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‘Grazing vineyards is getting more and more popular,’ ranch’s sheep boss says.

Lee Allen, Contributing Writer

April 14, 2022

3 Min Read
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Sheep graze in a vineyard at Paicines Ranch in San Benito County, Calif.Kelley Mulville

Park the tractor. Shepherd the sheep. Take weeds off the list of problems to be solved.

Based on grazing practices around the world, a 25-acre vineyard at Paicines Ranch in San Benito County, Calif., has proven that four-legged woolly critters make pretty darn good mowing machines.

“Grazing vineyards is getting more and more popular,” said sheep boss Kelley Mulville, a holistic viticulturist who designed the vines to require minimal human input while producing good yields of high-quality grapes. “Bringing in the sheep also has additional benefits of improved soil health and sequestered carbon,” he said.

Ranch owner Sallie Calhoun was intrigued by Mulville’s unique vision that removed bare ground, minimized repeated tillage and erosion and spraying that is common in California vineyards. “I wanted something altogether different and jumped at the opportunity to design a vineyard to be grazed by sheep on a year-round basis," he said.

Beginning in 2014, he implemented a process where much of the work that was previously mechanized could now be done by sheep.  Where tires used to roll, four hooves now move sheep that chomp away in high-density grazing.

“We trained things a bit higher than the normal vineyard, allowing sheep to graze underneath as floor management taking the place of tillage, herbicides, or weed eaters. It turns weeds into a resource as forage that gets cycled through the animal’s fermenting system and gets put back on the ground, thus increasing the nutrient cycling of the soils.

“Our design allows for basically any breed of sheep. One caution about the Baby Doll variety is they’ll put their front feet on their neighboring sheep’s back and reach pretty high --- although that does cut down on the amount of hand labor for shoot tipping. We suspect that sheep in contact with the vines may be a benefit through their saliva which has been documented to decrease disease pressure.”

Big labor force

Though not every animal gets put to work, Mulville’s labor force is impressive. “We have a flock of 1,700 ewes and when bred, they each have one or more offspring, so we’ll be up to 4,000 sheep in a few months. We ran all 1,700 of them in the vineyard for 24 hours in cooler months.  We subdivide the vineyard into sections so we have a high density of animals that stay there for a short time.”

The keeper of the flock has an interesting perspective on the economics of the effort: “A lawnmower is a crude imitation of a sheep, a living organism that’s a solar-powered entity that eats what people ordinarily spend money on to spray and control, then converts the edibles into nutrients cycled back into the ground. There’s no lawnmower or tractor that can come close to that.”

While there’s been interest, others have been slow to climb on board the sheep wagon. “Agriculture in general is pretty conservative, but with our fires and drought, growers are opening up a bit and looking at new ideas. Sometimes it just takes getting used to novel concepts.

“Historically, the first operation in growing crops involves removing animals, but that’s had a profound effect on our ecosystem health and I’m trying to put back what has been messed up.”

The effort is starting to build some traction. “Folks from larger vineyards have visited and said, ‘This simple concept makes more sense than anything I’ve seen in a long time. You manage weed control without taking a cover crop down to bare soil’.”

And that’s nothing to say "baahhh" about.

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