 My name's Tim Taylor. I operate Crossroad Farm in Post Mills, Vermont. And I farm approximately 50 acres of mixed vegetables. We have greenhouse tomatoes. We grow approximately 15,000, 16,000 pounds of those. Quite a big bedding plant business now. And in the field crops out here, we grow just about everything. One time we even tried artichokes one year. We have, as far as weed strategies, I think probably the one I focus on the most is to keep my corn crop the cleanest I can. I use that as a way to come into my next fields because in my operation it takes up a great deal of the acreage. I like to let no weeds go to seed there. But we use no herbicide there. I want to stress that right from the start. We never have. I've always cultivated it. I use a single-row cultivator. I use a two-row cultivator, the rolling Lilliston-type cultivators. And I use some blind cultivation with rotary hose. This is a rotary hoe, which we use in corn. It comes in all different lengths. This is actually a very small one. It's been cut down, so it does two rows of corn. We use it for blind cultivation. After we've sowed the corn approximately anywhere from four to five to perhaps a week to ten days later, depending upon the soil temperature and the time of the year, we'll come in and we just run this right across the top of the crop blindly. This is usually pre-emergent or just as it's spiking up. I use this in corn. I've used it in peas and in beans. It will get about approximately 50 to 60% of the weeds. It will get approximately, oh, maybe 2 to 3% of the corn, or the crop you're trying to actually grow. Depending upon your timing, you can actually come in when the crop is not so much corn, but peas and beans when the crop is actually up and starting to leaf out. It's one of the pros and the cons of this. It allows you a little more time for more finer cultivation because it does reduce the pressure, the weed pressure for a period of time, and yet it doesn't get them all and you still need to do cultivation. I find I still need to do single-row cultivation as well. Each sprocket here is spring-loaded. It'll bear the full weight of the unit. You can get a little nervous sometimes when you use it because it does sink into the ground quite a ways. I find that I'm quite safe as long as I keep my corn planted at 2-inch level. Corn planted up a little in the 1-inch zone will tend to be dug up a little more often. One of the problems with this tool is that it picks up all my loose plastic from my crops like melons and zucchini and squash. I don't know if it's exactly a down size. It gets it out of the field, which I do want to get it out. The other primary cultivation tool I use is a slightly modern version of 2-inch shovels. We call these the curb-co bat wings and their first single-row cultivation, although I have seen them used in other applications in 2- and 3- and 4-row cultivation. What they consist of is a series of old carb bumpers that have been fashioned into these bat wings for throwing dirt. Some of the things I really like about it are if I have some very mature weeds and come in quite late, it cuts under them and cuts them quite effectively and rips them up. It's quite effective where I do have some witch grass because again it rips it up. Here we have the budding basket weeder and what we do here is we plant, all our lettuce is grown from, is transplanted. We do nothing from seed into the field. It's all transplanted and it's a 2-row bed system. A week after transplanting approximately, we'll come in with the budding basket here, which is ground-driven off of this chain here. We can go approximately just about as fast as you'd want to drive it on the open field, 5 miles an hour or so. It's advantage is that it won't throw dirt into the lettuce. It moves in this manner and kicks up the weed seeds, cultivating at about 1 inch depending upon where I set it in the ground. We wait about a week because we get a little bit of germination, but we don't want to wait too long because we don't want the weeds to be too big. The advantage of the belly mount is that it does not wander. The cultivating tool doesn't wander in the field as it would behind the tractor but this place behind the tractor. I'm able to view straight down at the single row. I can't see both rows but I can see one row and I just can see exactly where I'm placing the tool. Absolutely exactly. If I daydream a little bit and it wanders off, I can catch it real quick whereas when it's behind me, in the case of some of the 3-point hitch tools that I use for cultivation, it tends to wander a little more and I cannot have quite the same control that I would have. I want to stress this. I own two of these Kubotas and this is mounted here all year long. I don't take this off. It's not difficult to mount. It just has four bolts here and four bolts on the other side but I have it set just perfectly the way I want it and I honestly believe you should have a tractor for each piece of cultivating equipment you have because the downside on all cultivation is the setup time. What we do is the basket is spaced six inches apart and I'll do two passes here. The first pass I'll be nursed right up next to the radishes down one side. I'll turn around and come back in the same bed up against the other side as close as I can go and that way I get within usually an inch to two inches of the crop even though I have six inch spacing on the basket. Here's the perfect field cultivator. This is something new for me that I'm just experimenting this year with. I hope it's going to reduce my reliance upon a motivator in my field bed preparation. Normally what my present practice is to subsoil in the spring, put the subsoil on a two shank subsoiler, run around the entire 30, 40 acre farm subsoiling. And then gradually manure and motivate and make beds as I need them. And then in the fall once again use the motivator to incorporate the residue. And I have some concerns about soil structure and I'm trying to look for alternatives to that especially the bed preparation in the spring and also again for witch grass control.