WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
A collaborative program of vineyard owners and conservation experts in California’s famous Napa Valley is working to keep dirt and sand from finding their way into, and clogging up, waterways through which fish in the salmon family travel in order to spawn. Doing the needed work to reduce soil erosion is part of an effort dubbed Fish Friendly Farming.
Among even the most casual observers, invoking Napa Valley will almost assuredly lead to talk about wine. Blessed with a Mediterranean climate, Napa Valley’s grapes benefit from dry summer days, rainy winters and nighttime fog — ideal conditions for the cultivation of late-ripening cabernet sauvignon grapes, which represent over 50 percent of the total varietals planted in Napa.
Far less likely to come up in discussions of Napa travels: native, endangered species of salmon and trout. But what happens along the waterways of wine country has a huge impact on its local fish. Lush, green and temperate, ringed by low-lying mountains and bisected by the San Pablo Bay-bound Napa River, Napa Valley might appear at first blush to be gloriously immune to the more dire effects of climate change. But an alarming decrease in the region’s salmon-family fish populations over the past 75 years suggests otherwise.
As it turns out, the dirty side to grape-growing is, well, dirt. According to literature published by the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, vineyards are “significant sources of sand and finer sediment discharge.” These sediments then collect in the Napa River and its tributaries, clogging up the waterways and making the return journey for spawning steelhead trout and Chinook salmon a treacherous one.
For 26 years, the appropriately named Fish Friendly Farming (FFF) program has sought to alleviate these impacts of farming and ranching on the local waterways. Administered by the California Land Stewardship Institute (CLSI), the certification program enlists specialty crops farmers — including grape growers — as stakeholders in the push to preserve salmonid populations. The program helps to demystify local environmental regulations and best practices regarding soil and erosion management in order to prevent sediment from entering the myriad waterways.
In 1997, Laurel Marcus, a consultant in habitat and watershed restoration, began developing the program with funding from the Sotoyome Resource Conservation District and a handful of Sonoma County vineyard owners and operators as clients. By 1999, she’d pinned down the basics, including a customizable Farm Conservation Plan template and detailed beneficial management practices (BMPs) learned, she says, “on the go.” Her goal: to make the certification process collaborative -- not just for fish, but for farmers, too.
Since then, the Fish Friendly Farming program has certified over 280,000 acres on more than 2,000 properties in 10 counties, including 100,000 acres in Napa Valley alone. As of 2020, an estimated 90 percent of all of Napa’s vineyard land was FFF certified.
For CLSI project manager Connor Bennett, a site visit is a chance to use his knowledge of topography and hydrology in order to help create a farm plan addressing a specific property. Having grown up 5th generation in Napa, with a close cousin who’s worked vineyards in Sonoma County since the 1980s, Bennett at first rejected a path into wine, opting instead to train in environmental science at UC Davis. But after an internship in biodiversity fieldwork at a 75-year-old wine business, Bennett rediscovered his innate passion for wine and its makers.
When conducting a site visit, he’ll sit down with an individual grower or property manager with CLSI-generated aerial and topographical maps and determine the terrain.
As the overarching purpose of the farm plan is to prevent sediment from contaminating the waterways, the majority of the recommendations focus on soil and erosion management techniques. Many are fast fixes and easy to implement. These might include a maintenance cover crop of clover and fescue that helps to hold soil in place in the fields. Or planting a “filter strip” of native grasses as a buffer between the vineyards and the riverbanks to catch any runoff from the fields before it reaches the waterways.
Some recommendations are more labor-intensive. Replacing culverts, regrading roads, revegetation of riverbanks and large-scale restoration projects such as creek setbacks might take several years to complete, and may result in a loss of vineyard land. But as long as farmers continue to work on implementing their individualized farm plans, they remain certified — at least until their recertification inspection, which happens every five years.
For all of this focus on soil management and stewardship, what Fish Friendly Farming can’t guarantee is a return of fish in the salmon family to their historic spawning grounds. Sediment is just one of many environmental stressors on their natural habitat, and not all sediment can be traced back to farming. Roads, commercial development, de-vegetation and hillside “mass wasting” erosion are also to blame — and there’s no one conservation program that fully addresses all of these .
“It’s very hard to say what the direct impact [of the program] on the fish is,” Marcus admits.
But what the CLSI can definitively point to is a network of connected, conservation-minded clients. From a scant handful of Sonoma county farms that had signed on in the late ‘90s to their current expansive reach, Fish Friendly Farming is cultivating a vision of shared ecological goals. Spread in many instances by word-of-mouth and growers’ associations that sign on en masse, the program continues to connect more of the many individual properties that impact the waterways. In doing so, FFF is developing interconnected and thriving ecosystems that will better replicate the ideal conditions that endangered salmon populations need in order to make a real comeback.
This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful, a nonprofit editorial project that strives to be a tonic for tumultuous times. It is part of Waterline, an ongoing series exploring the intersection of water, climate and food, told through the eyes of the people impacted by these issues. It is funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.
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