 My name is Brent Halderman. I'm the farm manager here at the Farm at Windy Hill. We're located in Mentone, Alabama. As the farm manager, I mostly just kind of directs the work and the workflow. We have five full-time staff right now. The Farm at Windy Hill was started in 2014 and Phil and Marcia Hurt were the longtime owners and directors of Camp De Soto for Girls, and they had dreamed for a long time, along with their daughter, of what it would look like to invite their young campers into farm life. We raise cattle here for beef. We have laying hens that produce eggs and over the last few years we've expanded into growing cut flowers and some fruit in our young orchard to to add to the other produce we were already growing. Those are some of the things we do outside of hosting campers all summer for six years into a journey of learning how to use tunnels. Originally, we built two high tunnels and they're both 96 foot long. We recognized from other people's advice and from our own experience how we could grow higher quality tomatoes undercover in the summer, kind of protecting them from the environmental stresses of rain particularly. We stopped trying to ever drive a tractor in here and just do hand work and just create really fertile soil. The soil in these tunnels, it's kind of like they're in the desert. They always stay warmer and they never get rainfall. It's just kind of this artificial warmer pocket of space. The soils need almost like an artificial rain event each year. So we, when a crop is finished, we may just like purposely irrigate it, you know, try to get like three or four inches or something like that of water just to flush those soils out. So now we're going to walk over to the first high tunnel we ever built, high tunnel one over here. Tomatoes are going to go here very soon, but we tried to squeeze in a crop of some greens. I think we probably seeded some arugula, a greens mix called ovations that we like to grow and then there's some little radishes and a lot of hickory turnips growing on the outsides of these rows and we were just trying to squeeze in a little crop to use this space a little more effectively before we prepped it for tomatoes. Left to center open on purpose, again thinking about tomatoes are first priority. It might be kind of challenging to get this arugula. We might be able to just put a piece of black fabric over this bed with holes in the very center for tomatoes and I might not, I may be able to just basically let the arugula and the ovations mix here just kind of get smothered out underneath. Here we have a few rows of hickory turnips. Yeah, they're a little, little small, maybe planted a little too close to grow through the size we would like, but they still have nice greens on them. Sometimes you can't control the timeline exactly. It would have liked for them to be ready to harvest already, but we're waiting on them. We're being patient. They'll go at least golf ball size. I feel like they get bigger in here with how warm it's starting to get in this tunnel. We'll probably try to harvest them when they're a little small, but they're really delicious, like sweet, like lots of like water content in these really refreshing to eat some of these turnips. In the back side we had some carrots that we harvested a little late and we decided to just go ahead and prep the soil and tarp it back there. We cleaned up the carrots. We broad forked the soil to kind of loosen the soil down deeper. We put out what we felt like was the appropriate fertilizer blend for this tunnel. We smoothed the beds out with rakes and then we we irrigated. We wetted those beds down back there and got them moist and then we put the tarp down. And the reason we did that was those beds are completely prepped. They don't need to be raked, broad forked, anything. They don't need to be touched before tomatoes are planted, but by by wetting them down and then putting that solid tarp out, the hope is that we will create like more of a stale seed bed. We want that moist soil, all the weed seeds and things that are in there to go ahead and sprout. We want the warmth that the tarp is causing that soil to warm up and hopefully even some of the like nasty summer weeds like crabgrass that we have might actually pre sprout under there and then die because of lack of sunlight or maybe because of the intensity of the heat. And we'll pull it off and we'll prep this half and then we will use the black woven landscape fabric with holes burned in them to plant three rows of tomatoes in here. As we've built a couple new caterpillar tunnels I'd like to move to a place of where we can treat the whole tunnel more the same if that makes sense. It makes it management a little bit easier, but sometimes we're trying to do lots of little different things and we end up treating one half the tunnel differently than the other. Do you need this much space between your high tunnels? The answer is no. Part of it was we, when they were built, we weren't sure how much space we needed. We knew that it took a lot of space to get the plastic up onto the tunnel. So by the time we built the second one we wanted to leave space for that. The other thing is we knew that there's actually a bit of a slope here and so we were trying to build them in a way that they would sit relatively level. We can't move them now. If I were to do it again, we would have invested more to bring in the soil we needed and we would have probably put them closer together. But we were instead trying to