I live at the Tufthof with my parents, my wife and our three children. The name of the farm comes from the fossil spring tuffs that are common in the area of our community on the Monte Sole as typical limestone deposits with cavities. After grandpa and father had devoted themselves to livestock farming, my brother and I then started growing apples and vegetables. I am a great friend of the Val Venosta Golden Delicious, which is not exactly the easiest candidate for us farmers in organic cultivation. Therefore, it took me a while to dare to start with organic. Today I am very glad I did: Golden Delicious, Gala, Kanzi, Pinova, Red Delicious, SweeTango and soon Cosmic Crisp have found a location in our orchards in Oris that suits them very well.

I had to acquire the necessary know-how for organic cultivation slowly and through a lot of observation. In the process, I understood that you can also take the wrong measures forever if you don't observe well what nature is doing. Today I have reached the point where I am happy when I see pests in the apple orchard. Why? Because then the buffet is there for the beneficial insects, which can simply help themselves once they are there in sufficiently strong populations. So the blood louse scares me less: it would inhibit shoot growth, prevent the formation of flower buds, cause black spots on the fruit with its protective wool. But thanks to the earwigs, and with the help of twitching and hatching vesps, the blood louse can be kept in check. These antagonists of the blood louse are our important allies in natural plant protection. Sometimes I help mechanically by spraying away the wool of the blood louse with gentle jets of water, which leaves the blood louse underneath unprotected and the earwigs can then pounce on it greedily. This has to be done very carefully, though, otherwise I also spray the beneficial insects off the tree.

Long before I switched to organic, we were already working without herbicides and always removed the weeds mechanically. The benefits to soil and tree life were always very clear. In the organic sector, you have to get used to smaller harvests and also to very strict controls that protect not only the consumer but also all honest farmers.

In the constant exchange of knowledge among colleagues, we deal with topics such as counting beneficial insects and pests, weather forecasts and ideal coloring of the fruit, but above all we talk about healthy fruit produced in a natural way with a beautiful appearance and with a unique Val Venosta mountain taste.