00:03:06] Craig Macmillan: most of our growers are already going to be familiar with this, but what kind of damage does the vine mealybug cause? It's so, so terrible. [00:03:12] Kent Daane: So the vine mealybug, besides being a vector of this pathogen, is also a direct pest of the grapevine. It can feed on the roots, on the trunk, on the leaves, and in the fruit. When this first hit California, we were working on it primarily as a San Joaquin Valley pest. growers that were putting on, you know, the products of the day dimethylate, lanate. If they were missing , the, target window where that pest was exposed, we would see thousands and thousands of mealybugs, not just per vine, but sometimes a thousand millibugs per leaf. It was causing defoliation. It was causing the berries to raisin on the vine. In South Africa, populations were getting so heavy. It was killing the vines themselves. How many people out there 20, 30 years ago were spraying so many neonics as we're saying today? We weren't doing that. now really, we were spraying for leaf hoppers as our number one pests followed by mites in case there was a flare up. It changed what we were doing in terms of pest management. In fact there's a group of us working internationally. Not just on the vine mealybug, but other mealybug species, because we've seen vine mealybug, grape mealybug, citrus mealybug, all becoming more problematic over the last decade. And we're, asking that question, why? What has gone on? And one of the thoughts we've got, not yet shown, but one idea is that we just sprayed so many of these, these newer chemicals that the mealybugs are developing resistance, The natural enemies are not, and we're seeing an escape of some of these mealybug species in now a, to them, a pesticide lessened environment. [00:05:10] Craig Macmillan: speaking of biological control, so this is an invasive pest, came from outside the U. S. That's the kinda the classical biological control problem. the pest comes, but its natural enemies don't come with it. there are some natural enemies of vine mealybug in the United States. [00:05:24] Kent Daane: Yes, they are, and I don't want to go too deep in the weeds on this, but this is new, very exciting to me. I did an importation program, that's a classic biocontrol program, where we go to the pests, origin, we look for natural enemies and we bring those back to the United States. Growers can't do that. It's got to go into quarantine. We have to study those natural enemies. Sometimes for years to make sure that they're not going to do any harm. The classic example people think about is I've got a problem with rats. And so I bring in a weasel, the weasel kills all the rats, and then starts going after my chickens. We don't do that anymore. Classic biocontrol is now much more modern. We've got all kinds of protective barriers against making a mistake. In fact, I think that we've gone a little bit too far. I think we're overly cautious. Bringing this back to the Vine melaybug, I imported material from Europe, from Israel, from Egypt, and from South Africa. We were finding mostly the same species in most of these different regions. The two most important species at that time were called Anagyrus pseudococci, which is The well known parasitoid that you can purchase from insectaries. The other one is Coxydoxinoides peregrinus, no common name on these insects. Both are established in California. When I did this work, we noticed a difference between the anagyrus near species Pseudococci that we were getting in Sicily and Spain with the material that we were getting that had already been established from Israel and what we're finding in northern Italy. Working with a taxonomist, Sergei Trapitsin he found some significant differences between these. And later on after both were imported in the United States determined that these were two species, one still Anagyrus pseudocoxi and one Anagyrus vladimiri. So sometimes you'll see insectaries selling Anagyrus vladimiri and you think, Oh, I want that. That's different. It is different, but both are established in California. We're actually going to do a followup study. now in collaboration with this international group to find out what we've got in California. I suspect we've got both. Now, why is this exciting? Because at the time we were doing this work, we felt like the parasites were different, and we felt that these different groups that we were importing, maybe one had co evolved with the citrus mealybug, And the other with the vine mealybug. And we had already done some work with the vine mealybug, molecular work, looking at its relationship to each other around the world. and their names are, scientific names would be citrus mealybug, planococcus citri. Vine mealybug, we knew as planococcus ficus, which means, Ficus tree, fig tree. And we were showing that this group was, they had an outlier and ours was the outlier. And then working with this international group, they said, look, back in the fifties, there was a planococcus vitis. And I think what you've got, what we've got on vines, is the vine mealybug. But not in Iran and Iraq at that time. And, and maybe in that Mediterranean region Israel, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Turkey the Mesopotamian region, I think is what it is. Maybe there are some parasites there that we didn't have. Certainly, my colleague in Egypt and more parasites than we were finding in Europe. We just weren't able to get them all to establish in colony in quarantine. So it opens up the window that, that maybe there's something still out there. At this point in time, I say in all the countries where vine mealybug is reported as a problem, that's most of Europe Mexico, South America South Africa. We have the best of those parasites. We just want to delve deeper into what are we seeing in Turkey? How does that match up with what we know is in Egypt? And I do have colleagues in Iran. It's just harder for me to go there. [00:10:09] Craig Macmillan: right, of course. so this makes me think, is it possible that we have mixed populations of these mealybugs in California on the same plant, so it's different areas? [00:10:17] Kent Daane: So that's the project we're working on with this international group. What we decided to do in a three part approach is to first find out what everyone's got. The assumption is that in South America, In the United States, North America, we have got single invasion events. Our guess is that it arrived in the U S in Coachella and Mexico at the same time. We're pretty sure that the population they have in Peru is from California Yeah, they were bringing nursery wood in and lo and behold, they found vine mealybug. We went down to look at a nomatode problem to be honest with some UC California researchers. And we found that they had some mite problems at the same mites that we've got in North American California. So they were probably not being very cautious in what they were importing. So we're assuming that South America's got this California group which came from Israel. We know Israel and Egypt have something very similar, but it's different than most of Europe. South Africa is similar to Portugal and Spain, which makes sense with the trade routes that were going on in the 1960s. What we're guessing is that The European groups, there probably are, there's reported failures of vine mealybug mating disruption in some European areas. And we think that probably is this other mealybug that is probably in Turkey. So it's all very exciting to me, kind of delving deeper into the weeds on this. But the first part of this international group, again, a great group of people, Europe, South America our first part is what do we all have? Our second part is what we're doing a grower survey that we actually sent to the vineyard team and they spread out to some growers as well. What are, what are growers using to control the mealybug? Because maybe with some of the, we find out what it is and maybe growers are working harder to control our vine mealybug than say that the fig millebug which appears to be what they've got in most of Europe. Remember when I started the foreign exploration when I was in Spain growers would tell me yeah we've got the vine millebug but it really is not much of a pest. Citrus millebug on vines is more of a pest. Well they probably have that fig mealybug but [00:13:01] Craig Macmillan: Ah, [00:13:01] Kent Daane: You know, taxonomically, it looked to us like the vine mealybug.And I hope I'm not throwing all these things out and it's confusing. So, second part, that is, the survey. What do you have and what are you using to control it? And if it matches up that, yeah, what we've got is the one that's more difficult, that fills in a lot of boxes. Third and fourth part are now looking at the natural controls. What parasites are you getting coming off of this? What parasites are in your region? And how do they respond to the pheromones that we know are out there? So if they're not, if they're responding to both citrus and vine, maybe that's an indication that it's this other group. If they're not responding at all, or weakly, yeah, we've, we've got three or more distinct species. And we can't tell them apart, but maybe the parasites can. [00:13:56] Craig Macmillan: this is kind of a practical question. hoW do you monitor parasitic wasps? They're tiny. They live in refugia. They then come out and plant their eggs in their host. that seems like a really hard thing to do. [00:14:10] Kent Daane: That's an absolute fantastic question. So let's look at that most common parasite, Antigyrus Pseudococci slash Vladimiri. So what we found over the years is that it does a great job on mealybugs that are exposed in the fruit, on the leaves, on the cane. By the end of the season, if you're not putting on a lot of contact chemicals, you're getting greater than 40 percent parasitism. Very easy to see, [00:14:43] Craig Macmillan: Right. [00:14:43] Kent Daane: doesn't do very well against the mealybugs under the bark, because it's got this searching behavior where it's got to get on top of the mealybug, determine how big it is, do I want to put a an egg that's not fertilized in that, which would be a male, and they need smaller mealybugs for that. Do I want to put an egg which is fertilized? In that, that will become a female parasite that needs larger host. [00:15:09] Craig Macmillan: the same insect, the same parasite has the ability to do either. [00:15:13] Kent Daane: Yes. [00:15:15] Craig Macmillan: Wow. [00:15:15] Kent Daane: again, this is really a neat subject and I hope I don't bore the audience too much. But, a lot of these parasites that become important for mealybugs they have this little sac, so you've got your oviduct going to your ovarioles, in the female. And right around the oviduct area, before it splits into the two ovarioles, you've got this little sac called the spermatheca. unlike humans, where the sperm goes in and Seeks out the eggs and fertilizes it. The sperm go in and the female parasite stores them in the spermatheca. And then as the eggs are mature and ready to go down, oviduct and get ready to be oviposited into the mealybug, the female decides to fertilize the egg or not fertilize it. And if it's fertilized, it becomes a female. If it's not fertilized, it becomes a male. And that allows her to determine what the host size is, because the females are bigger than the males. And so she will walk up and down. and size that mealybug and say that this, this mealybug is a good enough size that this is worthy for me to put a fertilized egg in and that will become a female. Or a second in store mealybug, she'll say, this really isn't that good of a mealybug host. So I'm going to put An unfertilized egg, and that will become a male. And that was, going back to this Anagyrus Vladimiri versus Pseudococci, that was the most important difference that we found in this Sicilian and Spanish group of Anagyrus, was that they would oviposit and