Combining viticulture with holistic grazing management techniques | Kelly Mulville, Paicines Ranch

Hi friends, this is Jon and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate soil health and plant health and human health, livestock health. And of course, on the pathway to achieving all these outcomes. We also regenerate farm profitability as well. That's an important outcome. I've really been looking forward to the conversation for this episode with Kelly Mulville. Kelly currently from California. And Kelly is the leader, as far as I'm aware, in figuring out how to do really good job of integrating livestock into perennial production systems. And I think what he's been working on transfers to more than just grapes, but also to trees and orchard systems and so forth. And there's a tremendous need for his type of innovation and thinking. So Kelly, thank you very much for being here and for agreeing to share some of what you've been working on. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and story and what has brought you here in the scope of what you're working on today?

Sure. Thanks for having me, John. I really appreciate this. I grew up in far West Texas, El Paso, Texas. And my dad was an architect who grew up in a blacksmith slash machine shop. And so he still had an interest in agriculture. And the plot of land that we built our house, we also had a small market garden on. And so I, I was very interested in that. One of the things that really changed my direction in my life is that I got interested in falconry as a really young kid. And I'm not sure where that came from, but by the age of 11 I was raising a hawk and that experience really connected me to the natural world. And at that point I knew that raptors were in decline and I decided I wanted to go into captive breeding of raptors. Shortly after I had raised that hawk and released it, I read Silent Spring. My mom checked it out of the library for me. And I only half jokingly say that I've been devastated ever since then. And I realized that if I went into captive breeding of raptors, there would obviously be benefits to that, but it wasn't addressing the cause of the problem. And the cause of the problem was agriculture. And the little market farm that we were running was, was not being run organically. I did find a book on organic agriculture in, in my parents bookshelf. I read that and, and told my dad I wanted to take over that market farm and do it organically. And he was thrilled that I wanted to take it over. So that started my journey and this is probably in the, in the late, late 70s.

What age were you when you started, when you assumed the responsibility for the market garden?

Probably about, I don't know, 16 years old or so. And so, and I continued farming. It expanded a bit, and I was selling to the first food co op in El Paso, Texas. And then I had a big crop failure one year and realized that I did not know everything I needed to know. And so I ended up, through a friend's recommendation, coming out to California and going through the apprenticeship in ecological horticulture at UC Santa Cruz, which at that time was one of the only places you could really study organic agriculture in a practical sense. And so I came out and did that program. And after that, I ended up back in the west and on a ranch, actually, at 9,000ft. And it was there that I found out about the work of Alan Savory through that article I read. I ended up riding my bike down to meet Alan Savory, which took about five days. And I got snowed out twice and introduced myself to him and told him that after reading what he was doing, I realized that is what I wanted to learn because it was a practical approach to basically ecosystem restoration. And by the looks of my transportation, apparently he gave me a scholarship to attend the first course. And so I went on. I went on to work with a number of really inspirational, innovative ranchers throughout the west and talked Alan into putting together a degree program, actually, so I could deep dive into holistic management. And so since then, I've basically been bouncing around between crop farming and livestock farming. And I realized later in life two things. I went to a wine tasting and realized that there was some really good wine out there and that the horticulture, the practice of growing grapes, was pretty fascinating, especially to a guy who really loved growing chilies, which are so expressive of their sight and climate. And so once I started getting into that realm, realized that there's probably great opportunities to integrate these two ideas of livestock in cropping systems. And so that's what led me to kind of where I'm at now.

So where are you at right now and what, what is the work that you're doing right now? You're, you're really, you've. You've made lots of. Developed lots of innovations in incorporating livestock into horticultural crops. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing. I find it very intriguing.

When I came out to California to start managing some vineyards, the first vineyard I actually put in was in Southeast Arizon in a very remote area. And I did not know anything about putting in a vineyard. Fortunately, I had a friend nearby who, whose family had put in one of the first vineyards in Arizona. And I kind of winged that and got a vineyard established. It was in one of the most biodiverse spots in the lower 48. And so we had some particular challenges, but that was pretty thrilling to me to be working with in the context of that amount of biodiversity. After establishing that vineyard, I went on to California and had managed a couple of vineyards. And in all of those vineyards in California, with the very first one that I started at, I started integrating sheep in those. And one of the first things that I. One of the early things that I realized was that because of the climate in California and, and Arizona as well, that grazing sheep in vineyards is not an uncommon thing. I think perhaps it's been done since there were vineyards, but because sheep have a. Are really fond of grapevines. In fact, I've used sheep to take out a vineyard. But the sheep are so fond of grapevines that you. You don't really want them in the vineyard during the growing season of the vines. But if you look at the weather and the growing season in either California or the southwest United States, the time when you get your rains and get things like a cover crop or vegetation on the vineyard floor are oftentimes peak when the vines are leafed out. And so therefore, the common practice is to graze only during the growing season. The are not during the growing season of the vines. So you need to have your seep out of there. And I realized that was a huge missed opportunity from the perspective of solar energy. And so all of that solar energy captured into those green plants, if you take that and then subsequently mow that or disk it, or often and doing both of those, or use herbicides, depending on what type of management you're doing, then you've lost a lot of potential. And so I was really intrigued by how do we create a system that allows the integration of livestock throughout the growing season of the vines. And I initially experimented with an offset system. So this is just an electric offset system. Those of us who have been involved in holistic management or planned grazing are generally pretty familiar with electric fence. And my thinking was that it would probably be fairly simple to devise an offset system to train to keep the sheep from eating the vines. So one of the vineyards I was managing in California was very small. It was a perfect trial site, and that it was a small section taken out of a larger, conventionally managed vineyard. And So I set up this offset system with the permission of the owner and trialed that for a year. It was just a year long trial and I did that. I used basically a grazing plan in that it was somewhat more of a rotation. Being a very small system, it didn't really require doing an extensive grazing plan and allowed our adequate recovery between the grazings. And at the end of that time, when I finally took the sheep out, it was completely successful in doing those things that I wanted to do. It allowed the sheep to do all of the suckering of the vines, it allowed them to do all the shoot tipping and it controlled all the vegetation on the floor. The thing that was really exciting about that was at the end of it I started compiling information on what happened and we found out that during that summer we had achieved a 90% reduction in irrigation use compared to the control site.

