Nick Gill is the General Manager of Greystone Wines in North Canterbury; New Zealand’s first organic, regenerative, carbon zero winery. His passion and principles for sustainability, regeneration and resilience are not only something which he embodies at work, but also at home with his wife, Angela Clifford, through their property called the Food Farm. For Nick, developing an increased connection with the land, and enhancing the symbiotic relationship between humans and land, has allowed him to approach viticulture in a way that focuses on ensuring that the land is cared for in a way that not only provides incredible produce, but improves the quality of the land resource itself for now and into the future.
Nicks’ take on sustainability is all about creating diverse and resilient systems, so that things can be left better than we found it. Sometimes the word ‘improvement’ gets used, which Nick points out can sound a bit harsh and minimise what those who have been custodian of the land before you have done. Instead, focusing on diversity and resiliency to create enduring systems is an approach that acknowledges the past, and ensures you are working towards being able to pass a resilient baton on those who come after you in the future. Nick had many experiences in his younger life that demonstrated to him what sustainability wasn’t, such as the impacts of light, sandy soils in South Australia where farmers would build fence on top of fence when sandstorms would change farms overnight, to heavy use of herbicides and the normalisation of all the old farmers around him dying of cancer, to pumping water 200 km from the Murray River to grow grapes. These experiences are what sparked Nick’s organic journey.
“I suppose wrapping it all up is you’re trying to leave it better than when you started… and also, we know it’s gotta be financially sustainable, otherwise you, you can’t survive. And you got to ideally look after your people because they’re what makes it all go as well, and your animals and all that stuff. So, we’ve all heard it, the, you know, four tiers of sustainability trotted out before, but bringing them all together in a way that’s meaningful for you and your place, which will be different from Greystone Wines. is different to the Food Farm, is different to a potato grower or a dairy farmer or whatever. It’s a bit like regen, isn’t it? It’s just a set of principles that you apply to your place in the way that works for you.”
Addressing the (organic) low-hanging fruit – quite literally!
One of the low-hanging fruit for Nick and Greystone Wines when it comes to sustainability has been the addition of their high wire trial where they have lifted the vines up so that their fruiting zone is about 1.7 m off the ground. The system at Greystone went from conventional to organic viticulture, and followed the processes that others do when converting to organic which involves moving from herbicide to cultivation. However, this move to cultivation brought about issues with soil disturbance and erosion that did not fit with other values that Nick and Greystone Wines hold around their organic regenerative practices. They saw the need to be able to use sheep as their weeding tool to be able to manage and control weeds in their different blocks, so raising the vines was an essential part of this. This approach brings about its own challenges from a wine purist point of view, in managing the canopy to produce high-quality wine where you need about three-feet of canopy. However, if they can get the system to work, they are able to halve the number of times a tractor passes through any given area in a year from 30 to 15 – a massive gain for reduced disturbance.
“We’ve run out of post; we don’t have any post height. So, the vines are flopping over and like that’s got wine challenges that we are working through at the moment. But if we can get through that, we’ve just got steel and tube have made some y shapes for us that we’ve put on the post and it’s sort of making the shoots go outwards. And if we can get that to work, we drop tractor passes from 30 a year to 15. So imagine if we could develop something that’s successful and you roll that across like Marlborough that’s growing 85% of New Zealand’s wine production and has all that grass in there and we are either, we are herbiciding it and mowing it like constantly because there’s wine problems if you don’t for all sorts of reasons, and we can just graze it with either sheep or another grazing animal, and cycle all the nutrients.”
Another benefit that has come from the integration of sheep into viticulture blocks is the management of vine shoots that grow on the trunk. The sheep love to eat these, which is a win-win as it reduces the need for labour to rub or cut the shoots off the trunks. The high-wire trial is in its second year and will be implemented across the 50-hectare vineyard when they have it fine-tuned. This approach excites Nick as it shows that wine can be grown in a way that uses much less resource than is currently used.
The Food Farm
The Food Farm is Nick and Angela’s tūrangawaewae: their place to stand. It is a place where they connect with the earth and organically grow annual and perennial vegetables, berries, and tree crops. They have a young food forest, a traditional orchard and espaliered fruit trees. There are Wiltshire sheep, Peking ducks, Wessex Saddleback pigs, Cobb 500 meat chickens, barred rock and brown shaver laying hens, Jersey milking cows, and honeybees. Heirloom seeds are saved, woofers are hosted, and there’s now a yurt for hosting educational and engagement events to connect others with food and empower them with tools to take into their own home gardens.
Nick and Angela have created something really special since they have been on the land of the Food Farm since 2005, evolving from small beginnings.
