 Hello and welcome to Farming Matters. I'm your host, Erin Schneider. I work with the North Central Region Sare program and I also farm in Wisconsin. And I am delighted to be here with you all today, first to introduce you to our producer and director of the show, Marie Flanagan. Hello. And I am delighted that we have a very special guest on our Farming Matter show today, Heather Dayton with Zambria Farms. So as with a lot of our videos on this series, we're just here to like celebrate and share the story of like really great projects that are coming out of the Sare program and just kind of learn a little more about the backstory of that and what they learned and what they have to offer. So with that, I am going to toss it over to Heather and she's going to tell us a little bit about her soil and water quality composting design research initiative that was part of a lot of the amazing things she does on her farm already. So Heather, welcome. So yes, my farm is called Zambria Artisan Farms and this particular project was titled Water and Soil Quality Composting Design Research Initiative. And this was, this is my very first Sare grant where I was able to collect some data and really look at the composting system and how I could integrate composting on my farm. Before we begin, I want to take this moment to do a brief land acknowledgement. Zambria Artisan Farms is located on lands taken from Ho-Chunk Menominee Peoples under pressure from the United States government. The Menominee unwillingly ceded this region to the United States in 1848. Zambria Artisan Farms recognizes this injustice as well as the more than 13,000 years of human history in Central Wisconsin. We honor the original residents of this land and those who passed through the Wisconsin River Watershed while fleeing war and oppression. We acknowledged that this land was not freely parted with and expressed our wish to honor those nations that held and still hold this land near to their hearts. This land acknowledgement was provided to me by the Wisconsin Historical Society and one of the components of this project was as I'm diving into soil health and looking at soil disturbance across the landscape especially in regions that are part of watersheds where there was travel and trade is looking at those lighter images and I won't spend too much time on that part but this was a really big core part of implementing a best practice on my farm. So a little bit about me. I have a few professional roles. I am the owner and operator of my own farm. I am also my off-farm income is outreach program manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and I am a former farmer advocate for conservation with the Nature Conservancy and so there's some really great educational outreach happening all across these higher ed organizations. I am a community volunteer as well so I'm the lead farmer for a producer-led watershed group Farmers the Ruchikri. I serve on the Adams County Deer Advisory Council where we look at deer metric data across this particular county and I'm the secretary for Adams County 4-H. So the humble beginnings of my farm started really right after I was I was diagnosed with a cancer and I started to in really look at what I was putting in my body in terms of nutrition and it started me down this journey as I started managing school garden programming and from my K-12 education background and witnessing the first witnessing firsthand the healing and transformative powers of permaculture food resiliency and education. In my background as an educator and school garden coordinator I established my farm as a humble roadside garden at a rental property back in 2019. My food as medicine initiative is integral to the foundation of this farmstead and I came to what is now the 20 acre farmstead on the Little Ruchikri in 2021 that would happen to be the same year I was awarded this amazing research opportunity. I am a registered ginseng grower, I licensed hemp grower, I also grow heirloom specialty crops and I'm just getting into that food forest living so looking at what are some native shrubs and fruit nut bearing shrubs and trees that can be implemented or planted on the farm to increase biodiversity. There's a little visual timeline of where this project has fit in within the last few years. So in 2020 is when I acquired this piece of land I had a big vision lots of small projects this is exactly the same part of the land so it started off as a little off-road logging road turned into what is now my beautiful driveway and I was able to start establishing some of those bigger projects and getting systems up and going as a beginning farmer. A couple years ago, a couple summers ago, I held my first on-farm event which was really exciting and started doing more educational outreach especially with my work in the producer I love watershed group. So getting into farming is I knew this was going to be a multi-generational commitment whether my son decides he wants to be of her or not that's totally up to him but I know that having those connections within the community building relationships across organizations that are doing this incredible work is what it's all about. It says multi-generational commitment to to honor the history but also to improve the habitat and improve water, soil and air quality. Initially I'm sharing this big picture view of my farm where I started how it's evolving and this hopefully will give you some context within the particular farm system that I'm going to be talking about later on in the presentation. So how and why did I become interested in this work well not just because that the healing transformative work around food but also this relationship with nature and protecting the watershed there's a lot of development happening in my particular area a lot of political divisiveness too and how land should be used and managed and so this is just one way I could get involved in this work and I got curious and wanted to do more research and explore these systems around soil health improvement and just overall well being. I believe that ecosystems are worth protecting, they're worth researching and studying especially in regards to water air and soil quality which is something that all life depends upon. I'm really blessed to be in this particular area and the longer I'm here the more rich it becomes in biodiversity and the C2L life refuge isn't that far for me so it's really exciting because I'm right on a migratory pathway and I'm seeing a lot more of these threatened species flying overhead and that's really exciting to see those populations growing within each year seeing more diversity across insects and the herps, the snakes, turtles, lizards and frogs and just really making sure that my farm activities are working to complement those other natural systems that are happening in the forest of wetland that is around my farm. So how did I get started in composting because that's what where what my project goes on is I started with the basics okay so this is one of my very favorite research items