Vineyard removals have been in the news lately, with stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, Lodi News-Sentinel and Ag Alert. Grapevines are getting ripped out and crushed up into a giant wad of metal-infused wood. It's a sign of hard times for California's wine industry.

It's also not nearly enough, says Jeff Bitter, president of Allied Grape Growers.

Bitter said in January at the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium in Sacramento that California growers need to rip out 50,000 acres of vines this year to bring the state back into equilibrium. Some of that is happening. But it's not going to happen in time to prevent another crop in 2024 that will be much bigger than the market needs.

"As I said from the stage, I don't have any expectation that we're going to pull out what we should pull out," Bitter told WineBusiness. "The reaction just isn't going to be that quick. They're being torn out, but not enough. In the Central Valley, the wineries are as aggressive as anybody in removing vineyards. We've seen a lot of winery-owned vineyards that have been removed or are for sale. That's a telltale sign."

Whether or not the process is full speed, vineyard removal in the San Joaquin Valley is a thriving business right now. 

"I know of four big vineyard operations that went out of business in the Central Valley," said Richard Lopez, owner of Apex Farm Solutions in Kerman. "You never used to see that."

Lopez had a machine tearing out a vineyard in Madera as we spoke, and as soon as it was done there, he planned to move it to another vineyard in Kerman. Removal business is brisk.

But, Lopez said, many growers have been reluctant to remove grapevines because they don't have any alternatives to plant. 

For years, nut trees were what grapegrowers planted when Muscat or Merlot grapes stopped selling. But since 2021, almond growers in the 8-county San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District have actually removed 3.5 times as many acres -- 144,000 total -- from production as grape growers. Walnut growers have removed another 18,000 acres. The district has subsidized the removal of thousands of acres of citrus and stone fruit trees as well.

"You'd be surprised by how many fields are becoming completely fallow," Lopez told Wine Business. "It's almost like they're getting attacked by different weapons at the same time. I have a client right now who's going to have 700 acres idle. There are almost no viable crops. There's no new contracts for tomatoes. The alfalfa price is in the gutter. We're in a period right now where there's not much room for agriculture."

You'd think growers might be in a hurry to remove vineyards because starting next year, nobody in the air pollution district -- which stretches from just south of Sacramento all the way to the outskirts of Los Angeles -- will be allowed to burn the vines. Currently, cane-pruned vineyards of up to 100 acres can be burned, while cordon-trained vineyards of up to 250 acres can be burned. As of next Jan. 1, all open burns of vineyard removals and orchard removals will be prohibited.

"The San Joaquin Valley has air control problems," said Jaime Holt, chief communications officer for the Valley Air District. "We sit in a bowl. We have a meteorology that lets pollution build up quite easily. We don't have the ocean breezes that bring clean-outs easily. Even though we don't create as much pollution as other parts of the state, that pollution doesn't have anywhere to go. Agricultural burning, while it's something that has gone on for hundreds of years, our capacity in the valley to manage the pollution from agricultural burning is limited."

There's a reason farmers burned the removed grapevines for centuries: it's easy and cheap. 

"You don't have to take the metal stakes out," said Joshua McCahill, owner of McCahill Dozing in Reedley. "You can pile up the sticks and we burn them up. Then you just pick out the stakes later."

But burning wood, especially with metal in it, creates air pollution. Now the air pollution district subsidizes removals on a fixed scale, paying from $500 to $1700 per acre to farmers, depending on both the trellising and whether or not the crushed vines are incorporated back into the soil. Small farmers (100 acres or less) get $400 per acre more than larger operations. Grapegrowers can feel lucky because the subsidy rates are significantly lower for orchards.

"We're a region that feeds the world," Holt said. "Our agricultural industry is unmatched anywhere else in the nation. We want to keep it thriving. We want to make sure that it's done in a way that's environmentally sustainable and economically viable."

However, it still costs more than the subsidy rates to remove a vineyard. 

"Most vineyards are in the $1500 to $1600 an acre range, and that includes removal, grinding and spreading out the chips," McCahill said. "It's actually cheaper to grind it than it is for me to burn it. I tell people, I'm going to charge you more and you're going to get more out of it.

"We feed the vines with the wire into the grinder," McCahill said. "On our discharge belt we have a big magnet that takes out all the wire. The wood chips, we spread back out on the ground. It's a big recycling operation. If you can use the wood chips for landscaping, it works really well. Power plants won't take the wood chips because there might be a few little bits of wire. We disc it back in and you wouldn't even know there was a vineyard there."

McCahill said most grapegrowers can at least afford to pay for the removal, whereas he knows almond farmers who didn't make enough money on their most recent crops to do it.

"They can't farm it, and they can't remove it," he said. "A lot of guys who have been in wine, they'll go back maybe with corn. I've had them do all kinds of different stuff. I had a guy who pulled out 150 acres of vines and within a month, he planted it all with tomatoes. Tomatoes were actually good because of the floods last year."

Lopez said that raisin farmers in particular are removing vines. The California raisin industry could soon be a memory, like the once-thriving Sonoma County apple industry, which lost its last processing plant in February.

"The vineyard I just took out in Madera is the 5th one I've taken out this year for raisins," Lopez said. 

John Yergat, president of JFS Enterprises in Fresno, said his company has been grinding up grapevines since 2006. It's not an overnight process. And the removal equipment that Yergat brings to vineyards costs more than $1.5 million, which brings up the cost for small vineyards.

"There's a lot of prep work," Yergat told Wine Business. "We have a prep crew for rolling the drip hose, rolling the wire, pulling the stakes. From start to finish on our jobs, depending on the amount of acres that we're dealing with, start to finish, is four to six weeks."

Yergat said that despite the impending burning ban, farmers aren't in a hurry.

"No one knows what to plant," Yergat said. "In the past, everyone was in a big hurry. The pressure isn't there like it has been. Just because of the downturn in ag. Nuts are down. Everything's down."

None of the vineyard removal guys had paid attention to which grape varieties are being removed. But popularity in a wine bottle won't save them. Aaron Lange told Ag Alert that he was planning to rip out a block of old-vine Cabernet Sauvignon from his Lodi vineyards as part of more than 400 acres he will remove. Cabernet, according to Bitter, is one of the most oversupplied grapes in the state.

"The varieties that we're ripping out, they're varieties where the contract has expired," Yergat said. "The wineries don't want it."

Bitter said that even with all the vines being taken out, he doesn't expect all of California's grapes to be harvested in 2024.

"Three out of the last 5 years, we've left grapes on the vine," Bitter said. "In 2020, even if we hadn't had those wildfires, there would have been grapes left on the vine. Over the last 5 years, we haven't had a crush above 4 million tons. The grapes are there, but we're not picking all of them.

"The data is screaming at us so loudly about the reality of our structural oversupply that we can't ignore it," Bitter said. "I live and die by grapegrowers. This is brutal. Having to talk about reducing our production, it's not a message that I want to deliver. But it is what it is. You can't ignore it like it doesn't exist."