Episode 177: Leveraging Native Biology and No-Till Strategies with Bob Tillman

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Today I'm here with an interesting character. We're all going to find out how interesting. And Bob Tillman from Paso Robles, California. Bob, thanks for being here. I'm uncertain where this conversation is going to go, given the comment that you just made about wanting to figure out who John Kempf is. We'll see how this whole conversation evolves. But, uh, tell us, tell us a little bit about your operation and the, the context that you are growing wine in?

Okay, uh, well, good morning, John. Nice talking with you. Um, so I'm a wine grower as my second career, actually. I did a 34-year career in the electronics business and launched a wine operation in 2003 here in Paso Robles. And, uh, So my vineyard sits in the mountains a little bit west of the town of Paso Robles. It's a— we have 32 acres of grapes growing on top of a pretty steep mountainside. And maybe a little bit of context for Paso Robles. It's a fairly extreme Mediterranean climate. So it rained a little bit over the weekend, which was shocking. I thought we were done a month ago, actually, but I have a feeling we're now done. And it probably won't rain again until Thanksgiving or so. So we're in for a very long dry spell, and some years we go without even seeing a cloud for months on end. Other aspects of the vineyard that might be of interest as we chat here is the kind of the soil situation. The Coast Range sits west of Paso, so you, as you leave town, it rears up, I don't know, maybe 500, 800 feet or something like that, and it's basically just faulted sedimentary rock, some limestone, some shale, with a fairly shallow, in my case, true loam, sometimes clay, topsoil. And the other aspect of it is extremely irregular. You can walk 10 feet and find yourself in fairly different situation in terms of the— mostly the topsoil. It can be anywhere from, I don't know, you can bury a probe in it easily, or you can barely get 6 inches before you hit a rock. So that's kind of the general picture of what's, uh, of what's going on.

What, uh, what different varieties of wine grapes are you growing?

So I have focused on grapes that are known as Rhône varieties. They're named after The Rhône River of France. That's where Julius Caesar marched in, you know, 2,000 years ago, planted olives and grapes and built a few aqueducts. And here we are today, those same grapes are being grown.

Any particular varietal names that people might recognize?

So the main ones that I have planted are Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvèdre. Mourvèdre is often unknown, but that's a really, it's quite a nice grape. And we have several whites. We grow Marsanne, Roussanne, and we grow Viognier, Grenache Blanc, and Picpoul Blanc. So we actually have 9 different varieties on our 32 acres.

Are you doing your own winemaking as well?

I was, uh, for the first 13 years I was the winemaker actually, and very much less involved in the actual growing side of things. In 2020, I was joined by a young lady that took over the winemaking for me. And since, uh, so the last 5 or 6 years, it's been— I really focused hard on the growing side. Prior to that, when we, when we planted in 2003, we worked with a vineyard management company. I was coming out of the electronics business, and I was pretty clear that I didn't know how to grow a darn thing hardly. And so they actually helped a lot in terms of finding the site and getting the vineyard installed and getting all the infrastructure in place to provide water and keep the deer out, that kind of thing. And then over time, we collaborated more and more and eventually brought it in-house in 2017. And then in 2020, I moved in pretty much full-time working on the vineyard side. Yeah.

So how, how has your operation shifted over now? Almost 23 years at this point. Your management practices at the beginning versus your management practices now, how has that whole dynamic evolved?

That has— that's a— that's an interesting story, John. It's, uh, it's kind of like the, the bumbling of an unconscious competent person, I would say.

How can an unconscious person be competent?

Well, just by sheer luck, I suppose. Luck and maybe just thinking about stuff and trying to mimic what makes sense. So yeah, kind of the chronology of the thing is the property— well, just back up a hair. Part of running a winery is that you get to know people coming in to purchase wine and About a year ago, the sons of the original owners of that property came in, sons and daughters. So I got to know them and learned a fair amount about what happened. It's a pretty steep mountainside. It was cleared in the '20s, 1920s. About 60 acres or so were cleared. So I still have about 80 acres of woods all around me. And they used it for— they did dry farming barley and they grazed some cattle on it and They had a walnut, a dry farm walnut orchard. But in around 1960 or so, for whatever reason, the family left this, left the place, and it just basically sat fallow for about 40 years before, before we appeared on the scene. So we were starting off with almost virgin ground, if you think about it. So what we did was, uh, when we first planted, we were pursuing a conventional sustainable type of agriculture. And it's sort of the chronology. Year 1, 2005, we planted. It took us almost 2 years before we could— we had all the prep done. In 2005, in the fall, after the vines were dormant, we went in and we disked. Well, maybe I should back up. Before we planted, we actually ripped just the vine rows, so, which turned out to be more of a let's see how many rocks we can surface program than anything else, I think. So that we did do that. And then in 2005, we cultivated every other row and planted, you know, nice UC Davis cover crop mixture. And in 2006, about July or so, I was talking with the vineyard manager gentleman, and we determined that we couldn't tell which row we had disced and planted the previous year, that the the native grasses that were so self-selected to that site had just taken over. So we stopped that. So that was our first kind of unconscious competent move is we didn't till ever again. That was one step. Second step, the first couple of years we use an herbicide down the vine row, which probably makes sense. And if you think about it, those young vines are trying to compete with a very voracious native cover that's there. But we stopped that after, I don't know, 2 or 3 years. I don't remember exactly, mostly just because why have herbicide around? Didn't it seem like it really wasn't necessary? So I think very early on, just from common sense, we ended up with a couple of really good moves, uh, and then it kind of drifted on from there, actually. In 2013, we shifted. When we first planted, I had 2 blocks that we farmed organically. It's kind of a newbie to the scene. We were trying a little bit of everything. So 2 out of our 12 blocks were organic. And around 2013, we noticed that, gosh, it seems just as easy to farm those as it does these other guys over here. The main differences were we were using some synthetic fungicides on the non-organic ones, so we just stopped doing that. And we had been doing some synthetic fertilizing, fertigation, and we stopped that also. Turned out, given our climate, I don't recommend it necessarily for everybody, but we have this very benign Mediterranean climate here, very low pest pressure. So suddenly we were organic without really thinking about it very much. And then in 2017, I brought the, the management in-house, mostly because I felt like, okay, I could save a little money if I do that, and I feel like I've got enough knowledge that maybe I could pull it off. So we did that.