put females in smaller hosts than the male. earlier parasite which probably evolved on the citrus mealybug. So going back to this question because I do go off on different tangents. How do you sample for these things? So it's really easy to find a mummified mealybug on a leaf. But remember what we're doing. We're spraying now a lot of Movento and we're spraying a lot of the Neonics regardless of its Admire, Platinum, or generic derivative. They're all good materials. and maybe you're putting on an IGR like a plot, again, all good materials, Assail, all good materials. What they tend to do is work really good against the mealy bug, which is exposed on the leaves. Our systemic materials are really good at going out to the leaves. Our contact materials, our IGRs, the neonics, that are contacts kill the mealybug that's exposed. All of these materials do less of a good job with the mealybug underneath the bark. we're not getting a true indication of what these parasites can do because we're killing the host that's the best location for them to attack. So that means to really find out what's going on, you got to strip bark oftentimes. So now you're looking at parasitism in that region of the vine that the parasite doesn't like to be. Now, if we add to this, this other good parasite, which is the coccidoxoenoides peregrinus, we really liked to bring this in because it attacks the very, very small stages of the mealybug, the first and the second instar. It's sometimes a small third, but really it's focused on the second instar. [00:19:05] Craig Macmillan: Got it. [00:19:06] Kent Daane: It's in California. You can find it, but it's really hard to find out what impact it's got because it will parasitize the mealybug and will cause the parasitized mealybug to die. to feel sick and to seek out some area for protection because the anagyrus if you see that mealybug parasitized on the leaf causes that mealybug to kind of glue itself down to the leaf You have to flip that thing to get it off the leaf. A mummy is a dead mealybug which sticks to the leaf. The coccydox anoides causes the mealybug to find a place of protection because it doesn't stick it to the leaf. So it often times goes to the trunk, or goes to the stem, and eventually falls off the vine, and will pupate down into the ground. And so to sample for that one, you have to collect them as first or second instars live, bring them back to the insectary, and rear them out to the parasite, which is just really a lot of work hard to do. so these things are far more difficult to do. Sample four, then going out and counting, you know, aphid parasites, which are just out there as little brown mummified aphids. [00:20:29] Craig Macmillan: it sounds like this would play a role in my timing of my insecticide applications, whether it's Spirotetramat or Neonic or One of the programs that I think is common is to have spirotetramat on top and have a myothiamethoxam soil applied. Does that sound right? [00:20:47] Kent Daane: Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, they're both good products and they're doing what they're supposed to do. they're killing the mealybug. And when the timing is right, they're getting out there before the mealybug. So as the mealybug is going out towards the leaves. You know, they're probably doing a better job than the parasite will do on its own. Now, if you are an organic grower and you can't use those materials, then timing does become a little bit more critical because you're putting on, oftentimes, organic materials every 10 to 14 days because they've got a shorter residual. So on those you may want to, you know, work your timing around to avoid to give it a window of opportunity some of these natural enemies. There you're looking on the leaf, you're looking for mummified mealybugs. You know, are, do I have some of these good natural enemies in the field? You're looking for the mealybug destroyer, or one of the other beetles. Green lancelings are also doing a pretty good job. So you're monitoring those. And maybe you're deciding, I've got a lot of good activity maybe I should wait to put on pyganic or one of the other materials, which is broad spectrum give the other parasites a chance, a cycle, to see what their impact's going to be on that millibug population. Or maybe you're going to leave every fifth row unsprayed to let the parasites come back in and then hit that row later. So you've got a chance for those natural enemies to move the just sprayed vines. [00:22:22] Craig Macmillan: That was going to be my next question is what is the refugee situation for these parasites? Do they come into the vineyard, do their thing and then leave? Do they come in when there is host and then they hang out in the vineyard for the rest of the season? Do we know? I'm just thinking about ways that I can preserve, conserve those parasites as much as possible so that they're there when I need them. [00:22:45] Kent Daane: That's a great question, Craig. And let's break this apart into two different areas. Let's talk about First, the generalist predators that I just mentioned, the green lacewings, a good mealybug predator against the smaller mealybug stages. A lot of the things we do to enhance natural enemies will enhance generalist predators. So that's where your cover crops come in. That's where your pollen and nectar come in. You'll increase generalist predators. Ladybird beetles, green lacewings, minute pyre bugs, those can all attack and kill. That same group of cover cropping that brings in the gentleness predator may have little impact on the specialized parasitoids. Things like the anagyrus and the coccidocsinoides, what they want is the mealybugs. And not all mealybugs will do. They really want the mealybugs that are better hosts for them. So, they tend to get everything they need out of that pest population. They can host feed. They can stick their ovipositor into a mealybug, turn around and feed on some of that exudate, some of what's being bled. The mealybug creates honeydew. That honeydew, instead of trying to plant a cover crop for honeydew, that honeydew serves as a food to increase the longevity of those parasitoids. And as the mealybug density goes down, the parasite numbers should go down as well. Now there are different kinds of food sprays that we hope to look at that oftentimes do help increase both generalists and perhaps specialist natural enemies. [00:24:46] Craig Macmillan: Hm. [00:24:46] Kent Daane: The number one thing you do to to enhance beneficial insect numbers is to watch the broad spectrum insecticide sprays or to time them where you're not spraying, you know, all 100 acres at the same time, but you're leaving a refugia so they can move back in. [00:25:08] Craig Macmillan: Interesting. So, I might be looking at something and saying, okay, I am going to have to take some action here. I'm hitting an action threshold but not pull the trigger on the whole thing. leave one area for a little bit, and then can you come back and treat that later, so that you're preserving some of these folks, and then they can come back on the other side, and find a balance between the chemical and the biological. Mm [00:25:31] Kent Daane: Right. A balance, a delay might just be 10 days, might be 20 days. We don't want to miss our spray window, but remember, Most of the natural enemies are winged as adults, whereas the female mealybug is never winged. Fairly slow, fairly thestle. So that allows for those beneficials to come back in. And if you're a large grower this just happens over over the course because you can't spray 100 acres in a day. [00:26:07] Craig Macmillan: Right. Right. Fascinating. Are growers starting to adopt, in your experience with the folks that you work with, are growers starting to adopt these kinds of timings and techniques and methods? [00:26:19] Kent Daane: I think growers are constantly adopting, improving, changing one of the common misconceptions when I talk to students or people who just don't don't know how to farm or farmers is that farmers really don't want to spray. Spraying costs money. it is an added expenditure, added time, added worry. So they'd much rather, you know, go back 50 years when we didn't have all these invasive insects from Vine mealybug to Virginia Creeper growers are always seeking out how to improve the insecticide materials they've got, how to reduce the insecticide applications they have to make. And that does include natural enemies, mating disruption. What it comes down to is just costs. So oftentimes there's a trade off. If you're going to use mating disruption, you may not be doing three applications of an insecticide for vine mealybug. Maybe it's one insecticide plus vine mealybug mating disruption. If you're organic and you're releasing beneficial insects and spraying every other week. Maybe you don't have the cost for mating disruption. So these are all decisions that individual growers have to make. Obviously we've got some growers in some regions can spend 300 per acre for mealybug control. Other growers simply cannot do that because of the value of, their product at the very end. [00:28:03] Craig Macmillan: Right. This is kind of a natural lead in to something I wanted to touch on, and that is the Virginia Creeper leafhopper that's found on the North Coast. That also an invasive, correct? Came in from outside. [00:28:15] Kent Daane: It is invasive to some extent. It is not invasive like the vine mealybug is from. The Mediterranean region Virginia creeper most likely is, is North American. But yes, it was never really a California leafhopper pest. It was, no England, Canada. Pest that then went into Washington, then went into Oregon, that then came into California. interestingly, the, leafhopper that I worked on for so many years the variegated grape leafhopper probably North American, probably had a different avenue, probably came up from the south, from Mexico, Texas, to Arizona, to California. So Some of our invasives are close relatives. [00:29:07] Craig Macmillan: Interesting. what's the difference in damage that's caused by the Virginia creep leaf hopper and the the variegated leaf hopper. [00:29:17] Kent Daane: So they're, they're very similar. I think that the grape leafhopper is the one we've been dealing with for the longest time and has been relatively mild compared to the other two. The variegated grape leafhopper When it first came into the San Joaquin Valley, it could defoliate vines. It had three to four generations per year. [00:29:42] Craig Macmillan: Oh, wow. [00:29:43] Kent Daane: It seemed to be much more damaging than the grape leafhopper. Virginia creeper leafhopper, now in northern California, making its way south. So it's gotten to the middle of the state. It's in Napa, Sonoma, Sacramento. I have not seen it. Heard it reported in the Fresno area. Oh, it has been reported in Fresno. But I'm not saying it causes much damage here. We really don't get many leaf hopper reports for damage here, except for organic growers. And that's because all the sprays for vine mealybug. Most of those vine mealybug sprays are very good against the leaf hoppers. Where I have seen it as a pest. It's been mostly in wine grapes. Mostly in the cooler regions of the state. Mostly controlled by conventional insecticides. There are programs organic materials registered for Virginia creeper that I think have done a fairly good job. But it, it does get out of hand. And I think for all these leaf hoppers with organic materials, what happens is that The organic products tend to not work well , against the leaf operant in the egg stage or the leaf operant in the adult stage. So timing is very important. You want to get those materials on. when egg hatch is nearly complete and when you've got mostly first and second instars out there. That's because most of our organic products tend to impact these pests by either being a desiccant like the soaps that dry it out or a suffocant like the oils that clog the spiracles. And so