 So I'm Dana Hilfinger. I am wearing a couple of different hats at this conference, but what I'm mostly gonna talk about or talk from here is I have a small farm. It's about 10 miles up the road in Johnstown, Ohio. And I'll talk a little bit more about that. And that's the farm's name is Roots, Fruits and Shoots. I'm also the Johnny's selected seeds territory rep for this region. So if you're in Ohio, Michigan or Indiana, I'm your girl. And if you ever have any questions about varieties or anything that Johnny's carries, please feel free to reach out to me. If you ever have feedback on anything that we carry, we value that input quite a bit. And we use it to inform kind of what our decisions are in the future. So yeah, my contact info is on this slide and will be at the end as well. But now onto the program, we'll be talking about heating the winter tunnel. Is it worth it? So to start out, I'll introduce my farm, kind of set the stage for what we're talking about here and give a little bit of background about myself. And then we'll just kind of dive right into the project that I was funded for through a North Central SAR grant a couple of years ago. So Roots, Fruits and Shoots is the name of my farm. It's located in Johnstown, Ohio. As I mentioned, I started it in 2019. The end of 2019 is when I kind of inherited the plot of land that was being farmed by someone else prior to me. And I bought two tunnels that were on the property at the time, one of which had a propane heater. Prior to that, I had been farming. I had apprenticed on farms and then managed a farm. So I've pretty much been farming since about 2012. So about a little over a decade now at this point. Since the inception of this farm, I have always worked an off-farm job, a full-time off-farm job. Am I in the way of some people if I'm standing here? Yes, okay, here. There we go. One of that, is that better? Okay, great. So yeah, since starting the farm, I've always worked an off-time or an off-farm job. So I'm a part-time farmer. I'm happy to talk to anyone about that. I have a lot of opinions on that. But in general, actually it's been really positive. So I have two seasonal staff that helped me primarily during the summer months. And then a few more that kind of come in for we have a big kind of glut of raspberry harvest in the summer. Just kind of to set the stage for what I'm doing in the winter, which is most of what we're gonna be talking about here. I'm out at the farm a couple of days a week, usually two to three days a week. And I'm mostly by myself, although I do have some help kind of on occasion to assist with harvesting, but it's primarily me in the winter time. As of 2023, I rent three acres at that property in Johnstown. I farmed two of it in vegetable and fruit crops and the rest is in cover crop. Of those two acres that are in production, 7,000 square feet are under plastic. So there's three tunnels that account for that 7,000 square feet. And in the summer, so the way I kind of describe the farm is that in the summer, we grow fruit and in the winter kind of fall winter, we mostly focus on vegetables. So part of that is to kind of divvy up the workload so that it's not quite as intense in the summer months kind of allows for cash flow to be a little bit steadier throughout the year. And also I just don't love being outside in the summer as much in Ohio. So I kind of focus my attention on a couple of things and then otherwise enjoy kind of being outside in the fall, in tunnels in the winter and again outside in the spring. In terms of marketing, so where that product is going, we sell most of our product through farmers markets and a winter CSA. Those are our two primary outlets for sales and then the secondary outlets are wholesale. So we sell to a couple of restaurants, small grocery stores in the Columbus area and wholesale to like a multi-farm CSA as well. I live, so I rent this acreage, I don't live on the farm. I live about half 25 minutes away or so. That will come into play greatly in this presentation as you'll see because that commute just to uncover and cover, row cover probably doesn't make sense. So, and then just to kind of give a brief overview of our practices, we're not certified organic but we use organic practices. We haven't found at this point that our markets demand that we certify organic. So we have not gotten certification. And we use minimal to no-till practices generally. Most of my outdoor beds are no-till. In the tunnel, I'll occasionally do a little bit of tillage but generally we are operating using no-till practices. And we're, I would classify us as kind of a small growing operation. So as of 2022, we gross a little over 60,000 in revenue. The year before that was 30,000. So we're kind of doubling at this point is our trajectory. I don't know that we'll quite double this year but the plan is to continue to kind of be on that like intensive growth phase of the operation. So I didn't mention this when I started but I'll kind of talk through everything and then ask for questions at the end generally. But if you have clarifying questions or anything that you would like an immediate answer to feel free to raise your hand and I'll try to scan the room. So in terms of winter growing in a tunnel I've been doing this since I started farming and I really love it. I enjoy growing in tunnels quite a bit but especially in the winter time because it's relatively low cost and relatively low labor in particular. Once you are planting your crops, a lot of times the biggest thing that you're doing really is harvesting. There's minimal weed pressure