 So first I wanted to make sure that everybody remembered that fruits and vegetables are still alive after harvest. Sometimes I tend to forget this myself that this is they still respire they still lose water and sugars. And then it also greatly affects how long you can keep your your product because it could be as little as maybe a week to maybe as much as three weeks depending on where you have to go with it and how long you have to sell it. So why is strawberry so fragile? Well, they don't have a protective rind. That's the first problem. And they don't have starch as a reserve so they have to be picked pretty much right off the plant whether sugars are coming through. They don't have any backup reserves. And then on top of that because they don't have a protective rind that tend to be very tender and prone to bruising. And for that reason they're often picked into the funnel container. So the reason that the reason that strawberries are so prone to having a short shelf life is that they really really depend on the cold chain. They have to have the field heat removed because that will increase respiration, growth of decay, loss of flavor, etc. The other key thing to remember about strawberries is that consumers assume they don't have to wash them. That's of course not maybe the best assumption, but it tends to be that they'll just pick them out of a clamshell and eat them right there without ever thinking about washing. That's interesting. So, strawberry harvest. How do you go about harvesting your strawberries? Well, believe it or not, this is something if you have a you pick operation, you may have to educate people. I tell the story of the first time we brought an admin staff out to the farm to have them pick strawberries. They grabbed a total of a strawberry and ended up pulling the whole plant out of the plastic. So it's a good idea to go through the rudiments of how you pick a strawberry carefully. You know, removing it from the stem and not just yanking it away from the calyx part here, the sepals. But the important thing really to remember is that you have to have to pick them at least three quarters colored. So this would not be, would not be red enough. This would be fine. And this is getting to like the ideal eating stage but might be more prone to bruising. So usually what you're trying to aim for is summer between these two colors. You could have a little bit of white shoulder or white tip. But basically for local sales in particular, you don't want to have a lot of white on there, because people are assuming that you have fully colored fruit because they're local. So it's really important that you have that full color that they look bright and glossy because that's another subconscious key to consumers that they're fresh. Certainly larger size helps children are always attracted to the large size of anything. So it helps with sales. And you don't want to have a malformed fruit. You want it to look cylindrical or these shapes are all fine. You don't want a really lumpy fruit for instance. And then the other thing to remember is you again you have to remember what your harvest are what harvest you aiming to get are you doing local are you doing 100 miles away are you doing East Coast kind of thing. And that will definitely affect which variety you select. And also how you hold these fruit what kind of packaging system you use how you intend to market them and hold them at what temperature. Okay. So, usually there's a five to 18 days storage life like I said, and this here we have some very interesting idea. This is what usually happens. So this is what you would like up in the upper left corner right corner. This is the light color for it. This is a dark color. This is cultivar differences right here. And it depends to a little bit about what your consumers think some I prefer mine to be darker because I feel they're going to taste better. And people think this is too over right. So you have to know a little bit about your market and a market preference. Some people may not care they just want fresh strawberries. But the other thing to remember is what you generally start to see is mold usually gray mold or fochitis is your number one problem in storage. It will start to grow one strawberry and it'll start to grow in the next strawberry that's in contact with it. And this can happen pretty quickly especially if these guys are not kept below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. This can happen in like two to three days. The other problem you can end up with here is on the on the right again in the middle, as you're seeing bruising. And partly this is because you're losing your gloss. So this is partly a weight loss issue, and partly maybe a little bit over right. So any injury that happened in the field shows up now when you start to lose weight. And sometimes you see these these bruises hold show up simply because they're in a pack that's now getting a little too dried out. The other one that is common, but we don't always think about it as sepals. The sepals are the green part. And then they start to wilt, and then they eventually will turn brown. So, I'd like a survey this one is a great example in the middle here of what happens this is really a turn off to consumers because now it's brownish green and even if you put past the mold you still wouldn't want to eat this. So you want that nice bright contrast of green to red. Again, this all depends a lot on the variety that you're selecting the right message you know are they just the perfect pre right or perfect full color or are they a little bit past that. How warm was it the day you harvested that can make a big difference. And then that goes forward into the amount of cooling time that you have in the cold chain that you're operating with. Okay, so really the ideal is of course in the South we always hear this you know harvest when cool before