Wow.

And simultaneous, we had a 1200, little over 1200 pound increase in yield. And again, this is, this is not a scientific, I'm not trying to say this is a scientific research project. This was an on farm trial. The previous two years it was managed with sheep only during the dormant season of the vines. And so the water saving compared to those two years was 80%. A couple of years later, I called up the winemaker who also at that time was teaching wine making at Napa Community College. And we, we had discussed during the, the trial of having the sheep in there for the extended season that what, what might happen to the wine potentially from that. Is it going to taste like, like wool or sheep pee or something? And so a few years later, I remember that conversation, I called up George and I said, what do you, if you still have some of that wine, do a blind tasting so that, you know, you know, set it out and taste and just see what year you think is the best. And I'm, I've already done the same and I want to see what you come up. And so for me it had been that last year when we did that trial and he said the exact same thing. He said, well, that year really came out good. And so we discussed what had come out of that and what I'd learned from going back on my notes. And he encouraged me to write an article on that. I did. I put together an article. I submitted it to every viticulture magazine in this country. It was rejected by every one of those. It was put into acres and Stockman Grass Farmer and Australia, New Zealand Great Brewer Winemaker put it in their next issue. And so consequently, after that got Published in Australia and New Zealand. There was a pretty good interest there. Well, a lot more interest than there was in this country. And I had asked the woman who was the editor of Australia New Zealand Grapevine Winemaker, why that might be, and she just said, climate change is affecting us probably more severely than a lot of places. And if you guys have been dealing with 25 years of drought and fires, then you would probably be paying more attention to approaches like this. And she said, and that makes total sense. It's not coming across as wacky to me, and I think there'll be a lot of receptivity. And so that was definitely true. I ended up being invited down to both Australia and New Zealand to do presentations. And the first vineyard to adopt that offset system that I developed is in Australia, or. Yeah, it's in Australia. And they've been using that now probably for about nine years, very successfully. So that's. That's been ramped up to a commercial scale now. But after that, I was invited to do a presentation at Eco Farm, which is a. Which is a conference on the west coast here. And at that conference, the owner of this ranch, Sally Calhoun, was. Was there and she came to my presentation and she was interested in potentially planting grapes on this ranch. And the history of this ranch is that there were years ago there were a thousand acres of wine grapes on this ranch. And that was part of Almaden Vineyards, which was a total of 6,000 acres, which was the largest wine grape vineyard in this country and one of the largest in the world. And so this ranch had a history of wine grapes here, and some of the oldest vineyards in California are in this neighborhood. So there's definitely a history here. And she just thought that it might be a good idea to diversify the ranch. The total. The ranch is 7,600 acres in total, and most of that is rangeland, and there is probably about 800 acres or so of irrigated cropland. So Sally came to that presentation. At the end of that, I talked about what I'd done with my trial in California, what the grower in Australia was doing. And I said, so what I'm doing is modifying a system that was actually never designed to be grazed. And what if we take a bigger picture approach and design our agricultural systems to more closely mimic natural systems and design them for ease of management and to be economically viable? Because it's kind of like trying to convert, like a Ford Pinto into being an all terrain vehicle or something. You know, it's just like, why not start from the get go. That's definitely an influence from growing up with an architect who designed everything. And so after that presentation, Sally came up to me and said, you have to come out to the ranch. I'm really intrigued by this idea. And in fact, I think that I probably can't do anything else but what you're talking about. And so I came out, looked at the ranch, and we talked back and forth for probably a year or so. And I wasn't initially planning on coming out, but Sally talked my wife and I into moving out here and establishing this vineyard. And so that was in 2000 that I first came out here, and we planted the vineyard in 2017. We got our first crop last year, so we're just now getting into production.

So what does a vineyard look like when you design it from the beginning to incorporate livestock?

So the. There's probably a number of ways to do this. And like, if you're really designing to incorporate livestock and respect and the ecosystem that you're in or the environment that you're in, it's probably going to look different wherever you are.

I'm also thinking of your. With your background in holistic management and the way that you've learned to so deeply consider the landscape and the overall ecosystem, I wonder, did you ever identify a list of the number of factors that you considered in your planning? I'm sure there were a multitude.