the the, adults just fly away from that tractor rig as it's coming down. The eggs are protected inside the leaf itself, in their little clusters for the Virginia Creeper. And the larger insects can, they're just more mobile. So it's hard to kill them. So timing becomes relatively critical with these insects. I've not worked directly with Virginia creeper other than hosting Houston Wilson did his graduate work in my lab and really focused on, on the parasites of this insect. Lucia Varela, now retired, did focus on looking at the different insecticides and she's got a nice summary article which is on Monica Cooper's website. It talks about the different insecticides, U C cooperative extension Napa County. And she's got a website that goes into materials for organic growers for Virginia creeper leaf hopper. I think that's where I saw. that information posted. And what Houston did was he just looked at and tried to improve the Enneagrus. So we get those two confused. The Lilybug parasite is Anagyrus. The Leafhopper parasite is Enneagrus. The two names sound pretty similar, but one is an inserted family and one is a Mimerit. Or a fairy fly, fairy winged fly. They're some of the smallest insects known. So, [00:33:03] Craig Macmillan: Wow. So, we are continuing to look at these new parasites, how they're performing, we're learning a lot more about them, and we're learning a lot more about timing of different kinds of sprays around their life cycle. [00:33:17] Kent Daane: Yeah, what Houston was trying to do was to understand why parasitism against the Virginia creeper leafhopper was against all the leafhoppers. Why parasitism was relatively low. So I was working with Danny Gonzales and Sergei Tripitsin, And just mentioning to the taxonomist, Sergei, that it seemed like there were differences amongst these Enneagris samples that we were releasing. And I had happened to save all of the material that had died. So I sent that to Sergei, and Sergei looked at these things closely and then said, look, we've got a complex of parasites. And he named Enneagris erythronureae. After the species that was most commonly attacking variegated grape leafhopper, which is Erythronere variabilis. There was another one, and he called a Negris tryptocova, which was named after his wife's father's family and he said that was the better looking one of the group. And there was one that just didn't do that much. And he named that after me, a Negris Dana. And so that one we thought was the one attacking the western grape leaf hopper most commonly. And it was being found more commonly in the riparian zone. So that's 20 years ago, fast forward to our new invasive leaf hopper, the Virginia creeper leaf hopper, which is again coming down from Canada to Washington to Oregon to California. Well, it ends up that the Enneagris deni is very important attacking that leaf hopper. So Houston was working out the relationship of these three parasites against these three leaf hoppers and trying to understand if he could manipulate their numbers to improve biocontrol. He looked at hedgerows, he looked at augmentative releases or inoculative releases, and we're still curious to see if that can't be improved even. [00:35:30] Craig Macmillan: That's fantastic. Another topic that I wanted to touch on, because it's a really cool idea, and I think we'll have applications across a lot of things eventually, and that is area wide pest management strategies. And I know that you've done a lot of work in this area from the beginning, really, of kind of the concept. What is an area wide pest management strategy? Management program. What does it look like? What can it what is its goal? How does it operate? What kind of success we've seen so far? [00:35:59] Kent Daane: Yeah, that's a fantastic question. It's a topic I'm really excited about and let's think about it when we think about the European grapevine model. that was another invasive insect, It was found in California, it was found in Chile around the same time. So you've got this invasive insect, and the state of California deemed this important enough to have an eradication program. [00:36:22] Craig Macmillan: Oh and just real quick. What kind of damage does grapevine moth do? [00:36:26] Kent Daane: So the European Greenvine Moth it'll feed on the vine, but it gets in the fruit clusters. think of the omnivorous leaf roller One of those, one of our tortricid pests that can really cause damage to the grape a number of generations per year, a lot of different possibilities where it might come from in terms of a host plant material. So it can be very problematic. It would require a spray every single year, an additional spray for a tortricid pest, if it were to establish. [00:37:00] Craig Macmillan: one the big issue here is that it attacks the berries directly [00:37:03] Kent Daane: absolutely. [00:37:04] Craig Macmillan: Okay. So that's a, that's a serious problem. [00:37:07] Kent Daane: No, no, the, it, it causes mold and rot and everything else once it gets in there. So, you know, two or three doesn't seem like a lot. You just think, well, berry can go to crush, but that berry will get all kinds of bunch rot. not a good fruit. So when you think about the eradication program, where there was monitoring everywhere in the state. When you think about the eradication program, where when they found this pest through pheromone traps, and then they did a ground search to find out where it was. And then there was a coordinated investigation. Effort to spray the right materials, to use mating disruption, to go after it in all of the adjoining areas. those eradication programs are very intense. Area wide control programs. So, let's think about Vine mealybug, which is now in most vineyards. We're still approaching this on an individual grower basis. We might have one grower using mating disruption, because they're going to go organic, and a next door neighbor doing nothing. There's going to be constant movement of that pest into that grower's. field We might have two growers, one using Movento every other year, and another using Platinum every other year. Those males are going back and forth between those vineyards, sharing whatever genetic resistance that they're developing. And so really, if those growers are switching, one's using Movento, one's using Platinum that insect is moving between those vineyards all the time. And it's not a resistance management program, or you might have a small five acre grower deciding to put out mating disruption. Mating disruption works better blanketing the whole area. So an area wide program, and then you bring into it the idea of roguing leaf roll diseased vines. there are two things I just mentioned in this last 30 seconds that are so important for area wide management of mealybug and leaf roll that are the killers to those programs. The first is mating disruption still costs more money than a pesticide application. It's a fantastic tool. It is a tool that works better the lower and lower the mealybug density gets. So you use insecticides to really drop the mealybug population down, but there gets to be a point where the mealybugs are now on the bark. There are little populations here and there, and we know the insecticides are never 100 percent. Mating disruption works better. The lower the milli buck density is. [00:40:05] Craig Macmillan: Got it. [00:40:06] Kent Daane: But there's a cost to it. So we start with insecticides. The next part is the rowing of the infected vines. That's very important on an area wide basis because if you're planting, you've had, vineyard is old, it's not productive, it's had leaf roll. You pull it out, but it's right next to a block that's got 80 percent infected vines. You're always going to have new infections showing up over and over and over again. Unless that grower next to you is just doing this bang up job of applying insecticides all the time to keep mealybugs from going into your vineyard. you can make area wide control work for the pathogen. and the pest. But in the best world, let's say you're in control of a thousand acres, pull out every vineyard that's infected and replant and then pull out every new infection in it. And people just can't afford this. [00:41:06] Craig Macmillan: Right. [00:41:07] Kent Daane: if you're managing 200, 300 acres and Your vineyard with leaf roll that's at 30 percent is still profitable. it's hard to pull out those 30%. It's just hard to do. I get it. But something that I wish we could get, you know, government subsidy for to, to have them help us come in, pull out the infected vines, start clean again. But it does work. It's worked in South Africa. It's worked in New Zealand. It's worked in Napa. It just comes at a cost that may be prohibitive in some regions, in some areas. So the best we can do is to manage mealybug and the disease incidence in an area wide manner. [00:41:52] Craig Macmillan: if I remember correctly, I mean, the work has been done now that, demonstrates roguing is your best strategy overall long term, but it's expensive short term. and that is the issue. That's the tricky bit. [00:42:06] Kent Daane: There are two tricky bits to it. The first tricky bit is the expense you just talked about. The second tricky bit is that in most of the regions where we know it's worked They have not been dealing, perhaps, with our vine mealybug. They've been dealing with the grape mealybug, long tail mealybug, obscure mealybug. we've got I think the worst mealybug. And maybe that mealybug is just better at surviving on root remnants. You know, you hear all the time from growers, I r I've been removing 10 percent of my vineyard every single year for five years. And when I looked at The south African data, they removed 20%. Second year, 5%. Third year, 3%. Fourth year, 1%. And after that, it was always 1%. [00:42:54] Craig Macmillan: last piece of this puzzle in my mind is you have to get your neighbors to cooperate. That's the area wide bit. You have to get people to get on the same page in terms of what they're doing. And it sounds to me like they don't necessarily have to be doing exactly the same thing. They just have to be sensitive to what somebody else wants to do. Does that sound right? [00:43:15] Kent Daane: There are areas where it has worked well. It can work in the Central Coast. It can work in Lodi. We may not see, you know, eradication of diseased vines. We may not see a reduction of vine mealybug to a point where we can treat every other year. We might be treating every single year. for this, but we can improve what we're doing through communication right now. In the central Valley, we're working with a great group of growers where we're just mapping out the vine mealybug and we're sharing with the growers where the melaybug populations are. It's their decision. What? What to use, what to do for control. It's their decision. Can they rogue or not rogue? But what we're trying to do is to help foster communication amongst the different growers that are neighbors, because we're a third party, which I think helps a little bit. it would be fantastic if we could have someone hired as a scout or PCA, where we work with. PCAs in the region and everyone shares data. We're trying a new computer program this year, which we at the end of the season, we'll launch with our collaborating growers where they can log on in real time. and see what the trap counts are as we count those trap counts. And that will help them make a decision, we hope, on what to do in terms of control measures. But again, the best thing might be that we're opening up communication, just as the Vineyard team is doing through podcasts, through field days, through the website. [00:44:55] Craig Macmillan: Well, let's hope. And I, and there's a number of other organizations too. the, the group in Lodi has done a fantastic job from what I understand. Fostering communication and sharing information. like you said, I think that's probably one of our, our, our best hopes. Is working collaboratively as an industry and getting communication between the experts like PCAs and the extension community. . [00:45:15] Kent Daane: And of course, anyone can always reach out to me with questions as well. [00:45:18] Craig Macmillan: Fantastic. And we'll put your information in the show notes. I want to thank you for being on the podcast. fantastic. Very helpful and very, very exciting. I think I was feeling a little more dismal about this whole topic coming into this interview than I am now. I think there's maybe more potential than I was kind of giving credit. I, you know, I come from a time back in the 90s when Vine Mealybugs showed up in the Central Coast. And it was a lot of gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, and we did not know what to do, and the damage was insane. I mean, I saw stuff that was just blood curdling, and I think we've come a long way. We've come a long way, and that's from the efforts of folks like you, so I really appreciate it. I want to thank our guest, Kent Daane. He is a Cooperative Extension Specialist with the University of California, Berkeley. he works primarily out of the Kearney Ag Research Extension Center. And, thanks so much for being on the podcast. This is great. [00:46:10] Kent Daane: Thank you very much. Enjoy the harvest time coming up.   Nearly perfect transcription by Descript

