 I'm going to talk not at all about my farm in this talk. I'm going to talk about a research trial I'm doing with a couple of other farms. So this is as part of my day job, I guess, evaluating and demonstrating weed control options for direct seeded fall vegetable crops. That was the title of our research proposal, unlike I think probably most of the other talks that have been in this track. This is a SARE partnership grant. So not a farmer rancher grant, but the partnership grant is something for an agriculture professional, so an extension agent or someone to work with a number of farmers. I think the minimum number is three, at least we've got three on our grant. And try and do maybe something similar to maybe a farmer rancher grant, but try and solve some problems, help farmers. So these are the partners. Someone else was busy this weekend, so they didn't come with me to talk about this. But so we've got Jill Elmers in the back here of Moon on the Meadow Farm, Jen Humphrey and Jess Pearson there, the Red Tractor Farm, and Kevin Prather and Jesse Asmason of Mellow Fields Farm. So all three of those are within, let's say, a 15-mile radius of Lawrence, Kansas. That's where I'm from, Douglas County, Kansas. So a little bit west of Kansas City, a variety of different things that they do. We're talking mostly about vegetables, so all three of these operations are certified organic vegetable producers. The Red Tractor Farm also does some goats, but that's sort of the scope of diversity. And the way this project came about, so this is a two-year research grant, we just wrapped up year one, so unfortunately, I'll skip ahead just a little bit. I don't have any real conclusive data. I've got some sort of initial findings and some ideas, but we haven't wrapped up both years of our project. But the way this came about in 2017, so my background, I had been a farmer for at that point about 10 years in that area, got hired on as an extension agent. So in the fall, I was talking with representatives from these three farms, and they were really complaining about a problem, they were having that fall, so this would have been 2017. And that was that they were having a lot of pigweed growth in their fall direct-seeded vegetable crops. So these are things that are small seeds, densely planted, and they didn't know exactly what to do with that. I mean, obviously you can go out there with a hoe or you can try and hand pick it or do something like that. But so they had this problem. Well basically, this runs down to in the fall in our area, probably up here, too. We grow a lot of the same things we do in the spring, so green, spinach, carrots, beets, radishes, all those kinds of things. Well in the spring, when you're planting that, the soil temperatures are relatively cool, so you get kind of a jump against some of the really aggressive annual summer weeds. But in the fall, when you're planting those in August, all of those really aggressive summer annual weeds, especially in our area, pigweed, was the one that they named over and over again. So I should say probably in case someone has a different idea of what pigweed is, I'm talking about like amaranthus reflexus or an amaranth family. But those germinate more quickly than the vegetable crops. They grow more aggressively, so they can provide really dense competition. Yeah, so many veggies germinate and grow more slowly than weeds. And the crops that really are troubling for this are crops with a real high planting density because it's hard to get in there and deal with those weeds anyway, except sort of hand pulling them, which isn't really an economical solution. So in sort of an ideal world, you know, people want to grow crops like this. These are all like nice, densely planted rows of greens in this case, where they want to grow beets or they want to grow carrots, things that are densely planted, and they were getting tons of pigweed in them. So yeah, to summarize, you want to grow something like this, and you get something like that. That is not red leaf lettuce, that is a field of pigweed, literally. So there's one older plant here, but everything else you see that's red or green there is a little baby pigweed. So you can see, I think I've got one more here. This is actually an ornamental amaranth that I just put in there because I don't, I guess I realized when trying to put this together, I don't take enough pictures of weeds. But this kind of illustrates the point I want to make. I learned in my first year of farming, a mature pigweed plant will put on about 900,000 seeds, and they will remain viable in the soil for up to 15 to 20 years, depending on the conditions. So if you let a few of these grow, or you let a few of these guys go to seed, I mean you're looking at a situation where that's common. And so a number of these farms probably in the past have had less than ideal weed management strategies, and they have persistent weed problems with pigweed, among others. But so what's the solution? So that was my job as an extension agent. Farmers come to me with a problem, and I'm supposed to help them figure out the answer. So for organic growers, they can't really spray an herbicide, but I think what's kind of interesting is even for non-organic growers, there aren't a lot of herbicide options because you're talking about broadleaf weeds growing in broadleaf crops, sometimes not so much with pigweed, but if you've got