Sheep and Grapes Together: Managing Vineyards Holistically at Paicines Ranch

0:15 [Music]

0:26 All right, so we'll wait a little bit so that people can stream in.

2:13 Okay, I think we're going to go ahead and get started. I think we probably have the most people that we're going to get. All right, welcome everybody. This is our fifth episode of this webinar series, and it's been going super well and we're really happy with all the different presenters that we've had so far. If this is your first time being on a Green Cover webinar, just know that your screen will be hidden and your microphone will be muted throughout the duration of the presentation, just so that we can focus all of our attention on our presenters for today.

2:48 If you do happen to come up with any questions throughout the presentation, please utilize the question-answer feature at the bottom of your screen there, and then at the end we have a couple people that will be answering those questions. So I will go ahead and turn it over to Keith, and he will be doing our introductions today.

3:06 Yeah, great. Thank you, Sophie, and thank you for putting all this together. It has been a really good webinar series. My name is Keith Burns and I am the co-owner of Green Cover and a sales manager, and one of the great things that I've been able to do as part of my job and position here is I get to travel a lot, meet a lot of really neat people, experience a lot of pretty cool things.

3:30 Our presenter today, Kelly Moldville. I actually met Kelly when he was in Colorado while working on some ranches there in Colorado, and now he is at the Pacinis Ranch, which is what you see in your background there, which is in California. And from the very first time I met Kelly in Colorado, I was very impressed not only with his knowledge of sheep, but really more so the knowledge of how to integrate the livestock with the land. And that's one of the things that's just always impressed me about Kelly: his ability to integrate both the livestock and the land and to manage it as an entire ecosystem, and not just as a herd or a flock separate from the ecosystem.

4:19 In moving to California, he's taken the concepts that he learned and he's integrated it even further into vineyards, which is maybe not necessarily unique, although I think Kelly is one of the guys that has done it the most and has some of the most experience. But it's really a great way to do it, because now they're providing weed control and biological diversity in the grape vineyards. Which, by the way, he said they're going to be starting harvest tomorrow out there. So I'm really excited to have him share that knowledge and that experience with you of how they're managing everything holistically and how they're seeing benefits to both the animals as well as the vines and the entire ecosystem.

5:08 I also want to introduce Davis Bailey. Davis is our salesman who has really grown into our orchard and vineyards expert. Davis has been out to the business ranch a couple times. He's visited a lot of our customers in California, specifically focusing on the vineyards and the orchards. So we wanted to have Davis in on this webinar. He'll come back on at the end to help answer questions. He can share some other experiences with some of our other customers and clients in that California area, or in that same type of vineyard-livestock integration space.

5:46 So I wanted to introduce Davis. He'll be back. I will kind of moderate the Q&A session at the end. So yes, if you have questions, please like Sophie said, put them in that Q&A box, and we will get to those at the end. But for now, I am going to hide my video and my sound and turn it over to my friend Kelly Molville. Kelly, take it away.

6:06 Thanks, Keith. Thank you for having me on here. I've been following you guys for a long time now and you've been really influential in my work. This first slide here is a broad shot of Piscina's Ranch from the vineyard. I just wanted to give a few basics: the ranch is 7,600 acres. We're on the central coast of California, about 60 miles inland from both Santa Cruz and Monterey.

6:38 That mountain in the background, when the rains come from the coast, that stops it all. So we're in a very dry place. We've had about five inches of rain two years running now. We're in a pretty serious drought, but our historic average is only about 12 inches. This is a pretty historic vineyard-wine-growing area in that it's the second AVA, which means it's a defined viticultural area, and there was the second one formed in California. There are vines across the road from us, basically next to the ranch, that were planted in the mid to late 1800s that are still producing fruit.

7:17 There used to be a thousand acres of wine grapes on Piscinas Ranch historically for about 30 years until 1995, and that was part of Almaden Vineyard, which was one of the largest vineyards in the world—that was 6,000 acres total. So there is a history of grape growing here. I was hired by the owner to implement an idea I threw out at a conference, and so we'll be discussing how that idea has basically come to develop.

8:00 This was the big question that has been driving me for a long time, and that is: is it possible to increase ecosystem health and resiliency to climate change?

8:11 When I saw him simultaneously maintaining or increasing profitability, I got into farming as a kid when I was about probably around 14 years old and we had a small market farm in the outskirts of El Paso, Texas, mainly growing things like chili and corn and tomatoes and selling them at a little stand at the busiest intersection near our house.

8:38 It was we basically were managing it conventionally until I developed a strong interest in falconry and raising raptors, which led me to reading Silent Spring and realizing that if I really wanted these birds to be around, we needed to figure out a different way to farm so that it wasn't destroying their ability to reproduce.

9:02 We're going to talk a bit about soil health principles and how we apply those or practice those. But first, I wanted to—one of those principles is to have a context, and so this is the context for the vineyard project at Piscinas Ranch. We are also running, we have about a little over 2,000 head of sheep on the ranch right now. We run cattle, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and then we have some crop ground, about 600 acres of irrigated crop ground.