[00:00:00] Beth Vukmanic: You're tasting room is more than just a place to try your wines. It is also what your guests visualize when they hear your name or senior wine on the shelf. And it's what they tell their friends and family about when they recall their last visit. [00:00:14] Welcome to marketing tip Monday with sip certified, we know that customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable while our longer form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry. These twice monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable wine growing. [00:00:32] Does your tasting room offer a memorable experience? [00:00:36] There are so many ways to make wine tasting special for tasters of any kind. Templeton based Castro Cellars has it down. They're tasting room constantly offers unique opportunities for visitors to learn something new and make memories. [00:00:51] The first two examples are for the music lovers. Every Sunday from may through October. . We're hosts, lazy locals. These free concerts invite music, lovers and wine enthusiasts to wind down and enjoy an evening of entertainment. While sipping their sustainably produced wines. [00:01:08] And if one band isn't enough. Guests can make a weekend of it at the Whale Rock Music and Arts Festival. This all ages, summer event welcomes visitors to enjoy live music, local vendors, yoga and beverages galore, including wine, beer, cider, and spirits. [00:01:25] In addition to providing a unique tasting and entertainment experience, the event has an altruistic purpose. Proceeds from the Fest are donated to the Templeton Instrumental Music Boosters Association. A volunteer organization that is dedicated to enhancing the experiences of Templeton high school musicians. [00:01:43] The second two activities are for the active [00:01:46] Wine tasting doesn't just have to be tasting wine. [00:01:49] Offer an opportunity to get active. [00:01:52] Castoro Cellars has an all level yoga class led by their in-house Yogi Lauren Udsen. It is the perfect way to start the day after the one hour class, students are invited to enjoy a delicious brunch and sparkling beverages. [00:02:05] To keep the blood pumping guests can get up close to the vines at the Whale Rock Disc Golf course, this 18 hole course. Is set in their, SIP certified and organically farmed Whale, Rock vineyard. [00:02:17] And the final two experiences are for the learners. Many vineyards offer tours. They're a great way to show off your vines and educate your guests about your unique history and farming practices. Why not kick it up a notch. [00:02:30] Vine cycle e-bike vineyard tours offer . Castoro's tourists, the opportunity to learn about their sustainable and organic farming practices while ebiking through the vineyard. After the two hour cycle guests relax, tableside and enjoy wine tasting and fresh lunch from the daily food truck. [00:02:48] Some people who are new to the world of wine are intimidated by all there is to know. Castoro also offers intimate, informative classes to teach the basics of wine tasting. Students gain an understanding of wines, intricacies and develop the tasting skills. They need to get the most out of their future tasting experiences. [00:03:07] So let us know, how will you make your next tasting and experience? [00:03:12] Listen up SIP certified members. Offer your club members, a chance to experience your and other SIP certified brands in February, 2025. ReSIProcal February is the annual month long event that offers tasting rooms. The opportunity to increase their traffic and connect with like-minded brands and wine enthusiasts who value sustainability. [00:03:33] We're enrolling participants now. Just go to sipcertified.org/join-resip- 2025. To get signed up. [00:03:44] Until next time, this is sustainable. Winegrowing with the vineyard team. Nearly perfect transcription by Descript.  Resources: *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course *** Apply for SIP Certified Wine Join ReSIProcal February 2025 Marketing Tips eNewsletter Sustainable Story | Print Sustainable Story | Electronic What's your Sustainable Story? Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member

To celebrate California Wine Month, we're highlighting winners of the California Green Medal Award. Allison Jordan, Executive Director at the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance shares the sustainable practices unique to each of this year’s winners. From farm hiking trails open to the community to a bio fuel powered fleet, you’ll be inspired by these stories. Make sure you listen to the end. Our host Craig works at Niner Wine Estates, the 2023 Green Medal Business Award Winner. He has great insights into the benefits of applying for the Green Medal that extend beyond earning the award. I have enjoyed working with the Green Medal on the steering committee and as a judge.  If you are a California vineyard or winery, I encourage you to visit greenmedal.org to apply. Applications open in November of 2024. Resources:         206: The Best Newsletter You Can Send | Marketing Tip Monday 231: Stacking Regenerative Practices to Create a Healthy Vineyard 2024 Green Medal Award Winners Allison Jordan Green Medal Awards Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript  [00:00:06] Beth Vukmanic: To celebrate California wine month. We're highlighting winners of the California green metal award. [00:00:11] Welcome to sustainable wine growing with the vineyard team, where we bring you the latest in science and research for the wine industry. I'm Beth Vukmanic executive director at vineyard team. Since 1994, we've brought you the latest science-based practices, experts, growers, and wine industry tools through both in-field and online education, so that you can grow your business. Please raise a glass with us as we cheers to 30 years. [00:00:36] In today's podcast Craig Macmillan, critical resource manager at Niner wine estates with long time sip certified vineyard and the first ever sip certified winery. Speaks with. Alison Jordan executive director at the California sustainable wine growing Alliance. She shares the sustainable practices, unique to each of this year's green metal winners. From farm hiking trails, open to the community, to a biofuel powered fleet. You'll be inspired by these stories. And make sure you listen to the end. [00:01:07] Our host Craig works at Niner wine estates winner of the 2023 business award. He has some great insights into the benefits of applying for the green metal that extend beyond earning the achievement. [00:01:19] I personally have had the pleasure of serving on the green metal steering committee. And as a judge, if you're a California vineyard or winery, I encourage you to visit green metal.org to apply applications open in November of 2024. [00:01:34] Do you want access to the latest viticulture research and technology from the world's top experts, then you won't want to miss the premiere Winegrowing event of the year, the sustainable ag expo. Enjoy the perfect blend of in-person and online learning. Speak directly with national experts, earn over 20 hours of continuing education and explore sustainable ag vendors. It all takes place November 11th through 13th, 2024 in San Luis Obispo, California. As a listener to this podcast, take $50 off of your ticket. When you use code podcast 24 at checkout. Get yours today at sustainableagexpo.org. Now let's listen in. [00:02:14] Craig Macmillan: Our guest today is Allison Jordan. She is executive director of a California sustainable wine growing alliance. And today we're going to be talking about the green medal awards. Hey allison, thanks for being on the podcast. [00:02:30] Allison Jordan: Great to be with you. thanks so much for having me. [00:02:32] Craig Macmillan: So let's start with some basics. What is the California sustainable wine growing alliance? And in particular, what is it? What are its goals? And what's it doing to achieve those goals? [00:02:42] Allison Jordan: Well, the California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance is a partnership that was created by Wine Institute and the California Association of Wine Grape Growers back in 2003 as a nonprofit organization that's all about promoting sustainability from grapes to glass. some of the ways that we do that, especially the whole idea of encouraging adoption of sustainable wine growing practices is also around communicating about it so we can really tell the story about California's leadership in sustainability. [00:03:14] And we do that through education, through outreach, through certification, and also through partnerships. So for instance, the vineyard team is a great partner of ours and us. Fantastic work. Not only in the central coast, but also throughout the state. [00:03:31] Craig Macmillan: Thank you. I know that we've really enjoyed and benefited from our work with you. And also around the Green Medal Awards. what exactly are the Green Medal Awards? how did that come about? What was the purpose of creating the awards? [00:03:45] Allison Jordan: So during Down to Earth Month each April, which is a chance to really highlight California wine community sustainability leadership we also celebrate the California Green Medal. The full name of the awards is the California Green Medal Sustainable Wine Growing Leadership Awards. And it's our way of recognizing industry leaders. [00:04:06] So those who wineries and vineyards that are really using advanced sustainability practices. They're innovating and they're sharing that information with their peers. It really was a way for all of the different California sustainability programs to come together. [00:04:21] We're all really about elevating sustainability. And so we came together with not only the Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance, which of course is this partnership with CAWG and with Wine Institute, but also with the Vineyard Team and Lodi Wine Grape Commission. Napa Valley Vintners and Napa Green, and also the Sonoma County Wine Growers, so that we could all be part of celebrating and shining a spotlight on these leaders. [00:04:46] Craig Macmillan: I think that's one of the really great things about this. And my understanding is that you actually have representatives from different organizations that are part of the review committee for the applications and also part of the cross promotion. Is that right? [00:04:57] Allison Jordan: That's right. Yeah, so all of those organizations are involved and participate in the judging panel. We also have experts from universities, the wine education field some