Episode 170: Reviving Degraded Soils Through Biological Farming with Jake Neustadt and Morgan Twain-Peterson

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Region of Agriculture Podcast. We, either fortunately or unfortunately, we are living in the times of the ancient Chinese proverb, may you live in interesting times. These are certainly interesting times, I think, for many of us. They're very challenging times. You know, it's in those interesting and challenging times that you have both the greatest risk, the greatest resistance to change and the greatest opportunities. It's kind of this interesting contrast where you have the greatest opportunities that are emerging in these challenging times and also the greatest risk for many of people who are already well established. And so it's and this is true across the entire agricultural sector. And perhaps in almost no space is this more true than in wine production where we have dramatic decreases in wine consumption and particularly in lower grade wines as I understand it. It's really the top of the premium wines that are the best performing. And so that's where the opportunity is and also where the challenge exists is how do you get there. So I'm delighted to have this conversation today with Morgan and Jake. Thank you both for being here. I'm not going to try to communicate your story. You've got lots of different things going on. Tell us a bit about the scope of your work and what all you're involved with and how you got here. Yeah. So Jake and I are with Bedrock Wine Company, a winery that I founded back in 2007. When I started it was just me working out of a 550 square foot chicken coop, fermentation outside, everything done by hand. And gradually we've grown up a little bit. And you know the overall goal of the winery since day one, though, has been to work with really old vineyards in California. I think what people don't realize is that we have some of the greatest sort of viticultural or agricultural treasures in the world and that we have vines that are in the ground that date to the 1880s. So some of the very first vines that were planted on resistant root stalks to a root laus called Vloxra. And then we even have vines that are own rooted in very sandy soils that date to the 1890s. And within these vineyards we have incredible genetic diversity. So at our home Bedrock Vineyard, for instance, we have over 29 different inter-planted varieties. And among all of the vineyards we oversee in farm, we have over 50, including bridles that have no matching genetic fingerprint and worldwide databases, which means they're extinct where they originally came from in Europe, but they still exist in our vineyards in California. So I feel like in some ways we're kind of curders of a museum on top of hopefully making delicious, soulful wine for people to enjoy. And what we really love about that too is we really make wine that is truly and distinctly California. And when you have vineyards that are kind of based around a real melting pot of varieties like symphindel, which is Croatian and origin, and then varieties from Spain and Portugal and France and Italy and Central Europe, that hodgepodge of varieties only exists in California. So it's sort of a one wine that we make here that we really aren't looking elsewhere for inspiration, which is not something you can say. If you make penon more, the great penon more is originally from Berkendi. If you make Cabernet, the first great Cabernet are from Porto, but when you make these old vine field blended wines that really unique to to California. Morgan, you got the company started. Jake, what has been your journey and story? What got you involved working with these old wine vineyards? So I came out of school from actually University of California Davis. So one of the more well-known wine programs, but I came out just as a very green undergrad working in sellers, making wine, but then found myself wanting to get into the field and actually accepting a job on a field crew for a full season down in the southern island of New Zealand in the Otago region. So I worked shoot thinning, fruit thinning, all the way to harvesting for a full season in New Zealand. And that led me back to California, keeping in viticulture. So I took a job, a one-year job at a winery called Ridge Winery, which was one of the, along with Ravenswood, which is in Morgan's family, one of the original old vine makers of old vine vineyards of these mixed Zinfandel vineyards. Also one of the early wineries that pushed organic practices. So I worked a full year at Ridge and through the connection of Ridge and the historic Vineyard Society, which is another thing to talk about, but both Ridge and Bedrock are in the historic Vineyard Society. And my mentor at Ridge, David Gates, who's their president of viticulture, treated me with Morgan, because essentially at that time, which was 2015, Bedrock was making the same production that it is now, but with half the people with Morgan was overseeing all the vineyards that we had that we were farming. So essentially, I got hoisted onto Morgan as here's someone who can help you with this project. We refer to David Gates at Ridge, oftentimes as kind of the Yoda of the wine industry. So when he calls and says, "Hey, we've got this extremely promising intern who may be the best intern we've ever had at Ridge," you pay attention. And thankfully we did, because Jake has really been instrumental in kind of taking what I kind of hoped for on the broad level and really on the day-to-day, implementing it and looking at it. And there's really been, you know, my right hand, as we've sort of gone through the trials and tribulations of moving these old vineyards, many of which have been very traditionally farmed via a lot of tillage, usually no cover crops, oftentimes dry land farmed, and moving those into, you know, non-till organic systems with holistic grazing practices and all that good stuff, like figuring out how we can run a roller crimper in the vineyard and do all of that stuff. So, you know, we've learned a lot over the last, you know, 10, 11 years as we've, you know, weathered droughts. We've got wet seasons, you know, but every year I feel like we've come out. We've learned an enormous amount, which is also what makes it so fun in many ways. I'll also say it's very rare that I don't walk a vineyard with Jake and I'm going home to look something up because he's already like engaged with the new idea that I haven't even thought about. So that's always really, really special. Morgan, tell us a bit about the, the scope for the scale of, of been of bedrock. What scale are you operating on just to give us some perspective for the different things that you're trying? Yeah, so there's not a lot of old vineyards left in California, so we kind of have to go to where they are. So there's sort of smaller pockets and they're quite spread out. So our sort of home core vineyard is bedrock vineyard right in the middle of Sonoma Valley. We have 152 acres in total there. 