Farming

Our farming is organic, undogmatic, and responsive to our land and the people who work it. We are low-input as a matter of both ethics and economy. High standards mean that most of our work is done by hand, though we use machines when they’re warranted.

We take the 100 year view. Operational planning with that perspective requires acquiescence to the innate order of things, so we try to work with the tendencies of our ecology as much as possible. A proper organic farm understands itself to be a complex natural system, contrary to the “conventional” farms of the last half+ century, which tend to self-conceive and operate more like open air factories. We are keenly aware that our ecological relationships include, in a very concrete sense, our economic ones. We rely on a group of dedicated employees who have lived significant portions of their lives on this land; everything made here has come out of collective work and specialized know-how.

We grow wine grapes, cherries, and pears on a commercial scale, but there are more than one hundred varieties of fruiting trees & vines at Idiot’s Grace. We just planted a small block of cider apples. The oldest cherry trees have been here for about a century, and those blocks are laughably outmoded in the context of modern fruitgrowing techniques and technology. But the fruit is very good, and the orchard has character, so we keep the old trees where we can afford to. We run a u-pick stand every summer, open usually in the last few weeks of June.

The wild biodiversity on this land is even more important than what we plant, and harder to summarize: we recommend you walk around and conduct your own survey.

We are certified organic, and that’s the only certification we’ve pursued. The language around agriculture changes much more quickly than the practices: we've been farming with the same ethic for a quarter century, shaping our practices to the character of this place. We like to talk about farming and encourage you to ask us any questions you have about our practices.