representatives from retailers and, and some somellier have. Participated in the past. So we try to have that really well rounded group that can be reviewing the applications from wineries and vineyards around the state. [00:05:20] Craig Macmillan: that's really fantastic that you have expertise from around different fields and different areas. I think that gives it a lot of weight and a lot of legitimacy. So let's get to the purpose of all this. So who are the 2024 green medal award winners and what are some of the sustainable practices that they employed that garnered them this recognition? [00:05:39] Allison Jordan: Sure. I'll just run down the list. So every year we give four green medals and they are in the categories of leader. So sort of the overall. Embracing sustainability also in the areas of environment, community, and business. And this again helps us really share in lots of different ways what sustainability is all about. [00:05:58] So for the Leader Award this year, which again is all around that excelling in all three areas of sustainability, being environmentally sound, socially equitable, economically viable. It goes to the Lang Twins family winery and vineyards. They're based in San Joaquin County, just north of Lodi, and have been very involved in sustainability, both in the Lodi region, but statewide for, for many, many years. [00:06:22] Really, since the inception of our programs. And if you think back further, because it's a generational business they've been embracing sustainability since the early seventies. just some of the examples of things that they've done. They've done a lot around habitat restoration projects. I've actually had the chance to just go in and do a walking tour just a couple of weeks ago, and it's just impressive how they've really repaired that riparian habitat, working with local youth and providing hands on environmental stewardship education for them. [00:06:53] But they also started off as a family of growers and built a state of the art winery. Just within the last decade or so and they really included a lot of energy efficient design and solar power technology. So just a really great example. thinking back some of the other past winners in the leader category are Treasury Americas, Wente Family Estates, O'Neill, Vintners and Distillers, and J. Lohr Vineyards and Wines. So some really great examples of leaders in our industry. [00:07:25] The next category would be community. of course, this is all around what vineyards or wineries do to enhance relationships, not only with their employees, but also with the broader community and with their neighbors. [00:07:39] And this year it goes to Cooper Garrod vineyards at Garrod farms, which is a beautiful vineyard and winery, and also a horse farm in the Santa Cruz mountains. really I've known. Doris and Bill for years, Bill was a former chair of the California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance, and they just give their whole heart to their community. [00:08:00] They have done things like pioneering the FireWise Community Initiative. They actively participate in benefits for their schools, for mental health. They participate in the Chambers of Commerce and the industry groups. And also to foundations. they really invite the community in so they can use their farm's hiking trails and participate in winemaker walks and all kinds of really fun ways to learn about sustainability. [00:08:26] And just thinking back again on some of the past winners in this category, we had Cake Bread Cellars, McManus Family Vineyards, and Smith Family Wines. And there are two more. Do you want me to take a breath or do you want me to keep going? [00:08:40] Craig Macmillan: no. Keep going. This is great. Yeah. [00:08:42] Allison Jordan: All right. So the third category is the environment. Something that I think people think of a lot when they think about sustainability. [00:08:50] there are those vineyards and wineries that are really maximizing environmental benefits. And this year it goes to Gloria Ferrer in the Sonoma region of Carneros. they use regenerative organic farming practice is something we're hearing a lot about. Regenerative is, is the new buzzword in the world of sustainability. [00:09:06] they're introducing biodiverse cover crops implementing high intensity sheep grazing. They create biochar and really thinking a lot about how do you build healthy soils and minimize your overall environmental impact. They've also established wildlife habitat with things like hedgerows and pollinator friendly areas and nesting sites. So they're really attracting that wildlife into their property and fostering biodiversity. [00:09:33] And I can think of some really great past winners too. Tobless Creek, Trefethen, Scheid Family Wines, and also Halter Ranch Vineyards. [00:09:41] So again, some stellar examples of environmental stewardship. [00:09:45] Craig Macmillan: Yeah. Very heady. [00:09:46] Allison Jordan: yeah, exactly, exactly. And we have the Business Award as the final category. And this is given to the Vineyard or winery that best demonstrates smart business practices. So things like looking for those efficiencies and related cost savings and innovation. [00:10:05] And this year's winner for that category is Vino Farms. They are a vineyard management company based in Lodi, but they farm all over the state and they've used all kinds of different advanced technology, for instance, for water use efficiency, they've used Tule towers and soil moisture probes and ceres imagery. [00:10:27] And the idea is to really understand water needs to prevent overwatering and to make sure they have uniform water distribution. And, of course, this can lead to substantial cost savings in addition to saving water. They've also done things like releasing beneficial insects via drones. To reduce the need for pesticide applications. [00:10:46] And of course, again, the associated costs with that. And then they've also done a lot to embrace renewable energy. So they transitioned all of their trucks and tractors to biofuel since 2010. So going way back They use solar panels in their vineyards to power ranch shops and also water pumps. [00:11:06] And some of the other examples of this category winners are Niner Wine Estates, Jackson Family Wines and Monterey Pacific. So some really good examples of both vineyards and wineries that have done some amazing work that are really driving that innovation. [00:11:23] Craig Macmillan: Did you say this is the 10th year? Is that right? [00:11:25] Allison Jordan: It's right. It's the 10th year. So we've now had close to 40 recipients of the Green Medals. We've had a couple of that have won multiple years Tablas Creek being one of them, Trinchero Family Winery being one. So when you look at the full picture, it's probably around 36 different recipients of the award. [00:11:43] And if you visit greenmedal. org, you can see all of the current and past winners and some video highlights of the winners. And just, it's a great way to learn really delve into what does sustainable wine growing mean on the ground. [00:11:56] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, it's, it's another way of having that kind of farmer to farmer, winery to winery contact to see what people are doing and, and how they've made it work and kind of encourages people to try things for themselves. [00:12:09] Allison Jordan: Exactly. Get some good ideas of things that you might want to talk to them about. And I think that's another key thing about wine growing. Virtually all of our green metal recipients, I feel like are leaders in that they're willing to share that information and participate in field days and workshops and all of the things that all of our organizations do to advance sustainability. [00:12:28] And when you look at it, it's amazing. We're the fourth largest wine producing region in the world. And today we have 85 percent of California wine being made in a certified sustainable winery and 67 percent of the acreage is certified to one of the California programs. So it's really exciting to see that level of adoption. [00:12:47] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, we've come a long way. [00:12:49] Allison Jordan: We really have. [00:12:50] Craig Macmillan: We really have. Thanks to the efforts of folks like you. [00:12:53] Allison Jordan: It's been a pleasure to be working in this field for now over 20 years, which is hard to believe. [00:12:57] Craig Macmillan: I know, I know. Is there one thing that you would tell growers regarding this topic in terms of either applying for awards or how to use what you can find from award winners? [00:13:10] Allison Jordan: Yeah. So I feel like the awards is one example of how you really have to think of all of the costs and benefits of sustainable wine growing. And as you explore specific practices to make sure they make sense for your operation. One of the things that I think comes to those vineyards and wineries that are adopting sustainable wine growing is the ability to share their story and the positive public relations around it. [00:13:35] And we can help amplify that through things like the Green Metal Awards. The green metal.org website has lots of great information about, again, the practices being used by the recipients. But also you can learn how to apply if you're a vintner or grower for the 2025 awards the applications will most likely open up around November. [00:13:55] So keep an eye out then and they tend to be due in January. So We will be getting the word out in lots of different ways through the vineyard team and all of our partners and through the California Sustainable Wine Growing Alliance. But you can also just periodically check out greenmetal. org to see if there's any new information about it. [00:14:14] Craig Macmillan: So we've got greenmiddle. org is a great resource. Where else can people find out more about you and your organization? [00:14:20] Allison Jordan: Our organizational website is sustainablewinegrowing. org. We also have one for, basically for more our, our Interested consumers and retailers and other stakeholders. That's all around certification. And that's California sustainable wine.com. And then the last one I'll mention is, is again, just showing the breadth and depth of all of the different initiatives across the state. [00:14:42] So in honor of 30 years of all of the different sustainable initiatives in the state, we put together a website called californiasustainablewinegrowing. org and it has a retrospective of some of the really key milestones. That all of our respective programs have done. So if you're looking for some of that history of how this idea and this approach has evolved in California, that's a really great place to look. [00:15:09] Craig Macmillan: Cool. Well thanks so much for being on the podcast. This is really great. And I'm really happy that we can support some of these leaders and get some of these messages out there. I think it's really important and it's been the mission of all of these organizations. And so to be able to come together for something like this is really great. [00:15:23] Allison Jordan: Yes. It's one of my favorite things of the year. So looking forward to celebrating the winners. [00:15:28] Craig Macmillan: our guest today has been Allison Jordan. She's executive director of the California sustainable wine growing alliance, and we've been talking about the green metal awards here today. Please, by all means, check out the resources we've talked about and think about applying. So I worked for Niner Wine Esates, so we won the business category. [00:15:45] And what we found as we went about it was, it was a great process internally, to list and think about all the things we've been doing. And what we realized was We were doing a lot of things in a variety of areas and you don't see that you're always focused on whatever the current project is, right? [00:16:07] You're always focused on fixing whatever. And when we stopped and actually kind of meditated on it, it was like, wow, you know, there's a lot that we're doing and a lot that's going on. And then it also helped us identify areas where we thought, Hey, you know, maybe we haven't paid attention to this. [00:16:17] Like maybe we should. And I just think that process, regardless of whether you're a winner or not is really valuable. It's a good exercise for people. [00:16:25] Allison Jordan: Yeah, that's a great, great insight. And I do feel like, you know, certification is a great way to tell, to tell a story. your story, but to add credibility to what you're doing, but you still need those examples. And so taking the time to compile those and to really show what you're doing, what you're exceptional at I think is a really great exercise. [00:16:44] So fantastic point, Craig. [00:16:46] Craig Macmillan: All right. Thanks, Allison. [00:16:47] Allison Jordan: Thanks. [00:16:48] Beth Vukmanic: Thank you for listening. Today's podcast was brought to you by San Agro. Westbridge is now San Agro. When the opportunity came to expand their reach and improve the customer's bottom line, they took it. San Agro's commitment to deliver science based solutions for both sustainable crop health And nutrition remains the same. [00:17:11] They offer a full line of plant nutrients, biopesticides, and specialty inputs. Visit san agro. com to learn more, [00:17:20] make sure you check out the show notes for links to all of the 2024 green medal award winners to learn more about Alison and to apply for the 2025 green medal award. You could also listen in to sustainable wine growing podcast episodes. 