 I'm Cliff Hatch. We're in Gilmass. Our farm is up in Gil. We have a you pick strawberry business. We raise and pick about five acres of strawberries every year. The farm is 80 acres. 20 acres of that is devoted strictly to strawberries. Then we do some other vegetable crops to add to our mix and our stand and we wholesale some berries to the organic food co-ops in the valley. We're picking five acres of strawberries a year and we have 15 other acres waiting to be planted to strawberries at any one time. The first year of our rotation always involves buckwheat for weed suppression and to build up organic matter. The year prior to planting strawberries we always plant Sudan grass to suppress nematodes as well. Every year there's a winter rye cover. Any land that is not used for planting berries or that is just waiting we use for rye production because we need as much rye as we can produce every year for mulch that we put on in the fall. This is rye left from last year. Last year's crop we harvest this in June. It's mowed when the plants have reached maximum height and they're just casting their pollen. It wants to be mowed before there's any seed set because otherwise you're just spreading weeds on your field. But the early mowing gives you a chance that any weeds in your field won't have set any seed and they'll be green if they're in this bale but it's the most weed-free mulch available just June harvested rye. If it's mowed with a mower conditioner you'll have much better drying results and it'll almost usually go through your chopper a lot better too. What we try to do is to mow our rye, bale it up, have it ready for our fall when we have to put it on as mulch. Most years we're not planting berries till June or July depending on how the season goes. Delayed planting of strawberries reduces labor costs by reducing the time that you have to tend the berries in the field. Berries have to be hand-howed every seven days to keep the weeds out of them. Every week we shorten the season we save that hoeing and that labor. We developed our delayed planting system with the aid of a SAIR farmer grower grant. We received two two-year cycle grants on which we basically trialed planting densities. We've trialed everything from six inches up to like 36 inches apart with different planting systems and basically what we found is that if we're going to plant in July we need to reduce our spacing down to about six inches. If we're going to plant in June we can have what you see here which is about 10 to 12 inches. If you're planting in May you can go with the customary spacing of about 24 inches apart with your plants. If the rye comes off early we can plant our plants farther apart. If the rye comes off late we take more plants we just put them in closer to compensate for the lack of season. Usually we harvest rye first of June and get it baled in the first week of June but some years this year is a wet year we're into the second week of June and we don't have all of our rye harvested yet we're still getting that put by.