especially early in the season. So like in the fall going into the winter you're really not battling too many weeds at that point. And it's fairly easy to establish a lot of those crops and have pretty good success. And the tunnel just an unheated tunnel is also a really effective way to grow a variety of cold hardy crops. But there are a few things that I did not like so much about winter growing over the years and those are listed here below. So probably one of the main things is this constant kind of having to mind the row cover. So in the past, depending on the farm that I've worked for we've pretty much covered everything either when it outside temperatures are projected to be below 25 degrees Fahrenheit or below 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside which in the winter is pretty frequently. So that could be pretty cumbersome especially if you don't live on the farm or if you're paying someone to do that work especially it can be pretty costly. The other kind of thing that can sometimes make winter growing a little bit tricky is the having a sufficient amount of time in a day to be able to harvest a crop. So if you're relying only on the sun to heat your tunnel there are gonna be some days in the winter where it's not gonna warm up enough until later in the day to be able to harvest things because you need to harvest when crops are thawed. And so for that reason, if you have an order on a Tuesday but it doesn't warm up enough within the three days or so when you're wanting to deliver that order or you only have maybe an hour window or something in which to harvest it can be really challenging. So that's another thing. The other kind of area that I'm sure many of you are familiar with this concept of a Persephone period or a low light period between about the end of November and our climate until the early end of January, early February. And so that low light also translates in the tunnel which relies on light for heat into like low temperatures as well. And so as a result in that December and January time period you have just really unpredictable growth. If it happens to be sunny and temperatures are milder then you might get some sustained growth over time but often what happens is that you have limited to no growth and so it's kind of hard to plan out your crop successions as a result. And then the other main thing that I found that can be challenging especially with growing in the winter is if you're also growing in the summer which you probably are if you're growing in a tunnel then you have to decide when to take out that summer crop in order to plant the fall crop. So and the most success you'll kind of see this throughout this presentation but the most success that we have with most fall planted crops is from an earlier planting. So if you're like oh those tomatoes are still producing I wanna keep them in until I don't know end of October or so then you might have missed the kind of main window where you could plant some of these other crops not all of them but some of them in the winter tunnel so that they're established enough to kind of make it through that lower light period. So these are all kind of, these four kind of concerns are four kind of buckets that I've been a little annoyed about kind of growing in an unheated tunnel. And so I wanted to see if there was a better way. And when I started renting this property as I mentioned there were two tunnels on the site that I purchased one of which had a propane heater. And I wanted to kind of figure out when it made sense to use the propane heater and how. And I couldn't really find that much information on the like a cost benefit analysis or anything. So I applied for a grant to do that. And that was through the North Central SARE program. How many just raise hands how many people are familiar with SARE? Most of the, or many of people in the room just a brief description then it's a program of the USDA stands for sustainable agriculture research and education. They offer a number of different grants both for researchers, nonprofits and farmers. So they have a whole program called the Farmer Rancher Grant program. Definitely encourage everyone to take a look. You can be a for-profit farmer and apply for it and get grant money to carry out a project. So it's a really great way to kind of test an idea has to be related to sustainable agriculture but that fits under a number of different buckets kind of within SARE. So, and we're within the North Central region. So that would be kind of the SARE program to look under. But so I applied for this grant and the title was the cost and benefits of winter high tunnel supplemental heat and row cover. And really it was looking at evaluating using small amounts of supplemental heat in the tunnel. So I'm not talking about heating it to 70 degrees but heating it at a threshold where the plants are above freezing or kind of just at their base growth temperature and how that would compare to using row covers in the tunnel both in terms of the yield of the plants so the potential revenue and then also in terms of the cost. So how does propane compare to my costs for having to cover and uncover the tunnel every time that it drops below 20 and the material costs of row cover and things like that. So the timeframe for the project and now kind of everything else after this point is going to be just me talking about the kind of setup for how we did things and the results and prepare yourself. There'll be a lot of graphs. So yeah, but we started this the first year we did it. So we did two years of pretty kind of the same experiment just