 Well, thank you everyone for coming and thank you obviously to Sarah for asking us to come and do this. I'm Adam. Obviously, this is Trent. We have another farm that's up in Alpina that was part of this project as well at Presquio Farm, Dion and Molly, and we talked to them yesterday morning. There was a lot of ice and we made the call as a team to not have him risk his life trying to get down from Alpina and taking 12 hours or so to get down here. We're going to present his part. He did put slides together. Obviously, we've worked closely with them and so we talked through his things as well. So we're going to start with a little bit of an overview about the project and then talk individually about each of our farms, how we, with our markets and how we looked at things a little bit differently and what worked well on our farm. We're really excited that one of the options with Sarah is to have a one-year or a two-year. We did a two-year and I think that I'm really happy we did a two-year because there's a lot of things that we figured out in the second year, especially with equipment as we start to learn it, that was really helpful for us to do better in the second year compared to the first and just kind of work through that learning curve. So again, so we were looking at scaling up some root crop production. So project overview, Sarah generously provided $22,241 is part of a Farmer Rancher Group Grant. Project number is FNC 171090. The participating farms were Green Gardens Community Farm in Battle Creek, Presquiel Farm in Pozen, which is just outside of Alpina, and then Tonhens Farm, which is us in Bath, which is just outside of Lansing. The problem or the challenge that we all have is that there is this increased demand for root crops, especially at the wholesale markets, carrots, beets, potatoes. We'll talk at some other crops that we learned in the second year had some more demand for. So there's this demand in the winter as local foods and regional foods have scaled up and it's something that we've all of our farms have continued to grow more each year and just not been able to meet the demand. So if we had more, we knew or we all know if we had more of them, we could sell more. And the challenge is those of you who grow root crops, we were talking with a couple of farms before this, is that there is a lot of labor demand, especially when it comes to hand scale, hand weeding, and as we try to scale up thinking about how we can do a better job of using some mechanization so that we can decrease our labor demands, increase our production, and still meet that price point for wholesale markets. We know no one's going to pay exorbitant or higher number or higher amounts per pound for some of the root crops. And so we need to be able to, while we can charge a little more, be able to decrease our labor demands as well. So all of us grow in high tunnels or hoop houses year round as well. And so what we have are year round markets where we have greens or other similar crops. And the root crops really piggyback on those greens and vice versa. The more kind of products we have at market, you know, you can imagine if you come to a market and there's seven different kinds of greens, someone's only going to buy so many kinds of greens. But if there's seven different kinds of greens and there's five different kinds of root crops, that customer is going to buy more products. Or in the wholesale market, that customer also is looking to buy more products. Another thing is that all of us are, we're not old by any means, but we're also not young anymore. And crawling around on our hands and knees is something we are trying to limit, especially when it comes to hand weeding carrots. So we're trying to think about how, you know, when we're 20, when we're, I think you're, I'm 40, you're 40. There, how? You look 40, Trent, sorry. Tough year, tough, tough year. So, you know, as we get older, trying to be able to farm for the next 20 or 25 years and not kind of beat our bodies up more than we already do. And then again, trying to decrease the labor. So our challenges, our opportunities in what we're trying to change in our systems, we're trying to mechanize seeding, weeding, harvesting, post-harvest handling and storage. So again, it was two years, our farm scales, we'll talk about, but Trent's is a little bit bigger, ours is in the middle and Deon and Molly's is a little smaller, we'll talk about those. But we're mostly moving through farmer's markets or other types of sales. And then we also have wholesale, all of us also have wholesale accounts. So we're looking mostly at yield sales and labor. And then our outreach activities that are part of this were on farm field days, conference presentations of which this is the second and trade journal article as well that we have submitted in manuscript form. So a little bit about our farm and what we looked at. So we're Ten Hen's farm. We've got about 17,000 square feet of high tunnel space. And then we farm about three acres of outdoor space as well. So not large by any means, but definitely enough to keep us busy. The farm is my full-time job, so on your left is our home farm. Our house sits right here on it. And then this property is about a mile away, which it's about two acres there. So we do restaurants, farmer's markets, multi-farm CSAs. And all those markets have continued to grow. And we've also started to sell into a number of wholesale accounts, some grocery stores, some mid-level distributors. And so that's really where we're seeing a lot of the opportunity to move these crops in the winter. So equipment that we purchased, we had a number of different cultivating equipment, so that's where we were looking to move towards on our farm. So we have some estines with different shovels. Deon and Molly did some discs, and they looked really closely at potatoes. So some hillars and trenchers. We looked at some different beet knives, and crescent knives to be able to weed in between the rows, and also our aisles. And so we're sort of at this funny scale of trying to, we are using tractor cultivation, we are using that, but we are very young at using that. And so we're trying to use some not overly advanced tools, especially because with our tractor we're doing blind cultivation, so we only have one tractor. So mostly what we purchased were cultivation tools like this. An undercutter to be able to lift some of the carrots and other root crops. And a jang seeder, so precision seeding. So something that we saw that was really a challenge for us was the amount of seed we were using and the cost that was going into that. We pushed this one by hand. You can buy a tool that mounts this to a tractor as well, to a toolbar. A flame weeder, and there's some carrots that we were looking at. So mostly what we looked at was carrots. We did some beets as well, but 2017 to 18, here's some yield, grow sails, and how much space or how much row feet we used. So I think the biggest thing that we learned when we said about that one year to two years is that we produced a similar amount, but we were really a lot better at using our space efficiently. And the biggest thing was we went from using four row. We have about a 22 inch bed, is what our tractor tires will form. Went from having two rows there, which we thought was adequate spacing to four rows in that space, and for us that increased the yield in that area. But it also really decreased the weed pressure. As those carrots grew up, there was much less space between those crops to be able to kind of shade things out once we got to that point. And I think if we wouldn't have done two, well, we probably would have learned that in the second year, but it was really nice to see that. The other thing that we saw was that as we got better at flame weeding and cultivating, that our labor from 2017 to 2018 decreased by half. And the big part of that was timing of the flame weeding. That was probably the number one thing. And then having those four rows instead of two rows. So the other thing that we're seeing is that we sold out about three months earlier this year than we did in 2017, even though we had the same amount. So that's a good problem to have, again, is we're seeing there's this huge demand for it out there. So overall lessons learned. We did have some tenderhose and beet knives. We used them less because they were longer. So as they come down, can imagine they come down like that and come out. And that spot that's flat is what's running between the rows. With the tractor that we have, we couldn't get in between the rows. So we used those more in the aisle ways where our aisles are wider. So what we've seen is that you can get smaller beet knives or we can cut those off and make them smaller, which I think we're gonna do next year. Just cut right through there so that we've got a smaller curve. We did earlier seeding in the fall, that was an idea Trent had. Did a lot earlier seeding and we're able to get larger carrots. So seeding more like the middle of July and the late instead of the end of July. We had better quality. The big thing for us too is we don't have a heated wash space. So in the winter, we've had a covered wash space, which is just another high tunnel. But being able to get those out of the field and wash in October, instead of getting them out of the field and wash in November or hope you get that 35 to 40 day degree in December and try to get everything out and wash and back in was much better to seed earlier. With the Yang Cedar or the Yang Cedar, it's a precision cedar. We had definitely like any tool, there was a learning curve. So in year two, what we saw is that we got things even closer spacing in the row. And again, we had four instead of two rows in the bed. And so talking with Trent and how what they've been doing with their cedar, we went from about 10 seeds per foot in the first year to about 14 seeds per foot and now Trent's around 20 or 22 seeds per foot that they're putting down. So we're upping that as well to try to get a better stand. Yeah, definitely, everything is especially on the carrots. Our carrots is overhead. Yep, with the what do they call the micro? The wobblers, yeah, thank you. The biggest thing for us is that we used to use an Earthway for all of our seeding. By using the Yang, we decreased the amount of seed that we're using for carrots by a third. And some of our other crops like Hacari turnips were decreased it by like 70% because those seeds are so small and the Earthway even taped was dropping so many. So we're saving so much money in terms on our scale for the amount of seeds. And then the bigger thing is also not coming back and having to thin them out. Yeah, but yeah. Definitely, especially for carrots, I think we get so much better germination just because once they get wet, they stay, you know, we still irrigating, but they stay wet. So we'll talk about that in a minute. Yep. So so carrots again, we said we seeded them earlier in 2018. We're packing them into 10 pound bags and we shifted that. So we had an increased demand. And for those in we need to increase our cooler size beats. We had a good wholesale market in 2017, not a great one in 2018. But what we saw is that 2018 we have a really and going into the future. We've got a really high demand for Hacari turnips, which are the white Japanese turnips. And then we did black and watermelon radishes seeded with the Jang seeder. And we didn't do that in 2017. We sold through those this year faster than we sold through carrots. So there's a huge demand for us right now for black and watermelon radishes, which are super easy to grow, really quick to grow, store incredibly well. So so Presky eel, here's their farm. They're about one and a half acres in production. They've got about 9000 square feet of high tunnels. They've been there for five years and they've got two and a half employees. Two of them are the farm mourners. So they hire in about a half time person. They have a split between farmers, markets, restaurants, groceries, a small CSA in some schools, and they do mixed crops as well. So lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, microgreens, root crops, potatoes, some alliums. And then they've got kind of this kind of 15 percent sort of one off things that they are trying out that year. So they do a lot of tunnel production of lettuce and spinach. They also do a lot of carrots and turnips and a lot of tomatoes. So the main focus for them in this project was potatoes. And so what they're trying to do is add their availability on the shoulder seasons. So they get a lot of big potato production up in Alpina, but they don't have a lot of kind of smaller scale direct market potato production up there. So they saw that as a really big opportunity to be able to push along with their greens, like all of us have seen. They're also in a place that's very, very rural and they have limited labor that they can hire in. So they're in a rural area and a rural county, plus they're also in a very rural part of that rural area and rural county. So for them, being able to minimize their labor through equipment is was was a really, really huge part of this. So one of the things that they had is a walking cooler that they added, which for them having their potatoes go into the winter and other root crops was imperative, otherwise they would not have been able to do this. They have a tractor cultivation tool bar similar to what we had where we are already where we attached the equipment to them. So they had those discs like you saw in the earlier picture in the Hiller. And then the big one, the biggest thing for them that they got this year was last year, sorry, and used for two years was this potato digger. So for them, they said there's no way they could have done what they did. Without having that potato digger and that cooler as well, and then the the hilling on the back of the toolbar. So for them, you know, they're pretty standard for their potato production. And then when they pull it out, they're putting it in their cooler at 50 and lowering that temperature down. So in 2017, they had about 4,300 pounds of saleable potatoes. They charged about average a dollar twenty four. You can see they were packing them into these bags like this and selling them at the market. And they ended up with about 2,500 net on about a third of an acre. So in year two, they also had the same amount. They had their challenge in year two was that they that they moved across kind of expanded their fire, moved across the street and they didn't have irrigation and it was a really dry year in 2018. So they had lower, much lower yields. But what they were able to do is from looking at their data from 2017, they they upped their price instead of a dollar twenty four. They were more like a dollar eighty four. So while they still had a lower net because they had a lower sales or amounts, they were much happier with the target number that they were looking for for their per pounds. So they're seeing that they need to definitely irrigate. But the the potato digger for them was and the digger and the harvester were imperative to have. So their payback period they looked at. So for equipment, this is a pretty good payback period about three and a half years if they if it wasn't bought through a grant. So what they've said is it's maybe not great for a cashstrap farm, but for a farm that's looking to invest in equipment over the long term, they're really happy that they that they did that. So. OK, so I'm Trent Thompson from Battle Creek. We're actually selling right now just a few miles away over at the Kalamazoo Farmers Market. My wife is over there. We do about six acres of produce. Been doing this is my 12th 12th year growing veggies. It's kind of crazy. We do about twenty five different crops. We're all organic, but we're not certified. We also have about two thirds acre under a greenhouse. This is all year round production, mostly greens in the wintertime and tomatoes, peppers, basil, ginger, summertime production. We have about three field employees and two part time people that work with us at marketing. Our marketing channels are CSA read about two hundred and fifty members. That's our target this year. We have two different CSA models. We have a market style and we also make in customizable boxes now. We have a farm stand at the farm. A couple days a week in the summer and kind of part time in the wintertime. We sell the Kalamazoo Farmers Market forty nine out of fifty two weeks of the year. We also sell to food hubs and restaurants. We're kind of getting away from the small restaurant accounts. Just not had consistent accounts for those. And so but luckily the food hubs are starting to buy more and more. OK, so the three pieces of equipment that we got for this grant were the basket weeder from Tillmore, the flameweeder.com thirty inch flameweeder that Adam also got. And our favorite tool on the farm, probably the barrel washer from voters. So initially, this basket weeder we had intended to use on our roots. But the more we thought about it with our small size on our farm, we only have six acres that we have to play around with. We really wanted to keep our our crop spacing the same. We wanted to keep putting three rows on a 30 inch bed. And if we would have switched over to doing two rows, it would have basically added on a whole nother half acre production space, which