 We are Marilyn and Joe Hannon from Rose Common Berry Farm. We are located in Birtle, Dallas County, outside of Linden, Iowa. We grow strawberries and raspberries currently and are looking at expanding into other berries for future years. We grow our strawberries in a somewhat unique situation. They're day-neutral strawberries, so we treat them as an annual and plant new ones every spring for harvest, somewhere between 1st harvest starts from July 1st to July 20th, depending on the year a little bit. But what really makes our strawberry system unique is that we grow them in vertical, upright, hydroponic towers, so there is no bending over and picking off the ground. Everything is done from knee-high to head-high. This is our second year of production on the farm. Last year, we were just getting things up and going and getting a lot of infrastructure built. We had some definitely major challenges. Last year, which the Sierra Grant is actually helping us figure out this year. We have about nine acres across the whole farm that we own and right now we just have crops in basically about three quarters to one acre. The strawberries that we have, we had about 17,000 out there when we started this spring, again, but that's all in a half-acre size. We have three weeks of rain literally every single day, so you'll find a few empty potholes and things out there. But that's a really good comparison of what works well under flooding and drought conditions because we've had flood conditions, well, not flood last year, but we had a lot of rain last year during the growing season. We had kind of some preliminary trial set up. We've had basically now at this point, three weeks up until today when we record it of bone-dry weather. I think we're going to learn a lot of good information from the trial this year. And we already have. We've started collecting some of our data and can easily see a difference between certain of our trials of our different media as far as different take rates. So we're seeing some different size, plant health, labor that's involved. How can we mechanize some of this? And we'll talk about all of that as we go through the individual thoughts. We have 15 rows of our towers out here. We have 10 rows that are 60 towers each, roughly give or take. And then five that are 40 in our smaller field. And in each of the towers, so each of the 60 or 40, there are five of these cloverleaf pots that just stack, snap together. And so each pot holds four plants. So then for each tower, it's 20, obviously multiplied out for the field itself. In our trial, we have four different media types that are in the middle of our field, so we can see side by side comparisons of what they look like compared to each other. The field that you see behind us, it's basically we had to put together a trellis to hold the pots up. They're all it's half inch conduit with inch and a half, inch and a quarter or something like that PVC that holds the tower or the pots up off the ground at knee height there. Because we're on a windy location, we had to go through and add some end posts and some ground stakes and a couple eight foot tee posts staggered throughout with a high tensile wire. There's not really any tension on that wire, but just something to hold those conduit from moving around. You'll notice that our rows are north and south here. The property actually doesn't quite look like it is north and south the way we're sitting here, but it actually is sitting fairly close to north-south. And the reason that they're set there are set up like that way is so that the morning sun can come up in trans and move over and actually catch basically three sides of the towers over the course of the day in order to get uniform growth and uniform ripening. It is a management thing that we have to do though is go through and rotate those pots 180 degrees once a day. We do that for sunlight, we do that to give the plants a little bit of a break from the wind and irrigation, water flow distribution to the towers. This is our first trial. This is a mix of the chips that we saw hydrating before that was in the bag, not ground up though. It's just the chips and then it's a mix of the peat material that we saw hydrate it and it's mixed at one part peat, three parts chips I believe. So the peat holds the water, the cheap chips give us drainage. The chips actually add and flow a little bit of nutrients I think as well. I can't 100% verify that. So pros to this media is it's fairly well drained and you can easily change drainage by adding more peat to that mix to suit your needs. Right now we're finding about similar water usage across the board from all our media out here. I don't know that that will hold through as plants are too size up though. Next treatment here is the peat that we had. So the ground up peat mixed up with the chips that we have, but the chips are also ran through the chipper shredder thing. I think we're at one part peat and three parts of ground up chips out here. The chips themselves are pretty well drained and get pretty dry and that one is a great option for wet years. So we wanted to see if we could find that same material and make it to be a little bit more suitable for a wet year. You end up with a ton of labor. I mean because you're already running stuff through the chipper, then you got to back mix it with the peat and it doesn't store well. So it's not something we can do during the off season. I've got iron chlorosis on some of these leaves. So I still need to fully refeed it and things like that and account for some of the excess of leaching that the other media has. So I'm not gaining anything by adding the extra labor