 I'm Jay, my wife Polly, Armor. We farm here at Forewinds Farm in Gardner, New York. We have a 24-acre farm of which about four acres is in a market garden. We sell primarily through a 30-member CSA and at two regional farmer's markets. When we started farming here in 1988, we used conventional tillage, plow, disc, road till. And about 10 years ago, through serendipitous relationship with a local not-for-profit, we figured out a way to do no-till farming, raise beds on a large scale. We farm four acres of vegetables without using a rototiller. We put compost on top of permanently-formed beds and we plant right into the compost. Some crops we plant directly into the compost, things like lettuces, beets, carrots, parsley, various herbs, basil. Some of the crops that we plant, like the transplants, your tomatoes, your peppers, your onions, leeks, we plant the transplants right into the compost. After doing it for a number of years that we've seen less weed pressure, we have a lot more free time during the summer. We end up spending more of our time actually just harvesting than we do trying to deal with weeds and a lot more relaxed environment. The first section of the garden, we converted to raised beds. We did sort of the backyard garden way by using a shovel. After that, we figured a way to use a tractor-mounted adjustable back blade that then was able to convert large parts of the garden on acres at a time into raised beds. And that has allowed us to convert a four-acre garden into permanent raised beds. Coming from a conventional background, I had a hard time adjusting to the idea that we don't need to till every year. But as long as you don't walk on the soil or you don't drive a tractor on the soil, and you don't compact the soil, it will stay nice and loose. And you can get away with not tilling year after year after year. We're adding a great deal of compost onto our fields, at least initially, and you might think that that's going to add to the weed burden, but since it's composted nor the weed seeds have been killed during the composting. And what we're doing in the garden is we're covering up the soil. The soil that has the weed seeds in it, we're putting a layer sort of a blanket of compost that doesn't have a lot of weed seeds in it. And we're sealing that off so that we have a much lower weed pressure here. The one weed that we do have a problem with is dandelion, because the seeds blow in rather than are there naturally. Sometimes other airborne seeds will come too. Thistle, milkweed, but those usually aren't a problem if you can get on them right away. During the winter time, our cows and sheep stay up here in the barnyard. Since they're up here, we're able to collect their manure. And this time of year, in the springtime, I come in with a tractor. We dig out the manure that's collected in the barn and we pile it up into this pile here, mix it with horse manure that I bring in from another farm. The cow manure is just a little too heavy, a little too wet to get generating any heat. So the mixing it with the horse manure will give us that heat that we're looking for. This is a pile I made a couple of weeks ago. We can just put this thermometer right on in here and check the temperature. It's something I do every day, just to monitor the temperature. After the manure has been sitting in for about five months, I load it into a rear discharge manure spreader. That helps mix it up, aerate it, and pile it up over here. It will sit here for about six or seven months during the course of the winter. The following spring, we use it as finished compost goes right onto the garden. Here's one of our raised beds that hasn't been tilled in five years. And you can see how light and fluffy it is. I can put my hand right into it. The soil maintains good tilth. Then as easy as I put my hand in, the plants can put their roots right down. This last got compost last spring a year ago. We're not gonna put any compost on it this year because it doesn't need it. In the beginning when we first started doing this, and also when we first turned over new ground, we put on a lot of compost. Sometimes a couple of inches thick, but since then we've really cut back. We found we don't need as much in subsequent years. And also we don't wanna put too much compost down because that'll increase the amount of phosphorus we're putting onto the soil.