9:37 But this is the specific context for the vineyard. Basically, it's a design project on how we design a vineyard that creates a flourishing ecosystem through mimicking healthy biological processes. This would include maximizing photosynthetic capacity, soil health, plant, animal, and insect diversity, and then integration of grazing animals. The end result is to achieve exceptional quality wine, long-term profitability, a thriving ecosystem, and resilience to climate change.

10:12 Those of us in the wine world have been fully familiar with climate change for a long time. Grapes are very sensitive to changes in climate. I think it was 20 years ago that I first heard about a conference on climate change in wine growing, so we've been looking at this for a while because we're working with a crop that is highly sensitive to changing climate.

10:35 Just as an example, in this area, the harvest used to traditionally go and tell about Thanksgiving, and now generally people are done with harvest. So there's a number of grape varieties and they harvest at different times. Most people are done with harvest now about the middle of October, so we've moved the entire harvest up about a month.

10:59 So the idea was again, how do we design this system? We basically created all these factors that we were designing for. I'm not going to read all of these to you because I think this will be made available, and if you want to see any of this stuff, you're welcome to contact us at Pisces Ranch as well. But these are the core things that we're looking for from a new design of a vineyard.

11:35 And the problem is that we tend not to have much design process in agriculture. If you think about it, you can get a degree in agricultural engineering, you can get a PhD in agricultural engineering, but as far as I know, there are no classes in agricultural design, which kind of shows why we've gotten into an industrial mindset.

11:58 These are the soil health principles. Some people have four, some people have more. We are working with seven right now, and we are always open to what might need to be added to this. So I think probably most of the people that are viewing this are familiar with these practices. One that I find is increasingly important is the last one. If you're not working with people who believe that soil is the basis for productivity of both our agricultural and natural ecosystems, if somebody doesn't buy into that, then you can't really push a string. So working with people who are passionate about this and willing to discover and take that journey of how to make it work is really critical.

12:46 And so this is—those mountains in the background, we are right on the other side of those. So this is the county next to us, Monterey County, and this is what a lot of the vineyards over there look like. I think the average vineyard size is about a thousand acres. And at this time of year, which is probably, I'm guessing this is going to be maybe February, March, you see that they have what looks like they did put in a cover crop. It looks like one species and they skipped every other row. I still have not been able to find a good answer why people are doing that, but anyway, there's not a lot of diversity in this ecosystem.

13:30 It's a stretch to call it an ecosystem. It's basically a very compromised former ecosystem. And so this is not the only inspiration that comes from me seeing this. The inspiration is that we can do a lot better.

13:47 And so my first attempt at this was to, realizing again the importance of integrating animals in cropping systems, take a formally conventional section out of a larger vineyard. So it was a large conventional vineyard, I took a small section out and did a trial running sheep in there throughout the growing season. Sheep are commonly

14:12 Grazed in vineyards in California during the non-growing season, which is our winter, which is also our wet season. And so that's when our cover crops and the native vegetation is growing well, basically from in a normal year from say October through April.

14:30 I just simply set an offset wire on here that enabled me to graze the vines without damaging the fruit or the fruiting zone. And this was a trial I did probably about 12 years ago.

14:49 On the right side you can see the trial vineyard. On the left side you can see the control site. And one of the things that this—well, so we did several things here. We did not do all of the vegetation was controlled by the sheep grazing and we were using a pretty high density of sheep. And even though it was a very small vineyard, we were able to keep them pretty highly packed in there and move them frequently. On the control site you can see that it was tilled. And if you want weeds, the best thing to do is till, so it's kind of a perpetual way to create weeds, which is funny that it's commonly used to control weeds.

15:29 These are the same vines, same variety, same clone. And on the side where I was managing it, we didn't have to do any mowing, we didn't have to do any fertilizing, we didn't have to do any suckering. You can see those vines are really bushy at the bottom, which typically has to be removed by hand, either by hand or by machine. And the sheep did all that for us and converted that to dung and urine. And again, they also did the shoot tipping because when the vines got long they hung down in the rows and they were able to do that, which is another labor savings. So that was a good indicator that things were on the right path.

16:12 After doing presentations on that concept, mainly in Australia, New Zealand, and helping the first commercial vineyard get set up in that system, which was in Australia, I started thinking: what if we actually bypassed the electrified system and created a vineyard that allowed us to graze throughout the growing season but did a bunch of other things too that we acknowledge the fact that things are getting warmer, things are getting hotter. How do we design for that and how do we create a vineyard that is more resilient in the face of a changing climate?

16:46 The other things we wanted to do is make it easier to manage. We wanted to make it more profitable by having sheep do as many of the tasks as possible, and we wanted to increase the overall biodiversity because if we don't have biodiversity, then we don't have resiliency.

17:09 This was from last year and this gives you an idea of the early on with what our system looks like. We have the vines pretty tall and we can walk under the vines as well as the sheep. And when we're first establishing and we can't have sheep in there because the vines are too small and they would eat them, we can mow that vineyard going both directions. You can see we're keeping that vineyard floor covered throughout the year. So this is the middle of our dry season, but we've still got good cover.

