SIP Certified: Pisoni Vineyards and Winery
 
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SIP Certified: Pisoni Vineyards and Winery

April 22, 2013
Mark Pisoni

Mark Pisoni

I had the chance to meet with Mark Pisoni a couple of months back and found the guy to be super down-to-Earth and quite passionate about his family vineyards, farming, and being SIP Certified. Below you will find three questions I asked him as well as his answers. On a future blog post I will be posting a video I did with him as well, so stay tuned for that.

1)    Your passion for farming and being in the vineyards was evident to me when we met, has this always been the case? When did you start farming or hanging out in the vineyards and has it always been that passionate for you?

Mark:  I have always loved farming. As a young child I was the one out in our garden planting corn, string beans, cucumbers, etc. I always liked watching things grow and spending time outdoors.  Today, while I farm vegetables and vineyards for “work”, my favorite hobby is still gardening at home- It’s where I spend a lot of time with my two kids- my son loves getting the water hose and watering the plants (and occasionally me!) while my daughter likes to look at bugs. It is good, clean fun until they are full of mud running through the house!

This love of farming was naturally fostered by growing up on our family farm in the Salinas Valley.  The farm and working with my family are things I cherish.  I realized this growing up and ultimately went on to study at Cornell, receiving my Masters degree in Agricultural Economics in 2001.  Today we continue farming the vegetables- from my grandfather’s start in 1952.   We also farm wine grapes, which my father started in 1982.  The next progression was to make our own wine.  We started this in 1998.  Even with this step, we still keep it within the family- my brother Jeff is our winemaker (while I was playing in the garden, he was playing with a chemistry set)

2)    What would you say are your three favorite SIP practices?

Mark: First, was working with our local Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) representative. One of the requirements in the SIP program is to develop a conservation plan. I reached out to our local representatives and they were extremely helpful. They spent time with me on the ranch and helped me with some erosion problems that I had been dealing with for years. Their fresh prospective was great.
Next, is having an irrigation consultant visit our vineyard.  One of our vineyards is located in the mountains and it is a difficult property to irrigate because the terrain is so varied.  The irrigation consultant looked at my drip irrigation system and pressures at various locations and helped me to improve my irrigation efficiency.  Farming in the mountains is full of obstacles, and it takes a lot of effort to fine-tune each practice.
The third favorite was installing a weather station and soil-based measuring devices to track and monitor my irrigation program. These new technologies really help inform what is going on underneath the soil.  This allows one to become so much more in touch with the vines and what they need: better for quality and better for our resources.

3)    Were there any aspects of SIP that truly taught you something or was most of it stuff you had already been familiar with?

Mark: I learned a great deal from the SIP process. It was far more rigorous than I had imagined and I was very surprised with how much time I invested in the certification process. But it was time well spent and it helped me to better understand our ranches-It’s a form of introspection, where by recording and planning, we were also evaluating what we do.  Many of the requirements of the SIP program were things I knew I should be doing, but as a small farmer it was always tough to find the time. The SIP program forced me to sit down and really dig into every detail of our ranch from the soil to talking with wineries that purchased our grapes.

Happy Monday folks, and more importantly…Happy Earth Day!!