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By Ed Boyce & Sarah O'Herron, Black Ankle Vineyards While all farmland preserves open space and protects some natural habitat, there are several qualities inherent to vineyards that make them especially well-positioned to achieve these goals, particularly in relation to issues that affect the Chesapeake Bay. First and foremost, vineyards provide a particularly robust protection of open land. With increasing development pressure throughout the state, farmers face a constant struggle against rising land prices. Traditional cropland in the state is regularly valued and sold for a few thousand dollars an acre. These prices make it prohibitively expensive for farmers who would plant traditional crops, but perfectly priced for developers who can build houses and resell the land at a healthy profit. In contrast, proven vineyard land in many areas of the country is regularly valued at $20,000 to $40,000 an acre, with land in high prestige areas such as Napa Valley, CA or the North Fork of Long Island, NY consistently selling for upwards of $100,000 an acre. At these prices, winegrowers can outbid developers for good grape land, thereby preserving open space and farming without causing storm water runoff problems, wastewater management issues, and the other by-products of development that are so damaging to the Chesapeake Bay. Second, grapevines’ deep roots, and the year-round cover crops that are routinely planted between vineyard rows, are very effective at stopping erosion. Grape vines are a perennial crop (a grapevine lives 30-100 years) with roots that can reach down 20-30 feet. Most tree roots are in the top 2-3 feet of soil, while the roots of annuals like corn and wheat go down a few inches at most. Coupled with the roots of the cover crop – typically grasses –on the surface, the grapevines have a tenacious grip on the soil even through the winter months when the annual crops would normally die off. Third, a vineyard can actually help build topsoil. A crop of grapes takes very little from the soil compared to corn, hay, wheat, etc. so it is much less demanding on the soil. At the same time grapevines produce prodigious numbers of leaves and substantial cuttings from the cover crops, and these are just left on the surface to decay and feed the biological health of the soil. Over time this “Green Manure” helps build more and more valuable topsoil that protects the productivity of our farmlands. Last, since a crop of grapes uses so few nutrients
(85% of the materials used to build a grapevine come from the air),
vineyards rarely use much, if any, fertilizer. Fertilizer run-off
from farms and lawn treatments is a very serious problem for the
Bay. Nitrogen fertilizer run-off in particular has been sited as
a major polluter of the bay, and Maryland has put strict nutrient
management controls on all farms in the state in order to address
this problem. For most vineyards, staying within the Nutrient Management
guidelines is easy because they rarely need much fertilizer input. |