Best Practices for Winter Storm Events

With extreme rain and storm conditions across the greater Bay Area, we recommend following these best practices during rainy winter months.
 
Subsurface drain tiles, sump pumps, and other vineyard “dewatering” systems are important and highly impactful farming tools. However, when run all winter long, they can waste electricity and prevent saturating rains from recharging our subsurface aquifers.
 
Consider turning your sump pump OFF until much closer to bud break.  When set to “auto” for the winter season, we risk unnecessarily adding more runoff to our swelling streams, creeks, and the Napa River. Saturated soils generally do not damage vineyard root systems during the dormant season; therefore concerns are minimal for vine impact.
 
IMPORTANT NOTE: drainage and pumping systems are critical to maintaining roadway access or preventing water from entering wineries and damaging other types of sensitive infrastructure. In these cases, systems need to remain operational.
 
Benefits to turning off sump pumps include:

• Reduction in electricity cost
• Increased lifespan of pumps and pump motors
• Increase in groundwater recharge – critical to our recovery from multi-year drought conditions
• Potential reduction in downstream flooding
• No need to service or check sumps during rain events, which reduces labor cost
• Rainfall infiltration allowed to completely flush accumulated salts well past rootzone

Resources

• To view all of NVG's best practices papers, visit the NVG Seasonal Best Practices archive
  
• Sign-up to for the complimentary NVG Weather Alert.