Hi,
I am a fifth generation farmer and agronomist from Portugal. I worked as farm manager, mostly in vineyards and wineries for some of the largest companies in my area.
Four years ago my father handed me our family vineyards, and I immediately started the conversion from “conventional” to certified organic. It is a small farm of 10 hectares, and I converted most of our foreign grape varieties to high quality ancient Portuguese grape varieties to make genuine, premium wine.
In 2020 a friend of mine told to me about John Kempf´s work and I started to listen to his podcasts, webinars and took all of the online courses and joined Kind Harvest. I immediately started to implement regenerative agriculture principals.
I believe the key to success is having healthy plants creating healthy soils, so I’m also taking sap analysis throughout the growing season to know what is really happening inside the plant and balance plant nutrition, so that they improve photosynthesis, get resistant to pests, diseases and feed biology with their root exudates.
I am doing multi species cover crops from five different plant families, I often graze them with sheep and use chicken. I´m using microbial inoculants and brewing my own microbes on my Johnson Su bioreactor to boost microbial diversity, not only in the soil, but also in the plant leaf, to help me sequester nutrients from the atmosphere, but also to help me control plant disease.
Regenerative agriculture opened a new window and a completely different way of seeing, feeling and doing things. Since then, agriculture became much more fun and I’m starting to see some changes in my vineyards!
Thank you Kind Harvest for all the help and inspiration!
Kind regards,
Sérgio Nicolau
Watch the video below to hear about the cover cropping he does on his vineyard.