There are. Yeah. I had. I had two pages of just basically bullet points of all these things I wanted to consider. And so. And this is a. It's a fascinating thing. I think the total vineyard right now is only 25 acres. We planted half of that the first round knowing. And this, by the way, Sally, both Sally Calhoun and her husband, Matt Cristiano, are both engineers. And so I really appreciate the perspective of that and thinking that we're going to learn a lot. And even though it's a small section, we're going to learn a lot in that. So let's save the second planting so that we can take those learnings to improve that. And so that was definitely true. And the simple answer to your question for this climate and this site, the way we ended up designing that is we trained the vines up high enough so that the sheep cannot reach the parts that are critical, but they can reach the parts that allow them to do a lot of the work that is normally done by hand or machine. And so we're designing so that the sheep can be do fully what sheep do. And then there's other factors that come in there, like you mentioned so, for instance, we were definitely seeing the effects of climate change here. Things are getting warmer, but things are also variable. The site that we planted in, the guy who had been at this ranch the longest when I started here was an older man from Mexico. And I asked him, I selected a hillside and I said, well, would we ever have frost problems here? And he said, no, never, not in my experience. You would not have a frost problem here. Last year we had three frosts in May. The last one was May 20th. Everything was leafed out May 20th.

Wow.

So what is what. So this is just a side benefit that we weren't necessarily planning on, but we, we had considered that it could be a possibility. So when we raised the vines up and the, the cordon wire, the wire that the, the cane is on that produces the fruit is somewhere between 66 and 68 inches high. So the vine is less susceptible to frost by being that high. And it's also going to be probably, on average, maybe a couple degrees cooler. And it also, I mean, there's, there's a lot of benefits that are coming out of this. Another one is that you're shading because it is an overhead, partial overhead system. You're shading the ground below, which in turn is providing shade for your animals, which is really important in a hot climate. And all of that allows for a lot of reduction in what could potentially be fossil fuels or heavy equipment and a cycling of those nutrients right on the site.

There's so many directions we could go with this conversation. I want to get into how you've been managing plants underneath the grapes, and then do the crate management as well. But let's talk about the reduced tractor passes and reduced tillage a little bit. I mean, how many it just what I can glimpse into your system. If you have a perennial soil cover being grazed by sheep, and your sheep are doing your summer pruning and your suckering, you've just, you've just had a significant reduction in labor, you've had a significant reduction in tractor passes and fuel consumption. What has that looked like for you?

So it. For us, because we started with this design, that's just the normal for us. But then back and look at where I did that trial and look at, say, compare this to it. Let's just say a traditional organic vineyard in California. The average number of tractor passes, I would say, in a vineyard like that would be about 25 per row per year. It's going to vary depending on who's farming that. The number of tractor passes we had last year was probably about 10. And all of those were for our sprays, actually, I should say somewhere between seven and 10 passes that we had with the tractor.

And of course, if those were only for sprays and perhaps a bit for harvest as well. But you have. That means you have no tractor passes for tillage.

Right.

And that has a tremendous impact on fuel consumption also.

Exactly. The. The estimate that I did when I did that trial in California. And again, this is 2000, I think. I believe it was 2010. The savings per acre from that, from. From outside inputs, from labor, from fuel, from tractor use, was $500 per acre.

I'm actually surprised it isn't more.

And actually, I've had a number of people tell me that I was underestimating that. I never had anybody tell me I was overestimating that.

Yeah, that sounds low.

And when you think about that, there's. In this region here, there's many vineyards that are. That are 1,000 acres or more. And if you think about, you know, transposing that kind of saving savings per year, that's a $500,000 savings. So that's, that's. That's not. That's not minor. So there's.

There's this reduction in these types of input expenses. And you also. I don't know if you included fertility costs in that, but with livestock and nutrient cycling, you have reduced fertilizer applications as well. But I'm curious about what the other side of the ledger looks like also. What have you. And I know you just had your first harvest with this design system, so you don't yet have history to go from, or a lot of history. But what are you anticipating and what are you observing with your experiences so far in terms of increased yields and overall crop performance and climactic resilience?

So the, the first thing that we've. We've noticed is that it's kind of an esthetic thing. It's a. It's a really beautiful system. It is linear because it's vineyard, but because it's trained high, you have access in both directions. So practically speaking, it's open. And so that makes a big difference for both humans working in there, because you can cut across and go back and forth through there freely. And at the initial development stage, when we can't graze because the vines aren't tall enough so that the sheep would graze them, when we can't graze during the growing season, the vines, we do use a mower, and that mower is on a quad. And because, again, we're doing everything we can to reduce tractor passes and tillage. So we're going smaller there and that allows us, we could potentially go either direction with that mower. Other things that are, that are happening with that is that in looking at this system as a whole, one of the big goals for me is how do we increase biodiversity in our agricultural systems, Agriculture in general, the first thing when you're developing a farm, the first thing you're doing is simplifying the ecosystem. You're clearing land, you're clearing soil, and so the ecosystem gets reduced greatly the biodiversity of that. And my hope and my thinking and my vision for this is that we actually restore the ecosystem health. I've joked saying that actually this is just an ecosystem restoration project that is producing really good wine. And so in order to do that, we are monitoring pretty closely things that are happening there. So we're monitoring our soils before we planted anything. We dug six foot deep soil pits on various parts of this vineyard and potential other sites. So we're monitoring soil, we're monitoring soil biology, we're monitoring bird populations, we're monitoring insect populations, which we just got our first results from insects. And then we'll be monitoring fruit quality as well. So it's one thing to say, yeah, everything is better than it was before, but this way we actually have something to look at and see what is actually occurring. And one of the most exciting aspects of this has been the. We've had a botanist come from the neighboring national park to help us with identifying plants. And we're at getting close to 50 species of plants that are growing in the vineyard. And we had, we have some birding friends, including a guy who's a PhD wildlife biologist who specializes in birds. And I asked him to go do a pass through the vineyard. And he said, well, vineyards are usually not too exciting. I said, I realize that, but just go in there and see what you're seeing. And he, he came back after, I think he was out there for four hours. And he said, you need to tell me again what you are doing out here, because there are things that should not be out here and lots of them. And the last time he went into the vineyard was just probably it was in the fall. And he just said, again, it's just amazing. The birds are thick, you have great species diversity and numbers. And so all of those things are occurring. And I think that we're just getting warmed up. And so I think back to your original question of what is happening with fruit and yields. We are not sure yet, but so the first wine that will be bottled from this vineyard, that bottling will be happening probably sometime in the next few months. I have had a chance to barrel taste it and I don't think that I'm a good judge to say, oh, you know, it's the best wine I've ever had. But I was really happy with the quality of the wine and the expression of it. And I do know that the winemaker that's making the wine was pretty thrilled with it as well. So we still have a ways to go to get it bottled and see what's happening. And again, it's just the first bottling and that's only three varieties of what will be probably a total of around 20 different varieties that we're growing here.