that I came across and this is what I started with so it was just a little small compost little composting bin that I was doing kitchen scraps and then I got chickens and then they start eating my kitchen scraps and then I was like well now I have manure I got poop like what do I do with this it's smelly and but I know I can use it to improve my soil so that's where I started getting into these looking into this basic system so here's another arrow view just to kind of give it where this system is taking place in context of the farm so you can see a little Rocha Crete is flowing through the blue box is a roughly those 20 acres the field seeing as there's a long thin strip of land there the yellow heart is where the compost actually we'll say facility it's pretty much just a shed right composting shed is where I'm managing that that compost and making sure that it's contained and and doing some work there and then the green heart is where the actual like compost is collected so I have a horse and I have chickens and ducks and one rabbit for animals on on the farm and so this strip here is is the field you can see that in the wintertime particular it gets a lot of shade and in the summertime it's pretty it gets full sun here's the high tunnel okay so I this is where the end product so the compost and manure ends up back here the green is it's kind of a low spot right here there's a little low spot right here so I wanted to keep that manure close to where the facilities are okay so I've got my chicken coop is right there the horse building is right there and that's where a majority of the animals spend a majority of their time okay and so that's the first step that so in that that manure is coming out of the animal it is in that location and this is where and it just it helps me to manage it it's far from the from the water this there's it's kind of hard to tell from the aerial view but these are really steep slopes yeah so it's uh the contour of this land this is pretty high right here is the 500 year flood mark and then right in here is the 100 year flood mark right about here and then this this will flood this this can this can flood if we have a pretty extreme rain you can see this is where there used to be one of these these oxbows so eventually when this erodes this creek is going to fill in this so this could happen within the next 20 years if we get extreme flooding or more extreme weather weather patterns happening this creek is constantly changing this this used to be the creek used to flow like through here and it just it continually changes and then as beavers also come and establish dams they change that landscape they're flooding things which i personally really like having beavers on the property because they they do so i had a plan when i was thinking where am i going to put this that in the event that this floods right here that these two stages are not going to interfere with this water okay and so when i had i had army corps engineers come in and help me design my driveway we looked at how uh is that water in the event that a flooding event would happen what's going to what's going to get washed where where how can i put these things position these things so that the creek is safeguarded from my activities okay so that was the driving force behind where these things went and so i highly recommend this is within my contacts this isn't going to work for every single other farm every farm is unique in their contacts you this is where getting in contact with local planning and zoning looking at those floodplain that floodplain data talking to wisconsin historical society to make sure there aren't any uh native american burial grounds or other historical sites on your land these are all these are this is all the homework right that needs to be done before these systems actually get you know integrated now if you come into a farm like so this also has people will purchase a farm that's already has a lot of these buildings and infrastructure that happens i really i mean it things change over time other activities could influence the way that your systems function on your farm so i i think reaching out to people those those field technicians nrcs can be really helpful uh like i said the local planning and zoning looking at those floodplains and then army corps of engineers so those are some of the the the resources that help me plan where i should put these things so that i could utilize the resources on my farm and you know we'll also working within the landscape so as we talk about these systems i knew that animal integration like so my animals are integrated into the system they are a part of it so it's not just for manure but the chickens uh they are released into my high tunnel so at the very at the end of the season the chickens help to break down that residue they're cleaning up waste they're preventing weeds from going to seed the ducks then go in to rehydrate that stressed soil because heat really stresses the high tunnel space this high tunnel was part of an equip practice that i had received some some compensation for with them and so the soils will rest and they will receive the compost amendments and then and also be tested prior to that planting so we have when there's a large animal so i only have one large animal on site and you know he's just him being there there's compaction there's other things going on so those are some systems there's some challenges that as i learned how to move him across that through some rotational grazing and even some silver pasture some other practices and i'm looking into i'm using i'm using his manure also as a tool so you can see right behind bail there is you see my little wig in there then the compost or the manure the fortunes in the compost is put there and the chickens scratch around they help to really break it apart saves me a lot of labor the biggest labor is just picking it up you know staying on top of it picking enough but i like a clean space so that helps and then so this is a closer look into what this as it starts to break down so you see there's some straw in there some hay there's some leaves because where it where it goes where that yellow heart was in the previous slides there are there's a lot of leaf matter so it's not just manure in the green waste it's there's a lot of brown waste being added to that as well to balance out those those ratios there and then as it breaks down it starts to you know if it gets really compacted or really wet then i i have to i just have them constantly monitoring and adding to it and depending on where it's going to go and what it's going to be supporting as far as crops because i grow specialty crops those crops need different things so i can add things that make it more acidic i can i can adjust my my recipe so to speak for whatever i need on my farm so big part of this is i was really excuse me i was really worried about public perception so anytime that you have you know comp you're working with manure even if you're composting what you're doing you're putting