 Bonjour. Hello. My name is Amber Marlowe. I'm the Extension Director for LeCoudre Ojibwe Community College and we are at the Sustainable Agriculture Research Station talking about our SARE project for the Beginner Farmer Rancher Program. Our project was looking at the five or looking at five Ojibwe reservations in Northwest Wisconsin that the college serves and the the challenge is that they're all at a different capacity so some have no agricultural starting you know they don't have any gardens or farm and then some have a very strong agricultural focus and they have a garden that they've had for over 20 years so our goal was to really look at what grew better on each of those reservations so we did a research plot and that plot was 30 by 30 feet and it was designed with native indigenous plants it was designed with a three sisters garden corns beans and squash and it also had other things that the community would be interested in potatoes tomatoes cucumbers things like that so we really wanted to look at you know did red cliff did they grow a lot of corn or did St. Croix just grow a bumper crop of beans and really look at you know is there something you know back in the day we facilitated and exchanged goods with each other and we wanted to look at how we could recreate that model and so LeCoudre would be a food hub and we would take in the products take in the veggies from the different tribes and then create some value-added product around that so the research that we were looking at was taking that plot and seeing what what would grow best and to help us with that we were able to provide all of the tribes with a couple rain barrels irrigation supplies seeds hand washing stations so things that helps them with their post harvest handling we also helped them with garden carts to carry their produce with things basic needs from gloves and knee pads to just basic garden tools so everyone had the supplies that they needed we tilled plots for them we didn't do any soil amending so it was just what their soil was like to look at what that base research would show us I think the biggest thing that came out of the project though was just the partnership building was that we really connected with those communities we reached out and had interns we hired interns to to help facilitate the the program and the growing and just talk about sustainable agriculture we also offered educational workshops in the communities so canning basic gardening demonstrations composting so really looked at each community what their needs were and then offered those specific programs so one of the main focus areas of why we wanted to do this project was to look at historically Ojibwe tribal people anybody was able to sustain themselves and grow their own food and we were truly looking at that key for what food sovereignty meant especially to tribal people and that it's been said that a tribe is not sovereign unless they can feed themselves and so our goal was really to empower these individual communities that they can you know start their journey of being able to sustain their community members and and helping them out and increasing capacity and just creating those partnerships was really the key and foundation to this project