 Greetings from Indiana, the Hoosier State Crossroads of America where no one knows what time it is actually, but we do the best we can. We – I'll go ahead and do a fairly brief presentation about Dowd Orchards. I don't consider that we do anything too unique, wonderful, or unheard of where we are, but perhaps there'll be some interesting pictures and sites there, and if you have any questions about what we're doing, we can address that. In any case, part of Indiana is up around Chicago, which we call the region, is on Wisconsin time, which all of us, agricultureists would rather be. The rest of us are on the same time as Bangor, Maine, or Miami Beach, or whatever, all those places we do business with. We actually have a fair amount of business with Chicago Whole Foods, which presents some difficulties because, as I say, nobody knows what time it is. But anyway, we are in North Central Indiana, kind of equal distance, like Michigan up here, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Lafayette, where the great University of Purdue is, and Indianapolis down here, sort of equidistant, not adjacent to any one large population center, a rural down-to-earth area with honest, hard-working, mostly interesting Hoosier people, probably perhaps not that different than rural Wisconsin. We're pretty far out in the boondocks, and I do have a map in the sales room of where people pin where they came from, so I have some idea where we draw from, but a lot of it's pretty local, really. We have been, I think at this point, either the first or second-oldest orchard in Indiana, depending on what statistics you use. We do have a sensory farm program there, so we stress history quite a lot and try to ride some interesting facet of our operation. I should have gotten a larger, closer blow-ups of these pictures on the wall, but I'll just relay a little bit of history, since it tends to be somewhat interesting, at least, and the faces perhaps don't matter as much. This was our patriarch, came from New York State in 1839, along with a lot of other settlers after the native lands were stolen and given to the Wabashiri Canal and the homesteaders, our understanding is, were required to plant an orchard on their new properties as one of the stipulations of homesteading. His son, Brinson, was a multi-talented agriculturalist who planted the first commercial orchard. He had five kids who were all involved in one facet or another, and two of them continued the operation on, interestingly, the youngest of that set, died of a massive stroke during the harvest season of 1946, I believe, which some of you can probably relate to, and the community came in and finished the harvest that year to try to bail them out. That was before my time slightly, but we do have newspaper clippings, and we honored the few surviving people from the school kids and things that came to help in that operation just last fall. My grandfather set for totally unknown reasons, was married in September of 1914, have no idea other than that grandmother wasn't pregnant, but real poor timing on their part, set up housekeeping and tent to do the harvest that season, and grandmother helped cook for the crew so they don't make ladies like that anymore. They made their first, I assume it wasn't unfortunate at that time, but their first economic progress packing Ben Davis variety and barrels and shipping to these coasts from a railhead. So a little bit of history background, we at least have a state road going by the place. Miami County is a county which is stable in population, not gaining or losing. We used to have a sack base in that county, so we were in the crosshairs of the missile threat, not so much anymore I think, hopefully. Numbers of these older trees have been replaced, but that was an aerial shot. Some of you older ones may remember my father, Lorne, who was instrumental in the early IDFTA organization, propagated some of the first dwarfing trees in the U.S., and a lot of spray residue on that, I don't know what the deal is there, but continued the operation until 1994 when my wife and I assumed responsibility. She's back at the back, and if you didn't indulge in our stealth tasting operation back there, please feel free to do that. I think there's still plenty to go around. Also some literature back there you should access. This gentleman who we were talking to was celebrating his 100th birthday at the time. He's a distant relative, but looked really good, I think, for that. We should all do so well. In terms of trees, I'm not going to talk too much about the cultural aspect. It's a constant situation of removal and renewal, and we don't do anything too unusual other than grow a lot of varieties, as many as 50, for retail sale. This appears to be pre-pruning. I hope they look better than that in a few months, a few weeks, but I'd rather prefer a semi-dwarf mulling seven-type trees for a number of reasons. I realize some of the drawbacks as well, but they do well for us on our soils. We are heavily invested in new MAIA material, and that was part of the major reason which I want to get to here in some detail of doing this presentation. I was talking about MAIA and the new varieties listed. Those are all young trees of MAIA developments, and most of them have not fruited to any degree yet, although we at least had some samples, and a few peaches, which are already that. Presumably, we were rooting for global warming on a consistent basis, so at least we could have peaches most years, but sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. We