You know, Kelly, I really appreciate the way you answered my question. I asked you a question of what does the other side of the ledger look like and you deliberately went to regenerating ecology and what you're observing there rather than dollars and cents because of a desire to produce change. Often when I'm having conversations with growers, I want to illustrate the dollars and cents to illustrate that these regenerative ecosystems are actually more profitable and folks can make more money than what they're doing currently. And so that, that has become a bit of a frame of reference where I go there frequently. And I completely lost sight of in this conversation of what you just described, of all the amazing benefits that are happening in the ecosystem. So thanks for the reroute.

Sure. I was about to apologize for you that. But I really appreciate that you caught that as well. And. But I think that the back to the economic benefits, the things that we're going to see. So there's a couple things about this design that are that obviously there's a number of things that are different from say a normal vineyard in California, which would be a vertically shoot positioned trellis system. In other words, the vines are trained up almost in a curtain like fashion. So the cordon wire is usually much lower than we have it. So say maybe somewhere between three and four feet. And then you have this curtain of vines that are kept kind of tight in this narrow hedge. And that's the conventional trellis that's used. The spacing on that is generally much closer than what we're using. Our spacing is 12ft apart in rows. I would say the average is going to be somewhere between 5 and 8ft of spacing and we're going to have a. Actually we don't have more wire on our trellis system. Because we don't have catch wires. We may even have a little bit less wire, but it is taller. So the posts are taller. But our spacing between vines is also more. We have a six foot spacing between vines that gives us 72 square feet per vine. And my hope is that during a normal rainfall year here, which is hard, or maybe I should say an average rainfall year, historically average rainfall in this area is 12 inches. Most of that will occur between January and April. There are people who have dry farmed in this area. A lot of those places I'm seeing drip on now. And we've, I think in the seven years that I've been here, we've had one year that had more than 12 inches and the remaining years have been less than that, but we have increased our water holding capacity in the soil. And before I go into that, I'll just back up and say the average, average dry farming in this state generally has probably closer to 100 square feet per vine. And that is managed using a dust mulch. So there's pretty extensive dust disking in there. And I don't think with your audience here, I have to go into what continuous disking would do to soil. But anyway, I think that one of the benefits of this again economically is that we will be able to reduce our water, our irrigation use, and potentially be able to do dry farming, depending on what happens with the climate. Our increase in soil organic matter on the site has been approximately 1% in the. And we achieve that before getting a harvest.

So I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly. You're at 72 square feet per plant versus the industry standard of 100, if I understood correctly. So you actually have a tighter plant spacing?

No, we do have a tighter plant spacing for historic dry farming practices.

Got it.

For the normal vineyard practices, that spacing would probably be anywhere from say an 8 foot by 5 foot spacing to a 6 foot by 4 foot spacing. So, and one of my concerns, and I should say that the trellis system that we're using is not one that we designed. I had been once I was, once I came in on this project. My, my initial plan was to use a complete overhead trellis system. And as I was kind of researching what the options might be, I came across a trellis system that was developed by a retired petroleum engineer in Texas. And it was, I, I saw a friend of mine who's a viticulture consultant in, in Texas show a slide on that. And I called him up and I said, hey, that system, which is known as the Watson system, that looks like it'd be a really good system to graze under. And he said, possibly so. But I know nobody who's grazing under that. And mainly people are using it because growing grapes in places like southern Texas, you have high humidity and high mildew and fungal pressures. And so it's partly for that to get it up off the ground and get better air circulation. So one of my concerns was because we have such wide row spacing that we would have a reduction in yield. But I don't think that is going to be the case, in part because this is the way this, this, the vine is divided in the system. You actually keep more growing canes than you would in a conventional VSP system, taking up the same footprint. So we harvested approximately 4 tons per acre this year, and none of those vines were fully developed.

I'm not surprised to hear you say that, because when we think about, I think in the future, instead of thinking about productivity per square foot of soil or per acre of land, we really need to begin thinking about productivity per gallon of water use, particularly in California and these, these dry land systems. I mean, we have so many examples of different types of management systems in different environments, like the system of root intensification that was popularized by Dr. Norman Hoopoff at Cornell and Bob Quinn's work in Montana, where they all recognize that a wider plant spacing in a well managed ecosystem actually allows larger root systems to develop and allows the plants to collect more sunlight. And you don't get a reduction in yield. In fact, in many cases, you go in the opposite direction and you actually get an increase in yield with a smaller plant population.

Yes. And that was definitely part of our thinking, is that exactly what you described would occur and also that having we have two crops, we have the crop of our sheep that are in there, and we have the grapevines. And so we are designing for both of those revenue streams.

