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Chautauqua County's rolling vineyards

Say the words “grape country” to Western New Yorkers and they’ll immediately think of that bucolic stretch of vineyards hugging Lake Erie from Fredonia southwest to Pennsylvania. It’s an impressive, reassuring sight any time of year with the ruler-straight corridors of vines running almost from the water’s edge up to into the hills. But find yourself in grape country when the fruit is on the vine, and the panorama takes on an added dimension as the aroma of ripening grapes fills your car even if you’re careening down the Thruway at 70 m.p.h.

Most of us Western New Yorkers have at least a rudimentary understanding of why grapes thrive on that two to three-mile wide ribbon of land just inland from Lake Erie. We know that the lake helps prevent killing frosts and extends the growing season by moderating air temperatures. But I’ll bet that most of us would be surprised to discover, as I certainly was, that grape country is also gravel country. Underneath the endless rows of grapes lies a layer of gravel ten, 20, 30 sometimes 40 feet deep that the Ice Age glaciers left behind as they receded. Grape growers learned long ago that their vines love to sink their roots far down into that well-drained gravelly soil to find the nutrients and oxygen they need.

Unfortunately, grape growers aren’t the only ones who know the value of gravel. Construction companies and road builders have an insatiable appetite for gravel and they have brought their machinery and their checkbooks to grape country in Chautauqua County where the gravel is plentiful and the digging is easy. Luckily, once that digging got too close for comfort, Jim and Penny Deakin, the heroes of this WNYLC story, decided to take action. 

Between the Deakins and their nephew Mac McCausland they own about 200 acres of gravelly, grape-growing soil in the town of Portland between Fredonia and Westfield, where Chautauqua grape farming had its beginnings 180 years ago. Theirs is an Elysian part of the world just above Route 20 with not only the rows of grapevines disappearing into the horizon but orchards of cherry, peach, apricot and sweet corn fields as well. Three minutes away by pickup truck, however, is proof that all is not well in paradise. Just beyond his property Jim slows down so I can get a good look at what once was a vineyard, but now is a gravel pit. His Portland neighbors have entered into agreements with the road builders, and have let huge earth-gobbling machines extract the gravel from their farms, leaving the land scarred, pitted and little more than a parking lot for rusted equipment. Worst of all the land is now useless for grape cultivation.

Of course, these neighbors and other farmers across grape country have received payments of many thousands of dollars per acre, in some cases enough money to retire and put their feet up. Jim Deakin says there is no doubt he could sell out to the gravel interests and receive a handsome payday. He can’t blame his neighbors for doing so; they are still friends, he says. The grape business is hard work with fickle weather and uncertain prices for their juice grapes. And graveled off acreage, although barren, can be reclaimed and made to look natural once again. But grape farming has been in both Jim and Penny Deakin’s families for generations, and as Jim says, “We’ve done well and we make a decent living and we love the area. We’re not going to be the ones to put an end to grape farming around here. And understand that once they take the gravel off the land, the grape growing is over.”

So two years ago the Deakins, worried that the encroachment of the gravel pits threatened not just Portland but the whole of grape country, attended a meeting in Westfield put on by the Chautauqua Farmland Preservation Bureau. There they heard about the WNYLC, and an alliance beneficial to all was forged. Last February they finalized an arrangement in which they donated conservation easements to the WNYLC and sold 61 acres to their nephew, who now farms it. The land will stay agricultural forever. “And that means no digging,” says Jim proudly.

Jim and Penny Deakins are easy folks to like—hard-working, respectful of the land, appreciative of its bounty. They are articulate and knowledgeable about natural resources, economics, viticulture, the grape markets. Now they are members of that growing family of landowners who are working with the WNYLC to protect not only the land but a rural, agricultural way of life as well.

Reprinted with permission from The Resource, newsletter of the Western New York Land Conservancy (www.wnylc.org)

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