33 acres are the 1888 planting. So that's actually one of the largest chunks of old vines left in our, in northern California. But then we farm vineyards up in North Sonoma County, closer to Healdsburg. We have one vineyard in Napa. Then we also farm in Contra Costa County, which is out in Annieock, which is actually just, it's surrounded by warehouses and tract homes, but there's 1890s planted vines in sand right on the Delta there. And then we also have vineyard that we farm in Lodai. So sort of all told were, you know, close to, you know, 300 acres, but spread out across a pretty wide geographic swath. Well, Jake, when you think about, if you have that geographic distribution and Morgan mentioned at Keypoint earlier, you have these historic vines that and historical vineyard management where you have soils that have been tilled for decades or perhaps centuries plus that have potentially become quite degraded. What are some of the challenges and how are you, what has historical cultural management looked like and what are you transitioning it to? What is it, what is it look like today and what do you hope for to look like in the future? Right. It's a big question. And every one of these vineyards that we've taken on to rehab has had such a different past. And because of their vastly different climates and soils and context, the plan has been very different. But the trajectory is always the same or that the set of goals is always the same, but on to different contexts. So I'll take Bedrock as an example in Sonoma. So Bedrock has a history unique from some of these older vineyards in that it was put on to irrigation relatively early and was actually farmed for white Zimphandel during the 1900s or the 70s, 80s, 90s. And that meant they were pushing these old vines with a lot of water, a lot of fertilizer to be highly productive. So it West. in a very, very conventional direction, whereas some of the other vineyards we take on are still in a very traditional dry-farmed context. So that means there's no irrigation, they're usually cross-cultivated, or because there's no irrigation, you can till in both directions. So you get this, what's called a dust mulch on the field. So those are just vastly different starting points, neither of which are where we want to be ultimately, but they yield very different problems and are a much different transition. So that's kind of the broad scope of what we deal with. - But that's some of the history of where these various plantings are coming from. Where do you hope to take them? - So, and it's still context dependent in that, like at Bedrock, for instance, we have water there. Some vineyards we truly don't have water, and if we do, it's salty. At Bedrock, we have all the tools to take a very aggressive, I would say soil rehabilitation approach by using our irrigation system to be able to apply biology and also support the vines through a no-till transition. And then out at Evangelo, which is our vineyard in Contracosta County, we only get an average of eight to 10 inches of rain out there. It's on sand, whereas at Bedrock in Sonoma, we get 30 inches of rain, both very Mediterranean. So this rain is highly concentrated to the winter months. But so at Evangelo, we are taking, we are using the tools we have, which means we are still cross-cultivating that vineyard. But we've changed our full year program dramatically to support the vines from a nutrition standpoint, and that's already brought in a lot of resilience. So we're kind of trying to maximize vine health out of vineyard like that with the tools that we have. And then maybe that'll unlock a next step to be able to look more at what we can do with that soil. - I think fundamentally what we're looking at in both contexts though is building soil biology back. So when we're in a dry land system like Evangelo vineyard, we almost have to think about that as sort of top down soil biology where we can feed the plant via foliers. And hopefully that helps with root exidates and feed biology around the vine roots, while as at bedrock vineyard, we are very aggressive in trying to build soil organic matter back up the crimping animal integration. And because in that situation in terms of what we inherited, we had soil organic matter 10 years ago at like 0.3, 0.4% and we've been able to build that back up to 4.5% to 5% and that obviously has a really profound effect on water capture and water holding. So you know, we see 20 to 23,000 gallons per acre for every 1% increase in soil organic matter. But then also really critical to that is because we're in Nontil, you hear in Northern California, we get hammered with atmospheric rivers, which means we get a lot of our rainfall all at once. So if you're in a system, a traditional tillage system, for instance, and you have tilled your soil or you've spread compost, tilled your soil, seeded your cover crops and it's the end of October and then all of a sudden we get 9 inches of rain. You have no roots in the ground. You a lot of that rain runs off. So you know, for us it's been about, you know, critically capturing that. And you know, we run soil analysis and we also run soil analysis on the surrounding chaperale. So we kind of know where the vineyard started back in the 1880s and what would sort of be a natural soil here. And then we're trying to kind of rebuild and allow kind of mother nature to repair itself in some ways via our practices. - I'd like to come back, Jake, to you in a comment that you made about working with foliar applications and kind of building biology from the top down. But before we go there, I want to, Morgan, I want to ask you about your vision as a curator of genetic uniqueness and these various genetics that are no longer readily, not or not widely grown or no longer readily available necessarily, how, what is your vision of bedrock and the scope of the work that you're doing? Are you expecting to see those genetics become more broadly utilized again at some point in the future? What's the vision behind that? - Yeah, I mean, I think some of it is, we don't fully know the answer to it, but what we do know is that as we see weather-wearing and climate change in certain areas, there's certain varieties that have narrow windows where they do particularly well. And a number of those varieties are the ones that are widely sold and planted throughout the world like Pien-on-Warr and Chardonnay and Cabernet. So at some point, we're going to have to start thinking about what varieties that we can plant that will be better adapted to the evolution of climate. I mean, it's getting warmer and warmer in Napa. And you see people that are already starting to plant varieties that hold acid better, that stand up to extreme heat events better. So in the context of being part of the historic vineyard society, part of what we've done is actually gone through and taken cuttings of all of our rare varieties and then worked with University of California Davis to clean those up of virus, 'cause a lot of these old vineyards have differing levels of virus in them and then have them available as sort of an open source through their ranches and through their sort of germ plasm or whatever you want to call it. So that means that not only do we have California selections of varieties of more popular grapes like granache or sera or petite sera, we even have 1888 planted Cabernet at Bedrock, we have some of the oldest in the world. But also the really rare things like molard and person and it's red and le dewey and all these things that we have two, three vines total that we've ever seen in all of California. So I think we're just kind of trying to capture that. I think part of what really feeds our vineyard practice is that to me almost all, we often get asked how old a vineyard can actually age to. And for me, I feel like every old vineyard that I've seen that's gotten torn out has been because of humans. It's because of they become non-economic but non-economic because vines haven't been