 There's a little bit about my farm. I'm located in Central Iowa about halfway between Iowa City and the morning. My least four acres of land, I have about two acres in production, in real production. I sell May through December. And my main business is CSA. I used to do it for some farmers markets. I shifted to online, but I bought online farms to sell them directly to my website. And then I do some online consumer co-ops and increase them to do more wholesale. I've been growing for 10 years. I also worked for three years on a certified organic farm in all areas, which is very close to where I now farm. And I'm not currently certified, but I am depending on certified. This season, and I've always been organic managed familiar with organic standards, and I've always tried to follow it. Just some pictures of the farm, and this kind of shows. I'm going to talk about the different parts of our farm, how we manage them. We have high tunnels that we manage in a certain way. We have what I would call more intensive market garden style beds that we manage in a certain land. And we have more what I might call broad acre plastic culture beds that we use. So those are all parts of our rotation and cropping system. Just think of the CSA share that we have this past year. So I feel like it's always good to start off a presentation with some explainers about what information I can and can give you. So this is just what worked on our farm so far. And this system will continue to evolve. I've seen how much it's evolved in the 10 years of the farming. And so obviously, all systems are subject to revision over time. And you can obviously just can't make a system on one farm and draft it on your farm. You can draft it in a certain sense into your personality, into lots of different things. And what I found is that even small variations in location and climate and soil type can make huge differences in whether a production system is going to work for you or not. So obviously, something that works in northern Minnesota may not work in central Iowa. But even something that works in northeast Iowa may not work in central Iowa. So that's don't take any sort of production system and think, well, this is it. You have to adapt it to your particular circumstances, which are always going to be different. And then this is something that I kind of started to learn at this conference. I'll talk about that in the next slide. Don't let the perfect be the end of the good. I think with crop rotation, especially early on, I thought I'd have to have a set crop rotation. I have to have this figured out right away. And the truth is that most farms do not have their crop rotation figured out, and that they're changing it over time. And that's not a problem. It's that you're slowly moving towards your goals. And so there's always going to be a gap between your plans and your actual living reality. And that's not a problem. That's just normal. And I went to a presentation by Kay Jensen here that was probably 10 years ago around the time I was starting to farm. And she mentioned this idea of the Fibonacci spiral. So progress is not linear. We tend to think of progress as being a line before we just move from A to B. But actually, if our goal is the center of that spiral, we're kind of spiraling in towards that goal. And so she gave the example of day one when you start your farm, you're not going to necessarily have written, standard operating procedures for your workers. That's not necessarily a realistic goal for the first day you start farming. But maybe by like 10 years, you might have that. So it's just a good way to think about, especially if you're starting out, that you're not going to have things perfectly set from the start. You're going to have to figure things out as you go. So I feel like it's always good to sort of interrogate the assumptions that we're making. Obviously, in organic standards, you are supposed to rotate crops. So I understand that. But why do you rotate crops? And it's everyone's favorite answer, which is yes and no. Because I think there's circumstances where we don't rotate crops. And there's circumstances where we do. And I think in particular, almost no one rotates crops in high tunnels, even in organic systems. Most organic growers, I know, are growing tomatoes in their high tunnels every single year, which is not what you're supposed to do. But they're still doing it. And so why does it still work? Well, disease pressure builds up over time. So growers are usually using greenhouse-specific, hybrid varieties that are very disease-resistant. People are moving into grafting in order to deal with disease pressure. And I've also heard that you can do that for 10 to 15 years. And then after that point, it starts to get more difficult. Or you can start to see depletion in your soil that maybe is not apparent at first. So obviously, the most immediate reason you might rotate crops is because of disease and soil born pests carry over from year to year. That's at least on my farm. That's my immediate concern when I'm thinking about, where do I put my broccoli this year? I don't want to carry over the black rock from last year's broccoli into this year's broccoli. And I just want to throw out there that I've been exposed to this conference and others about ideas around. You can actually prevent disease and pest pressure if you build up the biological activity in your soil and you have to take nutrition for your plants. And I think we're all kind of trying to work towards that. But it's not necessarily a realistic. Again, it's not a realistic goal from day one to have that in the situation. So we're all still dealing with disease and pest problems. And so, yes, we need to continue to rotate. So I think the considerations for crop rotation are timing. So I think rotating differently timed gas crops. So is it an early crop? Is it a mid-season crop? Is it a late crop? How far through the season does it go? What kind of window is there for a cover crop before or after that? And how will that influence what you can have there afterwards? So for example, if you have an early crop and then you plant an overwintering cover crop there, you probably don't want to have another early crop there next year because you're going to have rye or something you're going to have to terminate the spring. So the sequencing of how you sequence cash crops and cover crops and being able to alternate timing is part of what you're thinking about with crop rotation. And then there's obviously the fertility and the soil and the reconsideration. So there's the whole schematic of heavy beater, light beater, light beater. So you have certain types of crops that need a lot of nitrogen, certain types of crops that need a little bit of nitrogen, and then crops that