As A Fourth-Generation Farmer, I'd Like To Talk About My Podcast

My great-grandfather planted these vines in 1919 with a mule and a shovel. My grandfather held onto this land through Prohibition, the Depression, and a phylloxera outbreak that took out half the valley. My father put everything he had into a replant that nearly bankrupted us in 1987.

That legacy is why I want to talk to you today about Dirt & Grit, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Farming is in my blood. There’s a knowledge that gets passed down, hand to hand, generation to generation, that you cannot learn from a book. That knowledge deserves a platform. Specifically, it deserves a weekly 90-minute long-form conversational platform with a video component.

We’re on episode 47. I’ve had on a consultant, two other proprietors, a guy who does soil biology, and my dad, who did not enjoy it.

People ask me what I do at the winery. I tell them: I’m a farmer. I get out in that vineyard and I feel that soil and I listen to what it’s telling me, and then I go into the barn we converted into a studio and I tell 900 monthly listeners what it said.

My great-grandfather couldn’t have imagined this. He’d have called it foolish. He’d have said get back out to the north block, the wire’s down.

And that’s exactly the tension we’re going to explore in Episode 31.