 My name is Mark Kwee, I'm the farm manager at Scattergood Friends School in West Branch Iowa and we've been lucky enough to receive three CER grants over the years and the first one started I think five or six years ago. We decided talking with some of our neighbors and other hort growers in the area they were really wondering whether cover cropping of green manures could supply enough nitrogen to really feed some of our nitrogen dependent vegetable crops and if whether planting green manures could keep up with brown manures, animal products so we're in a nice position where we have access to both livestock product and you know we're really interested in cover cropping so I took it to a science class it was our advanced biology class full of a lot of juniors and seniors and they would just happen to be doing a unit on experiment design so they really took the question and ran with it and they came up with a number of different approaches that we could take and we workshop them and came up with one which I think is really good that we'll be able to take a look at and in that we have three different crops each of them have different fertility needs from the soil so we're looking at beets, zucchini and broccoli and we do those they rotate so we try to stay ahead of diseases and try to keep the soils from becoming too depleted and we have two different plots one plot receives animal product we graze our turkeys and sheep there and we also have a manure spreader so we will spread manure on top we also cover crop it as well but the other side receives no intentional manure I mean they may get some rabbit poop or something like that but but it's really just cover cropped and we started with oats and field peas five years ago and in the first year there was no difference and then what we started to see in the second and third year we started to see quite a bit a difference primarily in the zucchini it seems like they would get attacked by cucumber beetles and wouldn't be able to grow through that the harm that was done by the beetles very effectively so it became pretty clear to me that we were having some challenges there so we switch from oats and field peas I started using hairy vetch and just one year of hairy vetch it really seemed to bring the fertility back up and and since that time we've really seen the numbers have been like really close to each other we've been doing that experiment for I think we're in our sixth year now I collect the data through the summer one of our science classes takes it in the fall and then they compare it to past years and they learned some graphing and and really look at the different numbers and then we can just kind of see how things are doing from year to year so that's been a really fun great experiment for us and we've really enjoyed it and and we're still using some of the products we were able to get a little field cultivator which we used to tear up some of our cover crops and some electron netting to put the sheep and the turkeys on there and a nice solar charger so those things that we're still using and and and we bring the animals back there every fall when we're done harvesting those products more recently we've we received a grant for doing some worm composting and in the last three or four years we've been really scaling up on our vermicomposting we've started with like a lot of people you know just in buckets or small rubber-made containers but but we've been growing and growing and growing that and and we really see it as a an opportunity for us to I try to import as little fertility as possible I want I want us to generate our fertility I want to sort of create a closed loop fertility loop on our farm and that's one way that we can really do that instead of you know purchasing in compost or manure from another farm you know what can we be doing here and since we're a school we generate a lot of paper waste and instead of driving that to the recycling center if we can just recycle it you know compost it on site and have that feed our crops that would really go a long ways towards us again maintaining our soil health and and and keeping the fertility up in our land and the biggest challenge in Iowa is like how do you keep the worms alive through the winter you know it gets cold here and we can't really move the worms indoors very easily because it can get smelly and there can be you know some some you know liquid runoff from the various containers so I went to a conference the Moses conference up in La Crosse and went to a workshop by John Birnbaum from Michigan State and he had talked about how they had started had dug some worm pits into the into the ground inside some of their high tunnels so using the insulative capacity of the soil and then lining those with cinder blocks and maybe even putting some blue board in there you line the whole thing with a landscape fabric so the worms don't you know migrate out of your system but but really taking advantage of the the insulative capacity of the soil so again Sarah has as funded that experiment for us or that trial that that project for us so we're standing outside the greenhouse now and and we've started digging pits in two of the corners one of them keeps flooding which has become a problem but there's another one that is that is doing pretty well so we're going to enlarge that and hopefully we'll be able to to keep our worms through live through the winter so we can keep generating lots of vermicompost and feeding our crops well part of the design of that experiment also is to create a series of raised beds inside the high tunnel so we'll be able to fill those with various types of we'll be able to just move some soil from the inside the high tunnel and and we'll be able to keep track of some that we will add vermicompost to others we won't and see how that affects productivity on those over time so again that'll be interesting to see and we'll see what happens over the next you know three four five years with that another project that was just funded this last spring is looking at pollinator habitat everybody is really concerned about pollinators now and and we're no different the really important to everything that we do and and I've always tried to have various cover crops flowering I planted a lot of buckwheat keep that going throughout the year but also was had encountered some highly erodible land and we were seeing just with heavy rains recently there was a lot more topsoil movement than I was you know wanted to see so I reconfigured the layout of our farm a little bit tried to take out that out of production thought we need to put this in some sort of you know perennial what could we do that would also be beneficial to pollinators so we're looking at a really forb heavy prairie re-establishment so we're getting a mix I think from prairie moon and and we'll be planting that in the fall for years we've had a number of different colleges coming out and sort of doing pollinator surveys at our farm so we have lots of data about like what has happened before we planted this pollinator habitat so hopefully schools will keep coming back and we'll be able to take on this challenge of doing these pollinator surveys and look and see if that by adding you know a good half acre or more of pollinator habitat will that really help increase their populations and then we'll have basically will be incorporating like what the big conventional guys called prairie strips but we'll be doing it on a much smaller scale on our few six acres so we'll have you know prairie strips planted in various parts around the farm and hopefully that will encourage the pollinators to to establish here and and do their work for us so again thank you Sarah for for all of that