use the soil we had at hand and kind of scrape it together to get the good top soil up inside the tunnel. So here we're going to walk into high tunnel two. We have obviously a lot of spinach. We actually had double, we had two rows of spinach in here and we've just turned over one of those crops in preparation for some summer crops over here on the other side. But we still think we might have a one or two harvest out of this spinach over here even though it's starting to kind of slow down and the heat starting to affect it. And then we grow a lot of cut flowers here in the middle row. We have a lot of renunculus. We have some anemones which were growing like crazy over the last month. They actually seem like they're starting to slow down a little bit. We've had a lot of success growing and selling flowers in the spring and especially in the summer. But the renunculus and the anemones and a few of these other things that we've overwintered in here, they are helping us expand kind of into the earlier spring and have flowers well before when we used to. So people really are excited to see flowers after a long winter. This year I would like to not grow any tomatoes outside. So that's our six year journey. We would plant three to four hundred tomatoes total and a hundred and fifty of them would be inside of a high tunnel because that's all we had space for. We would seed tomatoes in January. We would plant them in these high tunnels sometime in April. They might start producing tomatoes by the end of June, but we would harvest tomatoes in these high tunnels not just for a month or two, but all the way up to October, even sometimes in November. And they may have lost some of their flavor by then because they kind of used up all the fertilizer in the soil or the temperature was a little off. The tomatoes just lived so long because they were not getting blight, which was occurring very fast when we would grow tomatoes outdoors. So blight was, again, just that problem that we saw, whether it was late blight or early blight or exactly what was causing it, we think it was just not having rainfall, splashing soil and maybe the blight that was living in the soil up onto the leaves. But that's what we observed from growing tomatoes in here. We're looking at a 100-foot-long caterpillar tunnel. We purchased it from farmer's friend a couple years ago. And we have now three caterpillar tunnels, which are more, they're more affordable, but they're a little less like, they're not like, our high tunnels are concreted into the ground. Caterpillar tunnels are just, they're not kind of, they're not in the ground quite as much. They're pipes slid over rebar. So they're easier to move if we ever had like a major soil problem. For example, maybe, and we just needed to move to another spot and treating them as a no-till space and trying to grow kind of crop after crop in bees and just much more intentionally kind of using this soil as opposed to our summer fields where we are using tillage and for the most part it's very summer focused and growing summer crops. I've bought a lot of this landscape fabric as well as a lot of our irrigation stuff we buy from irrigation mart. Farmer's friend is a company outside of Nashville, Tennessee and they kind of manufacture a lot of the parts for this and it's a lot of work to put one up and yet I didn't have to figure out where to source all this stuff. I would just order it all from them. It came in a kit, caterpillar tunnel kit. And you can add things. This particular caterpillar tunnel has a 16-inch lift kit so you'll notice the little bit of a riser on each side which gives us a little more height. We have an overhead irrigation kit that came from them. I feel like I'm always experimenting. I think most of the people who work here would probably just laugh about they would quote me behind my back and probably say like one of my most common sayings is like we're going to do an experiment because that's what we're always doing. The proper way to do an experiment would be to do half of it probably that way and do half of it the old way. I'm not sure it's always worked out that way here but normally we try to do some but not all when we try to change things. I think we've just grown in our confidence over the last few years to do two things differently. It's to start trellising our cucumbers and tomatoes differently up to the ceilings inside of our high tunnels and things and using this black woven fabric this year. We've really made a big jump because of some of what we've seen on other farms. Growing the Napa cabbage in the black fabric not only have they grown faster and higher quality with no environmental stress but there's actually been less insect pressure when we've used that black fabric and underneath that black fabric is actually it's a great mulch like there's a lot of great moisture attention and the soil is actually really cool underneath that black fabric when I instinctively would think it would be extra hot under there. It's a new step for us just trying to grow more things on this fabric rather than bare soil which we're excited about and also out in the field we're going to try to use less black plastic laid out by our mulch layer and rather just make a raised bed and put this over top of it. It's a plastic material that's pretty heavy duty again our hope is that it will last for several years. This is a roll that we put a single hole down the center at either two foot or 18 inch spacing for tomatoes. This will go in