The Beauty of Agronomy

At this time of the season, while wine lovers are getting ready for the holiday season, grapegrowers are busy tending their vineyards.

One of their major concerns is keeping diseases, like powdery and downy mildew at bay and also establishing and training new vineyards.

Storm cell over McLaren Vale: Dec 2016.

"Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge,

and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the

techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the

million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the

blights. These men work carefully and endlessly to perfect the seed,

the roots. And there are the men of chemistry who spray the trees

against pests, who sulphur the grapes, who cut out disease and rots,

mildews and sicknesses. Doctors of preventive medicine, men at the

borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle, men who

quarantine the sick trees and root them out and burn them, men of

knowledge. The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are

the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon's job, as tender and

delicate; and these men must have surgeons' hands and surgeons' hearts

to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover

them from the air. These are great men."

 – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.