For those interested in agriculture, wine and vineyards, the words pesticides and fertilizers will not be new, for everyone else they could!
What are fertilizers?
Fertilizers are substances that serve to improve the fertility of the soil and therefore the growth environment of the crop. They make the soil ready to welcome the plants and improve their productive performance.
And the pesticides? What are they?
Pesticides, on the other hand, are products used to control harmful organisms in cultivated plants that can compromise their production.
With the conversion to organic farming there is an obligation to abandon chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides in the vineyard. What does this choice entail?
First of all we must make a premise: organic viticulture is an evolved cultivation model to be applied on the basis of precise knowledge and experimentation. If until yesterday only the quality of the wine was judged, today the “how wine is made” is equally important for the market: but you don’t buy a wine just because it is organic …
Organic viticulture therefore aims to produce quality in quantity, with continuity, managing the vineyards with specific interventions, as few as possible, but absolutely precise.
Organic must be a tool to work better, with which enological, ecological and economic advantages can be achieved at the same time. Ecology is an important part of our agronomic approach, but not using fertilizers and pesticides is only one aspect of viticulture, not the core of it.
As winegrowers, we have not used chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides for some time. We only use copper, sulfur and other resistance inductors permitted in organic farming. The biological regulations also allow its use exclusively in approved formulations, and with a number of registered and controlled treatments.
In fact, no one knows nature so thoroughly that he can control it. Local variability between vineyards and even within the same vineyard is always high. For this reason, it is not possible to impose a secure control over everything that happens. What we try to do, and which we consider most productive, is to trigger spontaneous processes of self-control that give stability and resilience on the basis of preventive interventions made in a differentiated way.
In fact, organic farming does not simply provide for the replacement of ingredients (the transition from fertilizers and pesticides to more environmentally friendly solutions), but tries to change the recipe by working on the causes and not on the effects. From this point of view, the most important tool is natural grassing which increases biodiversity on the basis of local specificity and the response of plants according to the different nature of the soils.
The idea we follow is that for which quality viticulture at the highest levels must necessarily include the contribution of all the forces involved. For us, organic is the more professional tool than advanced agriculture and which finds in quality the best opportunity to express its convenience.
Did you already know fertilizers and pesticides? What do you think of their use in viticulture? Follow us on our social networks to continue the conversation and use the hashtag # generation2031!