replanted as they've died, people have really drawn down on soil bank accounts, they've created a lot of compaction. They've weakened the vines to the point that they become more and more prone to past pressure and all of that then nets to the fact that they are no longer economically viable and then they get torn out and replanted. So I think those are a reflection of management or all of them really. Exactly, so yeah, human management. So that's the thing here where we really feel strongly that the way that I think based on the health response that we're seeing from our plants over the last six, seven, eight years as we've moved into these practices, it really feels like we're able to reverse the tide in these vineyards in terms of what their ultimate longevity might be and that means that we're also gonna better be able to preserve the remarkable diversity of genetics that are in there. There's several directions I'd like to take this discussion but when you mentioned cleaning up the viruses in the cuttings, I understand that on one level, but if you haven't yet listened to the podcast interview that I did with Beni McLean from Florida Citrus history and the historical context, once they cleaned up the viruses from genetic propagation is when genetic resilience went down the slide. It's like what are those viruses doing from our resilience and future disease resistance perspective that we don't fully recognize or appreciate at this point? - That's a really interesting point, it's something we talk about all the time because there's this, the wine industry is so focused on virus and rightfully so for a lot of reasons, but our old vines have basically every virus you can have and they thrived with them. - Right and it's a question of, I don't know, of course a lot of them were planted into much healthier soil than we're planting vineyards now. But they, and then I don't know what virus load they had when they were planted, I'm sure there was plenty, but they write, they don't have any of the issues that we see with young vines being planted with leaf or old three, for example, which will not ripen, which will not thrive, but then these old vines that have all these viruses, deep roots, all these things do really well And that is always something I find fascinating. how appropriate it is to think of mammalian immunity as an analog here, but when you have, you actually need viral exposure to develop antibiotic, to antibiotic, to analog viruses and to create some immunity and some resistance. So I don't know how appropriate is to have that conversation because it's not domain that I'm particularly expert in, but or have a lot of knowledge about, but it's certainly something to think about. I think it comes down fundamentally to this different perspective of agriculture and of the microbiome is do we have an anti-biotic approach or a probiotic approach? Are we collaborating with the microbiome or do we believe that things need to be sterile to be the most effective? Absolutely, and I mean, I think in the wine industry too, that concept really plays very distinctly to the idea of quality, right? Because the greatest wines in the world people think are extremely reflective of their fancy French word, their terroir, their where they're grown. So you would think, and I think this is really what Jake and I you know kind of think about a lot is a vine that are in better communication, that are working synergistically with the soils that have more alive soils, that have more biology. We feel that in the winery we see that those wines have a better sense of place, that bedrock almost is more bedrock you now than it was 10 years ago. And which is just a really fascinating thing because it's obviously extremely complex and you can't reduce it to a single variable or factor, but at the same time we're seeing not just our vineyards becoming much more resilient to heat events, to droughts, to floods, but also seeing an increase in quality, which is fundamentally also very important. So Morgan, let's build on what you just said. Jake, I'd like to come back to you with when we're going to describing the increasing resilience that you're observing. I'm sure you're doing many different things. What are the different things that you're doing? What are the effects that you're observing, just from a practical implementation and management perspective. You mentioned fuller applications a little bit ago, but I'm sure that they are one piece of a broad number of different things that you're working with. Right, I'll kind of start go through a season, kind of starting with where we're at right now. So we just ended harvest. We just got our first rains the other day and right before the rains, we no till seeded. This is that bedrock vineyard. So on the whole hundred acres, no till seeded at highly diverse cover crop blend. So that's essentially all annuals of legumes and forbs and grasses. That will grow through to January, where we'll bring in our shepherd who helps us out to do non-high intensity grazing. So we run about 300 sheep an acre for 24 hours at a time to 48 depending on the amount of biomass and then move them through. So everything will get bitten and trampled once. And then the regrowth that comes back because we tend to get incredible regrowth after the grazing up to you four feet plus of cover crop. And that will get normally crimped with a roller crimper rolled down or high mode or a combination of both. And the goal is of that in our context is after you know after March for us there's typically no rain until around now until mid October. So our goal is to create a nice thick mulch layer on the top of of the vineyard floor to protect one to hold moisture in and prolong the moist period for biology. And then also once everything does dry out just to protect from outright heat and solar radiation. So that takes us through you know the summer where we are you know focusing on full-learn nutrient management, all these things. And then all the way to this time of year where we go back and in seed again. So that's our I guess that's mostly floor management but that's a huge piece and that's what we've been doing for six seven years consistently is that program. Was it in that seven-year time frame that you built organic matter levels from with these cover crops from a half a percentage point or less up to four plus? So that in some ways the transition really started more back in 2008, 2010 when the vineyard was moved from highly conventional to more what I would call traditional organic viticulture especially in this like in the high quality wine region. So that involved a lot of compost like three to five tons an acre of compost over the whole hundred acres spreading that, tilling that in, seeding a cover crop, growing the huge massive cover crop knocking that down, disking it in, having bare ground all summer. But that certainly helped a lot at the beginning to bring the soil more and you'd know better than me but from that like half percent to more like two to two and a half percent organic matter and then a kind of plateaued until we kind of started the next phase of practices. I think that was the real tricky thing is we began to get really frustrated with sort of traditional organic practices that were so tillage-based because it really put a ceiling on our capacity to build soil organic matter and also just from a you know a carbon standpoint it's like you've grown these huge cover crops after you've spread a ton of compost and all that