 Okay, my name's Rob. Our last name is spelled F-A-U-X, which if you know French means foe or fake. Therefore, we are the genuine fake farm. Our farm is 14 acres, and we are surrounded by corn and soybeans in northeast Iowa. So our neighbors do think we are a fake farm. Now, since I'm representing the farm, I have to put on my uniform, excuse me. I am now at work, all right. This is actually my Sunday go-to-meeting hat. It's the nice one. If you saw me out at the farm, it would not look nearly so red or beautiful. But it's what I'm supposed to wear. Just to give you a real brief idea, one of the things that my wife and I are very interested in is trying to grow mixed or inter-crop vegetables to try and help each of the plants survive and do well without chemicals and without other techniques. We are a certified organic farm. We have five acres of vegetables on the farm, and we started it. Do we need to increase the volume of my voice? Okay. We started this with just one lawn tractor and one walk-behind tiller. And you can guess how much fun it would be to till about one acre behind a walk-behind tiller that likes to break down every so often. So that gives you some background. We came from basically a large garden, and now we are a small produce farm, and we sell using a farm-shared CSA. We have about 120 families in the CSA, and we grow all kinds of vegetables from asparagus to zucchini. So that kind of gives you an idea of what we do. And the idea here was we were raring ourselves into the ground trying to keep all the weeds out, trying to handle all the production. We have to find ways so that we can actually maintain these five acres of vegetables, get a good quality product out to people, and maintain the variety that we're known for. And then you add certified organic to the whole mess, and this adds a few more dynamics to it. So here's the motivation for this. We actually managed to get ourselves a 1948 Ford 8N tractor, which is not a very large tractor, but it's bigger than the darn little lawn tractors we had riding around. The other motivation is we used to just run a tiller. We got in a tiller attachment for the lawn tractor. And the other motivation was that thing was not meant for five acres of tilling. After a few years, the tines were gone and everything was breaking up on it. So we needed to scale up our operation, but we did not want to give up the companion planting or intercropping. So there's your motivation. We all there with me now? I'd like to still scale up and maintain this method. So here's what we did. We said let's take our old spacing methods when we had the small tillers, and that's all we had, and compare them to some different spacing methods with the tractor so we could take advantage of it, especially for cultivation. So here we go. Here's the first thing. What we did is we selected certain crops that we like to do companion planting with, and we took the fields that we grew them in and split them in half. So the south half would be our old style spacing. The north half would be the new style spacing. And we made mirror images. So that meant the same vegetables were closest to the center, and then you'd work your way out in the field. And each of these plots, if you look at it, this is a 200-foot plot. And the width is 60, so each, the treatment and the control are 30-foot wide. So this would be the tilled area is the 30-foot, and then you see some greenery in the middle. That's where we hadn't planted yet. That would be the center of the field. Here's what we did before. We would have basically tiller widths, and we would have a walking space in between each. If you're a gardener, this all sounds familiar, right? You'd till it, and you'd have a walking space on each side, and what happens? You have lots of space that you have to keep weeds out of, or you mulch or whatever. So we'd do things like we'd have double rows of onions, and then we would have a single row of broccoli and then some more onions, call a flower over here, and then we'd usually have flowers on the edge of the field. That was our standard approach. And of course, what you would do is you'd try to have the double row of onions, and you'd try to make sure that they were wide enough apart that you could actually run some cultivation in between. We used something called a wheel hoe for that. So if you've seen a wheel hoe, you'll see one later in the operation. This is what we used to do. And here's what we tried to do. What we said is, okay, we've got this little 48N tractor. It's about 60 inches to the edges of the wheels. The center is going to be about 40-inch bed, allowing for slop, because if you're not a particularly good tractor driver or you're not used to it, you're going to kind of slide around a little bit so you don't want to plant too close to the edge of the bed or you'll destroy your crop. And of course, if you're going to use any kind of tillage behind the tractor, it's going to have some play to it, so it's going to slide around. So when you're thinking about having the bed, you want to make sure that you're pretty sure that 40 inches is clean so that you're not going to destroy what you're trying to save. That was my biggest nightmare, by the way. If you're going to go ahead and increase your production to get a bigger piece of equipment, my biggest nightmare was driving for 100 feet, looking back and seeing my entire crop rolled over, and the weeds still standing there going, haha, I win. So we had to try and think about this real hard. Now here's the thing. Remember, we're still a small farm with not a lot of tools. The tractor is new to us, and we don't have a lot of things that go with it. So we're still doing the butt scooch down the row and planting in the plants. But we do have a 