 Hi, I'm Gary Gem from Harvest Farm in Waitly, Massachusetts. I've got a wholesale vegetable farm with my partner Dave, and we specialize in certain brassicas, primarily collard greens and kale. We grow tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, some herbs, and greenhouse crops. We grow about 100 acres of crops, most of it is brassicas. Cultivation is a big part of our weed control program. Herbicides are used as well as hand-hoeing and cultivation using various different techniques and tools. We find that we can grow some of our crops with no herbicides and only cultivation and other growing techniques with the brassicas. We find that we need to use a combination of herbicides and cultivation. In particularly weedy fields, we may have to get out and hand-ho, but what we're looking for in the long term is to clean up our fields and get them to a point where we reduce hand-hoeing to a minimum. When we have to seed crops directly into the field, we find that we need to use a pre-emergent herbicide usually just to get a jump on the seeds coming out of the ground. Before we get to whether we use cultivation or herbicides, or both, really starts with the crop rotation. We have a three-year rotation program here on the farm to try and keep diseases and weeds at bay. We find that it works quite well for diseases, but the weed pressure is always there. We're trying to do better and better all the time, but it seems like the weeds are getting tougher and tougher to deal with too. We start with the rotation. That tells us where we can plant certain crops, certain families of crops. We look then at the conditions, weed pressures in the different fields and decide where to try to farm with no herbicides, where to farm with them, and what herbicides we may have to use, and basically our whole approach to farming those fields. This tool here is the basis of our establishing a clean field from very early on. This combined with making a bed to get a smooth surface gives us the capability of doing a good job to start with. Once we get a little bit of weed pressure and our transplants are still small enough, we run through with this cub tractor and the budding cages. We slide right in between the plants and do a nice job of cleaning everything up except what's in between the rows or in the rows. That serves us as our first cultivation, and after that we go in with a different tractor. We can do an acre in about a half an hour with this, and my goal is to always go as fast as I can. Speed seems to really make a big difference with this thing. If the plants are tall enough and the ground is firm enough, I've gone in road gear with it and really been pleased with the results. You also like to get your work done quickly, but you want to do a good job and that's the primary goal. When we find conditions that are particularly clumpy, such as after heavy rains, before we go in for the hilling, we will frequently go in with these small teeth, with these little wires attached to them, to break up the clods so that when we hill, we don't throw the clods all over the plants and do more damage than good. These we found hanging around in an old barn and put them to use. They work quite well for fracturing the soil. The key to doing a good job is to have a nice straight flat bed that the cultivators can follow to a tee. This system works well enough that the tractor virtually does it itself. As a matter of fact, one time I was chased by some mean bees and I jumped off the tractor and it caught up to me at the end of the row and it had cultivated perfectly all the way along without me on it. After we go through with the budding cultivators, we then leave the crop alone pretty much until it gets to a stage of growth where we can just sneak in one last time and that's when we come in with this tractor with the big sweeps on it. We adjust them. The cultivating shanks are adjustable so that the teeth are tipped down not as they are now but they're pointed more towards the ground and we go through and hill them up and top dress them at the same time. Now so far with the use of the buddings we've achieved weed control in between the rows. Once we come in with these particular cultivators we achieve weed control within the row because we hill up the dirt around the plants and we can bury weeds up to about two inches in height. We do that just prior to the canopy filling in and usually when we go in we also add fertilizer to give the crop enough food to carry it to maturity.