 Hi, I'm Jake Guest, and this is Kildia Farm in Norwich, Vermont. We farm here, my wife and I, on about 40 acres, most of which actually is rented, but we have about three acres on the home farm and another 10 acres nearby, and we own about 12 miles away to 24 acres, which we actually are, personally, leasing to someone else. My first experience, practical experience with flaming, was this little device here. The idea is that I can apply flame to anything, to a row. What I do is I actually go over the rows that are planted just before the seeds come up. And this thing is very useful for times when a crop, for instance, a crop that comes up much sooner than other crops, where I just don't, there's no point in going to get the tractor and putting the flame around and doing the whole thing just for radishes or something, something that's quick. So all the beds are prepared ahead of time, and then I just take this flame around just before the crop comes up and go along in the mark and flame the mark with a cedar, the cedar mark. And it kills everything that's germinated and the crop comes up right behind it. Sometimes it literally, as the crop is coming, it's actually cracked the soil. And when I flame it, it's literally hours before it emerges. But when it comes up, there's no weeds available, no weeds left. The flaming is very effective on weeds that are newly emerged, small weeds that are just emerged. It's less effective when the weeds are a little bit bigger, two or three inches tall or so, still works, but sometimes you have to go a little slower or use more heat. It's also not particularly effective on grasses, unfortunately, because any grasses or any weed that comes from deeper in the soil and not right on the surface doesn't get hit or can regrow. I found that the flatter the surfaces of the stale seabed, the better the flamer works. It's really important. If there's any ridges or lumpy soil, the weeds manage to, the flamer deflects off the lumps of the ridges. So I've experimented with different ways of preparing the beds and flat is important. That works really well. I found that grasses are a real problem. The problem is that the growing tip of the grass is slightly below the surface. So the flamer goes over the top, kills the top of what's visible, and a few days later the grass reemerges. One way that I think I've dealt with the problem is to flame a little later where grass is a problem, because for some reason, I mean, at later time the growing tip has actually come out of the soil and is vulnerable and I can hit it with the flame. The ideal way to use this technique is to prepare the beds way ahead of time, as many weeks even ahead of time. What I try to do is get an area all fertilized, ready to go, and all the beds actually physically made. Then I start at one side and, you know, I have to plant some early crops early. I plant them and do the flaming, whatever flaming I can, and then flame ahead. I always flame a week or so ahead of the actual planting. For those beds which I'm not planning to plant for, say, four or five weeks, I may actually go do a tillage with a rotovator, a very light tillage with a rotovator before I even get to the flaming and then they're part of the sequence. I actually have some fields where I make it a cycle and I start back in the beginning again, re-prepare the beds and start all over again. Spinach is a crop, for instance, where every week I plant two beds and I always have flamed the week before and flame right after the planting and then have flamed a couple weeks for the beds yet to be planted and tilled four weeks ahead of time. There are actually four components to the flamer. There is the flaming, the flame heads themselves. There's the frame, there's the tank, and then there's the regulating mechanisms. The regulator consists of a solenoid-activated valve which simply turns the machine on or off. This tank, the tank is really important. You can't just use a regular propane tank that you see standing around greenhouses. This has to be a motor fuel tank and they're not so easy to locate. This was used when we got pretty cheap but they knew they cost about $700. As you can see, it holds about 40 gallons of fuel. I figure it takes about $19 to $20 an acre. Worth a fuel. This device uses liquid propane as opposed to gas and that's very significant because one of the difficulties that some of the European burners have is that using gas means that they get too cold from the evaporation of all the gas. These burners are much different. They move the propane in a liquid form all the way down to the burners before it's actually burned so that there's no super cooling of the lines. The expansion of the gas just before it burns all takes place right down at the bottom of the burners. Each burner is a 250,000 BTU burner. It's pretty arbitrary what you need. It depends on the width of the bed. This seems to be sufficient for my uses. It covers a 52-inch bed quite nicely. Sometimes I use the burner for a single row crop in which case I don't even use the outside two burners, the outside four burners. I only use the two inside ones and tilt them so that they direct the flame right down to a single row down below there. It's very versatile. There's lots of different uses for it. This is a good example of what the flamer does. On my left here is a bed. These beds were prepared at the same time, the one on the right and the one on the left, were prepared at the same time. They were tilled and then rolled and marked. I use this roller. You can see it just barely. There are marks of three rows are marked out and that's the guide my planter, I plant by hand with a push planter. I flamed this bed about three days ago and it looked identical to this bed over here. As you can see, there are hardly any weeds left. There are new weeds emerging. What I will do now at this point is I'll plant the crop in this bed and then wait a few days before the crop comes up and flame it again. That's going to get any weeds that germinate between now and the time I flame. It also will get rid of these few little ones. You can't even see them. They're tiny little weeds that have germinated since I flamed it last time. I think one of the few downsides to using this machine concerns safety. There's a lot of energy in here and it has the potential for being pretty dangerous. I think that it's especially important that all the valves are tight and that the pins are all in and everything. If this thing dropped off or something broke it could be a real disaster. I think the flame weeder has a real place in our operation here. There are some improvements and there are some techniques that I need to work on but I think it's not enough alone but in conjunction with a proper and appropriate and timely tillage I think it's indispensable. I find that I'm using it finding more and more uses for it every year and I certainly am very encouraged by what I've discovered.