17:41 We have a canopy that partially shades the fruit and the vineyard. So we'll get about half the vineyard in complete shade during the hottest time of the afternoon. We've never tilled since we planted the vineyard. We did rip the vine rose on this section. The second section we didn't even rip the vine rose.

18:09 This is a rendering that a landscape architect did for us that was doing an internship here of what we wanted this to look like. And I was really happy that she said, 'Do you want me to go below ground too?' and I said, 'Yeah, that would be great. Let's show the whole thing,' because we're managing a whole ecosystem here. And so that's what we're working towards.

18:34 I want to briefly talk about what is different about this from a conventional vineyard, and by conventional it could be organic or biodynamic or just conventional management. And on the left there is what a normal VSP, which is called vertical shoot positioning, vine would look like, and it's basically a hedge. But the vine on the right is depicting what we're using here. And you can see that we are actually able to capture more solar energy for photosynthesis and we're also able to provide more shade because of this overhead canopy.

19:30 If you can imagine the one that's just the hedge, if that was the canopy like we're using, then you get a really good amount of shade, which is great for both workers. Right now my crew is out there working—it's going to be 100 degrees today—and so during the heat of the day, it's really nice to have some shade to work in. So that's kind of surprising that this particular trellis design was developed by a retired petroleum engineer in Texas, not just near Houston. And he didn't design it for sheep. He designed it because it's so hot and humid there that he wanted some type of canopy that was more open and but also had more shade.

20:16 This is just depicting the problem with grazing during the growing season of the vines, which is the summer. And if you're in a Mediterranean climate, this is just showing the two climates.

20:29 That I've worked in the Mediterranean and the southwest, the first vineyard that I put in and the first two that I designed were in Arizona. And you can see that the brown box is showing when the sheep need to be excluded from the vineyard, but it's also showing by the green humps when the moisture comes and when your floor vegetation, which could be native or cover crop or both, when that is at its peak.

20:54 So in either of those scenarios, and then now there's a bonded winery in every state in America and they are growing and making wine out of wine grapes and other fruits, but you can probably grow wine grapes in just about every state in the union now as well. Some of those are hybrids, but in order to graze there during that peak time of photosynthesis, you need to have a way to do that without damaging the vines.

21:30 This is a great photo that I use a lot and this is just showing why it's so important to have animals integrated in livestock practices. This is from North Dakota and this is showing three types of management on the same type of soil. So all these soil samples were taken within 200 feet of each other, just different management practices. And the one on the left is basically using holistic plant grazing and you can see the soil structure there—you've got nice open pores and a nice aggregate structure.

22:10 The next one, the middle one, is continuous season-long grazing, which you still have the presence of animals. They're just not managed quite as well as you could be doing. They're left in there longer, there's probably some overgrazing happening and maybe some trampoline, but even with that your soil structure is still better than the stuff on the far right, which was recently converted to cropland the year before. And interestingly enough, that was no till. So you can see that the soil degraded rapidly under that practice.

22:45 And the really fun part of this is they did a water infiltration test. And the water infiltration rate for the converted cropland for one inch took somewhere around 31 minutes for an inch of water to soak into that soil. On the continuous season-long grazing, it took about 11 minutes, so we're getting better. And on the well-managed grassland, it took seven seconds.

23:17 So we are in an area where every drop of water that falls on the ground we want it to go into the ground. And we have extremes. We have had the wettest year in California's recorded history. I've been here for eight years—that happened in 2017. And now we are in the most serious drought since in the last 1800 years. So we have big extremes and we need to be able to have resiliency in the face of that, and the key for that is how we manage our soil.

23:52 I'm going to quickly go through how we developed the site. This is the site where the vineyard was. The first phase we planted is a total of 25 acres. And we basically cleared the land, did an application of compost, a very thin application of compost in that first year. We ran cattle on that. We had the equivalent of seven animal days per acre. We didn't plant a cover crop or do anything else. We just spread that compost and we allowed the native vegetation to come.

24:30 So again we got seven animal days per acre. The next year we planted a cover crop and our productivity went up tenfold. We had 70 animal days per acre, so we're already on this curve of increasing ecosystem health starting with the soil, and by the way, increasing our carrying capacity so our potential for income is increasing at the same time. And we've not even planted a vineyard yet.

24:53 The next year we introduce sheep as well as cattle, and you can see our cover crop is still doing well. And then this is towards the end of that first year—we grazed it down, we put in our trellis stakes, and we planted the vineyard. So that would be 2017.

25:17 I just wanted to give people an idea of what this looks like right now. These are some rams we raise. We run both Dorper and Katahdins. And because of the fire, we picked up a big flock of Dorpers. Our flock is mainly dwarf now. You can see the fruit up there. This was probably in early August or so.