our high tunnel and have tomatoes transplanted in them next week. Here's an example of one of those pieces of fabric that we actually made just a few days ago just in preparation for our lettuce and so lettuce transplants will be planted in there. The rows I believe are 10 inches apart but then within the row the holes are just 6 inches apart. So this is a template we made to make two different patterns of holes on fabric for two different types of lettuce. So even though there's like 10 rows here it's basically a template to make the rows with the green paint put out a 5 row pattern for summer crisp lettuce and then the rows without the green paint are actually a little bit tighter spacing to make a pattern for our Salanova lettuce mix and Salanova lettuce heads can be a bit tighter. So Ray Tyler, we watched his lettuce master class videos through that we were able to kind of get the idea of making a template. We will lay out the black fabric and then we'll lay the template on top of them and you'll burn through the holes in the wood and you'll burn out holes in the black fabric. These three fields I think we planted maybe 800 row feet of carrots. It's always hard to make that decision to try to grow them outside but we had grown so many carrots in our high tunnels and our caterpillar tunnel that we didn't feel like we could follow it up with another carrot crop so we seeded them here in the field and they've had some really bad storms. We had a 5 inch rain last week and I think the week before that we had a really tough rain. We actually had hail here. I think it was like dime sized hail. So these beds got beat up with very hard rain and yeah it's just an example of kind of what we're not we're not wanting to farm this way and this way only though sometimes we've done this to try to grow more carrots so it's a good example of the challenges of when you do that. Dr. A has been a resource for us via email especially I think we kind of heard of him or met him at a conference and have asked him questions over email. I might be getting this name wrong but I think Dr. Kimball from Auburn has been a resource for me answering questions about vegetables some problems we've seen through the years have been able to ask him questions or get in contact with him through our local extension agent. When I first started out here and my main focus was growing vegetables those contacts and those resources to learn were really because I didn't have a lot of knowledge coming in I mean that was really what got me by I mean that's what got me a start. You know there were some great books there's great books out there by guys like Elliot Coleman but you know some of those live in person contacts that you might listen to at a conference or be able to have contact with via email or over phone were so important. As a summer focus farm the greenhouse gets extremely full in April and May and then it empties back out because we're trying to grow all of those summer crops and grow nice healthy transplants that'll go out right after the frost free day. The greenhouse is a little larger than we probably would need but the greenhouse is a place where campers come a lot they seed their own seeds in there it's like a work and education space it's not just a place where we start seeds for our own gardens and our own vegetable production. We're still starting things like tomatoes in January and it's way too large of a space to heat to just grow 200 tomatoes and that's why we've tried to build like an inner greenhouse basically like a heat zone and we're really right at the tipping point where that room is probably not going to be used much more and the seeding list over the next couple weeks is quite extensive. For us, for our size, I think we're probably going to seed like all of our okra here in a week or two and so we'll just start to fill this outer greenhouse up and we'll stop using that little room. We have over the last five years worked with a soil consultant. Her name is Mrs. Ellen we met her at a SOG conference several years back I believe her consulting company is now called Plant Plant to Profit and she has helped us develop a blend that we buy from Midwestern BioAg and it really really helps save time where we're able to apply you know seven or eight different types of organic amendments all in one blend. So while it might be cheaper to buy each of those products individually, it is not cheaper to try to spread seven products separately. This is how it comes on a palette it's really just seeking to address you know our nutrients for our vegetable fields We've decided to buy the Fort V mix from Vermont Composting to use as our potting soil in our greenhouse Every year we've used different potting soils and we've just seen the difference this is definitely a very high end more expensive potting soil but we're not greenhouse experts we're hiring people who are maybe rather inexperienced caring for a greenhouse and if I don't have time to do it we've just found that one of the ways to close that gap in knowledge would be to just have a really good potting soil This potting soil takes away the need for any kind of supplement supplemental fertilizer for example it's biologically active and alive and it's got real compost in it and we've tried the cheaper potting mixes potting mixes that you need to add some fertilizer in or your transplants are just not going to be very good by the time they're ready to be put out in the field When I came here to Windy Hill the soils were