 Right, so like she said, I'll be discussing the irrigation that we installed on our property. First, I'll give a little bit of history. The farm is owned by my wife and me, Katie Flickinger and Christian Flickinger. The name of the farm is Renegade Acres and we're based out of Howell, Michigan. We've been farming on this piece of land. This will be our fourth year. So we've had three full years of production with the irrigation that I'll be discussing in this presentation. We started as Garden Horde in 2010 and that's actually a seed business that we still run today. So it started out basically as Katie's interest in plants and heirloom vegetables and varieties got bigger and bigger to the point where we needed to kind of get rid of some of the seeds because they were taking up too much space in our house. So we formed basically a seed business. We started selling the seeds to local gardeners, friends, family, and eventually small farmers as well. Like I said, we still run that business. It's actually gotten quite large as a result of the farm. We grow mostly heirloom produce on the farm and then we save seeds from every single thing that we grow, whether it's a flower or a vegetable. We save the seed from it. We store it and then we catalog it, we sell it. So that started in 2010, right after we got married. Then as a result of starting to sell seeds, we needed to grow more seeds. So we began an urban farming enterprise. We had eight urban farms in Wayne County and Oakland County and these are people's backyards. They had some larger backyards and we would till up all the grass or sod cut it and get rid of it and put in tomatoes or peppers or flowers or whatever. That became tedious though, driving to eight different garden plots in two different counties and watering them and dealing with thieves and dealing with the homeowners as well. So we decided to consolidate everything into a small farm. In 2015, after two years of searching and really annoying our realtor, we found a property that met a lot of our needs, not all of them, but you can't really be perfect. It was seven acres total of land. Of that, five was tillable or usable for production and of that, we have three in production right now, three acres in production. So that started in 2015 and still continues to today. So now we consider ourselves small farmers instead of urban farmers. There's a Kroger a half mile from our house so we're not really rural, but we're not in the middle of a city and in the middle of suburbs like we used to be. There's woods surrounding most of our field. So like I mentioned, Garden Horde was the original seed business which we still operate today and then Rent and Get Acres is the farm which we operate today. We sell all the produce at farmer's markets to restaurants, wholesale and to a distributor. And that's what we focus most of our time on spring, summer and fall. This was the first photo of our field when we moved in. This was taken about two days after we got the keys to the property. We tried to do the American Gothic, but that didn't work out. So we just did a funny photo with our large dog and a pitchfork. So I weigh about 100 pounds more in this photo which was about three years ago. The field was all corn and it was corn for about 30 years prior to us moving in. Corn every year. He never rotated his crops. He had special application licenses as very whenever he wanted. And so it was just corn, corn, corn. He came through, I'll show you another photo, but this was our very first plan for the farm. We opened it up in Google Earth. We put a bunch of squares everywhere. They're all a quarter of an acre in size. And this was the dream for the farm. The back half was a maybe because it was separated by this middle part of the field. It's a very long farm. It's 1,500 feet deep, 200 feet wide. So it's like a strip farm or a ribbon farm is what they used to call them. So we wanted to make sure all the beds were manageable sizes. Each bed essentially would be a different crop was what we thought. So you'd have like solar canaceous stuff here and then you have like beans here. And then we do a rotation. So we never grow the same crop in each bed year after year. Right now we're on a three year rotation. So this is the first year that we're actually able to put like tomatoes back in this plot because we put them there when we first moved in. This was the idea of where we'd put our first hoop house. As you'll see later, we actually did put a hoop house right there and we put more hoop houses in because we found that they are amazing for production. This is what the field looked like after that corn farmer did his very last harvest. And we told him that we were going to use the land and that we didn't want him using it anymore. He left a lot of residue, a lot of stocks, which took about two years to fully go away in our field. But we made do with them. This is the field after that winter. So this is before we broke ground for the first time. Some of the stocks broke down through the winter under the snow. You can see some string here. We're starting to lay out the beds and kind of get everything done. This is actually a really wide photo. I couldn't put the whole thing in there, but it's a long piece of land. One of the first things that we purchased with a grant from another organization was a small tractor, 24 horsepower tractor. We didn't think we needed anything bigger. We didn't think anything smaller would really do it for us. We knew that we wanted a tractor because the prior seven years we did everything by hand, hand-tilling, hand-weeding, hand everything. And we thought with three acres that was gonna be difficult for me and her alone. So we purchased a small tractor, like I said, with use of a grant, and that thing has literally gotten buried in mud down here and we've had to have it pulled out by the neighbors and all kinds of things. It's a trooper. And we did receive it while it was snowing out, which was interesting. So we went and kind of used it in the snow that first time just to see how it worked. So another one of the first things that we put up was fencing. We had a lot of problems with deers on our urban farming plots and we hate deer and they ruin any farmer's life who grows anything that deer like. So we put up seven foot tall fences with, you can't see it here, because it's just the poles, but it's a very strong plastic like netting that you can't really break through. And over the years, we've seen deer literally bounce off of it. They can jump over it. They can also crawl under it if they decide to go military style and dig. And I've seen deer do that as well, but it probably keeps out 98% of deer pressure that we would have had had we not had the fencing. So the entire production area is surrounded by this fencing. The next thing after the tractor and the fencing is we had to water our crops. So in the past with our urban farms, we would literally use hoses walking up and down the Isleways and watering our plants. A little rudimentary, but it worked. And we always had access to city water or some type of pressured water at those locations. Lawn sprinklers, easy, cheap, effective overhead watering on a budget. You just get a $5 sprinkler and hook it up and you're good to go. Garden soaker hoses, what we did our last year urban farming kind of got a little smart. We saw somebody using soaker hoses and that was like, we thought that was next level. They're very expensive in quantity and they're not that efficient at releasing water. They kind of just release a lot of water actually. And they don't have, you can't really string them for very long, like 400 feet doesn't really work with a soaker hose. So the idea was on the new farm that we wanted to do drip tape. After doing a lot of research, we decided drip tape would be best for us. We grow a lot of produce that you can't really get the leaves wet. So squashes, tomatoes, things like that, that if you get the leaves wet, you're just introducing disease. You're asking for your plants to essentially die. So we wanted to do drip tape for everything. Even if it's a crop that traditionally is overhead watered, we would just use drip tape. So it's best for water conservation because it releases a very small amount of water and to a very specific spot, right where your plant is growing. You don't water the isleways this way. You don't water outside of your plots. You water just the plants. And it reduces foliar fungal disease, like I said. So if you don't get the leaves wet, you're not spreading as many spores. You're not giving the environment that the spores like to grow on a chance. So the next thing is we wanted to automate this system. So we were used to turning on and off hoses constantly at the urban farms and driving to them literally just, you know, a half hour just to water something and then driving back home. So that was a real big pain for us. We didn't want to have to think about water. We wanted to think about everything else on the farm, selling and producing and, you know, weeding and harvesting and stuff like that. So it wasn't about being lazy. It was about having more time to do bigger things on the farm. And by automated, I mean, not thinking about watering at all. It just happens almost like nature, but it's ours. Open source basically just means that I wanted to use a system that I could change in some way. I have an IT background, so a technical person programming, computers, networks, stuff like that. So I wanted it to be something that I could maybe modify if I wanted to in the future. But I also wanted it to be affordable, even on the verge of free if necessary, and something that was easy to replicate so that somebody with, you know, a thousand square foot garden up to seven acres could use it and replicate it on scale. And then I wanted it zoned for individual crops. So if I'm growing tomatoes and lettuce in two different areas, they need different watering requirements. So I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just all or nothing. Like everything was getting an hour of watering all the time, because I could drown some crops that way and some crops don't like a lot of water. So we looked into a lot of different grants. The SAIR grant was nice because it was about, you know, learning something and teaching other people and educational style grants. So we applied for the SAIR Farmer Rancher Grant. Grants are amazing. We use grants in our farm a lot. We have one to two grants a year for something, whether it's like a local business grant from a local business group. Like the women's small business group gave us the grant for the tractor, whether it's research and education grants like SAIR, government grants like NRCS or FSA, they do what they call them cost shares, but it's the same as a grant. They're great resources. Don't ever feel bad about using a grant. They're wonderful to help a farm learn something new or do something they usually couldn't afford. So like I said, Nor Central SAIR is the specific SAIR that we're in. And then it was the Farmer Rancher Grant Program. They have other programs like the group grant. They have an education grant and a few others. And they're all geared towards different things. We were awarded the grant in 2016 and it was a two-year grant. So 2016, 2017, 2016 May to 2018 May was the grant period. We completed it last year in May and they awarded us $7,442. Very specific number. They based the grant award off of the budget that you submit during the grant process. So it's not just like a blanket flat amount. Grants like the SAIR grant require a lot of writing. There are other grants that don't like an NRCS grant. You just go into the office, tell them you wanna sign up for something. They usually felt the paperwork for you and then they let you know in a couple months. The SAIR grant, you gotta put some effort into it. So you gotta submit a paper just like you would in college or in high school. And it has to have information in it. It has to be accurate. And there's a lot of people reading it and putting some scrutiny on it for good reason. They're giving you money to do something. So they wanna make sure their money's going towards something worthwhile. And then documentation during the process. For SAIR, we had to do two updates and update at the end of each year. It's basically, what did I do? How did I do it? What was the outcome? They wanna know that and you have to submit it or else you don't get the rest of your grant. So it's very important. So for the irrigation grant, we had to choose a water source first and foremost when I was doing the budget. We had two possible locations on our farm. One was at the front of the house. There was a well with a pump for the house. So that was my first thought. Second was the very back of the property we owned half of that creek access. This creek, you can't see it, but over here is a huge lake, pond. I don't know what they wanna call it, but it's a large body of water. We could pump from that as well. And we could follow DEQ regulations and pump just the right amount and not get in trouble. The problem was, this is where we planned and putting our main section of crops, this three acres. This was a section that we had thought about and we do use for low irrigation crops and low deer pressure crops like garlic and things like that. This was a very steep 30 foot incline hill. So it's just useless. And then this was another flat area that we thought would be great for an orchard. If I was pulling water from the back here, the orchard would get a lot of cool water. But all this stuff up here, I'd have to somehow pump water 1,000 feet uphill with a very steep incline to get the water up here. There's no electricity back there. We'd have to figure out some way like a generator or a tractor run pump. And those aren't very automatable because I'd have to be back there pressing buttons and turning things on. So that was actually the original intention of the grant was that was proposed, running electricity back there and doing all that stuff. But it became very clear when we started to do the actual implementation research that running electricity for 1,500 feet to power a high powered pump is very impractical. You lose a lot of power going from here to there very quickly. And like I said, running it with a generator it didn't make sense to the intention of the grant. So the next best thing, we decided to upgrade the well on the house. So it had like a half power or a half horsepower pump. We upgraded it to two horsepower's and we then extended, and I'll show you photos of all this, we extended it right to here essentially to a well head for our use. And that means we only have to push the water a couple hundred feet and it's pretty level. And that was it. We could still do everything in the house. You could take a shower while you're watering the field and you wouldn't even notice. So the day came that I got to use one of the world's largest chainsaws to cut a hole in the earth. So we rented that, marked out everything, called misdig, had them come out and then I set forth on putting a hole in the ground, dug the hole with that large chainsaw. It's just, it's a ditch which here is the well and I don't have photos of it, but right after I did this, a well company came out and dug a big huge hole here and put a guy down there and they did their thing and then they gave me an extension right to here. And then from there it was all me. You can see that the ditch goes right through our driveway. So for about two weeks, we couldn't drive our cars past the moat of despair. We also had to jump over it to get into our house. But sometimes those things happen. So it is going around the house and going back to where I said right at the front of the field, you see the fence there. But we didn't stop there. We took the ditch and put it all the way to the back of the front half of the field because the intention was to install the irrigation and use it throughout the whole field. So we wanted to make sure we had entry points everywhere. We chose one and a half inch main tubing from the pump to go out to the field. The reason we chose that is two inches seemed a little too big. A lot of the attachments and things like that were easier to get at one and a half inch. And we did the calculations and it pumped enough water for our use. So like I mentioned, I wanted this to be easy to replicate. So all the stuff that we bought can be rented at local hardware stores or purchased at local hardware stores or online at irrigation stores. It's all residential sprinkler equipment, stuff that people would water their lawns with. So instead of watering useless grass, we decided to use it to water vegetables. There is a picture of us finally being able to get into our house without crossing the moat. And here is after I ran the line from the pump, this is where it meets our first piece of equipment. There's a couple of valves in the way to shut off and clean out stuff. But this is my first piece of equipment. It's called an RPZ or a reduced pressure zone valve. And we decided to put in this beast because it's a backflow valve that prevents dirty water from getting into your clean water. We put this bigger one in place because if we ever wanted to use fertilizer in the field, organic fertilizer were certified organic. I didn't want that in the drinking water in the house or in my shower or in my clothes. I just didn't want anything to come back into our water source. If you have city water, you're absolutely required to put one of these in for sure because you can't have municipal sources being contaminated with anything. This is the more expensive model of backflow prevention, but it's well worth it because it's guaranteed. It has like three different fail safes. Water cannot backflow into this no matter how hard you try. The smaller ones, they only have one check and they can be thwarted if they get a piece of sand caught in them. I quickly became a pipe fitting expert specifically with PVC. I learned how to glue and do all that cool stuff over and over and over again. Here