Organic Report: Digging into the data

His Master’s project, funded by Organic Winegrowers New Zealand (OWNZ) through Lincoln University, will look at the financial implications of running a fully converted vineyard organically, including costs, yields, fruit price and wine price. “Hopefully it will give us average costs of production and return per hectare,” James says. “It would be great if people can use these warts-and-all figures to see if organic production stacks up financially and makes sense for their operation.”

But the process is “an unbelievably big can of worms”, he says. “People had to sit down and slog through a very complicated, time consuming and very private spreadsheet.” In order to make the task viable in a one-year study, the research will not compare conventional and organic grape growing, but people will be able to consider the results against the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) vineyard benchmarking reports. Thanks to “awesome” support from New Zealand Winegrowers and MPI, James has been able to use the same definitions for a lot of costs.

He believes the project is overdue, with people long relying on anecdotal reports when considering a transition to organics. It’s information that would have been useful to Framingham when it converted a portion of its vineyards to organics in 2012, relying largely on personal experience reports from others. “What people were saying is not what we were seeing,” he says. That’s a personal view, he adds. “I don’t think we are alone in that. If this report goes well and we get a lot of high-quality participants, we can have some numbers instead of just anecdotes.”

The report will also include data from organic growers who make and sell wine, reflecting the price of wine sold and any advantages of that, he says. “Is it more viable to be vertically integrated than just being a grower?”

James sees the study as a good follow on to the Organic Focus Vineyard project, which ran from 2011 to 2014, with three focus vineyards in different wine regions used for wider industry learning. “It was really cool at the time, with lots of information about the conversion period across the three regions in New Zealand,” James says. “It got a lot of the conversations going. Hopefully this can be a next step.”