produce their own radio can. And now that's not a realistic quotation for most of us because most of us are way over-representation of the heavy feeders, particularly we always talk about crops that are always being over-represented in a lot of vegetable crop applications. So we're obviously not going to grow equal amounts of each of those. But it's something to think about. I think of another consideration is that there's crops that are easy to eat and crops that are hard. So like carrots and onions, our crops are very susceptible to early meat pressure. So you probably don't want to put those in your weediest field. You want to think about what was the weed seed load like there last year that I let a lot of weed seed fall on the ground. That last year, probably, I don't want to put my carrots there this year versus potatoes. That's an easier crop to control beans in, a little bit more tar, weeds. So those are things to think about. So this is a map of my farm that we, I think this particular map, we actually grew up this past year. And this shows our field system and how our farm is set up and how we rotate through these different fields. So just to show you what's called the short field and how our short field's out, those are what I call the market garden intensive production type beds. So those are 100 feet long. The beds are four feet to four and a half foot on center. We tend to manage those by hand, generally, like in terms of work. We do notes on these beds, which I'll talk a little bit more about. We tend to use a BCS walk-behind tractor for preparing the soil, although I am increasingly setting them up for tractor spacing. And they're bare soils. We manage them as bare soil. And then we also grow crops that are higher value and higher turnover in those beds. The long field, west, long field, east, and then the far field, those are set up for tractor cultivation. And they're set up for laying plastic mulch. And so they're longer. Those are 265 to 27 foot beds. So I kind of have a hybrid system on our farm, where we have both what I would call like intensive market garden style production. And we also have what I would call more like a broad acre plastic culture tractor rototiller type system. So as I mentioned in the short beds, we do shorter maturity and higher value crops. So lettuces, spinach, carrots, beets, things that we can double crop. So our goal is to actually get two crops a year, at least. It's not free. So there tends to be a higher labor input per crop. So because we're going in there, we're holding my hand. And we're laying compost potentially. So we're doing a higher labor and we're wanting to get a higher revenue. In those fields, we tend to use compost as the basis for our fertility. So we're laying a significant amount of compost. And that's part of what we can do in the garden. The no-till trial that Anna and I did over the last few years, where we actually tested out no-till management versus rototill management. And I did that in these had. And so it's part of that. We were laying down really thick layers of compost. And we were using that as basically a mulch that we were then planting into without rototilling. We use overhead irrigation in this section. And that's partly because we're doing a lot of hand cultivation. And if you have to do irrigation and do hand cultivation, it's really, really annoying to have to work around irrigation or have to move it out of the way and move it back. So we moved to doing overhead irrigation in this area. And also, they call it germinating seeds. So like carrots in particular, we've had really two really dry summers. And both those summers I've germinated my carrots entirely under irrigation. Whereas in the past, I germinated those with a rain ball. And so that's been a really big part of being able to control more of our seed germination, especially in that summer window. And as I mentioned, we do weed control by hands. We use a lot of wheel hoses. We've set up our spacing so that we can use different types of wheel hoses. So we tend to do things on two or three rows mostly so that our spacing is standardized. And it's easy for us to go and do wheel hoses and just wheel hold the entire field. So the long beds, longer maturity, lower value crops. I'm going to show a crop list in our next slide. But potatoes, brossicas, broccoli, brussel sprouts, onions, garlic. We look at that as we're trying to get a single cash crop and a single cover crop per season. We're trying to basically rotate cash crop, cover crop, cash crop, cover crop. And so the cover crops are the basis of our fertility in those fields. We're looking to use those rather than compost or to recycle nutrients in those fields. And so we can use plastic mulch in those fields. I'm not set up for cultivation. I don't have a cultivated tractor. I have one tractor that I use where the only cultivation I can do is blind cultivation. So it's not very good for actually weeding crops. I can weed the tire trunks in the plastic bed. But that's a big reason why we use plastic mulch. It's not something I necessarily see in a practice that we use forever. But I have to get to the point where I have the cultivating experience to be able to get rid of it. In those beds, we use drip irrigation because we just put them under the plastic bed. We lay them at the same time as the plastic mulch. And then, like I said, we'll use the tractor to cultivate the tire trunks between the plastic. We'll also get vultures within the entire tract. So landscape, fabric, straw, mulch, or we'll use wheelhouse if we have time. So the picture on the left is our test germinated carrots like it sometime in August. And so that's our 100 foot beds, one of the more intensive market garden style production. And then on the right, that's more harvesting overwintered onions, fridged onions in June. And so there's also, you can see the garlic and onions on the other side of my workers there. And so those are the plastic beds. And that's going to look at how those two different types of fields look. So these are, this is kind of the, this is traditionally been our crop, as I say, traditionally is in the last few years. This has been what we've rotated through those different beds. So as I said, we cluster crops, so we grow certain types of crops in the short beds and then we grow certain types of crops in the long beds. And so they're mentioned in the short beds, the emphasis is on shorter season, generally things that are 60 days, no more than 60 days with the pre-needs and some of these things are a little bit longer than that. The idea is that we could grow two of these crops in a season and then the long beds, the goal is just to only get a single crop per year, remove the plastic and put cover crop down or have cover crop and then