have no lake effect to speak of where we are, other than some snow bands sometimes, but we don't get the climatic tempering that you'd like. Let's see the main sales area. We have a complex of buildings which were cobbled around an 1800s one-room schoolhouse, which I'll talk about in a minute. My brother and I moved a couple of barns and reconstructed them in the 1980s to form that facility, and one of our goals and hallmarks is large displays, massive displays of a lot of different varieties, so people have a lot of choice and a certain amount of shock and awe when they come in and see all that fruit. We also try to do as much as possible in the realm of public education and tasting and outreach for knowledge of new varieties, and if there's a secret to retailing where we are, it's that people have to have a reason to drive there because you can go to any store and get common commercial varieties, but not so much where we are. So we try to have, when the health police will leave us alone, have public tasting. They seem to have a set of guidelines that they're okay with, but to my way of thinking, I guess it's actually somewhat what we're doing right now, pre-sliced and diced and approved facility and so forth, but that's probably not as sanitary as some of the other ways that we have done it, and of course if you're staffed with knowledgeable people, my niece in this case, it goes very well with customers because everybody likes free samples and some education as they taste. I suppose other than a large selection of varieties, the other thing we try to push and stress is cider, fresh cider production, and that's in many ways the backbone of the business. People will drive for good fresh cider. Indiana Society also has a contest, which we've won a number of times and don't know whether there's any major secrets other than producing a really good blend and a really high quality product. We have a old, inefficient, slow, and I guess it's, I think it's fully, what's the word, legal. I was trying to, compliant, isn't that it? I believe compliance, you're always supposed to be in compliance of something or other, but certainly not the mass production thing that you see in commerce, but in any case it makes a really good cider. One of my nephews can lead a crew and make a thousand gallons a night, which is after work, which is enough for us. We do that one to two times a week, depending on the season and whether we're doing any wholesaling. We do also provide some cider to wineries. We have a UV cider shirt machine, which we use most of the time. It's not required as a retail situation, but it does offer some advantages and we feel it doesn't affect quality to any degree, does provide somewhat greater shelf life. We have Yupik pumpkins, that's a major attraction, and we have, I try to prepare as best we can to ramp up for those seven or eight golden weekends as I call them throughout the fall, hope for good weather. You're probably all in the same boat. Try to ramp up a serviceable, knowledgeable crew from almost nothing during the summer, and take care of the customers, many of whom I think visit just once or twice a year, but have to have their apple fix, and of course on a beautiful sunny warm September day with a weekend with apples flowing in and out and lots of activity and tours and everything going. It looks like heaven, but of course all of you probably realize it's not like that. You're around. I think I had some lady accost me once when I was extremely busy parking people during an open house event that she said, boy, you people are just getting filthy rich, aren't you? Or it works to that effect, and I thought a moment and just walked away, but anyway, it looks like that occasionally. We do try to have local entertainment on the weekends, fall weekends. There's a community band nearby. We have actually, it's my niece on the drums, and our local dentist, Doc Musselman, who is a multi-talented musician, has performed numbers of times with different groups and but on his own, who we try to get involved at least once a year. There's a Dixieland band from Peru nearby. Actually Peru is, calls themselves the circus capital of the world. I assume that Barabu might dispute that, but that seems along with Sarasota to be the three cities in the nation who go hog wild on circus, but there were circus winter quarters historically in Peru, Indiana, which is some 10 miles from us. Everybody likes tractor tours, universally attractive, and we try to do an open house usually the last weekend of September or any given year with vendors, tours, various events and good stuff going on. Let's see, go back, that's the only picture I've got that actually shows something of the old Port Royal schoolhouse, which I'll talk about in a moment. You might catch a look at that, since it's surrounded by everything else now, but that's how the outfit started. We have a tractor show, usually following open house. We have a some kind of Labor Day festivity. We have cider weekend, we have history weekend, we have variety weekend when the largest selection is available and we usually have something Halloween, and of course that's the golden weekends. This is Port Royal school, dating from 1883, which I think every township in at least our area of the Midwest had at least one single one-room school, and of course consolidation happened throughout the rest of history. That was a school standing on its own I think soon after abandonment about 1910. That was the deed of the property from