Typically we offer discussions of grape growing and winemaking on our blog, but this post features Mark Pisoni, our vineyard manager, as star farmer of Pisoni Farms. We are delighted that Mark appears on the cover of the March issue of Vegetables West, as well as inside this issue as its feature story. Writer Patrick Cavanaugh begins by naming Mark as the kind of farmer born to work the land, one who “absolutely loves his job,” and all of us at Pisoni are quick to agree. When Mark isn’t checking the vines or gauging soil health in the family vineyards in the Santa Lucia Highlands, you can find him overseeing the romaine planted last December on Pisoni’s Farm or monitoring the growth of the broccoli he planted alongside his team in mid-November.

As part of the Valley’s vegetable powerhouse, Mark oversees a range of crops like cauliflower and arugula as well as broccoli and lettuces for the Pisonis on the family farm. Broccoli, lettuce, and other cold-climate vegetables thrive in the same climate conditions that Pinot Noir requires. But where our hillside soils are lean and granitic, the soils of the Valley floor are rich in nutrients and high in the clay that helps earth retain moisture. Even as, all over the globe, we experience great difficulty and disruption because of the pandemic, these vegetables are growing steadily under the rain and the increasing sun. In not too long they will help comprise the produce that “shippers stitch together” throughout the Valley, providing “a steady stream of vegetables for the marketplace,” Mark notes. And of course it is vegetables in particular which keep us and our immune systems healthy by providing us with good nutrition.