by Lodi Growers | Feb 24, 2015 | Blog, Uncategorized
Cover crops are a critical piece of a sustainable vineyard system. Retaining plant cover in tractor rows helps reduce soil loss, limiting wind or water erosion. [1] Cover crops also influence vineyard nutrient levels [1, 2]. The inclusion of cover crops in vineyard...
by Lodi Growers | Feb 17, 2015 | Blog, Uncategorized
What I learned in The New Yorker, in an article titled “The Checklist” written by Atul Gawande, and published on December 10, 2007, was that a simple and effective technique for reducing human error is the checklist. Gawande later wrote an entire book on...
by Lodi Growers | Feb 2, 2015 | Blog, Uncategorized
The Lodi Winegrape Commission and the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) have something very important in common. We share the goal of helping communicate the best agricultural research and effective practices to farmers. In late 2014 the Commission...
by Lodi Growers | Jan 26, 2015 | Blog, Uncategorized
Some wine grape growers prefer to dry farm wine grapes, while others have no choice because either they have no water for irrigation or no means to apply water during the growing season. Of course, dry farming is as old as grapevine cultivation and it remains a...
by Lodi Growers | Jan 19, 2015 | Blog, Uncategorized
Nutrient Management planning Charlie Starr grew up around vineyards; today, together with his father and father-in-law, the family oversees around 100 acres of vines in Acampo, California. Since the 1960s, the families have been expanding vineyard acreage, with the...
by Lodi Growers | Jan 12, 2015 | Uncategorized
Introduction Thank you for reading Part III of this three-part series on water management. In Part I we discussed the importance of having a written water management plan, the advantages of Regulated Deficit Irrigation (RDI), monitoring water quality and soil...
by Lodi Growers | Jan 5, 2015 | Blog, Uncategorized
Introduction Thank you for reading Part II of this three-part series on water management. In Part I we discussed the importance of having a written water management plan, the advantages of Regulated Deficit Irrigation (RDI), monitoring water quality and soil...
by Lodi Growers | Dec 22, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
The 2014 season was a challenging and difficult year that ended well. Growers and winemakers deserve a tip of the hat. There were however some scattered misfortunes. The harvest wrapped up in the second week of October for most, although a few blocks were harvested...
by Lodi Growers | Dec 15, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
Introduction Describing the issue of water in California, Mark Twain once intoned, “whiskey’s fer drinkin’, water’s fer fightin’.” Winegrapes use less water than most crops, so we do a little less fighting than some, but we still need to manage our most precious...
by Lodi Growers | Dec 8, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and other sectors of California’s economy has become one of the most important environmental concerns of state and federal regulatory organizations. This is the result of the June 2006 passage of the California Global...
by Lodi Growers | Dec 1, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
The California grape and wine community, like many other agricultural and business sectors, is increasingly interested in better understanding its ‘carbon footprint’. A carbon footprint can be defined as a comprehensive measure of the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs)...
by Lodi Growers | Nov 24, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
Vineyard cover cropping practices have been refined in Mendocino and Lake counties over the past 15 years. When organic and sustainable winegrowing began in the late 1980s, many of the cover crop species were selected from agronomic crop farming systems. While these...
by Lodi Growers | Nov 17, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
The harvests have all come to an end in the Northern Hemisphere, and it looks as though France has regained its position as the largest producer in the world. French growers looked to have rebounded from disappointing volume results in 2013 with a much better looking...
by Lodi Growers | Nov 10, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
Thanks for reading this three-part series about using soil moisture sensors to inform irrigation management in vineyards. Part I focused on selecting locations to install soil moisture sensors. Part II took a look at depth of sensor placement and proximity to drip...
by Lodi Growers | Nov 3, 2014 | Blog, Uncategorized
Thanks for reading this three-part series on using soil moisture sensors to inform irrigation management in vineyards. Part I focused on selecting locations to install soil moisture sensors. Here, in Part II, we take a look at depth of sensor placement and proximity...