25:44 And again, we're actually strip grazing the vineyards as well, and you can see we have two poly wires in there so we can divide it up in any direction. We don't just have to go up and down the roads. So we, because of the system where we are able to graze year-round, and there's numerous benefits, I just wanted to show this photo because this is 1700 sheep on 12 acres in that particular section. We grazed the entire 25 acres in a period of 24 hours. And it's really nice to have the option of going from anywhere from say five sheep to a large flock like this of about 1700.

26:28 So we have that option and we can use the sheep at any time of the year. And it helps that we have this large range land outside of the vineyard where we can take the sheep out of the

26:42 Vineyard and put them on there when we need to. This slide is just showing what happens when we do graze during the growing season. This was actually a couple years ago and in the foreground you can see an area that has been grazed and in the background is also another area that has been grazed. The part in the middle was not grazed because the vines were too small and we would have had to protect all the vines which would have taken a lot of work.

27:10 Until the vines get big, it's problematic to graze during the growing season because they will eat the leaves. They love grape leaves. And so if there's not too many vines, and actually this year we just developed a vine protector that works really well and is easy to set up and take down so that we can graze the vineyard. So I wanted to talk about, we believe in monitoring and we believe it is really important to monitor towards your context and to make sure that what you're doing is allowing you to achieve the results that you're after.

27:53 And so we are monitoring for a wide variety of things and I'm going to go over the results that have occurred from that. One of the big ones is that soil organic matter has gone up by one percent. Before we actually got a crop last year was our first crop. So each one percent increase in soil organic matter here equates to about probably around 25,000 gallons of water holding increase in water holding capacity which is about 36 gallons per vine. And that's a lot. That's over a month's worth of irrigation.

28:31 And so if we can get that up to about another percent or so and we get a normal rainfall year, we think we'll be able to dry farm, to grow the grapes without irrigation or with at least a greatly reduced amount. And there's obvious benefits. We said besides water retention we're sequestering that carbon in the atmosphere and helping to support a healthy soil ecosystem.

29:02 Our inorganic nitrogen and sulfur are dropping. We actually have high nitrates in our irrigation water. So apparently that's being broken down and utilized. We also have high salinity, high salt levels, high sodium. And those levels are dropping in spite of the fact that again we are in a drought so usually the rainfall will help flush out some of those salts, but apparently our soil biology is helping with that.

29:36 Our calcium magnesium ratio is increasing which is good because we have low calcium and high magnesium soils until you get into the subsoil where we have very high calcium. Boron is increasing and we have high born in our water, but the symptoms of toxicity have declined. We attribute that to our foliar spraying of calcium and also our soil health.

30:02 And our microbial communities are become more complex and diverse. We're comparing them to some neighboring vineyards and we have 10 more bacteria and fungal species, and interestingly they have more species of those organisms that thrive in soils that have been disturbed, that have been tilled, and we have a lot less because we don't have those conditions because we are not tilling.

30:32 We have over 46 plant species that grow in the understory. That includes both native plants which are increasing and the cover crops that we use. A lot of the native plants that are coming in come in during the summer when we don't get rain and they're very drought tolerant and they can handle that. And a lot of those are great pollinator species too like milkweed is a big one.

30:57 We had an entomologist do the insect monitoring because we really, that was way out of our league. And again we're comparing that to a neighboring vineyard. We have about five times more insects than our neighbor. And we've got a lot more predators and parasitoids.

31:23 So as far as pesticides, we are certified organic and we are not using any pesticides and we rely on high brix in our crops to prevent the sucking and chewing insects.

31:41 On the birds, we've got over 52 species and the vineyard is now considered an eBird hotspot. eBird is an international site for birders. And a fair amount of folks come to the branch now. We have Airbnb rooms here and they come to check out the birds.

32:01 I alluded to the brix and the insects and I just wanted to say that we are using sap analysis and keeping our nutrient levels adequate on our vines so that that increases the vine health and we did find that the brix was highest in our vines where the sheep are grazing and so that's we think that is a

32:29 Direct result of possibly two things: the tongue and the urine and the contact of the sheep with the vines through the suckers and the shoot tips. We're the cheaper grazing we've had bricks as high as 22. Where the sheep haven't grazed we also have high bricks but I think the highest we got there was about 15.5.

32:56 That is, our program is to create health in the vines to reduce in second pests. Our estimated savings through once we get everything established through using these processes is about seven hundred to a thousand dollars per acre and that's because of reduced labor inputs. Tractor use has gone way down. I see since we never have managed the conventional vineyard here the tractor uses basically just for the sprays and we do about seven of those a year.

33:36 Unfortunately in organic vinegar you'll tend to have even more tractor passes because of the tillage that is done and so you can have as many as 25 tractor passes per row per year. And this does not factor in the we have the likelihood of increased income from having sheep.

34:01 We did start an internship program last year and this is one of these, the woman in the middle was in our internship program last year so this is her second year, all of the others are new. So education is a big goal of ours and it's one of the reasons I really appreciate what Green Cover is doing with all these series which is a real gift to the community.

34:37 Well this has been an internship program, next year we'll probably increase it to an apprenticeship program.

