Regenerative Farming with Alexandra Everson, Sustainability Analyst, Jackson Family Wines

Jackson Family Wines is a multigenerational, family-owned wine company with a penchant for exploration.  The Jackson family’s collection of 40 wineries spans significant winegrowing regions, from California, Oregon, Washington, France, and Italy in the northern hemisphere, to Australia, Chile, and South Africa in the southern half of the globe. The company’s flagship winery, Kendall-Jackson boasts America’s number one selling chardonnay for more than 30 years, Vintners Reserve.  

In August of 2021 the company launched an ambitious 10-year sustainability and climate action plan, Rooted for Good Roadmap to 2030 that is a bold, comprehensive set of goals and initiatives designed to lead climate solutions, create positive social impact, and support the Jackson family’s long-term vision for a sustainable future.

Alexandra Everson, a Sustainability Analyst at Jackson Family Wines, was kind enough to sit down with me and discuss the company’s regenerative farming journey. 

Before we begin, let’s take a moment to define regenerative farming, which can also encompass regenerative organic agriculture

According to the Regenerative Organic Alliance: “Regenerative organic agriculture is a collection of practices that focus on regenerating soil health and the full farm ecosystem.  In practice, regenerative organic agriculture can look like cover cropping, crop rotation, low- to no-till, compost, and zero use of persistent chemical pesticides and fertilizers.  Layered into these practices, depending on a farm’s needs, could be the addition of perennials, development of pollinator and wildlife habitats, incorporation of agroforestry systems, vegetative barriers, and other regenerative practices that are shown to contribute to the development of soil organic matter.” 

Why is Jackson Family Wines utilizing regenerative farming practices?

First, it’s important to start this discussion with the fact that Jackson Family Wines has always been rooted in the land. It’s been something the family has valued since day one back years ago and lives on today.  We believe it’s our responsibility to maintain biodiversity, preserve native habitats, maintain clean waterways, and enhance soil health within the lands under our care. We truly believe that rebuilding soil organic matter, improving soil water content, increasing biodiversity, sequestering carbon, and reducing our reliance on synthetic inputs will ultimately lead to a healthier ecosystem in and around our vineyards, which will in turn lead to higher quality wines. 

We also know that these practices are important to our consumers.  In the marketplace, we’re seeing that more and more consumers, especially younger consumers, really care about the environmental impacts of the products they buy and enjoy, like wine, so it’s the right thing to do on multiple levels. 

What does regenerative farming look like at Jackson Family Wines?

We have a regenerative farming working group of more than twenty people including winemakers, viticulturalists, vineyard managers, sustainability specialists, the finance team, outside consultants, and a professor from UC Davis that studies soil heath, so it’s a big table with a lot of different voices working together towards this common goal.  Right now, we’re focusing our efforts on building soil health through animal integration, cover crops, conservation tillage, and composting. 

As a wine company, our farming operations are focused on growing wine grapes, so we’re experimenting with how these regenerative farming practices impact different varietals and growing environments’ resiliency. We’re also increasing biodiversity through our cover crops.  We plant a lot of native cover crops such as poppies, lupine, other wildflowers, grains, and native grasses – things that don’t have deep roots and won’t compete with the vines but also preserve moisture and the top layer of soil.  We grow some non-native nitrogen fixing plants such as peas, legumes, and sweet peas and some of our wineries plant fruit trees in the hedgerows.  The peas, beans, and grains support the diet of our sheep and chickens on our ranches and the fruit is also enjoyed by our employees and other vineyard passersby.  We also plant a lot of beneficial grains to ensure that the chickens and sheep that live in our vineyards have enough to eat.  We promote natural biodiversity and support pollinators by working with partners such as the Monarch Joint Venture to plant milkweed plugs around the vineyards, and we plant flowering trees and bushes to preserve insectaries. 

We’re also working to preserve wildlands, 60% of our vineyard properties are left in their natural habitat to support native forests, wildlife corridors and buffer strips that we want to protect.  

We use different conservation tillage practices at each vineyard depending on the condition and health of the soil.  We’re working towards as close to no-till as possible, but for some of our more recently acquired vineyards that weren’t managed well in the past, we need to repair the soil and get nutrients deep down before we can transition to no-till.  

A really important part of no-till practices is active weed management, so we’ve been trialing a lot of different methods such as under-vine cultivators which are special weed trimming equipment that can weed around the base of the vine but leave the vine intact.  We’re also incorporating animals such as sheep and chickens because they do a great job of clearing out weeds and keeping cover crops from getting too tall and competing with the vines.  Grazing also reduces fire risk by crimping the cover crop down so that it flattens and retains moisture which also helps develop healthy microbes. 

