"�� the wine industry has been late to the dance again."

Editor:

The recent opinion piece under the pen name "O. Yeoponos" (Opinion/Analysis, February 2005) on organic farming deserves a rebuttal. The author has two basic points he would like to make. The first is that organic winegrapes do not (to his knowledge) command a premium in price, and therefore, higher production costs for organic grapes cannot be justified. This is a mere assertion on the part of the author, and one does not have to look far to see many examples to the contrary--such as consumers who are eagerly paying a premium for organic production of many sorts of goods, and especially foods.

Look at the most profitable and fastest growing groceries and restaurants. This powerful trend suggests that the real issue is that not enough organically grown wine has been available. No one looks for it or asks for it, because the wine industry has been late to the dance again. Unless the author thinks that people will pay a premium for all organic foods except--for some unexplained reason--organic wine, his argument falls short of basic sense.

But let's not leave our cost discussion yet. "Yeoponos" also says that it is cheaper to grow grapes the "petrochemical way," because he has a study showing one season's cost differences on organic vs. nonorganic Chardonnay in a single vineyard. An unfortunate aspect of the old farming is that it fails so often to account for all costs. In both his discussion of costs, and later of soil compaction, the author fails to discuss the total environmental cost of extracting, processing, shipping and distributing the petrochemical products he endorses. The soil, dearer to us all than we know, works on a complex network of interdependent processes, reactions and transformations, driven by tiny but efficient protozoa, nematodes and microbes of fabulous variety.

The sad truth is that petrochemical farming kills many of these essential helpers, substituting for their work a chemical dependence that we can call "junkie farming," because it requires ever larger doses of ever more expensive molecular contrivances. This throws off what nature has spent millennia delicately balancing, building salts and metals in the soils, creating new niches for resistant weeds and pests in the broken web of the natural. It puts man and woman as food producers, not in a relationship with nature, but in a war with nature. When we talk about costs, let's account for all of them, and over a reasonable period.

The author's second point is an allegation that organic farming is actually more harmful to the environment than the old farming. At this point in the article, I suspected that it might be a spoof. It reminds me of Reagan's remark that trees were responsible for more air pollution than our factories.

Perhaps, for the author at least, pollution is in the eye of the beholder. Without any foundation, the author asserts that organic growers make more frequent trips through their vineyards with heavier equipment, and that this leads to measurably greater fuel use and soil compaction. No research is given, and no attempt is made to address the widespread environmental impacts of petrochemical farming. No discussion is provided about the ways in which properly managed soils resist compaction. The author has built a very simplistic farming model, apparently aimed at reaching a desired conclusion--which (is that) he cannot figure out why anyone would want to raise organic grapes.

I conclude that everyone has to be somewhere on the power curve of change, and not everyone can ride up front. But I would caution proponents of petrochemical farming that the back of the curve is not the safest, nor even the most economical place to be in the long run.

s/ Ed King, CEO

King Estate Winery

Eugene, Ore.

via e-mail

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