My one challenge in this conversation is I have every time you start speaking about something, I come up with more questions, more questions to ask than I think I can squeeze in. So I'd like to go in a number of directions here. At some point, I want to come back to learning more about your insect populations and a few other questions on labor costs for harvest. But at this point, we haven't really talked about the sheep. How are you managing the sheep? And perhaps more importantly, what are the sheep doing for you in terms of grapevine management and in the overall ecosystem?

This is a really exciting part of this. And it's interesting because I was. When I was younger and looking at ecosystem degradation, I became a vegetarian. It didn't last very long because I was doing that while I was on a friend of mine's ranch. And after studying with Alan Savory, I again realized that what I was after was not taking something off the landscape. I was what I was. What I wanted to see in the world was ecosystems improving, ecosystem health improving, biodiversity improving, and as. Although Leopold said years ago that we may very well use the same tools that are degrading our ecosystems to improve them. And so in this case, sheep seem particularly suited to a vineyard. And they, in part because of their size, but also in part because of their manure and, well, their manure and urine. And one of the things that I've realized is that, for instance, when we make compost, we often don't. Are not able to include the urine of the. Of the animal in that. And I really think that the urine plays a key role in getting that urine in something like a vineyard or an orchard during the growing season of the plant. And I think that potentially contributed a little bit to that increase or decrease in water use by having the animals in there during the growing season. As far as management, the cattle fit in the design of many vineyards, as they are already, and so that's beneficial. I do know a few people who will let cattle go into a vineyard for a fairly short time. I tried putting cattle in a vineyard before I even planted it, and it was a disaster. So. But I definitely wouldn't preclude that possibility. But so some of the things we've talked about, the sheep can do the suckering for you, and the sheep can do the shoot tipping for you as well. And they have done both of those things and. And what I would refer to as basically a kind of a more conventional vineyard that's in California when I did that trial. So one of the things, and I learned this initially from reading Andrew Vozon, who is an influence on Alan Savory, and he talked about the role that animals play in reducing insect pests by grazing a plant. And if I'm remembering correctly, he was talking about a grass crop, and that the Graves trial had no leaf hopper problems, and the trial that was mowed had serious leafhopper problems. And so the. The. He deduced that the. The main difference there was the effect of the animal on that plant. And if we think about plants and herbivores and those evolving together, and the fact that if a plant wanted to discourage something from Grazing it. They've developed all kinds of mechanisms for that. Thorns, toxins and being unpalatable. And so a plant that is, that allows itself to be grazed like a grapevine is doing, there's probably going to be some kind of benefit that comes from that. And, and so we are just getting into this right now. But one of the things that we, that, that seems to be happening is that, so we have, we have very little insect problems in the vineyard. And leaf hoppers, by the way, can be a problem in vineyards as well. So we're not seeing mites, we're not seeing leaf hoppers. And I think, and, and also, by the way, last year, we did know we didn't use any fungal sprays on the vines that we harvested fruit off of. We did. I did. And we are, we're certified organic. And, but as much as possible, even certified organic fungicides can be pretty hard on beneficial insects. And those would be sulfur. The mains would be sulfur and oil. And so we are, we are pretty happy that because of our cultural practices and the, probably the trellis system and possibly some. Some effect from the. The presence of animals in there that we're getting reduced insect and disease pressure. We're doing foliar sprays that were inspired by your company's work. And so we are, we're doing SAP analysis and we are basing those foliar sprays. And it's really fascinating to see. We basically are not hauling in any fertilizer into the vineyard. The one exception to that was gypsum. We have a calcium deficiency at the soil surface, and we have excess calcium below, which I think is from historic farming practices here. So we are seeing. And then I think especially a lot of your listeners are aware of the role of brix in plant health. And the lowest brix we tested in our grapevines, this is not the fruit. This is in the grapevines themselves. The lowest brix we tested was 13.5.

Wow, that's amazing.

The highest brix we got, and this was the highest brix we got, was in an area where the sheep were actively browsing was 22.

That's intriguing.

We didn't even pick grapes at 22 bricks. So there's, there's something, there's something going on there. And again, we're just scratching the surface of this.

So, you know, it's, it's so intriguing. And your commentary on Andre Voisan's work on grazing versus mowing and insect susceptibility. So there's, there's this Research that indicates that when you have, you actually require a very small amount, an early infestation of some herbivorous insects, like larval insects or aphids or whatever the case might be, early on in the growing season. And this triggers a plant immune response. Like plants respond to the presence of these insects by sending out signals to attract predatory insects. And it changes the plant's internal chemistry as well to where they become much more resistant to insects later on in the growing season. That you can actually produce a great, a very strong resistance mechanism by having a small amount of, you could almost call them inoculum herbivorous insects at the beginning of the season. And based on what you're describing, I am wondering whether grazing by livestock might produce a similar effect where it changes the plant's expression and produces higher concentrations of compounds to reduce herbivorous activity later on during the growing season.

I think that's completely possible. Just as you're building up all these questions, we get all these questions as we're working along. There's so many research projects here. We actually have a person on staff who's spending a lot of his time managing research projects here. And I think it comes back to that when you're getting unanticipated benefits, you're on the right track as opposed to getting unexpected negative consequences. So I feel like we're on the right track, but we have so much more to learn, and it's exciting that we're seeing these results already.