to see if we got the same results year after year. So we started 2021 was our first year. So that's fall of 2021 going into winter of 2022. And then this past fall, fall of 2022 is our second year and technically the grant has ended but I still have those crops in the ground. So it was still kind of like collecting information. So I'm going to present kind of as of the last time that I have harvest data for this information and then have some caveats for what I anticipate that crop doing over the next month or so when we're still going to be harvesting. Okay, so there are a lot of different crops we could choose for this trial. And probably I'm guessing many of you maybe if you're growing in a winter tunnel you're growing more than just two crops but I wanted to focus on two in particular one because I thought it would be easier to collect information and two because I thought these could kind of serve as proxies for a couple of different ideas I had. So the first one was last not okay. So we wanted to use last not okay. Because while kale is often a crop grown in a winter tunnel last not is often not the variety chosen in part because it is not quite as cold hearty as a lot of the green curly winter bore options. And also it tends to be very susceptible to tip burn in the winter. So that same issue that you might see in lettuce in like an indoor environment you see in kale. I'll show you some pictures of that a little bit later but that's one example to see kind of what the impact of heating it would have on some of those physiological issues that could be a problem and that can make for a lot of unmarketable leaves. And then the other crop we used was spinach which is profitable in an unheated tunnel. Like you really don't need heat to grow spinach profitably in the winter months definitely. But I wanted to see if heat could have enough of an impact to make it even more profitable and how that would kind of play out. So it chose kind of a less cold hearty or less traditionally used crop compared to a more traditionally used crop. Yeah, so the one on the right the spinach is Sunangel. It's a Johnny's variety. And the one on the left, the one on the left is Mamba kale. Yeah, so it's a hybrid Lassenato kale. Yep, you could also use black magic is a good OP variety too. Okay, so just like a little information on our setup because we did this differently in year one versus year two in part because in the first year we only had one heater. So we broke up our tunnel into three different sections. So I should back up a little bit. So we used one tunnel in the first year. We prepared the beds and had the heater. The heater isn't like the far section of this tunnel. And we planted kale. So we transplanted the kale on September 7th direct seeded spinach on October 1st. And then after that we installed in October we installed two dividers in the tunnel. So we were kind of simulating having like three different zones in the tunnel. So there was these big plastic sheets of dividers they're just a kind of a standard poly that you would six mil poly that you would use for a high tunnel. We set up three of those kind of evenly dividing the tunnel. So we had one zone that was closest to the heater and that was set at 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Then we had the middle zone which we figured would get some like residual heat from that zone. So that we were monitoring the temperature but it stayed pretty much above 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And then we had the unheated zone which was the one furthest from the heater and that we monitor the temperatures and that just stayed pretty similar to our unheated tunnel. So I'm showing you this not to show you that you should do this in your tunnel though you could. I've seen farmers do it especially if they're like isolating a section for like seedling production or something in their tunnel and they don't wanna have to pay for heating the whole thing but only to say like that's kind of how we set it up in the first year because of the resources we had at that time. Okay, and then information that we collected. So yield, important. We measured that from November was when we started harvesting the crops until early March. And we took information, I'm gonna present all this information in pounds but we also kept track of bunches for last and out okay. We also then collected information about the cost. So costs to run the propane which included both the fuel, the propane heater that we used. So the fuel for that was propane and then also the electric to run the thermostat. And then the labor cost to manage the row cover. I also kept track of the labor and the time spent commuting to the farm to do that process. And then the material costs for both the row cover kind of standard unheated option where you're just covering and uncovering if it drops below a certain temperature versus the propane setup costs. So the cost of a propane heater plus any like installation costs as well. I didn't mention that in this slide here the unheated zone we were doing according to kind of what we were always doing. So we were still covering and uncovering that if temperatures dropped below 20 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Okay, you don't need to look too closely at this slide but this like the kind of main points these are the three different temperatures in the different sections over like a short kind of period of the experiment just to give you an idea for the trial just to give you an idea kind of of what the like temperature fluctuation was looking like. A couple like