‘It’s like Sleeping Beauty; we have to wake them’: winemakers urged to help save earthworms | Invertebrates

Vineyards are generally the most inhospitable landscapes for the humble earthworm; The soil under the vines is generally kept naked and compacted by machines.

But scientists and winegrowers explored means of transforming vineyards into paradise for worms.

The bare soil is problematic because the worms need the vegetation to be broken down by the microorganisms they eat. Pesticides are also very harmful to invertebrates, as is the practice of compacting the earth: worms need the soil to be porous so that they can move it.

Earthworms are significant and threatened invertebrates – engineers from an ecosystem that can be as diverse as the Amazon forest. Their excavations ventilated the ground and pull fallen leaves and other organic materials in the earth and recycle them. But their populations have decreased by a third in the United Kingdom in the past 25 years due to the use of pesticides and the overlapping of the soil.

Marc-André Selosse, professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, urged the vineyards to increase the grass and the cover of plants on their soil and reduce the quantity they precede, to save the worms.

Selosse said: “In France, vineyards represent 3% of the agricultural area, and they use 20% of chemicals. In the vineyards, for the ground, there is a lot of treatments, so all this does not mean that the soil is dead because the soil is existing.

The verses had not yet disappeared from the highest breeding vineyards, he said, but they had to be supported with more regenerative practices.

“I think the worms are at a low level,” he said. “They survive, but they are still there, which means that no one is thinking of buying earthworms for the ground, because they are there. It is like the beauty of the sleepwalker; They are there at very low level, and we have to wake them up. But again, in the ground, we have no resilience. It is a part of the biodiversity where they are so numerous that we could not kill all of them. ”

Selosse said that the main thing that the vineyards could do for worms was to stop plowing the ground – breaking it and turning it – even if it means that herbicides such as glyphosate are used instead to eliminate weeds. “When you go to the floor without work, even when you use glyphosate, you increase the biomass of microbes [which the worms eat] By 30%, which means that it is better. This does not mean that it is perfect because you use glyphosate, but because of work, it’s better. In the future, sooner or later, we will also have to stop glyphosate, but for the moment, plowing is the leading cause of verses. »»

Now, some vineyards in the United Kingdom make wine suitable for worms. When Jules and Lucie Phillips, co -owners of Ham Street Wines in Kent, started their vineyard, they were invited to develop conventionally by plowing and using pesticides, but were horrified by the results.

Julessaid: “After that, we came out and we dug a floor pit immediately after the planting, then also later in the season, and we realized that the soil was dead. There was no verse. It was not particularly interesting at all, and the structure was poor.”

The pair had a revelation. “We just thought it’s completely the wrong way to agriculture and we have to do something different. We want life in our floors. And we therefore started conversion into organic the same year, and we are now biodynamic certified. ”

Rather than using pesticides, they applied teas based on plants on the vineyards to promote plant health, Jules said: “For example, tea in the outdoor has a real content of silica, and which improves the wall of leaf cells and means that it is more resilient.”

The couple manages a system of non-till under the vineyard: “We have left the coverage culture developing a very long time, and we generally let it develop in the canopy until flowering, then mowed it. And the advantages of these are enormous. The cultivation of coverage really develops and really establish this root structure and make it at its maximum point. And finally, we put a large mold in addition to the ground that will feed the Worms and feed.

This has enormously helped their Green population: “We have seen our accounts to voidly increase by around 20 or 30 in a full spade.

Rob Poyser, vititiculturalist of the regenerative wine consulting company, Vinescapes, said that the cultivation of wild flowers in the vineyards on which they consult had also brought excellent results. “We think that between three and five years, we can take a naked soil and bring it back to life, in a flourishing ecosystem,” he said. “We used things as coverage cultures to give life to this vineyard, to integrate fertility into this system and this organic problem. We bring our life to these floors that we use. We let nature do it. “

Poyser said that they allowed wild flowers to develop everywhere in the vineyards, and that customers were delighted when the clover, for example, came because “the clover are large companions under the vineyard for the vines, they are also loved by earthworms”.