34:45 Not everything has gone perfect. We lost the first year we planted we lost a third of the vineyard to squirrels. You can see that that is a squirrel tail as it's about to go into a grow tube. We thought the grow tubes would protect from squirrels but they learned how to get into them. And we also lost a third of the vineyard to high rainfall in the nursery where the vines came from. They were underwater and consequently they never butted out. So between the squirrels and the flooding of the nursery we lost two-thirds of the vineyard the first year. But it's a constant learning process and that's one of the reasons why education is important to us so we can share our learnings with others and help them avoid the mistakes that we've experienced.

35:37 First wine from the vineyard was produced last year. From this winery we sell all of our grapes to local wine makers and she sold out the wine maker sold out of this. That white wine she sold out of it before it was even bottled and then there's another white and a red that sold out within about a month and they were the fastest selling wines from her portfolio. And she's doing a great job of that also telling our story and partnering with us and being able to expose people to these ideas in the wine world as well as just to people who buy wine.

36:25 I want to end with another thing that has been really important to us this year and we're talking about our monitoring but biodiversity is really critical to us. Agriculture in general tends to really destroy biodiversity. I mean we clear land and we tend to reduce it to just a couple crops. Our goal is to do the opposite, use agriculture to restore biodiversity and set things right with the world again.

36:59 This is a what's called a tri-colored blackbird, pretty similar to a red-winged blackbird which a lot of folks are probably familiar with and this is an endangered species, it's endemic to California and it tends to it was very common in the central valley but has been reduced mainly because of agricultural practices. And they are an insect eater and every now and then we would get a few on the ranch and their call sounds like it sounds like a cat kind of meowing and kind of with a rough voice. And we always get excited when we see a couple because they're endangered and it's just fun to have some biodiversity.

37:47 Well this year they we would see a couple more each day until it was getting obvious that there was a big influx of them so I called a neighbor who's a retired bird guide and told her that we had what I thought was hundreds and she said oh you probably just don't know how to count. So she came out and she said well according to my account you've got about 800 in this flock here and so they would come up to the vineyard every day and they would go through the outside of the vineyard in the morning and then come into the vineyard in the afternoon.

38:23 And I want to show folks a slide of what this looks like, if I can, if this will work for me. This is right on the outside of the vineyard. And again, this is an endangered species in California. And we had at one time we had up to three thousand, they nested just right below where this video was taken.

38:53 We were pretty excited about that, as were actually a lot of folks in California. The California state expert on tri-colors came out here, and one of the first things people asked was why are they in the vineyard? You guys must have a lot of insects, and we do. So apparently that created habitat suitable for them to be here, and we're really excited that our practices allowed habitat and food for an endangered species.

39:22 So in addition to getting a crop of wine grapes and sheep, we are also creating habitat for wildlife, which is really again critical. And their partners, they actually don't eat, they're insect eaters, so they don't eat fruit. But again, that's part of our mission.

39:44 This second year of growing grapes, we're seeing some pretty good indicators that we're on the right track. I just wanted to show this slide from Buckminster Fuller, which kind of highlights the importance of design. And if you keep trying to fight the existing reality, you're just in a fight that's going to go on forever. I got inspired by this: if you want to change the way things work, then create a model that makes the old model obsolete.

40:22 We are just in the early stages of this. We have a lot to learn. But I just heard a week ago that there's already one of these being used in Australia now because of a guy that was visiting here. And we have several other folks that are interested in doing this as well.

40:42 So again, it's more than just the vineyard design. You could do this with a number of trellis systems, but it's the practices and the processes that we're paying attention to that allow nature to flourish again and be partners with us on what we're doing here.

41:02 I'm not going to read all these, but these are some of the farming principles that we work with here in addition to the soil health principles, and all of these should be available on this site and they're available on our website as well.

41:23 And this is my contact information, and I think we're going to open up for questions here, so I will turn it over to Keith and Davis.

41:38 Yeah, great Kelly, that's really inspiring. I had tons and tons of questions and thoughts and everything else going through my head. I love that last quote by Buckminster Fuller: you know, to change something, you gotta build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. So my first question would be, it certainly looks like you've done that with this new model of vineyards and integration of the sheep and all the biological benefits that's coming from that.

42:07 Do you have a lot of people coming to you to try to integrate this into their own operations? And before I let you answer that, I do want to just put in a plug for the Piscinas branch and the Piscinas group. You guys are really set up to do this and make a profit doing this, but you're really set up as a learning organization too. You've got an entire division of Piscinas that is totally dedicated to learning. I think there's a separate website for Piscinas Learning, so I would encourage people to go and check that out. I've been there, Davis has been there, really put on some quality educational type things. But Kelly, I'm interested: are there a lot of people coming to you to try to learn this, to be able to expand this out into their operations?

