 I'm Catherine Kelly. I'm the executive director and co-founder of Cultivate Kansas City here in, we're on the Kansas side, but we work metro-wide so both in Kansas and on the Missouri side. Our mission is to grow food farms in community, which means that we work with farmers to help them grow and operate local farm businesses. We have a food access program that helps low income people get access to local food grown by local farmers and then we have a program called Metro Farms and Food Systems where we work with farmers across the metro area and nonprofits who are doing farming and food projects and food access projects. For this Nopales research project that we did, I had been working with a guy named Gerardo Martinez who worked for an organization called Maddie Road Center and Maddie Roads works with Latino, primarily Latino populations, a lot of new immigrants as well as more established Latino communities and one day we were standing at the edge of a vacant lot. We were looking at for a potential community garden plot and it was terrible, the soil was terrible, there was gravel and we started joking about how the only thing we could grow there was would be cactus and he's like well you know we eat cactus right and I'm like yeah I knew that and he's like why don't we do that and so we wrote a proposal and got it funded and spent the next three years kind of researching how do you grow, can you grow, how do you grow cactus for food consumption for eating of the pads and then for juicing of the what they call tuna the little seed bulb that grows at the end of the cactus. We grew it out in the field, we grew it in a high tunnel, we grew it in a greenhouse in Potts so we did it in different settings. What we learned is that it's very sensitive to excess moisture so inside the high tunnel in particular we had issues with cactus basically rotting because there was just too much moisture, they were mulched in with straw, we learned that it dies back in the winter and and it takes some time to regrow so we were sort of constantly in this process of it would grow out we think okay we've got a good number of pads then it would die and it would start growing again and so so are the challenge for this region for cactus as well as for pretty much every other crop is that we get you know the joke always is the worst of the north the worst of the south the worst of the east and the worst of the west and that means we have super high temperatures in the summer that the cactus loved but then we've got cold temperatures in the winter that the cactus hates and so there were some challenges on that front you know we also ran into a real learning curve around at what stage do you harvest the cactus where it's edible we harvested it too late and so by the time we tried to cook it up and cut it open with a fork and knife it was as hard as shoe leather and our knives were we didn't bring steak knives so it didn't work we learned that you know the different varieties had slightly different taste to them so there was some variation across that when we when we cooked them up we had Harado had brought in and cooked some cactus that he bought at a local Mexican grocery store and we learned that that was a much better texture better taste than what we grow and so I think that ultimately the learning was at least as long as our winters go so consistently below freezing and we have these abrupt changes in temperature it's probably not a good commercial crop for for this area we also learned that if it was somebody was going to grow it commercially they need to look at different varieties than what we had we had what was a really interesting idea from a you know reaching out to new markets developing new products that are better are well suited for climate change and rising temperatures in this area that would be well suited for the soil conditions you know cactus likes drier you know lower organic matter soil so it looked feasible from a number of angles but it didn't prove feasible from a couple others so we're really grateful that we got the support from SARE because that allowed us to not lose our shirts on the project and it provided some some structure to work within that you know put it into a format that we're where we can work consciously share with other farmers what worked and what didn't work