(NEWS BULLETIN: : Union Grove Farm has become the first vineyard in the nation to achieve Tier 5 Regenified™ Certification—the highest level of verification awarded in regenerative agriculture from the certifying organization.)
This is really big news. To get to Tier 5, you have to spend a lot more money, employ a lot more workers and do a lot more work. And then you have to prove it. It’s way harder to become certified regenerative than to become certified organic. Way harder.
So, of course, being myself a certified Tier 5 worry-wart, I wondered if the farm could keep it up, and that led me to ask Patrick Kavanaugh what T.S. Eliot might call the overwhelming question.*
Do we have enough worms?”
“What?” Patrick answered, with the kind of “why-do-I-have-to-suffer-these-fools-gladly” tone of voice reserved for people like me who ask stupid questions as a matter of course. I asked the question because the farm is putting more and more acres of land into vineyards year after year, and the soil on all that acreage must be enhanced regeneratively, meaning without chemical fertilizers, but with copious amounts of “worm tea” which is produced in a large see-through tank of which Patrick is the custodian.
The production itself is done by a great many red wiggler worms, who live out their lives in soil in the big tank, which must be something like vermiheaven, given that Patrick and his team are constantly adding delicious garbage which UG scrounges from local grocers and which the worms love like I love lemon meringue pie.
The worms then poop out the basic ingredient of worm tea, which Patrick turns into vermicompost and spreads around the fields, with the help of the talented UG farmhands and a few tractors.
More acreage means more vermicompost is needed, so you see where I’m going with all of this, don’t you? Do we have enough worms, and do they breed faster than the farm can bring new land under cultivation? That is the overwhelming question, as far as I’m concerned, the question that resulted in my bothering the redoubtable Kavanaugh, a former science teacher who now runs UG’s Soil and Vine Health program.
When UG started the whole vermicompost project, back in 2022, I was told they had purchased some 30,000 red wigglers, although I could never find out who actually counted them. How do we know our vermivendor (New word alert! Ding, ding, ding.) didn’t short us, say, maybe 500 or so?
More importantly, how many are there now? Patrick thinks there might have been as many as a hundred thousand, last summer, but apparently cold weather reduces the libido of the red wigglers (Don’t go there!) and so the population tends to decline a bit in the winter. But in Springtime, a young worm’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love which results in a wormlet boom and the wiggler population goes back up.
Of course, Patrick hasn’t counted them either. So it’s just an educated guess. (Very educated, He’s as big an expert in vermiculture as anybody in the free world. And maybe China, too, although they won’t release the books, so we can’t be absolutely sure.)
If UG doesn’t have enough worms, they will have to get more. Will that mean more tank space? Probably, Patrick thinks. You wouldn’t want to have overcrowded tanks, which might lead to poverty, crime, street gangs and other maladies associated with overcrowded places.
Tanks UG can always buy, but if they actually ran out of worms, then UG would no doubt have to – gasp! – buy vermicompost on the open market or something. That would be embarrassing.
Among other things that are hard to count are all the tea in China, the number of Starlings in a murmuration or Crows in a Murder. I don’t know why a flock of crows is called a murder, but it is. You could look it up. Speaking of counting and crows, experiments have shown that crows themselves can count to eight, which I think is pretty good for a birdbrain.
Sheep are relatively easy to count, if you can stay awake.
You can try to count the number of minnows in a school, but they will zig zag in formation before you get to three. How they do those precision military-like maneuvers without a drill sergeant somewhere, I don’t know
You can’t count snowflakes, and when they hit the ground, they cease to exist so you can’t count them at all; you have to measure them. My friend Kay, who lives in Maine, tells me they just got a two-foot-or-more snowfall the other day, so much that her neighbor lost her ruler trying to measure it. Maine winters are long; she may not find that ruler until late April.
Measuring snowfall in Maine is somewhat like counting worms. You’re better off just guessing rather than trying to get an accurate measurement.
One thing that’s easy to count is the number of Tier 5 RegenifiedTM vineyards in the country. It’s 1 (one). So I congratulate the Union Grove team on becoming the first and only. Way to go, team!
*Eliot was not, as far as we know, thinking of worms when, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” he invites readers down streets that “follow, like a tedious argument of insidious intent” to the overwhelming question. At least we don’t think so, but the truth is no one knows what in hell he was thinking of, so maybe it actually was worms. Personally, I wouldn’t put it past him.
