The Weekly Calistogan - Napa officials tour fish-friendly farming sites

Vineyard owners along the Napa River showed off the environmental benefits Monday of working cooperatively with government agencies to improve the lives of fish and other wildlife.

For the last decade, landowners in Napa County have enrolled in a fish-friendly farming program that allows them to produce a plan of environmentally friendly farming practices specific to their property, and have regulatory agencies sign off.

To grapegrower Ted Hall, the program was a means of ensuring compliance with the dozen or so regulatory agencies he deals with while also improving vital habitat along the Napa River and its tributaries for salmon and steelhead populations.

The practices are then checked regularly through a certification and re-certification process, enabling Hall to remain in good standing with regulators without burdensome or unannounced compliance checks, he said.

"We try to do the right thing," Hall said. "It's really hard to be compliant. The beauty of fish-friendly farming allows us to prepare that plan, have all 12 agencies sign off, and then we're free, essentially."

The program, also called Napa Green, started with 11,000 acres in 2004 but has expanded to cover 61,000 acres throughout Napa County currently, said Laurel Marcus, executive director of the California Land Stewardship Institute.

Marcus led a tour Monday morning of two sites along the Napa River — one near Oakville Cross Road, the second east of the town of Yountville — that highlighted the kind of large-scale restoration work agencies have done in concert with the adjacent property owners.

U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, Napa County Supervisor Diane Dillon, county Agricultural Commissioner Greg Clark, and other members of the wine industry, trade groups and environmental organizations joined in the tour.

Thompson praised the program, which is also exists in Sonoma, Solano, Mendocino, and El Dorado counties, as contributing valuable habitat restoration to salmon fisheries — a $1.4 billion industry in California — while also taking a proactive approach to regulatory compliance.

"It's always better if we're able to manage and regulate our own properties," Thompson said. "There's an avoidance aspect that pays off in spades."

Marcus said the program can entail smaller scale projects such as removing invasive plant species from properties, but the bigger ticket items have made the restoration efforts underway along the Napa River the largest such project in the Bay Area.

Property owners in the Rutherford Reach section of the river and Napa County restored a 4.5 mile stretch, which is slated to wrap up next summer. Monday's tour focused on the next stretch slated for restoration work, from Oakville to Oak Knoll, Marcus said.

At the first site off of Oakville Cross Road, Marcus said the adjacent property owners, Franciscan Oakville Estate and Cardinale Winery, have agreed to the restoration work, which includes removal of 1.8 acres of vineyard and converting it to habitat.

A steep levy abutting the river channel will be graded down and leveled, allowing crews to create an ancillary channel for juvenile salmon to stay in during the typical heavy river flows in March, Marcus said.

Widening and leveling the channel banks, in addition to growing new natural vegetation, will reduce the velocity of the river compared to the narrow channel it navigates currently. The narrow channel increases erosion and the amount of sediment in the river, to the detriment of native fish, while also worsening flooding downstream.

The restoration of four acres at this site will cost $2.4 million, split between federal Environmental Protection Agency grants and funding from a local sales tax measure, Measure A, that voters approved in 1998 for flood control projects.

The adjacent vineyard benefited because some stocks that were removed were having problems with Pierce's disease and other difficulties. Their removal improves the health of the remaining vines.

"This is the largest project in the Bay Area," Marcus said. "To do this in San Jose you have to take out 25 houses on each side."

The second site abuts vineyards owned by Treasury Wine Estates, the Missimer family, the Traina family, and Silverado Vineyards. The project will improve 35 acres of habitat at the expense of 10.7 acres of vines.

The channel will be widened to 160 to 250 feet across with similar features as the Oakville Cross location, as well as creating new wetlands and off-channel habitat for salmon and bird species. The project will install 1,400 feet of clean gravel into the river bed for salmon spawning habitat, in addition to lowering steep levies and banks alongside the channel, Marcus said.

For Rachel Ashley of Treasury Wine Estates, the project means a loss of vines in a 290-acre vineyard of chardonnay grapes, but comes with new benefits to the environment and to flood protection. Flooding in 2006 did heavy damage to the vineyard when the river ran over its banks and eroded the levy, she said.

"This is a fantastic example of the right people working together to put together a really fantastic project," Ashley said." This project is so much more than flood protection. It's about restoring the riparian habitats for the next generation."