are the valves that we used. Once again, residential sprinkler valves, very inexpensive. I think these were like $13 or $14 each. They run off of very low voltage so that they can be automated. They have their own anti-siphon valve in them so another layer of protection. Nothing can backflow into these even to get into the system. And here's how we installed them. So I made a custom manifold which just has three pipes coming out of it and then put the valves on it. All this is buried a couple feet in the ground and stuck them up so that I could access them and make sure that they were working. You can also bury these if you want but because these were in the field, I didn't want to have to dig holes every time I wanted to service them or put in service boxes. This is a bypass valve. This allows me to inject fertilizer into the system. And here's our first test. Yeah, that's actually at the back of the field. So that's pretty good pressure and volume at the back of our fields. That's 1,000 feet away from the main well. Here's me running the irrigation wire. A few extra things that we added was a filter. It's well water, it's gonna be dirty. It's gonna have dirt in it. So we put a really 55 micron filter in place. We change that once a year. Here's a furtigator. It allows us to inject liquid fertilizer into the system. I'm running a little short on time so I'm gonna go a little quicker through these but this is the actual open source sprinkler system. So it's a small computer. It's called OpenSprinkler. They have a newer version out. If you go to OpenSprinkler, I think it's .org. Just Google OpenSprinkler. But it's a great system. It's made for lawns. However, there's nothing specific about it that makes it only usable for lawns. A lot of small farmers actually use this to automate now, which is really cool. Because you can rename everything from lawn to, as you'll see in my next slide, to carrots if you want. So basically you install this, you run all the wires to this control unit and then you can open up all those black valves that you saw just by going on your cell phone or a computer and pressing a button. Here's what it looks like on my cell phone. So I can open up my cell phone right now and turn on any part of the field or turn it off. But that's manual. You can also do it automatically with schedules and things like that. You'll notice we've got peppers and greens, onions and garlic, tomatoes and potatoes, peas and beans, so it's all of our different fields that we have on the farm. This is us running drip tape the first year for tomatoes, I think. And then I don't know if you can see it, but it is dripping and getting the soil wet. So the data, this is all about data. So how is this helping me? Aside from the soft cost of my time, our time of going out there and opening up valves and closing valves and making sure everything's being watered, which is a huge saver. I don't worry about irrigation anymore at all. Everything is automatic. The first year we did it manually using the system. We would go in and press that button that says water the carrots every single time. We wanted to do that to make sure that we were comfortable with the system, make sure it actually watered because I wanted to make sure that everything was getting watered properly. So this is a log of the temperatures for the year. And then rainfall is the orange graph. So this was 2016. Quite a bit of rain that year actually. And then every yellow dot is when I pressed a button to turn on the irrigation system. So because this was manual, there's a lot of water being used. 64 rain days, which was 42% of our growing season. 51 irrigation events, which was 33% of those days. So that's 33%. So one third of the year I was watering the field this season, I should say. Because our growing season is 153 days. So we use an estimated 101,000 gallons of water. Sounds like a lot. It is, but it's also not. You put a lot of water into a field when you're watering it if you're trying to get inch deep and stuff like that. The next year we turned on the automatic features. We let it look at the weather. We let it calculate when to water. And there was an extreme reduction in the amount of water used. So we only used 42,000 gallons of water and 35 irrigation events. So let's go back 51 to 35. So it only watered 35 of those days. And it watered less. So this is a full water. That's a partial water. And that's like a barely watered. So you'll notice instead of being flat at full, it was calculating based upon previous rain events when it should water next. And this is all built into that system, that open sprinkler system. So we reduced our usage by more than half of the water. I just made this graph last night of last year's watering. And you'll notice it was a dry year. The rain was very weak when it did rain, except for if you go before this graph, we had tons of rain. And at the end of the graph, we had tons of rain, as we all know. But in the middle, it was very dry. But still, reduction of water even on a dry year. So last year we were at 42, 2018. I'm sorry. I forgot to change that graph title. 2018, we were at 37,000. So still reduced our water usage and only irrigated for 24 days, which is really cool. Cause we had larger yield last year, sold more, made more, but watered a lot less. And I didn't think about it. We didn't even, I didn't even know if, I didn't even know if it was irrigating half the time. I just assumed it was cause our plants were growing. That's how like, like hands off and out of my mind this is now. And then the overall trend, this is water volume that we used. This is number of days it rained and this is number of times we watered. So everything has gone down that needs to go down. I hope that next year it's even lower. This is the farm two years ago. We do use plastic culture now on the farm. And that was one hoop house. And then this is the farm last year post season. So after we did our last harvesting, we have three hoop houses now. And it's just a beautiful sunset. You can't see the field.