Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome back again to another episode of Conservation Stories. This is a podcast hosted by the Sandhill Area Research association, otherwise known as Sarah. I'm your host, Tillery Timmons Sims, and I have with me again my brother. I've decided that we, Dusty Timmons and I should see if we can make one more podcast without arguing. I think we did pretty good last time. And we have asked Kelly Mulville. Kelly is a viticulturist. He manages the Piscinas Ranch vineyard, and he is all things regenerative grape growing, I guess you would say. And this is why we have Dusty here, because Dusty is the past president of twiga, the Texas Wine Grape Growers Association. Thank you very much. And so he's going, going to ask the smart questions and I'm going to ask the dumb questions. And Kelly, thank you for joining us.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: We really appreciate you joining us from California. This is early morning for you, and thank you very much. Can you give us a little bit about, about your background and kind of how you got into viticulture?
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Sure.
I was born in West Texas. We were on the edge of farming. In fact, the house, the house my dad built, he was an architect, was a cotton field where he, he built that. So I grew up around agriculture. We did a little bit of market farming. I started in organic growing early on, ended up going to UC Santa Cruz to the. The program in ecological horticulture, which was at that time, kind of the only place you could learn organic farming practices. And then shortly after that, I ended up running across Alan Savory. From that point, I ended up going to a wine tasting when I was working on the ranch, very small town in Colorado, and realized that there's some really good wine out there. And that caused me to shift gears a bit. And next thing I knew, I was in southeast Arizona putting in a vineyard. And that started my journey of trying to take all my background in organic agriculture and range restoration, using livestock, finding all of those into wine growing, which landed me eventually in California.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: That is really fascinating. And can you tell us a little bit about Piscinas Ranch and where you're working now?
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Sure. So Piscinas Ranch was originally a Mexican land grant. It's been in operation since 1846.
And sometimes I feel like I've been there most of that time.
Yeah, I've only been here 10 years. And I was the, the owner of this ranch, Sally Calhoun. And I knew of each other basically when I was in California before working on vineyards, but she came to a presentation I did at Eco Farm on some work that I'd done with converting basically a kind of a more conventional trellised vineyard to a system that allowed it to be grazed at any time here. And I did that. I did that initial trial and research in California and ended up writing an article on that that was published in Australia, New Zealand, were winemaker. And so consequently I was invited to do presentations down there.
But after, after going down and doing that, I realized that I was kind of trying to modify a system that was never meant to be grazed throughout the year and that it was a bit clunky. And so I've done a presentation at Eco Farm conference here in California, right near Piscinas Ranch. And Sally was at that. And at that I said, what we really need to do is look at how we are designing vineyards and how we might potentially redesign vineyards to be ultimately more diverse and sustainable, especially in the face of changing climate and loss of biodiversity. And so Sally came up to me and said, I want to do what you're talking about at Vicena's ranch. And I said, well, here's the thing. I don't really know how to do it.
I'd be happy to jump on this opportunity, but it's going to be a learning journey, all of us, which it has been, but she invited me come to come out and be part of this operation. And so I've been working on this ever since.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: I've never met Ms. Calhoun, but I've heard a lot of good things about her investment in, in research and, and the things that she does on that ranch. It's pretty impressive.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: It certainly is. She's. She's a, an incredible force and. But just amazingly down to earth person.
[00:05:14] Speaker C: I did a little bit of reading back upon on what you're doing there. Can you walk us through the.
Basically the nuts and bolts of going from the bare ground to the decisions you made on your cord on height training system and even all the way into, you know what, what type of livestock do you run underneath in the canopy?
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Okay, great question. And it's always good to start from the beginning. The, the ranch is 7,600 ac. 600 acres of that are irrigated cropland and the remainder is rangeland. This is so we're central coast, California, inland a bit. 12 inches. Average rainfall a year.
And it seems like it's either we're getting 3 inches or 20 inches.
[00:06:05] Speaker C: So it's very similar to us out here.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: It's funny because when I went to UC Santa Cruz from, you know, from West Texas. I, I got claustrophobia in the redwoods.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: That's funny.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Anyway, historically there were, for 30 years there were a thousand acres of vineyards on this ranch and they'd been removed in about 1995.
So when I selected a spot, I looked around at the terrain and realized that the place that perennials are growing in this climate, in this location are on the north facing slopes because that's where they have bit of shade, they don't dry out as quickly. And so I purposely selected a hill and which is predominantly north facing.
The first thing we did was, well, we didn't have to do much because it was pretty bare, was not in great shape.
So we leveled it out, we did an application of compost and that was it. When the rains came, we ran cattle on there as a to. To in the spring to graze down the vegetation and get some manure and urine on the site to help building the soil health.
That first year we had seven animal days per acre, which means that we had basically seven, the equivalent of £7,000 cows on one acre for one day. The next year we added cover crop seed and had about the same rainfall and our, our productivity increased tenfold. And I think that was for two reasons. One is that that compost that we applied the first year had a chance to get, get kind of vitalized in the soil and then that cover crop provided additional forage the next, the next year was the last year we grazed. So this is year three.
And we had similar animal days per acre, actually a little bit higher because we also started incorporating sheep into the picture. We ended up lambing on the site. That was going to be the first phase of the vineyard. So before even planting anything, we were, we were building the soil out. And the interesting thing when you, when, when you know, when you look at that scenario is we did that while bringing in some income at the same time. So it wasn't all about just bringing inputs. The very input was a little bit of compost, a little bit of seed and then having the livestock, livestock took those, the initial boost from those things.