fill that in and relate plastic. So one of the big changes we're making this year is we're really carrying down what we're growing. We're trying to increase the amount of diversity of crops that we're growing. We really focus on the crops that we grow well, have a good demand for them and we can actually grow cropably. So we've been dropping crops from our crop list. So the bolder ones are the ones we're still growing and then the ones that are not bolder are the ones we decided to drop. And by drop, I mean we're just not growing them at all or we may need buying them from another producer who has a better system than us. So for example, we're getting sweet potatoes when someone grows like six acres of sweet potatoes. They got the tractors just in set up for planting and cultivating. They just have a much better system than us. And so it doesn't really make sense for us to try to go sweet potatoes given our scale, given our equipment. So this is a modeling part of our farm but this is just kind of showing you what we're still growing and what we dropped. It does make crop rotation a little bit more challenging. In some ways, we're growing larger amounts of fewer crops. And so we've got bigger blocks of crops to rotate through the field versus having more diversity of what we can rotate smaller groups of crops in the field. But what we're looking at is this is kind of how I look at crop rotation. We have families of crops that we rotate through. And this largely has to do with disease. There's a disease that affects certain families. Like for example, black rot is a disease that affects the Roscoe family. It doesn't affect cucurbits. It doesn't affect the quality of anything. So that's largely what's that based around. It's also based a little bit around fertility for example. So there's similar fertility needs within the Roscoe family. And similar fertility needs within the Carrot family. So that is another part of why we're clustered together. But when I'm looking at actually making a map of the field and where things are gonna go, this is how I'm clustering things. And then within each of those clusters, I might say, okay, the crop is gonna go exactly here. The potatoes are gonna go exactly here. But the first step is just kind of figuring out what block of crops is gonna go over there. And I would say it's more important than the long beds. That kind of rotation or really mapping that out. The short beds, it tends to be because there's so much turnover in those beds. It's a little bit harder to have a set rotation plan for those beds. So I still think that through it is a little bit more fluid in those beds than it is with the long beds. So, and then just to mention the high tunnel. So I have one 30 by 96 high tunnel. And so we rotate that. We have basically three seasons in that tunnel. We have a spring season, we'll be planted. The next few weeks, typically we plant spinach and lettuce, although we do also sometimes plant arugula and kale. And then in the summer, we have tomatoes in there. Generally just tomatoes. I also have tried other crops in there and may try other crops in the future. But generally it's just tomatoes. And then in the fall, we'll rip out the tomatoes and we plant spinach and lettuce. And then we generally will harvest that up through December and then the spinach will harvest into January and February. So that's kind of the rotation that we have in high tunnels. You can see it's not a, it's the same crops every year. And so part of the problem is with having only one high tunnel, it's difficult to have an actual rotation. So I'm hoping over the years to add more tunnels and be able to do more rotation. And then having more tunnels would also allow us to potentially have a fallow period. So for example, we could take one tunnel. Let's say you have like three tunnels, but you take one tunnel every year and you just grow a cover crop in there. So to give it a rest, to break up these cycles, break up these cycles. But currently you can get only one tunnel. We're doing this, it's working so far. I mentioned there's some pitfalls to that, but I'll kind of frost that bridge when I come to it. So these are the crop families that were rotating in the tunnel. Functionally we're really just rotating lettuce spinach and nightshade. And like I said, the tomatoes were just growing. It's been in the same place every year. This is just a schematic that I came up with recently to show how we flip the tunnel from one season to another. So on the left, what you're seeing is, this is what it looks like when we have small, we have fall and spring greens in the tunnel. And so the black strips are landscape fabric and the green strips are the planted bed. And then kind of each row in this spreadsheet is a foot. So you see it's dirty clean. So this is looking across the tunnel. And so you can see on the edges, we have three foot fabric. Along the edges, that's kind of a permanent walkway. Some growers like to row all the way up to the edges of the tunnel. I'm six foot eight, it's really hard for me to provide a view of the edge of the tunnel. And so I like to have a walkway where we can walk all the way around. And then you can see we have the four foot beds and we need to plant with a paper pot transplantor. And that's how we plant our lettuce and spinach. So we use six rows, a four foot wide bed, which is about eight or nine inches between row. It's about as close as you can get to paper pot transplantor between just going down the bed. And then we actually generally remove the landscape fabric. So we have a one foot bare soil bed, or sorry, bare soil pathway between the beds that will just wheel hoe for weak control. Okay, so that's fall and spring. When we flip into our summer production, which is tomatoes, we roll out landscape fabric onto those pathways. So we roll it right over the center of the pathway. And so we're covering that one foot pathway, plus we're covering a foot on either side. And so we're narrowing our beds down to two feet wide now, two foot wide strip. And that's where we're planting our tomatoes. And most recently we've been planting them in a single row and doing a double and training them to a double leader. So we have a single row of tomato space, one foot apart with a double leader, going to a wire that runs, the wire would run right here and right here. So right along the edge of the bed, running all the way down the length of the high tunnel. And so we're training the tomatoes up to that wire. I think that what I'm gonna do this year is I'm actually gonna do a double row of single leaders because I think I might have, basically I think the system I've been using is more for a grafted tomato and I'm not grafted. And so I'm moving more towards a double row single leader. So I'll be