lamb's quarters or something else, that's like in the same family as spinach. So it's really hard, even in non-organic systems, to use chemicals. And in organic systems, the only herbicides that are out there are broad spectrum. They kill everything, and they're not very expensive and very expensive. So nothing really to spray. So going through the literature, it seemed like the consensus recommendation was this idea of a stale seed bed. And a stale seed bed is basically you prepare your planting bed as you want it. You do things to encourage the weeds to germinate, maybe irrigate it and let it sit for a couple of weeks, or if you get rain, just let it sit. Let the weeds germinate, and then you kill those weeds, and ideally you have depleted the weed seed bank enough that subsequent crops won't have to suffer that pressure. So there's a question there, like, well, how do you do that? I mean, that's sort of a generality. How do you terminate those weeds? And that was really the question that I was kind of left with. I didn't know what to recommend to them, like, what's the ideal way to do this? Specifically, also, I think the ways that are commonly done are very tillage-intensive, so really disturbing the soil. And we don't want to do that. We're trying to help them build soil health. But also, we want to minimize the disturbance because we don't want to bring up more weed seeds lower down. We want to kill the weed seeds that are in that germination layer and not bring up more. So we put together, you know, not knowing the answer to that question, not knowing what to recommend to them. I wasn't familiar with the Sarah Partnership Grant at that point in time. I was familiar with the Farmer Rancher Grant, so I started looking at that. But on the website I found this partnership grant, which seemed like this was really kind of an ideal fit. We had farmers with a problem, sort of unclear what the right solution for them was, and we could help them by doing some on-farm trials. And not only those three farms, but pretty much everyone I know that grows any of these fall crops has these problems. Weeds grow fast, especially in the fall. So we narrowed it down to three crops that they routinely grow that really were the most troubling for them. So that includes beets, carrots, and spinach. Spinach they have probably the most density in planting. The carrots are really problematic because it takes a long time for a carrot seed to germinate, so you have a lot of chance for the weeds to get a head start. And beets, I think that was more of a consequence of that particular year, but that was a crop that they were really having a hard time with that year. As part of this grant, so we want to try different techniques to control weeds in those specific crops, monitor changes to soil health, and monitor and analyze the amount of labor time needed to do these different techniques because there's a lot of different ways you can kill these weeds, the implements to do them have variable costs, the amount of labor time it takes to do that has variable costs. So trying to figure out what all of those are to help them come up with what the best idea is. So breaking that down, we came up with a few ideas for different ways to terminate weeds in this stale seed bed technique. So the three options we came up with are occultation, flame weeding, and using a power harrow. I'll have a few examples of those so you can see what I'm talking about when I talk about each of those. But then there was this thing that I guess isn't so new, but it's new to me and it was relatively new to them that isn't really a stale seed bedding technique, but might help these densely seeded vegetable crops compete against the weeds. And that was this paper pot transplanter, which I'm going to talk a little bit about. It was a two-year grant and here I say it's for 2019. So after we submitted our grant application, they pulled the registration for the paper pots and the paper pot transplanter for the National Organic Program. So last year none of my growers could use a paper pot transplanter and be certified organic. They reversed course on that in October. I wanted to change and try something else in the growers like we really want to try that. Don't take it out of the grant. I bet they'll change their mind and NOP did. So this year we are going to try a paper pot transplanter too. So occultation is basically covering the ground with something that is opaque, encouraging the weeds to germinate, not find light and die. This is sometimes I hear people use this interchangeably with solarization. They're not the same technique. Solarization you use clear plastic or clear glass or something that allows the sunlight to pass through and you're cooking the seeds. This isn't cooking them, it's letting them die by not getting light. So that's the first technique we decided to try. Flame weeding is the second technique. And so this is a flame weeder here, basically you're just passing some burners across the bed so you make your planting bed, you let the weeds germinate, you cook them. So that's what we got there. And that's not going to go maybe. I have a video here if I can, maybe if I hit play here, sometimes it works with my butt. Guess not. Anyway, that was just showing the flame weeder going across the bed and cooking a few weeds. What you want with this, you've got four burners on that one. That is a farmer's friend