Jun 28, 2024

Great Bear Vineyards’ biologicals focus

As the owner of Great Bear Vineyards, which will complete transitioning all grapes to organic production this year, Marcus Meadows-Smith relies on biological products to help control disease and pests.

He’s not just a user of biologicals, however. As the former CEO of AgraQuest, a biopesticide company, Meadows-Smith is recognized as a pioneer, selling the company to Bayer CropScience in 2012 for almost $500 million. This signaled the first major investment in biologicals by a traditional chemical company.

Now he is the CEO of BioConsortia, a Davis, California-based company that discovers, designs and licenses microbial products.

Marcus and Jenny Meadows-Smith share a passion for wine and food, which led to them develop Great Bear Vineyards. The winery hosts events ranging from wedding receptions to comedy nights and birthday parties.

As a boutique winery, Great Bear Vineyards produces about 2,000 cases a year, most of which are sold at the winery and through a wine club it runs. The winery has gained a reputation for its grapes, some of which are sold to Napa Valley wineries, a 45-minute drive from Davis. Marcus Meadows-Smith and his wife, head vintner Jenny Meadows-Smith, bought the former tomato, sunflower and corn ranch about 10 years ago, incorporating historic buildings into the business, including the barn and original homestead, built around 1860. Jenny Meadows-Smith, a chemist, attended the University of California- Davis’ renowned viticulture and enology program. The couple planted 10 acres of grapevines, about 600 olive trees, lavender and assorted fruit trees around the property. They process and sell olive and lavender oils and donate fruit to local charities.

Great Bear Vineyards offered its first wines for sale in 2018, and quickly became noticed, earning silver, gold and double-gold medals at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Great Bear Vineyards was voted Best Local Winery by Sacramento Magazine readers in 2020 and 2021. Its Chardonnay, Roussanne varietals and Grand Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon have received high ranks from Wine Enthusiast Magazine.

Great Bear Vineyards kept the original barn and homestead at the former ranch. Marcus Meadows-Smith and his wife Jenny, who own and operate the winery, also live at the property.

The winery attracts visitors from UC-Davis, including international visitors, who are interested in Great Bear’s sustainable and organic growing practices. Weeds, wildlife, water and more Davis has hot, dry summers, so pest pressures are low, Meadows- Smith said.

Permanent cover crops include a mix of ryegrass, wildflowers and clover. Under the grapevines, weed control is critical because a grape’s flavor can be affected by plants touching the fruit. As an organic grower, Meadows-Smith said weed control is the most difficult challenge. “In the first year, you have to protect the very young vines, because if they get an insect attack, then you can lose the flowers,” he said. “Now that they’re mature, a small amount of insect pressure on the leaves does not affect the quality of the grapes at all. And then we tend to do like a lime sulfur (application) when the vines are dormant and then through the growing season, it’s mostly just a natural oil that is sprayed.”

To be effective at limiting pest damage, the treatment has to be repeated during the growing season. “Is it better for the environment? I don’t know, because we have to go through the vineyard more frequently,” Meadows-Smith said. “So you’re using more fossil fuels by taking the sprayer through on a more regular basis.”

Great Bear Vineyards uses Bayer’s Serenade ASO, a biological fungicide developed by AgraQuest, as well as Pyganic Crop Protection EC, a bio-insecticide derived from chrysanthemums, the biofungicide Regalia and a microbial insecticide containing spinosad, which has been used by organic growers for more than 20 years. Meadows-Smith describes himself as a “keen ornithologist,” and the property is home to owls (including a pair of great horned owls), kestrels and hawks, and other assorted wildlife.

If coyotes aren’t keeping the wild turkey population in check, they’ll eat the grapes, so a friend with a crossbow is invited to hunt them. “So having those birds of prey around is certainly a deterrent for other birds that come in,” Meadows-Smith said. “The problem you have is, once they’re pecked, the sugary liquid comes out, and then you can get disease, bunch rot. And then as an organic grower, it’s almost impossible to control that.” The winery stopped growing Petit Sirah and Zinfandel grapes, because they’re thin-skinned and prone to bunch rot.