points I wanted to make though where that the like average temperature is not very different between the different treatments like we're not talking about huge swings and like temperature differences. We're talking about like pretty minuscule temperature difference change. And you'll see it can have a pretty big impact. The other thing I just wanted to show for the minimum temperatures while our set point for the one zone was 35 occasionally dropped a little bit below 35 but stayed above freezing always. And the unheated you could see sometimes it would be almost a six or seven degree difference between those temperatures. And I think this was kind of a warmer period in other cases it would be quite a bit more. So if it was gonna be 10 degrees outside or something at night, it would be pretty close it would be probably about 10 to 14 degrees or so in the unheated tunnel. And it would be then like 30 in 35 or close to there in the heated section. Okay, now I'm gonna talk about a challenge in the first year that it will be the caveat to some of these results for a year one. So challenges that we had in year one. Now that you've seen this beautiful picture of a spinach leaf up here for a while. So this is what happens when you have a salt buildup in your tunnel and this tunnel had been used for a few years and we had a tested and it said the salt levels were normal. And then we had it, we test every year kind of in the fall. So we had to test it again a little bit later when we started to see these issues then we came back with a pretty high salt level. So it was over, it was like over two on the scale that they use to measure salt which I don't know what the units are offhand. So this is a pretty common issue in tunnels, right? So, and we had been keeping an eye on it but we also had applied compost I think pretty recently in the tunnel which is no longer a practice that we do. And so some of the like if you're especially if you're using any animal based compost a lot of those will have higher salt content which can result especially in an environment where you're not, there's not rainwater you're not overhead watering it can result in salt buildup as well as using other forms of even organic fertilizers they can be high salt. We use a lot of the Ohio earth food Revita Pro historically but I've kind of moved away from doing that in our tunnels because we're concerned about salt buildup. So we mostly stick at this point with a feather meal or other pelleted guided nitrogen that they carry. Also because our nutrient levels in general are pretty high in the tunnel. So we're really kind of mostly focusing on supplementing nitrogen at this point for the winter crop at least. This would have been after me really growing in the tunnels for under three years. So about two and a half years or so but the remedy we didn't even actually like take off the skins of our tunnel we just overhead watered it for a long time. So kind of flooded it out. That was helpful. And then the other remediation that we did we added peat and citric acid as well because the other issue in addition to a high salt buildup was that we had high pH that's in part due to just the pH of our well water is high at the farm but also that again some of the fertilizers can lead to a higher pH especially the compost was a higher pH compost. So that combination of a high salt content as well as a high pH leads to plants especially spinach being pretty sensitive to not being able to absorb certain nutrients. So this here is likely an iron or magnesium I think I have a note there. Yeah, magnesium proficiency. Our pH was like at 7.3 or so. So it was high. It wasn't super high but it was high. And then the other issue that I would say I didn't see like a direct result but it was just a note for maybe it's one reason not to break up the tunnel in the winter months when we're relying mostly on the gable vent ventilation was that we did have some higher humidity unless we vented the sidewalls more in the tunnel which was just a little bit more work than what we would have wanted to do because normally we kind of keep those shut for the winter. Okay, so now we get to the fun part. So this is just gonna be kind of a format we'll see with a lot of graphs but I'm not gonna go through the yield information that we had. I'll go through the cost information that we had from the first year and then do kind of like an analysis of profitability. So this is looking at the two different crops. Kale is the blue and spinach is the orange and it's the three different zones for treatment. So we had a 35 Fahrenheit treatment the 30 Fahrenheit and the unheated. And then the unit of measure is pounds per bed feet. Oh, just to back up to like clarify what these challenges led to, like the result was lower yields than we expected and pretty significantly. So I'll mention that and then how we adjusted for it and how it's different this year. But yeah, so the scale on the left is pounds per bed, pounds per bed feet. So I'm gonna use that unit as kind of my main measure. So like per bed feet, whether it's dollars per bed feet or pounds per bed feet. So that's just per foot of bed in the tunnel. So the, as you could probably see just kind of from the trends of the graph, the kale yield in the 35 was higher than the other two. It was also the 30 was also higher than the unheated. And it's a similar trend for spinach. Now, just as a note, in case we have any researchers in the room as well, this is a SAR Farmer Rancher Grant proposal, which means that like it's not a requirement that I have a bunch of replicates of my