 So, most people consider that to be in line with no-till because you're not radically inverting the soil layers in the way that you do with a gas powered or diesel powered rototiller. And then the third treatment was to lay down the same amount of compost as we did with the no-till treatment but then to till that in. And the reason we did this third treatment was because we wanted to see, we wanted to isolate whether any effects we were seeing were due to not tilling or were they due to compost. So, if we lay the same amount of compost and we till it in, do we get the same effect as if we not till? And then this first year, we did not replicate across treatments. In 2021, we did replicate the crops that we planted across the treatments. Okay. That's the till third. Just if you're not familiar with that tool, drill powered rototiller, although really what it does is just mix the top layer of the soil. So, we'd use that to just smooth the soil and mix in amendments into the compost beds. We used a broad fork, which if you're also not familiar with that, it's just a manual tool for loosening soil without inverting the soil layer. So, still in line with no-till principles. The chisel plow is what I would use on the, I would say it's kind of an alternative to a broad fork. It's kind of like the mechanized version of a broad fork. Also doesn't invert the soil layers but does break up compaction. We only use that on the tilled beds. And then we also used a wheel hoe, which is basically a stirrup hoe with a wheel on the front. We'd use that for weed control, but we also use that in the no-till beds for prep to basically break up the soil surface prior to planting. So this is just a look at our no-till beds. We would use about a cubic yard of compost per bed. So a significant amount of compost using wheelbarrows. We also would use the tractor with a bucket in different situations, but generally we'd use wheelbarrows and then we'd spread it out with a rake. We'd do the same thing on the till beds with compost, but then we'd use the BCS to till that in to create our planting surface. And then the till beds, we'd use the chisel plow and then the tractory rototiller to prepare those beds. This is just, we had a very heavy rain in June, 2020. I think it was the remnants of a hurricane, four to five inches, and it really blasted the soil. And this just kind of showed how each treatment held up. And I think each of them shows some damage from the rain. You can see that in the tilled section, it's very compacted. There's cracking in the soil. There wasn't really anything to protect the soil. You can see in the no-till with compost, you can see that sort of layer of compost that's sort of on top of the soil, that armored the soil a little bit more, protected a little bit more, although that compost did move around. And you can see there is bare soil there under the compost. And then the tilled with compost is sign of somewhere in between those two where you can see there's compost there on the surface, but also there's a lot of bare soil. So I think this was an interesting just look at how not tilling and using compost as a mulch can potentially protect against heavy rains or have some armoring ability to the soil. The photo on the left shows the same crops. These are both beauty heart radishes that were direct seeded into the beds. And you can see how much better the germination was in the tilled versus the no-till. And one of the big issues we had with our no-till beds was because we weren't doing any tillage prior to starting the no-till, we were sort of starting with a fairly compacted bed, a bed that had not been tilled for several years. And so it really took a lot of work to get enough tilth to run a cedar through that, to be able to have the shoe of the cedar penetrate the soil and not hit clods underneath the soil and skip. And so that's what you're seeing here is you're seeing the skipping of the cedar where it didn't really run through the soil very well, whereas in the tilled section, you can see that it ran through the soil better. For our no-till beds, we use silage tarps to facilitate the bed turnover. So when we were done with whatever the crop was, we could mow that down. I have a flail mower for the BCS and then put the silage tarp down. And the idea there is that the silage tarp is supposed to help with kind of killing any existing plants or weeds that are there and then maybe help decompose the residue for a few weeks. And then you pull that tarp off and then it should be more or less in planting condition. And that's kind of an alternative to going in and just tilling in that residue. So let's just look at some of the crops we pulled off there. We did do no-till carrots. And I have to say that it was difficult for the carrots to grow through that. And you can see they're somewhat wobbly because they had to push through the compaction. Had really beautiful spinach coming out of those tilled with compost beds. And then we had great carrots coming out of the tilled beds. So I would say our crop quality was fairly high in all the beds. We had our most issues with crop quality with the no-till beds. And I would attribute that to the initial compaction that we saw that was not mitigated even by the broad forking. But I think in general we had pretty good crop quality between all the treatments. The no-till had the most issues for us in that first year. So these are my takeaways from the first year. I think, as I said, I think that it's important to mitigate compaction first before you start no-till. So there's a lot of people who are curious about no-till. Say you just go into an area that's never been tilled and just start no-till. But I think