it through these processes that make it safer i i'm not so much worried about the pathogens things like that but i know public perception people are like well what she's gonna manure by the creek you know and there was a lot of i was hearing rumblings of that and i i think there was a lot of just lack of education so i knew that i was gonna have to have on farm events to walk people through this so they could see it they can see what it's like and then ask questions so the riparian forest buffers this is something i'm particularly passionate about this is where establishing those deeply rooted trees shrubs around spaces that you know runoff could be a concern and it's really to prevent those nutrients from going places they shouldn't be going like the water and so you can see there are some raspberry bushes and some black caps that are really starting to take in so this just takes a lot of time and that's something that i found to be a challenge with grants is like some of these projects which these are systems that are going to take could take a decade to establish you know really healthy root systems and these trees so it's just going to take more time and removing invasive species and doing those like buckthorn for example to create space that will allow more biodiversity to thrive so this is where once those soils have been essentially i'm going to say created but you've broken down the manure created into compost now it's time to add that into the soil make it a soil amendment and really support biology and they'll stress soil salt here's what it looks like so the chickens have already been in there they've been out those soils have had a chance to rest they've been hydrated and now that compost is coming into that system to to support for the next growing season dive into a little closer look so here is what looks like though i leave the residue so anything that the the chickens haven't eaten they've kind of broken it apart it's really great it it really helps to break up some compaction i'm not tilling at all in my high tunnel and i just planted peas a couple days ago so here's some nice summer pictures so this has these systems are working together so really this that's what the work is all about is how can i manage this manure how can i create something from it that's going to benefit my farm it's going to give me data give me things to really look into but then also support all these other systems that are working to to benefit the overall function and you can see i've got some pollinator habitat out there the crick i do have to mow cut back that reed canary reed canary grasses another invasive that i'm dealing with here it's just takes over however once it's it starts to get managed it's really exciting to see those sedged grasses and some of those those flowers coming in this particular project focused on so these are kind of the the checkboxes that i i continually revisit like are my systems doing these things and this particular project really covered these these top three of improved soil health function improved water quality and it is a regenerative egg practice i would tell farmers whatever you are looking to implement on your farm whatever kind of project or system you know it comes back to what brings you joy and i i i asked this all this question like what you know seeing things grow seeing things thriving bio seeing biodiversity brings me joy agri ecology brings me joy looking at farm systems and how we can learn from nature and mimic nature and and create a living ecosystem within the soil that's that's exciting to me and my creepy horse bio that likes to peek in my windows he brings me joy too so here's my farm my name my email people can find me on facebook and instagram i i look forward to connecting with you and and growing a network and supporting your systems on your farm thank you have you noticed improvements or changes in what's happening in your high tunnel based on what's happening on your post i have a little story about the high tunnel soil disaster so it was the same year in 2021 and i'll tell you right now this compost ended up being such a blessing because i had ordered compost because compost takes time right it takes time to build it up it takes time to build up your soil so i i this is year one 2021 okay and i am my compost isn't ready yet to put into the high tunnel right because it's still like i'm just getting up and going and i needed compost i say this because uh the place that i'd order from it was not compost it was black sand with weeds and garbage in it it did not even get filtered or sifted out it was a mess it was a mess i actually sadly i had the first year i had put chickens in there i had lost half my flock because they ingested glass yeah and so i was livid okay so this is where i say i this is exactly why i am making my own soil amendments because i don't know if i get it from somewhere else if i buy it from off farm who knows what's in it who knows what chemicals are in it who knows what's going on so i say the more you can if you can build in systems within your farm that you know exactly what is going into that amendment you know that you know you know you are supporting your land in that way and you're in your and you're keeping i don't have to move my manure somewhere you know i used to have to do that when i was renting i had to take it somewhere have a local farmer come pick it up you know and it was just i didn't have i don't have to do that now and so i think this is what makes it it makes it all worthwhile is seeing my animals in a clean pen because i'm out there all the time like oh i need more manure i need more manure and you know for my compost so they have clean facilities right and they're they're doing great they love life and i'm making this beautiful soil amendment this gorgeous product that is supporting all of that soil health and improving biology and it's just great what kind of advice would you offer to farmers like navigating a serigrant or like what has this led to some other things for you or want to speak a little to that or yeah i and you're not going to get every project you want funded i mean two grants i mean that that happens right and it's certain things just click right it just clicks and it fits and there's a you know there's a lot of interest around it so it'll you'll get funded so i i would say if our farm is looking to get into any star projects look at what are the needs right we're really where are the areas that if you had access to you know x amount of dollars that those dollars could be applied to really leverage your project into the next that next chapter and and to reach that audience and to engage conversation and get people thinking around systems or you know whatever it is that the topic is so that's i'd say it's just really look at you know look at where are the areas that you need support on your farm and but then also having that vision of like where you want to go and and what you want to accomplish as well and then finding those resources between those two points