Vineyards are generally the most inhospitable of landscapes for the humble earthworm; the soil beneath vines is usually kept bare and compacted by machinery.
But scientists and winemakers have been exploring ways to turn vineyards into havens for worms.
The bare soil is problematic because worms need vegetation to be broken down by the microorganisms they eat. Pesticides are also highly harmful to the invertebrate, as is the practice of compacting the earth: worms need the soil to be porous so they can move through it.
Earthworms are important and threatened invertebrates – the engineers of an ecosystem that may be as diverse as the Amazon rainforest. Their diggings aerate soil and they pull fallen leaves and other organic matter into the earth and recycle them. But their populations have declined by a third in the UK over the past 25 years due to pesticide use and over-tilling of soil.
Marc-André Selosse, a professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, has been urging vineyards to increase grass and plant cover on their soil, and reduce the amount they till, to save the worms.
Selosse said: “In France, the vineyards are 3% of the agricultural area, and they are using 20% of the chemicals. In vineyards, for the soil there is a lot of treatments, so there’s a lot of compaction, and there is a lot of pesticides used. This all doesn’t mean the soil is dead because dead soil doesn’t exist, but it is the soil on which there is the most to do and on which we have a lot of data to do better.”
Worms had not yet vanished from the most intensively farmed vineyards, he said, but they did need to be supported with more regenerative practices.
“I think the worms are at a low level,” he said. “They are just surviving, but they are still there, which means that no one is thinking of buying earthworms for the soil, because they are there. It’s like Sleeping Beauty; they are there at very low level, and we have to wake them. But once again, in soil, we have resilience. It’s one part of biodiversity where they are so numerous that we were not able to kill all of them.”
Selosse said the main thing vineyards could do for worms was to stop tilling the soil – breaking it up and turning it over – even if that means that herbicides such as glyphosate are used instead to remove weeds. “When you go to no tillage, even when you use glyphosate, you increase the biomass of microbes [which the worms eat] by 30% which means that it’s better. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, because you use glyphosate, but because of no tillage, it is better. In the future, sooner or later, we’ll have to stop glyphosate also but for now, tilling is the first cause of worm problems.”
A common earthworm in soil. Photograph: blickwinkel/Alamy
Now some vineyards in the UK are making worm-friendly wine. When Jules and Lucie Phillips, co-owners of Ham Street Wines in Kent, started their vineyard, they were advised to grow conventionally by tilling and using pesticides, but were horrified by the results.
Julessaid: “After we did that, we went out and we dug a soil pit immediately after planting, and then also later in the season, and we realised the soil was just dead. There were no worms. It was smelling not particularly interesting at all, and the structure was poor.”
The pair had a revelation. “We just thought, this is completely the wrong way of farming and we need to do something different. We want life in our soils. And so we began the conversion to organic in that same year, and we’re now certified biodynamic.”
Rather than using pesticides, they applied herbal teas to the vines to promote plant health, Jules said: “For example, horsetail tea has a real high silica content, and that improves the leaf cell wall and means that it’s more resilient.”
The couple run a no-till system under the vine: “We’ve let the cover crop grow really long, and we typically let it grow right up into the canopy up until about flowering, and then we’ll mow it back. And the benefits of that are huge. The cover crop is really growing and really establishing that root structure and getting it to its maximum point. And finally, we put a big mulch on top of the soil that’s going to feed those worms and feed that soil life.”
This has hugely helped their worm population: “We’ve seen our worm counts increase massively from basically none to around 20 or 30 in a spade full. So extrapolate that up to a square metre, and it’s a very decent volume.”
Rob Poyser, a viticulturist at the regenerative wine consultancy firm Vinescapes, said that growing wildflowers in the vineyards they consult on had also brought great results. “We think in between three and five years we can take a bare soil and bring it back to life, into a thriving ecosystem,” he said. “We’ve used things like cover crops to bring this vineyard to life, to build the fertility into this system, and organic matter. We’re bringing life back to these soils we’re using. We’re letting nature do it.”
Poyser said they allowed wildflowers to grow all over the vineyards, and clients were delighted when clover, for example, sprung up because “clovers are great companion plants under the vine for grapevines, they’re also loved by earthworms”.
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Plus, Masters speaks with Runway co-founder Cristóbal Valenzuela about the role of artificial intelligence in Hollywood. The Chilean-born developer acknowledges that AI may lead to some job losses, but he argues it will ultimately benefit filmmakers. He explains why studios including Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney are already using Runway’s tools. Plus, he compares the current backlash against AI to the upheaval that followed the introduction of sound in film.
Anthropic told a San Francisco federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion US to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using pirated copies of their books to train its AI chatbot, Claude, without permission.
Anthropic and the plaintiffs in a court filing asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement, after announcing the agreement in August without disclosing the terms or amount.
“If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment,” the plaintiffs said in the filing.
The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
As part of the settlement, Anthropic said it will destroy downloaded copies of books acquired through pirating sites LibGen and PiLiMi (Pirate Library Mirror). Under the deal it could still face infringement claims related to material produced by the company’s AI models.
In a statement, Anthropic said the company is “committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.” The agreement does not include an admission of liability.
Around 500,000 works are covered in the settlement, according to the Authors Guild, meaning an estimated $3,000 US will go to each author. (Morakot Kawinchan/Shutterstock)
“This historic settlement is a vital step in acknowledging that AI companies cannot simply steal authors’ creative work to build their AI just because they need books to develop quality LLMs,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement.
“These vastly rich companies, worth billions, stole from those earning a median income of barely $20,000 [US] a year. This settlement sends a clear message that AI companies must pay for the books they use just as they pay for the other essential components of their LLMs.”
Although an estimated seven million books were downloaded by Anthropic from piracy sites, according to the Authors Guild, only around 500,000 works are covered in the class action, meaning the settlement amounts to roughly $3,000 US per author.
Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the class action against Anthropic last year. They argued that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, unlawfully used millions of pirated books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.
Creative work stolen
The writers’ allegations echoed dozens of other lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets, visual artists and others who say that tech companies stole their work to use in AI training.
The companies have argued their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content.
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the books to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than seven million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for that purpose.
B.C. author leads lawsuits alleging big tech used writers’ works to train AI
A best-selling Vancouver author has launched a class-action lawsuit against NVIDIA, Meta and two other tech giants.
J.B. MacKinnon claims that books he and other Canadian authors wrote, were illegally used to train artificial intelligence models.
A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI copyright cases.
Vancouver author J.B. MacKinnon recently launched class-action lawsuits against NVIDIA, Meta, Anthropic and Databricks Inc. in B.C. Supreme Court, alleging that his and other Canadian authors’ works have been used illegally for AI training.
Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup’s decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in “many circumstances.”
Cristóbal Valenzuela is the co-founder of AI firm Runway — which is bound to make plenty of people in Hollywood bristle. But he says studios and independent filmmakers are regularly using AI tools. And while he concedes that artificial intelligence will lead to some job losses, he argues that ultimately it will be a boon to filmmakers.
“AI is not The Terminator. AI is not Black Mirror. AI is not God. It’s a technology that can be very powerful for you to leverage,” Valenzuela clarifies. “It has challenges like any other technology, but you are in control. Humans are in control, like they’ve always been.”
Valenzuela discusses why studios like Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney are already using his company’s tools. The Chilean-born developer also compares the current backlash against AI to another major industry upheaval: the arrival of sound in film.