planting, instead of planting the tomatoes right down the center, I'll be planting them like in a diamond style on either side. So they'll be more directed on the wire. And then when we flip back into fall production, we rip out the tomatoes, take out the landscape fabric, usually the year gate because the soils quite dry at that point and it's been compacted from us walking up and down the pathways. And then we'll broad fork, lay down a bunch of compost and then we'll plant our lettuce spinach into that. And so we've been managing up the high tunnel and no-till for the last several years and I think it's working really well. Any questions so far about this or anything else that I've talked about? We'll also have time for questions and put them in the comments down. I probably should be showing this but I got this from Andrew Method's book which is showing this is where I got this system from. So if you're interested in that, I don't know if they have that in the bookstore but you can go check it out. But basically it shows you how to use this for a bunch of different crops, so. So I'm reading that. Okay. And so I've already made it. But so why, when you say you think that's for crack, can you say a little bit more of wire? Is it the yield? It's that the tomato basically doesn't have enough, doesn't have enough productivity to maintain two stems because the photographic variety's got a much stronger root stock and so it has a stronger root system so it can really produce on two stems and from conversations with other growers. And actually if you read the recommendation in this book that's exactly what he says. I just kind of skipped over that and didn't do it for a few minutes. So I'm going back to what the recommendation is which is you're not grafting, you're a single leader because the plant will be able to produce more proof on that single stem versus if you're trying to train it to two stems, you're kind of like overtaxing the plant, it's not by your stem unless it's grafted, so. Yeah, so when you're pulling out the tomatoes and then you kind of pull that landscape fabric off and you're going back into your fall production, you said you'd be using a paper pot transplant here? Yeah. So what are you doing beyond rod forking, good prep, the planting area in a way that's adequate for the paper pot transplant? So yeah, the sequence is, I'm remembering it correctly, the sequence is we irrigate, then we broad fork, and then we lay down the compost and then we will either wheel hoe or tilt to use the tilter to basically get enough, yeah, to basically get enough loose soil to be able to run the paper pot transplant. And I run the paper pot transplant on the shallowest depth, I found that works best especially in a double tilt system because if you run it on a deeper depth of shoe, it's just gonna catch any quads that are gonna be underneath there. So that's worked for us. Do you assess for a tool to ensure that those paper pots are varied if you're putting them in shallow as you are? Usually we do it as a two-person team and so all those are on the paper pot transplant and then someone will just come behind me and they'll just kind of kick the soil in around there or use their hands, yeah. Okay. So that's just what that looks like, what the high tunnel looks like with the plant-state fabric, with the tomatoes in a single row, we did some inter-planting of beneficial plants of borage, marigold, basil, some other things in there so that's what you're seeing and there's some weeds in there too. And we run a double drift tape right along the tomatoes and I just like to double-click it, it just gets more water down more quickly. And so you can see we use the tomahooks which we don't actually use that system to actually like lower the mean tomatoes but I like that for just being able to get it on the wire easily and then we use the plastic tomato clips and we come in and we'll prune the lower parts of the tomato and we'll prune off any suckers so we're just training the tomatoes to two and like I said, I'm gonna go to just training them with a single beater and then we're pruning kind of throughout the season usually up until about harvest time and then we kind of run out of time and soft pruning at a certain point but it's to just increase the airflow to make sure that it's not a jungle in there. The last time I worked on it, we would kind of stop pruning in like May and so you would go in there and it would be like going into a jungle and it would be extremely humid and hot and you'd cover it in tomato pollen. So I try to avoid that but the pruning labor is sometimes difficult to balance with everything else we're trying to do on the farm. And then this is what it looks like in the Springer Fall configuration this fall. So you can see there's roughly half spinach and half lettuce. I've got some kale in there, I'm gonna stop doing kale because we don't plant it early enough to actually get good yield from that. You would need to plant it probably in late August or early September to really get nice sized plants and so I planted, ended planting it too late and then you just have small kale plants and no produce. But spinach and lettuce work really well in the window that I need to plant in which is generally we're planting the end of September or early October so we're ripping out those tomato plants from like mid to late September and then we're replanting the quail creams in late September or early October and then our aim is to have greens in November which is around the time that we have to stop harvesting outdoors. So you try to harvest outdoors as long as possible and then you can know how it's going on. So with your pathways being so narrow, are you starting at one end and harvesting down or are you able to harvest in the present you've got a lot of potential? Yeah. No, we don't do like a path man style of like plant the whole tonal out. So we do have the pathways to walk down and the plant, the plant grows are a little bit into the bed. So it's the pathway and even though you're not supposed to walk in the bed functionally, the pathway is more like 18 inches between plants. But yeah, it's a little bit difficult but getting a harvest, so generally we kind of harvest and then we're dragging the total over what we've just harvested. Because it's actually hard to get our totes down the pathway itself but it is a little awkward. We have hoops in here too and hoops get in the way. So it's always a little bit awkward harvesting in this kind of style but we want to maximize the non-grown area. I haven't yet found the motivation to try to move towards that kind of path man style which is what that means is people plant the entire tonal like wall to wall. There's no pathways and then you just harvest your way through the tunnel. So