 My name is Diane Nordel, and this is my husband Eric. We've been farming here since 1983 in the village of Beech Grove, Pennsylvania. Our farm is about 90 acres, but we're mainly farming about seven acres under cultivation managing for vegetables. We supply locally to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which is about 25 miles away. We do a farmer's market once a week, and we supply restaurants and grocery stores. One of our goals when we started farming here was to keep this a two-person operation, and also we wanted to rely on horse power completely, not only for tillage, but also for fertility, so that limits our labor, our power, and our fertility source. And consequently, we rely on cover crops extensively. In fact, we take half of the land out of production each year just to grow cover crops. This has helped tremendously with weed control, maintaining the tilt of our silt-loan soil, as well as preserving moisture, which is an issue for us because we don't have irrigation. One reason we got into reduced tillage is really to optimize the benefits of the annual cover crops. Intensive tillage can also often destroy everything we've gained, so by minimizing the depth and intensity of tillage, we can preserve more of those benefits. Becky, Ben. We like to use the horses for several reasons. First of all, I just love working behind the horses. That's what gets me going, sustains my interest. They also save the fossil fuel and pollution associated with that, and of course, there's less problems with compaction and so on. You could take anything we're doing here and do it with a tractor, probably with fewer passes and maybe a lot less aggravation. It was about 10 years ago that we started experimenting with reduced tillage using this ridgetill system. For years before that, we'd been using a winter-killed cover crop, just working it into the surface of the soil for early-planted vegetables. That worked great for conditioning the soil, erosion control, moisture preservation, but it was a problem in springs when it was cold and wet. We started planting the cover crops on these ridges. It allows the soil to warm up and dry out faster in the spring. It also enables us just to peel the top off the ridge, moving the cover crop residues into the pathway. If there are any winter weeds on the ridge top, it also sheds them into the pathway where it's easy to control them with mechanical cultivation. One of the differences of doing this kind of minimum tillage with the horses is we have to break it down into several steps. With a tractor, you can do all the ridge-building steps in one pass. I simply don't have the physical strength to raise and lower that much equipment on the old riding cultivator, so we do it in three steps. We're broadcasting the seed, we build the ridges, then we come back, inter-seed the pathways, and then the final step is to roll the ridges with a cold-up packer. The idea is we want to kind of level them, make a nice, flat seed bed, and also to create better seed-to-soil contact for the cover crop seed and help us bring the moisture up to germinate it. Typically we plant oats, like you see here, and the peas coming up. This makes a nice mix of a small grain and legume. In this planting, we also have sorghum-sudan grass to boost the carbon and cover crop biomass. These steps we use for preconditioning the beds for planting in the spring. The residue cutter chops the residue. It also makes those slits in the soil kind of hairpins the residue in, so then we can go over with this rotary hoe and just lightly till the surface of the soil. This makes it possible for us just to make a furrow for transplanting, we'll just go right into it, or we'll scrape the top off the ridges for direct seeding. It probably looks like these tools aren't doing much, but that's really the whole point. We're just trying to loosen the top inch of the soil. The residue cutter slices the residue, it also cuts about an inch deep in the soil, and then the rotary hoe loosens that up. You can see we have this sort of crumb mulch on the surface. When we peel this back to plant, you know, we'll have a nice seed bed for planting. Here's a field where crops have been planted into our ridges till system. The previous fall, we built the ridges and planted a cover crop of oats and peas, and then they winter killed. They die back, and the following spring, what we did was we go through with the residue cutter to cut up the residue, and then we went through with the rotary hoe to kind of loosen up the beds, and then all we did was we made a narrow slit in the soil and then planted the transplants of onions and leeks. Because the residue breaks down so fast, doesn't really provide wheat control or moisture control, so what we do is we put down a wheat straw in the pathways in order to preserve moisture. But the weeds have not been a big problem here. We haven't done any hand-weeding in this field at all. I'm trying not to say any oms. Oms. Oms. It's not a big deal, but you'd rather not see yourself bleeding or saying anything. Give us a shot. I'm excited because he's here now, sir. He's an exciting guy. We're in the area where he already is. Okay. Brush your hair too. There you go. I mean, it's wet. Yeah, I was looking at the camera. Okay, camera's not there. Yeah, just look around. You want to move forward a little bit? I'm bugging her. And you'll get that straight 24 acre. Mark? Is it nice? Nice scene there? Okay. So tell me when I can start. In the meantime. And I gradually worked the whole farm and now with the strawberries, the last couple years we've zoned till the strawberries where everything we grow is, that was a lot, but really good. I should say a couple years ago. A few years ago. Don't date it. Yeah, because... Yeah. It was in 2020 when they're watching this. Right. Okay. The scraper on the ridge, these are... Sorry. I can't do this. Let me start over again. Let me... Hi, Baron. How are you? Ready? We're rolling. Oh, don't go too far. Get close there. Okay. Ready? So like I'm 10 years old. Hi, huh? Yeah. Thanks. Have a nice day. Thank you. Bye. Bye. See you. Bye, bye. Bye! Take care guys. Bye! Bye. Bye. Bye.