trial. They're a little bit more, you know, they want farmers to kind of do research. So they're not expecting kind of the same rigor that a peer reviewed journal would. So while we did have two like beds that we use kind of as an average to compare, I just wanna say that, you know, like, I don't have like air bars or whatever on here or whatever. So yeah, to see. Okay, so put it in another way. The kale, the yield in the 35 Fahrenheit tunnel was 30% greater than the unheated. The yield compared to the 35 and the 30 was pretty similar. It was only about 5%, 4.5% higher in the warmest tunnel or in the warmest section. And then for the spinach, similar result for the 35 compared to the unheated, but a higher yield or a higher difference between the 35 Fahrenheit and the 30. Okay, so now looking at costs, these costs are for the tunnel. So just kind of a different scale here. So the costs total are on the left for the 30 by 48 tunnel and I haven't broken up into two groups. So there's annual costs, which like our operating costs. So that's mostly propane and electric or the labor costs required to remove and cover. And then startup costs, which the startup costs for the unheated sections is really the cost of the row cover pretty much. And for the heated sections is the cost of the propane plus the installation costs, yeah. So I then broke it up further. So in my situation, I accounted for the fact that I'm commuting out to the farm and the time it takes to do that as well as the gas required. So I mean, I do that in part because I'm the owner of the farm, I might not do that for an employee account for their time driving out and everything, but I'd probably have to pay them for more than like 15 minutes to cover and uncover. So that would be a higher cost too. But just for me as the owner, I'm accounting for that. I charged just like a kind of minimum wage that we pay at the farm. So $15 an hour when I was looking at any labor costs here. So that might vary depending on your situation. And then, I'm trying to think of this, there might be another note there. Oh yeah, and then in terms of, well, let me just kind of go through some of the unheated costs and I'll talk about what was included in them at the time. So the blue column is unheated costs without a commute. So if you lived on the farm say, and you were just like going into your backyard and covering and uncovering, that would be the cost. So the annual costs between the blue unheated and the orange unheated are different because the orange includes my commute time and the mileage. The startup costs for those two situations are the same because it's just row covering both situations. Then you have the heated, which is the gray bar. And the annual costs for those are really the costs of the propane fuel and the electric to run it. So those are what are go into that cost there. So there's no maintenance cost for me for like uncovering and uncovering. And then the startup costs for those are the cost of the heater again and then the cost to install it. So just a note kind of about this year, this example, what we're talking about. It was a pretty warm winter last year, similar to this year in general. And so I didn't have to start row covering my tunnels until January 5th. So I went through the whole month of November and December without having to cover and uncover the tunnels. Maybe that's becoming the new normal but that also seems pretty unusual for me over the years. So I had to make in total for the unheated sections, I had to make a total of 29 trips out to the farm to cover and uncover. And for the propane, we refilled it a few times throughout the season. So I think we were refilled it in November, January and then at the end of the season in March. Okay, so now I kind of want to look to like combine those two together to talk about whether or not it makes sense to heat. And I'm going to grab, I have some actual numbers here that I can reference just to, okay. So this is going to be a format I'll use for a lot of these. So just to kind of familiarize yourself with what we're looking for here. So this is just for the kale, year one kale. And we're talking about a scale. All of these dollar signs on the side are per bed feet. Okay, so when it's, you know, it's, the revenue is 13 or so dollars for the unheated tunnel. We're talking about $13 per bed feet. So the graph on the left is the unheated tunnel and we have both the commute and the non-commute option kind of in comparison here. The graph on the right is for the 35 degree heated tunnel or the heated section. And I am only going to be able to really do the analysis between the unheated and the 35 degree heated because I don't quite know exactly how much propane it would take to do the 30 degree. But I wanted to have that information just to have a sense of how much the yield might increase just by doing the 30. So in the unheated section, we have, and in the, and in the heated graph, we have three kind of groupings, three sets of information. We have the costs that are graphed per bed feet. So in the unheated section for a commute, the cost was a little under $5 per bed feet to if I was gonna do a commute or if I was commuting to the farm, which I am. If I'm not commuting, it's less than a dollar per bed feet. The revenue for the unheated tunnel was close to, it was about $13 per bed feet. And then the profitability, which I'm gonna put in quotes here because it's not the true profitability was, which in this case is just the revenue minus the cost is listed in that FAR section. And these graphs are roughly at the same scale. I try my best