not particularly very very good we knew that we had soil that was a little more poor it was depleted from years of just this being a hay farm and so we wanted to use cover crops to try to bring that back but also we had lots of space we knew we were going to grow three to four acres of vegetables at most and this is a 200 acre farm so rather than like having fields that we just use constantly and rotate crops through them we chose to use cover crops a lot even like let plots rest meaning for like an entire year so what that's translated into would be we might grow two acres of vegetables every year but we've got four acres of field space so since this plot is resting for this entire year this is a great one for them to graze and it has a blend of cool season annuals there's a lot of oats and crimson clover in there as well as like forage kale, daikon radishes, hairy vetch trying to think if there's anything else a little bit of rye grass at least those things are all in there we bring the cows in, let them graze it'll regrow and they might graze it again before we use a no-till drill to drill summer summer annuals in this plot which we will also probably graze with the cattle we're going to plant a summer crop here if there were no cows involved I might have to mow it and then disc it three times or something like that to get the soil ready whereas I've observed if we can bring the cows in and graze extra heavy it's almost like they're digesting and processing the cover crop before it goes into the soil and it can speed it up so maybe like a really hard graze followed by one or two passes of tillage gets the soil ready the 90-120 rule is that for safety practices a crop that is grown in soil that had fresh manure applied to it like for example these cows being here if it's a crop that doesn't have contact with the soil and grows above the ground it needs a 90-day period and if it's a crop like a root crop like a beet or a carrot that has contact with the soil it needs 120 days so that's one of the reasons why the cows are grazing here because this plot is at rest and we're not going to grow vegetables here this summer just in the last year too I've spent a lot of time just kind of learning some things from the Soil Health Academy and a lot of the guys like Alan Williams and Gabe Brown who are kind of on the front lines of the regenerative agriculture movement but I think just like some of those basic things that I feel like I learned before the last two years but maybe they've put it into words maybe in the most straightforward way of just like always keeping the soil covered always keep a living root in the ground some things like that have just been the best advice that we really summarize what we're trying to do here on this farm and what honestly makes me the most excited about farming using regenerative agriculture practices I don't feel like maybe my vision of growing cattle in the past would have been a lot more messy maybe I would have been given a lot more shots I don't know if that's true but these animals have been so easy to care for and so healthy we've had very few problems as we seek to just give them fresh forage sometimes when we're able to really move them like we want to give them fresh pasture every single day and the health of the animals and what they really need outside of clean water and good forage has been very minimal this is just one of our small water troughs again as we move our cattle frequently into small areas we're primarily hooking into an irrigation system that we have that stretches throughout the farm and using like 100 or 200 foot sections of the hose like this red one to fill up these small water tanks that have a float valve on them when the water goes down the float drops down and the hose more water goes into the trough and then as the water rises up it cuts the water off so that it won't overflow so this allows us to be really mobile pretty lightweight we've got several of these though part of the weakness one of the reasons why we might try to make a change to some newer models that they're making that have water that comes in from on the bottom side of the trough would be that we the cows the cows if they hit that they can break that float pretty easily or they can push on this with their nose and it would kind of disrupt or even strip the threads and so every time we set up one of these water troughs we use a brick line to protect the float valve from the cows here's some of the tools that we've used through the years we do use this mulch layer a lot especially for summer crops we've used white plastic we've used black plastic we've used biodegradable plastic but primarily this creates raised beds for us lays drip taped down and if we want it to it'll lay the black plastic but the plastic mulch over that bed which is creates a great planting space one of the biggest downsides of that is you have to till the soil pretty well you have to till the soil pretty deeply like we were talking about loving the no till that the results of no till inside of our tunnels we have something to contrast that to and it's the tillage that we have to do to get ready for our summer crops in building these we primarily use a disc to till we do have a we do have a six foot tiller right here which we try to use as little as possible this is a no till drill that we've had for a year or two it's kind of just been one of those tools that has really changed a lot of what we do here now that we've gotten this no till drill there's