40-inch bed, which is wider than our tiller before, so here we're trying something new. We're doing onions on both sides and Kohlrabi down the middle. Kind of makes some sense, doesn't it? I mean, Kohlrabi gets done in about 40 to 50 days, so it's pulled out, and the onions can go a little bit longer. So it made sense on a piece of paper to do this, and we tried to put three in one row and away we went. And the idea here is then we could use mechanical tillage for the wider paths, and we wouldn't have to do that all by hand. So that's the plan. We also said, you know what? We don't know this tractor spacing is going to work perfect, so we also modified our regular spacing and said, you know, instead of always having a walking path between each tiller, let's just cram two of them up close to each other and have a walking path on either side, which certainly makes sense. Why didn't I think of this before? Well, it's because I had no motivation to think of it before. So we did that as well, and now you can, by the way, this is Barty. Barty's our tiller. He's a BCS. He's a good-looking little tiller. And here's what we're trying to do. On our farm, we do all kinds of intercropping, and we decided to focus on two of them for the Sare Grant. The first one is the brassca and allium. So that would be broccoli and onions, for example, would be an example from each family. And the other one that we do is the potatoes and beans. And I'll just summarize this very quickly for you. The reason we have the brassca and allium together, you've all seen those nice little white butterflies, cabbage butterflies, and you know about the cabbage worms. We are thoroughly convinced that if you have allium crops like garlic, like leeks, like onions next to brassca, you will have less of that pest in your brassca crops, okay? If you grew 200 by 60-foot solid of broccoli and you do nothing to control for those cabbage butterflies, you will have a big white sea of them. I can guarantee you that. So if we break this up with some diversity, we believe this controls for the problem. So that's one of the ones we were interested in with the potatoes and beans. We're really worried about the Colorado potato beetle. That thing's nasty. And we know this works because we had problems a couple years ago with getting green beans to germinate. They wouldn't. Guess what happened to our potatoes? They also were destroyed because the Colorado potato moved in, potato beetle moved in and took all the foliage away. So we lost both crops that year. So we're pretty convinced these are two good companion plants or intercropping techniques. So now we're going to try and make them work so that Rob doesn't have to walk behind the walk behind tiller every day as long as he did. So here we are in the brassca and allium crops when we're planting. And here is our tractor spacing here. My lovely bride is there doing a little bit of hand weeding right next to the plants real early in the process. And notice we're doing two rows of brassca in one bed. And we're trying to keep them about six to eight inches from the edge of that 40 inch bed. That's approximately what we're doing. This is our standard technique using the two tiller beds right next to each other. And that's the same planting technique we've always done. And here's the potato beans. I tried to put some lines in here for you so you can kind of see where they're at. They're just planted in, of course, bean seed potatoes and seed bean at this time. You don't see anything. But here's the problem that you probably are wondering about. A lot of you like to put potatoes in early and then green beans go in later. If you're going to do this and you're going to mechanize, you almost have to keep them within a similar window for planting time. Because it's going to be difficult to plant your potatoes and then come through and prepare in these same tractor beds and plant your beans later. So that was a restriction we had as they had to go in at about the same time. So here we go. This is an example of some of our green crops with that second tractor or the second no tractor method. Here's what the broccoli and onions look like in June. So they're growing and there's plenty of weeds because that's the way it is. And here's the potatoes and beans. And this is the tractor spacing. And I wanted to get to this because you start seeing something here quickly. We have potatoes here, we have beans here. We have potatoes here, we have beans there. This is the tractor spacing. They're growing right into and right next to each other. They're excellent companions because you've got the potatoes underneath the ground, the root system's a little bit different than the root system for the beans and they both are very tolerant of each other. It doesn't matter if they kind of lean to the side apart from each other and make a crown. The other advantage is, is once they fill in here, you've got a canopy between them. So you have a chance when they're young to run through with a wheel hoe and knock down the weeds young. And then you've got canopy that helps prevent more weed germination later on. So it was kind of nice in that respect. And then as they lean over, the canopy spreads out further into the space between the rows. So that was fairly nice. Here's what it looks like with no tractor. And what we did is we'd have a single row of potatoes and then we'd have double rows of beans. So that's what we're trying to do here. Now remember, one of the things we want is we want control of Colorado potato beetle. So we're trying to find a way to make sure the beans are close enough to the potatoes to have some effect. So this is where some of the spacing comes from. And here is the center between those two. You're gonna notice that we've got the tractor spacing here and this is the non-tractor spacing here. I took the first two pictures thinking, gosh, I want to show people how beautiful both sides of our field look. And then I thought, well, okay, truth in advertising, here's where we didn't get to the weeding in row yet. With the larger cultivation pieces, you can get the paths cleaned up pretty easy, but you still have to go through regardless of the spacing you pick and pull out the weeds in the row. Whether it's a hand tool by hand or with a wheel hoe. Okay, here's the brass canalium in July. We've managed actually in this picture to stay up pretty well with the weeds. It looks pretty darn good. I'm not so worried by the way about this stretch right here with weeds in it, because there's nothing there right now. So that doesn't bother me so much, I can run through and knock it all down. But here we've got a double row of onions right here and right here we've got ourselves a row of abrasica. And you'll notice that we've put drip line in because in Iowa, we also had a drought problem. It's just kind of like having a relative that you don't really want around. The drought was like that this year for everybody. It's like, could you please go away? And it didn't. So we started running a lot more drip line. And here's what it looked like on the tractor side. Notice we've got a single row of onions here and a single row of brassica here, and they're fairly close to each other. Want you to take note of that because it's going to be important later on. Okay, another thing to notice is after harvest. This was pock choy, this was kohlrabi here. Both of them are fairly short season. And the reason I took this picture is because you could kind of see that we still had some weeds in these rows. But because they were mature crops ready to pull out, you don't waste your labor going through and pulling these weeds now. You pull the crop and then you go through and you clean it up, right? So truth in advertising again, we were not perfectly clean with the weeds. We still had them. Okay, here's July. Potatoes and beans in July, the tractor spacing. Potatoes here, beans here. We always had the beans on the north and the potatoes on the south for every single one of them. And I can tell you this much right now, that looks darn good. Looks pretty nice. And here's the no tractor spacing. We've got a double row of beans here, single row of potatoes, double row of beans, and you'll notice there's a little bit more of the button weed and a few other things in these rows. So it's just a little bit more weedy and we've had to attack both of them at about the same rate. And if you look real carefully, you'll see a couple people back here. We're trying to clean it up and I said, heck, I'm taking the picture anyway. Plus I'm showing you that we do work, all right? Then we had a diversion from the season. We are an organic vegetable farm and we got sprayed. Happily not on that part of the farm, but our west half of the farm got sprayed. So now I can tell you why we didn't get a whole lot of pictures in August of those fields. We were a little busy. But here is one picture in August and you'll notice that not only did we get just a tad bit of rain in August, which was really welcome, we were a little diverted, so we didn't get out there and get the weeds. So now you're not seeing the pictures as well. But what I want you to notice here is this is broccoli and our broccoli was getting to be pretty darn good size because we got the irrigation out there in time and we had some good fertility. Our onions are supposed to be here and here. But we had a nice wind a couple of times and it rolled over the broccoli plants and the cauliflower plants. And if you've grown them you know how they'll do that little twisty thing and then come right back up. So they're fine, well the onions were not so fine. They were pretty well covered, let's just put it that way. So now they're not getting the sun, the competition of the brassica is winning and the onions are not so happy, okay? So what ended up happening in the tractor spacing is we lost a lot of our onions. They didn't bulb out because they didn't have the chance to do so. And part of that was they were just too close, all right? So the tractor spacing probably loses for the brassica and the onions. And then here's a October picture where we still have the brussel sprouts in here, we've pulled out a number of the onions that were still there. And to be truthful, our onion crop on the south side wasn't great, partly because it was so dry, but that's where we got our onions. Was the south side where we did our traditional spacing. We got very little, next to none, out of the tractor spacing. So no, I'm kind of saying, okay, we're gonna have to do something different if we're gonna do that tractor spacing. Here's one of our favorite tools, this is called the wheel hoe. This is how we do a lot of our hand weeding. And it's kind of turned upside down right now, but we've got the long handles and we have a saddle hoe connection down there. And what it does is it uses more of your bigger muscles. So you're spending less time with your shoulder muscles, hands, arms, and more of your legs and upper body working together. So the wheel hoe is a good way if you have a little bit longer rows to work larger areas. And then here is where we started mechanizing. This is the Ford 8N tractor. And this is a standard toolbar. We initially, when we did the serigrant, had written it up to try and get a brand new made for vegetable production cultivator. Which can be fairly expensive on the order of $1,000 to $1,700 if you want a new one. And finding a used one's nearly impossible. So we went to an old farm auction and found this toolbar that was about 14 foot long initially that had gangs of S times, so an S time looks like an S. And they're on these different gangs that can be removed from the toolbar. And we cut the 14 footer in half and had two seven footers. And now what you can do is if you want to cultivate the whole thing, you leave all the gangs on. And if you want to cultivate the outsides where your wheel tracks are, you take these two middle gangs off and run the tractor down the row. And this cost me $250. 