 Well, welcome to our next presentation. We're pleased to have Curtis Millsap. He is a vegetable producer from Southwest Missouri, specifically the Springfield area. And he's going to be talking with us about trying to extend the vegetable growing season with quick low cost hoops. So Curtis. All right. So just so I know who I'm talking to, how many of you already grow vegetables under low hoops, like little three foot tall hoops, more or less, some of you. So my research was focused specifically on how to set those up efficiently and economically and then keep them there, which turned out to be, in my environment at least, that's the biggest challenge, wind. But so first I'm going to give you a little bit of a snapshot of what we do otherwise to protect our crops and why that led us to looking at low tunnels. So this is a nice kind of panoramic shot of our farm. We've got 20 acres, two acres of vegetables. We focus in on high value crops, a lot of salad crops, tomatoes, squash, that sort of thing. We don't mess with winter squash anymore. We've pretty much dropped doing potatoes. And there's probably a couple other big area crops that we just kind of said we can't afford to do those with the labor pool we have. Guys with big tractors and big acreage is doing better. This is my family. I have a lot of help in five years. Right now, not so much. You act like you know what I'm talking about. So this is kind of an overview, overshot of our farm the year we bought it. And the reason I show you that is I want you to look at all the green space and see this is now, and I apologize for the perspective change, but what we've done is we have progressively added more covered space. We realize that we get higher quality and better yields out of those covered spaces than we can ever do out in the field. So but the limitation on us, there's two limitations on adding more space under cover. One is cost. That's an obvious one. It costs a lot of money to put up a tunnel, even with a grant. It still costs money and it costs a lot of labor, which is the other limiting factor on us right now. Land, I feel like we still have not reached a point where we are utilizing our land as effectively and efficiently as we can. But the capital and the labor are both issues for us. So why are we protecting crops? I hit on that a little bit. Better yield, better quality. But the other thing is this happens. Things are going along so nicely. It's warm and cozy and then it starts icing and snowing and then this happens to your crops and this happens to your shoes. This was actually the end of May last year. We did this all May last year and then stopped for a long time. And this happens and that causes this. And this could also represent insect damage, which is a big issue. We do grow organically. We're not certified, but we try and use organic practices. So we deal with a lot of pest issues and of course we have some organic pesticides that will work against things like squash bugs, but we'd rather not use them. It's easier if we can exclude them. So one option for covering crops is this. It's our big greenhouse. It's a structural greenhouse. It's 30 years old. It's showing its age a little bit, but really I don't see any reason why I won't go for another 30 years. The metal structure is real sound. It was a heavy-duty greenhouse when it was put in. And it's 6,000 square feet. Here's when we had the plastic off one side a couple of years ago. You kind of see how it's laid out inside. We're constantly figuring out ways to maximize our space in there because it's a very expensive space. Fortunately, when we bought the farm, it was more or less devalued because where we live, our 20 acres couldn't see that real clearly in the overhead picture, but we're surrounded by suburbs. So people who buy farms in our neighborhood bulldoze them down and build houses. So when we bought our farm, it was really valued for the land, which is great because we wanted a farm. And so we got this greenhouse. I won't say for free, but we didn't exactly have to pay for it. We do some heat in our greenhouse. These are the kind of representative of the two different ways that we heat our greenhouse. We do have wood heat, and we have a little bit of propane. We no longer use forced-air propane heaters. That's just too expensive. It's too much risk economically for us. But we do still use a propane hot water heater, an in-demand to heat our ceiling table some. And then this barrel is also hooked up to heat water for that seedling table. So our greenhouse is heated. We get some pretty amazing crops out of there. This was a bed of choy and lettuce a couple of February's ago, and it's a real pleasant environment to work in. It is very demanding because everything has to maximize the space it's in. Everything has to get vertical. And cucumbers grow fast enough. You try and keep them growing up a string, and then suddenly you can't trellis them fast enough to keep them happy. So it's very labor-intensive, but that's because it's so capital-intensive, it's the most valuable real estate on the farm. Second place is our high tunnel. And we've got now, between our high tunnels and greenhouses, we've got almost 10,000 square feet. So we've got about 4,000 square feet of high tunnels. And every chance we get to add one, we do it. Because the