So you’ve made the conversion. You’ve gone all-natural with your fertilisers, your pesticides. You’ve fixed your land’s nitrogen balance with clover, perhaps, you’re rotating your crops, managing your land organically. 

Then you’ve moved up a level. Biodynamics. You’ve made your way through the exhaustive reading list, learned the minutiae, the down-to-the-day calendar, the esoteric preparations. Perhaps you’re making and maturing the 500P and 501 yourself, immersing yourself in the complexities and required patience.

Your soil’s looking richer, more fertile. The worms are happy – there are more of them, all a good, healthy-looking pink. Your barley is feasting on a banquet of unprecedented nutrition from the 500P washed down with all-new levels of soaked-up sunlight via the improved photosynthesis the 501 allows. Its flavours have never been better, as evinced by the far-higher intensity scores observed by our Terroir Specialist, Angelita, under the controlled conditions of our sensory panel.

What’s next? How can the flavours of your barley be improved further? The answer lies in the barley itself.

We have previously discussed how modern varieties have been bred for broad adaptation and for consistency of yield. In the process, the genetic pool has been shallowed to such a degree that the barley varieties in use today share the same parents and thus the overwhelming majority of their genetic makeup. The result being, as we confirmed in the course of the terroir project, that the variety of modern barley used in a whisky offers far less to that whisky’s flavour than does its terroir.

What’s more, a steady diet of artificial nutrition sprayed on the surface of the soil has meant that successive generations of barley have had little work to do in order to feed. The upshot of this is clear to anyone who has pulled up a barley plant. Its roots are very short indeed. After all, they’ve no need of being any longer. But this in turn gives them less access to the nutrients, the minerals, of the soil itself as well as preventing those roots from breaking up the soil and improving the land’s physical structure. 

The further we go back in time, the taller barley gets. This makes it more impractical to grow, certainly – more likely to blow over in strong gales, more likely to brackle before harvest. Either way the farmer loses out on yield, which is why varieties have also been bred to be shorter, and why there are methods which can also be used to retard growth.

But taller barley means longer roots. It has to, or it wouldn’t stand a chance. Longer roots which can search down further into the soil, can break up the structure of that soil and can feed on more of what that soil has to offer. Which, if the soil has benefitted from biodynamic preparations, is rather a lot.

“It’s something that I’d been putting to Waterford from the start,” says Trevor Harris. “That we needed varieties geared towards our type of farming. My viewpoint being that a lot of modern varieties are bred to be paired with soluble nutrients –  so they have a very shallow rooting structure. They’re bred to be short so they’re not very good at smothering out weeds. And given that we’re biodynamic farmers we need a plant with a rooting structure that’s much more explorative and goes much deeper to make use of the full soil profile, not just the top two inches. We also need a plant that grows reasonably vigorously in the absence of soluble nutrients, and grows tall and has a smothering effect on weeds, because we’re not going to use chemical herbicides to kill the weeds.”

Last year, for the first time, Trevor sowed his fields with Hunter barley, a variety that once dominated plantings in Ireland and was lauded for its distinct flavours and malting quality. But, as is always the way, it was eventually replaced with a higher-yielding variety, and until a few years ago, only 50g remained, held by the Irish Department of Agriculture.

We’d worked with the Department to scale that 50g up over two years until it could be sown over a whole farm, and after it had been trialled on conventional soil our biodynamic growers finally got their hands on it. It’s fair to say that Trevor’s a happy man.