Marcus Meadows-Smith tests winegrapes to to determine when they are ready for processing.

To ensure the grapes receive enough water despite the dry climate, Meadows-Smith employs deficit-irrigation techniques to train roots to grow deep. Quality, and not tonnage, is a goal in growing winegrapes.

“You’re looking to have small berries with intense flavors, and therefore you don’t actually want to fill them with water because then the berries just swell up,” he said. “Then you get a lot of juice, which means you can make a lot of alcohol, but you lose flavor.” Genetic editing Meadows-Smith said BioConsortia uses gene editing to maximize the beneficial potential within a microbe’s genome. For example, the company’s work on nitrogen-fixing microbes uses a proprietary research and development platform to improve a microbe’s nitrogen- fixing capabilities.

“Microbes are very clever, and when they detect ammonia in their immediate surroundings, they switch off nitrogen fixation because nitrogen fixation is very energy intensive if you do it in a factory or if you’re a microbe doing it, because you have to break chemical bonds,” he said.

BioConsortia removes the microbe’s feedback loop that tells it to turn off the nitrogen-fixing process, essentially causing those microbes to continue to provide nitrogen in the soil after synthetic fertilizers would have dissipated. “It’s different from genetic modification,” Meadows- Smith said. “What we’re doing, we are just unleashing the natural power of the microbes so they naturally fix atmospheric nitrogen or they naturally control nematodes — we just help them do it better.”

Field trials and the future

Before AgraQuest, Meadows-Smith led Chemtura Corporation’s plastics additives and crop protection business. Now, he’s helping growers reduce reliance on chemicals at BioConsortia. The company recently closed on a $15 million round of financing, spurred in part by successful field trials, according to the company.

Great Bear Vineyards grows four varieties of white grapes and eight varieties of red grapes, some of which are blended. As a boutique winery, Great Bear produces about 2,000 cases of wine a year.

“Particularly now at BioConsortia we’re looking to produce very high-performing products that are equivalent to the chemistry and their efficacy as (synthetic) products, or in the area of nitrogen-fixing microbes, that will displace a large percentage of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer,” he said. “You know, my philosophy is we don’t want the grower to compromise on quality. What we’re looking to do is to provide an easy-to-use, cost-effective product.”

The first U.S. regulatory approvals are expected on BioConsortia’s products this year and the company has agreements with companies to distribute specific products when EPA approves them. That includes a broad-spectrum biofungicide for diseases in apples, berries, grapes, stone fruits and vegetables from Nichino America, and the biostimulant Zaffre from The Mosaic Co. that has shown average yield increases of more than 15% in fruit and vegetable crops, including tomatoes and beans. Other partnerships haven’t been announced yet.

In recent years, BioConsortia’s products have been through about 3,000 field trials across the U.S., Meadows-Smith said, on a wide range of specialty and row crops. Trials are also ongoing in Europe and South America. More than a dozen seed companies are testing BioConsortia products as seed treatments. After selling AgraQuest, he became head of strategic and business management of biologicals for Bayer for a brief time.

It’s now common for the major chemical companies to have similar divisions, acquisitions or partnerships to advance biological products.

“I think growers are starting to see advantages to soil health, regenerative agriculture, that replacing some of the sprays with biologicals is giving benefits to the soil, to their ultimate yields,” he said. The products are becoming more shelf stable; some products had to be refrigerated, and were not easy to use or mix with other products in the sprayer tank. Inconsistent results concerned growers. But field trials in recent years have proved some biologicals do work as advertised, Meadows-Smith said. “So with the best biologicals, it’s no longer a question of compromise,” he said. “It’s now a question of getting the message out.”

— Chris Koger, contributing editor