 Welcome. I am Erin Schneider. I work with the North Central Fair program. And I also farm in Wisconsin. I have a small CSA farm. I am hosting today's Farming Matters feature and excited to be featuring Andrew Adanski. And Andrew, I know there's like a lot to unearth right in the, not just the title, but your project and what is happening on your farm. So I will turn it over to you and give you a chance to share your story and share what is going on with your farmer at your grant research. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrew Adanski. I operate an all in full circle community farm here in Green Bay, Wisconsin on traditional Menominee land. And we run a 300 members CSA or president of the slow farmers cooperative. And we also operate 300 acres of certified organic pasture where we graze grass fed beef, pasture pigs and about 2000 laying pasture laying hens, along with 20 acres of vegetables. So just what we're here to talk about today. Thanks for having me on here and I'm really excited to get the information out there to all the folks that are interested in preserving their soil and doing some alternative advanced soil preparation techniques on their diversified organic vegetable farms. So that was kind of where we were coming from with our project was a lot of the preparations out there for organic vegetables or either, you know, plow and rototill. There's some cover cropping starting to come in. But it's either super large scale or small scale like Jam Forte, Elliot Coleman, such skills like that. And we were looking at a lot of the equipment and systems that they were using those being power heroes, Rob Forks, you know, deep mulch compost systems. And we wanted to emulate that but we have the acreage here in Wisconsin on my family's farm to do a little bit larger scale. So obviously, Jam and that whole cohort. They have a system that works really well, and trying to emulate that and scale it to different sizes and different styles of farming is I think the next logical step in the progression and advancement for market farming. So I always start my presentations and anything that I'm talking about with the land acknowledgement. So it's important to acknowledge who is here first, who's here before and honor the wisdom and knowledge that they still have with their traditions. Yeah, so a little bit about our farm. We're not just vegetables we do pigs and grass fed beef and laying hens. We're transitioning into perennializing the farm so we have currents and hazelnuts and chestnuts, apples, plums, peaches, working on just doing a lot of different things. So we all know what no till is disturbing the soil as little as possible. A lot of different ways in here you can see two different systems that have worked large and small scales there's a picture jam. Really great person idol to look up to. And yeah, you can see here's the problem. The existing no till methods are brought for at small scale and you need a small army of people if you're going to broad fork 12 acres of vegetables every year. Another issue could be that if it gets too large scale, you know, if you're up to 20 plus acres it's pretty specialized equipment that you need like front hitch non roller crimpers amongst many, but that's a lot of other things. So this is some of the equipment that we did. We were specifically comparing rotators to power heroes. So this is the main final soil preparation. Rotators just a really fast spinning rototiller usually tractor mounted. So we did have one from doing pasture renovations for about 15 years that my dad still has. And then the power hero on the right here. This is the ibex TS 90, I believe, is the model that we purchased. So you can see the main differences the way the times work the road till road of Vader rototiller spins in terms like this the power hero stars in a vertical tillage, and the deepest it will go is like three or four inches. It doesn't go very deep at all. And here's a video showing that action. That's kind of cool. I got slow motion. We'll see. Yeah, you can see how those times just kind of spin around and they're not super deep into the soil but we're trying to get just that surface layer of the soil open and available for seeding. So that those seats can get established. We do have some problems. It's a loud machine. It is PTO driven so it's not like, you know, riding on horses and hearing the soft slush of soil falling against steel. The biggest problems are, it wears a lot of sheer bolts out. There's rocks that get stuck in there and glacial till. So, things get stuck break, but luckily they anticipated that and there's a piece that, like I said the sheer bolt just comes off all the time. We replace that. And it can still be fairly aggressive. In the soil, it will pulverize if it's too dry. If the soil hasn't been loosened enough, it won't always break down the root ball zone enough. So for transplanting sometimes things don't get planted deep enough. But those are really the only two downfalls. I mean, it's a little more available during if it's really wet, I'm not really wet but if it's more wet, you