you just walk over what you harvested and that's the way it's got to be in. As many greens as possible into the high tunnel space. So some of the challenged crop location I think just growing different amounts of the different families like brassicas are always over-represented on those special farms. It's always hard to rotate brassicas with other things and try to not grow brassicas in the same spot every year. And then for me, my production levels change from year to year and part of that is being a beginning farm especially as you're growing or as you're changing your markets the amounts you're growing, your things are going to change and that's why that idea that I'm going to have a set crop rotation and I'm going to use that. Well, you could have a set crop rotation one year and then your market changes or your size changes and you're going to have to change that. And then I think there's always the unexpected adjustments and the reason for us soil conditions we've got to get this in right now. And so we're going to plant it somewhere where it maybe wasn't in the crop rotation plan but it's just because the soil conditions are right. Sometimes you bump short on transplants or you plant it one less bed of something that you would have transplants. So all those things can change. And then I think there's always a question about growing things in blocks. So all the brassicas grow here, all the algae grow here versus growing them as a more heterogeneous distribution. So some brassicas here, some not easier. I think the block system is easier to scheme out. It's easier to plan that way but also you're concentrating on potential pests and disease problems in a single block like you're making it very easy or pests to move in and be able to like move from crop to crop to all of the crops in a single family are together. And I've been working in a two acre field so it's not as though I can really spread things out that much. But even just having something on like for example in that map I showed you in the far field versus in the field that's farther to the west, I see differences in how like if I plant my spring and my fall cucumbers in one field and I plant my fall cucumbers in another field it takes a while for them to move from crop to crop. So for example, like they basically will destroy the spring and zucchini and cucumber, talking about cucumber, peels and squash blocks. And then once that crop is destroyed or I've ripped it out within the next one. Whereas if they were right next to each other, I don't know what that would happen. I think they would just spread right between each other. So yeah, there's probably more to say about that. I think there's also considerations of being able to interplan with beneficials to break up lots of crops which also can complicate your crop rotation. But these are just some basic principles that I try to follow. So I mean, at the very least you're not growing the same thing in the same soil every year. I mean, the high time being the exception. At least every other year, better yet three years I think is a minimum. There's different recommendations for different diseases and different crops. Some people will say three to five years, but in general, if you're breaking up a extra disease cycle over a single year, I think that's, sometimes that's the best you can do depending on how much space you have. Being aware of edges where diseases can transfer. So I changed the orientation of my fields. So they used to run east-west and I changed them to run north-south. And what that meant was now all my beds for one year ran across the previous year's beds. And so there was no way for me to avoid growing broccoli where I grown broccoli the previous year. And so what I found was that was where the slack rot transferred. So the end of the bed where my current bed crossed the old bed, that's where the slack rot showed up first. And then after that year, things got better because it just was that one year where I changed the orientation of the beds. And then obviously if you have identifiable diseases or pest issues that you know are a problem on your farm, learn about the life cycles of those things. It might make sense to, for example, with black rot it makes sense to tilling your residue into the soil either that fall or early the next spring because the black rot would carry over on the residue. Tillage can also help with some insects that overwinter in the soil. So if you till and fall and not that that's generally a good practice but if you have a specific problem you're trying to address it can make sense. And then soil testing every year and for every other year is important. And then you can adjust your amendments based on the soil testing, the actual needs that the crops you're growing. So actually understanding what a frost is in need, what do the aliments need, what do you curb its need and trying to amend your soil based on the needs of those crops. Rather than just having a media fertility program that can be used for the whole farm without regard to the crops you're growing or the particularities of your fields. Because I know each of my fields has its own particularities. One field is kind of high in phosphorus. One field is generally lower in organic matter. So knowing what each of your fields, what the needs are of each of those fields you can try to address them specifically rather than just kind of using a blanket program to address your whole farm. So just to talk a little bit about the record keeping and the way I do it. I come up with a proper rotation fuel plan and I just use spreadsheets for this. So I kind of have a spreadsheet that's similar to that map I showed you. It's in a spreadsheet form. So like each row is a bed in that system. I think I have a screen out of that next. And then I want to have my actual crop planting field map. So this is my plan and this is what I actually did. And then that crop planting field map becomes my historical record of crop location. So if I have one of those for each year then I can look back and say this is what I planted where in 2021, this is what I planted in 2020, so I can make actual crop rotation decisions. Because if you don't remember where you planted things, you can't actually make the crop rotation decisions. And so this is just what that looks like in the spreadsheet. So you can see I've just taken the columns and merged them across the rows. And so each of these columns are the bed and I have a little code for the bed. So like this is, that's long field, east, the bed 24, and then I've got, this is actually part of my plan for this year so what crop I'm gonna grow. Sometimes I'll also put in the cover crop that I'm growing in there. But this is the plan and so then I'm gonna want to capture the actual planting