compost has arrived you know by truck 24 tons at a time from the yard and all the stuff that's upstream of that. So it's really intensive in terms of inputs. It's really hard to sometimes get it all timed because if you have a rainstorm coming, spreading the compost, disking the compost, getting the cedar on. If any of the you know things break you're kind of in a bad spot and so that's sort of like why we really started you know thinking about what we could do next in terms of moving into non-till and I will say keeping the ground covered is profound in terms of what it does for grapes in terms of weathering heat events. So back in 2022 we had six days where it went over 112 degrees in a row and our neighboring vineyards that were fully tilled the heat that was coming off the reflected heat was like 160 to 170 degrees and that's reflecting back onto the fruit and in that situation the fruit begins to degrade its anthocyanin its color which is really critical to the quality of red wine. Well as our vineyards had been roller cramped and had a nice thick thatch on them you know they were still like in the low 90s high 80s so you also figure that the underground soil biology is also able to stay alive. So that's just like one really profound change that we've just seen just by simply like starting to keep the soil covered. That reflected heat the those reflected heat numbers that you gave me there was a much bigger delta than I expected. Yeah no I mean the first time like I was out there I took my like pizza thermometer and this was like you know for the oven was pointing it at the ground and I was like this cannot be correct and so then took another couple implements but yeah it was like you know a 50 to 60 degree delta between the two. Wow and I can only imagine well obviously it means a lot of things for for the anthocyanins and wine gully but also you just think about the fundamentals of photosynthesis. Yes I would water stress all that stuff. I would also say that we started cover cropping and crimping on an experimental basis back in 2015 and 16. I think and I think that that's a really important thing. I think what we did learn though is that if you move right into that and you don't take into account the vine nutrition levels you really can stub your toe on yield lag on creating excessive a lot of competition for vines and you can kind of see a drop off there so from what we learned is that we almost have to think about the vine nutrient status as sort of one trajectory rebuilding the soil as another trajectory and then eventually those two kind of come together as you sort of rebuild the biology in the system and what we've also seen is once we started grazing on hay and e-tests within a year we are seeing four x the time so amount of soil biology so like the grazing really almost like turbocharges everything. All right hang on a second here. Sorry to allow you there. No this is good but just the way the way you framed the conversation around matching vine nutrition with with the cover crops so that you don't have a yield loss effect. Let's let's go into that into a little bit more detail and this this is a topic that I find so important because there are there's come to be within certain groups this this expectation that as we go through a transition we should expect to see a yield loss and I'm of the opinion that if you have a yield loss it's because of poro-granamy not because of a certain set of practices that you may or may not do. So I'd like to better understand what you observed and experience there. So when we first started World of Cramping, it wasn't every site, but I'll stick to bedrock. But when we first went, you know, one year we were doing that compost system I described, the next we were doing a full crimped floor. And this was before we were looking at SAP, we were taking dry tissue analysis, you know, we were doing typical, um, viticulture monitoring. Um, but we saw in those first two years of doing that kind of what everybody warned you about. And this is the such a common conversation in the viticulture world right now about going an on till in your loss of vigor. And we definitely saw that, but we were not, um, looking at nitrogen in the right way for instance. We weren't looking at timing of nutrient applications to try to compensate for what has changed in the system. We were no longer getting this massive flush of green manure every time the vines were coming out of dormancy, but we were not adequately, um, accounting for that change. So we saw pruning weights go down by half, um, yields go down by half, you know, like really extreme, bigger losses. So it took us kind of taking a step back and of course learning a lot more to learn how to make those transitions successfully without seeing those. And now we're able to do that. But when you think about, um, Morgan, the way that you framed the discussion, I forget the exact phrase, theology that you use, but something to the effect of the trajectory of line nutrition versus the trajectory of, of, uh, soil and nutrition status, how are you thinking about that? So I think the way that we think about it is it's almost hard to overstate how beat up soils and a lot of these old vineyards are because they literally have been discs into oblivion for a lot of times just to powder for a hundred plus years. So you're just starting from like nothing. So it really is like, um, so it really is quite a shock to the system of all of a sudden vine set of sort of been kind of holding on in that environment or all of a sudden then finding themselves in competition with other plants that are around them. So the way we think is sort of thought about it is that sort of we think about, um, and this is really helped our more recent transitions and other places that we've done is we really think about the vine health and the vine nutrient status and we, and this is an area where like sap analysis has been really, really critical for us to be able to see how nutrients are being translocated throughout the plant, what we might need to supplement via foliar or other means to make sure that the vine is not excessively freaked out by all of its new companions in the field. Um, and then as we gradually build soil biology back up and we get to four or five percent soil organic matter, we actually get real nutrient cycling going on in the soil and the biology has been rebuilt. Then we can kind of like, you know, step back a little bit and kind of allow the system to actually operate as it probably operated when the vines were first planted when there still was four to six percent organic matter in the soil before it had been tilled to powder for a century, you know. So and then the, you know, the compaction as well on certain sites and all the stuff that comes with that. And so that's sort of like what we look at it now and then, you know, and what we find so fascinating to and we work with green cover seed who I know he's been on the pod before, but, you know, now figuring out all the things about chloram sensing and once you build into those systems and when we can now have, now I think our cover crops this year are 22 different plant species across eight different families and trying to build as much diversity during, you know, the winter months. It's, you know, that that part's just been fascinating and it's just been fascinating to see the vines now that they're sort of in a proper system. How much longer they hold on to their leaves for how much I think probably post harvest