Well, it sounds like it, management at that point was essentially pruning management because if you weren't fertilizing, you weren't tilling, you weren't doing herbicides, you weren't doing fungicides. I mean, what's left?

Well, we were doing them. We were just doing organic versions of them.

Okay.

It's the, uh, we still, the mildew is for real. We have never, to this day, we continue to fight that. In fact, we're just trying pinion this year. Hope, have our fingers crossed on that one.

I'm actually kind of at the stage where I don't have my fingers crossed about pinion. My confidence level's pretty high at this point.

Hallelujah. I'm praying for you, buddy. I would love that. And we did, we did organic fertigations during those, those years as well, which we continue to do to this day. But when we brought it in-house, well, a lot of times, you know, people, they, they start the season off with a, kind of a fertilizer shot. And I skipped that part and I waited until bloom time, and then we did the leaf samples. It's sort of the traditional way of checking on nutrition, and the vines seem to be fine. So I basically pretty much stopped fertilizing in general. It just didn't seem to be necessary at all.

We—

the other thing we did was We had been mowing, you know, but in the mid-rows, and like good traditional farmers, we mowed low. We wanted that. You didn't want those terrible weeds growing out there. We decided that wasn't such a bad deal, so we basically raised our mower as high as we could get it. And so we were mowing and leaving a 5 or 6-inch stubble behind, which tended to make it through pretty much this season. and we transitioned to a weed knife. It's a Clemens is the name of the product. It goes, it sort of articulates in and out under the vines as you drive a tractor along. And we decided that we would start putting compost on, so we did, uh, 3 tons an acre for about 3 years. And at some point I again, reading and trying to figure stuff out. So here, I don't know if this is right. I'm, I figure I'm talking to a person who really knows, but I'll give you my version of this thing. So I look at compost and I say, okay, it's 60% dormant microbes and 40% humus. And I'm, I've got this spreader and I'm spreading a very thin layer of it and I'm unable to really incorporate it and I'm doing it in the fall. Which may or may not get a rain shortly thereafter, often not. So I figured that probably most of the microbes were dead before because the ultraviolet pounding down on them. So I shifted over to compost tea and invested in a brewer and started approaching an irrigation is not so much watering vines as injecting goodies into the soil. So that was kind of my MO. so that was the next step in the evolution of things. So we're down now to hardly ever fertilizing, organic mildew control, and a bunch of compost tea. And the vines seem to be doing great. The wines are good. And then in 2020, a young lady came aboard, took over the winemaking, and it freed me up. And so I started really getting in there and causing a lot of trouble on the vineyard side of things. One of the first things I did was one of these Total Nutrition tests. I went to Regen Ag Lab and, and, uh, got back the information for what if I really consumed all of the nutrients available in my soil. So I got these numbers, are huge as you know, and I found a paper out of Australia where guys had figured out If you took a ton of grapes out of a vineyard, how much did you consume of all these nutrients? So by simply dividing, you can determine how many years of stuff you have in the soil. And what I found was that the, uh, sort of the range was for potassium, I had 644 years worth in my soil, and for iron, I had 7.2 million years worth. So I figured, okay, it's not necessary to put stuff in. I just need to figure out how to get it out of there. That's, that's the That's—

and that was, that was probably accounting for what, the top 6 inches or the top 12 inches of soil profile?

Exactly, 6 inches. Got it. So I mean, multiply it out.

How deep, how deep does a grape's root system go?