206, the best newsletter you can send featuring Niner Wine Estates talking about their green medal award and 231 stacking regenerative practices to create a healthy vineyard with a member of the Langtwids family. [00:17:49] If you liked the show, do us a big favor by sharing it with a friend, subscribing and leaving us a review. You can find all of the podcasts at vineyardteam. org slash podcast, and you can reach us at podcast at vineyardteam. org. Until next time, this is Sustainable Wine Growing with the Vineyard Team. Nearly perfect transcription by Descript

[00:00:00] Beth Vukmanic: While most consumers say that environmental friendliness plays a significant role in how they make purchasing decisions. Brands, messaging about sustainability only reaches about half of global consumers. Welcome to marketing tip Monday with sip certified. We know customers are looking for wines labeled as sustainable. While our longer form episodes help you learn about the latest science and research for the wine industry. [00:00:24] These twice monthly micro podcasts will help you share your dedication to sustainable wine growing. [00:00:30] Your sustainable story can be shared across any of your communication channels, including social media, wine club, newsletters, tasting room signage, and so much more. [00:00:39] Are you wondering what to tell your audience about in your next story? From cover crops to owl boxes and water collection, ponds to native landscaping. There are many sustainability topics. right outside of your window. [00:00:51] At ancient peaks winery in Santa margarita, California. There is no shortage of natural. conversation fodder. Their sustainable story highlighting the value of habitat shows creative ways to support the native wildlife that lives around their vineyard. [00:01:07] The Santa margarita ranch. Ava represents just one vineyard. Ancient peaks wineries estate, margarita vineyard. Which is home to an abundance of beloved wildlife. [00:01:17] The team takes great care to respect and facilitate the presence of their winged and furry friends through the preservation of their habitat. [00:01:25] Wildlife corridors are present through and around the vineyard to ensure animals have free and safe passage. Black bears, Bobcats, mountain lions, wild pigs turkeys, deer, and bald Eagles are among the many creatures. That you'll find. [00:01:39] There's also aquatic life at the ranch. The team protects Creek setbacks and implements filter strips between the vineyard and waterways to keep the water healthy. With all of this life on the property, not all of it is beneficial to the health of the vineyard crop. To help keep pests at bay, the ranch attracts natural predators with bat boxes, Al boxes, and wrapped her purchase. They even invite a herd of goats to feast on their vegetation, acting as low impact herbicide alternative. [00:02:05] They're affiliated margarita adventures is dedicated to nature and wildlife appreciation and education. [00:02:11] The ranches natural list. Jackleen. [00:02:14] offers a variety of guided wildlife tours. For guests, including nature, adventure tours, Eagle tours, forging tours, and photograph tours. [00:02:24] Think about the habitat around your vineyard. [00:02:27] How will you highlight preserving nature at your property? [00:02:30] If you want more inspiration to help share your sustainable story, make sure you check out our newly updated online course. We've spent over 40 hours writing new sustainable stories for finding our training module and recording and editing video content. [00:02:45] This simple yet powerful free tool will help you tell your own personal sustainable message. To get started. Just go to the show notes. Click on the title. Tell your sustainable story to sign up and start writing yours today. Until next time, this is sustainable winegrowing with the vineyard team. Resources: *** Tell Your Sustainable Story Online Course *** Apply for SIP Certified Wine Marketing Tips eNewsletter Sustainable Story | Print Sustainable Story | Electronic What's your Sustainable Story? Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet  Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member

Microbial communities vary widely from plant to plant, even from rootstock to rootstock! Philippe Rolshausen, Professor of Cooperative Extension for Subtropical Horticulture in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at the University of California Riverside studies the phytobiome. This includes all organisms associated with the vine including bacteria, fungi, insects, and animals. Learn the impact these communities have on your vineyard from young vine decline under extreme stress to the wine’s terrior.  Resources:         78: Biological Control for Grape Vine Trunk Diseases A Method to Detect and Quantify Eutypa lata and Diplodia seriata-Complex DNA in Grapevine Pruning Wounds Endophytic microbial assemblage in grapevine Grapevine pruning strategy affects trunk disease symptoms, wood pathobiome and mycobiome Philippe Rolshausen Phylogenomics of Plant-Associated Botryosphaeriaceae Species Rolshausen Lab Soil Health Playlist Temporal Dynamics of the Sap Microbiome of Grapevine Under High Pierce’s Disease Pressure Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Sustainable Winegrowing On-Demand (Western SARE) – Learn at your own pace Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript [00:02:07] Craig Macmillan: Our guest today is Philippe Roshausen. He is Professor of Cooperative Extension at University of California, Riverside. And today we're going to be talking about the soil microbiome. Thanks for being on the podcast, Philippe. [00:02:19] Philippe Rolshausen: Thank you for having me. [00:02:20] Craig Macmillan: Well, when we do these topics, like to start from the very basics. And then we can go very deep from there. What is your definition of the soil microbiome? [00:02:31] Philippe Rolshausen: Well, a microbiome is the collection of microbes. The soil microbiome is the collection of microbes associated with the soil. I have to say we work on the soil microbiome, but we also work on the phytobiome, which is the collection of organisms. associated with the, the, vine, and that can be fungi, bacteria, viruses, even insects. So we are more interested in fungi and bacteria in my lab. And especially those that live inside the vine and how it's connected to the roots and the soil. [00:03:12] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, I'm very interested in that. Just for our listeners, other aspects of the soil microbiome could include things like microarthropods, uh, nematodes, etc. It's a very complex Complicated ecosystem. [00:03:26] Philippe Rolshausen: I and I only focus on one part of it. [00:03:29] Craig Macmillan: The work that I've done with soil microbiome in a very primitive way. We just focused on total bacteria, total biomass, things like that. You just mentioned this and this is a good jumping off point actually. Because plants are an active part of this ecosystem, you will find different soil microbiomes around different crops. What is the soil microbial community like around grapevines in particular? [00:03:50] Philippe Rolshausen: Well compared to, to what is the question. Let's give you an example. I work on citrus and grapes in the same soil environment, you would see differences between a grapevine and the citrus plant just because of the property of the host. Within grapevine, you know. Depending on the variety or the rootstocks, I should say then you would also have different microbial communities associated with the rootstock. And this is like a plant effect because plant recruits their microbes. So, so you have sort of a template of microbial or a core microbiome, which is you would find across a different rootstock or varieties of grapes or even plants. But then. Some are very variety specific or host specific, and so you would tend to see some varietal specificity and specific microbe associated with some of those rootstock operants. [00:04:47] Craig Macmillan: That's news to me. That's fascinating. there is some commonality, but you will find some differences just based on things like rootstock? [00:04:56] Philippe Rolshausen: Yes.   [00:04:57] Craig Macmillan: Oh, that is interesting. We may come back to that. one of the things about your work that I was really intrigued by, which I was unaware of, is the different microorganisms that one might find inside the grapevine, and what roles they play in the functioning of the plant. I mean, I think most of familiar with Our gut microflora. Right, where we know that we have organisms inside us. We have organisms on our skin and all that. I didn't realize that was true for plants as well. Tell me more about that. [00:05:26] Philippe Rolshausen: You can make the parallel between the roots and the gut, actually. Because they have similar functions. Especially with respect to nutrient assimilation Defense against disease, for instance. Now, the gut is inside, the root is outside. Someone made the comment that the plant where there are guts on the outside, just because of that parallel that between the rhizosphere and the gut. there is a connection between what's going on inside the plant and what's going on outside the plant. We are interested to understand what the organisms that live inside the plant. Where they're coming from. in terms of diversity the endosphere, which is the the region of the, the organism living inside the plant, the endosphere is not very diverse. There's only a few of thousand fold less microbe capable of living inside the plant just because it's a more. Stringent environment I work on the xylem a lot and, you know, there's a negative pressure for instance, there are, there's not a lot of food available, for instance. And so microbes have to adapt to those environments, right? And it's not every microbe is capable of doing that. there's only A certain type of microbe that can live inside them. we're interested in those because we work specifically on vascular disease of grapevines, so fungi, bacteria especially. And we try to understand how those pathogens interact with the plant, but also really understand those pathogen within the, context of the microbial community and how those pathogen interact with the microbes living inside the plants. to go back