Green wine lifts bottom line

Waipara's Muddy Water Winery is an eager participant in a Lincoln University biodiversity project.

Climate change has focused attention on environmentally sound practices throughout the commercial world, if only because consumers are increasingly averse to buying products with high environmental costs.

This is most obvious for land-based industries, whose farming activities have obvious environmental effects. But even without the impetus of improved marketplace performance, being mindful of how the environment is bearing up can boost the bottom line.

This was one of the drivers behind a Lincoln University biodiversity exercise in the Waipara winegrowing district of North Canterbury. Working with Waipara Valley Winegrowers, Landcare Research and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, Lincoln's National Centre for Advanced BioProtection Technologies has developed the Greening Waipara project, which aims to revitalise the natural biodiversity of the district against the trend to monoculture that winegrowing inevitably involves.

Breaking up the monocultural vineyard landscape with areas of native vegetation once common in Waipara has visual benefits as well as nurturing insects that pollinate and others that act as pest predators. These are further encouraged by inter-vine planting of crops such as buckwheat, where leafroller-munching wasps thrive, while botrytis is kept in check with the use of organic mulches that in Waipara eliminate the need for any fungicide in a normal season.

The experiment had its genesis in a project initiated by the Hurunui District Council to put an economic value on the services provided free by nature to agricultural, pastoral and horticultural commerce. This research project set out to establish such grass-roots values as the worth of a worm in maintaining soil fertility, and the economic contribution of bees in fertilising crops, from grass to grapevines. While this research is continuing, and for many is simply a quantification of a value that is already acknowledged by farmers, it quickly became apparent that there was considerable immediate economic benefit to be had in promoting biodiversity throughout the winegrowing region.

Not that the profit inherent in organic farming should be a surprise to anyone in the wine industry, as organic winegrowing has been practised by Gisborne's James Millton with considerable success for 25 years, and the numbers are clear for those who ask.

"I spend virtually nothing on fungicide apart from a little sulphur," says Millton. "Nothing at all on herbicide or fertiliser."

Compared to a New Zealand winegrower's average spending on these chemicals, this is a saving of slightly more than $1100 per hectare per year, without counting the value of bees saved or earthworms nurtured. Against this is a 30 per cent increase in labour costs because of the extra work required in managing the vineyards, or $800 per hectare. All told, that's a reduction in costs of $300 per hectare in what Greening Waipara project leader Professor Steve Wratten calls "short-term costs".