pyro weeder. You've got four burners across the front so it does a 30 inch planting bed. And what you want to do, you don't have to roast the weeds and blacken them or char them. You just pass it really quickly, they'll turn a slightly darker shade of green. And what you've done is you've ruptured their cell walls, the water inside the cells is boiled, you've ruptured the cell walls and they have died and you can move on. So it's a pretty quick process. Here is the second option. This is a power harrow. I've got a video of it next to which, oh it does work, awesome. So this is behind the tractor, here's someone videoing it. So this is just a small implement. It's a power harrow. The difference between this and a rototiller, which is what the farmers had all used for this kind of, some of them maybe experimented a little bit with this pseudo stale seed bedding. But they would use a rototiller for this termination step, which is mixing the soil this way, bringing up more weed seeds into that top germination layer. The power harrow has little hands like this that turn around. So they're rotating around, they're not mixing soil layers. So they're killing, they're disturbing the soil at the top level, killing any weeds that are in there. And actually if you look at this, you can kind of see there were actually a couple of sort of more mature pigweeds that you drove over. If you do those and you get rain in the next couple days, those will probably survive. But anything smaller than that will die when you disturb it that way, but you're not bringing up more weed seeds into that planting area. So that's kind of the critical piece of that is how do we kill these weeds without bringing up more. And here's the paper pot transplanter. This is a picture I stole from their website because I don't have a picture of it in action because we just got it in December. I have a picture of it sitting in my office, but that's a little less interesting. So this is basically, if you're not familiar with it, a tool from Japan. So you have a prepped bed or a bed that you're ready to plant into. Instead of a regular plastic 10 by 20 tray or with plastic cells, you have a 10 by 20 tray and it's got paper cells in it that are actually connected in one long chain. So they look like individual cells, but it's a chain that wraps this way. You start sticking that into the ground. There's a little shoe here that cuts a furrow. And that chain just moves down, so you drag it to the end of the row and it plants a chain behind you. So the problem with these vegetable crops that we're interested in has been the planting density. So the issue of how do you deal with the planting density versus the weeds? Well this is a way that we can densely plant transplants in an economical fashion. So they get a head start above the weeds, but you wouldn't want to do that with some of these like beets or carrots or spinach, just with hand transplants. I think the labor and the cost to do that would be kind of prohibitive, but this is a way they can do it quickly. So the weeds are started behind the plants have a good leap, so you don't have to wait for the seed to germinate while the weeds are going. They've got a head start. It's kind of the theory on that one. I'm sorry, so you can do this with carrots? Yes, people do that with carrots and beets. The problem sometimes with carrots I've read, and we haven't tried it this year, so we'll see if this is an issue, is if you have a heavy soil, so they start growing, they hit the bottom of that transplant and then they fork, so we'll see if that happens. Some people have that experience, some people don't, but like I say we haven't grown with that system yet. So one of the challenges we have is I don't have any real harvest numbers for you on yields today. Most of these crops are grown, or a significant portion of them are grown for overwinter harvest. So they started harvesting the spinach in the fall, but the carrots and all of that they'll harvest in the spring. So I'll have harvest data on any variable yields coming up this year. We didn't do the soil health in 2018. When I made my budget I basically decided that the soil health testing I was going to do was for organic matter. So I put in money to run organic matter soil tests on these trial plots. After I did that I decided that wasn't a very good test for soil health. And so we saved the money and we're going to get more expensive tests, but we couldn't do both years with that. So we'll have those again for this year. But so I'll talk about the results we do have from the three different farms. So Farm One, I would say, was a bit of a disappointment. So they planted spinach and beets and they lost the beets. But on the spinach there was no significant difference in the labor time to manage weed post planting between the control, which is what they've always done. They also did the flame weeding and the power harrowing. So this wasn't replicated on every farm. Different farms are doing different techniques and different crops. So they didn't do carrots, but they did spinach and beets. And there didn't seem to be any real visual difference in weed pressure. I'm guessing there's not going to be any yield difference either. So basically that one was a wash. Farm Two, I'll just put up pictures of all this in a minute so you'll get a little better idea of what I'm talking about. Farm Two in general had what I would