to your question, it's like, where are those pathogen coming from? How did they get there? How do they interact with the plant and how do they interact with the microbes? within those interaction, what would be the, the disease outcome in certain type of interaction. [00:07:35] Craig Macmillan: So what we're talking about is we have these pathogenic organisms Which could be in the form of like grapevine trunk disease Things like that or Peirce's disease. In the case of bacteria and what you're getting at is it that there's other types and populations of microbes that may be antagonistic to the pathogen? [00:07:56] Philippe Rolshausen: Yes. So that was our hypothesis. Traditionally, you know, microbiologists were looking for biological control agent against diseases and they were culturing those. That was the traditional approach. So you take a plant tissue, You put it in the culture media and you see what's growing and then you test if those organism are able to inhibit the growth of your pathogen. That would be the traditional way of doing it. Now, with the metagenomics , the development of those technology, we're able to kind of look, at the entire community of those organisms living inside the plant and using those tools, we could actually select those that have some. That might be antagonistic to certain pathogens. the beauty of this is that you can actually look at the entire community. When you look at a traditional microbial approach, you kind of zoom in on, to those that can grow in culture and those that can grow fast in culture and sort of overpower the other ones. when you use those molecular approaches, you look at the entire community and you can And sort of a broader view of really what's going on and who does what. and so that's the approach that we've been doing to try to identify biological control agents or beneficial organism to plants and to grapes in particular. what we do is we select plants with different phenotypes. So we will select. Plants that, you know, that range from very healthy to poor health. And we're able to build those sort of correlations with organisms that associate specifically with healthy plants and those that associate with sick plants. and from that, once we have identified the organism, we can go back and try to culture it and to reintroduce him in the system to prove that Actually, they are beneficial in some capacity. [00:09:52] Craig Macmillan: does this mean that I could have plant material, and one of those vines would be healthy and one would be weak and showing disease, but they both would have the pathogen, it's just that the other one has the microbial community to help fight it. [00:10:07] Philippe Rolshausen: That's right. [00:10:08] Craig Macmillan: Wow. [00:10:09] Philippe Rolshausen: there's a environmental factor that comes into play as well. because abiotic stresses also so like, you know, drought or heat play a factor into the plant, weaken the plant in some capacity and will change the disease outcome and the interaction between the pathogen and the microbe. There are more layers than, you know, the simple pathogen, microbe. plant interaction There's also the environment in which those components are part of that really plays a big factor. [00:10:43] Craig Macmillan: So, are you finding or pursuing how those abiotic factors can be manipulated? [00:10:50] Philippe Rolshausen: A little bit. I'm really interested in those aspects of, especially in the eras of climate change. plants are going to be subjected to a lot more stress than they used to be. I think we need to understand how this is going to affect the, the microbiome at large and because I'm a pathologist, how this is going to affect disease outcome. we are starting to only scratch the surface of that. I think a lot of people are as well. It's a lot more complicated when you work with. Woody perennial than when you work with an annual plant, because you have the approaches and the logistics are more challenging, I would say. drought is the number one just because it's been on the radar of every grower in California, but so we, you know, we are interested to see how those factors really affect the Have an effect on disease. Yes. [00:11:44] Craig Macmillan: Are you doing that in the laboratory? [00:11:46] Philippe Rolshausen: Well, yes. You have to sort of work in more controlled conditions and sort of dissect it one stress at a time. so it is in more greenhouse conditions or gross chamber conditions where you can, semi controlled environment where you can really control heat or, you know, water or, and see how that affects the microbiome. [00:12:07] Craig Macmillan: I think this is fascinating. can you tell me more about what that actually looks like, like how do you set it up? How are you controlling it? What kind of ranges are you using? I love the details. [00:12:17] Philippe Rolshausen: So we've done experiments mostly with irrigation so far. And we are only starting to tie irrigation to microbiome, but we have done the. How irrigation affects severity of disease and impact on the plant. this is pretty straightforward, you have plants that are fully irrigated that are not on the deficit irrigation, and then you calculate what a deficit irrigation like a 25 percent deficit irrigation look like, a 50 percent deficit irrigation look like, measuring, you know, how much water. How much irrigation you put in on your plants, you inoculate your tree or vine with a pathogen, and you let it incubate for, you know, weeks, because you know, those are slow pathosystems, they take time, and you see how that affects for trunk disease in particular lesion of the wood necrotic lesion, for instance. And then we look at factors on the plant. We measure biomass, for instance, of the roots, the shoots. We look at gas exchange, photosynthesis, and so on and so forth. going down to the microbiome, you know, we would be sampling the tissue, extracting the DNA, and then sequencing, you know, all the microbial community, bacterial and fungal, to see how those communities have changed over time in a well watered versus a deficit irrigated plants. [00:13:49] Craig Macmillan: And is that quantitative analysis, or is it simply the complexity of the diversity of the microbiome [00:13:56] Philippe Rolshausen: it's semi quantitative so let's say, you know, like you're looking at a presence of a specific taxa. It's a relative abundance of the taxa in comparison to the others. So when you see an increase of the taxa. in your community, it's either because it does increase or because the other taxa within that community decreased. So it increases in, in relation to that. So it's not really an absolute measure of abundance. It is a relative measure of abundance, but you could still use it and make some correlation with that. [00:14:34] Craig Macmillan: Can you explain, metagenomics? [00:14:37] Philippe Rolshausen: That's not my field. To be honest with you, but the principle is that you're using primers that are universal primers and that allow you to, so there are. Meaning that you can sequence conserved region. So those primers are aligned with conserved region across several taxonomic groups. Okay, so fungi or bacteria. And then you sequence a length of nucleotide. In our case, it's about 200, 250 nucleotides in length. In between, and this is valuable between those two. Primers, that region is valuable. And so you could start making you can do a micro real fingerprinting and identify which types are, are present, you know, but it's the community of organism. So it's like all the fungal communities or all the bacterial communities. So some primers are better than others for special taxonomy group. So for instance. I work with Dario Cantu at UC Davis, CBT Controlled Neurology. Davis uses field of knowledge, and so he developed primers for group causing grapevine trunk diseases. And so it's mostly what's called the Ascomycota phyla. his primers are mostly focusing on this group of, fungi, but it doesn't give any information on The basidiomycota, which is another group, or the glomerulomycota, which is the mycorrhizae fungi. if you wanted to get information about this group, you would need to get a different set of primers, right? so it's really up to primer that you're using that gets you the right information. and also the database that you're using that gives you the right information because sometimes the database are not curated or they're not accurate, and those are getting better as we're getting more and more knowledge about the taxonomy and, and the biology of those organisms. we're able to make more accurate prediction because we're gaining more knowledge about those organisms. So for instance, there's a lot more information about bacteria than, They are about fungi just because there are not a lot of reference genome for fungi compared to bacteria. so it's a lot more difficult to predict. Sometimes for fungi than it is for bacteria. [00:17:01] Craig Macmillan: But it sounds like that would be coming down the road. [00:17:04] Philippe Rolshausen: Oh yeah, yeah, it's a matter of time. I mean, really, you know, this technology is going so fast, so quickly that, in five years from now, I can't even predict what it's going to look like, [00:17:15] Craig Macmillan: This thought just occurred. your work is obviously, I don't want to say infancy, but it's, it's pretty early work. You know, we're, we're working with tools that are still in development, basically. at this point, would you say that there are certain conditions or practices or manipulations that a grower could use to promote the most beneficial endo, um, microbiome in their plants? [00:17:40] Philippe Rolshausen: In principle, yes, and I believe that this is true. We just don't have the knowledge yet to make recommendations that are solid. There we go. So, when you apply something to your soil, you know, if you're a grower and you apply fertilizers, or this is going to, or even if you if you till your soil or it will have some impact on the soil microbiology. That we know. How that reflects to what's going on inside the plant, we are, we are not there yet. We, we don't have that knowledge yet just because like I've said before, only a few of those organisms move inside the plant. There's always a a gap between you know, what's going on outside the plant and what's going on inside the plant. The inside the plant it's a buffered environment that changes very slowly compared to the root of, a grapevine. what we've done is we've looked at the microbiome of vines that we planted in the field and look at the rhizosphere microbiome, or the, the The macro bill community associated with the root and the macro bill, community associated with the trunk, the graft union, and so forth. And we see right after planting that the microbial communities associated with the root changes really quickly, whereas the the microbiome in the trunk are the graph union. changes very slowly. whatever growers do and cultural practices that they implement in the vineyard will have a limited effect inside the vine or it will take years for this to see the effect. the rhizosphere microbiome drive a lot of, of biological function, you know, they, they, they fix nitrogen metabolize phosphorus detoxify compounds and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of, benefits of, using some cultural practices, beneficial practices and how they affect microbial communities associated with the roots. [00:19:48] Craig Macmillan: We know that for like the pathogenic organisms, like the fungal ones, you know, they come in through wounds, whether that's a grafting or whether that's a pruning, we know that bacteria are introduced through things like piercing sucking insects. Like Leaf Hoppers and Peirce's disease. what is the, pathway for the bacteria and fungi that you find inside of a vine that are not the pathogens? [00:20:10] Philippe Rolshausen: Well, you said it. the pathway is like from inside the vine, it's first of all