it really does make sense to till first to break up compaction in order to be able to create the proper conditions to then stop tilling. Because then if you're not tilling anymore, you're preserving whatever soil structure you're creating after that point. I think it's really important with no-till beds to keep them clean and weeded and to be able to even pull the crop out cleanly out of the beds. Because if you don't have the option of tilling that residue in, then you're going to have to do something else with that residue. You're going to have to let it break down. In a lot of cases we had to rake it out of the beds, which was an extra step and created more labor. I did do soil testing in 2020 and I did see some interesting results. The nutrient retention and the soil health indicators in the no-till beds were quite a bit higher than either of the till beds, including the bed that had compost in it. So it's clear that the no-till did have more biological activity in it, even if that didn't necessarily translate to better crop quality for other reasons. The one thing that we noticed was that when you have this thick layer of compost over the hydrophobic qualities where it resists absorbing water, and I think that that caused water to shed off the top of the beds sometimes, and it resulted in some weird fluctuations in moisture in the soil, which we saw a lot of split roots, particularly we've had a lot of split but Beauty Heart Rage isn't a lot of split kohlrabi, which we didn't see in our till beds. And so that's just to say that there could be some issues with having that much compost. Tilling it in seemed to mitigate that and I think compost quality matters. So I don't know if that would be an issue with another type of compost that doesn't have those hydrophobic qualities. So our second year was we kept the same beds, the same 15 beds, same three treatments, some things that we did differently. We broadforked all the beds to start and then what we did was we decided not to do that full application of compost. I'm trying to remember from the spring, it may have been that we just didn't have the compost on hand, but also the consideration was time and labor and also just seemed like an excessive amount of compost to apply two years in a row. So the compromise was that we used just a bucket of some compost plus, which is a product from Vermont compost company that is kind of a concentrate of compost that has some minerals added to it. And then we used our regular fertilizer blend. So we use that on both of our compost treatment beds. And then we use the fertilizer blend only on the till bed with no compost. And then another thing we did differently was that we replicated through the treatment. So in each treatment, we planted the same crops for the spring. So we planted beets, one bed of beets, one bed of spinach, one bed of lettuce, one bed of onions, one bed of green beans across all three treatments. We had three beds of each type of crop. We didn't replicate. We didn't do that replication in the spring, excuse me, in the fall. So this is just another look at prepping the beds for the spring. For the second year, so on the left, we're rototilling those beds in after we spread the amendments in the compost. On the right, you can see we've raked all that residue. We wheel hode and then raked all the residue out of the no-till beds. And then my worker, Sam, is spreading compost and amendments onto the top. And then after that, we would use the tilther to tilt that in. And then on the left, you can see the till beds that we were just going to go in and rototill those beds. One of the things that's different, I think, from the way that we did it versus the way that Hannah and Emily did it is that to use the paper pot transplanter and our cedar in these beds, so we were doing no hands transplanting into these beds. And that required us to have more tilth in the soil. We had to have a greater depth of loose soil in order to be able to run that paper pot in that earth way. And so that presented some challenges because that meant we had to apply more compost or we had to do, let's say, more aggressive wheel hulling or broad forking just to loosen the soil more to be able to use those implements in those beds. So it was kind of a challenge to see, can you use these implements which are typically used only in tilled soils in a no-till situation? This is just a look at the beds in June. This is right around the hardest time for all these beds. As I go across the slides, you can see there are some differences in crop growth. We didn't standardize varieties across the treatment, so I think there is some variation there. But I think you also can see that I think the tilled beds were potentially slightly behind the beds that had compost in them. I think the compost pushed the maturity of the plants along a little bit quicker. And the actual result of that for us was that with the spring greens, like spinach and lettuce, we saw them bolt quicker than in the tilled section. And so actually we ended up harvesting more out of the tilled section because the maturity was delayed. So that was sort of an unintended consequence that it's sort of because the maturity was delayed, which normally is not something we think of as being good. But in the springtime when we have this quick warm-up here in Central Iowa where I think it goes from spring to summer like in a week, that actually turned out to be an advantage for some of these greens. So the takeaways I had from year two was I mentioned that adding the two inches of compost was somewhat excessive. It's about $50 of compost per bed to get that thick two inch layer where you're completely covering the 30 inch