Well, we just recently did a pit, uh, and I found roots as big as my little finger 5 feet down. Yeah, it's a little bit misleading in the sense that at that point they were in really rocky material. There was about— where we were digging was one of the more rich spots, actually. We had about 2 feet of really nice topsoil, and then after that, sort of a— looked almost like small rocks about the size of your fist that are kind of jumbled together, and roots able to move down through them. So the last few years I've been trying to figure out, how do we get these microbes working for us? We clearly have everything we need. And then about '22 is when I discovered AEA.

So that's when you shifted from unconscious competence to conscious competence?

A little bit. I became a little bit more conscious at that point. Yeah, just a little bit. Still working on that part. So at any rate, then we jumped into this. Pedro got involved. And, started using sap analysis and started to add the foliares, which it was kind of an eye-opener really to realize on some of the micros, I was still, I needed, I need help there. And, we've been, we've been after that. And I also have at that point decided, okay, I'm going to increase the diversity of my cover crop, which, I still haven't achieved that. That's about 4 years later. So I invested in a no-till seed drill and got to know the guys at Green Cover and did all this analysis, all these families of, of, uh, cover that I was gonna plant. And I've studiously done so for about 4 years. And so far I've got very, very little take. I guess 5% or so of those seeds actually have survived.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Is that because of the vigor of your native material?

Yeah, I had some guys in just this spring from the, uh, local branch of the California Native Plant Society or something to do an inventory of what's going on out there. And it's remarkable, the diversity. They found 37 different species. I don't know about families. I haven't had time to figure that out yet. But the problem is, is that about 8 of those species represented about 80% of the growth, and they were all described as invasive European grasses.

So invasiveness is in the eye of the beholder, just to be clear.

Exactly right. And I think at this point in time, it's a done deal. It's— they're now native. They dominate the area. So that's kind of where I'm at. I've been focused— what I've been doing is trying to devote about half of my year to focusing on the COVID crop and about half of the year focusing on the vines. And the dormant period is the COVID crop time. So we've been doing, you know, a lot of efforts to try and increase the diversity by planting in there. And we've experimented quite a bit with how we terminate them. So what we're doing, we We've got a, purchased a mower that articulates under the vines. So we're able to kind of sort of mow under the vines. It's not super effective, to be honest. And I've been trying to crimp in the middles. And I'm happy to report on my third try, I think I actually got it. The problem is that the site is just droughty enough that depending on the year, that cover crop may or may not be very high. Like, for us, if it gets up to our knees, we're pretty excited about it. And some years it's not that high, and the crimper doesn't have much hope if it just doesn't have enough stem to work with. But I found— I kept— I went through two different crimper designs, and then this year finally, so that they're not quite razor sharp, but they're a good They got a good edge on them and seems to have worked actually. There's a few spots where it's, the grass is short enough that it really couldn't get a, you know, get a bite on it, but I don't really care. Just gonna leave it be. So that's kind of, yeah.

Yeah. You, you've been on an interesting journey. Um, the, that's interesting. Can you hear a lot of background noise on my end? Seems every time I— it's a pouring rain thunderstorm outside my windows here.

Is that what's going on? I hear occasionally.

I want to dig deeper into the compost tea applications. If I followed your timeline correctly, you had started the compost tea applications for several years before you started working with AEA. And I'm intrigued by I've been so impressed with some of the things that I've observed from biology, and it seems to me like you had lots of things going in your ecosystem, in your environment. You had some fairly decent soils to work with, you've got rich native species, you're doing the compost tea. So I'm curious to learn more about, um, what— a couple of areas. One is, how did you observe soil health improving with the compost tea applications, uh, before and after? And then Kind of the follow-on from that is what nutritional imbalances remained after those compost tea applications?

Okay, well, let me just add a little more insight into that. The learning that I had at this event in January in Scottsdale, I was talking to the Hiwase people, and they had worked with an outfit in Denver to actually do the DNA analysis of compost teas, compost extracts, and then the compost itself. And it was super eye-opening to me. It was probably the biggest aha of that whole meeting. Basically, you get— the guy would— he could pull the DNA of the compost and find a very rich environment of both microbes, of fungi and bacteria. And he pulled the same analysis of an extract and find almost the same thing. It still was very rich. There were many, many, many species there. And then a compost tea where you've allowed it to run for 24 hours or whatever, it was down to like 12 species and they were all bacteria.

Yeah.

It was like a shocker to me. So I have, starting this year, we are now we're doing extract. We're no longer, we don't run that brewer overnight. We start it in the morning for half an hour, an hour, and then extract. So that's one thing. In terms of the actual soil improvements and so forth, it's interesting what's going on. So if you go out in the woods and pull a soil sample, the numbers are, The pH out in the woods is 5.9 and the organic matter is 8.8%.

That's pretty good.

It's pretty good. So it's a, an oak woodland, you know, no one's touched it forever. It's just been sitting there. And if you pull the same numbers on, on the vineyard, the soil organic matter is pretty decent. I've, I've done it in multiple places and it ranges between 5.8% and 6.9%. So pretty reasonable soil organic matter. The kind of the challenge I found though is that the pH under my drippers is 7.5.

