Montrose - Daily Press

HOTCHKISS — A vineyard on Redlands Mesa mixes teas with manure, operates to lunar patterns and makes an effort to attract a variety of bugs.

It’s the only certified organic vineyard in Colorado and is well on its way toward obtaining a more involved certification: biodynamic.

“The wine is outstanding,” Trevor Hertrich of The Liquor Store in Montrose said. “It’s one of the few wines I’ve had that’s made in Colorado and really shows, like, a sense of place.”

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“They’re kind of taking what the land is giving them and bottling it.”

Lance Hanson, 46, started Jack Rabbit Hill estate winery in 2000. The first crush was in 2003 and it produces about 1,000 cases per year, which routinely sell out within a year.

“It’s really important, we believe, not to use synthetic fertilizers because the vines, we believe, tend to be less vigorous... We also think we’re gonna be able to make more distinctive wines because of that,” Hanson said. “I think it’s kind of like pumping your body with a bunch of vitamins versus maybe just focusing on trying to eat the right foods to stay healthy longer.”

About 15 to 16 months ago after touring some California estate wineries, he began implementing biodynamic practices. Rather than use synthetic fertilizers, Jack Rabbit Hill has turned to a combination of manure, wood chips, organic fruit pressings and such tea ingredients as chamomile, yarrow and dandelion for compost.

Hanson said this biodynamic preparation results in the need for much less compost.

“This is kind of the foundation of the core of the biodynamic system, which is the idea of — I don’t want to throw out too many kinds of buzzwords — but it’s a form of real holistic farming. It predates organic.”

The biodynamic movement began in Germany in 1928. It is based on the perspective of a philosopher, educator and artist named Rudolf Steiner.

The practices developed as a result of Steiner’s 1924 lectures before farmers looking for alternatives, Hanson said.

“They had observed that they were starting to see a number of problems in terms of fertility, seed viability and pest problems and it was all kind of coincidental with early use of ammonium nitrate synthetic fertilizer,” he said.

The ammonium nitrate left over from bombs had been implemented by the farmers as fertilizer.

“All those things kind of evolved into these herbicides that people use to, you know, make all their vineyard rows nice and tidy. They’d spray in between the vines, nuking the soil,” Hanson said. “You don’t have any organic matter, you just kind of wipe out everything in the ground and turn it into sterile dirt.”

An article titled “Rudolf Steiner: A biographical introduction for farmers,” which was published in the journal, Biodynamics November/December 1997, describes Steiner’s perspective:

“Perhaps more than any other realm of activity, agriculture has been torn forcefully and irrevocably from the culture from which it originally came. But it is, in another way, only one of many activities upon which our lives depend that now exist in a manner that is light-years apart from the cultural matrix in which they originated. It was the life work of Rudolf Steiner to provide the roots of a totally new culture.”

Jim Fullmer is director of the Demeter Association, which certifies Biodynamic farmers across the planet.

“If you look at ancient Egyptian or even Native American farming in this country, there’s a lot of crossover in the concept. They saw farming as much more of a broader, holistic thing,” Fullmer said.

It’s the creation of a self-sustaining ecosystem.

“You’re creating a natural resource rather than depending on it,” he said. “It’s really a whole other though than standard conventional agriculture based on materials (and techniques) to kill this or that pest.”

Hanson said biodynamics “goes really broad and really deep and you could talk about it forever.”

“We are toddlers at this but we’re big believers and, based on kind of what we’ve seen by other players in the industry in California and even by our own sort of early results with it, because we’re clearly seeing the difference in the structure and the quality of our soils as a result of it. More humus. More organic matter. We think our vines are healthier for it,” Hanson said.

Fullmer said it’s difficult to meet the Biodynamic standard, and that because of this the practice will not grow as quickly as organics have. Ten percent of the farm’s land base must be set aside for biodiversity, fertility and pest control must be developed from “the life of the farm itself” and it doesn’t allow much for importing.

Hanson said his farm “isn’t interested in keeping bugs away. What we want to do is create an environment that attracts a lot of different kinds of bugs.”

“Because in nature what happens when you have a pest problem? What happens is things are out of balance. Predators are missing for those things that you don’t want — so those things that you don’t want aren’t kept in check so they take over the place.”

Many grasshoppers have a place on Hanson’s farm. It’s in a field of tall grass about 30 paces from the grapevines.

“They get really bad if we upset the tall grass that they like — so that’s why down here in these fields you have plenty of area where there’s big tall stands of grass they can come hang out in there,” Hanson said. “If we give them that space they’re not going to be as inclined to come in here and screw with the vines.”

“It’s not about killing the grasshoppers — cause they’re gonna come back. That’s a no-win situation. These insects are smart enough to adapt to all these chemicals that we want to spray on them.”

He said it’s about copying mother nature’s system.

Hanson said the biodynamic techniques use special times of the day, month and year for farming practices.

“That’s a very simplistic high-level explanation. Then you get into the specifics of it and that’s where things get really interesting and very powerful,” he said.

For example, he prunes his vines during the period when the moon descends because this results in reduced secreted fluid from the plant’s “wounds.”

“As it’s dropping, the life force in the plants is actually dropping, it’s subsiding, it’s going to the ground,” he said. “In the next two weeks it comes back up — so life actually surges based on a menstrual cycle — based on a monthly cycle.”

Hanson said the next biodynamic step his vineyard plans to take is to bring in sheep among the rows to eat weeds and leave fresh manure. To keep them from eating the vines, he will use a portable electric fence.

Fullmer said biodynamic farming has been used for decades in Europe, but that Demeter wasn’t established in the United States until the 1980s.

“It was kind of dormant, very small until over the past five, six years it really started to grow here in the U.S.,” he said.

Hanson said Jack Rabbit Hill has about another year before it can become Biodynamically certified by Demeter. His will be the first farm in the state to do so.

“We’re drinking the Kool-Aid and we’ve taken steps to kind of research it and what we’ve found is that there are real benefits associated with it.”

Contact Robert Allen via e-mail at roberta@montrosepress.com

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