42:55 Yes, the interest has picked up pretty dramatically in this past year, I think in part because the wine writer for the New York Times came out and did a piece on what we were doing. And that was spawned by a neighbor who I'd actually done some consulting work for a while back named Randall Graham, who used to have his own winery that was a pretty famous one. And he came out to visit what we were doing, and he tweeted, and he had 600,000 followers or something, and all of a sudden, Alison and I—I actually am not on any social media—so it was my crew told me, hey, there's a little bit of a buzz going on.

43:44 So there is interest, and unfortunately, our current management practices in California in general mean that the life of a vineyard is only about twenty years. And we have things like red blotch and Pierce's disease, and I would say a lot of the conventional management is hard on the vines. But I had a guy who is having to take out sixty acres because of problems, and he came out to visit. And it took him a while to find me in the vineyard, and by the time he caught up with me, he said, I actually don't even need to meet with you, I see what you're doing here, and I'm excited that I actually have.

50:14 To be conducive to just about any breed of sheep. The V is four feet across, and when the vines split at the cordon wire, they come up and split like a T, and then they split like a V and go over into either side of the row.

50:34 When they are fully taken advantage of, they will extend probably a foot beyond the four feet of the trellis, and so that will take up about six feet of the 12 feet of every row, which gives half of it in shade.

50:56 Because we are using wider spacing, I would say that the cost is going to be pretty similar to a conventional VSP system because it takes more hardware, more posts, grape stakes, and wire than the Watson does. But we are using a little bit taller posts, and the V's, so I think it would probably be pretty similar in cost to set up either of these, but in labor, orange would take a little bit less labor because there's fewer posts to pound in.

51:32 Remember, that system you said it was developed in Houston, high humidity, you're in a very arid environment. Both probably have heat taken care of, but where that system might not work is if one that could be more of a universal system. Are you suggesting with the spacing, with the height, if it's covering a broad range of geography already, are there limits to it?

52:06 There would be. One thing that could be a factor is severe wind, and if you could only go one direction, we were able to set up all the rows so that the prevailing wind goes basically up the row. It doesn't go against the vines, in which case it could potentially flop everything over to one side. So that could be a bit of a problem.

52:33 And then I think there's probably some of the hybrid vines that are grown in the northeast where you don't need that much canopy from them, and so a lot of them just had two wires, and some of them would even just be a single wire. So that would be overkill for something like that where you could just get by with maybe one wire. Now, if you wanted to graze, maybe you would have a little bit of a V on there, but not to the extent that we're using it. Might just have one wire on either side to help keep stuff out of reach of the sheep.

53:16 And it would be possible too if you were in a really cold climate and you needed to be close to the earth to take advantage of the heat of the soil during the summer and that extended heat that goes into the fall to keep from frosting. That would be another reason why you might not want to have something that tall.

53:38 Do you have any pushback from your workers on harvesting those higher trellises, or does that not seem to be a problem? No, actually, everybody so far really likes that. We do have a lot of folks from Oaxaca and Guatemala that work vineyards in this area, and some of those folks are not very tall, and they said that would be a lot of trouble. But in general, when you're picking, you're stooping down, and so I think when we did our harvest last year, everybody was really excited about being just able to stand upright and pick fruit at eye level.

54:26 So Tiffany has a question, and I'll let you weigh in on this. Davis, you can maybe comment on what you've seen in other places as well, but what seeds are you using for the annual portion of the cover crop that you're drilling in there? You've got some perennial natives coming back as part of that mix, but what kinds of things are you planting?

54:49 So we are some of our core mix tends to be oats, and I have also done barley, triticale, and wheat. But oats is one of my favorite of the grasses, and it's one of the favorite of the sheep as well. Oats and barley are both good sheep feed.

55:16 And then I had started initially using a lot of radish, but I'd heard that there can be issues with the radishes affecting the flavor of wine grapes, so I've switched over to using a lot more chicory, which does well in this climate. And I actually really like the chicory, and that's good forage for the sheep as well.

55:38 And I'll throw in some flower seeds like phacelia, California poppy. I also like to use hairy vetch, crimson clover, and then I slightly started collecting native flower seeds from the ranch and threw those in the mix as well to try and encourage some of the native diversity and native vegetation. In part because we have a lot of pollinator insects here that are specific to specific plants, so having those plants growing I think will be beneficial to us. So our seed mix can be pretty diverse.

56:23 To maybe probably 20 different species in there, some of which we're adding and some of which we're just purchasing.

56:31 Davis, any comments on what some of the other vineyard folks in that area maybe have had some success with as well?

56:38 Yeah, I think the termination time is really important to point out there. So with Kelly's context, having a variety of maturing plants is really helpful if we're talking about grazing sheep over a certain duration. If another grower was trying to get as much biomass produced from that cover crop before they terminate at a certain time before maybe they have to start other operations, they would maybe have to focus a little bit more on the earlier maturing options, so maybe a little bit more barley, a little bit more rye, potentially fava beans. I've seen do really well in addition to the other species Kelly mentioned. So that's something that I like to ask about is just when they're going to be terminating the cover crop and how they're going to be terminating the cover crop.

57:32 Another pro for Kelly's system is not really having to terminate the cover crop. You're trying to produce good feed, so that's not as much a concern for him. In fact, with that system we're trying to again just extend the maturity of the entire cover crop.