2017, we planted the first vines and we got our first crop in 2021 and this year, so this year we, we had our fourth crop. So because I did not know exactly what I was going to do for a trellis system, I'd initially thought about using a system called Dov, which means dried on the line, which is used by raisin producers in California. It's, it takes a lot of infrastructure. It's fairly Massive. I realized pretty quickly that it probably would not do well on a hill. And so about that time, as fate would have it, I was at a, at a workshop, a viticultural workshop, and my friend Fritz Westover, who's based in.
[00:09:29] Speaker B: Texas, you know him, Dusty.
[00:09:31] Speaker C: I worked with him at agriloft.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Agriloff.
[00:09:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I know Fritz very well.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: Fritz got called up to do a presentation on the spur of the moment because somebody got food poisoning or supposed to present. He, he just said, oh, I, I think I have some slides, and went and checked out a bunch of people that Fritz recommended that we're using the Watson system. Came back and decided that's what I was going to do. And so it's a high, it's a high trellis, it's a divided canopy, it's the vine density less, but the yields are better than, say, a conventional VSP system. So there's a lot of things in favor of what we were trying to do. And when I say what we're trying to do, the. Sometimes people mistakenly think that we were just trying to figure out a way to graze sheep in a vineyard during the growing season, but actually it's much bigger than that. The ultimate goal is we restore biodiversity to a landscape that has been denuded, which is the case of most agriculture. We take a site, we clear it basically of everything, and then we usually plant a crop of something. And if we get a little bit better, we might have a crop rotation. And then if we get even a little bit better than that, we might have a, a diversity of crops growing at the same time. Ultimately, we were trying to figure out how we support the native biodiversity here at the same time as we produce a crop profitably. So that's. That, that's the goal here. And we just realized from my initial work in setting up a vineyard to graze by during the summer by putting in electric offsets, that the benefits are pretty substantial. Like that first, that early work I did was in around 2000, like 2009-2011, and we were seeing a per acre savings of approximately $1,000 per year in this area. The average size vineyard is about a thousand acres. So if you use those numbers that are now almost 14 years old or so, savings would be a million dollars a year. The, the economics has to work for everything. That was a big indication that we're on the right track.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: Let me go back and that's one. A couple of little questions in here.
When you. It's interesting that you. I didn't realize that it came from the, from the Watson training system. He was, I think he just got that perfected pretty much when I was with extension. Um, this has been, I don't even remember the dates. I'm, I'm, I'm just lucky if I can remember to get up in the morning. I consider that a win. So whenever it was, I was down there.
When you looked at the, at the Watson training system and trying to figure out how to graze underneath the, underneath the system that you mentioned, the divided canopy. Can you go ahead and explain kind of what the divided canopy is for our listeners?
[00:12:24] Speaker A: Sure. If you are looking, if you're in a vineyard and you're looking at the row ends from the impost, you have a impulse that's coming up pretty high and on top of that is a V. Ultimately, as you get into the vineyard, all of, all of your grape steaks have a V. But what that means is that your vines get trained up pretty high. Our cordon height is about, probably averages around 66 inches. So you have basically, what is it, the trunk of your vine going up to just before 66 inches and then it does a Y, so it spreads in two directions and those create arms. And so when those are pruned, it looks just like a giant tea standing out in the field. Now in the growing season when those, when the shoot start to grow out of those two arm off of the tee, we, we select for spurs on either side of that so that they're going both ways into the row. They accentuate that V pattern and they come up on the trellis wires and they create a V and they droop over and hang into the, into the row. And so if you're looking down the row, which, when you're in full production and later in season, what you see is a, is basically this, this V shape of foliage draping down on either side of your trellis. And actually what tends to happen in practice is that those shoots, depending on the variety, some of them grow out and that creates a kind almost a complete overhead canopy. A lot of them though, just go out fairly far into the row and it creates this big umbrella like effect which provides a lot of nice shade for sheep, for people that are working in there and for the vineyard floor. Because of that, that creates cooler conditions, dappled light on the fruit, which is ideal, and in our climate, which can get pretty hot. That shade, both for the fruit and on the vineyard floor, it keeps things nice and cool in there.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: That's really cool. So dusty. Do we have Any Watson.
We don't. I was gonna say. I've never seen that here.
[00:14:40] Speaker C: Watson. It was developed for black Spanish.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: Non vernifera. I mean, this is the matter of fact when that. When. When I was with extension, then we're looking at it. It was exclusively for non vanefera. So like your cabernets and temperios and Grenache and worse demeanors and stuff like that did not have. Everybody was conventional.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:15:01] Speaker C: At that time that, you know, with the industry being young out here, I kept telling everybody, let's do what's in the box first before we start thinking outside the box.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: So let me follow up one more with. With the question that I think other people might be wondering about the term V S, V system. Can one of y'all. Dusty, can you just give us a real quick.
[00:15:22] Speaker C: I think that's so people will be vsp.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Vsp. Okay.
[00:15:25] Speaker C: Vertical sheet positioning.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: That's. That is a spurring cord on typical.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Just the way it's normally. This what we see around here in West Texas, it's vertically.
[00:15:36] Speaker C: You. You basically position the shoots vertically.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: It's, you know. You know, great. Guys are ingenious about. About how they do things, but not so much with how we name things.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So this is basically the way that we. We. We typically, like, prune things here. Yes.
[00:15:51] Speaker C: Probably 98% of the stuff in Texas is done this way. And the other 2% is. Is what we call a Southwestern sprawl, or.
That's pretty much it.
[00:16:06] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: There's some smart Dyson, but very, very little, like two years in the state do smart dice.