can use it at a higher soil moisture than a rototiller because it's not going to smear as much, especially in our clay soil. Yeah. The deep chain gripper is you were asking about the power hero or the broad fork. The deep chain gripper is what we decided to utilize. It's basically just goes 18 inches below the soil surface and breaks up any plow pan. This was our first iteration of it. It's not a terribly complicated machine. I'm going to mute the thing so I can talk while it's going. It's just a piece of steel on a three point hitch. The key with this one, it's, it like leans back it doesn't always get into the soil all the way. So we started adding weights to it. And I welded a tooth onto the end so that it would grip and sort of lift that compacted sub layer, a little bit. It still did a pretty good job but only in the middle. Our beds are 36 inches on top and five feet center to center. So we don't have a huge planting zone but more than enough to get in, but just ripping down the middle. Obviously leads to just the middle being uncompacted in the outer edges, still having a little bit of compaction. So it's not as complete over the entire bed as a broad fork would be, but our new iteration of it we took a old single bottom middle buster plow and took the plow part off of it. So it's just a shank going straight down in the soil. With a couple weeks and works pretty well. You think this might work well for like for example like some of your perennial bed prep when you're trying just to maybe maybe where they're wanting down the road help for spacing or. Yeah, so that's something that I mean it's similar to a yeoman plow. One of the ones that the permaculture folks will use a lot where they'll use it to open up the root zone and then come in and mulch with landscape fabric or till or plow or whatever they're doing. Yeah, this would work pretty well that way. I've done it before to plant our currents. Deep shank right into the sod after after flail mowing deep shank and then power hero, then we can plant right into that works really really well. Yeah, so the results we've gotten so far. Pretty decent. You know we've had, we've been able to grow vegetables in these plots. Our preliminary data after one year so we did have an issue with COVID where ever just about every single power hero that's sold in the United States is made in Italy. So I was ordering it in 2020 spring 2020 which Italy got hit hardest that it's been a huge blur since then but yeah Italy was hit really hard at that point they shut all the factories and distribution out and so we were behind on the project for like the first six months. So, we really only had one year under it when I did the first soil test, and there wasn't any significant difference at that point, but we're in year two, and I'm seeing some anecdotal evidence that it seems to be causing a difference. But, like I said, I still have to collect the data this fall. So we're testing soil compaction, seeing how much it's compacted organic matter in the surface layers so we're seeing how much of the inversion factor of the motivator is degrading our organic matter and oxidizing it. And we're also looking at water infiltration rate. So seeing how fast water is able to percolate through into the bottom layers of soil which is a great indicator of overall soil structure and help. So, we picked three easy easy ish tests to do. Because it's a mechanical operation that we're testing so the mechanics and physics of the soil or what's probably going to be affected first. Yeah. Are those your carrots this year or is that from last year or that's from last year. Last year they look great. I mean, they did look great. Yeah, yeah. Pretty good deal out of them they were all super straight they were boleros. Our storage carrots that were like a foot long. A couple inches thick. So, the carrots, the lettuces did really well. This year we did spinach in the spring. And then I cover cropped, I just a quick little OPE radish mix. Mold that down and then I planted beets for the fall. And they're looking pretty good. So yeah this was like I said my presentation from Moses. So, just some of the other equipment that we're using our get this old John Deere manure spreader which fits perfectly over the beds and we can use to apply our compost. Yeah, it's just ground drive. It doesn't have pto which, you know, depending on who you ask is great or bad. But it allows us to put a lot of compost down. We make it all on the farm from the common or bed pack and chicken bed pack from winter. This was a year to visit two years ago. So you can see we're still telling the ground, because it used to be pasture for 30 years. There's still a lot to get out of there but we're starting to get to see it as full on established garden beds that we can really be intentionally no tail with. And then the last piece is the flame over here just chopping up all the debris. And that's one issue with the power hero is it doesn't incorporate any of the surface debris into the end of the soil so you get a lot laying on the surface. Especially if you don't get a good chopping