Well, I'm really excited that you are actually observing or attempting to observe and measure many of the ecosystem and ecological changes that are happening with bird populations and with insect populations. You know, when we think about insect populations and insect management, the kind of the contemporary framework that is commonly used to have these conversations is a framework of IPM and identifying the economic threshold at which a. An insect becomes a quote, unquote pest. And I believe that this discussion or this framework is incomplete in that we are not considering the population thresholds of the beneficials of the predatory insects on the insects, which might potentially become problematic. And we really have to consider these population dynamics. And so because these are commonly not measured or not considered, we actually have a very incomplete point of view on IPM from my perspective. And so I'm really curious about what you have observed. You know, what is it? Something in the high 90th percentile of insect species are actually beneficial or not harmful? I guess I could say. So what have you been able to observe so far with your insect populations?

One of the first things and I guess technically spiders are not an insect, but we have huge populations of spiders and I've noticed this for a couple years. And John Lundgren was out visiting us recently and he told us that he considers that a really good indicator of a healthy ecosystem to have a high spider population. So we have had some sticky traps out, but as probably even trying to identify insects is definitely a chore. And we have struggled with how do we interpret what we are seeing. And so what we ended up doing was finding a recent PhD entomologist graduate from UC Santa Cruz and asked him to develop insects, a way to monitor insects for practical farmers. And we wanted him to do, to do this trial, this insect monitoring both here and at some of the neighboring vineyards. And I believe it was just, we just had one neighboring vineyard that participated in this, it may have been two, but they, and they are, they're managing differently than us. They're more conventional. And so we are just in the early part of this, just last week we had a presentation from Andy, the man who did the. Has been doing this research. And what he was able to provide us was the cup traps that you place at ground level. So he placed those in both vineyards and he gave us the data from that. And by the way, to any of your listeners who are. We will be posting this on YouTube, the presentation he gave and any of the. We are definitely an open source operation and share everything that we're doing here with anybody who's interested.

Yeah. And to follow up on that for our listeners, as soon as that is on YouTube, we will also share the link in the show notes, which you can, you won't find the show notes on many podcast platforms, but if you go to the podcast website at regenerative agriculture podcast podcast.com we will include all the links that come up in this conversation in the show notes to that as well.

So the, the short answer to that is we have more diversity and in general much higher populations. And one of them that was really high were the springtails. And so, but this, and, and according to Andy, through these live traps we're just seeing a glimpse and that's on the soil. It's on basically the soil surface. And so the next thing he has to do is measure the sticky traps that were, that were more up by the canopy. And so then we'll be able to see what's going on up there. And that will take longer, so it'll be a little while. But once, once that information becomes available, we'll be sharing that as well. And so all that we know is that we have very little insect pressure and we have a lot of pollinators and we don't have to spray organic, any organic products for insect pests.

Another complementary part of this system. We spoke a bit about the sheep and what they are contributing. But I'm curious about how your use of COVID crops has evolved. Are you actually planting crops for the sheep to graze? Are you just using what is naturally present? I mean, the reality is we know that many of the, many of the plants that we give the misnomer of weeds are actually more nutritious than plants that we cultivate and have somewhat domesticated. So I'm curious about how that has evolved for you.

That's a great question. And it is something that is definitely evolving. The development phase of the vineyard started with using the principles of holistic management. So we selected a site that was selected in part because in this climate the perennials grow on the north facing slopes. And so we selected a hillside that is primarily north facing because we're planting a perennial. And the ecosystem here is saying, okay, if you want to grow perennials, these are the sites that we've determined are best, for obvious reasons, because you can, there's less direct sunlight and you can hold that moisture in there longer. So we initially kind of did a leveling of the ground. We put a light application of compost down and that was it. The first year we ran just cattle on that the first year and we had a forage consumption or forage use of about seven animal days per acre. The next year we planted a cover crop, a mixed species cover crop, probably about. It wasn't a high, high number mix, but it was probably around six or seven species. That year we, our animal days per acre went up tenfold and so we had 70 animal days per acre. So just adding that cover crop in there dramatically increased that. I also think though that the compost had a little while to work its way into the soil and get a better effect. I don't think you see that at least in this climate the first year. So since that time, we have been using cover crops in the vineyard pretty consistently. But over the last few years, I've started taking the number down, the number of species down and the amount down because of what is happening with, with the vineyard floor naturally. And so what that is is that we again, we're in a Mediterranean climate. So we get our moisture during the winter and early spring and then in the summer it's completely dry. We are doing irrigation on the Vines, but it's drip irrigation, pretty much located right around the base of the vine within a couple feet. And so the majority of that area is not getting irrigated, but we are, as each year, as we move forward, we're seeing more and more native perennials in particular coming up. And a lot of those turn out to be pollinator plants. And so as things are drying out from the COVID crop and the seed bank that's already here, which are a lot of probably annual grasses that were not native to this area, which is the case with most of California. But as those start to die out, then we're seeing things like milk vetch or milkweed, I'm sorry, narrow leaf milkweed is coming in a lot, and some of the other native plants are taking over that, that floor. And so my thinking going forward is that we're going to probably within two years or so, get to the point where we don't have to seed any cover crops. And again, there's no tillage happening in here. And so right now, I just, I just checked before this interview, we are at about, I think, just below 50 species of plants growing in the vineyard. And probably about, I'm going to say roughly a quarter, maybe a little bit more than that are native species. And so with this management, I think that we will be able to phase out of our cover crops.

I'm beginning to understand a comment that you made earlier in this conversation that you think the cumulative benefits of this system are just beginning to express themselves. I think you have lots of upward potential yet based on what you're describing.

Yes.

