Israel is a Drought-Survival Model for California – But Not the Way Everyone Keeps Telling You
That’s it. I’ve had it. It’s just too much. Any time I hear speakers talk about the drought in California, there is a portion of the speech that goes something like this: I was just in Israel to see how they deal with arid conditions. They have it at least as tough as us and have even fewer financial resources. But they have no water worries! In fact, they’re exporting water and operating aquaculture in the middle of the desert! In conclusion, we must build more water sto
Product Review: Vintel
Product Review: Vintel Vintel is a piece of software made by a French company called ITK that predicts vine water potential, “by mapping soil and plant characteristics to prevailing weather and irrigation practices.” I gave it a spin at Unified and it seemed surprisingly simple to use. It was easy to enter the various data points necessary to perform such a prediction and the mapping software seemed quite easy to use, too. The data outputs are clean, detailed and easy to in
Water, Water, Water pt. 3
In the last two blogs I gave an overview of the current water situation in the state and discussed mitigation strategies for vineyard owners. I left out one important action we should take: educate ourselves and share our opinions with elected officials. For instance, I would recommend that we ask our elected officials to instruct regulatory agencies to clarify what “hydrologically-linked” means, so that we know under what conditions usage of our own wells can be regulated
Water, Water, Water, pt. 2
In the last article, I gave an overview of our challenging water situation. This article will discuss tools and strategies for dealing with water shortages. The tools I’ll discuss are insurance, conservation, unregulated water sources, storage and rootstocks. Let’s start with storage. Storage: Increasing storage capacity is one obvious way to increase a vineyard’s ability to function during a drought. The key issue to consider right now is that, if you fill your storage f
Water, Water, Water, pt. 1 - How Bad is It?
In the near future, I plan to start throwing more grape price projections up on this blog, but first I'm going to do a three-part series on water, which is on every grower's mind right now. This first post will give an overview of the situation, the next post will be the meat and potatoes of what you can do about it and the third post will focus on what our state and local governments and our society can do about the current drought. So, how bad is it? Let's start with the g
