 Sarah is so special. It's a farmer-directed grant arm from the USDA that started in 1988 with the farm bill because the USDA knew that farmers are always on the cutting edge to find applied solutions to their problems that they have. Kate Hodges is a first-generation farmer in central Ohio. She founded Foraged and Sone in 2015 focusing on super niche crops and value-added products. Foraged and Sone is dual certified organic as both a grower and handler with the real organic project add-on. So Foraged and Sone is a farm that began as an urban farm in Columbus. We expanded into a larger space, which is still small. It's just three and a half acres west of Columbus. And we have a lot of value-added production. Actually, that's that's the main focus of our farm. Our SARE grant was on saffron, which falls into the like super super super niche category. It is a fun crop to grow. This was a great project to speak a little bit about SARE. One thing that hasn't been mentioned, I think, is that the SARE farmer rancher grant requires that you include in your budget money for the farmer to pay for labor. And that is unique in my experience to that grant in particular. Our farm is in its second value-added producer grant. So we have completed one. We've completed a SARE grant. We're in our second VAPG. And we've done some local grants as well. And none of those allowed you to include labor in your budget as money that would be anything other than an in-kind contribution from the farm, which sucks. So the SARE grant is great. It is, like has been mentioned, it's a great way to experiment with adding a new crop into your farm schedule, your farm program, and making sure that you kind of cover your bases so that you're not taking too much of a loss on any realm, whether it's materials you know, packaging or the labor side of things. So our farm, again, focuses mostly on value-added. We grow a lot of specialty herb crops, which we then dry in a barn and make into things like teas and seasoning mixes. We do not have a CSA, but we do contribute items to other CSAs as add-on products. So I think that's an interesting way to get involved if you're not ready to or willing or wanting to do a full, like comprehensive CSA. Especially, I'm a first-generation farmer. I started the farm on my own and we have a very small labor force. So we don't have the capacity, the space, or actually the knowledge to do anything that's going to be as comprehensive as a full CSA. So, oh, I think I skipped one. I'm going to go over saffron growing real quickly. Which direction should I point this in? Oh, maybe I missed the slide. We ended up on our farm mostly focusing on container growing of the saffron. So saffrons grow as a corn, which is like a bulb that's planted under the soil and it blooms in the fall, which is actually a nice addition to a lot of other seasonal rhythms for folks who are growing things that are on in-ground production because they don't start blooming for us in central Ohio until late October and most of your other farm heavy farm work is kind of waning at that point. And container growing was easy for us because we were able to maintain the moisture level. Yeah, I skipped the in-ground production slide. But we visited a farm and this is another thing that you can include in your SARE project budget is travel. So we traveled to a farm in Ontario that had about five acres of in-ground saffron production. It might seem strange to have crops that are blooming in November in Ontario, but saffron will grow through the snow. It's not really affected by the cold temperatures. And so the only modification that they had to make was just to plant them a little bit lower so they weren't going to be frost-heaved out of the ground and otherwise they had no issues. And they found it was actually easier for some mechanical cultivation because they could run their equipment right over and not even ever touch the corns because they were so low, like six to seven inches under the soil. We focused on container growing because we in central Ohio have a lot of water and the easiest way for us to control for that was to raise everything up out of the ground. We did have some in-ground production as well and most of those corns rotted in one season, which was a huge bummer, but low risk because the SAIR grant provided the money to purchase the corns in the first place. So we were able to figure out the most profitable form of production for us. So the harvest is just harvesting the whole flower. It doesn't have to be open just as long as it's fully emerged and kind of bringing those to a central processing place so that you're not losing the stigmas from the flower, which are extremely tiny and susceptible to being blown off of your workspace. So all you have to do is separate those stigmas from the flower overall and then you trim the white and yellow off because those parts add to the weight of your product, but don't contribute anything to the taste. And then the tricky part with any specialty product is marketing it. Really, honestly, the market, even though folks use saffron, is pretty untested still for this product specifically because it's not seen as an approachable product thing to use because it's so expensive and you do have to charge a lot for it because of the labor involved and so that's always a factor. But again, because it was a grant funded project, the balance wasn't, we didn't need to keep sales equal to all of the investment infrastructure. And in conclusion, and usually there are a lot of questions about saffron, so I made my presentation super fast. We have a couple of videos on YouTube about the harvesting and the processing of saffron that are kind of go into depth in the process and those are available there on youtube.com slash at Forged and Sohn. How are you helping your potential customers understand their potential use of saffron? So we had a saffron field day as part of our grant project we also had a presentation at the OFA conference a couple of years ago focusing on that. We've also had just kind of pop-up taste experiences for folks. The easiest way, which was a slide on the marketing one, is by brewing it as a tea, actually, and we're accustomed to that for our farm because we sell a line of herbal teas, so we're pretty frequently bringing a sample, a hot sample to market in the colder months and saffron makes a really lovely floral tea.