That has nothing to do with water quality, does it?

I'm pretty sure that's what it is. Whereas out in the, in the rows, it's more like 6.4 or something like that. It's still higher than in the woods, but I figured there's probably some acid in those leaves or something. Out there. So my current thoughts are part of my problem, part of the problems I'm having possibly with the micronutrients in the sap is due to the fact that this pH is pretty darn high under the dripper area. So I'm trying to tackle that this year. And the first approach I'm trying is this, there's an outfit that injects carbon dioxide into an irrigation line and creates carbonic acid, which definitely lowers that pH beautifully. So I'm trying that and we'll see, see where that takes us. I still, I don't fully understand the chemistry because there's, you got some carbon there, you got some protons there, but you've also got carbonate. So I don't know, I'm not sure. You probably know better than I do on that.

Yeah, the carbonic acid what little I've seen so far has been a very nice performer. And the biology seems to have not have the detrimental effect on biology that some other acids do as well. So that's a plus also.

So I'm hoping that that will take me forward. And so the areas that in terms of nutrients that I'm working on are I need to get more calcium in the program. and I see that in, in my sap. And, and iron is the other, other one that we tend to struggle with. And so at this point, whenever I do a fertigation, I'm doing some calcium along with it, and then our foliares as well.

So do you see calcium trending up over the season?

We do, absolutely. We, we eventually get it there. I'd like to have it be there on day one.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Have you played around with boron levels at all?

We monitor boron, uh, again, looking at the sap. I have been— what, with the fertigations I'm doing now, I'm using, uh, CalGuard and I'm using, uh, Rebound Boron in, in there. Um, but we've had the same— the boron is another one that we tend to build up over the season and we eventually get there. And again, I'd like to get there right away.

Yeah. Do you have any perspective, given the, the depth of history that you have on your soils with, um, them having had them covered with plant material for the long term and, and the compost extracts that you've been— and the teas that you've been applying— do you have any perspectives on your soils' fungal-bacterial ratios and what might have been happening there?

Well, again, I don't have a heck of a lot of history, but I do have a snapshot anyway. PLFA analysis is what I've got. And, uh, so the, the numbers are, let's see here, in terms of bacteria, I have, and they've measured nanograms per gram for what that's worth. So I run about 1,700 on total bacteria. And on fungi, I run about 900. So, uh, and, and the, uh, arbuscular mycorrhizal are about 200, and, and the saprophytic are about, uh, 700. That's sort of the picture. I think it's reasonable, although again, it's not—

yeah, you have some pretty— you have some quite decent soil, high organic matter, and you have some very nice, uh, raw material resources there to work with that many people would probably be envious of.

Yeah, I think it's pretty good at this point. I think I'm shifting my focus back more to the vines. I think the soil is in pretty decent shape and we're going to really get on those saps and try and make sure we got the vines happy.

How has your fruit quality and wine quality and disease resistance evolved over this entire journey? So far, we've You've spoken about your soil, but what's been happening with the plants?

Yes, it's really interesting. The basic answer is nothing, John. So with wine, you can look at sensory. And starting in 2020, we added the ability to measure phenolics. So we can measure the tannin levels and anthocyanins in our wines. And what we're finding is they were good to start with and they continue to be good. So again, there's time ahead. We'll see just how it goes. We have years left to work on this thing, but yeah, it's kind of surprising, really.

So as you've been on this pathway, this learning journey and trying different things, what produced the most unexpected results? What has surprised you?

Oh, that's a good question.

So, well, since you self-describe as having been subconscious or unconscious for part of the time, I figure something had to wake you up at several points along the way.

Yeah, I was going to say almost everything. This was my first response to that question. I was trying to prioritize them. Okay, which one was the most surprising? The thing is, sort of, the, uh, if I just kind of reflect on the great scheme of things, in my lifetime there's been some really interesting stuff happened. So for example, DNA got discovered. Somebody figured out DNA and figured out how it works, how it makes, how cells make proteins from it and how to read the code and all of that. Which has created this huge biotech revolution that's going on. The transistor got invented, and that's created the whole computer and AI and all of this stuff, of which I was a participant in the early days and really loved. But then more recently, and I think hidden to the, to the population at this moment, is this discovery of how plants grow. The idea of the, this this kind of soil food web, which I assume was new in about 1980 or something like that. Yeah. And then sort of the liquid carbon pathway stuff that where the mycorrhizal fungi became more clearly understood. And then more recently, this rhizophagy. These are astounding discoveries actually.

They're astounding discoveries, and they completely upend on its head the historical practice of agronomy, which has not been implemented yet on a commercial scale.

Exactly. It's, it's, uh, I find it just fascinating as hell to be involved in this right now. It's very lucky to be alive at this moment in time to see how it's going to proceed. Uh, and I think there's more to learn. I have a feeling also that some of these rhizophagy ideas are going to find their way back into the biotech world, that maybe there's some human stuff that might be related in some way to that whole microbiome interaction with the organism cells. And somehow I wouldn't be surprised if we don't find something along those lines.