“…when you start feeding little babies, you start really thinking about the food that you’re feeding them. You’d go to buy an organic chicken or something and it was so expensive. So we were in our first rental at Tuahiwi and I ripped up the garden and we planted it with vegetables and I got some meat birds. We used to kill chickens and sheep and stuff on the farm, but I couldn’t really remember how to do it… so I just sort of made it up and, yeah, killed our first batch of chickens at a rental and then we cooked them in the crockpot with lots of vegetables and froze them into little ice cube trays for Ruby, you know, baby food. And never looked back really. It’s just evolved from there.”
The way in which Nick and Angela approach growing organic food has evolved with the Food Farm over time. They also started out by rotary hoeing and raking out beds, but over time soil structure was starting to struggle. Over time they moved to no-till methods in their raised beds, as well as now building compost directly on the vegetable bed. Having a perennial diverse system that will be here in the future and providing a lot of food for whoever is there is the key aim for Nick and Angela, as well as feeding into community sufficiency, allowing even more resilience to be built into the local food system. One of the best parts of the Food Farm for Nick though, is the connections, sharing and learning which it has provided.
“I feel like the Food Farm’s now at a stage where I’m confident that we were able to bring people onto it and have something to show them. Whereas a few years ago, I wouldn’t say I was embarrassed, but I certainly wouldn’t have been in that situation. And just really grateful of having the flexibility to be able to do that and, now that people are traveling again, we have amazing woofers from all over the world and they, it’s like, I haven’t travelled, you know, I’ve only been to Australia and New Zealand, went straight from school to sort farming, education and working sort of thing, and, I would love to travel in the near future, but it’s just great meeting people and having people come onto the farm and share their perspectives. And particularly we get a lot of chefs and having an ingredient that you’ve grown for a long time and worked with that, getting someone and they just work with it completely differently, in a way that you’ve never seen before, is really amazing. And it’s all, it’s just sharing things as well, which is fabulous.”
Diversity
A simple word encompasses Nicks’ take-home sustainability tip: Diversity.
“It can be diversity in your commercial operation or even just diversity in that you, you are doing this one crop or operation, but you’ve decided to grow some of your own food. And it might just be something really easy, like, you know, potatoes or, or anything really, but I think that in the long term, diversity is going to prove to be the winner. So, if you can increase your diversity a little bit, either in your production system or your workforce, or how you spend your time or just break up some routines, or something like that, I’m sure you know at the time it can be challenging, but there’s always good that flows from it.”
That is a great one liner to remember: diversity – there’s always something that flows from it.
Nick also points out that diversity will always have good flow from it but it might not always be in the short term. Introducing diversity requires initial investment and is about playing the long game. Having your focus set on the journey and where you are working towards is key for the long game.
Nick’s endeavours and the Sustainable Development Goals
When looking at how the SDGs are integrated through Nicks’ viticulture and Food Farm endeavours from the full podcast conversation, there are a clear top five:
SDG #2: Zero Hunger
- This was covered in relation to Nick and Angela’s work at the Food Farm. Building food system security and resiliency is such crucial work.
SDG # 11: Sustainable Communities and Cities
- Nick and Angela’s work at the Food Farm is not only about building person security and resiliency but being able to build this into a thriving community of people who are learning how to create resiliency for themselves.
SDG #12: Responsible Consumption and Production
- Resource use efficiency in relation to organic food production was covered in this episode, through both Greystone Wines and the Food Farm. Navigating a system that is not only responsible in its human resource, energy and expertise efficiency with regards to the Food Farm and community food resilience, but then leading into Greystone Wines innovation, building efficiency of energy, and farm systems stacking, into the winery business, Nick has created continued his efforts to create more resilience and a lighter footprint on the planet at the same time.
SDG #3: Good Health and Wellbeing
- In the podcast episode, Nick shared the ways in which he pursues good health and wellbeing. These include his conscious commitment to avoid social media, going to the gym with his son, diving or skiing. Nick says that he’s shit at skiing, so he has to really concentrate, which is a good way to get rid of thinking about things when all concentration is on staying upright on the slopes.
SDG #8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
- Nick places conscious effort on making himself dispensable in the workplace. This empowerment and ownership he gives the team is resulting in a business that is thriving with Greystone having just been awarded three distinguished trophies for their 2021 Organic Chardonnay at the 2023 International Wine Challenge. A huge achievement as these awards are judged blind by some of the world’s most respected wine experts. In the words of their winemaker, Don Maxwell, this is proof that you can have a sustainable organic approach and still make incredible wines that stand up to the classics of the wine world.