that I did this year. Because if I just have the plan and I'm going to plan for next year, I don't necessarily know if I actually followed the plan or not, or if I had to make adjustments. I'm going to just provide a different farm example of all the way that we do both fields. So my farm is Humboldt and Tarvis, I'm in Decor, Iowa, and they have had five years on this farm. So this is a picture from our first, or second year on the farm. And yeah, so we have a two acre field and it's laid out in six sections, 10 or 15 foot beds, about one bed per section. And so that is kind of the, this is a new one that we grow at the rocks. Can you turn up the volume a little bit, please? Oh, I think over the shield, it's hard. What? The shield, it's hard. I wanna just take it off. How about that? Oh, really better. Okay, yes. So this is a picture of planting garlic. So garlic is our, we have six sections. We're entering into year six of our farm. So we'll have gone through every single section after this year, and then we'll be restarting next, in 2023, we'll be restarting the cycle. So Allianz is our first section. And so we plant our garlic, we plant onions, shallots, leeks in this section. It's the least number of beds that we need to use. Of any section. So sometimes we stick in, maybe if you want to plant some corn, popcorn or something for fun, we'll throw them in the Allianz section, but otherwise we can cover crop about half of the section during the year. This picture is actually of our no-till system, which we started just a couple of years ago. We started transitioning our farm to no-till. So that means we, yeah, this year with garlic, we actually put furrows in our no-till beds, and then covered those, once we planted the garlic, we covered it with compost, and that was our method of covering the furrows. And then we launched after that. But yeah, our no-till system is basically compost-based. We fill up a bed, we kind of dig out pathways that we can, that are permanent, and then we can add compost to the bed, add to the bed. Tilt, yeah, I think we'll go back. Can you hear me? Oh, can you hear me? You have batteries. Is that enough? It's good, it's good. It's good. This last session's good. It just doesn't have battery in the last year. They've been having problems. I'll just talk really loud. Can you hear me in the back? Great, kind of. Okay, I'll be as loud as I can. Yeah. I think that's enough on the no-till situation. So, alliums, most of them come out of the field pretty early in the fall or late summer. And so we are then able to cover crop almost immediately. For development of fall. So, we either put in oats and peas or a rye and a vetch mixture, depending on whether we went to overwinter the crop. Oh, yes, in fact. So, if we want a cover crop that's going to extend into the spring and grow in the spring, then we use rye and vetch. And if we want to be able to work the ground immediately in the spring, we use something that winter kills like oats and peas. We also are usually able to get around a buckwheat in, which is a summer crop and we'll die at first frost. We're usually able to get around the buckwheat in after the avidems. Yes, those are our garlics coming up. So, this picture is of our cute Kermit section. Yeah, we follow our alliums with cute Kermits. And the, yeah, this picture is basically, witcher's wash will spread over many beds. So, we have to think about what we're going to do with the ground that is in between these rows of Kermits. So, that here, this picture is when we planted a bunch of lettuce in between rows of Kermits before they spread out so that we could kind of get two different crops out of the same zone. And of course, it gets complicated like, you have to get the lettuce out before it starts getting overwhelmed by the vines because otherwise it's really a mess to walk around in there. Our next zone is roots. So, roots for us include carrots, beets, turnips. So, a bunch of different crop families, the carrot family and the rest of the family but the turnips are, and the, yeah, so that's an interesting thing because roots are basically, that's what is basically about our, the way we cultivate the crops, the way they're grown, the way they're easily had rather than what family they're in. So, yeah, that's the way we think about our roots. And this is our brothel section. So, it's the most full of any of our sections. Fill it up every year with cabbage, kale, broccoli, collards, brussel sprouts, and kohlrabi. And so, but I think it's the most beautiful movement of the sections. And again, thinking about cover cropping, we basically are able to cover crop beds by bed. So, our kohlrabi comes out pretty early in the season and we're able to put in a buggy cover crop there or we're able to even do double cropped kohlrabi before. We don't have the same black crop crop in Jordan. Yeah, so we're able to kind of fit things in and then always thinking when we plant our fall cover crops, okay, is our next crop going to need to go in in the spring or can it wait until June and in which case, we would plant marae or something that would, that would really come up with the organic matter and grow in the spring as well. This is a totally messy, messy picture. So, our tomato section, we also include our beans in that section because they kind of have a super season. We want to plant them after all these different crops, after the soil's worked out. And we put in several different sections of beans. So, we've been figuring out just kind of trial and error over the years, figuring out ways to kind of manage the architecture, I guess, of our section so that we can harvest the tomatoes easily and the beans won't be too much in the way. So, yeah, we've started kind of alternating tomatoes and beans to just add more variety and more kind of ability to move around in that section. Yes, and then the final section is our green section. So, our lettuce, our mustard mixes, our spinach, and then we also put our peas in the green section. Again, because they kind of match the timing of greens. We put them in the spring and, yeah, and get them out kind of fairly early in the season. So, we can also double crop in our green section. As we need to. That's my co-founder also in the green section. This is in the back down. Yeah, and this is just a picture of buckwheat cover crops surrounding like a weeding parsley patch. Just thinking about the timing of cover cropping is a really interesting question. We're always working out and making sure everything is accessible and that we can just get as much stuff growing as we can as possible, but without overwhelming our eyelids of parsley. Yeah, and I believe that is it. So, plenty of time for questions, yeah. How are you breaking down your cover crops doing complete no-till