[00:16:11] Speaker B: And Kelly, you were here just recently.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: Yep, I was in August.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: That's what I was thinking. The hot time. Hot time of the year. Although I think every part of the year is hot time now. This feels like it. Anyway. So, Kelly, what did you. What were your thoughts when you were up here and you spent a few days.
[00:16:28] Speaker A: I. I did. Yep. And I was. I. I stopped there, actually.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: I was.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: I was coming back from Oklahoma to California, and I stopped there in part because I've. I've developed a big interest in cotton and I wanted to see what folks were doing in. In that big cotton patch over there.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: Trying to get out of it.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Trying to get out of it.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: So. Yeah, so I spent some time running around and visiting.
I think they're primarily organic growers.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: You met Jeremy Brown.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: I did, yeah.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Carl Pepper.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Huh. Yep. That's one of the. That's the OG Organic girl right there.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Yes. One of Those original guys. Yes, exactly.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Was kind of driving around with a guy named Edo Tal, who's a cotton breeder from Israel.
[00:17:18] Speaker C: Out here, our cordons, we. Like I said, we're pretty much predominantly VSP out here.
One of the things that we have done, and it kind of started that. Well, it actually started 100% at our vineyard and is we use hail net because we have, you know, hell is a. Is a pretty big problem for us there with continental climate. You know, I always say that we're, you know, all we need to have the perfect climate to grow grapes is the Pacific Ocean, you know, 90 miles west of us. But with the continental climate, you have hailstorms, and they can come in and be pretty severe. We've started hanging hell net in our vineyards, which. It's a side netting similar to some of the shade netting they use in some of the vineyards in end up in Napa is where I've seen. Where I've seen it used. It's similar to that, but different because, you know, we're cheap. And so we try to do it as inexpensive as possible. But have you ever looked at protecting the canopy from the side like that, and then being able to run sheep in graze livestock in it with the conventional trellis system by just protecting the canopy from the grazers or browsers, I guess what it would be.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: So I. I have. I. I'm familiar with what you're talking about, and I've seen people actually using a similar setup for heat, intense sunlight protection. And so that's. That's definitely a possibility and could be a side benefit for folks using that system and that they potentially graze that pretty easily. The reason that I didn't do that in. In the vineyard here is because a. I had free range to figure out something that would provide additional benefits. And I didn't want to try and make a Volkswagen Bug, a Mercedes. What I was trying to do is not just take an existing system and see how we make it a little bit better. Let's reverse that and say what would be the ultimate setup for providing things like improved shade, improved access of the sheep to the vines? Because I actually want the sheep to be able to browse all the suckers for me. And so standing back and saying, is what we're doing actually working for the bigger picture that we're trying to achieve? And it's so easy to get caught up. And the first vineyard I put in in Arizona was vsp. The first vineyard I designed actually was vsp, but then I just, you know, it was a gradual process of realizing that there's, there's different ways we can do this.
[00:19:53] Speaker C: When you look at what they've used, you know, in other places in the world where they have grazed livestock through the vineyards, you know, in times past, and we've gone more in towards, you know, everything is a dedicate. Every field is a dedicated field for a dedicated crop. When we pull that diverse, we've pulled that diversity out like the vineyard, like in our vineyard, for example, up here we are, Our rains have fallen, fall at different, at weird times comparatively to like, say the, you know, where it falls in California. California, you got the rains throughout the winter and then it's dry in the summer. And we're, we're, we hope, we always hope for rains in the winter, but we never count on them. This has been an unusual year. We've had. I think our vineyard this month has had 7 inches of rainfall and I have got just scads of, of erosion that I've got to deal with, but we've moved. What, what I'm trying to do in looking at, at our vineyards is, you know, we try to put a cover crop on our, on our alleys, in our turn in our rows, but we can't. We feel like we don't have enough rainfall to grow a cover crop without, you know, substantial irrigation. We don't have enough irrigation to grow, grow a grape crop with a cover crop in the vineyard, if that makes, if that makes sense. I'm kind of talking in circles here.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: That, that, that is something that comes up a lot dusty when we're talking to different. Like we've done a roundtable with different producers and, you know, some of them, you know, are willing to put some irrigation, but most of them are, it's completely. Cover crops are rain dependent.
[00:21:28] Speaker C: Yeah. I think the thing that excited me the most when Tillery asked me to be honest with you was the very first thing I did. I always do when somebody says, oh, you got to hear about this. This is a. Regenerative agriculture is. The very first thing I do is I go look at where they are and I go find rainfall charts.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:21:43] Speaker C: And when I saw your rainfall charts, I thought this guy might actually have something that we could work with. Because regenerative agriculture works exceptionally well with 36 to 44 inches of rainfall a year.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: Well, and it depends on what you're calling regenerative and who's.
[00:21:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Who's telling you what and. Yeah, right.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: But going back when you were talking about weeds and when I was in College, the weed professor was always like, a weed is a plant that is out of place. You know, a rose bush in a cotton field is a weed, is basically what he was. What, what the. How the theory went, when you're looking at your biodiversity, you said that you had. You went in, leveled the side and then put out compost and graze cows that kind of, the next year you just graze, whatever I'm going to call them, weeds, because that's going to be what we're going to go with on this day. Did you just graze? Whatever happened to come up on the hillside of weeds, Weeds, grass, native come up on that hillside that year. And then you said you. The next year you went back in and planted a cover crop. What did you plant back into that site when you. On the second year?
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So to answer your question, yes, it was just whatever came up. It was basically, we get a lot of annual grasses. Some of them are okay to graze, some of them are not that great. So just grazing whatever was in there. But we're, again, we're using holistic plant grazing, so we had pretty good density, and we're moving the cattle pretty often. So seven animal days per acre, and so that would be the equivalent of each acre getting seven animals for a day. That's just a figure. We used to talk about forage production. It might be, you know, 13 animals or something, but when it, when you, when you calculate it out, that's what it comes to. So then in the second year, we planted a cover crop, and that included oats, which is kind of funny because we do have, well, we have oats that come up as weeds, as you would term them. And. But we planted some, some forage oats, radish, probably peas and vetch and possibly maybe some barley or something in there, too.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: You gave your biodiversity a head start with what you. With the variety of seeds that you put on that.
[00:24:00] Speaker A: Exactly. And I will say, before we, before I even selected this site, we were doing a botanical survey of the ranch. And on that site, we recounted 11 species of plants, including one perennial.
And just to jump forward, we are now at over 100 species of plants on the Vineyard.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: That was the. Actually, that was the next question I was going to ask you is if you'd seen an increase in the biodiversity in it. How, how tight do you graze it during the season? And I'll go, I'll get to where I'm going with this here in just, in just a minute. But when I say how tight, how far Down. Do you graze it? Do you graze it hard back, you know, hard, and make sure everything gets eaten uniformly across it and then move them, or do you let that it selectively graze it and move them through it that way?
[00:24:50] Speaker A: I'm going to go to that old standby answer. It depends.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: Are you sure you're not an economist?
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Well, that depends.
I do like things to make economic sense, for sure, but I wouldn't call myself an economist. So that's the great thing about thinking of grazing as a tool, is that really what are you trying to achieve? And so, for instance, this year we had a big vole outbreak. And if I'd known how voles function, I would have have gone in right before the thing started, right before the vines started greening up. When we had the chance to easily graze everything, including some of the young vines that were in there, I would have grazed severely. So grazed it down pretty hard, and then that would have reduced the habitat for the voles. So we have that option. We have the option of grazing severely. But in general, during the winter when we're grazing, we will graze probably down about halfway or so because we want to keep the photosynthetic capacity of the plant that's being grazed. We want to keep that high. If you graze it down to the ground, you're going to reduce the photosynthetic capacity and you're going to be sacrificing roots to recover. So the plant's going to have to sacrifice roots in order to be able to recover. So if we don't sacrifice roots and we keep that photosynthetic capacity the going, that is an engine that is pumping carbon and root exudates into the soil and feeding the soil biology. So it just kind of depends on what you're trying to achieve at any moment. And also if it's particularly wet in the winter, which we generally don't have to deal with, but it seems like it's either going to be really wet or pretty dry. We will kind of try and delay having the animals out there for a while. And if we do just need to put them in there, we will move them pretty quickly. Because you can increase compaction and wet soil quickly.
[00:26:56] Speaker C: Yeah, that was me. Another, because, you know, there's a reason that a sheepfoot packer is what they use to pack roads down.
Compaction is an issue that we are beginning to see in vineyards out here in Texas. Our soils are typically a lot of sand.
Where the vast majority of the vineyards are grown is it's predominantly a sandy loam or loamy fine sand actually. And so you don't have as much compaction in there, but just below the horizon you typically have an increase in, in clay. And we're seeing compaction down at about 8, about 16 to 24 inches. And it's impacting. We didn't think it was impacting our grape production until we went out and we did something to counter mount, kind of, you know, counteract that. Basically we did subso deep, relatively deep ripping. We ripped it about 24 inches deep. And for two years you could, I mean this is the second year that we've done since we've done it. And you can still even last year you could tell walking down the row how much better soil tilt you had in those rows where you had. We had fought that compaction. So that was. Compaction was another one I was worried was, was concerned, was not concerned about. But I was curious about when you said you had increased it to what you say 111 different species of plants.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: A little over 100.
[00:28:21] Speaker C: Well just called 100 plus.
When you, when you see that are you seeing an. In an increase in.
Is there any kind of an increase in a native versus a non native plants that you know, invasive. Are you having. Seeing any problems with invasive species coming in and you know, out competing some of your. The more native species that that are native to your region in California?
[00:28:51] Speaker A: The quick answer to that is no.
But we are seeing things that people would consider invasive. For instance, we now have some of the vines have Bermuda grass growing underneath them.
We have some perennial western wheatgrass growing underneath some of the vines. We have coyote bush which is a native that, that was the one perennial that was on the site before we planted and as of. And we have Peruvian pepper trees, we have elderberry trees. We refer to this every year it seems like there's a different thing happening. And last year was the year of trees popping up and, and including palm trees.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: What.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: And so it, it's, it's like when you, when you manage for diversity you.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: Get man, here I was completely here. I was worried about nutsed and we've got nut sedge in a part of our vineyard and at least I don't have palm trees.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:29:47] Speaker C: Of course we'd have Chinese elms coming up in ours. We actually have Chinese.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: But yeah, so. So we have a lot of stuff and let me kind of stand back a little bit. So we started out with 11 species. We did cover crop for the first few years. We haven't cover cropped in four years. But. And one of the reasons that I quit cover cropping is because we had two severe drought years, including the driest year in recorded history in California, which two years later was followed by the wettest year in history.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: It evens out.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So you know, when you talk about weather extremes like I know you guys experience in Texas, we've got them here too for sure. So the thing that I realized so I quit planting cover crops is because I could not predict what was going to happen in the year. And we losing a cover crop two years in a row, it adds up monetarily. And so but the thing that was happening, even though we weren't getting the COVID crop germinated, we were getting natives and some of the introduced stuff germinating. And so we still had good ground cover.
So at that point I said, well, why, why even bother with COVID crops? It's kind of like it was, it was a good way to prime the engine, but now the engine seems to be self driving. And so. And we're still seeing an increase of 5 to 10 species every year of new species coming in. A lot of those are native stuff. Some of them are interesting things like narrow leaf milkweed, which is one of the favorite foods of monarch butterflies. And that is toxic to livestock so the sheep don't mess with it. And we have all kinds of insects buzzing around that. And then we'll see other natives coming in. Now I will say that last year we received a grant to do some native plantings. And so we planted some native stuff that native perennials that would end up coming in here like the trees did by birds. And they are primarily varieties that need a little bit of shade. And now that we have a little bit of shade happening on the property, things like a native honeysuckle and stuff, we're just planting this stuff. And the grant was to put in a hedgerow. And I told the guy who got the grant and pulled it together, who runs Wild Farm alliance, when he said, hey, we need to come out and plan your hedgerow. And I said, I've decided we're not doing hedgerow. And he said, well, you got all the grant money, you got to do it. I said, no, I'm still planting, but I'm just going to plant everything right inside the vineyard underneath the vines.
And there was a long pause and he said, God, that's a great idea.
So he said, but. And so we'll see how it works. And they did. They're doing fine except for the things that Got taken out by volts.
[00:32:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're, they're doing fine except for the thing that nature killed. Go figure, right? Yeah, I say that completely tongue in cheek. But anyway, I was going to ask you, you said, you said you planted native honeysuckle. The honeysuckle, I'm sure that 99% of our listeners are thinking of, is what we grow out here. That, that is a very big vine and it gets big and brambly. And you plant that on your, yeah.
[00:33:03] Speaker B: You plant that on your back, back fence.
[00:33:05] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:06] Speaker C: You pan on the back fence, sort of climb up it. Is it, are we talking the same kind of growing habit or is it a low growing running. What does it look like?
[00:33:15] Speaker A: It's a, it's a climber and, but it's, it's not nearly as vigorous as the honeysuckle we know from Texas.
[00:33:21] Speaker C: Okay, then they, I guess I'm assuming that since you're grazing livestock in there, they'll pretty much keep it off of anything that's, that's growing at eye level because they're going to be, hey, look, there's something to eat right there. Has it been growing long enough to see if it's going to climb up and get into your cordons or is it, or if it has, if it has not been long enough, as are you anticipating that being an issue that you're going to have to look, look at.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: It hasn't made it up that far, but so far I haven't noticed it being browsed. And so we hope that it will make it up to the cordon. And because it's, it's such a, it's a, it's, it's kind of the opposite of the honeysuckle we're talking about in that it's a, it's a very fine plant. It's small leaves. And I just, I think it would be kind of very compatible in the trellis, actually. So. But we just have a few of those plants. If it's problematic, then we'll take it out. But I think that I have no problem with having an additional vine in there. And, and this year I think I will try planting some, some, probably some, some beans in with the vines just to see how they do. Yep.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: What's the benefit, I mean, what's the benefit of having is just the fact that it's just diverse or is there other benefits? Something else in the, having another viny plant growing in there.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: One of them is the flowers. And so like on a, another one that I would like to do is a name. It's. It's like an Aztec bean. A scarlet runner.
[00:35:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: And so it's a great attractant for hummingbirds.
And hummingbirds are kind of territorial. They chase the other birds off. So we are. I mean, in a. In an ideal world, would have so many hummingbirds that we don't have to put up bird netting.
But in the, in the. In the meantime, it'll be a fun little experiment. And so it's kind of this constant thing. And, you know, it's a legume, is a nitrogen fixer. Not that we are low on nitrogen. Having sheep graze the vineyard in the summer, we actually never have to apply nitrogen.
So the. That urine being deposited in the vineyard during the growing season of the plant is providing plenty of nitrogen for the vines.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:50] Speaker C: What is your. Is your predominantly sandy soil, rocky soil?
What does your soil profile look like?
[00:35:56] Speaker A: The soil is technically, according to the nrcs, is technically considered diablo clay.
But it's pretty diverse. We have some spots that are a little more kind of a tight loam, but in general, it's fairly clay, fairly heavy clay in spots. We also have.
We have calcified river or ocean rocks in the soil profile, a lot of fossilized clams.
And the soil surface is considered extremely deficient in calcium. And when you go down about 2ft, we have excessive calcium.
So we. We see a little bit of calcium deficiency in the young vines. Actually, when we plant now, we just throw a little bit of pelleted chip in the planting hole. And then once they hit, and then we see some boron toxicity from the boron and the water. Yeah, the young vines, but once they hit that calcium, they. They've got more calcium than they'll ever need. Yeah.
[00:37:20] Speaker B: Out here on the Texas plains, water is everything. And there's a resource that's as vital as it is fragile. Our playa lakes. These lakes are nature's reservoir, catching rainwater to recharge our aquifer and provide lifelines for wildlife. But now they need our help. In collaboration with the Task Texas Playa Lakes Conservation Initiative and the Cargill Global Water Challenge, Sarah has started the Our Legacy is Tomorrow's Water initiative to inspire and work with landowners to restore and protect our playa lakes. Each playa we save helps secure a sustainable water future for the generations that will be coming after us. Whether it's improving soil health, restoring habitats, or recharging groundwater, we are committed to making a difference. Together, we can build a legacy that we can all be proud of. To learn how you can join in visit the Playa Lakes Restoration Initiative page on the SARA website. Let's keep Texas water flowing strong for the future. Visit sara-conservation.com.
[00:38:31] Speaker C: We have a very odd soil profile out here. It's, it's. If we had unlimited water, we could grow whatever you wanted to.
It's, it's a good growth medium, but it's, it's predominantly sand in a lot of areas. Up north, you know, at the Plainview Health center north of Lubbock area, that's more clay and holds more water. But down south it's, it's predominantly sand. That's where most of the vineyards are, not all of them. There's a few people up there that are growing it. But where we've got the sand, we also typically don't apply hardly any nitrogen. But it's mostly because where our vineyard sites are, they've been growing cotton for 80 years and they put, you know, way more nitrogen in it. The nitrogen leeches through the soil to the, to the cliche, rock cliche. It's semi permeable cliche down there. And then by the time your, your vines get to it, then you're like spending the next 10 years trying to not put any nitrogen on so you can pump the nitrogen oxygen out of the soil and so you can get it back down to where the vines don't grow like gorillas.
Another thing I wanted to ask you about was in looking at your, at the winery, the vineyards website, you have a very unique blend of varieties that you have selected.
And it made me feel comfortable because that's kind of like what we are out here. We just, we've got a bunch of different things. But what went into your selection of the cult of the varieties that you did plant? Was it it deliberately because of market need or was it deliberately as a how they grow top issue.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: Well, because this is, this can be a pretty hot growing area. I wanted to select vines that have, that come from areas that are hot and have proven to do well in hot climates. That was one of the criterias. The, and I, since that first, that first finger that I put in the Chiricahuas I was looking at, I actually kept a list of varieties that I thought would do well in that type of climate. The other factor in that was that. And so in this area, there's a lot of Cabernet being grown, some Merlot, some of kind of the mainstream varieties. And because we're small, the vineyard is just 25 acres. At this point, I realized that our clientele for buying grapes Was probably going to be some of these smaller producers that are growing, that are making wine out of varieties that are a little bit more unusual. And rather than competing with the big guys.
And so we got a little bit of input from those folks as well, as far as what they were looking for. And then we were just going back to our list and saying, okay, well, let's try this and this. And some of the things, for instance, were accidental. I had planned on planting, let's see, Alvarino. I think it was Albarino. And they didn't have any.
And so I.
But they had a certico. And the certico is a Greek variety. Greek variety. And we ended up just getting that and planting that, and that is that. That the Assortico grown on this site almost sells out before it even goes on the market.
So it's limited. It's grown in a kind of a unique way. And the winemakers are doing a good job of promoting the growing practices that we're using here. And so right now, as of this year, we're working with nine different wine growers or winemakers, and they are all pretty small.
They are all doing kind of unique stuff and kind of have little.
Have strong following for their wines. So that's. That's. That's been helpful in creating that market. We did also, we. We did plant some Cabernet just because we're trying to. This part of this is just inspiring others to think differently about how wine can be grown. And since our neighbors are doing a lot of Cabernet, we said, we. We better do some Cabernet so that they don't just come over and say, well, you can do that with all those weird varieties, but you probably couldn't do it with Cabernet. So the first Cabernet crop was. Was this year.
[00:42:42] Speaker C: So I did not know how Cabernet grows on your site. For us out here, Cabernet is a very aggressive. It puts on a lot of canopy, and it is. It works out pretty well for me because I get to skip irrigation on that block. You know, when it's. When something like Rousseau and our white grape roots on. You know, it needs the water, we got to keep water. We. We basically, like, keep ordering the whites and, you know, stress the reds a little bit.
But Cabernet is one that. It is so aggressive and so vigorous that we can skip water to try to slow. Slow that down on that. On that. But I would assume on your site, getting. Do you supplemental irrigate your vineyard, or is it completely dependent on rainfall, it's, it's irrigated. Okay.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: Which I'm going to say, at least at this moment, it has to be. I mean, we've, we've had years with inches around.
[00:43:36] Speaker C: No, believe me, I, you know, I understand 100% on that. We've got, we may actually have the only 100% dry farmed vineyard block event of grapes on the high plains. And it was a complete and utter accident. But it's in the bottom of a playa lake. And so every time it rains, it stands water. And so it's the only place that will actually. And it's funny because we have lost fewer vines in it than we have where we irrigate. But I completely understand having to water that. Do you water with a subsurface drip? Above ground drip, overhead irrigation? How do you irrigate that?
[00:44:18] Speaker A: We, we do drip irrigation. The lines are just under the cordon, so they're high as well.
And if I could do subsurface irrigation, that's what I would do.
I don't think I can at this because of our gopher pressure. Yeah, but we are, and I've, I've done a lot of work in New Zealand and the New Zealanders are big fans of, of this type of thinking in part because they have so many more, they have more sheep than people. So. And they, the, the, the, the wine growers actually get paid to graze sheep, whereas here we're paying the shepherds in New Zealand. They're paying their, the stock producers are paying them as though it's just pasture land.
[00:45:02] Speaker C: Yeah, they graze it for, they rent it to, they rent the vineyard. Florida graze. Yeah.
[00:45:07] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Kind of, kind of back to the irrigation. Having, having our drip up high means that it's, it's easy for humans. I mean, we could, we can run a mower on a quad. Either direction. We can go between the vines or we can go down the rows. And so that, that, that allowed some management options. But also just having the sheep in there, I wanted as much out of the way as possible so that they could go in any direction. And we can set up fence in the vineyard in any direction. We can use either electronet fencing or we can use two or three strand electric poly wire. And so that just gives us great opportunities to go in any direction. And that has actually allowed us to do some interesting testing. And I'll go back to that in a second. But what I did want to mention is that so we do irrigate, but every year since we've started this project, our irrigation use goes down. Even during those dry years, the irrigation use is going down. And I think that that is in part because our carbon levels are going up. And so, you know, each 1% increase in soil carbon means about a 25,000 gallon increase in water holding capacity.
So we're up to probably in some places close the 3, 3, 3% increase. So that means that we've increased our water holding capacity by say 75, 000 gallons per acre.
[00:46:36] Speaker C: So basically three acre. And was it a 20? There's an acre inch is 25, 700 and something gallons.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I actually don't know that off the top of my head.
[00:46:47] Speaker C: I think, I think that's right.
So you basically, basically added 3 inches of water holding capacity to your soil.
That's, that's a big, that's huge, big savings through that.
[00:46:59] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: So, so that's a, so and that's a, that's kind of an ongoing thing of, of increasing the, the soil carbon. And we see that this year we had this, the soil ecologist from Australia named Christine Jones out at the ranch and she had just done a, spent some time with a guy up in Indiana I think it is, who is kind of the no till organic guru and John Kemp. And, and so he was, he was pretty proud of his soil. And Christine Jones looked at it and said, I wouldn't be so proud of this. It's, it's. You've got some issues here. So when she was here, we went into the vineyard and so we had a whole, we had, I don't know, 60 people here or so for that workshop. And everybody said, well, let's look, you know, let's look at the soil here and see what you think.
And so she, she dug into the soil under, under the vines in the, in the vine row and she was very impressed and she said I'm. This is actually really remarkable what, what has happened to the soil here. And then someone said well let's check between, you know, in the, in the middle of the, of the alleyways here. And Christine said, well I, I don't think you'll be able to get a shovel in there. It hasn't rained in six months.
And two women picked up a shovel, went over and they said, hey, it's actually pretty easy to dig in here. And so we all went over and looked at that and it just compounded this, you know, the results of what has happened from our management practices. And the soil has become more friable, it's got a lot more earthworms in it. It's more conducive to a diversity of plants and rodents.
And so.
So anyway, we. We feel like we're on the. On the right track in that regard.
[00:48:55] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so. That is so interesting. And I. I don't know how much that will carry over to sandy, sandy soil, but it would be interesting to see some of those things tried in our area. And I appreciate the fact that you're also looking at the bottom line, the economics of it, because what sounds good but doesn't pay is worthless.
[00:49:17] Speaker C: Yeah. There's the two biggest trials I'm going to. I assume that you're being on the watts and you're hand harvesting your crop. Is that correct?
[00:49:27] Speaker A: That is correct. But I will add to that that before we put in the trellis system, I ran the trellis design by all of the grape harvesting companies that I know that are working in this area. And the outcome of that was that they could harvest that.
All of the companies on the west coast that make machine harvesting, they could harvest the Watson. Except for a little bit of side slope that we have on one of our blocks.
[00:49:55] Speaker C: They using a trunk shaker to shake it with.
[00:49:59] Speaker A: I think most of them are using trunk shakers, but none of the European companies could do it. But we're 25 acres. It's not worth machine harvesting. And. And so we're doing that by hand. And that's another reason for the diversity of varieties, is that if we just had one or two varieties, we would have to harvest a bunch of stuff quickly by hand. And we just don't have the. We just don't have the resources here for that. So with all these different varieties, they're coming off at different times, and it makes it pretty easy to get them all harvested without a big crew.
[00:50:31] Speaker C: Yeah. But the other thing that would challenge, like our stuff. Stuff up here, we won. The machines up here harvesting are the European machines. They're a bow rod.
[00:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Because I couldn't imagine what I've seen here working.
[00:50:44] Speaker C: But they do have. But there is.
I don't even know if Agh. Still exists. American grape forester still. I think they made. Still exist. But they used to make one that's a trunk shaker. The difference is instead of shaking the upper canopy, the shoots to get them off, it holds the truck and it shakes the truck, thereby shaking the whole thing.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: Like more like a tree shape for a tree.
[00:51:10] Speaker C: And so that's a little bit different machine than what we have up here. The other thing that would concern me Here is that our sand, our soul is sandy. And so anywhere you have a plant growing in a matter of weeks, if not days, you'll have a little clump of sand around that. And so your vineyard floor would be exceedingly rough going through. The few people that have done a permanent grass up here have run into that issue to an extent also. It builds up, you know, because, you know, just because you've got good cover on yours. All it means is that's going to catch all the sand everybody else going from, from the other. So but the, the theory windbreak around.
[00:51:51] Speaker B: Your vineyard so you could prevent that.
[00:51:53] Speaker C: But it's phenomenal. I mean, the, the carbon increase in the soil. What, what is your soil pH? Is it relatively low, neutral or high?
[00:52:01] Speaker A: So the, the PH is, was high and like into the high sevens, low eights.
[00:52:08] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: And it started there and it's. Now it's, it's continually going down.
[00:52:12] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I can see that. If you're, if you're building carbon, you're going to be dropping. You're going to. Organic matter goes away very fast in an iph soil that's, that's our, the bane of our existence up here is our soil PH is typically fairly high. The parent material on it is, is a high ph. And then we add water on it that is also high ph, hard water, that's also high ph. And so organic matter does not tend to hang around in the soil very long.
And so that, seeing that, in that increase in carbon, that's the increase in carbon is probably the most phenomenal thing.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:52:46] Speaker C: Of everything that we've done. It takes a lot to increase the soil percent by 8%, much less 3.
[00:52:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a lot of work.
[00:52:55] Speaker C: So what variety of the varieties that you've picked that you selected? And this is going off the, off the, about the regenerative and then kind of into an economics class section a little bit. Which variety of yours is doing the best in terms of, of quality and which one is doing the best in terms of yield?
[00:53:15] Speaker A: Okay. So the, this year we were getting 5 tons the acre for our Grenache. And that's. We had to, we had to actually do that by looking at the vines that were, that were mature. We have a lot. The first year of planting, we lost two thirds of the vineyard and that was a large part due to nursery stock that had been under underwater for all winter. So when we planted it, most of it never sprouted. We did have a fair bit of loss from squirrels as well. But so consequently we had a diversity of age in the vineyard. But this last year, we were able to say, okay, let's just. Let's just. Let's just look at the yield off of the vines that. That are pretty close to being mature.
[00:54:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:07] Speaker A: And so we're at five times to an acre on that.
And so that's. And it'll probably go up a little bit from that eventually as all the young vines and replants come into their maturity. So that's been a good producer for us, and it does well on this training system. Actually, we haven't found anything that isn't doing okay on this system.
We had 17 varieties, and the Asserto has proven to be a low yielder, but it is also the most. For ease of production. It's like the Watson system was made for it. Even though historically Assertico has been grown on the ground in, like, a bird nest thing.
[00:54:56] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: And so we joked around that. I joked around with my crews when they were first coming up. I. I would have little talks with them and saying, this might feel a little weird, but this is how you're meant to grow.
And so they come up. The spur spacing is perfect.
The canopy, it's kind of sparse, and it is one that actually grows all the way across and connects. And so it's very beautiful in its form out in the vineyard, but the.
The yield is a little bit lower than the others. And so I think that the way that we'll eventually deal with that is to raise the price on that. Verdejo has proven to be a really good white for us.
Picbul Blanc has been good as well.
[00:55:54] Speaker C: It does well here as well.
[00:55:55] Speaker A: Now, I need to tell the. The tragedy story or our first big tragedy here, I guess. I guess that the first planting was a big tragedy.
[00:56:05] Speaker B: Sounds like it.
[00:56:07] Speaker A: But this year's tragedy was voles. I had never seen a vole in this vineyard.
Sally, who owns a ranch, has never seen a vole on the ranch in 25 years.
And so we saw the voles, and we thought, there's getting to be quite a few of them. And then we started noticing that they were doing a little bit of damage to the trunks.
And about that time, I went to New Zealand to do some presentations and was gone for a couple weeks. I got a text from the guy who's taking care of the vineyard, and he said, looks like we might end up losing a couple of these vines from the voles. They're so severe. By the time I got back from New Zealand, it was too late. And we're now looking at that. We probably lost about two thirds of the vineyard again, and that was from girdling. And I thought, I thought that it was because of our management practices, because we leave veg, you know, we leave the vineyard floor covered with pretty thick grass, dead grass.
And we've not done any tillage in the vineyard, actually, we've not done any tillage on that site since we initially leveled it. We did do ripping on the first section, but we did not rip the entire second section. But then talking to neighbors, they were having a heck of a time with it too. And neighbors that were conventional and left bare ground.
I do think that going forward, if so, for instance, if next year, in the late winter, early spring, we saw a vole, we would probably assume the worst and graze severely and keep the vegetation down low. The other thing that we're going to do this year, we're assuming worst for next year, we're going to put vine protectors on every vine and those need to be buried at least 4 inches and they need to be up above by probably a foot or so. And so we'll, we'll do that. And, and I'm even looking, trying to find a metal version of a, of a grow tube because they did chew through. We did, we ended up putting grow tubes around everything. Could they chew through those?
[00:58:18] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. So, yeah. So now that people haven't figured it out yet, that's kind of like a mouse, almost a mole. It's like a, it's a rodent, closer.
[00:58:26] Speaker C: To a prairie dog.
[00:58:27] Speaker A: Oh, well, it's about the size of a mouse, a little bit bigger, a little bit different color. And the.
So in struggling to figure out how to manage these things, I called the neighbor who has the oldest vineyard in the area, about 70, 80 years old, and I asked him, I said, so, do you get any damage? And he said, Yeah, I lost 30 of my crop.
And I said, when's the last time you had voles? And he said, 30 years ago.
[00:58:56] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: And that was the. And she said that was the first time. And he's probably as old as the vines.
[00:59:02] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:59:02] Speaker A: And so the. In his life, that was the first time he'd seen voles. And voles behave differently in different parts of the country. And they're, I think they're basically just about everywhere. But in some of the wetter regions, they, they don't have these locust like outbreaks. But in these drier areas, when you've. And we've had a few good rainfall years in a row. Then we got that. We got the plague of voles.
[00:59:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, this has been so good. I really appreciate it, Dusty. I appreciate you coming on to ask the right questions. And Kelly, thank you so much for graciously giving us your time. So much interesting information and maybe some is applicable to us, we think, Dusty.
[00:59:45] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, absolutely, Kelly. Keep up the good work and keep, keep doing what you're doing. I think I'm super excited about it.
[00:59:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Someday I want to come and see Piscinas Ranch.
It's on my bucket list.
[00:59:58] Speaker A: Yeah, you have to do it.
[00:59:59] Speaker B: Well, friends, thank you for joining us again for another episode of Conservation Stories. And one way you can help us, us, if you would, is to like and share this podcast. We would really appreciate that that helps get us in front of other listeners and it's a way that you can participate in what we're doing. So we look forward to visiting with you again on the next episode.