inherited from the nursery. That's, that's the main pathway. And then. Some of those organisms come from the soil, there's a fraction that comes from the soil and move throughout the plant systemically through the sap, the plant sap. So that's another pathway one of the major pathway. But again, that takes time. Right. And then, you have fewer introduction that comes through, you know, the plant natural openings, stomatas on the leaves, for instance. Right. Or pruning wounds. Some organism when vines are pruned some organism common pruning wounds and are able to colonize down into the vascular system. That's another path. Or introduction through insects. And, you know, OSA is, you know, one of the best example of that being introduced with shop shooters. during feeding So, but I would say those, are minor introduction compared to what's already there when the vine is being planted and secondary to movement you know, sap movement throughout the plant, from the root to the upper part of the plant. [00:21:29] Craig Macmillan: One thing that I saw mentioned is that these variations in The microbiome inside the plant may also have kind of a role in our concept of terroir in terms of how different areas have different characteristics. Is there, something to that idea? [00:21:46] Philippe Rolshausen: the characteristic of wine region or the terroir is not only linked to the soil, the variety or the weather condition. . It's also linked to the microbial communities associated with those vines. There has been a study that's very famous that was done 10 years ago at UC Davis that showed that. But it's mostly true for organisms that live on the plant surfaces the surface of the berries or the surface of the leaves. It is not so true for organisms that live Inside the vasculature of the vine, just because of what we've talked about, just because it takes time for those communities to change over time. really those the microbial composition of the trunk is, from what we understand today, mostly inherited from what's coming from the nurseries. you know, nurseries have a huge impact in shaping. the microbial communities of the trunk and the vines and you know, can you talk about terroir when it comes to the endosphere of the vine? I don't think so. I think it's, it's a debatable question. I think it's mostly true on epiphytic organism, organism that live on the vine surface just because they are more subject to the environment. Whereas it's not so true for trunk organisms, [00:23:11] Craig Macmillan: , Even though we've been talking about the endophytic side, what's some of the things that the other parts do you were just talking about, we have a different community in the environment that's on the surface of the plant and that, that has a role in, you know, differences between regions in terroir. What impact are those kinds of organisms having on the physiology of the vine that contributes to those differences? [00:23:35] Philippe Rolshausen: Well, that I don't know because, you know, that's not the field I've studied. But they, could influence the fermentation process, but I'm more interested in the one that live inside. Do they have an impact on the wine quality itself, perhaps, you know, that's a question we're interested in. they have an impact on disease. We know that much because they, they affect disease outcome and we've shown that. The question also, I think, from the standpoint of A grape grower or a winemaker is like, well, do they also affect winemaking? we found some bacterium in the sap of grape vines that are present during the fermentation process. So lactobacillus, for instance we found those in the sap of grapes and some bacteria that also that spoil the wine fermentation process will also. Found them in the sap. So the question is like, are those, are those coming from the soil? You know, where are they coming from? We find them in the sap and then can they go inside? Can they be moved to the berry of the grapes and then participate in the fermentation process later on? We don't know the answer to that question. The only thing we know so far is that we can detect them inside the plant stem. And so. What is the impact? That's the question mark, but those are really relevant questions questions we're interested in because, if you can connect the root system to the cluster, and then if you can influence the root system or the microbial community of the root system, then perhaps you can influence the communities living in the cluster and then, you know, Later on, influence your fermentation process. So that's the idea behind it. It will take time to decipher those questions.   [00:25:27] Craig Macmillan: Coming back to the pathology side. we have testing programs for virus in the nursery system. And we have the ability to test for fungal diseases, of course.  Do you see a role for testing for bacteria and fungi other than the pathogens at the nursery stage? [00:25:48] Philippe Rolshausen: I don't think it makes sense. So we've been working with nurseries for several years now. And we are looking for where diseases are coming from prior to vineyard establishment. there's no certified program for fungal diseases and some bacterial disease like Crown gall. there is a fraction of those pathogen that is coming from the nurseries. That's a fact and this is true for California, but this is true for everywhere else in the world. So if you get any. any vines from a nursery, you are going to find fungi causing grapevine trunk disease. And the reason is that there are over a hundred taxa of fungi causing grapevine trunk disease you will likely find one of them and not only that, but they are able to live on a different environment. And so they can live in soil, they can live in water, they can live in plant debris for some of them. And so you cannot get rid of them. I think that growers have to have the mindset that you are not going to be able to have plants free of pathogens causing fungal, grapevine, and trunk disease. That's just not possible. Viruses, you can get rid of them and there is a certified program that works for that. This program would not work for fungi. It's just not realistic. Right. It would be too costly to do it. Right. Right. Right. Right. The question is like, can you live with it, right? Do pathogen causing grapevine trunk disease will cause the vine to die? If that were the case, you would have no grape production in California because virtually all the vines are infected with one fungus causing grapevine trunk disease. that's not the case. It happens, it's called young vine decline, you know, when sometimes growers plant their vine. And the vine dies within five years. But this is because what we understand now is that it's related to the stress factor that I was talking about earlier. there is something going on with the environmental stress that caused the vine to decline after five years. what we've done is to monitor the microbiome and the vine, like I've told before, following planting. And we do capture those pathogen from the nursery to the vineyard. And they are evolving in the vineyard just and we can detect them. But under no stress conditions the vines are doing just fine. So every year a vine will lay out new wood, right? It will grow out some wood. The trunk gets bigger and bigger.  the fight between the trunk disease pathogen and the vine is if the vine can grow wood faster than it loses some to trunk disease, then it's fine, you know, it will be able to survive. Plants and grapes are able to compartmentalize the infection. They lay out walls to compartmentalize infection, and if they do that successfully, you know, Then they will survive now when you have a stress factor that comes into play and here you have to Go back and define well define stress this is where we go back and go back to your question about what stress are we talking about? Heat a drought I think overcropping can be one of them also, when growers take tend to push the vine early on after the establishment to get into production quickly after two years. I view this as a stress factor, so this will influence the microbiome of the vine, living of the microbiome living inside the vine, and as a result, it will influence disease outcome. [00:29:34] Craig Macmillan: I will not look at grapevines the same way. , is there one thing, one takeaway from this conversation that you'd like growers to hear [00:29:44] Philippe Rolshausen: what we're trying to do is to identify cultural practices that are beneficial to production. I think you, you have to look at it from a probiotic or prebiotic. Standpoint, just like we do for humans, you know. when you look at the prebiotics, those are similar to the cultural practices that you implement in vineyards to support the presence of beneficial organisms. that can be, you know, adding compost to your soil or cover cropping because they provide some benefits to the microbes living in the soil, and as a result, the microbe associated with the vine. that's one of them. The probiotic is the addition of single microbes to the system identify which one of those probiotics using the metagenomics approach. And we've made some some stride in, in, in that research, we've identified several organisms that are beneficial to the plant and that are antagonistic to some of the disease. So for instance Pierce's disease we've identified several organism living inside the vines that are antagonistic to PD. And today we are testing those organism in field trials at UC Davis. Because we've demonstrated that they, they work on the greenhouse condition. And now we moved on to field trials. And when we inoculate those beneficial organisms to, or those probiotics to vine, they are able to stimulate the vine health in some capacity, or are being antagonistic to the pathogen in some capacity. And the vines are able to sustain the disease. So, the takeaway message from that is that we are making progress, you know, understanding what those probiotics and prebiotics are for viticulture. [00:31:39] Craig Macmillan: That is great. and I'm really happy, That you're doing this work. It takes time Oh yeah, It takes time. Absolutely, that's, and that's, part of what we do here is we, bring people kind of what the future is looking like and what's possible because if you understand it, then when it does come along, The learning curve is already hopefully down the road a little ways. doing your homework, basically. thank you in your lab. This is really exciting. interesting stuff. Where can people find out more about you? [00:32:09] Philippe Rolshausen: Well, they can go to the University of California, Riverside Botanical and Plant Sciences website. I'm a faculty member, so they will find me there. I have also my personal website. Rolshausen. Slash lab. com. The problem is like the spelling of my name, right? It's not easy to do. [00:32:27] Craig Macmillan: We'll have a link to that show page plus A a number of your recent publications. [00:32:33] Philippe Rolshausen: Yeah, we have several publications about what we've talked about today. We have just had one released about how pruning practices affect also the microbiome and, and disease. So. You know, this is an active area of research. I'm not the only one doing this. Like I've said, I've collaborated with Dario Cantu at UC Davis. And I think he should be mentioned because he's doing some excellent work. And we are a great team working together. As a cooperative extension specialist, I collaborate with others. I collaborate with other faculty. And this is a collaborative work that I'm talking about. I'm not the only one, [00:33:11] Craig Macmillan: there's a network. want to thank our guest, Philippe rolshausen. He is professor of cooperative extension with the university of California riverside and doing some very exciting work. And thanks for being on the podcast, Philippe. [00:33:24] Philippe Rolshausen: Well, that was great. Thank you for having me.   Nearly perfect transcription by Descript