to this media. This one will never be seen on this farm again. Another media that's in the trial. This one is the chips that we had and then ran through the chipper shredder mulcher thing. And it's just a nice fine grain material that we saw earlier. The reason that we like this one is it's very well drained. So we get into a wet year. Water moves down through here and these strawberries are never wet. In fact, we got a half inch rain this morning. We may, if it gets sunny and warm out, we may have to irrigate this afternoon. And I should mention all of these are on a twice a day irrigation cycle. That's the way we're set up. The challenges on it though is the nutrients run out. And then you end up with iron deficiency. So you can see I've got some iron deficiency here. So it becomes really critical to make sure that you're managing putting just enough water on to get everything hydrated, but not too much in leaching excess out. And then coming back in, you're going to have to do some foliar feeding after a rainfall. Labor wise, the stuff is really easy to hydrate. It's really easy to tip, but then it takes time. Right. Time is the worst part of the labor with this. Planting into it is really easy. It really doesn't take much time at all. It's so fine that you can just pop plant right in. Really, it's the time that it takes to hydrate and run everything through the wood shipper. Finally, we have our peat and perlake mix. This is again more closer to what's generally used for hydroponic strawberries and flat culture beds. This is nice because you can pre-mix it and put it all together and run it through an auger or pot filler. I mean, this is designed to go through a pot filler. It's also the cheapest overall of all the different types of media and the lowest labor of all the different types of media. Going to what I think is a little bit higher quality media, going to a higher ratio of perlite in there. And perlite is going to detract water. So it's going to shed water away from the plants. It's actually working out pretty well for us. The challenge on it is it dries out. And so when it dries out, it blows. And so we have peat and perlite that's flown all over the place out of here. It's hard to keep it wet on a windy, windy day. Inside a greenhouse or a high tunnel where we could provide wind protection, this would be great because it would never blow around. It'd be pretty easy to manage and keep in place. Water flow and distribution across these pots throughout the tower. By far this is the best. Again, it's going to be your better option when you get into a droughty situation like we've had last couple weeks. We get into a wet period. We may end up struggling again. So we'll have to see how that goes. The other thing that I like about this is that you can direct seed and plant other things into it pretty easily. One other thing to note with the peat and perlite is I have commented on the ease in planting into the chipped up stuff. This is even easier. I think I had timed at one point and we were able to plant an entire tower in a minute. Which means on a long row you've got an hour of planting, which is fast. You can do a short row like this, one person in 45 minutes. And our reports will all reflect actual person hours per unit, but it's fast. So what led us to this error from our rancher program? One of the challenges with growing strawberries in these vertical upright towers is water distribution, water holding capacity in these towers. Oftentimes you will see the bottom pots of these towers get too much water and they start showing signs of iron chlorosis, boron deficiency, and it's very difficult to manage water distribution and nutrient distribution through those vertical towers. Looking at the SARE projects, looking at a lot of the other research, nobody's really doing a lot of research on these vertical towers. They're all flat dead based systems, whether it's farmer ranchers or whether it's university research. We had a very specific question that we wanted to answer, very specific to our farm, but it's applicable to people that are growing vertical strawberries across the country. And then knowing Krista poking around and asking some questions about how we go about doing this, whether we can make it work for us. That's kind of what drove us to actually taking a chance to write a project for the SARE Farmer Rancher Grant here in the North Central region, how easy or how difficult that is. I'm a little bit biased because I write grants on a fairly regular basis, but again, we knew what problem that we wanted to address and we were able to sit down and go through that process for the SARE Farmer Rancher Grant. I think we started writing it and we set it aside for about six months at one point because we knew we were going to apply, but it wasn't around. But I spent a few hours one night kind of throwing ideas together and starting to figure out what our plots were going to look like. And then when we came back to actually write it and finish putting it together, it was not difficult. One of the more challenging parts of the proposal, although I found it to be really valuable, was to go back and look at what the other SARE folks had been doing in other regions. We found a lot of good information that was being done in other places and we were able to talk about what else is being done and how or why it's not relevant to us. But we did find some tips and tricks and some information that we pulled from those and we'll actually be able to show some of the stuff that we pulled, not part of this particular project, but stuff that we pulled from another project that we're trying out on our own farm.