call inadequate weed control and faulty experimental performance. I thought we had gone over this, but they didn't really do the control correctly. So they just had a treatment. And so they did occultation on carrots. And from my perspective, there were too many weeds in the carrots to really call it a success at all. But they did say they had less weeds in the carrots than they have in the past. But there wasn't any control. They didn't leave an untreated area. And then Farm Three, we did have some significant visual difference in the performance of the two techniques. So they did occultation, power harrowing on carrots and spinach. And they noticed the differences most in the spinach. So occultation, they had the best results, power harrowing. So here's Farm One. Here's pictures from the three different trials for their spinach plot here. So here's one trial, one trial, and one trial. So these are three different treatments. Unfortunately for us, this is the power harrow, which seems to have the most weed pressure. I don't know if you can pick that up in the back, but there's a lot more little tiny green dots, which are the weeds. Then on this one, which is the flame weeding. And the one that looks the best is the control. So this is exactly what shouldn't happen. And we'll talk a little bit about some interesting things about this in a second, I'll do sort of a review of what I learned. And there's some interesting reasons that might contribute to this. And if I want to give you a little teaser that might be a hint is none of these are, none of the little green dots that are there are pigweed. So actually controlled pigweed, but not some other weeds. So here is Farm One, what that looks like. So these are those three beds, actually in the different order. So that's the control, the flame and the power harrow. So no noticeable difference, basically. They did harvest this for a fall CSA and they've got the beds row covered. They'll harvest more in the spring. So that's when I'll get my total harvest numbers off this. Here's a close up. So here's the spinach, here's another row of spinach. These are the same treatments, that's not difference in treatment. Just this is the edge. And these little dots here, that's all hen bit. So a different weed than we were expecting. So here is Farm Two, so I think I've got, yeah, there are carrots here. There's a row of carrots there and a row of carrots there. They use, oops, they use this occultation. So here's like the tarp, like they used. They had just done it on this section and they moved it over there. So both of these rows had been treated and actually the difference here, these rows go all the way down there and the difference that ends right there is this is how far they hand weeded. You can see they, again, don't have a lot of pigweed, but they have so much grass that it doesn't really even matter or foxtail in there. But so this is something where we need to figure out a better strategy or different strategy or something else to help with this problem. Yeah. Longer time with your silage tarp, that's grasses, I mean, 30 days is not enough. But grasses, when they come back green. Yeah, and they actually, I think theirs were actually down for six weeks. But one thing we noticed, I'll talk a little bit about is there's a, we've noticed a little bit of effect and I didn't do, I didn't think about this. So we didn't do enough research to figure it out. But a difference in tarping with the white side up or the black side up. And if you do the black side up in the summer rather than killing the seeds, what happens or what seems to happen is it almost seems to force a dormancy. So the seeds don't germinate and it gets too hot. The seeds don't germinate and die. They just kind of go dormant. You pull that off and they're ready to go once they kind of wake up. That's sort of what seemed to happen, but so I just had made a sign. They had a field day out there. So I just threw this in here talking to passersby about occultation and stale seed beds. Here's farm three, the carrots. Unfortunately, they're not planted all right side by side. But here's the control. These two rows were done with the power hero. And then this one is done with occultation. You can't really tell on this. The farmer says this one is doing the best so far. It actually had better germination, even though it received a little bit less water because it was under the tarp. But something about that helped the germination. These are taken in October after we'd already had a little bit of time after a killing freeze. So what you probably can't see because the resolution on this screen isn't great. But if you look down here in the control and it looks like maybe there's some kind of straw mulch or something like that. These are all dead pigweeds that died when it froze. You can see these rows look a lot cleaner on the sides. This rows a little bit cleaner. These plants are a little bit further along and fuller, even though it doesn't quite show up here. But so according to field observations, right now this one is doing the best. This treatment in terms of weed control, these two are much better than that one. This one is actually working in the way it's supposed to, unlike the first farm. Kind of excited about this. So the carrots will be harvested this spring. Again, we'll see what those results are in the spring. So observation, right now I don't have any