agriculture? Yes, so the question is how are we breaking down cover crops, especially when we're doing no-till agriculture? So, a number of different ways, we've tried a number of different ways. So, we've tried just like pulling them out of the bed, like we're eating them out, which is not actually as bad as it sounds, but it takes a lot of time to do it. The other big thing that I feel Jordan and I are trying is silencerming and using silencerks to break down break down cover crops, do you want to answer that at all? Sure, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, I think the way that I've done that is I have a flail mower that goes on a BCS. It's all flail mowing and then lay the tarp down. And, you know, we've talked about this, and I've talked about this with silo charts. You don't get all that much residue breakdown we found. That's sort of how silo charts were sold to us, I guess, or something like that. A lot of residue breakdown, but I find that's not so much the case, it just kind of kills what's there. And it will start to decompose a little bit. I'm actually interested in possibly using clear plastic to try to get more residue breakdown. But yeah, because you don't get the residue breakdown, I think that like for me, if I want a direct seed or a paper pot into there, I need to then like break that residue off or do something with it after I pull the tarp off. So, yeah. Yeah, we definitely have just covered the bed with compost, like just like kill it with a silencer, fill the cover crop, and then just cover the bed with compost and plant directly into that. And yeah, we don't use a paper pot transmitter, we just transmit by hand, so it works for us. What have you found for no-till systems in direct seeding? Is that something that you find that you're able to do, or is that kind of a, do you have to transition more heavily into the transplant? Yeah, so my co-farmer manages the direct seeding and she hates using seeders. She just makes a burrow and directs you with her hand into it. And so we can do that in a no-till system, no problem really. What we have found, we actually found that our germination was best when we would make a furrow and just like the picture with the garlic, we'd make a furrow, we'd seed into it, and then we'd just cover it directly with compost and that would be the best germination you get. Jordan, I'm curious to know why you switched your bedroom to the last one. It was really just to orient things more to the tractor because if you have 100 foot beds, the turnaround to it when the tractor is terrible, so I didn't have to do as many turn-arounds with the tractor, yeah. So it wasn't necessarily like oh, or South Dakota it was more just because of the way my fields were oriented. Yeah. Curious with, I understand, what was your lead to all of this stuff? Yes, the question is what's the weed kill like with a silo shirt? I mean, it kills the angel weeds very well. I think the issue is typically perennials. So like we both have some issues with thistles, I'll even have some animal issues. So yeah, perennials, it does not kill perennials unless you beat it in place for like an entire season. So, but it will kill, it very effectively kills my angel weeds. The question is it will kill the existing growth, but as soon as you pull it off it's more easy to terminate it. So like, I think sometimes in a tillage situation people will till first and then put the tarp down because they want to flush them out before they tarp because as we run into the situation we can kill the existing angel weeds, but then there's a whole another generation that's just going to come off as soon as it's triggered by pulling on the tarp. So. Yeah, and I'll add that we have a big thistle problem. So yeah, we found that our annual weed pressure is not as bad in the ecosystem because we're using, we're using compost as a whole. But our thistle problem is huge. It's just coming back and so we try to tarp kind of any part of the farm that doesn't have something growing on it. In a, for like a three-week change of time or more, we try to put a tarp on it so if those thistles stop for a second. Have either of those experiences with living mulch and your permanent growths, do you have time and what have you used and how do you manage the height or how does it work? Have you? I have not, I have not done living mulch. I do use Dutch white clover in other parts of my farm and that's one, oh sorry, I do use Dutch white clover in other parts of my farm and that's one that I've seen other people use in that situation, but I've not personally tried it in my growing beds. I use it in my like tractor pathways, like my access roads. Yeah, I've also never tried a living mulch other than once I tried some clover and had a bunch of re-servening with it and it just didn't make sense. But I just wheeled it in. But I would love to figure that out. When you guys use the tarps to suppress the cover crops, does the temperature affect the effectiveness of the tarp? I think it's early spring versus the middle of summer. That's a good question. I don't know. I mean I think the, yeah, I think there's definitely a heat effect with the tarp that can, I think that might have an effect on the residue breakdown potentially, although I was saying I'd still feel it's a satiety in the summer, but I think the main way the tarp works is by excluding light. So I think in the case of the tarp, it's not so much that it's heating up the soil, it's that it's excluding light, that's what's killing things. With clear plastic, it's the heat that is actually killing things and breaking down residue, so. So when you're doing your crop rotations in the sections that you're doing double cropping in, you're rotating at the end of the season, right? So if you have all of your brackets in one section, like some of us have longer seasons. So if you're double cropping multiple times, you're not worried about rotating into a different section at that point. So you're kind of looking at it from a season perspective, are you both looking at it that way, but to those sections? I definitely am. You're my year, I'm a graphicist, go here, and nowhere else. Yeah, well in the place that I'm double cropping, I'm usually changing families, but my understanding is like, because I kind of had this question too, it's like, is crop rotation always between crops or is it just between seasons? And I think, I don't know, maybe best practices would be yes between crops, but I think there is some leeway where like yes, you could rotate, like you could grow lettuce twice. There might be reasons not to do that for other reasons, but like, you know, in terms of an overall crop rotation, I think that's fine to grow things in the same, to grow the same family and same beds, same fields