So so far we've, in our conversation, we focused primarily on the agronomics of the system of wine grape production and so forth. And there's still more to discuss there, obviously. But I'm curious about the livestock component, the particular sheep component. What are the economics of that, and how have you found that to be improved as a result of incorporating wine grapes into sheep?

So it was actually the sheep program here. We're up to just under 1700 use right now. And I started that when I came to the ranch, and we had a big influx of sheep numbers a little over a year ago by buying a flock that was basically burnt out of their rangeland from the fires in California. So the sheep operation has been developing as the vineyard has been developing. And we have kind of a unique advantage in that the majority of the land here is rangeland. So we have plenty of space to have the sheep when we're not in the vineyard. And for instance, Last summer we were just running the lamb, the, I'm sorry, the ram flock in the vineyard during the growing season of the vines during, during the summer. And that was plenty to cover the little bit amount of vegetation that was, was in there during that time. But realistically this, this vineyard is such a small part of, of the grazing that the, that the larger flock does. And for the first time this year we were able to, well, actually was in December we were able to bring in the entire flock of ewes. So we had about 1700 sheep on the vineyard for about 24 hours and to get a really a pretty high density on there. It always surprises me how it doesn't look as dense as you think it is. It might. And so in general though, what we will do, probably starting in about a week or so, we will take the replacement yews, which will be about 370 ewes that have not been bred, and we will graze both sections of the vineyard. The first phase that we planted and grafted and the second phase which has not been grafted, it's just rootstock in the ground. We'll graze both of those sections for probably about two months and that'll be again, they'll be in probably one acre, maybe two acre paddocks for that and probably grazing for about approximately, let's say an acre a day.

Given your background and familiarity with holistic management, what do you believe to be the optimal grazing outline over a calendar year for your local ecosystem? And for our listeners, if you're not familiar with holistic management, it's very worthwhile digging into and at least getting some basic familiarity with it. If you have any interest at all in working with livestock or grazing livestock. And it is extraordinarily context dependent. So whatever answer Kelly has for us and what might be optimal for their environment is almost certainly to be, be different from what that optimal answer would be for your environment.

Thanks for that lead in, John, because you saved me from doing that. And that is really important because often, oftentimes that is the first question people will ask me if they're, you know, if they're calling me from England or if they're calling me from Arizona. And it's like how many sheep should we have in our vineyard? And obviously the answer is it depends. And then the next question that if people are thinking is that what do I do with my sheep if I, if I can't keep them in the vineyard all the time? Which is generally the case because you're usually going to need to get in There for something in which you need to probably remove all the sheep. And so that is something that needs to be considered. And so for our particular context here, we'll graze. Ideally we would graze probably. And again, this is rainfall, totally rainfall dependent. And we would ideally graze at least two times during the non growing season of the vine. So this is winter grazing. And ideally it would be three to four grazings. But three would be pretty, pretty much as much as I could hope for here. But during the summertime because, or let's go into the spring, so after or after the leaves have come out, then we could go into the vineyard as long as all the vines are up and trained to the height they need to be. And so we have a little gap between when we plant the vines and when we can actually graze that during the growing season of the vines. And last year, in order to deal with, in order to be able to graze some of those areas where we had some vines that were too small to be left unprotected, we, we put some tall grow tubes in there to protect those vines. And we have totally redone how we are going to train the next round of vines in order to get them up to the cordon wire as fast as possible because then we can really start getting the benefits. So back to the ideally three grazings during the dormant season of the vine. And then once the vines start budding out, we could probably get in another one to two grazings with a fairly decent sized flock, say averaging maybe around 200 sheep per acre per day. So if you had 200 sheep. Yeah, if you had 200 sheep, you would be grazing. You could graze the whole vineyard in about 20 days or so. And then during the dormant season of the vegetation during the summer, your numbers would probably go way down to something more like around 25 to 50 animals that you again are doing moves through that area and allowing an adequate recovery for both the plants and the soils. And that would go on for probably until pretty close to harvest. Then after harvest you might do one additional grazing and then you might have a period of time that could be anywhere from two months to five months before you could, you could go back in. Last year we didn't get, we only had really one rain event and that was at the end of, towards the end of March. And so that would, and we weren't really, we did one grazing in the vineyard, but there was one very little to eat in there.

Kelly, this is such a rich topic and I think it's a Topic. I really hope that your work becomes very widely known and many people begin adopting it because it's something that's so badly needed in agriculture generally is to develop these perennial type systems that really regenerate ecosystems. And there's so many different tangents and rabbit holes. I'd like to go down, down. There are a few kind of big picture questions I'd like to ask yet, which is what, from your perspective, what you've observed, how adaptable is this system to other perennial crops like tree fruit and orchards and nuts and so forth.

So people are already doing this in tree crops for sure. And in particular with walnuts in California and almonds, people are starting to do it in almonds as well. There obviously are concerns of food safety.

Was about to ask that.

In a sense, one of the reasons that wine was pretty easy to go into is because there is essentially a kill step in taking a grape and fermenting it and getting the alcohol up to a level where basically you don't have issues of pathogens in there. So that makes it. We were able to get this early on. I worked with CCOF to make sure that this was going to be allowable. And because of that, actually while I was in New Zealand doing work, they weren't able to certify their stuff as organic because they were doing some leaf pulling in the summer. And they were able to change that as well. But so food safety is always going to be an issue. And I mean, because of the work that people like David Johnson have been doing and showing how as a soil gets, as the soil improves in its health and structure, then a lot of these pathogens in soil are actually going away. And so I think that oftentimes again, the cause of a lot of the food safety issues is our farming practices. And it's an indication of the problem, it's not actually the problem itself.

