John KempfRegenerative Agriculture Entrepreneur

These Cover Crops are Sheep-Approved 🐑🌱

10 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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Short video transcript of a conversation at Wilson Creek Winery and Vineyards where vineyard manager Greg Pennyroyal and events manager Jeff Luttrell describe grazing sheep on a pre-inoculated cover crop (referred to as "COVID crop" in transcript). They highlight good germination despite drought, improved nutrition for sheep compared with dried alfalfa, and rapid grazing impact after ~24 hours.

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Hi, this is Greg Pennyroyal, vineyard manager at Wilson Creek Winery and Vineyards, and I'm here with Jeff Luttrell, who is our events manager and has brought his sheep in to graze on our cover crop. We were noticing that this really had a nice color to it. The COVID crop just looked good. The sheep seem to be really enjoying it, and I think part of it is we pre inoculated the COVID crop seed with seed flare and Biokoat gold. It's an advancing eco ag product like most of the things we use here. And with the drought that we've had this year, we're still getting a decent cover crop.
Yeah, absolutely. Which I noticed, and I begged you to allow me to bring my sheep in to benefit from the fresh grass. Normally, they get.
Dried alfalfa, which in the drying process.
Depletes some of the nutrients. So giving them the fresh stuff is much better for them.
Yeah. So saying that good germination and the good growth is good, but the ultimate sign is watching them chow down.
Absolutely. And just putting them in here almost 24 hours ago, they've mowed this section of the vineyard down pretty well.
Cool.
They love it.
Yeah. All right, thanks, Jeff.
Thank you.