See Saw Wines is running a sustainability tour on Friday, October 20 as part of the month-long Orange Wine Festival.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The winery, which has a cellar door on Lake Canobolas Road, also ran a similar tour on Sunday, October 1, where tickets were sold out and guests could learn more about sustainability and organic farming while visiting the Balmoral vineyard.
The Central Western Daily has asked See Saw Wines co-owner Justin Jarrett to share some of his sustainability and organic farming story, practices and values.
1. What have you implemented to make See Saw Wines a leader when it comes to sustainability?
"Over the last 25 years we have fenced off all the waterways and grassed them up so all water leaves the property in pristine condition," Mr Jarrett said.
"We've done revegetation areas, tree planting, built wildlife corridors.
"In the vineyards we've gone from a conventional farming system to certified organic and then on top of that 100 per cent ground cover in the vineyard. Now we're in the process of replanting the vineyard with different rootstocks that allow for less water use to handle drought better.
"On all the farms we've put solar systems, 10kW systems on every farm.
"In the winery we have turned all the pumps into what we call variable speed drives, so they only use the amount of electricity they need on demand unlike a normal pump which uses 100 per cent electricity."
Mr Jarrett said as they need more pressure, water, heat or cooling, the pumps ramp up and ramp down unlike traditional pumps which were either on or off.
"The idea is to significantly reduce your power needs, which then in turn reduces your carbon output," he said.
"We've replaced the chilling system to a smaller but more efficient one, we've increased the size of the press so that we can get our work done mostly during the day so our electricity usage is 90 per cent from solar cells and we do not do a lot of work at night.
"We've put a worm farm in and we make our own worm castings that we use for planting the vines.
"We implemented a whole system in which we flew the vineyard drones and that mapped different bigger areas and then we built a spreader that puts it out based on high, low, or medium [need] of compost.
"Nowadays we use about 600 tonne of green waste that's been composted from Orange back into the vineyard."
2. What inspired you to become sustainable?
[Wife and co-owner] Pip and I both of had ag science degrees and we just [thought] that agriculture in general is going in a direction that we sort of thought wasn't sustainable long term," Mr Jarrett said.
"Once we had our own kids we really started looking at what our legacy would be and that is we wanted to leave our farms in a condition that our grandkids were proud of them.
"At the end of the day the main thing is that we just want to leave our bit in better condition than what we got it and that to us is a really important thing."
3. How does technology help with sustainability?
"We adopt modern technology to make either better decisions or better outcomes for the farming system in general," Mr Jarrett said.
"You've got everything from moisture probes to drones, tractors with GPS, you've variable speed drives, you've got monitoring of water troughs.
"If every time there's a technology that was can see will reduce our effect on the planet then that's a technology we can get hold of.
"The answers on sustainability are highly complex, so there isn't any one answer and that's why technology is such a great thing, it adds bits in to help you."
4. Do you think more local wineries will make the move to become more sustainable?
"Absolutely, the wine industry as a whole recognises that we produce a good that's a luxury item, it's not an essential ingredient to life," Mr Jarrett said.
"I really feel that most people in the wine industry have a sense of responsibility to produce a product and to do it in a sustainable way.
"As a collective in Orange we are all working on different things in different ways of achieving that goal."
5. How long did it take to switch over to a sustainable model?
"We still haven't achieved it, we're still going," Mr Jarrett said.
"Just to put it in context, you want to measure your carbon output and we do produce more carbon than we sequester.
"The goal now is to mitigate even further our carbon output and to further increase our tree planting activities to hold more carbon back.
"I would see we are at least another 10 years away from when I can put my hand up and say this system as it currently is can go on for another couple of thousand years but we're not there yet."
Reading this on mobile web? Download our news app. It's faster, easier to read and we'll send you alerts for breaking news as it happens. Download in the Apple Store or Google Play.
Sign-up to our latest newsletter.