we didn't have. And so we decided to kind of last minute, even though it wasn't the intention of the grant, we decided to switch over to brassicas, which we do plan at two rows. We just got this tool this year, this patch year. Sorry. So what we did is we basket weeded these brassicas that were planted towards the end of July with a basket weeder. You have a very small time window to weed. It's pretty much you're just going to get the first flush of weeds. I think with roots, maybe you could get two passes in there. But what happens is, oh, I get to it later. But basically, the pros of this basket weeder are that it quickly eliminated about 80 percent of the weeds that were in those beds. We had very few fatalities and it made the hand hoeing that we had to do much more manageable. The bad parts are, we still had to go through there with the hand house. Very small window to use this tool and the soil conditions had to be just right. The soil was too wet. We couldn't have got in there. So these brassicas, you can see, like at four weeks, we had to use a different tool. This is a two row cultivator with sweep. So we had to go through there because the crop was already so big, we couldn't get back in there with the basket weeder. So this is a nice tool compared to hand hoeing or I'm sorry, wheel hoeing, which is what we did before. It's about three times as fast. For our scale, we weren't saving a ton of time. Like for this planting to do that with a wheel hoe, that might have taken an hour or hour and a half. And with the basket weeder, it took half an hour. And so we're not saving a ton of time. If you were doing a lot of brassicas or a lot of roots with a basket weeder on a much bigger scale, then you would see a lot bigger labor savings and a lot faster payback than our particular operation. We only do an acre of brassicas a year roughly. So the payoff for us is not that fast. It's not that fast. The other tool that we used for the grant was the flame weeder on carrots. Before this nice 30 inch flame weeder, which you can drive over a bed. Our bed size happens to be 30 inches, so it's just perfect for ours. We would just use the single hand torch, the red dragon. And that works, too. It just takes three times as long because we were going through at every row with that single torch. And so it's just this is three times as fast, basically. And it also actually does a better job because it's covering the entire surface and it's locking in that heat with the. The steel, basically. So our application. Was carrots. So we sewed 12 beds, three rows per bed, 300 feet per row. So 10,800 row feet on July 10. We flame weeded these about a week after. I usually like to sew a little bit heavier and then wait until I see the very first carrots come up and that's when we try to flame weed. We also did overhead. It works equally well, whether you overhead or you strip tape. The seed is just underneath the soil. So it's not hot enough to kill or to kill that emerging plant. This is probably one of the most rewarding jobs on the fire because if you can't see it, looks like we're not weeding anything. But if you were to get down right on the ground on your hands and knees and look, you would find thousands, millions, probably, of very tiny small weeds. The pros are it's simple to use, uses very little propane. You're not going to kill the plant with a tiny little propane they use for this. You wouldn't even grow this crop without a flame meter organically, right? So this will allow you to grow a bigger planting area. Cons you get burned. I always get burned every year. I always make this dumbest thing and I get burned. So we were able to grow a large area because we have this flame meter. Wouldn't have been possible without it. There are other applications for flame meter like this. You could, let's say, go over a bad area that you want to put salad in. So it has lots of applications here. We're out harvesting. We get about an average of one thousand pounds per bed. We record the weight as we as we wash. And so I'm not really sure what the total weight is yet, because we're still plowing through our roots, but we still have a ways to go. We'll probably end up with about 12,000 pounds. Barrow washer, this is an amazing tool. This tool has the best payback for us as a small farm. This is about four thousand dollars from from rotors. So we're washing tons and tons of roots of this. We wash about twenty five thousand pounds in a typical fall winter. But here you go. I mean, these rates are incredibly fast. The employees love this tool because they're not having to bend over and pick up roots. Before this, we would just wash roots with a sprayer on the end of a hose. It was so slow, painfully slow, hard on our body. The employees just love this tool. So just a quick little economic analysis. I estimate this is at least twice as fast minimum at a minimum compared to hand washing. And so if we were to run the numbers and say that we have fifteen dollars per hour labor cost for a whole winter at, let's say, we average three hundred pounds an hour washing speed, we'll literally save about eighty eighty hours of labor at fifteen dollars an hour. OK, so that's twelve hundred dollars of safe labor in one winter. So in less than about four years or three and a half years, we're looking at paying off that tool with safe labor in one winter. So this machine for us had the best payback compared to what we previously had. OK, super ergonomic like I talked about quality. The roots sparkle. We like to sell stuff that sparkles. It just looks so good. You want to eat it. There's no dirt on these roots whatsoever. Things will go in disgusting, just totally covered in dirt. And they come out sparkling. There is little maintenance, but not that that you do. It's like everything.