"If the tomatoes aren't good enough for gazpacho."

As they say, the people at Long Meadow Ranch are not former hippies. Their belief is that organic farming methods produce higher quality at lower cost. They do everything at Long Meadow Ranch, nothing is wasted. It seems that everything at the ranch is there for a reason, from the grapes to the chickens.

"If the tomatoes aren't good enough for gazpacho, they'll be fed to our organic chickens. Because they eat fabulous tomatoes and veggies, the chickens lay spectacular eggs with yolks almost neon-like in their color. We then get to sell the eggs back to Auberge du Soleil! There are even more efficiencies here. Since we raise the poultry near the vegetable production, we have no cost of poultry feed because we're feeding them our leftover vegetables. When we're done with the crop season, we have all the organic matter - old pumpkin vines, dead tomato plants - that then goes into a nearby compost pile. This time we use the chicken manure as the source of essential nitrogen. And, by spring the compost is ready to go back on the field as fertilizer. The cycle begins again." -Ted Hall, the owner of Long Meadow Ranch.

Instead of the "mono-culture" they have developed an integrated farming system that relies on each part of the ranch contributing to the health of the whole. Vineyards and wine making, olive orchards and olive oil making, and grass-feed beef, horse, and chicken raising all work together (not to mention the organic vegetable gardens). Even the soil from the making of the wine cave was in return used to construct the winery building. These things always amaze me, when people uncannily find ways around all the problems in their way. We should all just take a look at what Long Meadow Ranch does, and learn that the speed bumps between point A to point B are just little rests.