I love that.

So of course if you're the recipient of food that has problems, it's obviously not going to be fun. But really, I think again, there's so much work in this realm that needs to be looked at and how we create healthy soils so that we don't have those issues.

Yeah, so what you mentioned that people are doing this now in nut production. How are they managing the food safety concerns? What's the pathway to resolving that?

Well, for them, I think technically they need to have that, that waiting period. One of the ways going forward that I think we can bypass that. So for instance in nuts is if we are shaking the nuts and collecting that in a tarp above ground.

Right.

And so that the nuts never touch the ground, then we can potentially bypass that. And this. I'm just speculating on that, but I know that there's some people that are looking at that. And also that helps if you, if you're looking at, at how you manage your ecosystem, your agricultural ecosystem, if one of the things you have to do is make that ground as bare and flat as possible to harvest your nuts, that is probably not contributing to soil health. So bypassing that by heart, changing your harvest practice has a double benefit.

Kelly, you're way too soft. Let's just say that making soil flat and firm is definitely going to damage soil health. No questions, no holds bothered.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

That. Yeah. Yeah. So here's another important question. How does this, this idea of incorporating livestock into perennial crops not just transfer to other crops, but how does it transfer to other regions? And specifically, I'm interested in the possibilities of transferring this to the dry land Midwest, where there is the mindset or the perception that the only thing we can grow here is wheat and corn and soybeans and milo. And yet it seems to me there's a perfect opportunity in some of these dry land climates to grow crops such as grapes. And this seems to me to be a management system that could transfer into that context very well. But I'd love to get your perspective on that.

Well, it's interesting if you look at some of the climate maps that people like Greg Jones, who's a climatologist and grew up in a vineyard, are doing. Some of the regions that he has marked as prime viticultural areas in this country are places like North Dakota and getting into Canada, and a lot of places that aren't growing grapes now, but the way that the weather is changing, the climate is changing, it's going to open up places that are more suitable to growing grapes than places like this now. So there's that change that's occurring. So this same system that we're talking about, the same process of designing for your ecosystem, I think could work with table grapes as well, with raisin grapes as well, with all kinds of different fruit crops. Again, it kind of goes back to that design aspect. How do you design for food? How do you design and manage for food safety issues? Because animals have been on the planet longer than us. And so again, it's going back to how do we create systems that go beyond the problems that we're facing by designing for more complexity and health.

Yeah. And, you know, for us as Farmers. And in the farming community, we've become indoctrinated to agricultural ecosystems that don't include livestock. We've become comfortable with ecosystems that are divorced from livestock. And what that has done is we have lost an appreciation for what livestock can actually contribute. They are perceived as being management intensive. They are perceived as not offering the returns that you might experience with pure crop production. And yet there is this effect. I think Norman Uphoff described it so well in, in the interview that I had with him. There's this compounding synergistic effect, or you could almost call it an algorithmic synergistic effect effect where 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2. And you get into these cases where 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 11 anymore, it now equals 1100. And so when you think about what you're describing, you're changing the system where you're changing slightly the way the vineyard and the grapevines themselves are managed. You're incorporating livestock, you're incorporating cover crops and grazing. And the combination of those management changes produces outcomes that are much, much bigger than you might anticipate. They're not additive, they're compounding or algorithmic. That I think is something that we've largely lost sight of in our crop production systems across the Midwest and well around the world for that matter, in our emphasis on having monoculture crops. And, and the reality is that working with perennial crops rather than annuals is perhaps one of the easiest places for us to incorporate livestock and these types of perennialized systems in place.

I think that's definitely true. Although I will say that before we came out to California, my wife and I were growing crops, about 60 different types of vegetable crops as a commercial operation in the San Luis Valley. And preceding again, San Luis Valley is high altitude, very cold, short 90 day growing season. So the preceding year we managed livestock on the farm, on the section that we were going to farm food crops on vegetable crops. We had high density grazing there. And when we came in the second year and planted that, we had some of the highest quality produce I've ever experienced. And that was actually verified by the people that were buying produce from us. They called and said, we want to come out and look at your farm. And I said, is everything okay? They said, yeah, everything's okay. We just want to see what you're doing. And they said, we've never heard of you guys and you have the highest quality food crops coming into our, into our company. There are wholesalers that we've ever seen. What are you doing? Yeah, and so. And it was incredibly simple. So there's enormous opportunity here.

That's such a great illustration. And the other illustration that describes this is the example that you noted of having sheep grazing on the grapevines producing a 22 brix reading. The highest point that you'd ever measured was when you actually had the presence of livestock. There's stuff going on here that we don't fully understand yet. We haven't fully quantified it, and maybe we never will. But it's important for us to just recognize that these compounding effects are there, they're present, and we would be wise to take advantage of them and foolish not to.

I think that's really critical. Nature has given us so many examples of how to do things and we need to start paying attention to them.

Yeah. Kelly, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your wisdom and your experience. Experiences. And for all of our listeners, Kelly has some other really great resources that he has developed. Articles that he's published and videos that he's put out there. We will link those in our show notes that you can find on the Regenerative Agriculture podcast website. And if you want to dig deeper into these types of management systems. And Kelly also managed or mentioned that he's using plant SAP analysis and foyer sprays.

If you.

If you have any questions about that, feel free to reach out to our team@advancingecoag.com we'd love to work with you and look forward to connecting with all of you. And again, Kelly, thank you for being here. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I'm sure everyone else has as well.

Thank you, John.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative system. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.