250, 1250, I think I'll take the 250, thank you very much. So this works fairly well for us right here. And here's an example of using this S time. In this case, I ran it with all the tines on it. And this is a field that we just, we put fallow for the year. We have one of our fields fallow in the crop rotation. And I wanted to kind of pick up the trash. And what that means is I have all these weeds growing, they were about this tall. And I said, okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna just drop it down to the surface of the soil and drive the tractor. It grabbed the weeds and pulled them to the end. And now I have a pile of weeds at the end. It wasn't so bad, okay? It worked pretty good. One of the things that I did learn, however, is it catches trash so prolifically that if you have tall weeds, even if you mow them down, anything that's longer than a foot, these things are gonna grab and clog the machine up. And next thing you know, you're gonna be halfway down and your tractor's gonna start spinning because you have this big bunch of trash. And it'll pull things up out of the ground, too. You know, if you've got stuff that you've broken in, it'll pull that up and clog it up, too. So you have to make sure you don't let things get up too high. You're gonna have to use a different piece of equipment. Here's another option that we started looking at. We started looking at paper mulch because you noticed back before, we had the rows where there was weeding still to do in row. So we did a trial with paper mulch, and that's because we were able to save money on that cultivator. Instead of spending 12.50 on a made for vegetable cultivation thing, we could spend some here. And here is the used mulch layer that we got. It's a flat bed mulch layer, and I was able to get this for a few hundred dollars as well, and it works pretty well. This is a drip tape roll up here. I just put a bar across the top, and I could find a way to run the drip tape down underneath. And what happens is you put a roll right down here of that paper mulch. And what happens is this disc digs a little bit of a trench, sorry. And then the paper rolls down underneath this wheel, and the wheel pushes it down. And then there's two more discs on the back that throw the dirt back over it. So now the edges of the paper mulch are covered to prevent it from blowing away. It would work for plastic as well, but we have a philosophical difference with plastic, so we don't use it. The other thing that we had to do is irrigation. And what we found with the irrigation is the tractor spacing was a win. Because you could run one row of drip tape for the bean and the potato row, just one. But if you used our old spacing, you had to run one for each row of potatoes in each bean. So in one of those, we could have 14 tractor spaced beds and have 14 strips of drip tape. With the old method, I would have had to run 22 strips. And if you're paying money for materials that probably won't make it through more than one year, I have yet to find anybody who can reuse drip tape well because this stuff breaks down. You're gonna throw that much away and buy it again next year if you need it. So I wanted to cut down on that. So the tractor spacings are in here. And then of course we did the potato harvest and we were able to get ourselves a little, this is an old horse drawn potato digger that we put a three point hitch on. And we can use that to try and dig the potatoes. It beats using a fork or a broad fork or a shovel. And then we were able to run that down. Notice the beans are done, so this is the other thing. You have to make sure you're done with your bean harvest. Then you can run the tractor and you can go ahead and harvest the potatoes. So that's another restriction with a companion planning, but frankly that's okay, as far as what we do. And we were able to run that. Basically the potatoes all get dug up mostly on top of the soil or at least the soil's loose and then we run through and pick them up, throw them in containers and away we go. Here's where it gets interesting. You remember in the non tractor spacing, I had double rows of green beans. And in the tractor spacing I had a single row of green beans next to the potatoes. We're worried about yield here, right? Are we at least getting the same thing as we were before? So here's the deal. We ran provider green beans as one of our trials. Providers a very standard green bean, a lot of people will grow this thing. Okay, and so tractor we had 193 pounds and no tractor we had 235 pounds of green beans for the season. That's not bad. These are 200 foot rows, folks. And I'm getting about a pound per row foot, which is about what you would like to get, okay? So that's good. But here's the thing. Providers here in the south, in the no tractor, those are double rows. So I've actually got 400 seed foot. I've dropped twice as much seed and I'm not getting twice as much production for the providers. So I actually wasted seed in that double row with the provider, okay? That's the first thing you should notice. The second thing you should notice is for Jade, look at that. That's just about double. This is the double row. This is the single row. Jade didn't care. It said it's okay if you run me into double row. I'll give you about double