Our composting practices focus on finding the best way to manage the waste products from the winemaking process, like skins and seeds, and waste products from farming such as green clippings and livestock waste. 

How do you measure the success of these practices?

One of our major mantras here at Jackson Family Wines is that you “can’t manage what you don’t measure.”  We try to analyze a lot of data, but in all honesty, quantifying results for regenerative agriculture is still very much under development within the wine industry and especially relating to vineyard settings. But we’re working hard to develop methodologies for measuring and understanding the impact of our work.  We’ve partnered with UC Davis, Cal Poly, and others to run scientific trials and collect data on the results of our regenerative farming practices. 

We’re doing things like soil carbon testing, looking at soil nitrogen numbers and moisture retention, and measuring microbial activity and checking for critters in soil like nematodes, bacteria, and fungi.  We’re counting the wildlife and native pollinators we see, measuring erosion, and tracking decreased costs and improved conditions for our workers.  We’re also looking into the phenolics to measure the impact of these improvements on wine quality.  We’re trying to learn as much as we can and measure as much as we can, it’s the foundation of what we’re doing. 

How does Jackson Family Wines work with growing partners to encourage the adoption of regenerative farming practices? 

We’re adopting as many regenerative practices as we can and doing the experimenting and learning on our own vineyards first, we’re running trials in every region that we operate in.  We’re then sharing what we learn with our growing partners and with organizations that can support our partners in adopting these practices.

All of our estate vineyards in California are certified by one of the local programs such as Certified California Sustainable Winegrowing (CCSW), SIP Certified, LODI RULES Sustainable Winegrowing or Napa Green, and our Oregon vineyards are LIVE Certified. 

We encourage our growing partners to connect with a local organization such as the California or Oregon certification programs, and then as they become more ambitious, they can pursue organic and eventually regenerative organic certification if that suits their land management goals. 

California growers can pursue California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) certification and register with the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) or they can get USDA Organic certified.  Once a grower’s operations are certified organic, they can then take the next step to pursue Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC). 

What are some of the tools and partnerships that are important to your work?

I use a lot of different tools to help measure and manage our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  I use WRI’s GHG Protocol for all of our operations from the vineyard to the end consumer and to account for post-consumer waste. 

I rely heavily on the International Wineries for Climate Action (IWCA)’s GHG Emissions Calculator, which is a tool that we  developed with Sustridge Consulting and then helped “open source” for use with IWCA members.  It’s the most robust, publicly available GHG calculator for the wine industry.  It’s open source so that even wineries that don’t participate in IWCA can use it because everyone needs to have access to this information. 

Another tool available to use is the  COMET-Farm, an in-depth tool for calculating farm and ranch greenhouse gas emissions that is incredibly comprehensive.  You enter information related to a location’s farming practices, rainfall, and climate and it provides a detailed account of your emissions. 

There’s also the Cool Farm Tool and CCSW’s carbon calculator which is based on the DeNitrification-DeComposition (DNDC) model. 

Partnerships are also incredibly important to us.  Jackson Family Wines has always valued partnerships and collaboration that can improve the environment and our communities.  Whether it’s co-founding IWCA with Familia Torres to working alongside the Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Game, and local Resource Conservation Districts to improve salmon habitat in local watersheds, Jackson Family Wines has a long history of leading by action and partnering with individuals and organizations that share our values.

What kind of education do you have?  How did you develop some of the key skills for success in this role?

I grew up on a small family farm and vineyard in Sonoma County, so I had 20 years of experience with sustainable farming practices before I had even finished college.  Hands-on agricultural knowledge is essential to this role because it gives you a deep understanding of the realities of the working conditions and challenges that we’re facing. 

I went to UC Berkeley for environmental economics and policy, and that degree gave me a very technical understanding of things like data science, econometrics, environmental science, farming techniques, and insect management that supplemented my personal experience nicely. 

I then earned my MBA online from Sonoma State to learn the business side of the industry and how to be a change agent, I really recommend pursuing an MBA in whatever format works best for people as it’s so helpful. 

I’ve also attended a lot of hands-on workshops so I could see and feel how to properly do things like composting, vermiculture, and making biochar.  And it’s been helpful to visit colleagues to learn things like how to lightweight glass and make bottling lines more efficient, or how to develop a bottle reuse program.  I also love programs put on by local resource conservation districts, they always have great workshops that can be applicable to both home and large-scale agriculture operations.  I love both Daily Acts and the Xeres Society near me. 

What is your favorite part of your job?

