Regenerative agriculture

Hi friends, this is John.

Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast.

Sometimes it's worth having controversial conversations.

Conversations that challenge our thinking, that inspire our thinking.

And there's that culture around, you know, the highest priced animal.

is is the one that tops the sale ring and that's the one people talk about and so that's what we blame for but you know if if you granddad was always always more concerned about balance in the farm and not overstocking and i think had an idea of what a cow should be and didn't want to change it too much on the other side of my family was just a huge amount of experience in horse breeding and training um my grandfather put his three daughters through private school through um breaking and training race horses on the farm um and he and his brother did that and and they used to just instill this sort of this importance on confirmation and and structure and structure being everything and so you know I think a combination of those things coming together and I think we're always you know standing on all that we almost don't know what we know sometimes I think in agriculture and farming and I think all this there's a lot that sits behind it that just comes from people before it's not our own knowledge and And then we take on new stuff like holistic management and all the amazing people you have on your podcast influence and the knowledge you bring and all of that that's going on in regenerative agriculture or grass-fed systems.

I think that all feeds into what we're doing.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, exactly that.

And I think it's interesting as well.

I ended up doing a presentation at one of the big regenerative agricultural conferences here on this, trying to put science behind essentially all the stockmanship that we kind of take for granted.

and um it's really interesting actually because the top top geneticists in the world actually moved away from um genetics uh in terms of the selection of cow families and the female line because it was all this idea of um mendel and his pea breeding that he did and i remember from doing school exams on biology but um it's interesting because apparently now they can't recreate Mendel's experiments so they don't they're not repeatable which is interesting but it was this idea that all the genetic material is 50-50 and so if you obviously if you have one bull on 30 cows then you know that half of all the carbs is from him genetically whereas only half of one of the carbs is from a cow and I think again the old Stockman and women knew that cow families were important.

So, you know, the more wines we can make from the vineyard and sell directly from the vineyard to y'all isn't just benefiting our business, but actually is continuing to better the industry as a whole as sort of the as the sort of.

touch point of like regenerative farming, working, making the wines better, all that stuff.

That's the hope.

And, you know, to go along with the, you know, Portuguese red grapes that we've planted, we have also planted things like Gadeo and Albarino and also just a smattering of things like Assyrtiko and Petit Moussain and a bunch of others.

They are very wild in Texas indeed, Dave.

So my observations and just the evidence from the practice is regenerative farming will take away the problem that we created.

Duh, duh, duh, duh.

These cows didn't come up, haven't been on the planet for millennia and all of a sudden started breeding amyloids and these chickens the same.

So if we get back to regenerative farming, we will get back to living as nature intended, which is actually the subtitle of my book.

And while I say now in this world of a pandemic where we are amyloid burdened on so many, I call it the disruptive mirror effect.

So it's disruptive, right? We've got the amyloids coming from the food supply.

This is John.

Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast.

Today, we're having a conversation that even just thinking about it brings a big smile to my face.

You know, my understanding of what pathogenicity means and when fungi cause problems has evolved quite a lot over the last 15 years.

you're wondering why I changed my shirt, it's because I got pooped on by a bird.

Art is only half the story here at Donham Estate, and to learn more about the wine, the process, and the focus on regenerative farming, we're going to talk to Tony Chapman, the head of wine growing.

Tony Chapman, we met earlier.

Harvest was in full swing, at least from my opinion.

of the head

of wine growing? Overseeing all of the farming of our grapevines, we have five estate vineyards that we farm in-house and then also oversee the winemaking with my incredible staff here at Donham.

And regenerative farming is very important to you guys here.

Can you talk us through a bit about what that is, what it means?