to like line them up. So when you're looking at one of them, you can kind of compare it directly across to the other. And then the same thing on the right for the heated, it doesn't matter whether I have a commute or not because I'm not accounting for that labor. So I was just looking at whether, you know, the cost revenue and profitability there. So basically the kind of main takeaways here are that it was more profitable for me to grow kale in a 35 degree heated tunnel in my situation where I had a commute. It was not quite as profitable in this year to heat the tunnel. I still covered my cost, but it wasn't quite as profitable as it would have been to grow in an unheated tunnel. Now, the little orange bubble I have in the corner there is kind of a note about the actual costs associated with growing kale. So in addition to the costs I have listed here, which are just about like whether about heating the tunnel or about using row cover, there's also just cost to grow the kale, right? Cost to harvest, cost to plant, cost to of the amendments, et cetera, everything like that. And in a tunnel, that for me works out to be about 575 per bed feet in the first three years. So it's for any tunnel crop, I add on like a minimum of at least $3 per bed feet. And that's just to cover the costs of a tunnel. And then the kale, regardless of whether I'm growing it outside or in a tunnel is averages to be about 275 per bed feet. So the good news also is that in all of these cases, the kale covered that 575 per bed feet cost, right? So those graph, those lines on the side there for profitability are all at or close to above 10. And subtract 575, there's still additional profitability to kind of cover. In my case, that would be just profit beyond. 15 minutes, cool, okay. Rock on, we're gonna keep moving then. So now that we got this format, we'll just breeze through all of this information. Okay, so just to kind of as a little bit more information, this is another way to look at it. The yield increase needed to cover costs for a commute versus a non-commute in terms of pounds per bed feet of that crop. Okay, and then for spinach, we looked at a similar thing. And kind of the main takeaway here is that it was more profitable in the situation where I had a commute, but less profitable or not as profitable without. I don't have the cost for my spinach production. That was a little bit of an oversight on my part, but this would cover, based kind of on my hunch, this would probably cover the cost. And then this is kind of an example of what that yield increase would need to be to cover the costs for a heated tunnel compared to an unheated tunnel. Okay, so year one takeaways, increasing the yield from heat covered the costs in general for incurred for running the propane. So the yield was enough to cover the costs. So I wasn't in a situation where I was kind of losing money there. But heating was more profitable in my situation where I was living off farm, but it wasn't as profitable in situations with a commute compared to the other crops. However, as I mentioned earlier, this is a situation where our yield was lower. So it was about 40% lower than previous years. So would we get a different result if we corrected the soil? Which we did in year two. So in year two, we used three tunnels instead of one. We also looked at doing, we did two plantings of kale instead of one. So we wanted to, this was kind of helping to have us think about whether or not having, we could kind of push it to have a later planting to be able to get more out of our summer crop, right? So could you keep those tomatoes in longer and still get away with planting kale and have it be a profitable crop through the winter? And then we amended the beds and tested prior and our pH and salt levels were still kind of within the normal range, although they're a little bit elevated. Okay, so this is kind of where we're at in the year for our production. So, you know, we're, this was, I took all of this information as of February 8th, but this is an example kind of of how like, how much we harvested over time. So we harvested about at this point last year in the heated area, we had harvested about 60% of our total yield. And in the unheated, we had harvested about 70%. So just so you kind of see that, like know that this information, this information I'm going to show you for this year is a little bit incomplete because we'll have another month or so of harvesting. So yield information for this year, the kind of main takeaways here, and these are in a different order. I'm not sure why that happened, but the main takeaways here are that our 35 degree treatment was more profitable than our unheated, although our unheated early kale was like gangbusters this year, it did great. And then the late treatment of care, there were the late planting of kale was also, we yielded more from the higher one, the higher temperature tunnel than the unheated and also from the 30 degree tunnel than the unheated. The spinach kind of followed a similar trajectory, although the 30 degree temperature and the unheated are relatively similar. Okay, and then this is just kind of to illustrate like why I would anticipate though that like these numbers will change over the next month or so, and that's because this is the state of our unheated kale crop right now, which is a lot of tip burn, definitely some harvestable leaves, but the new growth, a lot of the new growth is looking a little bit rougher now. So I'm not expecting that we're gonna be getting many more harvest of these beyond maybe the next week or two before they're gonna