clear winner to say this is what the best thing to do is or this is the best way to do it. We have a lot to learn. Some of those like the timing of the tarps is something that everyone in this trial is new to all of these tools or growing systems. So I think we do have a lot to learn about all of them. Challenges also. 2018 was hard. A lot of years are hard, but where I was at that was especially hard. I'll talk a little bit about that. And then learning new systems, figuring out we have some observations about occultation and some timing things that maybe will inform what we do next year. Yeah, and then measuring soil health is of course an ongoing challenge, finding reasonably priced ways to do that. So here's a sample. I just want to talk a little bit about 2018 being hard. So here's sort of the log of farm one. So it says first attempt, July 17, prep two beds covered with tarp, August 9th. They prep the rest of the beds they're using, August 17th uncovered two tarps, August 18th fertilized all the beds, 19th they power harrowed and rolled with power harrow to incorporate and they flame weeded at that time too. And then August 19th they planted spinach and beets. And then September 10th, tilled all beds due to low germination and high weed pressure. So the initial planting of this farm was a total failure. And here's my guess as to why. So this is the U.S. Drought Monitor, August 14th, so the week before they planted that. Douglas County is right there. We have growers in my county that have been doing this since 1980 and say this was the worst year they've ever had. So nationally, we didn't hear anything like we heard in 2012, but where I was at it was every bit as bad. So in spite of irrigation and all of that, the first planting of those fall crops just didn't take actually on any of the farms. That made the occultation trial hard because the first farm that only did the power harrow and the flame weeding that I showed you farm one there, the reason they didn't have an occultation trial this year is because they did it for their first planting, but they didn't have enough time for their second planting to leave the tarp down for even four weeks. They planted again about two weeks after they tilled that stuff up. So that was definitely a challenge, figuring out the timing of that system. But this was not like so they planted, irrigated, but the soil was just too hot I think for a lot of those crops, especially spinach is pretty sensitive. Yeah, on occultation, like I mentioned a minute ago, there were some like we had some observations but not enough, I don't know, science to put behind it that there might be some difference. So people use the silage tarps that are white on one side and black on the other side. And it seems like in the summer, like I mentioned, if you put the black side up, it's not as hot as solarization, so it doesn't kill the seeds, but it seems to not get them to germinate and then die. So they don't germinate, it's not hot enough to sterilize the seeds so they're just still there waiting once you pull the tarp off. So you get a delayed germination versus a termination if you do that. The other thing that was an interesting observation that I hadn't thought about, but two of the farms had problems, the two with lighter soils had this problem with this occultation and this isn't from one of those farms, I put this in here. When you get rains, the moisture gathers and ponds on that tarp and that's heavy and so they have these localized areas of compaction in beds that were more or less ready to plant. So they had a problem with that, so there would be places where it was nice and ready to go and other places where it would be like tamped down from the weight of the water that it stood on top of that tarp, which is also not something I had thought about prior. And yeah, I think you mentioned the timing can be challenging, getting them down early enough so that they kill the weeds and then for the second planting like we didn't have enough time to readjust to the sort of failure due to that dry heat wave that we had in the summer. So that as a sort of research project occultation seemed to create some fits for us a little bit. So yeah, looking forward to 2019 is my overall concluding thought. If you're considering doing a SARE farmer rancher grant or any other kind of things, doing multi-year projects is good because something almost inevitably goes wrong. I've reviewed a few scientific papers that people have submitted and there's always like oh well we couldn't get data from the farm this year because it flooded, there's always something so given yourself some time to adjust to those challenges. So what would I do differently? Thinking about that in that light. So I probably would redesign the experiment to look at a slightly different thing rather than just looking at different ways of terminating the weeds essentially. I saw some research presented by Mark and I'm drawing a blank on his last name from University of Kentucky that talked a lot about the effectiveness of multiple passes in stale seed bedding and so I probably would incorporate something with that. So his numbers and these are probably not exactly accurate but roughly so they would do a stale seed bed, make the bed that they're going to plant, do something to terminate it. They were actually using mechanical cultivators and so if they did one pass so two weeks prior to planting