just much less need to like disc up areas to prep for a cover crop for example so this no till drill has really changed the way we do things and it's caused some of our pieces of equipment that were used for more tillage to just basically stay parked which is exciting it's kind of shows some of our journey as we try to till the soil less I will bring it into our small vegetable plots and use it to sow all of my cover crop we harvest our sweet potato crop last year and normally after you harvest your sweet potatoes your field is just kind of a mess of like bad sweet potatoes and like all these vines and normally I would disc that a few times and prep to lightly disc in a cover crop and instead I actually our sweet potato field was kind of kind of haggard with vines and it was just after harvest and I decided to just no till drill our cover crop our winter cover crop straight into the sweet potato patch I made two passes over it and the drill itself actually leveled the ground off a bit and we had a our winter cover crop came up great in that sweet potato patch we're looking at our movable chicken we call our chicken cabin somewhere between 250 and 300 lane hens are typically living in it we kind of have a rotation where we'll raise a new batch of lane hens and retire the older ones this trailer primarily spends most of the year out on pasture the only reason it's not back out on pasture right now is we're waiting on a local welder to come and help us weld up part of the hitch what we've started to do just as a way to get them off the pasture and bring them into a water source that we don't have to worry about freezing as much in the middle of winter and also to just kind of spare the pasture from how they might make it kind of torn up and muddy in the dead of winter we bring them into an area like this and we roll out a lot of hay or straw or leaf mulch and then we move the cabin throughout the winter kind of in this plot and we allow them to almost help assist us in making next year's compost and so it doesn't look like it but there's close to a foot of leaf mulch in some of these areas and it's been layered we've actually used the cabin to kind of layer it with manure and then we'll add more leaves and manure and so hopefully by next week when we move them back out on pasture I'll use our front loader and I will I will just heap and pile up all of this mixture of hay and straw and leaf mulch and all of the chicken manure and I'll try to pile it up and we'll try to have a nice compost pile we've done lane hens since the beginning here it started with me watching a bunch of Jill Soliton videos about his mobile mobile chicken coops our customers love our eggs and it has been a challenge to to make a profit with this amount you know we've had lane hens I feel like it's been a challenge to just break even but it's always seemed like it paid off because we had so many customers that were coming for eggs because we have had success with our two Great Pyrenees guard dogs we don't set up any portable chicken netting when they're out on pasture they basically just move around about a 20 acre section of pasture and they move every day and the dogs do a really good job of protecting them I really like these rolled out nesting boxes from Hengear there's a roosting bar that you put up at night so that the chickens won't sleep inside of the nesting box and then in the morning there's a timer that goes off and the roosting bars fall down and that gives the chickens access to get in and lay their eggs and then once they lay their eggs their eggs roll away from them into a tray where they can't get access to them and there's been a lot of improvements over the last six years since we built this trailer and built a structure on top of it but honestly there's so many things I would do differently now so I'm pretty sure for anybody as soon as you build one you're gonna the process of trying to build one in and of itself would teach you a lot of what you would want to do the next time COVID for us here at Windy Hill was really challenging I feel like it carried with it a lot of opportunity I would estimate somewhere around 50% of every thing we sold when it came to food so meat and eggs and vegetables probably somewhere around 50% two years ago was sold to Camp De Soto, Camp De Soto for girls the camp that we're partnering with and we grow food for their dining hall and Camp De Soto had to cancel last summer so huge impact without going into all the details we ended up last year 2020 the year that camp got canceled and COVID hit we ended up selling about the exact same amount of food for the year we used to have an on-farm store that people came in and shopped and for the last 12 months every Friday that we open our on-farm market we offer drive-thru service only we normally try to sell all of our beef over the course of 12 months and over the course of like 2 to 3 months we sold out of all of it often times we were seeing customers come out that we had never seen come out trying to navigate when to close down the drive-thru market and reopen our market and there's a lot of different opinions about that but from a business standpoint we've just found that a lot of people have really enjoyed our drive-thru market and they come here because of it so it's going to be hard to change back to be honest, kind of night and day from a lot of people in America who couldn't work the same way and we had like a farm and the work didn't change so we were really thankful for that