bed top and you're not seeing any soil underneath, plus labor. So that's a consideration, I think. Hannah, I have talked about this in terms of how do you justify that labor and that cost and part of it may be just that long term it really pays off down the road as you stick to it. Another big issue we came into was we had to mitigate a lot of compaction that was created by uncontrolled foot traffic. So we do have pathways that people are supposed to walk in. But during harvest, people just end up kind of walking here and there, carrying crates, moving crates. And so that ends up erasing a lot of the gains that you make from not tilling. And so I think that's controlling traffic is really important in a no-till situation because you don't have that easy resort to a rototiller to loosen the initial compaction. I mentioned the maturity being delayed in the till beds. And then what we observed between our beds was that there was some slight yield quality improvement in our no-till beds for certain crops. For example, we had a slight yield improvement in our green beans between the no-till and the till beds. But we did not see a reduction in weed pressure. We actually observed that our no-till beds were the weediest of all the beds. And I think that probably the reason this happened is because our use of the tilter to mix in the compost kind of mitigates the advantage of having the compost just sit there as a mulch. And I think this is a difference between our system and Hannah's. And I think that trying to use the paper pot transplanter and the Earthway cedar may not be an appropriate way to approach no-till that you really should be just hand transplanting into no-till because then you don't have to do that mixing of layers. I really soured on the silage chart over the course of doing this because I did not see the residue breakdown that I expected. And I think Hannah has also observed this. And so I'm interested in using clear plastic for shorter term solarization to actually get some residue decomposition. And that's just kind of another unintended consequence of this is kind of noticing that the silage chart didn't really achieve the goals that I wanted to. I would say for me it's kind of a mixed result where I see that there's utility for no-till in certain situations for certain crops and that it doesn't work as well for other situations than other crops. And I think Hannah has a similar observation in that it's really about how you allocate your time. So no-till preparation is always going to be more time intensive at the planting and bed prep stage. It may save you time down the road like with potentially reduced reed pressure. But you have to be able to front-load that time in. And so I think it's really great for late fall and early spring prep when you potentially have the time to do this. You don't have other harvest tasks to do. For me, I find that mid-season turnover is always a there's always a premium on time. I'm trying to do it just before rain. I might be doing it in the evening after I've already had a day of work. So using tillage to me is much easier during that mid-season turnover. So I'm going to continue to potentially use no-till in certain situations, but I'm not going to necessarily use no-till all the time. And for me, I think of it as part of a rotation. So trying to rotate tillage. So rather than eliminating tillage altogether, trying to rotate it so I'm reducing how many times I'm tilling the soil. So, and I mentioned the issues with the paper pot and the cedar. So that's what I had to say. I'm going to turn it over to Hannah to talk about her experience with no-till. Sure, thank you, Jordan. Yeah, so my name's Hannah Breckbill. I use she, her pronouns and our farm is Humble Hands Harvest. We're in northeast Iowa. So zone 4B, yeah, near Decora. And yeah, so our system is different from Jordan's in that we are, we're actually physically raising the beds. As you can see this, I use a shovel. It only happens once, but we also have 30-inch wide beds with 18-inch pathways, more or less, using a shovel to raise them. And then from there on, Jordan was mentioning the problem with foot traffic. Because they're raised, it's really easy to, you know, for any worker to know that they can't step on the bed and instead are only stepping in the pathways. But yeah, so we use a system where we raise a no-till bed and then we put compost on it. So you can go to the next slide, Jordan. The process of adding compost is definitely a lot more labor than just tilling a bed. So yeah, as Jordan said, there's kind of a reallocation of labor over the course of the season. We're used to tillage being just the quick and easy thing to do and bed prep being a quick and easy thing to do at the beginning of the season. And so in our no-till system, we're learning that we have to really spend some time to prepare the beds. But kind of the biggest reason that we had started working with no-till and experimenting with it was because in the spring, in our corner of Iowa, it tends to be really wet. That didn't happen in 2021, but it tends to be really wet. And so it's really hard to get into the field and it's kind of stressful to find the window for being able to till. But when you do a no-till bed prep, we can do that whenever and we can do it when the soils wetter than it would be ideal for tilling. So that kind of gives us more flexibility. So even though we have more labor hours that we need to put in in order to prep these beds, it also there's a bigger window for us to be able to do that, which is nice. Yeah, and so we're laying down newsprint underneath the compost in this picture. And that really works well for transknited crops in terms of