start to bolt. And then this is an example, when you brought up that freeze in January, we did have in one section of our unheated tunnel where the kind of cover had blown off and the sidewall had like blown up a little bit at one point. So we had some die off of some of the kale. We accounted for that in the like yield information. So we just kind of took out that bed sheet, but maybe we shouldn't know because this, you know, I guess could happen in an unheated tunnel and we didn't see this happen in our heated ones. And then the heated crop looks a lot nicer. So we're still harvesting that quite a bit. I think this is a picture right after we had harvested a lot of spinach, but yeah, they're still growing strong. So this again, just kind of showing the costs and the red line there, this is a cost comparison between 2021 and 2022. So lower costs in 2022 across the board and that red line there is what I project the cost to be for 2022. For kale then for this season, basically what we saw was that even though this is incomplete and we anticipate getting probably a lot more yield out of our heated crop, we saw higher profitability for the kale in the heated tunnel versus the unheated tunnel in both the commute and it was in both the commute, sorry, with the commute, it was more profitable. Without a commuter it was about equal profitability at this point. And then for the later planting of kale, unheated kale, the unheated tunnel kale, the amount that we were kind of netting after subtracting the costs in the unheated tunnel was below our cost of production. And it was above our cost of production in the 35 degree heated tunnel by about $3, so per bed sheet. And then the spinach we saw about equal profitability between the heated tunnel and the unheated tunnel. And in a no commute situation as of this time in the year and it was a little bit more profitable than the commute situation. So our main takeaways were that increasing the yield from the heat always was enough to cover the costs of the propane for these two crops. Heating was more profitable in my situation with a commute for both early and late plantings. And it made late planted kale more profitable. And then also, just kind of as a, like looking into the future, I anticipate by the end of the season, the heated section will be more profitable for both spinach and kale based on kind of the current state of the crop. And then this was a note I didn't mention too much, but one difference that we noticed between the unheated and the heated were possibly in part because of what appeared to be maybe some differences that we didn't account for in terms of fertilization. And in general, with a heated tunnel, that might be a consideration that's important to think about. The plant is gonna be photosynthesizing more and able to grow more. And as a result might require more nitrogen. So we as a like general rule do about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre in our tunnel, like as a guideline per acre in our tunnel. But we're thinking of probably bumping that up to 200 after talking with some other growers as well. Okay, I think this is pretty much it. These are just some of the benefits of heat. We already talked about this mostly, but we saw more consistent and reliable harvest. We were able to harvest at almost any time in the heated section. So we didn't have that kind of like short window where we could harvest. And they were a bit more comfortable to being at 35 degrees. And then for me, my time isn't free, right? And so I had fewer trips and unnecessary time spent at the farm. I was able to leave the farm a couple of times this winter for a week and not go out there and felt confident that that was happening. These are just a couple of other kind of quick observations and then I think I'll be done is couple of other recommendations that we discovered through this were that, I think we're gonna transplant our spinach from here on out. We did that for most of our spinach or for a portion of our spinach this year and found that it was really produce more than the direct seeded ones in our situation at least. We were able to kind of get more consistent germination. We didn't have some issues with germination that we did in trying to seed the tunnel in September when you can have some like 90 degree weeks where it can be hard to germinate spinach. And so the transplanted sections were just higher yielding. And then this was just kind of a note about what we saw in some of the heated while the heated Lassenado tunnels did not have the tip burn issues nearly as much as we saw in the unheated. We didn't get like some of this side shoot production. So this is like looking down at the Lassenado plant and like that little like cluster of leaves of small leaves on the side is like a little side shoot that was producing off of it. So we did get a little bit more of that in the heated tunnel which maybe was in part because of daytime temperatures or something being a little higher in that tunnel, not sure. So my plan moving forward is I'm gonna continue to use heat for a lot of my winter growing. And if I'm gonna be using unheated space I'm gonna make sure to have the rotation in place to plant earlier. I am also curious after talking with other farmers about evaluating the increased yield if I increase the heat even a little bit more to 40 degrees and also evaluate as I mentioned that increased fertility of increasing the amount of nitrogen we use. And then my eventual like longtime bull is to be able to do a cost benefit analysis of this if I was to use a more renewable energy source