carbohydrate uptake is improved because the canopies are still intact. Things like that where we, there's just, you know, things that we see in terms of plant health that we just didn't see before. As you, as you practically what is different today from what you first started observing 10 years ago, what are you doing differently today from what you were doing 10 years ago? So, one of the first things we did, even before we were looking at SAP, it goes back to what I was saying about just considering what has changed in the system. So, one thing we started doing was supplying nitrogen in this case, a betarach which is organic soy protein hydrolycate, supplying it much earlier than is typical and what had been typical for us to give the plants what they were, part of what they would have been getting from that green manure breaking down which was highly leguminous. So, one thing was just a little bit of water in nitrogen early because what we were seeing was just shoot growth starting and stopping much, much earlier. So just greasing the gears a little bit at the beginning in that way and that was kind of the first breakthrough and since then it's been following nutrition with the whole season. So, in grapes we spray for powdering mildew in an organic system every two to three weeks with wettable sulfur. Wettable sulfur is really the only thing we use for mildew in that isn't ideal but what it does allow is it means we're set up to spray quite consistently. So, fitting these other basically making our tank mixes more useful than just sulfur is such an easy addition to the program that it has fit right in. So, we're able to evaluate sap and spray, evaluate spray you know six times or more throughout the season. Oh my do I ever have a magical product for you? Yeah, I mean it is sort of one of the great challenges of the wine industry is just sort of the omnipresence of powdery mildew pressure and honestly certain grapes that the market has kind of selected that they like like Chardonnay is extremely prone to it and then the areas where they're considered to be qualitative, glutenally good is where the powdery mildew index is off the charts all year round and so then it sort of so in some ways it's kind of silly but you know what I will say is we've seen powdery mildew pressure go down as a result of these practices it just seems like plant cell walls are healthier so the pressure has gone down and I think my greatest hope is at some point we get to a point where the plants are healthy enough that we really don't even have to think about it there's a couple vineyards I know that have been able to do that but then also really the resistance to insect pressure has been you know in Zinfandel which can be very prone to pacific and will have it spider mites we no longer have spider mites we have incredibly diverse insect populations that keep each other in balance knock on wood at bedrock we still have not dealt with Vinelli bug which has been a real issue in some parts of California and so it's and then leaf hoppers out in contra cost to county which were a real issue it starting this year when we started actually spraying a couple AA products we literally they went away like the neighboring vineyards had them but we we didn't and that was you know I mean that that stuff's all very very interesting to see but also allows us to kind of monitor plant health in many ways because if we're seeing susceptibility to virus I mean I think you've talked about it a lot where you know pests attack weak plants so if the plants are stronger you know you're going to have less pest pressure. Have you I'm quite curious on on many plants particularly on annuals once we start working with nutritional support and microbiome support often there are changes in epigenetic expression you started seeing changes in leaf expression or node expression there's just there's all types of subtle changes sometimes they're much more obvious than others. Have you observed any of that changed expression on these older varieties and curious how these long live perennial plants might respond differently than as compared to a short short lived annual plant. You know in this case we've been we've been really tracking sap and applying for about two full seasons now and the main change I've seen is mid-season canopy color without any any extra nitrogen we're not but just so the color of the canopy has been a major one things like leaf size node length I haven't seen as much of but we are hoping you know with having now two full seasons of the vines having their nutritional needs met to see things like clustered number change hopefully increase some of these things any shorter internodes facing. We hope to see that. I would add though Jake that you know there's some points that we were walking the vineyard this year where we were almost feeling like the leaves were thicker and glossier. Right. Yes. And so like in it felt like they were just more there's more substance there. It's almost like the cell walls were thicker when you touch them. So it crumbled them. Yeah, they snapped a little bit more. So you know, that's just in you know, we had a very mile growing season this year though too without a lot of heat events and heat stress. So again, need more need need more data over more years, but at the same time I feel like you're definitely seeing a physical response within in some ways within within the plants. Yeah, and I can't wait for my my equip about the powder miller earlier. I can't wait for things to get through the regulatory channels of you to be able to use opinion out there because what we're observing with opinion is you're you're going to be able to kiss your powder miller challenge is goodbye. Simply as a reflection of changing the microbiome and the plants immune immune system response so strongly. So I can't wait for you to see that. I mean that would be an absolute game changer for the wine industry. I think there's something like 85% of pesticides applied to the grape industry are for powdering mildew. So whether that's organic, whether that's organics and sulfur and silo oil and stuff like that or whether it's conventional systemic. So it would be you know that's that's a real a real potential change. So along with these changes in can it be color disease and insect resistance. I think the obvious question particularly for a wine grape grower is have there been any changes? How how kind of two questions? How has the quality and the terroir of your wine changed over the last decade plus but also the last couple of years of more accelerated changes? Yeah I mean I think the quality has I feel like increased significantly in part because we just weather heat events better. And I think that there's just more resilience and that you know as we kind of talked about earlier without like you know when we don't have as much reflected heat in the vineyards the vines don't get as stressed out and they don't get as water stressed. And the result is that we can kind of slow down ripening and sugar accumulation for for us you know if we have a really hot august which is when the vine is really sugar loading for the most part like you know sometimes what we see what we happens where we get you know sugar in advance of flavor because we're looking at other physical factors like seedbrowning, rakeus thickness like all you know like all these other elements that we look at and what I've really seen over the last eight to ten years and I think it's been extra so the last couple