Coffee Shop Blog

All California vineyards become infected at some point by trunk diseases: Botryosphaeria dieback, Esca, Eutypa dieback, and Phomopsis dieback. The symptoms do not become obvious until years 6-8. Trunk diseases limit the productive life of infected vineyards, and can...

Hilgardia was the primary technical publication of UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) for 70 years. The journal was established in May 1925 and succeeded the Technical Paper series which ceased with issue No. 20 (April 1925). Although production ceased in...

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...

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 the subject...

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...

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...

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...