 I hope I can be of help to those who are in attendance. We started out on our certified organic farm just growing produce. And we discovered that there are times of year when you can't grow produce, of course, and you can't get any income. So we slowly evolved into what I'm going to talk about today. First of all, value added products. I'm a school teacher, so this is going to be very simple. Everybody will be able to understand me. But what are they will value added products or products that you make from the raw materials that you grow, or that you buy. An example, the example I use in this, I don't know what a bushel of wheat is going for now. Don't know if anybody out there would say it's not $4 and 57 cents. But at the time that I put this slide together, it was, and if you grow a bushel of wheat, you can sell it for $4 and 57 cents. If you decide that you want to turn that wheat into flour. You can make 42 pounds of flour. And now flowers either enough was a five pound bag so you're talking about eight bags of flour. And we know the flower doesn't cost 80 cents or 90 cents or a dollar. And so you see the value that's added once you just simply grind the wheat 22 bushel 22 loaves of bread can become made from that one bushel. And bread is now selling for if you make it yourself I some markets sell it for $8 or $9 of loaf you know so that's an example. And value added products reduce waste on our farm, our compost heap has shrunk to practically nothing. And that's one of the reasons is if you're selling it market, and you have butternut squash that has a big chunk out of it or rotten spot or it looks ugly. You can't really sell it at market, but you can certainly take the skin off, cut it in half take out the seeds, put it in chunks and freeze it and sell it that way. Also, things like strawberries. If we pick them on a Monday, they're not going to keep until Saturday for the market. If they if you pick them too early they're not going to be sweet. If they're perfectly ripe, they're not going to stay that long so what we would do, we would, the Monday picking would go into the freezer. And then the, the Wednesday or Thursday picking would go to sell fresh at the market. We sell frozen strawberries during the winter for the same price as we sell fresh strawberries in the summer. And if you go to buy frozen strawberries, you will find that they're not perfectly ripe, that is, I don't know when they picked them or when they froze them but they aren't. They don't have that wonderful taste that a perfect strawberry does also value added uses market returns. That's one of the most devastating things for a farm market. The only way that a marketer is to get all of this produce together and wash it and package it up and take it to market and nobody buys it and then you bring it home. What do you do. So we can use when you value added, we can use those market returns. Maybe it would be cucumbers and turn them into pickles. What can add value to products there are three that I'm going to talk about and then other ideas and I would hope maybe some of you would. I've gotten ideas from my audience many, many times. So, freezing those there's a picture there not very big of our frozen strawberries. You can put them on a sheet like that stick them in a chest freezer and bag them up and keep them for a later sale. We've also done this with green beans with tomatoes. We didn't realize. Initially that frozen tomatoes less are cherry tomatoes are very sweet. You can freeze the cherry tomatoes just as they are. Sell them in the winter for the same price that you sell a pie of cherry tomatoes in the in the summer and people like them and they sometimes they'll they'll bake them bake or put them in the oven. They'll put them. We've actually freeze dried them and use them as what we call cherry tomato croutons. So you just put them on your salad, but the flavor is still there. One of the biggest things we're doing now. We are making soups and we're selling them in two ways, either frozen in a court or freeze dried in a soup powder mix where you just add water. You can make a puree, same way you could you can take sweet potatoes and make a puree out of it and not flavor it in any way then you can turn it into mashed sweet potatoes or you can turn it into a sweet potato pie, however you want to. A friend of mine had a boys grow and has a city. They throw away 1200 pounds of butternut squash because they couldn't get rid of it and. You see these, this is actually a picture of. Yeah, those are butternut squash. That have been diced. Essentially we just skin it, cut it in half take out the seeds, run it through a process food processor to dice it and put it in a bag and freeze it. People I was talking to a person here in the audience before that they have all these nice squash. There's things that they aren't going to keep all winter, but people do buy the processed butternut squash so they don't have all that work. They aren't throwing away half of it freeze drying is a process that we got started on with a Sarah Grant. And to be honest, we didn't even know what freeze drying was. This grant together Amy was with me, your former employer, and I had heard about it but I didn't really know what it was and we have since fallen in love with freeze dryer. The freeze drying process is is different than dehydration. It's better than dehydration in most ways, because it doesn't use high heat doesn't take your herbs and blow heat and air across them. The herbs are have a greener color and a better flavor than dehydrated. You can dehydrate apples. Again, seconds can be used you can slice them into rings, core them of course, and then freeze dry them, and you've got these little freeze dried apple chips, which are healthy snacks. Ours of course are certified organic as well. We have freeze dried cherry tomatoes, green beans, peppers. If you don't want to buy a whole green pepper you just need a few peppers for your tomato sauce for your spaghetti, you take them out of the bag and sprinkle them in there and then they re hydrate. We've actually freeze dried onions and turned it into onion powder, which is one thing we do sell as little jars of of our herbs. The other thing about freeze drying is that it doesn't change the flavor, whatever it tasted like when it went into the freeze dryer or when it came out of your pot. It comes out tasting the same. We are selling lots and lots of freeze dried soups now. Salad dressing mixes is a new product that we we put together in cute little jars where you can make your own ranch dressing or your own Greek dressing or Chipotle ranch dressing by adding ingredients to it. I didn't put this up there. Sometimes you fail. We tried baby food. We thought how easy could that be. And it was so you'd take green beans or you'd take butternut squash or you'd take sweet potatoes and you'd cook them down freeze dry them turn them into powder. And now all the mother has to do is add mother's milk or formula or water, and they can make as little or as much as they want they don't have to throw away half a jar or whatever. But for some reason. We they didn't sell. And we're not exactly. We didn't have a lot of babies come mothers