years is we're seeing physiological development and incredible flavor development at lower potential alcohols and the vines are also holding on to their natural acidity better. So that makes for a better fermentation and that also makes for higher quality because here in California we have a lot of sun we're kind of known for making high octane sort of more alcoholic wines and so anything that we can do in our vineyards to kind of combat that naturally is a really good thing. Can you translate that for a for a non-wine grape fermenter? I'm not even quite sure what it is your choice. So when you talk about high alcohol what is that a reflection of from a biochemistry perspective and what does the yeah what does that mean from a quality profile? Yeah so really the alcohol percentage is sort of based on how much sugar comes in with the grape and at some point you get to a point where there's so much sugar that you will not be able to ferment the it dry and then in the winery that's when you do things like ad water or tarteric acid to supplement which is something we try to avoid because we feel like that dilutes quality. So really yeast kind of have a maximum fermentation capacity of about 16 to 16 and a half percent alcohol which is quite high by sort of worldwide standards. I'd say on average red wine is about 13 to 13 and a half percent alcohol and white is 12 to 13 percent alcohol but you know in California it's you know it's not uncommon to see wines over 15 percent alcohol but what that does oftentimes is if you don't have balance it just makes the wine taste fiery it makes it taste hot it makes it taste sort of unpleasant and so really one of the key factors when making high quality wine is finding balance between the acid profile the tanin and the structure which is all the polyphenolics and anthocyanins and the sort of feeling of fruit weight in the wine so you know for us we are always trying to make wines that have great balance and great density but aren't particularly alcoholic. We're just going to open it up more broadly what what important topics or what important things have you observed in as your vineyards every generator that we haven't talked about yet what were some of the really memorable moments for you? I mean I think maybe that when we started doing Haney test which we've only started doing for the last couple of years and seeing the amount of biological improvement from grazing compared to blocks that we did not graze that was really eye-opening like when we after just a couple years of grazing biology was four times the level of areas of the vineyard that we had not grazed. So that's based on CO2 burst CO2 respiration is what's increasing. Was that with identical cover crop management? Yes yes so this would have been like a purely vegetative cover crop in crimping and then the same thing but with high intensity grazing and actually the vineyard that had less respiration had been under crimping for longer but the introduction of sheep really seemed to push respiration and that was across a few different blocking samples. Yeah and I think playing on that what's been really surprising too is it's given us confidence to rethink how we develop young vineyards and that we now have blocks that we're just planting that we are putting immediately into organic nontil which is pretty kind of contradicts what the very standard treatment is in the industry where typically it's like you plant young vines and you try to be a tillage and herbicide eliminate all competition and we've kind of gone the opposite direction and it's been really fascinating to see how verdant and healthy the canopies have been and also how good the quality has been and also the fact that it's quite economic you know even we're now just sort of moving into full cropping and we're you know going to be getting 4 to 4 and a half tons per acre on these blocks which for us is quite good at what age so that would be on fifth and sixth leaf and are you seeing those vines come into production earlier than they would have historically are still a similar timeline. A similar timeline to what would be a standard program. We also have the goal of those blocks to convert them to dry farming eventually because that's I think one of the factors in California we really need to think about when we kind of think about the core of sustainability you have to think about which resources are the most scarce and water is scarce in California at times so I think what we're so excited about is we basically we dropped fruit from one additional year to really push root growth but I think we're going to be able to because we built soil organic matter and we built biology I think it's going to expedite the process of us being able to wean those vines off of water and still have them have very happy and productive lives and that's you know that's a very exciting thing for us to see because it's almost allows us to do it all at once rather than develop the vineyard and then undo all the effects of the tillage via cover crops and crimping and so it like sort of shortens the timeline by probably up to five years. Wow. Another interesting thing that we didn't mention I think I'm young vines is we're just from a heterogeneity standpoint is we're actually taking a lesson from the old vines which I don't even know if Morgan mentioned but all of those old vine vineyards that are so genetically diverse are actually field blended so all of those different varieties that Morgan was pointing out they're often in the same block so we have blocks we call them fendell but are actually 28, 29 different varieties all mixed together and we picked that all at once we fermented all at once and that's very very much not the norm in the wine industry but it was the norm in the 1880s and 1890s so we are actually planting young vineyards as mixed variety as well some of those are the traditional California field blends of zenfandel carinyan more velle alicante and then others are we're taking some of Portugal's traditional field blends just looking at another hot arid region in planting mixed Portuguese varieties all together And that's just looking at the benefits of diversity, even just at the variety level. What does that look like from a management perspective? Is there the need to prune varieties differently or manage varieties differently in the field or are you managing them largely homogenously across varieties? So there's an element of that. And so for instance, I'll take the example of Karen-Yan, which is in a lot of old vineyards and it's a beautifully vigorous variety, very dry, and it's a farmable, but it's hyperprone to powdery mildew and in some ways it's overly vigorous. So a lot of our crews, and we have the benefit of having experienced crews at all of our vineyards. And they're able to go through and spot the Karen-Yan vines. It doesn't take a lot of knowledge to spot it once you know what you're looking for. When they're going through and shoot thinning, they'll take the basal leaves off the Karen-Yan, they'll do extra opening up, because we know in three weeks it's going to close back up again because of the vigorous. So there is an element of that, but and it's certainly not a management style for more anal-retentive farmers in some way. But in there are other ways that it makes things easier, and I think Morgan would agree that having that diverse variety mix really smooths vintage variation. So in a really hot year, for instance, Zinfandel can sometimes shrivel and get really