noon or even at night. Trying to get your field, you're basically in the field from dawn until maybe 10am whenever you're getting to about 85 degrees you need to pull out. If you can, and definitely try and pick dry to minimize bruise and injury. It's really hard to keep a wet star break in a rain and the rain conditions look making it look good later. And also make sure if you are harvesting large sizes. Don't go bigger than a gallon this is a gallon size bucket here. And this is a gallon size clamshell. I think here I'm sorry court size. You want to be careful not to get too big because they'll start to compact is these berries will compress on each other and start to bruise and keep the fruit in the shade and that's a little bit harder than it used to be because we're now advised not to use trees because of birds and food safety. If you have a pop up maybe sometimes that's a good idea or if you can take advantage of shade from a east west kind of location on the field and that's helpful to. And the other is to try and take your food into the coolers frequently so you can get the cooling parts started. Okay, now I like to spend a lot of time on cold rooms and I know it's hard, especially now that harvest started but it's really important if you have any kind of commercial operation that you have some type of cold storage available. And preferably something big enough your operation and it's hard to do this because cold rooms are not cheap. But it's particularly critical for small fruits you have to be able to remove that field heat, and you really with small fruits you only have two choices, either room cooling or forced air cooling. And the cooling is important because it's going to increase for days of shelf life you know if you have them here close to freezing. This would be in blackberry you're getting about 15 days of shelf life but if you hold in them a room temperature, you're getting about five days or less so it makes a big difference on your bottom line and what you plan to do those berries how quickly you plan to turn them around. So it's really important to choose what you need for cooling storage well before you're harvesting. I think most people always underestimate the amount of cold storage they're going to need. And that becomes problematic when you have a bumper crop or it comes into too much all at once. So basically the steps that are followed is to bring your fruit into the pack house place them in the cold room until you're ready to do forced air cooling if you have somebody you can spare to start doing forced air cooling you start that right away. Once forced air cooling is done you remove your fruit back to a cold room. The thing to remember is small fruits generally don't freeze. If they're just below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, they have a lot of sugars that act as an antifreeze. But generally, we see fruit are between 33 38 degrees Fahrenheit. So the problem is we run into that's often quite difficult to get this temperature to be consistent without having problems with your coils racing up. So some people will try and hit right around 41 degrees Fahrenheit a little bit less but this is a break point here because when you get to 41 degrees, but try to start to kick in a lot and it will be your your for us type to germinate. And you have to start having from this taking over. And there's a quick. This is a kind of a standard thing that's done to demonstrate the difference between forced air and room cooling. So if you starting at 20 degrees C, which is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, it's going to take you, if you're using room cooling, it might take you six hours. If you're doing forced air cooling, it's going to take you about two hours of cooling to get there so you save a lot of time by using a forced air system, although it's another level of management. I like to talk about cold rooms really quickly because it's really important to understand that when you're looking at cold rooms make sure you have insulation on the doors and on the ceiling these are the two areas that are most ignored, especially if you're making one yourself or buying something that's already been used. Make sure that you have the refrigeration capacity for the type of heat load and make sure you have room to move your pallets in and out here they have space that you can move through your fruit easily back and forth. And also it's important if you have some sort of shade system whether it's a pole barn, or even a tree to give you a little bit of shade protection. So that's the thing we do, anytime you can buy these cheap, or they're not cheap, but these plastic curtains will help keep cut down you're not exchanging the whole room worth of air every time you go in when you use plastic curtains. They're actually pretty reasonably priced I think for, this is for a eight foot wide trailer and it was about $150 at the time now I haven't checked to see it may have gone up since then. But it's a nice little addition and it makes a big difference in your exchange of heat and cold. The types of cold rooms that are out there they're all over the place. This looks like one that was using the airline system. But usually shipping containers are probably the most popular right now because they're they're easy to get if you're near a court 20 foot container size is the most popular by far. And you can usually retrofit them pretty easily they're usually pretty good on the weeks, which is your number one problem with use containers. And then use restaurant called cold and cold rooms and freezer rooms are probably the second most popular because almost always as a restaurant that's gone out of business or needs to get their equipment or maybe wants to size up and has equipment for sale. So these can be a pretty a pretty good bargain, as long as you're careful about their status as far as them