Nathan Wood is the vineyard manager of Johan Vineyards, an 87-acre biodynamic and organic vineyard and winery in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It’s a wonderfully complex vineyard with over 50 individual blocks, 15 different varieties, and 10 clones of Pinot Noir. Nathan shared with us his journey of experimentation, and how Sectormentor has helped him and the vineyard team with their progressive approach to viticulture.
Experimentation to improve vine vigour
Johan Vineyards has been no-till since 2019, and dry farmed since 2011. This has been a challenge in the Mediterranean climate of the Van Duzer Corridor; over time the vigour of the vines began to decrease, most likely due to the vines and ground cover plants competing for limited nutrients and water.
‘You’re really pushing the vine to a total stasis within the land environment in which it finds itself, including all of the general native competition. I mean, we’re doing some mowing out here, but we’re not removing the root mass of any of our competition, and so that’s gonna really show you any weak spots that might be there [in your vineyard].’
The vineyard team have had to be creative in finding new ways to experiment with the vines to find a reasonable crop load and stabilise vigour. Over the last four years, Nathan has been using Sectormentor to track pruning weights, cane weights, crop load, and to experiment with the amount of shoots to prune to, in order to optimise vine health in this environment.
Tracking pruning data on Sectormentor has been key to this experimentation process, as the team can compare these results annually and assess which methods have had the most positive effect on vine vigour. Nathan was very happy to share that this year the vigour curve started to go up again, showing that the vines are beginning to conserve energy from previous years’ growth and respond to the updated pruning techniques.
‘The complexity of this vineyard and trying to understand what is going on in the land, this is where Sectormentor comes in, it helps me understand how everything is working.’
'Pruning weight (lbs/vine): 2'
Retaining yields during the no-till transition
The move to no-till at Johan has been very carefully managed – with a big focus on the % short shoots. Nathan highlighted the critical importance of a pro-active data driven approach to maintain yields during a transition to no-till.
“I think in the context of regenerative transitions it is important to address what everyone is so scared of: losing yield, through the transition,” Nathan explains. “We’re trying to retain yields while converting some blocks to more regenerative practices. That’s possible and you really need the data to make this transition smooth.”
The key metric Nathan monitors to prevent yield decline is the percentage of short shoots on a vine. This data point serves as an early warning signal of vine stress. If a block in no-till transition sees its short shoot percentage jump from 15% to 25%, the vineyard team knows they are in a sensitive position. To avoid a significant drop in vigor and a resulting yield loss (which could see short shoots rise to 40%), Nathan’s team takes proactive action:
“We have found that when you see those numbers it is important to lower your bud counts by 10% or so for the next year,” he says. “We have been able to do this without corresponding yield declines.”
This proactive use of data allows them to avoid costly, reactive inputs and instead make better shoot thinning and pruning decisions the year before. Nathan told us the philosophy aligns well with the Simonit & Sirch pruning techniques: prioritize fewer shoots per vine that are healthier and produce larger clusters, benefiting the vine’s overall health, rather than straining the vine with many small, meager clusters.
Farming this way has provided measurable benefits: over time, Johan Vineyards has seen the percentage of short shoots decrease and cane weights go up, allowing them to retain the same yield on a fundamentally healthier vine. Nathan notes that even their blocks 10 years into a no-till system are successful: “These vines will be smaller but it’s better to have smaller beefier shoots. You can have a smaller vine but have bigger fruits. We think the larger shoots give back to the roots whereas the smaller shoots don’t.”
Sectormentor as a tool for time-efficiency
The inclusion of all the vineyard’s datasets in one place means that Nathan can compare different variables between blocks and varieties and make quick, informed decisions: ‘Okay, boom, done. We’ve just made a plan for that block, concisely, using all of the data available, and in 14 minutes instead of going back and forth between 9 different spreadsheets for a month and a half.’
Comparing different data-sets simultaneously
The reports section of Sectormentor has been particularly useful in guiding Nathan’s decision making, ‘being able to dive in and see visualisations of your data makes this app different to any other software available to vineyards.’ In particular Nathan loves the custom reports to set different blocks side by side in graph format and compare what is going on in different areas, to see what’s working and what needs tweaking.
‘Being able to open up multiple reports at once, set them side by side, when you’re really driving deep down into what’s going wrong in a block, along with fruit composition, laboratory results, is just super helpful… Being able to look at [the data] in graph version, right next to my winemaker, we were able to make very, very dynamic, complex pruning decisions, and try to match the vine more correctly to the soil system that it finds itself in.’
Johan Vineyards is at the cutting edge of taking a regenerative approach to viticulture in the Willamette Valley, so they have not been able to rely on advice from neighbouring vineyards. This has meant that their data on Sectormentor has been even more central to understanding what is happening on the vineyard:
‘One of the things about being super progressive is that we are at the bleeding edge of experimentation in vineyards here in Oregon. So there’s nobody that you can ask, well, how did that work out for you? Because nobody’s done this yet. And so, if you’re not quick with using your data, and quick at trying to make a response, then you can really push a vineyard too far, and that’s going to impact you.’
Sectormentor as a tool for vineyard managers
The team at Johan have been using Sectormentor to monitor vineyard data since 2019. When Nathan arrived in 2022 to take over vineyard management, being able to immediately see the historical data of the vineyard meant he could build an understanding of the context and experimentation that had taken place there over previous years. This allowed Nathan to step into his role as a vineyard manager with confidence and ease.
‘I was very, very happy that many years of data had been uploaded into Sectormentor, and that my predecessors had been using it for a couple years; it let me hit the ground running, quite a bit faster… It’s hard to imagine what the experience of working at this progressive and dynamic vineyard would have looked like if no software was being used and all the vineyard data was in 13 different spreadsheets… it wouldn’t have been better. I can guarantee that. I don’t know how bad it would have been, but it would not have been better.’
Sectormentor has also been a great help for interns that the vineyard have hosted in the past, ‘having the phone app be quick, easy, and intuitive is super helpful for them.’ The ease of navigating Sectormentor has been very useful when there is a language barrier between the interns and the vineyard team; Nathan appreciates not having to teach complex data inputting systems, ‘I am a farmer as well, it turns out. So, I’m better at driving tractors than I am at phone apps.’
What is next for Johan Vineyard?
The Johan Vineyards team are currently taking part in a 3 year-long project with Oregon State University (OSU), to document how the major Oregonian soil types in vineyards react to different management practices, such as tillage or animal grazing. Nathan is excited to collect the soil data from this study and see how it fits into their current experimentation around vigour, ‘we can start working on evening out the increase in vigour in a way that is more informed by nutrition and soil health.’
Nathan also envisages Sectormentor’s new Heatmap feature to be useful for the team; there are many blocks with shallower soil on the vineyard which Nathan would like to see mapped out, to understand certain patterns in data and see if they’re related to soil depth.
Thank you to Nathan Wood for sharing with us what the Johan Vineyards team are up to at the moment!
If you’d like to learn more about Sectormentor, feel free to email us on info@vidacycle.com.
Turn Your Observations Into a Stronger and Healthier Vineyard
See how Sectormentor works for you:
