Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Conservation Stories. Conservation Stories is a podcast brought to you by the Sand Hill Area Research Association. I'm your host, Hillary Timmons. Sims. And today I have somebody that has something in common with me and that is the last name, by maiden name. I have with me my brother, Dusty Timmons. And Dusty is my brother, just younger than me. And he is a viticulturist, has been in the grape industry really since the 90s. Yes, since we kind of had a revival of that industry. And the history of wine in Texas is a long one. And Dusty is also like a, he's kind of like an amateur historian. So we're going to put him on this, we're going to put him on the spot and ask him some questions. But very interesting. And some, some changes, some not so great changes have happened this year in the wine industry and the grape industry. So why this is important for our listeners is because most of our grapes for Texas wine are grown right here in the High Plains region. And it's a $20 billion impact on the state of Texas. And we have about 5,000 acres. And comparatively the cotton industry is a 24 billion dollar industry on the state of Texas. And they have about 5 million acres of cotton. So it is, has been an industry that has taken off fast, has, has had a huge impact. And we're going to start kind of at the beginning before we talk about the bad news from this year.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: All right.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Well, really, the check. The grape industry in Texas goes back a very, very long time.
Actually, if you go to France, there's actually, I can't remember what the guy's name is. Now you'll have to free of me, but there was a, a gentleman in Texas that isolated a, that found rootstock.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: You're talking about Munson?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, TV Munson. Yes, TV Munson.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And he found rootstocks that were resistant to a louse called phylloxera, which is a root, a soil borne insect that wiped out, it threatened to wipe out the industry in France. Now, almost all of their grapes in France are on root stock that are derived from plant native grapes in Texas. And that's the vast majority of the rootstock can actually trace their lineage back to the Texas. Texas in this area.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So that means that, that that stock, that rootstock had to have originated there in France or in that, that region to begin with. And then it came to Texas.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: I, you know, you'd have to go. Maybe it goes back to when the continents were all linked together.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: It didn't come from France to Texas and then France. It was here.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: It was here.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: It was here before the. Like the. Like before the.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: Before the Europeans. So.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: But.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: But we do have, like, Spanish grapes, do we not?
[00:03:03] Speaker B: No, that's actually. That. We did actually have. We actually had. Some of the Spanish missionaries actually planted grapes down around Del Rio area, I think where that was. Don't hold me to that, but I know the oldest winery in the state of Texas is actually in Del Rio.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: It's the oldest continuously producing wine. It made it all the way through prohibition because it was. It got classified as a sacramental. They made Sacramento.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Oh, interesting.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Okay. And that they actually buy grapes from Terry County. From. In Terry county and have. For eons. I mean, for. For a long, long time.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. Because.
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Eons. I'm 50, so they. My first merchant my whole life.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: Right. Because we've had grapes in Soteri county just for people that. That want to know where this is. So we're. We are here recording in Lovett county, so. Which is Love Texas. And then Terry county is south of us, south and west. And it's about. You go through basically two counties to get there.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: And Tarry county, you know, you've got the. Out of Plains. You had the Newsoms, Hoss Newsome and Neil Newsome out of there for years. Been there for a long time. 80s, I think, is when they went in. But this is actually the. I want to say it's the third iteration of grapes on the high plains.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: I don't think I knew that. I knew that I was thinking it was the second, but it's the third.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: It may be that. It may just be that I'm trying to. I'm trying to go back in my head and think if there was anything before. No, it was this. It would be the second, because Hoss and Neil Newsome came in the first. There was a big planning. A lot of stuff went in. We had an October freeze. Wineries quit buying grapes for a while. The economy went through some, and we.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Weren'T necessarily known for high quality.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Well, at that time, the whole wine industry wasn't.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Wasn't really.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Really known. I mean, you just come off of the.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: The wine industry was not known for good wine. That doesn't necessarily mean that we weren't known for good grapes, because this is a great region to grow grapes.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: It's a pretty solid region. The only thing that. The only thing that West Texas misses from being at the best wine region in the world is the Pacific Ocean about 70 miles west of here.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: If we had, if we had the Pacific Ocean 70 miles west of here, we would be Napa.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: If we could just get, you know, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, get on board with this go away business. But I mean, when you have a more a coastal climate like that. Yes, it mitigates the, it mitigates the lows especially.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: The highs, the highs still get there kind of warm and stuff, but I think the record low in Napa is somewhere around 26 or something like that. It's been a long time since I've seen that number. So again, don't hold me to it. I'm kind of halfway pulling things out of behind parts here. But when you have what we have here, you have a continental climate, so you risk, you have late fall freezes, early spring freezes, you have hail. You know, we've mitigated a lot of that with the introduction, you know, technology.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, your other brother.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Yes, our older brother, Andy.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: And we will say yes. Andy is kind of like, what, what would you call him now in the, in the second iteration of the industry? I'm thinking he's kind of like the grandfather pretty much.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: I mean, you know, it's kind of. I kind of feel we're talking about my, my brother this, this way. But most all of the, of the massive cultural innovations in vineyards, be it helmet, be it the extensive use of wind machines and stuff, and that kind of stuff has come from him.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: He was the first one to do it.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: So we were gonna brag. He is. But it's not. Not true. It's true.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very, it's. Yeah, it's. It's ain't bragging if you can do it.
[00:06:39] Speaker A: That's right. That's right.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yes. But he's gone in and he sat down and looked at and said, okay, what are the, the challenges we face? Well, it's an inconsistent crop because of freeze and hail.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:49] Speaker B: And so what the first thing that he did was, well, he started looking at what do they do elsewhere.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, that to me is the key to Andy's like, success so many times is humility. Like, you know, if you don't know, you shut up and listen. This one thing he told me one time, and I think that is the key to why he's, you know, he's gone, he's made friends, he's list sat down and he's listened and then he's brought back. And, you know, this reminds me, this is not the first time I have quoted this on this podcast. But there is a great quote by a man named Robert Mason and he's talking about agricultural that grew up here on the South Plains and how we kept one eye on our neighbors crops and techniques and adopted those which would best serve us. And like, I think a lot about.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: That when I think about Andy, so very untimely, straight.
He goes against genetics a lot, so.
But he does a really good job. He did a really good job of looking at what was available and then also having the financial resources to go out there and do it. Because it's not cheap.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: I mean, it's not.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Right. The good thing about it is he got in kind of on the ground floor. The wind machines that he bought were, you know, 30, 35,000, something like that to get them put in. And now they're running 70.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: So. Yeah. So let's go back just a little bit too, because this second iteration of this industry was really brought about because people were thinking we are running out of water.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Exactly.
That's one. The primary driver. That's a big driver.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: For the growers.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: You know, the number one driver is always money.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: The bottom line is always the. But what matters? I mean, it doesn't matter if you. If you're running out, if you don't, if you're starving.
But you know Doc McPherson, Kim McPherson's dad.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Who is a chemistry professor at tech. He is one of the founders of Yano. Got the. He really got the first iteration going.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: And so when we came in to the late 90s, there was only a handful full of growers that made it through it. You know, the Youngs in Brownfield and made it through it. Neil Newsome out in Plains and made it through it. And I think that may be all.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Those are the pioneers, those folks. And you know, that's. That's the folks that we. We look to and you know, just on a, like, not that we're not already on a personal note here, but our family is like anti alcohol for many years. And Terry county, ironically was still in prohibition. It was status.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And even today it's only damp. I mean.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's not even fully wet.
So it's ironic that that's where, you know, the majority of our grapes are grown are in that county that we grew up in. And grew up like that was your like really number one go to hell card was alcohol.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: Yes, yes. That and dancing.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Dancing and alcohol.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: We're dating ourselves.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: We are.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah, we are.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Move on past the personal stuff, we are going to say that those two families, the Newsoms and the Youngs.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Were instrumental in, you know, they. They were the ones that knew what to do here.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, the interesting thing, I had a discussion with Bobby Young, who is the Young that started the vineyard.
And he primarily was two types of grapes. He had Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, and he had Muscat Cannelli grapes.
Muscat canali grapes. 25 years ago was the number one grape in for Texas.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: That was the first. That was my first thing that I ever drink.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: It makes a sweet wine.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Wine.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: It makes a sweet wine. And, you know, in the land of Dr. Pepper, sweet wine's king.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: That's just the way it was.
But I asked Bobby, you know, I said, how did you make it through? Because they went. They went three years where they produced grapes, harvested grapes, and didn't get paid for grapes.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Oh, that is bad. And it does sound familiar.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: And honestly, when you're in agriculture, how.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: Do you hang on?
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Crap rolls downhill, right. And the farmer's always at the bottom of the hill. There you go. And unfortunately, that crap is not good for fertilizer.
And so you get. You get in the situation where, you know, I asked him, I said, how did you make it? What did you do? And he said, dusty. He said, quite frankly, we were just too poor to quit. He said we had. My gosh.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: That is like. That is. Should be a. On a T shirt. The life of a farmer. You're too poor to quit. I would quit, but my banker won't let me.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Exactly. I mean, you turned around. They then had an unbroken series where they've managed to do pretty well.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: This has been a rough year.
This year, that. That particular vineyard had a late spring freeze on it. That. That hurt the Muscat Canali. And it also hurt. You know, the bad thing about grapes is. Let me put it this way. The good thing about grapes is that by the time May 1st rolls around, you know, if you got a crop, the bad thing is you don't know if you've lost the crop on a freeze. And so you can break it bud, and you can break bud, and everything looks great and it's growing well, and you're this fantastic. But what happened was the cold killed your primary bud, so your secondary bud doesn't have any fruit on it. And so you go in, and instead of making what they'll typically make on their Muscat's about six tons an acre, it'll make it. It'll make about a ton.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And you don't know that.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: And you don't know. You don't know it, you don't know it until you spend a lot, a.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Lot of money you've already gambling.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah. By the time you spent, by the time you get to what's called Verasian, where the grapes start softening and the red grapes start turning red and they're no longer hard, you know, acid.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: You know, but by the time you get to there, you've probably spent about 75% of your money. And grapes are just like any other high value crop. Every, every high value crop is also a high input.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Right, right. High risk, high reward.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: When I used to work for Texas AgriLife Extension and I was the high plains and West Texas viticulture advisor, so my territory ran from the Panhandle to just east of Abilene, down to Del Rio and out Del Paso.
[00:12:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: I covered basically a third of the.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: State, like Sonora, some of my favorite grape growers.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: And the rest of it was, you know, the rest of it of the state was divided by four people, but that was me. And it was, you know, and all. Most of the production was up here because of another disease. We'll talk about a little bit.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Um, and so in that area, I used to, when I would have, have new grower meetings, I would tell them it's the most, it's. The grapes are the most profitable crop you can grow legally.
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: And it really was at the time. It's true. It really was.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah. A lot of people started growing, so.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: A lot of people started growing.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: And. But here's the thing that I think that's interesting about, to think about this is that the grapes, the grape growers that are here, most of them were cotton farmers.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Almost every one of them.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: I mean, there's a few exceptions.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: But that is the thing that I, you know, if this is not an industry that's made up of hobbyists. No, it is like it's not made up of a lot of, you know, wealthy investors. It is like our neighbors and our family.
It's the cotton. Cotton growers. A lot of them are still cotton growers.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, almost. With very few exceptions, they're all cotton growers. I mean, if you. Generally speaking, people that do it on a small, that are not farmers, that are not cotton farmers. Those vineyards are small. They're two to ten acres max.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: Right, right. And our vineyards are like. What's the largest vineyard? Lehes.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: Lehes.
About a Thousand acres, right? Yeah, they're the largest. Right behind them is either going to be the Binghams.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Or the ready vineyard. One of those two. And then either one of those two or the one out in Dale City. And I don't remember the name, not for. Not remember the name of it, but there's one out in Del City. But the top, I don't know, probably 10 largest vineyards in the state are all within easy driving distance of Lubbock.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. But not the wineries.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: No.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Which is another story. Do we talk about that yet?
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Well, this is, I mean, you know, this is a region where, you know, this kind of where tourists come from is what I'm used.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: This is where tourists come from, not where they go to. Yes.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Okay. But I mean, and a lot of vineyards aren't, you know, vineyard. Like I've given a couple of vineyard tours, had people just randomly show up that were wine club members of one of the wineries that we showed and they, you know, they had a bottle of wine that was vineyard designated. And we actually show. Ours actually shows up on Google Maps.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: Yes, it does.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: So. And so you can, you know, Google it and find it and when it shows up and you're just. I was out there working in the morning, this Cadillac pulls up and I'm like, one how in the. I mean, we're a mile off the pavement. We're a mile off the pavement at this thing. And it is not a well maintained road.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: No, it is not.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: It is a poorly, poorly maintained road. And I mean, it beats me to death driving up and down in the Gator, much less. Anyway, but they come out and then this, this lady and her daughter got out and they were coming from.
Moving her back from LA to no way Austin.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: She had been at school at. Either at UCLA or USC or something like that, and she'd finished and she was moving back to. Until she. Her job started in the mall or whatever and they stopped. She said, we're in wine club. And so, you know, I gave her the 10 cent. To her, I'm like, well, that's. She's like, my favorite wine is this. And I said, but come here real quick. And we walked, you know, right out there. And I said, that's them. I said, here's what you're gonna have.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: You know, got short well and truly. I mean, this is like one of the. There's, there's a few, you know, the specialty crops are the crops that you can really think of as farm to table. They really are. I mean, and part of the reason why we are such a large grapes is such a large industry is because it all stays within the state.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: And where cotton. It all leaves it. In fact, it leaves unfortunately, leaves the country. Yeah.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: With. I think there's only. What is only one cotton mill left in the. In the US and that's Origin up in Maine.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: I think there's one in. I think there's one in North Carolina still is there around the Raleigh area.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: I think.
[00:16:30] Speaker B: Well, I know origin in Maine. Jocko Willnicks. And they make, you know, but they make. They specialize in making jeans and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu geese. So. But I mean, they took it, brought it back from. From the dead. But yeah, especially crops are. Are that way, particularly because you're looking at a smaller market in a smaller sales base that you can sell it to. You know, and this. This area is.
It's really known for trying new stuff. I mean, we've done a lot of different, you know, Tarry County, Gaines County, Yokum County, Hockley and Louisiana. When you're hungry, you do.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: You do a lot.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And you see, you know, you see that in, you know, the people that are trying Saffron.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: Yes.
We're those kind of people that we love interviewing here on the podcast, you know, and we've had some. We've had a roundtable where we've taken Lacey Verman and Jeremy Brown and Kyle and like, talked to them about, you know, here's three different. You know, they're growing the same crop, three different methods, and they're trying all these different things, you know, and that's a. That's something I want people to know about. Our culture is, you know, we are just. We're gritty, you know, and you had to be if you lived here because. Right. It was not an inhabitable place. I mean, sometimes I wonder.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: It really wasn't. I mean, you know, it's. It's funny. There's a couple of two little short stories I'll go into real quick.
One of them is I remember talking to. Oh, good Brief, our state representative back years ago. We were out at Newsom's Grape Day, which is happened. Occurs in April every year out there. Nagelbauer. Randy.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Oh, Randy Nagelbauer.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: But we were talking about at that time, you know, water was just becoming an issue. You know, it. It was just becoming an issue that everyone.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Every farmer knew about becoming aware of.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: You know, I mean, you know, people.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: Were being impacted by it.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Right. You know, Circle Systems had gone from 800 gallons a minute to 400 gallons a minute.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Right?
[00:18:28] Speaker B: And everybody's like, hey, what's going on here? Why is, you know, wells were being, you know, that people were poking more holes, but, you know, putting more straws in the cup and sucking it out of it faster. But anyway, he was. We were talking about.
About CRP program, and he's like, we need to get more. Get more land out of the crp. We need to get more back in production. I was like, no, like, this country was grassland for a reason. You know, I mean, it's my firm opinion that, you know, if done right, you know, with some of the new cattle stuff and things like that, I mean, the problem we run into is we only get 16 or so inches of rain a year. And a lot of the people that really ring the bell on regenerative agriculture and it's a big thing, you know, they get a little bit more than that, like three times as much. You know, it's a lot.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: We gotta get. We got to get creative on those things. So.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: But, you know, but there's. There's always room to. You know, we've got growers right now. I mean, the grapes are what they do. They also do peanuts. They also do cotton. They also raise pumpkins.
They've got black eyed peas this year. They've. They're raising Pima cotton, which is something that we could not do back in the 90s. You and I were hanging around the house. We couldn't grow Pima cotton.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: And then in addition to grapes and they also have sheep. Yes, you got thousands of sheep, you know, and, you know, they were really good for a while, and then all of a sudden, you can't give them away. Just like everything, It's. Yeah, you know, that's the thing about it. You know, you go to the grocery store and you buy a rack of lamb. It you like. It's like, I got to give a kidney, you know, I mean, I love me a good rack of lamb and. But I mean, it's.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: It's so expensive.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: Ridiculous. I'm like, good night. I can either have this little, you know, eight French rack of late, that, you know, eight bone French rack of lambs, or I can buy these two nice rib eyes.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: You know, and so it's kind of a weird deal how it works because, you know, the grower side of it, they're not getting anything.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: You know, you talk everything. That's a whole nother podcast.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: But anyway, and so I was talking to him about that and that Was one of my. The number one thing was, hey, we need fewer acres in cotton, especially in peanuts. Peanuts and cotton, like. Right. You know, they've gone a long ways. You know, I'm not the biggest proponent of GMOs and seed and seed companies and stuff like that, but the work they have done on making cotton more water top water use.
[00:20:42] Speaker A: Oh yeah. I think more efficiently is unbelievable. Right, Right. I definitely think we know some. One of the things that we talk about here is like the benefits of GMOs. There's. There's unintended consequences and we need to talk about those.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: But they. I think the consequences aren't necessarily people are saying they are, you know.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: So we looked at the different types of crops you can do. I mean, you. The growers in particularly in Terry County. Terry county is. Has kind of been the bell cow. Because we never had the water that Gaines county had. Gaines county had oceans of water. I don't know what happened 100 million years ago down there, but they had absolutely oceans of water down there. And then you go up to around Plainview and it was the same thing. You had a lot of water. Olton area had a lot of water. In those sand hills, there's a lot of water. Downshoe. And it started going down, you know. But Terry county was never blessed with an overabundance of much of anything.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:33] Speaker B: You know, 30 square miles of kind of the same.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:38] Speaker B: But come to find out it works out pretty good on when you're. When you're growing grapes because we're, you know, it's 33, 3400ft in elevation, which makes it really high. A pretty high area.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: It's not the highest. Argentina, I think has got some of the higher ones, but it's way higher than Napa Value. That's like, you know, Napa Valley is the high elevation grapes there are a couple hundred feet.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: You know, stepping up on the side of the hill, you go into it and you're like, okay, so that helps with the diurnal cooling. So what makes good. What good wine is a swing in temperature, you know, so we're. We have a lot of things going for us. When it goes grapes, we don't. We got a dry climate. Which means two things. One, fungal pathogens are not really much of a problem here. Most years you can get away with one or no fungicide applications. If you have a winery that you're dealing with that's really particular, you'll go on to it. And like we've Done. We've done two apple, three applications this year. We really haven't needed.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Because they don't want that in there. So. Yeah, so we do have a lot of people that listen, that don't understand it's fungal pathogens, so.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: And it's something you don't want. Yeah, it's. It's mold.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Well, it's kind of thing.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: It's rot. I mean, it's basically. You can walk down, you can walk through the vineyard. When you get a field that's got it bad, you can walk down the roads and you can smell vinegar, basically.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's hitting.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: It's fermenting kind of old moldy kind of. Yeah.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: And it's, it's fermenting it out in a good way. Basically. Winemaking is just controlling rot anyway. That's. Yeah, that I had, I had a really good winemaker tell me that 15 years ago. He said it's basically, it's a construct. The winemaker's job is to control rot. And that's basically what you're doing. But so, because our normal, you know, like on a normal June, July or August day, our relative humidity is like single digits, you know, like maybe it's 12.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: You know, this has been a particularly wet year. I remember being out working, thinking, my Lord, it's humid out here. And looking at my phone at the mesonet app, I'm like, oh, it's 18%.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Right, right. But at the same time, though, a couple years ago I was looking at it and our dew point was like minus four.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: You know, and so, but, but by dry, I mean, that helps us though. That does help, but it hurts like on, on row crop stuff like black, large production row crop, whether it be grain, sorghum or peanuts or you know, cotton or watermelon, pumpkins, anything like that. When it's dry like that, you've really got to pour the colors to it. And, but with, with grapes, you're growing a tree. You're basically growing a tree. You're drawn. You're not growing an annual, growing a perennial. And so that gives you a little bit more leeway in your, in your watering.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Right. And you know, and you're not watering as many acres.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Correct. We run a drip tape that's, that's attached to the, to our trellis, our. The post.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: And so we've got ten foot row space. And so we have a drip line every 10ft. And we run typically. I will give them, you know, I'll run it for two days. That gives it 1.2 inches over the whole thing. But it's just more in that one confined area.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: And so that makes the water go a little bit further.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: You know, it takes, generally speaking, to run our emitters. We. You're looking at 10.1 gallons per acre per minute is what it takes to function properly versus.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: Versus. Let's talk about pivot.
[00:24:54] Speaker B: Well, if you put a pivot on it, if you don't have 400 gallons a minute, you're kind of spitting in the wind.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: You're really not doing a whole lot of good. I mean, you don't that anything below 400 gallons a minute is. Is not even good air conditioning for the plants. I mean, it doesn't even do that. And a lot of stuff that we've got is that way. I mean, you know, I remember in the late 90s, one of the places that Andy's father in law farmed, they used to call it the nine wells farm. And they finally took the pivot down because they had nine wells and a quarter and couldn't get enough water.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Right. Well, so y'all. Doug's got some family land that's got 21 wells on a section less than 200 gallons a minute.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
And so with that, you look at something that. So then you start looking around, okay, what can I grow on a small scale?
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: That makes a high return.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:38] Speaker B: You know.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: And, you know, even though the cost of production, the cost of getting into the game of grapes used to be when I was with extension in. In the early 2000s, I guess it was. It was like 9 or 10 or something like that. I don't even know. I slept. I slept since I worked there. So it was a great experience. But at the same time, I was able to look at it and say, okay, at that point in time, it cost about $15,000 an acre.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: From the time you planted your grapes until the time you got your first crop, you were going to spend 15,000.
And now the steel that you have to put in to the vineyard is over 9,000.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Some people are using recycled stuff from the oil industry.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: I mean, a lot of the stuff we went in, we took out. We got t posts from California that they'd pulled out vineyards in Central Valley and gone with. I think that that time they were switching to pistachios maybe or almonds, one of those two. And they were taking out vineyards. And so they had. There was a lot of that you get. So we got to send My load of them out and put them in that way. But I mean, it's even at that, it's still. I mean, it's just mind numbing when you think, you know, the way we used to put them in. You had a T post every eight feet.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: And that T post now cost $6.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Or 650, I think, is what I saw the other day. And so you got.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: So think about the investment that people have in that. Yeah. In an average growing season, what are you going to spend to care for them?
[00:27:02] Speaker B: And we'll spend between 6 and probably 7570. $500 an acre.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: An acre.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: And the huge chunk of that is hand labor. We have a. We have a lady that started with us in 08, I think.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Like shortly after we started, we started. I think the first grapes we planted went in 06 and 08. She started working just as a day laborer and worked hard. And after about four or five years, we were like, hey, you know, you gotta start a contract labor crew. And so she went and got a contract. She's got a licensed labor contractor and has all the. Does all the bells and whistles. But we use her for the vast majority of it. And, you know, that's a big check you cut to her. I mean.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:47] Speaker B: She's probably the, you know, I mean, of course she pays because she pays all your people. Well, at times we'll have. We. At the most people I had working for me this year was we had, I think, 47 people for about three weeks.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: And that gets expensive.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: 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 Texas Ply 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 SARAH website. Let's keep Texas water flowing strong for the future. Visit sarah-conservation.com well, and you Think about, I don't know how many a 5,000 acres of grapes. I mean, that's a. That is a lot of.
That's a lot of jobs that this industry is still.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: You know, providing people.
It is something that.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: And everybody manages vineyards a little bit differently.
I know a lot of people don't have. Will not have the same cost of production as us, because as the vineyard ages, you're. You have to have better level of knowledge when you're. When people are working in it. And so that drives cost up a little bit more. It slows things down.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: You need units, skilled labor.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Yeah. When you. Basically, when you're putting them in, a trained monkey can do it. I mean, you know, and. But when you. But once you get 7, 8, 9 years old, you start seeing the effects of the weather, you lose spur positions. Well, you have to retrain a spur. You get hail damage on it. Well, you have to retrain a. You know, have to recognize, hey, there's hail damage on this cordon. We got to cut the cordon out and retrain a new one. And so it makes it. It makes it challenging, you know, and that's. The cost of production has gone up. But conversely, you know, just like everything else in agriculture, the cost that we're getting, the. The money that we're getting for our grapes has not gone up the same. It has gone up some.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: Mostly because we're holding the line and saying, hey, you've got to pay more for this.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: But we had this. The first year we actually had a winery that is a new one to us that we had sold, that we had sold through someone that sold to. Through one of our existing clients.
[00:30:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Over the last couple of three years.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Well, this year they went. Went. They had a good relationship, but they're having to pay. Yeah, they. Well, they went. They went from that. The client that we were selling to was making wine and then selling them wine.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Oh. Oh.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: So they got there. They got their own facility built. They knew it was coming. It was not. But not acrimonious or anything like that and work back around to it, where they came in and bought grapes, but they wanted to hand harvest a lot of fruit.
And they brought a company in that is actually, I believe it's a public, publicly traded company now out of California that has a branch in the Hill Country.
[00:31:34] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Because a lot of the vineyards in the Hill country are small, and they are owned by people that are retired. Doctors, lawyers, you know, people that have had a good career.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:41] Speaker B: And they've got their little.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Their hobby little.
[00:31:44] Speaker B: They got their ranch and air quotes out there, and they put in a vineyard out there and it's, you know, acre three. There's a couple of bigger. Getting to be a couple of bigger ones down there now. But I think 40 acres is still a substantial vineyard, you know, and they were.
[00:31:56] Speaker A: They were down there before, but they had disease.
[00:31:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:59] Speaker A: In the soil. Pearson's disease. That's why really stuff moved up here.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And that, I mean, it's. Pierce disease is, you know, they got it in like Temecula, Southern California, where it's warm.
The glassy and blue wing sharpshooters. Glassy winged sharpshooter and blue wing sharpshooters are a vector for it. Carry it out through it. I mean, you still can't grow. Great grow vinifera grapes, which is the wine grapes.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: You can't grow vinifera grapes from the Houston area because they'll all get pierced disease and die. They're doing it. They've done a lot of work on it. But Pierce disease is one of those things that comes and goes in waves. If you track the government funding for Pierce disease research, it comes in like 10 year, 10 or 15 year cycles where it'll be like the most funded project in the history of ever, and then it'll get like a dollar fifty. I mean, it's just. It's just because it. Because it comes in waves. Right. It hits the vineyards, it obliterates a vineyard in a. In a remarkably short period of time. It can literally take a productive vineyard to nothing in about two years.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: And we don't have it here because it's cold. It's cold and it kills all that.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: We don't. There's. You know, the number one reason is we have what's called winter cold therapy. Basically the same reason they don't have it in Washington State, because it gets cold enough that what happens is they the. It's just like getting like, say, West Nile virus. You get it. They get it from, like, from. You get it from a mosquito.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: Mosquito.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Well, the glassy wing sharpshooter and the blue wing sharpshooter, you know, inject it. They've got this bacteria in there. It's xylophastidiosis, I think, is what it's called. That seems like I'm trying to say something from Harry Potter, but I think that's right.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: But Xyle gets in there and it clogs up the vascular system of the. And it basically chokes it down.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:33:33] Speaker B: It's just like, just like when your plumbing gets clogged. It's the same, same, same thing. And so you start seeing typical signs of drought stress on something that's got plenty of water.
But where we get infected by it, then it gets cold enough that it actually kills that bacteria inside the trunk. And so it'll.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: So that, that's the cold therapy on it.
[00:33:57] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: And then they have used, interestingly enough, not to go too far off in the weeds. They've actually been able to grow better in areas that are more susceptible to it because of the use of neonicotinoids.
And so they, they inject imidacloprid through their irrigation water.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: And it takes it up into the plant, transplants it through it. The piercing sucking insect. It cuts down on the amount of feeding those piercing sucking insects do.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: Interesting, interesting.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: It doesn't. I mean, it'll kill them if they feed on it. But the actual incidence of feeding actually goes down on plants that have been treated.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: And so you're still going to have, you know, like, I'm just going to pull some numbers out for good reason.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Okay, so you have 10% of your bites are infect get infected. Okay, well, you're still going to have 10% of your bites get infected, but it's less attractive. So instead of having a thousand bites with 100 infection sites, you've got 100 with 10 infection sites.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: And so it slows the progression of it down quite a bit. And there's been some indication that there's some other products that help, you know, with that as well.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: But that's biological products. Is that word, what is that word? Is that the name of a chemical? What the, what, what is this product that you're putting on?
[00:35:11] Speaker B: The neonicotinoid?
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that is.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: Okay. It's, it's basically synthetic nicotine.
[00:35:17] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. So that's, that's what I was.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: But it has some severe downsides on it. There's some indications that it may contribute to the decline in the honeybees.
And because of that, it's, I'm very, you know, I'm not a huge fan of using the. I mean, I use it because, dear Lord, it's easy. I mean, you inject it. I inject it. I can inject it in May and I don't have to worry about anything feeding any piercing sucking insect, leaf hoppers, flea hoppers, anything like that feeding on any of my, my grapes the rest of the year. But, you know, we also try to. I also try to do it as quickly as I can. And we don't have a cover crop in our vineyards here, so we don't have.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: So you're not attracting bees anyway. Right, Right.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And so most of my. You like. I, I like to push my. I like to make sure that the non grape areas of my vineyard, of the land that our vineyard sits on is a very good habitat. I love looking at wildflowers. I love years like this where we had multiple rains come in. And the hillside, which we actually have kind of a hillside on it.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Yes, it is.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: It turns, you know, it turned red with, with Indian blankets. It turned, you know, yellow with prairie sunflowers. You just all, you know, just go through and all these. The different colors that. It comes just in waves.
[00:36:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: And it's, it's fantastic. I mean, I love to have that. You know, I'm a big quail. Quail guy, so I do things to help that.
But since we don't have a cover crop, we don't have to be in the vineyard.
[00:36:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: We don't have. It's not taken up by wildflowers and then moved in, potentially moved into pollen.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: Right. So you're really like, come over here, bees.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: But don't come over here.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Well, because there's nothing. There's not actually in the, Anything in the grapes to attract them.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: No. Right.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Because grapes are.
[00:36:58] Speaker A: But you don't have anything in between your rows.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:00] Speaker A: That is going to track them either. And so. Yeah, you're kind of like you're giving them a detour.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: Stop over at McDonald's. Yeah. Because the Sonic is closed.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Well, but McDonald's is bad for them too. But.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: No, that's. McDonald's would be bad for them. But.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: No, but, but I mean, you've got it, you know, so we got, you know, with a closed pollination system, you don't have to have bees and grapes by the time, by the time the, you know, there's no actual flower. I mean, there is a flat technical.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: Flower, but they're not going to come over there. But they're not going to come over there.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So let.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: We'll move on.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: Although they did. Although yellow jackets do like them. They like to make nests in you.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:35] Speaker B: So.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Well, that's a whole different.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: You get to have fun when you sample grapes because you stick your hand in blindly and oh, that's a yellow jacket I just pulled out.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: And that.
[00:37:42] Speaker B: That hurts. Yeah. Yeah, that. But so you.
But that. That chemical though, has allowed grapes to succeed in a bigger.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: In a bigger area.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: And there also is some work that they've done at I think it's UC Davis and some other places in California with converting the. With crossing Cabernet, like vinifera grapes.
[00:38:05] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: With varieties of grapes that are resistant to Pierce's disease, which most of grapes, most of the native grapes are resistant to Pierce's disease. You know, you're not going to see Mustang grapes that are going. That are going to die from Pierce disease. You're not going to see whatever random grapes growing in. In the draws and gullies around El Paso die from Pierce disease.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: And so they've crossed that. And but when you. The problem is you wind up with. No matter how many times you back cross that because you grapes are weird when you cross them, but no matter how much time you back cross that, you're still not. You wind up with a Cabernet top grape that is resistant to Pierce's disease, but you don't wind up with Cabernet that is resistant to Pierce's disease.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:38:46] Speaker B: And with the way that the wine industry is, that's a big distinction.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: You know, it's not like a tortilla, but I mean, it's, it's the same. You know, you get. There's a lot more ego in, in the wine industry that you have to circumvent that, work through that. But I mean, there's. There's some tracks and some things that are doing that I don't know how well that funded that is now because Pearson disease has kind of been off the radar for about the last six or seven years.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:12] Speaker B: But I hear that it's coming back. You know, people that are in the know say, hey, it's going to be a problem again, but we don't have that up here. And it's gone. It's gone well. So that's allowed our industry to succeed in this bay in its infancy. Very, very well.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: Right. And that makes the wineries dependent on our area.
And then let's talk about there's 500. The last I heard, there were 540 wineries. Most of them are in the Austin area.
And that's a lot of places for people to go to in one area. So.
And now people are not drinking as much wine.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's interesting.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: I mean, and those wineries have invested a lot of money in there.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: Their locations, etc. Etc. They are not vertically integrated. Some of them are, some of them aren't, but most of them aren't yeah. And so they have to cut cost.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:40:12] Speaker A: And where's the easiest way to cut costs?
[00:40:15] Speaker B: The easiest way to cut cost is you don't buy Texas fruit. You buy finished, finished California wine for $3 a gallon.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: And you call it.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: You just. You just call it whatever. As long as you don't try to label it as Texas. You. It doesn't matter where it comes from. When you put Texas on it, I think it has to be 75%.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: I think it is up to 75 now.
[00:40:35] Speaker B: 75% now. I know, like Washington. And I think Washington is either 95 or 100%. I think New York has got to be 100%.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah. We've had a hard time, I think, working that. I think the growth that's kind of been an industry battle, you know, because the farmers, like.
Wait a minute.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, and. But I mean, it is.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: You're. You're. It's kind of like tricking people.
[00:40:57] Speaker B: It is. It's. You know, you're not. Nobody's explicitly lying.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: Let me rephrase that. I'm sure people being people and the number of people in the industry. Somebody's explicit. Somebody somewhere is explicitly lying. Okay, but that's not that. But that's the outlier, right?
The. What it, what it boils down to is you're like, you've got a couple of people and I mean, you've got some smaller wineries. You know, there's one we're picking fruit for tonight that he's very small. He'll never be big. He's a French guy, and he makes really good French style wines in Texas.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:33] Speaker B: And most people make. Most people make California style wines, and he makes very French style wines, and they're very different.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:40] Speaker B: But he does a very, very good job with it. But he is very much. This is how I want to do things, and we're gonna do this, but he's only gonna make, you know, a couple hundred cases a year. Five hundred. A thousand cases a year. Yeah, something like that. But I just talked to a really good friend of mine who has a winery that started in May of 2013, and he told me. This has been a month ago, I guess.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:42:03] Speaker B: He told me. I just. He said, I just had the worst July I've ever had, he said. Ever. He said July of 2013 was a better month than July of 2024. And you've got a lot of. I mean, you know, the land down there, you know, right on 290. 290 is the Silverado Trail.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: It is.
[00:42:20] Speaker B: I mean, It's. It's Highway 26. It's Silverado Trail. It's all those rolled into one.
[00:42:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: And it runs all the way from Fredericksburg. Actually, I think the first one, there's a winery or two west of Fredericksburg on 290 all the way out to Johnson City. You know, it's just solid. It's just. I mean. Yeah. And it's gone. I mean, it's gone crazy. You know, I. I hadn't been there. I went there maybe last year, and I hadn't been there for, like, three or four years because I just, you know, with kids and that kind of stuff, I just, you know, didn't reason.
And I had, prior to that, had been down there very frequently, as frequently as once a week doing consulting down there. And I went back, and I didn't recognize it. I mean, I'm shocking.
[00:43:00] Speaker A: It is.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: I was, like, going down 290, thinking, oh, I know where this guy. Like, what the heck? But that land down there has gone. You know, it started off expensive. It was 10,000 bucks an acre.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: And now you can't even buy stuff off of 290 at that. Right. I talked to somebody the other day that a new one had gone in, I think, last year, and I believe that the rumor had it they were paying like 50,000.
[00:43:22] Speaker A: Well, and that's. That's the issue. So they've invested a lot of money.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: That's a lot of money.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: A lot of money. And. And so have.
On the high plains. Do you have, you know.
[00:43:32] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: A lot of labor. And, you know, it is not a hobby for us. It is our. It's our living.
And when you have a contract to sell your grapes and somebody backs out, it's tough. And it has been tough for everybody.
[00:43:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's. It's. There's. There's no sacred cows on the. On our. On the list. There's no vineyards that are sacred. Every vineyard I know of has at least some portion of it that they didn't sell, that they didn't sell. I mean, we're very, very stupidly fortunate. And we've also got some other reasons why that we were able to sell the vast majority of ours, but even us. Even we have got stuff. We got 156 acres, and we're not going to sell all 156 acres.
[00:44:18] Speaker A: Well, and I know. I mean, I've talked to friends, other friends who are like, you know, they would say, like, this, X amount of, you know, yeah, tons were Walk, you know. Yeah, the winery walked on them. You know, we don't need them this year. How.
[00:44:31] Speaker B: I mean, what, I mean, I know people that walk. I know of a winery that walked on 80 tons in August. In August.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: And you've spent, I mean, and people have already spent.
[00:44:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: Like a lot of money per acre on that. So you haven't just, you haven't just like at the beginning of the year said, oh, I'm not going to put any money in this because first of all, even if you get freeze, you don't know for sure if you are going to be damaged or not. So you spend the money anyway.
[00:44:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: And it is not like an annual crop.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:44:58] Speaker A: To where you can just say, oh, I just won't do anything to them this year. Yeah, no, you have to have to be maintained. They have to be cared for.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: There's a baseline of labor that you have to put into it and you can do a couple of things mechanically to cheat that and make it. Make that number pretty low. But even doing it pretty low, I'm gonna, I would spend like if I. Let's, let's say I went in and let's just pick up, we've got a bunch of them. So let's say that our senso that we have, we've got 10 acre block of Cinso, let's say half of it they didn't want anymore. Well, I could go in there and I could mechanically do things, do it and then send a caruther to just get what I missed. And so I'm leaving mechanically barrel printed.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:45:38] Speaker B: Instead of cutting it back to two buds where it's, you know, relatively short. Two to four inches.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: I'm leaving seven, eight inches.
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:45] Speaker B: Okay. So I'm leaving like four to six buds.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: Which is not good because the top couple of buds will probably break and then you wind up with your spurs being really long and yeah, that causes problems in and of itself.
But even if I did that and send a crew through to clean out what I missed so that everything was the right, was relatively the right height. And then I went out and I put a pre emergent herbicide under my vines to keep my weeds out, I would spray it a couple of times with a contact herbicide to keep. To make sure I burn the suckers off of it so that they're, they're not chewing up growth and so that I can at least get the growth where I need it to be by the time it's all said and done, I've spent more than most growers will spend on a cotton crop. Per acre. On a per acre basis. But I'm only doing it on five acres instead of doing it.
[00:46:30] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: 120 acres in the pivot.
[00:46:32] Speaker A: Right.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: And so I mean. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what's, But I mean, it's in agriculture right now. There are no sacred cows that are not being slaughtered.
[00:46:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's very true.
[00:46:43] Speaker B: Every one of them are dying. It's, you know, it's from the cattle industry to the sheep industry to the dairy industry and it's, you know, cotton is 70 cents. Now. I remember in 92 when it hit, when it hit like 65 cents. And I thought, this is fantastic. 65 cents. Well, you know, it was a $13 last year, you know, and that's half this. Well, it's not quite half, but guess.
[00:47:09] Speaker A: What else but has not come down the process. The prices of everything else.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:47:13] Speaker B: And I mean, it's, it's, you know, it, the, the models of, of agriculture in general is just not.
[00:47:20] Speaker A: This is another topic we will discuss another day.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: But it's, you know, it's been when you look at the, at what grapes have got when, you know, when you go in and like, okay, we got a. Cut this out.
You can do that for about two years and then you've got to go in and you've got to fix everything you screwed up.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: Because you're, that's what you're doing. You're actually going back in and you're screwing up the grapes.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:43] Speaker B: And you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's calculated risk that you take on it. But I mean, at this point, that's where you're, where you're standing at. You're just looking at trying to do the best you can with what you got.
[00:47:54] Speaker A: Okay. So the, I've heard someone say, oh, this is just a market correction. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:48:00] Speaker B: No, it's not as much of market correction.
[00:48:04] Speaker A: Like, we have too many grapes.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: Well, we do, but only the only reason we have too many grapes because nobody's buying wine.
[00:48:09] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: I mean, if people were buying wine like they did in 2022.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: This would be a moot point.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: We would still be rocking on and rolling.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: So what are the theories I've, I've heard, you know, I know marijuana usage has increased while wine, you know, consumption has gone down.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: It's not just wine. All alcohol.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: All alcohol. Yes. I should clarify. All alcohol has.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: And is It. Do you think part of it is just what is it what people are broke, you think? It's just people don't buy, you know, because. So I threw that out to a group of people at event I was at last week, and all of them were like, oh, no, we still buy wine. We're still buying it. You know, and so who. Who is it? Is there. Is there this really important sector of people that have been buying that are now gone? You've got as far as spending money on it.
[00:49:01] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you've got a section of people like the middle class. Okay. You've got the middle class that's. That's sitting there in one piece. And you've got all labor stratosphere that you got the upper middle class, you know, middle middle class and lower middle class.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: Well, you had upper middle class trying to spend like they were rich.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: Right. Okay.
[00:49:21] Speaker B: And then you've got the middle middle class trying to spend like their upper middle class.
[00:49:25] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: You know, everybody's trying to spend up.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: Okay. Right.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: And what you. I think what you're running into is people as a. As a group are not typically the brightest. When you get a bunch of people together, you get a herd mentality. But what you get on an individual basis, people are very intelligent.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: And they're very much aware of what their. Of what they need and what their self worth is. I mean, there's outliers everywhere on this thing. But I think you've got a bunch of people who are.
Who that maybe they were dinks, you know, dual income, no kids, you know, two or three years ago. And maybe they decided to have kids or maybe one of them got laid off or, you know, maybe they're like, hey, you know what? There was a huge rush, like when Covid shut everything down. Nobody could go anywhere.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:10] Speaker B: And everybody got a bunch. You know, there was a big chunk of money went out right in there. And you know, you had people that couldn't go anything. They couldn't go to Italy.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: Well, they couldn't go to Napa Valley, but they could come to.
[00:50:22] Speaker B: They could. The winers in Texas were still wineries, jumped through hoops and basically became restaurants.
[00:50:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: To do it. I mean, there was some. There was some very creative. Creative lobbying and creative bill writing and legend, or not even bill writing because they didn't do anything legislatively. They just did it by fiat.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:43] Speaker B: But there were some really creative people in that that figured out a way to keep the doors open and when nobody could go anywhere, you know, you had a huge population that suddenly was never going to see another.
[00:50:55] Speaker A: I mean, I. I've read that we surpassed Napa Valley injurism that year. We've been neck and neck with them.
[00:51:00] Speaker B: Yeah, we did.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: Yeah, we did.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: But I mean, it's primarily because, I mean, like, California was much stricter on.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. I know, obviously that's the reason why, because they shut things down, you know, But I know that we do have. We have had a lot of tourism. So is it. This. Is. Is this strictly a Texas issue or is this a. This is a international.
[00:51:17] Speaker B: This is a worldwide issue. Wine consumption is down worldwide. Alcohol consumption as a whole is down worldwide.
The company that owns. I think it's.
What's it. Jose Cuervo. I think it's a big holding company. They reported their first sales drop in history.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
[00:51:39] Speaker B: Like this last. This, this last year.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:51:41] Speaker B: They're actually. It was one segment, one section of their. Of the. Of the world. It wasn't like overall they sold less, but they actually had a place that had negative sales year over year sales.
[00:51:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:51:52] Speaker B: And when somebody, I mean, they've got a big portfolio, I think they sell Johnny Walker and stuff like that. And so, I mean, it's a big deal. And it was. I mean, it was big. It was a pretty big headline if you were looking for it. Right. And it was kind of shocking to see that. But, you know, wine consumption is down. Alcohol consumption is down.
You know, you look at. Gen Z does not drink much, right? Yeah, that's what I've heard.
[00:52:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: I heard the funniest thing. Heard a guy say, you know, it's not necessarily a bad thing if they're not drinking because, you know, they think that it's bad, but it may. May be a bad thing if they're drinking because they don't have any friends to go out drinking with.
But. Yeah, but I mean, that's just what I mean. But when you're looking at the industry as a whole, the whole alcohol industry as a whole, it has gone down. And I think you're seeing it. You don't just see it in alcohol. You also see it in, you know, restaurants are going down, sales are going down. You're starting to see some. Some pretty big names that are taking it in the shorts on some of this stuff.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: But I think that this has been fun. I'm glad that people were able to sit in and listen to. And I hope that you found something interesting in this conversation, because there were a lot of things that we talked about, but I hope you learned something about wine. And Lost Draw is the name of Andy's, our brother's winery. And you can find that location there in Fredericks Johnson City.
In Johnson City. Also, they're part of the William, William Chris is part of that group. And some of the, I think best wines in Texas.
[00:53:27] Speaker B: And I agree.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: So enjoy the podcast.
That's it. That's it. Yeah. It's all our fault. Enjoy the podcast. And mass hate with a glass of Texas wine.
[00:53:38] Speaker B: Or bottle.
[00:53:38] Speaker A: Or a bottle. Yes.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: Case would even be better.
[00:53:41] Speaker A: A case. A case. Thanks, friends, for joining us for another episode of Conservation Stories.
This is your host, Hillary Timmons Sims. And I hope you have enjoyed this conversation with my brother, Dusty. We'll see you next time.