Well, it's interesting actually, when I— this is going back 15 years ago, maybe longer, but when I was first studying the process of endocytosis, there was There was a historical book, I forget exactly when it was published. If I had to throw a dart at the dartboard, I'd say somewhere in the 1980s or late '70s. Um, it was titled The Organic Method Primer. It was a husband and wife team out of California that wrote it, and they first wrote about the process of endocytosis of plants, of plant cells absorbing entire bacterial cells. And they had some images in that book of underneath a microscope documenting this process. Wow. And come to find out, that process is well understood and well established in human cell biology and animal cell biology, but it never got transferred to plants. And now we're discovering things in plants that, as, as you said, I think are going to come back into, into cellular biology more broadly as well.

Yep. Yeah, it's a, it's a good time to be alive as far as this kind of stuff goes. Yeah.

So those were some of the things that have surprised you. What about experiences out in the field? Um, what have been some observations or experiences there that were unexpected?

Well, uh, One thing that pops to mind is just in terms of viticulture, one of the areas that people go around on is the undervine tending, I guess, to pick a word. In my particular situation, that native cover comes up like crazy and it's growing right under the vines, and there's a tendency for people to say, gosh, the competition there is really tough, you got to get it out of there. And I'm kind of the observation that I don't think I have to, that the vines are rooted much, much deeper than that cover crop. Plus you have all of the sort of indirect evidence that cover crops can help on some of these situations. So that's, that's one area that, that I puzzle about. The, I think my observation is that the real problem with it is just annoying the crews that are working those vines. If they, if you get, if it gets too fuzzy in there, if you get grasses and stuff that are growing all the way up into the canopy, it impedes their ability to, to, uh, fruit thin and shoot thin and this sort of thing. But in terms of just the actual growing of the vine, I don't think it's a problem. So that's one area.

Yeah, when we look at what is happening in agriculture generally, I mean, it's been true for several years that the general ag macroeconomy has really been struggling, and something similar is happening in wine grapes as well, where consumption is declining dramatically, not just domestically but globally. Wine consumption is, is on a very dramatic down— downward decline. It seems Uh, what do you— how do you see the future evolving, uh, both in wine industry more generally and for your operation specifically?

So that's a really interesting question that you're right about that the, uh, the wine industry is really— the history, the history is kind of interesting. My perspective on the history— I just had a cat jump down from the bookcase to the floor behind me there. Uh, We, uh, if you go back, the Prohibition pretty much knocked out the, the, uh, the wine business, at least in America, and there was a very slow recovery after that. It sort of drifted back, uh, starting in around 1970 or so. Robert Mondavi in the Napa Valley really kind of began to seem to push and move that forward, uh, and, uh, made some progress. But in the '80s, the Mothers Against Drunk Driving— remember that, MADD? they put the kibosh on a lot of that growth. And so the wine industry again was pretty stagnant and not moving a lot. And then, and you can actually set your watch to the moment where it turned around. It was a, uh, 60 Minutes episode in about 1991 or '92. Uh, it was called The French Paradox, and they did a, they did a half an hour of, uh, going over to France and showing these people eating all these fatty foods and and pasta and wine. Pasta and, yeah, and then they stated the, they quoted the stats about the cardiovascular disease rates being way lower, longer lives, etc., etc. And then at the end, they sort of popped the surprise, and guess what? There was a glass of red wine sitting on every one of those tables that you saw earlier. And at that moment, the U.S. wine industry took off. If you could plot it, you would see an inflection point. And it maintained that growth rate growing, I don't know, 7 to 10% a year until 19— until 2019. So we basically have a 30-year span of uninterrupted growth, and we have an industry that almost everybody that works in it has never experienced a downturn. So it comes as kind of a rude shock. Uh, and if you— in retrospect, it peaked in 2019. But then COVID came along, and there was a natural spike again. 2020 was a great year because most people were sitting at home and having wine delivered to their front doorstep. So '20 and '21 seemed pretty good. Then in '22, it began to revert back to more normal, and suddenly we discovered that actually the industry peaked in 2019, and there was no— we're catching up. So there has been some hard years. And it is shrinking. So that's kind of the history. But now looking ahead, what, where are we going to go? Who knows? You know, that's one thing about time is you can look back and you can't change anything, and you can look ahead and you don't have any idea what the hell's coming. So with that in mind, we can prognosticate to our heart's content. Personally, I think To me, wine is not just alcohol. It's not something, you know, you drink in order to achieve a level of drunkenness or whatever. It's a social beverage. It's intended to be enjoyed with food and people and friends. It serves a minor purpose of lubricating the social interaction, and at the appropriate level is wonderful. And I personally feel like there's probably some health benefits at the with reasonable consumption. So I have confidence that we'll come back. I don't anticipate it's going to be real fast or anything like that, but the fundamentals of human life don't really change. Having friends and enjoying a meal, these are things that will not change. They've been around since, I don't know, Julius Caesar or somebody, you know, goes back. So my personal approach is to stay the course, try and really focus on growing the healthiest, most nutrient-dense grapes I can possibly do and making the greatest wine I can out of them, keeping it at a reasonable price, and build it and they will come. So yeah, that's probably not going to win me any marketing prizes, but that's my view.

