Paicines Ranch Vineyard #82

Paicines Ranch Vineyard: A Vineyard Designed by Nature

The Paicines Ranch Vineyard has been designed and is being tended to promote ecosystem health and flourishing biodiversity while producing exceptional quality wine and food. This 25-acre polyculture vineyard in central California’s San Benito County explores a key question: What if a vineyard could require minimal inputs or human labor, deliver high-quality grape yields, produce animal protein, improve soil health, sequester carbon, increase biodiversity, and still offer strong financial returns?

This vision was developed by holistic management educator and viticulturist Kelly Mulville. The vineyard at Paicines Ranch features a unique polyculture system with a partial overhead trellis that allows grazing of the vines year-round. This eliminates the need for tillage, mowing, herbicides, suckering, and hand weeding, while fostering a thriving ecosystem of plants, insects, birds, and soil biology.

Results That Speak for Themselves

The outcomes are remarkable. Soil organic matter increased by 66% (from 1.5% to 2.5%) before the vines even bore fruit. More than 60 bird species now visit the vineyard, including over 800 endangered tricolored blackbirds that successfully nested nearby. Insect abundance is more than five times higher than in neighboring conventional vineyards, with beneficial predators two to three times more common — all without the use of pesticides. Soil microbial communities show 10% greater diversity, and over 35 plant species flourish in the vineyard’s understory.

The Visionary: Kelly Mulville

Kelly Mulville’s path to revolutionizing viticulture began with raptors and falconry. Growing up in El Paso, Texas, he raised hawks as a child. Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring at 14 devastated him – he realized agriculture was destroying the birds he loved. “I’ve been depressed ever since,” he says. That compassion for the natural world became his life’s work: transforming agriculture from one of the planet’s most destructive forces into a method for repairing ecosystems. For 25 years, Kelly has combined viticulture experience with holistic management to design ecologically, socially, and economically sound farming practices that profitably restore biodiversity – usually involving considerable help from livestock. His breakthrough came in Sonoma County between 2008 and 2010, using electric fencing to allow sheep to graze during the growing season – eliminating tillage, reducing water use by 90%, and increasing yields by 1,300 pounds per acre. When Kelly joined Paicines Ranch in 2014, he had the rare opportunity to design a vineyard from scratch. “Really what I want to do is not see how many farm animals I can have on this place, but to see how much biodiversity that is native to this spot we can get to return,” he explains.

The Paicines Ranch Learning Center

Paicines Ranch is a historic 7,600-acre certified organic and Audubon Certified Bird-Friendly ranch in central California, managed using Holistic Management principles. This diverse landscape – producing pasture-raised meat alongside the innovative vineyard – serves as a living classroom for regenerative agriculture.

The Paicines Ranch Learning Center is our 501(c)(3) that educates, inspires, and connects people with new ideas and networks that advance healthy soil and resilient communities. With the land as a key collaborator in solving complex ecological and social challenges, we host workshops for winegrowers that foster collaborative experiences where participants exchange knowledge and innovations from their own operations.

“Our overall philosophy at the ranch is to be open source,” Kelly explains. “Our hope is that others will learn from what we’re doing and take their creativity and expand on it, because we’re just scratching the surface here.” The big question driving this work: Can we use agriculture as a process to restore biodiversity to the planet? We are working to prove that the answer is yes.