raisinated under really hot conditions. So Karen-Yan will, whether any sort of hot conditions it'll hold its acidity, it'll hold its color, more of ed will never skyrocket in sugar, for instance. So in hot years, some of these mixed varieties will cover up some of the issues with the dominant variety and vice versa. So you will get, we think, kind of a higher baseline quality year in and year out by having a more diverse field. Does Vine diversity, are you, does this look like varieties still planted together in rows or just complete random scattering of, or somewhat uniform distribution of a variety across an entire field? So Morgan wrote a whole thesis about this, but in the old vineyards it's a bit of a mix. But there does seem to be even, even if it looks random on, we actually map all of our old vineyards variety by variety and have them all mapped out. And you will find reason in the patterns once you map enough, not at every vineyard, but at a lot, you will see like, oh, they planted more Karen-Yan on the edge, your lower fertility soils because they knew Karen-Yan was more vigorous, or they'll plant more dead in the swales because it's a late butter. And so it will bud after frost risk is over. So there was definitely intention in the centennial vineyards. With our young vineyards, we will plant not down the road because you never want the temptation to pick them separately. But instead we'll plant maybe on the diagonal or have some sort of pattern, so we're kind of aware of what's in there. But even now we consider the topography of the block when we're planting young vines. What's really fascinating is that this practice kind of flies in the face of the last 30 years of sort of modern wine making in terms of wanting control and then picking your cabernet separate from your Merlot from your cab trunk and then blending those later. But it's been really fascinating is and I love it when things like this happen is that there's now a lot of research that's been done showing that when you actually co ferment different varieties that have different levels of color that have different types of phenolics that have different types of aromatics, they actually will polymerize with each other. They will co factor they'll stabilize aromatics so you actually can create much greater complexity by having more ingredients in the soup in some ways, then if you're just were to take those exact same varieties and ferment them separately and then blend them later. So that part to me is always fascinating. And so in some ways you kind of have to seed control as a wine maker. And there's sort of like element of almost picking on gestalt because not all the varieties are going to be perfectly right at the same time, but you just kind of got to go with be like, okay, it looks good. And also if you really know your vineyard, you also know when can it be start to just look a little different when leaves are turned ever so slightly and you just be like, okay, this vineyard's done. It's ready to for it's fruit to come off and then you you pick it and then that doesn't even get into the really fascinating element of how plants communicate under the soil with each other. And you know, that's a complete an area of almost no research, but I think is very fascinating. And that was one of one of them is several things that you just said are quite interesting, but that is that is one domain that in in small grains production wheat production now, then this is having the UK, it's having in Canada, there's a number of growers here in the US that I'm familiar that I've been having this conversation with as well, where they will come angle and plant five different wheat varieties that have similar harvest windows. And they get greater disease resistance greater insect resistance and higher yields than from any one of those varieties alone. And it's just like how do we how do we explain that? I mean, it's it's plant communication is that quorum sensing is that sharing of resources and all these things where these plants are truly collaborating with each other and and perhaps sharing. Immune pathway secrets and other things that we don't even know about yet at this point. Yeah sharing information with each other. Yeah, it's the next frontier in agriculture, I think is in there's just, you know, we, we, I think we barely know what we don't know about what's going on under the soil in many ways. And so like it's just, you know, it's very exciting. What do you see as the frontier? What are the new things that you're working on? What are the ways that you want to see your venue? Can you continue to progress and grow? What do you think you might be doing differently or experiencing in the near future? It's a big question. I mean, there's a there's a number of things. So for us, I think, you know, right now we just graze with we do mob grazing with sheep adapted paddock grazing, which is great. But to me, I'd be really interested. We have a neighbor who actually, it's a smaller operation so they can do it, but they literally will move, you know, like eight or nine different types of animals at a time. So when you're looking about creating a greater diversity of biology in your grazing, what that looks like. And then, you know, for me, it'd be fascinating if there's ways to integrate other revenue streams into the vineyard sort of year round. And we, whether that's cattle or whether it's sheep or something else in terms of just trying to figure out a way to diversify that element well also being of benefit to the land. I think that's a big part of it. And to me, just broadly from an industry standpoint, I think it's really important to talk about these practices and to show what we think we've gotten right and what we've gotten wrong with other people because just in terms of selling wine and the way that the wine industry appears to people on the outside. And bottles of wine can sell for, you know, 50 hundred, 200, 500 dollars a bottle, you know, there's there's margin there. So in some ways, I feel like there's a responsibility within the wine industry to try to be moving forward the conversation about responsible agriculture. And in that element, and I feel like there's more steam gaining as that is going on right now. And I think that, you know, that's, you know, I think that's something I'm, that's both exciting and also absolutely necessary, particularly as we try to sell to a whole new generation of consumers that are coming up that really care a lot more about, you know, what they put into their body and the really cool thing about wine is you can really get all the way upstream of what you put into your glass in terms of who grew it, how it was grown, the ethics of it, the vine age, all of that stuff. And, you know, so can the complexity is scary, but at the same time, it's also what makes it what makes it so fascinating. So it's kind of like integrating the agricultural element into that conversation. I find so interesting about our conversation. I came into this conversation kind of like I've heard some large numbers about how dramatically wine consumption is dropping and how there is this growing need for differentiation and how there is this intense interest in adopting regional agriculture on scale because of the need to differentiate. But what stood out to me in our conversation is the tremendous heat resilience. climactic resilience that you're experiencing with these different management practices and how I think we should reasonably expect that to