Well, I think your, your comments speak to differentiation. It's just a simple question. If you have greater production and greater supply than you have demand, how do you differentiate in that environment?

Exactly. And I can tell you that the regen ag is going to be big. I'm sure you've already noticed that.

Yeah, I think wine— I mean, everything, all the indicators point to wine grapes being the leader in implementing and adopting regen ag on scale, to the point where it could rapidly grow to be a significant proportion of the overall production.

Oh yeah, I expect it will, John. The wine industry is, the way I think about it, is kind of at the top of the, near the top of the agricultural pyramid in terms of dollars per acre or something like that. And it is typically vertically integrated in the sense that, like for in my case, most of my grapes I sell to myself and I make wine out of them and then I sell that wine. So I have a I don't have to go through a broker or some cooperative or something like that, which— and there's also a plethora of marketing people associated with the wine industry. If you go into these big, the larger corporations, I would guess they have more marketing people than anything else, uh, and they are looking for an edge. And regen ag, it just— it's a bright shining star, and you can bet there will be a mad rush to implement that and to exploit it in the marketplace. So you guys are gonna do well. Your timing is excellent.

Well, we were there before the timing was excellent.

Yeah, exactly. That's it. That's why. Yeah.

Yeah. It's certainly an interesting time. And I think, um, your comments about vertical integration and value adding, they're kind of inherent within winemaking. There's the grape growing and then there's the winemaking and selling the wine. There's that inherent close connection because you have this very short life. You don't have something that's storable. And when I look at the rest of the agricultural landscape, so many of the other things that we produce, a majority of them are commodities or quasi-commodities that can be stored and we've disassociated the production from the value adding.

That's correct. And I think that if you're on the farmer's end of that, you're, you've got a big challenge. It's, uh, you know, the value chain, when, uh, when the way that works in a value chain is the person closest to the actual consumer is who makes the most margin. And when there's a, when there's an inventory issue, it ripples back and it whipsaws the guys at the very front end of it. So I think that's the the farmer is probably in that situation. Wine is pretty lucky, although there are still quite a number of guys that are just growers that are seeking to sell grapes to another wine company. And they're, I'm sure, under intense pressure right now.

Yeah. Yeah, we— I'm just realizing, I feel like we didn't quite finish up on the plant population, or excuse me, on the plant conversation. Of how are your plants evolving and how are they expressing themselves differently than they have in the past in any way? You started by responding to some of the things that you've been surprised by, such as rhizophagia and so forth. But I'd love to dig more into the in-field application of how things might have changed.

You're thinking sort of in terms of how the vines are behaving differently now, possibly?

Well, combination of how the vines are behaving differently and how your management of the vines is different, if it is at all.

So, um, I don't want to give the impression that our— that the vineyard is just pristine. I've got plenty of challenges. I have, uh, there is trunk disease out there that comes from, you know, long ago fungal infections that have gotten in through a pruning wound somewhere. So we're constantly fighting that, and we continue to, to, uh, to work on trying to do better on our mildew. But just generally speaking, what, what I have observed is that the vines are happy. Uh, you know, it's Maybe the way I would think about is you can drive around and look at vineyards, and occasionally you'll see a vineyard that's got that, you know, that beautiful bare dirt everywhere. And if you look at the vines, they just look forlorn. They just look sad out there.

They look weathered.

They look weathered. The shoot lengths are a little shorter. They just don't look very perky. Whereas if you look, if you go to, if you You look at my vineyard, you have the opposite. You got this terribly shaggy ground cover situation, but the vines, they feel, they look happy. You know, they look like they're, the shoots are solid and yeah. So that I observed. But as far as kind of really doing something different on the viticulture, there's not a lot. Vines are, They're pretty straightforward. They love to grow. I think if you just give them a little bit of water and give them a little bit of nutrition, they're going to be happy. And you have more problems trying to deal with excess growth than you do with trying to nurse them along, trying to get them to grow more.

Yeah. How have— it's been several years now, I think, that you've been using the foliar applications. What does your foliar application frequency and timing look like, and how has Has that made any observable improvements for you?

