Technology growing on the vine

Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 18, 2006 at midnight

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Engineering and construction juggernaut CH2M Hill is wading into the art of winemaking.

The Douglas County company isn't exactly known for fine wine. Rather, it's grabbed headlines for cleaning up the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons site and providing emergency housing for Hurricane Katrina victims.

But CH2M Hill has teamed with an award-winning, unconventional California vineyard owner - one whose farming methods include burying female cow horns filled with cow manure to improve the soil.

The duo's goal: Make quality wine in the most cost-efficient manner and in an environmentally friendly way.

They're marrying digital-age technology - environmental sensors, Google Earth's satellite-photo wizardry, and radio frequency identification tags - to old-world agricultural practices such as using sheep and chickens to battle weeds and pests. The collaboration began last January.

"It's the best of the old and the new in winemaking and winegrowing techniques," said Josh Metz, who's serving as a consultant on technology issues for the project and is president of Geovine Inc. consulting firm.

CH2M Hill, for its part, first looked at the project as a potential high-tech model - one that could be applied to other winegrowers, as well as "high-value crops" such as palm oil.

"We saw it as a prototype," said CH2M Hill Vice President Ed Riegelmann. "We also saw it could have immense business potential."

The technologies work together to keep tabs 2 4/7 on such conditions as air and soil temperature, humidity, ambient light and soil moisture.

Observers log on to a Google Earth satellite image of the vineyard. There, they can click on icons to get the latest environmental data gathered by 15 sensors scattered around the vineyard. The system also will zap alerts to wireless communications devices such as a cell phone to let vineyard operators know, for example, that hot weather dictates the need for watering.

The vineyard, Ceàgo Vinegarden, is the brainchild of veteran winemaker Jim Fetzer, a member of California's Fetzer wine family. Fetzer owns Ceàgo, a 163-acre operation in Lake County, about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

He launched the vineyard in 2001 to help showcase the biodynamic farming methods espoused by Austrian scientist and philosopher Rudolph Steiner in the 1920s.

They're intended to be a sustainable method of farming. Air, light, water, soil, the sun and the moon are considered key factors in the health of the crops.

Chemicals are out. Instead, sheep are deployed to control weeds and provide manure that gets mixed into compost. Chickens roam the vineyards with the sheep, eating cutworms that munch on vine roots while supplying eggs for staffers' breakfasts.

Those manure-filled cow horns are buried to promote beneficial microorganism content in the soil.

Ceàgo's 40 acres of vineyards include plantings of cabernet sauvignon, syrah, sauvignon blanc and chardonnay grapes.

And while Fetzer's old-world farming may appear vastly different from CH2M Hill's other work involving, say, Rocky Flats, the two have a core belief in common.

Fetzer's emphasis on sustainable agriculture meshes with CH2M Hill's emphasis on projects that spur sustainable growth that doesn't harm the environment.

"It just really fit with our culture," said Shannon McElvaney, a CH2M Hill technology consultant who's involved with the Ceàgo project.

fillionr@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2467

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