they build the bed directly prior to planting they terminate all the weeds that have germinated. They would get about 70% weed control. If they did two passes it would be about 85 and at three passes they were at like 94% weed control. So the critical variable might not be which way do you kill the weeds. It might be really how many times do you do that or maybe you do three different ways. I think there's a lot of variables there that are interesting that I hadn't considered when we put this proposal together. I think I would have thought about the timing on the tarps, like think about what are you going to do when that fails. So maybe we would have had multiple trial beds getting ready so if one of them doesn't work then the next one would be ready. So thinking about that in sort of experimental design, trying to imagine what the worst case scenarios are. So it's like what would you do if you had a record setting drought. You can have some predictable responses to that. I hadn't really thought about that in depth. I was just like well we'll plant at this time because that's more or less when you plant fall crops and we might fudge it a couple weeks either way depending on the weather because fall weather in August is always a little bit variable but not so much like well what do you do if it totally fails? How are you going to back up with that? You know the one farm that didn't actually do a control versus a treatment. So make sure I thought we were exceedingly clear about that but just make sure everyone is really on board with all the different steps. I know a lot of farmer rancher grants also have a number of participants. I've been on one of those before too where there were some people that kind of went their own way and so making sure everyone has buy in and is doing the same project is good and I probably would have increased the testing budget for soil health. So those are kind of my take aways at this point. Does anybody have any questions? The question was what's the cost of the power hero? I think it ended up being with shipping $3,500 so relatively expensive and that was something that had gone up by they raised the price by $500 between when I submitted the grant project and when I was approved for the grant project. I was able to find some extra funds through my office to kind of smooth that out. But it was something else I didn't mention is like in grant you might think about things might be a little bit more expensive than they are when you price on the day or the week or month before you're getting the proposal in. Because it is, but so it's relatively expensive. There are a number of them. So that's a tractor size model. I originally wanted to get a smaller one that would have been cheaper that would go behind a BCS walking tractor because my office has a BCS. So I could take it to the farms and help them. But the challenge with that was the farmer said we don't use a BCS on our farm. If we're going to do this we need a system that works with our systems. So that was a little bit of back and forth between us and ended up with the tractor tool. So yeah, that was that the flame weeder. There's a couple of different models. That's the farmer's friend pyro weeder, which I think is maybe on the higher end. And that was like $900. The tarps that for large tarps, but it was kind of the pricing for the amount of ground they needed to cover was right. It was like, I think those were like $150. If you knew where you could find used silage tarps, then you could probably get them a lot cheaper. So the question is what happens with the equipment at the end of the grant? That is a really good question that we didn't think about when we wrote the grant. But my understanding is that it all stays with the farmers because they have a need for that, like in my, yes, yes, that's right. So the tarps, we didn't get one tarp to share. So they each have their own tarp. But the other equipment, and they worked together before on some, they already share some equipment. But yeah, so that's the understanding. But I hadn't really thought of that until, and it's like, well, does my office? Well, we, but we don't need any of it. So yeah, that's what we came down with. So the question is on the paper pot transplantor, you're seeding and germinating in the paper pots. And yes, that's correct. So I should have, I should have brought these, but the paper pot transplantor's like seven feet long. So it doesn't fit in my car, but I could have bought the pots. They come in these little things and you spread them out. They're like slinkies. You spread them out and then they have special flats that'll, or things that'll hold them open. And so you put it, so you plant in there. Yeah, so it does take that extra step to get them started rather than seeding them in the field. So that kind of goes in there in terms of the time calculation. Is this an economical weed control technique? And as far as I know, there's been a number, there've been some other Sarah Farmer Rancher grants that have experimented with paper pots. But no one, and some of them have looked at plant quality, different issues. But no one's really looked at the weed control. If that's, so it might not be an economical way to do that. But it, maybe it has other benefits. We'll, we'll see. So they are price, yeah. So the paper pot transplantor, the machine itself is like a thousand bucks with all the little accessory