So it, uh, we, we basically have been adding our foliars in with our mildew sprays. It's been the approach to it. And with, uh, with an organic approach, you have to spray more often. That's probably one of the downsides of organic chemistry. So we run about every 10 to 12 days, we go through and spray, and we've been adding the micronutrients primarily to those sprays based on a sap analysis. And we try and time that sap analysis so that we get it after the last spray. And, and we'll probably— well, the approach is we spray, give it 4 or 5 days, pull a sap analysis, then there's another spray without any new knowledge. And then the next spray after that, we have new knowledge, and we adjust our, our foliars accordingly. And thus far, we— it's still each year we've had to work at it. When we start off, what we find with our sap is that certain micronutrients are deficient, uh, and of the macros, calcium is often a problem. And we work through the year, and typically by the time we get to verasion we've got everything pretty much where we want it. So that, that has been the theme thus far. And, and obviously the goal is to try and get that very first SEP analysis to be where we want it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So I have a question for you, John. Uh, one of the— there's, uh, there's some very good wines that are made from dry-farmed vineyards and oftentimes very old vines. And the typical situation there is that they, they're widely spaced, maybe 10 feet by 10 feet or 12 feet by 12 feet. They are, they're typically grown in clay is what I have observed, something that has a little higher water retaining in it. And they, they The, what the, again, I don't, since I don't farm that way, I'm not an expert, but here's what I see is the, typically the guys have either a native cover crop or this, in more recent years I've noticed they're starting to plant a cover crop. They let it grow until just before bud break, and then they till it under and they till it dramatically. They till, X and Y, and they till deep. And the idea is to create what they call a dust mulch. It's like 6 or 8 inches deep. And those vines seem to do just fine and make really, really good wines. And yet, from my perspective, it seems like they've pretty well erased any, uh, soil biology in that top foot or so. Curious for your thoughts on how that system works.

Um, that's intriguing. I have a few thoughts around that. I would tend to agree with your assessment that they've really destroyed much of what is left of any living system in that upper profile. Obviously the plant roots are a lot deeper than that and they're getting moisture a lot deeper than that. Um, it, it would be interesting to know what, how that system might operate without that dust mulch. But you know, Bob Quinn first pointed something out to me. I had him in here on the podcast years ago. He's a longtime leader in the organic farming space out of Montana, and he's growing crops that it's supposedly— he's in a dry land, arid environment. If my memory serves me correctly, I want to say 10 to 12 inches of rainfall a year, maybe a bit more than that, but not much more. And um, he's growing watermelons in that environment, and he's growing potatoes, and he's growing a variety of crops that supposedly you wouldn't be able to grow in that environment because of inadequate moisture. And his solution was spacing. He said he, he just spaces the plants farther apart. So he's thinking of it in terms of plant spacing relative to moisture requirements, that if a watermelon plant is planted 2 feet apart in a 40-inch rainfall environment. He's planting them 8 inches apart in a 10-inch rainfall environment, and he's able to produce the same yields because he's essentially giving those plant root systems access to much larger soil volume to absorb more water. So I found that idea pretty intriguing, and that kind of aligns with your idea of plant spacing. Now, what is interesting, I don't know about in your context, but if you go further east where there's this longstanding historical practice of a summer fallow in dryland farming, with wheat farming and so forth, this idea of having a summer fallow, of not having any plants growing and of conserving moisture by having the soil bare and uncovered, you know, when you start thinking about soil dynamics and evapotranspiration, the idea seems kind of not so smart after you really dig into it. But I'm trying to remember, a couple of growers I was visiting with at an event this last winter told me about this research. I don't remember if it was the University of Nebraska or Colorado, but it was out in that area somewhere. And they studied soil water dynamics and they came to the conclusion that when you have a summer fowl, you have bare soil. You actually keep only 20% of the water that lands. So the benefits of that bare fallow are actually very minimal. Now, in your case where you have this, this dust mulch, are you actually able to, to keep more of that of what fell during the winter months? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that, but I have I have a feel it's, as we have a growing understanding of how plants are collaborating with each other instead of competing with each other for moisture and nutrients when we have really good biology and quorum sensing, there are many instances emerging and observations emerging where we realize that the idea that plants inherently compete with each other always is not true. They can, they do sometimes, but it's not an inherent, um, de facto status. And so understanding what those variables are, I think, is very important for us to figure out because it's in— I'm of the, of— I'm of the opinion that it is going to be possible for us in most environments to identify companion pants plants and collaborators that share water instead of competing for water. And all of a sudden, the idea of a summer fallow or, or, uh, a dust mulch becomes obsolete. I don't know if that was really an answer to your question.

Well, I agree with your thoughts on that, but I— the guys that do it don't, I can tell you that. A couple of them.

Yeah, it's— you've, you've got to You know, there is this challenging aspect of being human, human psychology, that most of us are only willing to consider making changes when the actual pain of not changing becomes greater than the perceived pain of changing. So that's why we have, in so many domains, there are breakthroughs where A lot of advances are made in science and so forth, but they're not implemented for 20 or 30 or 40 years because people prefer not to change.

Yes. Well, when I was actually working for a living in the old days, I read a book called Change in Science. This would have been back in the '80s, and the guy that wrote it had gone back like to Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and worked his way through to current times and came to the conclusion was that science does not change until the last professor from the old regime dies. That's exactly right.

It says Thomas Kuhn, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions. That's, that's the, that's the foundational premise of a couple hundred page, very well-written book, because the nature of scientific revolutions is when the old guard dies off.

