What if I told you that you could take a piece of degraded, marginal land with 3.5 pH soils and turn it into an agricultural production system with five times the productivity of neighboring conventional farms without using any fertilizer or pesticides or outside inputs besides sunlight, seeds, and plants? What if I told you that there are decades of data to support this and that it can be done anywhere, and that this system makes grapes more productive, healthier, and more delicious?

Erik Schellenberg is the Commercial Horticulture and Natural Resources Educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension. He runs Black Creek Farm & Nursery in the Hudson Valley of New York, and he’s implementing a commercial scale married vine (or vite maritata) vitiforestry polyculture. If you don’t know what married vines are, it means growing vines on and with living trees as their trellising. But I prefer to think of it as the “Three Sisters” of perennial agriculture, in the sense that I don’t think the emphasis should be solely on the vine… I mean why isn’t it called a married tree? But that we should think of these living partnerships as polycultural guilds with symbiotic and stacking benefits.

In this episode, Erik outlines a syntropic approach to agroforestry, and breaks down how this system works whether you’re growing cacao and coffee in Brazil, or grapes in Switzerland… and anywhere else. You likely have some appreciation for the importance of trees. But so much of our approach from a viti-forestry perspective is about how to integrate trees into our wine monocultures without hurting productivity, and sometimes we even may argue that we have to sacrifice productivity for ecological reasons. After listening to Erik present how syntropic agroforestry with vines works, you will begin to see that not only is using trees the most productive way of growing vines, but that without trees we will be handicapped in our efforts to farm with fewer inputs and to increase health and resilience. In this system, pruning functions almost exactly like rotational grazing, and really takes regenerative viticulture to the next level, where we think of perennials as cover crops… but even that doesn’t capture it exactly.

This is a kind of viticulture that embodies succession, the ecological process that most of our vineyards fight against, and how humans become the regenerative partners we are meant to be in our communities. We dig into the details of vitiforestry and how to select the right tree to grow with vines. And we get into the myth of invasive species… and even some ecological solutions for the spotted lantern fly.

There’s a moment in this episode in which Erik talks about how a tree responds when it gets pruned, and I got goosebumps thinking about what it would mean if we followed this example. And there’s another mind blowing moment where he discusses the ecological function of a vine and how vines may be the plant equivalent of a mastodon or elephant, and how that informs pruning and developing an early successional wineforest for their greatest productivity.

I was excited about growing vines with trees before, but now I can’t imagine growing them any other way. Enjoy!

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