production. So its seed foot has the same ratio. Its row foot is approximately double. And in both cases, they weren't affected for their production by the potatoes they were next to. Okay? So that means I can have a win either way, but I probably should change my ideas about putting providers in a double row. Cuz I'm not gonna get more out of that double row than I got out of a single row. That was by the way not one of the questions we were asking, but it was cool to find out, okay? So that's the first thing. And here's the other thing. We did the potatoes. By the way, that's bullwinkle the potato. We ended up pulling a potato out that looked a lot like bullwinkle and of course we brought it to the market and everybody was having fun with it. But here's what we learned with some of our potatoes. Real grande is this type over here and it's a russet type. And you'll notice that with no tractor and tractor spacing, the tractor spacing was down a fair amount, okay? And that's the one where the beans are next door, like right next door. And with the non tractor, they're a little further away. There's possibility here, although it's not statistically significant that those potatoes were affected by the beans. On the other hand, the purple majesties are right about the same. So they didn't appear to be affected at all, whether the potatoes were next door or not next door to the beans, okay? So this could be very much a variety, independent or dependent. I don't know which right now, I would have to study it more. But this is telling me that that tractor spacing can work. Now here's the other thing that was interesting about it. I don't have a slide for it. We found that the potato beetles that we found in the field were always on the edges in both cases. So the ends of the rows, okay? So what does that tell me? That tells me it looks like the companion planning or intercropping worked. Because whenever I found the pests, they were not where the rows were next to each other. They were on the ends. So this is a good thing. And that is my quick summary of what we ended up doing, which means I'd like to get questions from you if you have them. Yeah. Kind of at this point, you know, between gardening and mechanization, and one guy that I was talking to was saying that if you plant by hand versus planting off of a tractor or off of a bar spacing, it makes it very hard to cultivate with a tractor because it's hard to get your uniform row spaced and what was your experience with that? Okay. The question or the observation has to do with planting by hand versus planting mechanically. And the issue, if you plant by hand, if you saw the butt scooch picture way back at the beginning with people planting, you noticed the onion rows did this nice little sneaky thing and none of them were exactly the same distance apart because no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get them straight, all right? And then when you do the mechanical cultivation, that's an issue. And that's entirely true, entirely true. It is very hard to take hand planting and combine it with mechanized cultivation. So what we ended up having to do or what you have to do in this case is we tried to make sure that the outsides where those paths were, where the wheel tracks were, that's where the mechanized cultivation came in. I did not try mechanized cultivation in between the companions. That ended up being the wheel hoe anyway. So the net result, though, is I didn't save the labor I was hoping to save with the tractor planting because it wasn't straight. So here's the next part. We're looking at maybe a waterwheel transplanter in the future and that will force, if it's not a perfectly straight row, it's a tractor non-straight row or it's a gentle curve instead of, and the spacing between them is the same. And here's the second part to that answer. The paper mulch can come pre-punched. And if they have pre-punched holes, then they're always the same spacing, but you're also not cultivating in between. So those are our two possible approaches right there. Good question, yes? It's easy to get a crooked row with mechanical, with tractors planting and then you come right with the six row cultivator and you rip up just as much. But how did your paper mulch work out? Okay, there's an observation about it. It's easy to handle crookedness when you're working with the tractor. Yes. It was real easy to make a mess with the tractor. And make a mess with it all at the same time, yeah. In fact, when we did the potato digging, I had it shift on me a couple of times and of course now you gotta go back and get those areas again. But the issue was the question about the paper mulch. How did it work? The first thing that I noticed about the paper mulch is it actually lasted longer than I thought it would. I was prepared to maybe throw a mulch on top of the paper mulch after a while, but that's probably because it was so dry. If we add the moisture, I think it would break down faster. I did notice that as far as what I liked about is the fact that when it did rain, the rain was taken advantage of because it would go through the paper mulch, okay? I also noticed because I've seen and worked with people who've used plastic that it laid no worse. It laid just as well with this flatbed mulcher as plastic. It maybe would make you nervous as it would intend to maybe tear, you would think, or wrinkle, but it handled it fine. We did get the heavier mulch. We didn't get the light paper mulch. So that might have been part of the deals we got the heavier mulch and we were intending on it. But I was pleased enough. We only bought a couple of rolls to try it. I'm going to do a much bigger trial next year. It was that good. I'll be around out here and back if anybody wants to talk.