Bees and vineyards: For Ron Bitner, they go together

“Bees are my passion, and I love grapes,” Bitner said. “I’ve been fortunate to put them both together.”

An Idaho wine industry pioneer and pollinator advocate, Bitner has spent the last 40-plus years trying to figure out how to best care for agricultural resources — and how to get other people involved.

Bitner considers himself a “synthesizer” rather than an innovator, he said. “I read a lot, understand science and see what’s going to work for me — so I’m not necessarily making an innovation. We get some ideas, see what’s lacking in Idaho and see what would work.

“My goal is to understand as much as I can.”

Bitner, a former C of I football player, has a knack for team building.

“He’s innovative in the sense that he’s bringing together different researchers that do not typically work together,” said David Wilkins, a retired Boise State University associate professor of geosciences.

Designing and installing a network of vineyard-sited weather stations — one of which is at Bitner Vineyards — is an example, said Wilkins, the project’s principal investigator. Bitner helped to bring together the team, which included several colleges’ researchers and students. Their specialties ranged from geosciences and soils to electrical engineering.

Broad cooperation was “kind of what made that mesh,” Wilkins said.

The network was started in 2015 in the Sunnyslope wine region, in the hills above the Snake River between Caldwell and Marsing. An expansion brought in the Eagle Foothills to the north and east and the Lewis-Clark Valley in the state’s north-central region.

Essie Fallahi, a retired University of Idaho pomology and viticulture professor, has known Bitner for decades.

They worked together on a research team that figured out which plants could be introduced, and where, to serve as hosts for truffles.

The southwest Idaho project, which had success, included input from people in other states.

Bitner “has been a great scientific bridge between academia and application at the grower’s level,” Fallahi said.

“I would call Ron an agricultural ecologist,” said Brad Stokes, a Caldwell-based UI horticulture and entomology extension educator involved in the bee survey. Bitner is “on the forefront of innovation and sustainability in southwest Idaho” — important “so we can keep farming and keep taking care of our lands for future generations.”

Wine pioneer

A grape grower since 1981 in the Sunnyslope area, Bitner was part of an early core group that saw strong potential for the Idaho wine industry. He was a key member of a team that in 2007 secured American Viticultural Area designation for the Snake River Valley of Idaho and Oregon.

“Ron has been a great leader and advocate for the Idaho wine industry,” Idaho Wine Commission Executive Director Moya Shatz Dolsby said. “We are lucky to have him in Idaho. He has consistently been at the forefront of efforts to enhance the wine industry and agricultural practices.”

Keeping his own vineyard and winery relatively small — Bitner Vineyards typically limits annual production to fewer than 1,500 12-bottle cases — has allowed

Bitner to treat the property as a kind of best-practices laboratory as he cares for the site and his longtime staff.

“When we drive near his winery, we see plants not very common to the area,” Fallahi said. Hazelnuts for the truffle project and an array of flowering, pollinator-attracting plants are examples.

Bitner became involved in state and national wine-industry leadership and continued to do bee research — traveling to Australia 25 times between 1995 and 2006 to do work associated with the Alfalfa Leafcutting Bee, for example.

“That little bee has taken me all over the world,” he said.

As for growing wine grapes, “Ron was talking to us about sustainability and soil health before they became part of the popular conscience in the ag industry in general,” said Martin Fujishin, a neighboring vineyard and winery operator to whom Bitner gave a book on cover cropping more than 20 years ago.

“He has really — quietly — helped keep Idaho on the forefront of a lot,” Fujishin said. “He’s not going to give himself credit.”

“I feel like what I have is that historical background on a lot of this,” Bitner said.

As a board member of the national Pollinator Partnership nonprofit since 2019, he has helped build the group’s Bee Friendly Farming certification program from about 800 acres soon after its formation to more than 360,000 worldwide now, including Bitner Vineyards. A gardening certification program followed.