action from the flail more it doesn't incorporate very well and then our cedar gets stuck. It'll wash things off it'll make it hard to cultivate all different types of things. I'm curious to part of, you know, your, your project I know you, your, you shared this with Midwest organic and sustainable education farming conference, and then it also looks like you hosted like a field day or farm dinner this summer as well. What were some of the things that farmers had questions about or that you would recommend to from your project so far, in terms of like, you know, I mean you shared a lot of what you learned but like I mean just in fielding those questions and from outreach the summer. Yeah, so a lot of the questions of farmers that I've talked to have is basically is the power hero worth it. Like, is it even worth investing in a whole new piece of equipment when the rototillers been working just fine for me. And what I basically tell people is you know if it works. It works if you're just starting and you're choosing between a power hero and a motivator or rototiller. I would say go for a power hero, you know, it does basically the same thing. And there's not any different equipment that you need beyond it that you're going to use anyway. And the farther you get the less equipment you need, you know, eventually we're just going to do flammable deep shank compost power hero. So if you're designing your system from the start. It's definitely a good thing to do. If you are more established and you've been using rototiller, and you're looking to change. It's definitely something to try. As they always say never just go full in on a whole new thing right off the bat, you know, so if you're considering making the switch to power hero. Because yeah, there are definite soil benefits. So do you feel like this practice you'll continue with once once the, you know, your grant project is set to wrap up later. Yeah, I mean, I've been seeing a few other farms that are doing great examples of flammable deep shank power hero in different combinations. And I've seen the efficacy of it. We haven't used the motivator at all this year. We did it a little bit last year. I mean the motivator I used in our project but nowhere else on the farm. Resetting some beds we did use field cultivator. But I think definitely it's something that I could see us really standardizing and making just our standard system. I don't see any need to go back to rototiller or motivator power heroes working just fine and there's a few more things that we can make even a little bit better like the roller on the back we just got the crumbly bar. But if I put some of the the diamond pattern. Steel on it I can't I don't know what it's called, but the standards like seed bed roller you see on the back of those things. Make it a little flat, a little more flat on the bed top something like that. Just tweaking it little bits here and there. I don't see changing our system anytime soon. I mean you also have a lot of like you mentioned animals and you know you have sitting for neighbors pig right now too but like you have a lot of pasture and like beef and hogs on your farm to how does that work with your vegetables or compliment your your CSA. Well, the reason we're doing animals is not just for an income source all of our compost all of our fertility comes from the animals. So we collect all their poop compost it and put it back under the soil. Your farm has been in your family for like over 100 years and kind of that's been transitioning to co op farm model like that I also feel is an interesting thread to your to your like that you know farm your farm operation as well as just how you how you farm all you do so. Yeah, the whole cooperative thing it's really looking back at the way grandpa and my great grandpa and his grandpa farmed. Like, it was never just them by themselves. They were all doing it with the community. My grandpa was the president of the cooperative cheese plant right down the road. So it was my great grandpa so co ops have been deeply ingrained in my family for a long time. Co op is just another way of community that involves operating business together. So, the main reason we want to do it as a cooperative farm is that, you know, land ownership is a can be a violent and challenging system to overcome. We have issues of who has access to land you obviously get into a lot of deeply ingrained hierarchical patriarchal issues in our societal systems that need to be addressed and seems to be collected and cooperative ownership of the resources is the best way to start to deconstruct that. It's just a so long for now Andrew but I always ask like it's anything that's going to give you heartburn or make your heart thing that you that feels on said that you want to share with with our farming matters audience. I mean I just want to give a huge thank you to Sarah, the whole project is really one of the best ways to encourage farmers to explore their own solutions. And without Sarah we couldn't have done what we're doing and a lot of other farms I know wouldn't be able to do what they're doing.