quality we can get is so high. Plus, it insulates our labor pool because if we have a rainy May like last year, there are only really two options for working in that, and we can't till the soil. We can do no-till, and we did some of that, but we can also work in our tunnels. The weather's still fine in the tunnel. And we have found that to be a really big advantage to covered spaces. Just another example of interior high tunnels. We've done them all different ways. We've done them no-till and aggressive-till, and all of ours now are mobile. We stopped building stationary structures. Everything moves because it's too valuable to sit in one place all the time. That's a little 20 by 50 tunnel. Our other tunnel is a 30 by 96. That's this one here. This was an NRCS tunnel. It's a great tunnel. It's a Zimmerman from Morgan County Seed. We really were happy with it. We still are very happy with it. It is. Yeah. Don't tell NRCS that. But yes, it's on skids. Three by three steel skids. We fabricated it ourselves, figured out the dynamics of it, and we're really nervous the first ever windstorms, but it hasn't left, so that's good. We do stake it down aggressively. We put T-posts in, and we shove them in with the tracker, and then we pound them in as deep as we can get them before they get to solid rock, which is not that far in our area. But it's deep enough. They kind of crammed themselves in there. So far it hasn't even really budged any more than ground-mounted tunnels do. And then we have these little tunnels that we built some of as well. And what I love about tunnels is they are versatile. They're inexpensive to build. This is a little 32 by 12 tunnel. The cost to us on this one was maybe $300. It was really cheap, and we bent all the hoops ourselves. We're kind of handy that way, and so that's an advantage to us, but you've got to take your advantages where you can get them. So here we are moving one of those two dollies in the back, like furniture dollies, or appliance dollies in the back with a person on each of them, and a tractor pull in the front of it. So we've actually moved them down the driveway. It's kind of fun. Drive a tunnel down the driveway. Well, like I said, versatility is great. We can use them for poultry. We can use them for veggies. I like things that have multiple uses. It's nice, because if you're going to invest capital, make sure it's going to work for you in the long run, and that means flexibility. So we started doing row cover the first year we grew, and row cover is amazing. Great results in germination, frost protection. It insulates. It protects. The moisture right up against the top of the soil, where it germinates really well. But once stuff starts to grow, it does cause problems, because it's pushing on the top of the plants all the time. So growing tips get damaged. If you're using it for frost protection, we have found that anything that's resting on the plant gets frosted. And so we had to get this up off of our cover. Now, not all the time, we do have things. We just use flat row cover on still, lower value stuff. And the great thing about flat row cover is you can keep it on the ground. The simplest way to do that that we found was just to use shovels full of dirt. So we'd go out and lay our row cover out, and we could use huge pieces of row cover that way, and just walk down the row, and every three feet, we'd toss a shovel full of dirt. And if I was really concerned about it, if it was a great big piece, I'd make sure that that shovel load ended up back in the hole that I took it out of with row cover in between the dirt and the hole. So we learned a little bit about keeping it intact, and we're a hilltop farm. We're not in Kansas, but we do get a lot of wind. So we get a lot of flapping, and we learned pretty early on that if it's flapping, eventually it's going to leave. So you better stop it flapping. So I'll show you how we accomplished that with row cover. This was another issue with flat row cover is sometimes it gets nailed to the ground, and you can't harvest that as it turns out. But what was cool is when the snow and ice finally melted off of this particular patch, we peeled the row cover back, and the plants were beautiful. So they had little frost damage on the growing tips, but really it stored them very well. And this was a huge piece. I don't even remember how big this was, but it seems like 18, maybe 20 feet wide. And I was kind of leery about using something that big, but it did turn out to be pretty simple, because when you went to harvest, you only had to loosen up one side and peel it back. Now you had to wait until it wasn't blowing to do that, or you'd end up with your... I do have some row cover and trees. Nicely decorated trees. It's very difficult to get out of a locust tree, as it turns out. And so this is why we're covering in the winter, at least in part. You know, snow and ice, it's really representative. What we have learned about row cover, and we didn't learn this on our own, I mean, we really are modeling most of what we do after Elliot Coleman. But he lives in a forest surrounded by tall trees, and we don't. We live on top of a hill surrounded by short trees, and lots of wind. What we did learn from him, though, is wind is the issue. More than temperature. So you look at the numbers on row cover, and it's pretty discouraging. You only get like two degrees of frost protection. That's not much. But it blocks the wind, and it keeps the moisture high in there. And so the plants continue to grow. You don't get a big temperature rise. But in my climate, that's really handy. Because if you get a big temperature rise, where I am in February, that means you're baking your spinach. Or even December last year. You know, we get these warm, sunny days where if you have a plastic cover over something, it's gonna bake it. And so a row cover does a nice job of self-venting and keeping it warm. So, I mean, warm enough, but not too warm. So this is what we're going for. These were rows, row covers we built a couple years ago. And this was in a pretty good size field. The field length is 230, 240 feet long. So these were nice, long tunnels. And they worked pretty well. We did have some issues with them, and I'll show you some pictures of what issues we dealt with. But this is the target. Now, you all probably, any of you who've messed with low tunnels, either own or have seen the little hoop bender that Johnny sells, and the other places they're now selling. And I looked at the numbers, and I had to make 250 of these hoops. And I thought, I don't think I want to do that. So we started looking at our options. This was the actually leftover stack of our pipe. My brother and I split a pack of 500. So actually we had to make 500, 250 for him, 250 for me. And we figured for that it was worth taking the time to figure out how to mechanize it. And we wanted to end up with this as our result. Evenly bent, uniform tube that were not kinked anywhere, and that we could get done in a reasonable amount of time because nobody really wants to spend three days bending hoops. So what we did, let's see how this plays, we set up a mechanized system. I may have to do that manually. But we set up a mechanized system that allowed us to run these through a machine. So that's what mechanized means, of course. So we bought a tubing bender from Harbor Freight. You all can condemn me for buying things from China now, I know. But that's what we could afford. And so we bought a tubing bender from Harbor Freight. We installed it on a pallet so it wouldn't move while we used it. And then we got out the welder and got creative and attached a drill to the end of it. And second time to charm maybe, we'll see. And so what we ended up doing was basically hillbilly-izing it. And we got it to work. So we were pleased with that. And one day I'm going to get to show it to you, don't worry. We'll go the other way. We'll just show it through the... Yeah, we'll get it to pull up here and then we'll see if we can center it. Thousands, and I'll sell you one if you want. The Harbor Freight portion of this was, I believe it was about $150, that roller. And we've used it on much bigger tubing as well. I showed you those 30 by 12 tunnels. And we've been able to roll those with this as well. That tubing will roll with it. In fact, it doesn't actually have rollers that are set to go this small, but we made it work. It flattened them just slightly, but it wasn't enough to matter. And then we welded a piece of rebar to the... Let's start this slide show again here. So we welded a piece of rebar to the driveshaft of the bender. We just put that in the chuck of a heavy-duty drill. It is not a recommended use of a drill, as it turns out. A little high RPM, really, for what we wanted to do. But it worked. And so that's what the mechanism looks like. I would recommend attaching it to something solid, because it wants to move. There's a good shot. You have to pay attention. It took two of us really being on it. But as it comes out of the bender, as long as you keep it vertical, you don't get a warp. So yeah, we have some that... I should have taken a picture, I have some pictures of them, but they're like curlicues. You can really get... Yeah, but that's not what we're trying to do. Yeah, so that's basically it. You can see the... This is a safety switch over here. Small girl with hands on triggers. As in, let go, let go! So it went without incident. It all worked quite well. We bent 500 tubes in less than an hour. I mean, it was cranking. It was actually so fast that it was... I felt like a Lucille ball in the chocolate factory. It just kept piling up, and I couldn't stack them up as fast as they were coming off the bender. So the issue was me, yes, again. So that's our hoop. These are now two years old. We store them, just leaned up against the tree out in the field. They seem to be lasting quite well. I do think they'll have a life span because we're sticking galvanized metal that's not really made for ground contact into the soil. But I still think we'll have a pretty good life span there. So here's trick number two. We went out and we stuck them in the ground the first year. It was September, so it was dry because that's what September often is. And we had a hard time getting them in the ground far enough. It rained and they fell over. So we went out and we stuck them back in the ground. It rained and they fell over again. And by that time, we were tired of sticking 500 ends into the ground by hand, bending over for each one. So we figured out that a pipe wrench will fit very handily on the bottom there. I guess I have another shot of it, but pipe wrench fits on the EMT. It's metal conduit, half-inch metal conduit. You just adjust it so it barely fits on there. It slips on and then when you step on it, it cams and it locks in place. You can use your body weight as opposed to your back. Then if you really want to do the efficient way, at my farm we would think hard, not work hard, right? So then we got out the duct tape and we duct taped the pipe wrench to our boot. So then the two of us walked down the field like this and we'd hike a leg and we stomped that sucker in the ground and moved to the next one. It looked incredibly ridiculous, but it works quite well. So as opposed to bending over each time. I couldn't talk my apprentice into doing that this year. He didn't think it was as funny as I did. But it did work really well and it saved me bending over another 250 times. So that's worth it. The pipe is 10-foot. It comes in standard 10-foot sections. It covers a 6-foot wide bed. It ends up being about 3-feet tall. There's a good shot of the pipe wrench. So you got a 3-foot tall hoop, 6-feet wide more or less. Ideally you put about 8 inches in the ground. Sometimes you can't get quite that much. Sometimes you can get a little more. Deeper tends to be better. Then you lay out your sandbags down the row. You need a sandbag for each hoop. We've experimented with different hoop spacings and we're still experimenting. 6-feet to 10-feet is kind of our range. I wouldn't go any longer than that. I think that it tends to get a little flappy on you. My brother goes 5-feet. But he's kind of that way. At the end we learned to put a one on a cross. Because the end one wants to pull in. It always wants to fall down because it's got tension on it. The reason it has tension on it is because after you've rolled out your row cover like this. You roll it all the way down the row and then you tighten it. You can see this is starting to get tight. We stake it down at one end and then go to the other end. Stake it down and pull it out really tight before we unfold it. These are our stakes. Wood stakes because then I brush hog over them in the spring invariably. Tie them out just like that. A nice long angle. You can't tear the stuff in mass. If you hold onto it like that and you can pull with all your body weight. At least my body weight. It doesn't tear the stuff. It just gets nice and tight. Then you start unfolding it. Lay in the sandbags along the side. This is your end result. If it's nice and tight it doesn't leave. We've had really good results. What's the weight of the... The lightest, Ag 19. We've experimented with some of the heavier stuff and we continue to. We value sunlight over solidity at this point. Because the winter growing there's just not enough sun. That works well. We've been able to set out squash in early March doing this. Without really risking the squash. We've got a bunch of tunnels right now out that are covering things like green onions and beets and carrots. Baby lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, turnips. I don't cover turnips. I take that back. There's a good example, kale and arugula. And they're versatile too. Again, I like the idea of if you're going to invest in something, make it something that works more than one way. This had different bed spacing. We just put two side by side and still managed to make it work. So the pipe is half inch, EMT. I don't know what that stands for. Electric metal conduit with a T at the beginning. So here's the money shot. Lifespan of a greenhouse, if you figure it at 30 years, cost you 38 cents a year to operate per square foot. Just to have the structure. That's my greenhouse. Yours may be different. A high tunnel, 22 cents a year with a lifespan of 15 years. That may be optimistic if you live in Kansas, right? I've had so far of the tunnels I've built, none of them have lasted more than three years. So this might be very optimistic. Low tunnels. Note where the decimal is. Point zero two dollars. So it's 2.7 cents per square foot. Now it's a yearly investment, but it's the same thing with the high tunnels in greenhouse. So it is a great low cost way to get into year-round growing. It does not have the level of protection of a greenhouse or a high tunnel, but it also costs, you know, a tenth of what a high tunnel costs per year. Plus the upfront investment is also important to note even the upfront investment is only nine cents a square foot. So you can be out there, you know, for nine cents a square foot protecting crops. So where do we get sandbags? U-line. U-L-I-N-E. But, you know, I've also ordered them from sandbags.com and they actually were the same sandbags. So, but it's worth pricing around a little bit. Some of them are cheaper than others. Sandbags are, sorry, I don't know that off the top of my head. I believe they are about 20, 25 cents a piece. They're not too bad. Pretty cheap. There's a standard size. I think that it's 11 by 14. No, 11 by 22. It's a standard sandbag size. Yeah, just the bag. I fill them with compost because then when they finally degrade after three years, then you just dump the compost on the garden. Better than sand. Yeah. I already have raised beds that I would like to make a tunnel and they're four feet wide. How long are we going to pipe? Well, you could still do a 10-foot pipe. You can bend it tighter. Although