57:52 I want to ask one more question and then I'll turn it over to Davis. You can ask a few additional ones here, and I know we'll run a little bit past our hour, but Kelly, as long as you've got a few more minutes I think we can extend this out just a bit. I wanted to go back and touch on something that you said because again it's a really big number when it comes to Brix. You know, you said that you were measuring 22 Brix levels with your grazing, around 15 without grazing. Can you talk at all about what a conventional vineyard might have without any of these practices that you're doing and then just kind of put that into context for people about how big of a deal that is and how that is really preventing you from needing insecticides and I'm guessing maybe even fungicides you're pretty well eliminated because the Brix is an indication of how healthy that plant is, but do you have any idea what your neighboring vineyards, you know, like the one on the other side of the mountains that you showed, would be?

58:52 That's a great point. Keith and I don't think that we have tested Brix as any of the neighbors, but I'm going to have the guy here, Greg, who's been doing that monitoring stuff. I'm going to have him do that and compared, you know, within like 15 minutes or so, the Brix here at neighboring vineyards. But so I'm not sure actually, but we've just been testing within our own vineyard. And I will say that we've had the range from all the way up to 22 with where the sheep are grazing, and I think our lowest Brix was about 13.5. And if you listen to folks like John Kempf and others who are talking about Brix, then anything above 14 or 15, and you basically are out of the zone. The plant material has become indigestible to insects. So that is something that we, I mean we would look at forage Brix just to see how nutritious it was, but really this idea of looking at Brix as a way of preventing insect damage—and we are, we are so again we are certified organic, but I don't like to even use our organic fungicides, which tend to be sulfur and oil are the main two that we have used in the past. But this year we did use one oil application, which is way down from like doing maybe at least half a dozen applications for fungal disease. And last year we didn't have to do any oil sprays on the vines that we harvested fruit off of. So we are getting closer to that point, and I think that it's going to be a combination of canopy management and vine nutrition.

1:01:15 Yeah, and if people aren't familiar with the Brix test, it's a relatively easy, super cheap test to do. Anybody can do it. You can do it in real time, and so it's a really great way to test your—it could be any crop, you know, grapes, but it could be corn, beans, anything that you're growing. You can get a Brix test. But I think what Kelly is demonstrating here is the power of these principles of soil health. When you're not applying any of them, my guess is that Brix level is below 10 a lot. When you're applying most of them, you're getting, you know, to that 13, 14, 15, which is above that threshold. But when you're putting them all together, 22 is incredible. I mean, that's just me. Yeah, I saw David nod his head because he knows how impressive that is. That's actually higher—at a higher Brix in our shop than the winemaker wanted in the wine grapes. So that's kind of funny. It makes too sweet of a wine.

1:02:13 Davis, I'm going to turn it over to you. You can ask the last few questions and then kind of wrap it up here.

1:02:18 So Kelly, you showed the picture of the squirrel. That's a common question.

1:02:24 Squirrels or at least other types of rodents. Was there anything that you did to alleviate that issue or do you still have to do anything to treat that issue?

1:02:36 Yeah, it's funny so that was one of the wettest years we've had and we had a big squirrel infestation and now we're in our driest year and we've also had a big squirrel. So they're definitely opportunistic, whatever way the climate's going they're going to take advantage of it. And so we do live trapping. We've tried a little bit of trapping with a kill trap but that hasn't been too successful. And I have been shooting a lot of squirrels as well and we have some, we have a handful of retired guys who come onto the ranch to shoot squirrels just because they want to, so we have a volunteer predator posse.

1:03:22 And I think one of the problems is that we have reduced or eliminated a lot of the predators for ground squirrels. I think a big one was literally was a grizzly bear. And I've heard stories of grizzly bears basically just getting into a squirrel den and popping out the squirrels and eating them like popcorn. And we don't, you know, there's grizzly bears have been gone for a long time. So unfortunately we have to become the predator in order and, you know, we're managing for diversity and ecological health and so obviously all the animals are going to try and take advantage of that. It's just that the predators tend to be behind the prey animals and as far as their life building up numbers.

1:04:13 Now another common question that we get is what to do right under the vine row or in the vine row, so cover crop focusing on in between vine rows but what's new right under the blind rail. It seems like as we listen to your system and see the pictures of what you're doing that that's really an irrelevant question by the time you are running sheep through it. Are you noticing any reduction in vine vigor or are there any cons to not doing anything in the vine rail like other people might be doing to control weeds right around the vine?

1:04:54 Last night I was doing a little spraying of a foliar spray of kelp and kelp and calcium and a fish hydrolysate. And so it's just to give them a little bit of a boost and sometimes the young vines do show symptoms of the boron toxicity more than an older vine. So I was doing that spray. And the one thing that can be a problem is if you have weeds around a young vine and can't access it for a spray like that, but the thing I also noticed is when the weeds do well the vines do well. And so it's pretty rare that I have weeds overpowering a vine in general. The vines kind of shoot up through the weeds and are doing pretty good. But we've, when we first do grafting and things like that, the grafters need to get in and that area needs to be clear, then we'll remove weeds. Otherwise we don't really worry about them and we don't really have that much trouble. And again, as I mentioned, the weeds can actually, they're working in a different zone than the grapevines. Grapevines can be very deep rooted. And so I think that the weeds may actually help drive the roots down deeper.