kits. Some enough paper trays for us to go through this experiment at three farms. I think we ended up around $1,500 was the total budget for that item. So that's not, none of those are cheap solutions really. So hopefully they're effective. So the question is what was the change with the NOP program that the paper pots are now allowable? Okay, so to take a step back, my understanding is they originally had some problems with the glue that would join the paper together. And my understanding is they were scrambling to come up with alternate solutions. But before they did that, there was just a bunch of petitions and things, so the NOP reconsidered it and basically decided that it wasn't that bad. So they're not new paper pots as far as I know. This has happened in the last few months? Happened in October or November, yeah. Really? Yes. That's crazy, that's awesome. So it was like, in January or whatever they banned them. October, they re-allowed them. So they are, what? They started selling them like crazy. Yes, I mean, they're becoming really popular, a lot of people were using. There was a ton of farmer pushback when they banned them, I think was probably the critical variable. So the question is on the soil health, are we looking at the problems within each plot and the soil health or are we looking at something else? So I think what I'm looking at, what my goal was is to look at which one of these techniques more or less does the least damage to soil health. So not looking at what is this, not from today, what does this plot need to do to have healthier soil? But from the beginning of the season to the end of the season, which one of these techniques did the least damage to the soil health? Or ideally improved it the most, but given that I think none of these techniques really are probably on the, they're not really building soil health. You're crisping off weeds with a flame weeder. That's any organic matter, so it's like, but you're maybe doing less damage than tillage. So trying to figure out how to measure that was the problem. But yeah, there are different challenges and probably, yeah, working with soil health and organic vegetable production is something these folks all need to work with and that's like sort of, yeah, everybody needs to work with, yeah. Yeah, so the question is, am I familiar with the work of Elaine Ingham and how various soil fungal and bacterial communities and maybe using compost tea as a way to remediate that could help control weeds. I wasn't familiar with that, I mean, I'm familiar with her work generally. I didn't really know about the weed. Yeah, so I haven't read about that. I have, I guess I don't know the specifics on that. The, I'm also responsible for produce safety education. So compost teas have, depending on how they fit into that, have, okay, without any microbial additions to stimulate growth. So there, yeah, there are some issues with produce safety and microbial teas, so. The other thing I would say is like, yeah, I mean, both of these, or all three of these farms are dealing with pretty high residual weed pressure from a number of years of letting weeds go to seed too much. So this is something that probably one year is not gonna win the battle on any of it, but hopefully they can move the bar. So the question is, how did the farmers hold down the tarps? So they use sandbags around the edge, but just filled with soil. So they don't fill the sandbags with sand, but just get empty sandbags and scoop, and it doesn't really take a lot. The tarps are reasonably heavy. They are all using raised bed systems. So they, the ends sit in a trough, which is probably important. We're in an area of high winds, as probably is most of the state of Nebraska. So, yeah, I mean, but, and then especially if you get a little rain, I mean they'll have lots of weight on them, but I didn't see any of them moving, so unlike row cover or something like that that wants to go, this does not. So there are two questions. One, am I familiar with work about what weeds tell us about soil conditions and maybe how to treat them by changing soil chemistry? And two, in cold weather, do the plants have more sugars in our area? So for the first one, I am somewhat familiar with some of that research. Unfortunately, we started out really specifically focused on pigweed. And the work I've read on that's like pigweed is a weed that means you have good soil fertility. And it's easy to kill, which is true. It is easy to kill if it's not like densely mixed in with your seedlings. So, yeah, I didn't find a lot of, a lot of solace there. I did want to make a comment since you said the thing about mice. When I threw out that 900,000 number and like the 15 to 20 years, there is a lot of research on what they call weed seed rain, which is kind of a scary term to me. But so those seeds don't all live that long. It just sounds really terrifying. But there are mice and other insects and things eating the seeds and birds. But, yeah, I just wanted to throw that in. And then on the plant sugars in overwintered crops, yeah, they tend to be a little bit sweeter, I think. So some root crops, if they will last the whole winter, if you can get them to overwinter, yeah, they're pretty sweet. Or even spinach, maybe I have not done testing. But, yeah, it tastes sweeter to me in March if you have stuff that's overwintered versus stuff that you get harvest in September, October.