Exactly right. Sounds about true, I think.

How much of that, how much of that is true in farming?

Well, I would say the same. I don't know, you have a hell of a lot more experience in farming than I do. There's some pretty old codgers around that have got pretty set views of the world.

You know, there's this interesting phenomenon. I've spoken about this a couple of times, but a lot of people don't realize there is this what is called the theory of diffusion, the diffusion of innovations. And it's how new ideas and new technologies get adopted. It was originally— the original research is in the 1970s by Everett Rogers. And people may not be familiar with the theory by those terms, but they're very familiar with the language. The marketers have made the language popular talking about the innovators and the early adopters and the early majority and the late majority and so forth.

Yeah.

What a lot of people don't realize is that that original foundational research was done on farmers, specifically on how farmers in Iowa adopted hybrid seed corn technology.

Interesting.

And of course, the research has expanded now far beyond that original scope, but there's a lot of research on how farmers adopt new information. And Simon Sinek says it very well when he speaks about the last category, the laggards, The laggards are those people which only— the only reason they use touchtone phones is because they don't make dial tone or ringtone, ring dial phones anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you look at the demographics of what is present in agriculture today, and there's a lot of variation in subgroups, but you look at the commodity production across the Midwest and agriculture largely is a group of elderly people who've built up a lot of equity, and the development of air-conditioned cabs in tractors and combines has allowed them to keep farming into their 70s and 80s when historically they would have been ejected from the tractor seat. They would have not been comfortable in the tractor seat 50 years ago. And so it's that entrenchment of age and the proclivity of age to be somewhat resistant to change that is, I mean, all of those are contributing factors to why we have this inherent resistance to change in so much of agriculture.

Yep. I can believe it. Well, you know, in the technology world, you kind of have a, you have the flip side of that. They call it the innovator's dilemma. So these technology people come along and they launch a successful company that they grow like crazy. They hire 50,000 people, make a lot of money, and then 10 years later another company launches with a product that actually is better than that and makes theirs obsolete, and they're unable to adapt because they've got the huge infrastructure in place. And even though the boss can see the problem, he cannot communicate it down the chain and get it done.

Well, agriculture is the same way that we also, we also have a lot of of incumbent infrastructure that isn't easy to, and it's highly leveraged in many cases. So you're committed from a debt and a capitalization structure perspective where it's very difficult to pivot.

Yep. That, you know, in that, going back to that Scottsdale meeting, that's the first time I've ever gone to, to that kind of a session. And that was one of the learnings that I got out of it was just the challenge that the kind of the traditional farm people are faced with, with that, that whole situation of, you know, declining, declining margins and, uh, being kind of locked into different techniques and approaches through insurance and through loans and what have you. So pretty tough situation.

Yeah. So I asked you this question earlier, um, how do you see your operation evolving in the future? And you, you spoke very broadly about, um, the wanting to grow nutrient-dense, high quality, and so forth. But let's, let's focus on the growing aspects for a moment. Do you, do you anticipate— how do you anticipate your operation shifting or evolving in terms of your actual growing practices, in, if in any way?

Well, I, at this moment, I don't know of anything else to implement. As soon as I find out anything, I will. You can bet on that. So kind of the, for me, the holy grail is back to wine quality. And I'm hoping that's out as we keep pushing these things that we will find that are, when I say nutrient-dense, I'm thinking more in terms of the phenolics actually than anything else, those aspects that really impact the wine quality. I'm hoping that we'll be able to push those along. I'm hoping that we can build vines that are really resistant to mildew if we can get them strong enough and nutrient satisfied. Just kind of in passing, one of the things that's happened so far is that the progress that we've made, the leafhoppers and spider mites that were occasional problems back in the more conventional days are gone. We haven't had those in years now. And that strikes me as a good sign. And I'm hoping that somewhere along the way we can push the mildew into that same corner. So yes, it's more, for me, John, this is kind of a lifetime project. My daughter is in the business. She's in the process of taking it over. Thank goodness for that. And I'm gonna—

You're not gonna be one of the guys in air-conditioned tractor cabs at age 85?

Well, I won't have an air-conditioned cab, but I will be there at 85, I hope. Yeah, exactly. It's one of these deals, you know, when you're young, it's like you learn, you learn, you know, a little bit about a whole lot of things and you just keep expanding. And I'm at a point now where I'm— there's very few things that I'm interested in, but I want to know a hell of a lot about them. It has to do with really focusing in on growing these grapes.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're having a lot of fun. That's one of the most important things in life.

Oh, definitely. Definitely.

Yeah. Well, thank you, Bob. I really enjoyed this conversation. Um, where can people learn more about your vineyard, and are there any final thoughts that you would like to share?

Ah, well, it's easy to find us, uh, www.altacolina.com. We're located here in Paso Robles. We would love to sell you wine. Log in and place your orders, please. That would be just fine with me. And I don't know, final thoughts? I appreciate the opportunity, John. It was fun talking with you, get to know you a little bit face to face.

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