instead of propane which I would eventually love to get away from. So the comment was about how where it would become unprofitable if you increased the temperature more like what that gradient is and then also whether the market that you're selling to makes a difference in terms of the profitability of these two I didn't mention that that much but for kale our average in the winter is about $6 a pound for like what we're selling kale between our two markets. So that's between CSA and some wholesale. But yeah, those kind of future questions I think would be great to explore and to answer. And there's limitations with this one but we wanted to at least get some numbers in place for like some basic information to be able to build from. Yeah, yeah. So the question was about use of double layer tunnel and whether doing that in tandem with the heater makes sense. And then the other part was about alternative energy. Yeah, so or alternative energy sources for the tunnel. So if you are gonna heat the tunnel you should double layer your tunnel. Yeah, it's gonna pay off in terms of like the R value the insulation of your tunnel you're gonna be losing less heat out of the top. And the cost to add a double layer is not that excessive. So I would definitely recommend that. Otherwise I think you're gonna kind of be throwing some money away with the propane heat or with any kind of heat. Yeah, in terms of if you're not planning to heat the tunnel whether or not double covering makes sense I think it depends on whether you're planning to really push a lot of season extension into the winter or you're focusing more on summer growing. If you're focusing on summer growing it might not be worth it. And then the other question about alternative sources and using like electric with solar panels I don't know that I can speak to that quite as much. I have heard of more farmers using geothermal and their tunnels as an option which still requires some or in many cases I think still requires some kind of electrical electricity needs because there's like a fan involved. So that could be powered using solar panels. But I've heard of that more because that keeps it around the like 40, 45 degree lower limit. Yeah, are we like out of can I keep taking questions or should we? Yeah, great questions. Okay. Yeah, we just read too far. Okay, okay. Great, bring it up, great. Yeah, in question about whether or not I take measurements on relative humidity between the different treatments and the answer to that was no, I did not. All of the tunnels had some fan ventilation and those are run on an as needed basis not on a regular basis. So yeah, I guess that was the best we could do. We were not taking those treatments or those measurements, but that would be interesting to kind of see how that varies. Yeah, I'd expect the heated ones to be lower humidity than the unheated, yeah. The question was about whether or not I, what my plan is for fertility in the tunnel. So we've added quite a bit of compost in the past. And at this point, our plan is to take regular soil tests and to kind of make sure that our organic matter percentage is not decreasing, but at this point, it's close to 7%. So we're pretty high. And so we're not really too concerned with adding additional things. They're gonna like affect the soil structure or soil biology so much as like supplying the additional nitrogen in some cases that these leafy greens might need. So I think we'll probably mostly just go off annual soil tests and kind of correct occasionally from there and monitor it. But we probably, yeah, we'll stop using those compost at this point just because of the state of the soil. The question was about, have I thought about using getting an artificial light or any kind of supplemental light? And for these crops, no, I have not, my hunch and pretty educated guess would be that I don't think it would be worth it to, I don't think the payback, unless I wanted to build a full greenhouse might not be worth it for these crops. I think it would be more worth it if you were looking at doing fruiting crops because like the outdoor light levels in the December and January are like normal unit of measure is like DLI daily light integral. And for most of the leafy greens, it needs to be like a minimum of 10 for them to grow. In Ohio, it's probably in December and January closer to like eight or so, or sorry. So 10 is the minimum for them to like kind of be growing pretty well. So even at eight, they're still growing maybe a little bit, but not nearly as well as they would at that higher level. In the summer we get to levels like 40, so we have way more than we need. But for fruiting crops, the light requirement is a lot higher. So in order for a tomato or a cucumber to put on fruit, it's probably more like 20 to 25 DLI. So there I would think that like having supplemental light would really pay off. The comment that was made is that the one grower has used some supplemental light and has been experimenting with that. And yeah, that would be interesting too. I think you're right to think that like increasing the temperature would be required if you're gonna be increasing the light like that, because otherwise you might get to the situation where there's more light coming in than at that temperature, the like plants enzymes can use for photosynthesis. And so you might end up with things like a redder lettuce or like a purple or kale or something, which is usually like a self-defense kind of mechanism against highlight conditions. So I would wonder if that would be the case, but I'd be really interested to hear more. Yeah.