our forebearer providing the land for the school, and this was some of the kids, including my grandfather right there and his siblings who only had to walk a couple hundred yards to school, and that was a graduation program from our degree I think, like 1903 or something like that, and so inside of that facility, which was the only building to retail from it originally, we provide, we do like resale items, jams, jellies, popcorn, snacks, caramel apples, popcorn, et cetera. We'd like to do something more, space is limited, and then there's the health and safety situation. We're nothing if not antiquated and out of date, but then some people call it charming, so there's a certain ambiance. I think as we speak today on a winter weekday, we're on self-serve. There's a money box on the counter with a sign, including a number to call if there's any questions, and you make your own change and leave, and it works quite well. Don't think we've never lost anything significant, and some people downright appreciate it, enjoy it, but of course the traffic is pretty slow on State Road 19 today probably. I have a local honey producer that's getting more and more tenuous it seems like. We have traditionally done field trips. I think that has been de-emphasized pretty significantly in recent years, mostly because of the financial state of the schools and the fact that it's hard to scrape money together to do rural field trips. The ones that do come are appreciative, but that was a different situation 12, 15 years ago when lots of people, lots of schools were doing it. Staffing is obviously critical as you probably are well aware. This is our sales manager who was a regional rep for McDonald's. I oversaw a number of restaurants, a very good background to do something like managing sales in an orchard, but our labor pool is primarily housewives and retirees and part-timers and folks with kids in school and the kids themselves, and that's two, four year round situation. We only have three or four employees that stick with it pretty much. Felicia is one, but she values her free time and doesn't want to be 100%, which is fine, except in the fall. Apparently almost every seemingly top student who lived nearby from North Miami has worked with the orchard at some point in time and seems like almost everybody from the county that comes in either worked there as a kid or a young adult or had some relative who did and they all tend to point that out. We have had people see where was the gentleman from. Somebody that came back, I think it was from Washington State last fall, they talked about his early years working at the orchard and still remembered it right there. I think so we want to stop on those. See, I don't know if I missed anything I was going to cover. I think I would take some questions and we'll reserve some time for the MAI material, which I really want to get into here and give you some in-depth information there, so any questions now? When we do not at this point, we were talking about that to somebody in the room this morning and other than the logistics of actually doing it, my impression is a lot of the folks where we come from consider that work not recreation, but you know, of course that did not want anybody messing around in his trees and he would cringe and go apoplectic if someone was climbing a tree and breaking limbs, so there's downsides to it. No, we do not charge to get in. We don't actually charge our vendors for open house either on that particular weekend because that connotates a free situation and the wagon rides are free that weekend. The other times the gentleman, Jim on the tractor there is a folksy local fel that's worked with us for some time. His son lives in the orchard house and in that case it's a free will offering and it helps support his weekend, so we feel like we get, you know, more than enough kicked from the enjoyable activities to make up for in sales. I would say about 60% of our total activity income is retail. For markets we are open year round although to a lesser and greater degree obviously. We do some offsite farmers markets in Indianapolis primarily who now has a pretty good system. That was not the case in the past, we actually drove to Chicago historically 20 years ago to do markets and the other 40% or so is various wholesale, various year to year, but I mentioned hard cider material, whole foods, some small lot resale to other orchards or vendors and also some schools. I should put in a plug. I don't know. Do you have farm to school up here? Yeah, activity going on. That's been a very hot item I'd say we had historically a great deal of trouble finding the right person to deal with to get fruit into local schools and it's become much more easy in recent years and the extension people are out there to help facilitate that. So that's been a very good thing. I hope it continues instead of eating tater tots and chicken nuggets or something, you know. Management practices, we do IPM to the best of our ability. We have some pretty good connections with Purdue which is only an hour down the road and we have not tried to do anything strict, organic or along those lines but most people are satisfied with the IPM situation and we're pretty happy with that. So, certainly in the apple scab belt as we all are I guess, so scab and kyling moth is the two really big deals along with curculio early and best be on top of that. Of course some of the MAI material is going to help along those lines I think at least with the disease, from the disease standpoint.