 Hi, my name is Megan McGuffey and I am the Program Coordinator for Community Crops. And I'm Amy Girdas, I'm the Operations Supervisor for Community Crops. We are a 20-year-old program here in Lincoln, Nebraska, so right in the heart and the middle of the country, and we have existed for 20 years independently and just recently joined Family Service Lincoln, a larger non-profit. Our mission is to provide education, advocacy, and experiences to grow local food. We do that with a variety of programs and spaces. We've grown from a single community garden in 2003 to almost 19 acres of property across 16 sites, that's gardens, farms, and greenhouses. So the site we're at today is the site of our CERA Partnership Research and this is the Prairie Pines Training Farm. So this is a five-acre property that's nestled in a larger 140-plus acre property that's managed by the University of Nebraska Foundation and the Nebraska Forest Service. So the larger property is really focused on conservation, space for wildlife, and then we have the sustainable farm that's kind of nestled in here. So it's really an idyllic setting and it's really an incredible place to farm and to give our farmers a chance to really dive into farming in the United States or for the first time and really try to build their skills and their business and find their place. About 80% of our participants are low to moderate income and about 40% are immigrants and refugees. So it's really exciting to work with the full diversity of the folks that live here in Lincoln and oftentimes the most knowledgeable people when it comes to growing food. Lincoln is a refugee resettlement community so we have folks from all of the world that call Lincoln home, in particular I want to highlight for the SARE Project, the Yazidi refugee community. This is an ethnic minority from Northern Iraq and we have the largest population in the United States, over 3,000 individuals. So this community came to us at first through our garden program. There was maybe 30 or 40 families there and they kept asking for more and more space and our gardens have smaller plots. So something clicked for us and we're like, okay, actually are you guys farmers? Are you interested in growing food at a larger scale and as a business? So through that connection we were able to then start the Yazidi refugee project in our farm program and have really seen a lot of growth and excitement through that that has connected into our work with SARE. So we currently have six farmers who are growing at this site, six farm businesses. We also have a couple agroforestry spaces, cooler space for the farmers and high tunnels, caterpillar tunnels that they utilize for season extension. So as Megan mentioned, most of our farmers out at this site are from the Yazidi community and those are for the most part who's participating in the SARE partnership project that we have active right now, which is a weed suppression study. So the crops that we're focusing on for that study are crops that were culturally important to those farmers. So eggplant and pickling pepper, which is a longer sweet pepper that's traditionally used for pickling. Some cool herbs too. They do a lot of parsley, cutting celery, garden crests, lots of stuff that we know but some stuff that's new to us and exciting. Sustainability is really a core value for community crops. We focus everything on sort of using organic techniques and really believe in not only preserving but building up our natural resources here. So we really try to prevent folks from using chemicals and teaching positive practices like cover cropping and good irrigation practices. And we always try to do that from a perspective of giving people knowledge, giving them access to resources and opportunities to see things that they might have not seen before and see how they can work so that sustainability isn't just this difficult thing that you have to do but it's actually a positive thing that you can see value for in your work.