1:06:29 Wow and when I'm calling them weeds because that's what people refer to, we call them resources right. Yeah I like that.

1:06:40 Now I've got two more questions for you that are a little bit more your picture. We've talked to about a few technical questions but one of the things that I think makes you really unique is how talented you are at making the livestock system fit with the cropping system. We've got all sorts of producers who are commonly raising livestock and raising crops but you have created such dramatic synergy from the two of them together. Do you have any advice for our growers who are livestock producers as well as crop producers and just how to be thinking even deeper about creating this energy like you have?

1:07:24 Yeah I think we have to put aside our limitations and thinking that it has to be a certain way. And I mean it's to me it was pretty funny to get so much resistance from folks who'd been growing grapes for all their life to be really concerned about raising the vines up higher. And when as anybody who's seen vines growing in the wild, I mean that where I, the first venue I put in in Arizona, there was a vine growing on a tree. I could not see the top of the tree and the vine was going all the way to the top of the tree. And so they definitely have that's their habitat. And so I think oftentimes the things that limit us are the things that we know. And so we have to get beyond this narrative that we can only do it a certain way and I think.

1:08:22 That goes, that's going to go for all types of cropping systems. And prior to doing the wine grapes, I was doing vegetable crops, growing 60 different types of vegetable crops in Colorado, and we were integrating livestock into those. But we were doing that the year before and then having the winter rest, and that allowed us to do that with virtually no inputs and produce really high quality. And I had that under a center pivot and I had to think again outside the box of how am I going to set this up and make this work. And I think that oftentimes the things that where we get stuck is because of the things we know and we need to free ourselves up to think outside the box.

1:09:12 Last question for me anyway is this system. You have listed off benefit after benefit. I mean it is just incredible. What's left for you on this journey? What's left to figure out in this system? And assuming that there might be a few other things to figure out, what things are you really trying to observe this season or right now?

1:09:40 Well, we're just scratching the surface. And I would like to really see in our monitoring the biodiversity go way up. I would like to see our soil health go up to the point that we have our outside inputs, just our foliar sprays, which I mean by volume it's tiny amounts of stuff that we're putting on. But getting our soil biology to a state that it's providing everything that the vine needs and so we don't have to do those foliar sprays. And looking at ways again that we increase the plant biodiversity as well as one of the things that's kind of biting us a little bit now is we have really high bird numbers through most of the year. And I think those birds, when we start putting cannons out in the vineyard during the harvest, just before harvest, are kind of used to us and they get used to our cannons. And I think that makes the birds that do eat the grapes say, well if those birds are in there it must not be too bad. And so we will probably have to net everything next year, which in the long run is probably better than shooting off cannons and doing all that stuff. So but I think that it's that again, I don't think we know what the potential is with something like this and how much biodiversity can we achieve and what does that look like? And then how do we do that with our other cropping systems as well? And then of course how do we get more and more people to adopt this? And now the thing that I want to see is we have multiple winemakers this year and there's going to be a lot of expressions of the fruit. And I would really like, in the wine world the winemakers are the big shots. Nobody ever talks about the wine growers, but I think that if for one thing it's going to make it a lot more interesting for younger folks to get into something like this because it's a different way of thinking about things and it's a lot more interesting. And so I think that it'll be fun to see vineyards getting more of the acknowledgement for creating quality wine, but not just quality wine. I mean, if you can buy a wine that is restoring ecosystem health, you've got to feel good at multiple levels about that.

1:12:32 Well, I quote you all the time. I understand now that you're probably channeling Buckminster Fuller when you said this, but you mentioned to me on one of my trips out that some people are looking at regenerative practices and trying to figure out, oh I like this practice, I want to put this into my operation. And while that's good, sometimes the whole system needs to be redesigned. And so I'm constantly challenged by that. I think that's really an important note and something that we all need to be thinking about. So I appreciate your inspiration and your education to us all with them.

1:13:22 I'll just say thank you Kelly, this has been a super informative webinar. I've been taking tons of notes this entire time and learning a lot. So it's been really awesome. Just a quick note about next week's webinar, we are going to be talking about wine again, so we're continuing the theme. Joseph Brinkley from Bonterra Organic Estates is going to be on next week, same time, Tuesday at 12 o'clock Central Standard Time, and you guys can register for that webinar if you haven't already on our webinars page, which is just greencover.com/webinars.

1:13:59 And then I do have one thing I'd just like to mention that people are interested in getting on our website and signing up to be notified of our workshops. We do, and we are kind of coming out of COVID now and doing more and more workshops, and so you can go in there and sign up.

1:14:19 Yep, thank you guys.