weed suppression. So yeah, we're not mixing the top layer of soil like Jordan is. We're just laying compost on top and then planting into that. It works really well for hand-transplanted crops. For things that were direct seeding, it's a little bit less easy to figure out how to do that. So what we actually have ended up doing is when we're direct seeding a crop, we dig a furrow in the bed as it is and then we seed into the furrow. And then on top of that, we lay our compost with no newsprint, of course. And that allows for really good seed to soil contact because the compost is just right on it. And it has worked better in side-by-side comparisons than trying to lay compost first and then dig a furrow and recover it or something like that. So those are some things that we've learned. You can go to the next slide, Jordan. I'm not sure what's next. Ah, yeah. So we also have been silage tarping. So this is just an example of silage tarping over some no-till beds. We have a canada thistle problem on our farm. And so that's probably the main reason that we try to silage tarp is to try to get that to kind of get less vigorous if we have a silage tarp on for three weeks before we try to plant into it. So this is eventually where we planted our squash. And you can go to the next slide. Yeah, and so that's from the other angle. So yeah, we planted our squash in these no-till beds. And they were really clean beds. So what we've noticed is our no-till system where we lay compost on top and ideally silage tarp beforehand ends up being pretty clean compared to our tilled beds that bring up a bunch more annual weeds. But yeah, and as Jordan said, they kind of have to be cleaner. And we have to figure out what to do with the residue afterwards. And so what we've seen is that our no-till beds kind of give us motivation to keep them cleaner, which is a useful thing. It's another kind of allocation of labor issue of, yeah, because we know that we have to get rid of this residue and these weeds in a way other than tillage, we do it. Yeah, is there another slide? Yes, so this is another question about residue. These are green beans that we had put into a no-till bed. And then we decided to see what would happen if we just left them on the bed as residue. And so that's what we did. We pulled them up, we left them on the bed, and then we composted over them. And then we ended up cover cropping with oats and peas that fall and then planting our brassicas into that, so just transplanting into that, which is no problem to transplant into that with residue. And because we had composted the year before, we didn't need to reapply compost when we were prepping the bed in the spring. We just needed to grab any like dandelions or thistles that were starting to come up, and then we could, and then we just transplanted right into that. So that was kind of fun. And yeah, it's a continual experiment in how to allocate labor, what part of the season to do things, yeah, that kind of thing. So I would say that our conclusions from our stuff include that we've had kind of variable results in some side-by-side comparisons, but we really do like what the compost and the kind of careful, yeah, the not compacting the soil, both of those things have really looked really good with our brassicas, with our cucurbits, and yeah, and with our solinaceous crops too. And we do want to convert our whole farm into this no-till system, so we're still working on the kind of direct seeding on dialing that in, but, yeah, that's our, that's our stuff. So we are happy to take questions at this point. Perfect, does anybody here have any questions? Looks like there's a question in the chat. What other cover crops have you used? I actually have not used, in the area that I'm using for no-till, I'm not using cover crops in that area, and so I will turn that over to Hannah. Yeah, so we did, because of the residue issue, we have not planted rye, because we don't want something that will overwinter. We've just done oats and peas in our no-till beds, as well as some buckwheat during kind of mid-summer times. But yeah, so it's just a question of, I think ideally we would kind of be maximizing the crops in the beds. So this year we planted some spring beets in one no-till bed and then followed that up with our fall carrot planting. So not needing to use cover crops, but instead just continual cropping until the fall when we can throw some oats and peas on. We did try some rye in some no-till beds this year that we're planting on smothering with the silage tarp in the spring, so we'll see how that goes. Yeah, my question's for Hannah, and now it's a double question. Hey, number one, how do you terminate your cover crops within the no-till beds? That's my first one, I'll let you answer that. Okay, yeah, so we've done it two ways. We've done it where we just kind of go through and basically weed out the whole thing, put in the path. But I think what I would prefer usually is to smother it with a silage tarp for a couple weeks and then it doesn't decompose the residue, but it's definitely dead. And so we can just transplant directly into that or we can put compost on and seed into that. My other question was originally about the green beans pulling up and laying them. I understood that you did plant something in there, but how did they do decomposing being left on the bed? Yeah, they didn't. So the leaves definitely decompose in the spring when we replanted into that bed, we transplanted brassicas. There was still bits of stem and things like that in the bed, but it wasn't a problem to transplant into that. It would have been less fun to try to make a furrow, but it's still possible to try to make a furrow into that.