with babies coming to the market. Maybe that was it. Somebody told me Wednesday. That's when all the babies come to them. So freeze drying keeps once they're in the bag. They will keep for 15 to 20 years without refrigeration so that you can take them on camping trips. You can put them in a drawer. You don't have to worry about continuously putting energy into keeping them pulled. Here's some examples. The one at the, the, he did say there was a one on this side shows the color difference the top half is the freeze dried herb. And the bottom half is the same or that was dehydrated. So you can see they look like they're fresh. The bottom, which one of these buttons is little, little one at the bottom. Well anyway. That's the herbs. This is the little chives that were freeze dried. That's a carrot ginger soup mix. And there you just add water laser or the laser. Really. Anyway, canning is another thing. So we've talked about freezing. Talked about freeze drying and that equipment is expensive. It's about. Or $5,000, but. Sarah does do grants. They do not buy equipment, but they will buy tools. And equipment is anything that's $5,000 or more. So if you want to buy a tool, a freeze drying tool, it does qualify. That's how we've gotten our freeze charge. Pickles, of course, those that's where we sell lots of cucumbers. And we, we make spicy pickles and we make pickled okra, like it sells out immediately. We make jams and jellies. We make an elderberry syrup that you can put into hot water to make a tea, which is very good. We make sauces and sauces. There's elderberries before they're cooked down. Other ideas. Well, the way we got these ideas was our first Sarah grant. We went around to all the farmers in the Kansas City food hub and interviewed them and asked them. What they did and any experience they had with. Value added processing. Some had made flour in the past. T's some baked goods. Some dehydrated things. Nobody had heard of a freeze dryer at that point. You can press oils. You can juice things. You can make smoothie packets. Well, as I said earlier, this is kind of repeating myself, but what are the benefits? If you don't have to throw something in the compost. If you can turn it into value. That's a win win for everybody. And so processing seconds. Things that are not, I mean, we do sell things we call them. Cosmetically challenged tomatoes. And people laugh and then they buy them, you know, because we reduce the price. But still, there are some things that you don't even want to take to the market. That just don't look good. But they, those, those tomatoes. Still taste good. Shelf life. Certain times of year, everybody has tomatoes for sale. And so nobody need, you know, you're taking them to market and you're bringing them back. And you're not selling them. You don't want to drop the price too far. But you spent all that time and effort. And now you got to throw it in the compost heap. Put them in the freezer. A friend of mine who ran several restaurants. He would buy cases of tomatoes and put the whole case into his freezer. He would make the mother sauces and the other sauces that he had later in the year. He could buy them when they were cheapest when everybody had them. So if you have a freezer, you could preserve these and tell another time. Barry's I talked about cucumbers, okra, those perishable things. You just don't want to put them in the compost. You can sell throughout the year. You can sell like we had a farmers market last Saturday. And we didn't have one today because it's zero outside, but you can sell throughout the year and you can have a little bit of cash flow coming in. Our value added has gone. We are most of the year at our markets and we sell fresh as well. The value added products are now about 65% of our income. And during this time of year, the only thing we have to sell are some butternut squash and some some onions. And so they're close to 90 95%. People love jams and jellies. You can also sell these things for higher prices. As we talked about the bushel of wheat becoming 22 loaves of bread, but even jams are selling. If they're homemade and they're good, their good quality can sell for a little higher price. It also is pleasing to customers because of the convenience of not having. You know, I don't think skinning a butternut squash is that big of a deal, but some people would rather just buy the chunks of butternut without having to throw away half of it. Now, you need there are several things several hurdles I would say or several things to think about. If you don't have your own kitchen, can you share somebody else's. If you see the two, I've got two sources up here on my website one for Kansas one for Missouri. And I'll speak it out. But the Kansas one is agriculture dot ks dot gov. And that one tells you where some of what they call incubator kitchens. There's no search for that online incubator kitchens or kitchens that are used by other people. Churches have them community centers have them, and they can rent them out by the hour. This second one from Missouri, I just stumbled on it. It's, it's called the kitchen door dot com. And if you go in there and you type in your zip code. It'll tell you where your options are within your zip code. It's quite a good website. Well, what did they do here. Some reason my picture for my canner didn't come out but you know what a canner looks like we're all electric at our farm and we have a solar array. So our canner is an electric canner. Our freezers of course are electric. And where can you sell value out of products, but we've talked about this. You can sell them on your online website. You can sell them to retirement facilities to schools grocery stores we do sell wholesale to certain grocery stores, winter markets, especially CSAs farmers markets, and food pantries. And safety hurdles this. This is not in the purview of my presentation today, because there are people that know and keep up with all of these things. So, I'm going to go back to Linda Nwadake from K state and University of Missouri has, I will give you her link, a couple of the sites where you can go and find out what what are the regulations. But, you know, if you have meat in them, it's different if you have anything like eggs or milk in them. That's different. More than I can tell you about today, but all the agencies the USDA the state agencies and the local do have regulations about food safety, which is good. There are two links to food safety. One is for the University of Missouri, and one is the Kansas department. And they even give workshops on this for growers. If you want to know more about our details of our Sarah grants. You can go to our website pat and Rachel's gardens.com, or you can go to Sarah. www.sare.org and look up these two grant numbers. But my website I think has even more free information about that. There's, there's my contact pat and Rachel's gardens.com or Dr James our leak at gmail.com. So is it for those who couldn't hear him he's saying that if you use indirect sunlight to dry your herbs that they will also preserve their color and not not change to gray like, like they do when they're dehydrated. A lot cheaper than buying a freeze dryer.