I have two favorite parts.  First, I love being in the field, I do a lot of the certification auditing, leading tours, and carbon sampling, and I love to see when everything comes to fruition like when our fields are full of baby lambs, butterflies, and bees, or when I overhear our cellar workers chatting about waste sorting over breakfast. It really gives you a sense of tangible connection with the environment and with our ecosystem here. 

Second, I love how innovative my job is.  We’re always trying something new and getting inspiration from others, it’s very energizing to be around people who are excited and hopeful and are actually doing something instead of just forecasting doom and gloom.  It’s amazing to have opportunities to build things like the IWCA tool that will help our entire industry, pioneer new refrigeration techniques that will save energy and money, pilot electric tractors, or develop new ways to measure our progress. 

What is the hardest part of your job?

Finding the time for all of the projects and engagement that we want to do can be a challenge.  There are three of us on the sustainability team so bringing about change through influence in a company with more than 1,500 employees and millions of consumers can be daunting.  We focus a lot of our energy on educating and deputizing our coworkers to empower them to make day to day sustainability decisions and to come to us with their ideas so that we can support them.  It’s taken a lot of effort, but it’s amazing that we now have so many allies throughout the company bringing a sustainability mindset to their work. 

A great example of this is the process we used to develop our 2030 Rooted for Good goals.  The goals weren’t an executive decision or created by the sustainability team in a vacuum.  They were developed through a series of working groups and checkpoints involving 75+ people from different levels and groups throughout the company.  It took about six months, but it was a wonderful experience and the process of going through this group exercise transformed a lot of people into strong advocates for our work. 

What is your proudest professional achievement?

I think my proudest moment was this summer when we had more than 250 sales representatives come out and do a tour of our Saralee’s Vineyard so that they could learn more about regenerative farming.  I gave a talk on composting and it was so incredible to see how engaged they were about this less glamorous part of regenerative farming.  They had a lot of questions and were really excited to learn about the technical aspects of composting and go back and tell others about it.  It was great to have the chance to demonstrate the passion that the family has and that everyone in the company has for this work. 

I’m also really proud of the work that I mentioned earlier on the development of the IWCA GHG Emissions Calculator.  Something like 70-80% of a winery’s emissions are Scope 3, so it’s really important to be able to see what they are so that you can figure out what to focus on.  For example, it makes a big difference if you’re using cork and barrels from France or from the US, or if there’s a percentage of recycled glass in your bottles, or if you’re sending product directly to the consumer or through a distributor.  The tool allows you to account for all of these things and uses both WRI and ISO 140641 standards as a basis, so it’s really comprehensive.     

What are the game changers in your world?  

The widespread adoption of regenerative farming practices in general would be a huge game changer but I think in order to get there we’ll first need better guidance on how to calculate carbon sequestration from agriculture in general and from the wine industry specifically.  Carbon sequestration capacity varies a lot depending on what crops are being grown and the long-term impacts of agricultural carbon sequestration are still not very well understood.  I think the more positive impact that we’re able to quantify, the more adoption we’ll be able to drive. 

Other areas that I think could make a big impact in emissions from the wine industry include reducing bottle weight and light weighting glass, electrifying equipment such as tractors and ATVs, and decarbonizing product transport through things like electric shipping and trucks. 

What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?

Every sustainability team is looking for help.  There might not always be an open role on the team, but even if you’re working in a different part of the company, you can still help them with their projects and develop those skills.  Go to workshops and local groups and learn anyway that you can.  Sustainability is everywhere, once you build up your skills, there will be opportunities that will present themselves. 

What are your favorite resources?

Jackson Family Wines produced a virtual masterclass series on regenerative farming that’s available on YouTube.  We’ve also got a lot more information about our regenerative farming and land conservation work on our website.  

Michael Pollan is wonderful, I’ve read all of his books.  All We Can Save is another wonderful book about climate hope and what we can do.  There are also a lot of great regenerative agriculture books out there like Regenerative Viticulture by Jamie Goode.  I also follow our local natural resources board, the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Project Drawdown.    

Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?  

I really admire the Benziger Family Winery in Glen Ellen which was one of the first Biodynamic certified vineyards.  I went on a tour there when I was in high school and was really inspired to see how they were using some of the practices that we had been using on our tiny two-acre farm and applying them to 10’s of acres to create commercial products.  It really showed me that anyone who is dedicated to these practices can scale them up and use them. 

I also admire Katie Jackson, she’s spearheading a lot of the work that we do, and is a strong advocate for finding the best business practices that consider everyone’s views and creating an engaging and equitable working environment.  It’s wonderful to work in a place where everyone can contribute and work together towards a more sustainable future.