not with a tubing bender like that. Six foot. Well, it's covering two growing beds and six foot wide. But the other thing you can do, and here's what we've done on our narrow beds, is just turn the hoops on bias. They're actually at an angle. And you can shorten them down to as narrow as you want that way. It makes the row cover sit a little funny, but we haven't had a problem with it. It works really well. It also gives you more height at the edge of your tunnel. Have you tried to do a row cover inside a row cover? Because I know Coleman talks a little bit about that. Yeah, it's on my list of things to do, but I have not given that a shot yet. Just a suggestion. Pretty cheaply, you can also rent like a gardener bender, a pipe bender at any rental place, and for maybe 50 bucks, do everything you need to do one day. Yes. So there are rental, there are definitely rental benders out there. Heavy enough that you're not going to have to attach them to anything or do anything. Yeah. Stick them in the ground. So we start out. It works best with three people. One person carries the hoops and measures the spacing. They set a hoop out. One person on each side bends down and just shoves it in the ground to get it started. We got to get it in about three or four inches just to hold it up. Then we walk through with that pipe wrench and you put the pipe wrench on the conduit, point it out. You're basically creating a step on the conduit. So you're attaching your pipe wrench, but you don't have to adjust it each time. You just adjust it so it just barely bigger than the pipe. And then as soon as it gets any torque on it, it locks onto the pipe. You do have to be mindful. If you're not careful, you'll bend your pipe, you know, like spaghetti, but it's not, as long as the soil's wet, it works pretty well. So at the ends, we have a stake out about six to ten feet beyond our row cover, our last hoop. We put a stake in at a 45-degree angle or whatever the rocks allow. Then we tie, we happen to have a lot of drip tape sitting around that's no longer usable. So we tie that around the end of the row cover and then tie that off to the stake, go to the other end, do the same thing, but this time, before we tie it to the stake, we yank it as hard as we can get it, so it's really tight. And that's what keeps it from flapping. Yeah, side-top. It really doesn't matter where it rests while you're tying it off, but then you do, once it's that tight, actually, as you spread it, and of course this is not a windy day activity, this is a, but we've done it in reasonable breezes. It's not like plastic on a high tunnel, it's less than that, but as soon as you start spreading it, as soon as it's tight, it sits on the hoops pretty well. So the sandbags really are for windy conditions, that's what holds it down then, but we find the hardest part initially is spreading that row cover without tearing it. It's just so tender and we have several casualties that way. And the other issue is if you have wildlife that likes to gamble through your fields, then you will have problems there too, but what are you gonna do? One year. And sometimes not that long. But I mean, we typically get a good season out of it. We'll harvest out of this until January or February. I don't like throwing away big mounds of row cover each year, but I will say that a thousand-foot roll is five feet wide and about that big around when it comes off the roll. So you're not really throwing away that much material. It looks like a bunch once it's all out and bundled and it takes up a lot of space, but it's my justification, thanks for asking. And the winner, I don't. I don't have to irrigate in the fall and winter. Does most of the stuff you're planting for weed control? No, what we do... Yeah, so what do we use, plastic mulch under there or some other kind of mulch for weed control? We have some no-till beds that we're doing row covers on, and those are heavily mulched. And those are all transplanted. All of our direct seed stuff is not on plastic and a lot of our high value stuff turns out to be direct seed, which is part of why it's high value because you can't plant beets on black plastic. So, or maybe you can, but we don't. And so what we're doing there is getting... We're giving it a month to grow or even two months to grow before we cover it so we can do some aggressive hand weeding. And then we let the weeds go. Sometimes we'll go in on spinach and long-lived things like that that we're going to pick right on through the winter. We may do a mid-winter weeding, but we've also found that the weeds, the winter weeds are just not aggressive. You know, it's not as much of a problem. How do we deal with holes that develop? I would like a good answer for that. So far what we've done is take another piece of row cover and just drape it over the thing. If it doesn't tear through the entire cover, we've found that one hole on a 220 foot row or 100 foot row is not actually that big a deal. We'll lose the plants directly under the hole and maybe two feet back in each direction. One year we had some puppies who really got into it and shredded a bunch of our cover and I was still amazed at how much protection we got out of these covers that look like Swiss cheese because it is wind protection. We're going after more than actual frost protection.