and the same year. Yeah. So you might be multiple crops that sound like the same bed, or you do- I haven't done that, but it's like it's again, like because I want to have flexibility, I can have myself that if I had to, I try not to, but I try the best I can to rotate between crops as I can, and usually I'd be able to do that, but it is something that I would do if I had to. In your greenhouse, when you said after tomatoes, when you go, you bring in a ton of compost. How many yards of compost in there? What does it fund me? Yeah, yeah. So it's, I think it's pretty quantifiable. It's, we usually lay about an inch over the top of soil all across the bed surface, and we do it, we move with a tractor bucket, and then we'll dump it into, because we can't put the tractor in the tunnel, we dump it into the wheelbarrows. So we line up three wheelbarrows, dump the compost into those three wheelbarrows, and I'm trying to think, I have this written down. What's that? What's that? What inch? Yeah, I think we're using probably three to five bucket loads per bed. If I remember correctly, and in general, I think I've wanted to, but we ended up using about a cubic yard per bed. It's in general, if we're doing that thick mulch layer, so we get it delivered to 40, basically 40 ton loads, and we're gonna have to cover about 40 of them. That's your, yeah, that's about the rate we're using to get that one inch thick, like heavy mulch. Yeah. But, yeah, I'm, I had some needles. I could do better with the proper thing, that would be perfect, but I need to know that there's any effort to do this, so I'm gonna figure that out, we're actually gonna go, um, again, I'm gonna go with the, the needles. Um, the only answer that I know for three needles is just the bro cover. Um, right when you land the crock, just cover it, and, with bro cover, it doesn't have any holes in it, and not a few of the needles. Um, I'm actually trying to figure out the problem when we bro cover, um, her plea needles, it's, it's often on grass, because they're gonna float really fast, especially with that hot bro cover, so that's, that's hard to kind of negotiate. Um, but yeah, I have, I think people see that. My understanding is, if it's a flying insect, then unless you're able to isolate long distances, it doesn't, the rotation isn't gonna matter for that, because the plea needles are just gonna find your crop. They don't necessarily overwinter in the soil, or if they do, they'll just come up and find the crop. So that is less of a crop rotation issue, like Hannah said, it's just more physical exclusion. And I think that's the case with other pests, like cucumber needles, they're just gonna come find your, you curve it, it doesn't matter if you rotate them. Is that really a crop rotation related, but you were talking about the rope cover, do you have an issue of it blowing off, and are you the secure it, or not let it rip? Yes. So how do we secure rope cover? I, yeah, in my obsession with exceeding plea needles, I have gone into burying the side of the rope cover. And, so just like, continual dirt on all edges of the rope cover. And then the problem is, if it's a rubella or something, and I'm harvesting multiple times, actually, it's like pinning it back down under that row of dirt, after every harvest. Yeah, the other problem with rope cover that I've noticed is that it creates this microclimate that's really kind of luscious and the patients love it, and they get all over the crops and that's kind of gross. Can I have a question for you? Word of potatoes and sweet potatoes fit into your rotation? We put potatoes in our potato section. Okay, I was wondering about that. What about you? Sweet potatoes, do you know? We don't. Okay. I treat them as a night shade, so simply I treat the potatoes, so the other is sweet potatoes that much. Yeah. One thing I also want to, I don't know if you've heard this on the room, but I was going to say about how we've done direct seeding with no-till, so it's similar to what I talked about with the high tunnel where we're trying to get enough till to be able to run that either pot transplant or through, and we did have issues where the seeder is skipping, so we're pushing a seeder through the soil, it's like hitting a hard pan layer, just kind of skipping. But this year I switched to using a jam seeder and it's a lot heavier, and it's been a lot better for no-till because it can just kind of plow through sections that where Earthway is very light, we'll just kind of skip. So that's one thing I found that really helps with direct seeding into a no-till situation or any kind of situation where you have tighter soil or more residue, it's just, it's a more robust, heavier seeder. What was the name of the seed that you used this time? Jeng, it's a jeng seeder. Jeng? J-A-N-G. There's probably some vendors who sell that here. Okay. When you're planting your cover crops, do you use the broadcasts though, or do you use the soil in the soil that you use in your direct seeding? We broadcast our cover crops. Yeah, I broadcast with a little Earthway chest butter, and then I have a cul-de-packer, so I generally will cul-de-pack that in or sometimes I'll disc it in. I've also tilled it in too with a rotator, but it's not, I'm not wild, I would like a better system, because a lot of passes over the field would be nice to be able to do things in a single pass rather than having to do it in a pass. Cool, any more questions? Yeah. Do you guys transplant in the residue of the cover crop if you don't till it ends? Yeah, we have, we, so... Yes, okay. I didn't do it. The question is, do we transplant into the residue of the cover crop? We would only transplant into the residue of a dead cover crop, for sure, and we would add a compost mulch over it, so there would be a lot of tilt of that compost as we transplant it, so it wouldn't feel like very residue-y. And I would till in the residue before I plant, because generally I'm not using cover crops in those short beds, although I'm kind of moving in that direction, and I would do similar things to what I was doing in the parchment, to fill it first and then put it down. Yeah, so the question is, how do we get brassicas, like Brussels sprouts, stuff that has heavier stock out of the soil if we're not tilling it in? And we have tried multiple things. We tried just pulling the whole thing up. And it's awkward because it's like frozen in the fall and by the time we're pulling the brassicas out, it's like the soil is frozen and it's really challenging. So we switched to just chopping them up at the soil level and leaving that roots just in there to kind of rot, and because we're rotating, I think our roots come next after our brassicas and so we're direct seeding, so we just make it frozen and it has worked out.