being operational. And then when this extremely popular is to do it yourself, and you can use an AC unit for cool bots. This I would not advise though, if you if you are trying to go below 36 degrees Fahrenheit. This is not for you and that of course for cold or for small fruits in general, that's going to be borderline. It's great for a relatively inexpensive fix, but if you're serious about holding your fruit for a retail market, it's probably not going to be enough for you. A little bit about cool bot has been extremely popular for about 10 years or more now. And the nice thing is, you'll pool an AC unit a regular home AC unit into running colder than 60 degrees. You have to be careful about the brands. So check this website store cold calm first started selling them exclusively here now you can pick them up on Amazon. Their prices gone up over the years it was like I think originally like $200 now they're the cool bots I think are up to three or even $400 a piece now. But they're really slick way to make it do it yourself and provide some opportunities for I always like the fact that if you have a cold room with two of these in here. One goes down. So one of them will stay kicking in there while you go down to your home depot or whatever and get another AC unit and put it in. So you don't have to depend on mechanical refrigeration repair. So that's a really nice perk, especially in rural areas where it might be hard to find that service. For room cooling you have to make sure you have air movement between your boxes and the flats and they talk about being able to walk around them. They also have to have movement between these stacks of flats. And that is to make sure that that air, the cold air continues to flow through the berries and around the room and go back through and be cooled again. Or stair cooling the tunnel system. This can be done on a very small scale. Here is a here's a commercial system where they actually have a wall unit and embedded in here. And what they're doing is pulling this tarp right here over these pallets of fruit. And there's about probably 20, 24 inches between these pallets. And you pull down your tarp, you have a weight on it. And basically you're sucking, you're making it kind of a low pressure system on the inside here. And that pulls warm or cold air from the room through here and pushes it out back up into here. And goes back into the cooling unit to be recalled. You can do the same thing yourself by using a box fan. This is kind of the idea here but instead of this fan you would just use a simple box fan from Walmart. This is really useful if you have maybe 10 masters of fruit and you stack them up five on each side you have a plastic tarp. You just turn it on. Make sure your box fan has the exhaust system pointed out into the room. And it will give you a nice quickie method of doing your own cooling. Okay, calculating refrigeration needs is something that takes a while to go through. And the best advice I can say is go to this website. And if you're not an engineer, this one is a pretty nice website because it'll let you put in numbers and calculators a worksheet so you don't have to sit there and remember all of the theories behind cooling technologies and refrigeration needs. After cooling it's really important you've done a lot to get the fruit cold. Now you really don't want it to warm up too quickly. It's important depending on what scale you have. So maybe you're a big grower down here on the right, you have a refrigerated truck, you have a bay, you can back right up, maybe a cold room is right here in the back. You can go directly from the cold room onto the truck and the fruit is just minimally exposed to room temperature. If they're starting out, it might be more like this system or this system. And you can do your own cooling in an ice chest simply by putting in frozen ice or blue ice. And that will get your temperature inside that cold, that chest. It takes a while, but you can get it pre-cold essentially if you're going to a farmer's market and keep it around, it'll get to around 50 degrees. Which will give you a little bit of cooling opportunity in a van too. You can buy these units to monitor temperature pretty cheaply. This hobo unit runs a little bit more, it's about $150, but it gives you humidity as well. And that is something I didn't touch on too much, but humidity is very important for strawberries. It's important to keep a cold room as close to 90% humidity as you can. And then these others are logger type systems. So if you're sending your load any distance at all, you want to know what's happening to it. You can pull these loggers out at the end and check your temperatures. There's some resources here. These guys will make loans and micro loans, so it's worth checking out to see what they're still offering. They've made loans in the past for energy efficient coolers. And then Stuart Cold also sells coolers that look like this. You can buy it with or with out. And then we made our own mobile cooler years ago. There's plans for that. It actually originated in Stuart Cold, a lot of people post what they've done on Stuart Cold, so it's a great resource. We just made it a little bit slicker with fancy paint job and everything like that. And then there's some other sources of information for post artist that you can go to and grading standards as well if you need those. And also, if you are not a DUI person, and you still want some sort of cooling cooler, there's a place actually that's in North Carolina that offers these pre built systems. Some of them have a cool bought system, some of them have a different type of refrigeration system. But I thought this was wonderful when we found it because people are always asking us if we made these commercially and the answer was we don't. There's now a commercial source available. And with that I will stop and take any questions.