become the foundational requirement into the future. Like we are going to need a heat resilience on a regular basis going forward. We will already have a pattern, a recent pattern that we can observe that that's going to be the case. Absolutely. There's something that as you sort of talked about at the beginning, there's incredible opportunity to change people's minds by showing them how these practices work and that they do work. But it is also very frustrating when you drive down Highway 29 in Napa, which is surrounded by some of the most expensive vineyard land in the world and everything. There's not a single thing growing on the floor of vineyards. There's a lot of work to be done then or sort of like, and I think Evo from Gurgichill's chat talked about it a bit, but also sort of like sort of demonstrative grazing but without any real theory behind it. So you just sort of like put out a couple of sheep. And I mean, most cynically, I see vineyards that have just sprayed herbicide and then they have sheep grazing that herbicide sprayed soil and it's just like, you know, and then they post it on Instagram and it's like, as we know, grazing can do incredible damage, but it could also do incredible good. It just has to be deployed properly. So also just educating people about that part of things as well. So it's, you know, there's just a lot, there's many lifetimes of work to be done to progress the conversation, I think. Jake, there's, I have a feeling that I could have a long conversation with you just growing all the things out that you're holding and reserve here. But I'm realizing at the very beginning of our conversation, you mentioned this idea of building biology from the top down with foliar applications and we never came back to that. We touched on it a few times, but we never dug into that in detail. So you can follow on to any of Morgan's comments that you will like, but I'd also love for you to dig into that a little bit of how you are dealing with these dry land situations. Right. So like I said, evangelos are others. We have bedrock, vineyard and Sonoma, evangelo and contra costa county. And those are two pillars of estate vineyards and they could not be more different. So like I said, evangelo has almost no rain, there's no water. The only water we have is for is for spraying with a solar well. So there we've been, we just decided that we are going to go all in with tracking SAP consistently and and addressing things and just in seeing where that takes us because we do not have a lot of avenues to improve soil like that with the limitations of that system. So it's very interesting to see, I mean, so we see all these increases in canopy health and photosynthesis, even just in the sugar levels on SAP analysis. And to know that then the vine has the excess energy to be improving the microbiome around its roots. It's getting to a place that we could not get with a tractor. You know, it's we're able to give the vine's the ability to essentially bespoke their microbiome when they did not have the energy that they had before. And the same thing is true at bedrock where we are inputting biology and improving. But the main thing that's happening is that the vines are have the have the energy and the tools to to foster their own microbiome in a way they haven't in the past. So what indicators are you observing about? So we that's a good question. So and I would love to know more about what indicators we could be looking at because it's not that easy to mine your vine roots and dig them up and look. We do know from our cover crops in the soil that we are seeing rises sheathing and things that we have never seen before. And that's from more diverse mixes and then of course better inoculants and a better better seed coatings and all these things. But the I would say the biggest indicator that we get is there's plenty of evidence of natural nutrient cycling of things increasing in the vine that we did not add directly. So that that that that would be one of the biggest things I've seen. And that's even more prevalent at evangelo, which is dry farmed where we know all we're giving is these foliers and we're seeing increases in things like phosphorus and these things that we are not applying. So so we imagine that that's part of what's going on. You know the largest part of the thrill and the beauty of these of working with these biological ecosystems we're now in this particular moment in time. Well, it's been true for the last half of the years, but input costs are at an all time high, I'm able to do fertilizer costs and so forth. And there's it seems there are constantly new people discovering the power of biology to release the nutrients that are already present in their soil profile. And of course if you're going wine grapes you have the capacity go down to a depth that's measured in feet or yards or meters. And it is so it's so much fun and so enjoyable to see that whole ecosystem just begin working. And you start getting results that are greater than any of those that you would have imagined or forecasted. And I think that's in this particular environment that we find ourselves in is that that opportunity and that optimism and that conviction that this can happen and does happen is is the encouragement and the direction that many growers need to go in. Yeah, I agree completely. What I've already asked you what important topics we should go into and I really I feel the need that we need to have another follow-up conversation because there's other conversation other discussions I'd love to dive into, but I want to be respectful of your time and of our audience this time. So I want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experiences. And where can people find out more about your work in Dig and Deeper? Yeah, so if anything I have a writing problem. So if you go to our website which is bedrockwindco.com there's a lot of material they're raiding from the wines that we make to the history of wine in California to our farming. There's some really great quotes from Jake on there as well that I think really cut to the core of what we're looking at. We also have our own podcast called bedrockwind conversations and you know we just got you know regenerative organic certified and so we did a whole pod on like what that process looked like and what that entailed because there's definitely some you know hoops to jump through and things like that. And we also have other people on that we consider to be very important in terms of leading the conversations around regenerative bit of culture within the wine industry specifically people like Jason Jardine at Hansel and folks like that. So yeah so you can find us there and then you know I'm still on social media somehow so you can find me on Instagram as well and I'm usually just talking about geeky things about grapes. So yeah and Jake is on Instagram as well and you can always email us. All right well thank you both thanks for being here thanks for your work and let's catch up soon. Hope they'll see you next month. Absolutely thank you so much. Thank you so much for having us John. The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At AEA we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible and since 2006 we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At AEA we don't guess we test we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing someone who believes in a better more regenerative way to grow visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.