 Ann Karm's is a vegetable farmer from Crothersville, Indiana and she is in year nine of being a veggie farmer and she moved home to Indiana a couple of years ago with her farm and so this will be year three at her current place and she's figuring out how to make biologically active compost and she's going to show us videos. It should be fun. Okay so the title of our project is Leveraging Biodiversity to Approve Probability on a Small-Scale Vegetable Farm. That sounds really boring, doesn't it? But the overview of the project is it's a multi-farm venture so we have collaborated with other small farms to create the biologically diverse compost from livestock bedding to improve the health of the soil and the probability of our small-scale vegetable farm. So what basically what does that mean, right? We talked a lot about compost today about how compost is not all treated equal so we want to monitor our compost with a microscope. We want to see what's going on in there, what's alive, what kind of diversity can we get and how can that affect how the crops grow and what we're hoping is that we can use that biology to eliminate the need for additional inputs. We want to stop using fertilizer. We want to, well we try not to use pesticides, but you know we want to stop those inputs that are not only extensive but you have to apply them every year. Whereas with biology it's a living organism. You can introduce it and maintain a healthy habitat for it. It in theory will continue to thrive and do the new recycling. It will, you know, do all the things. Be born, die, reproduce, eat, poop, all bits. So let's talk about the compost a little bit and how we have decided to develop the biologically diverse compost. We started with the, so the picture on the right side is the Johnson's Zoo Bioreactor. It is a static pile style to make compost. It's just a fencing frame that has a hole in the center. So it actually looks like a donut should have gotten a picture from the top. What that allows for is oxygen to be able to access all the bits. So there's no center point that goes in a robot or loses oxygen, which is where you get the pathogens and kind of the bad guys start to form. So the center is open. Everything is within a foot of air and it just hangs out. So we filled this a year ago last summer. Well, the lifestyle timer was filled. It was useless. But, so that just come out. So we're just now beginning to analyze what's going on there. You're going to get to see a video of that. And that's, we just use an apple corn and pull the samples from the center. And we also have the chicken bedding in a nicely formed tube. So we kept the feedstock separate, which was our first mistake. There wasn't a diverse enough feedstock to provide diverse enough microbiology to be effective. So we're seeing some biology there, but it's just not going to be enough to offset all the things we wanted to do. So this season, we are going to change our method of making compost. And it is also a Sarah sponsored program. So the jokes you see by a reactor was a Sarah program back, I don't know how long ago. And then the other one that we're developing is also based on the research done through Sarah. And it's Dr. and Inom's soil food web approach. So it is a thermal composting method, which means that we're hitting temperature for a certain amount of time, kill seeds, kill pathogens. There's turning involved. But we will use the same framing from the reactor to keep it consolidated. So great for urban environments. You don't need big equipment. You don't need big windrows. So it is contained, I guess, if you will. And we use five gallon buckets to develop the recipe. So we're going to develop a recipe that can be repeatable so we can continue to produce the compost that has the diversity of microbiology. So that's the sugar sand piece that we grew. We just let it dry in the field in the sun, stuff it in the buckets, we'll add water to the buckets, and that will be one of the feedstocks. So we'll have, that will be our green, we'll have the sheep bedding, which will be nitrogen, and woody, or I guess thundering brown. Anyway, we're going to hit on this, high nitrogen, hopefully with some brewery waste grain, and also the chicken bedding will be woody and high nitrogen as well. So hopefully we'll develop a recipe that works, and we will be able to test out that microbiology to see what happens. This is an overview of the field, so this is where I've taken samples of the current status of the microbiology. So all those little markers we've done in areas that we've planted, either annual crops or perennial crops, places that have been followed, places that are dipped in disturbs that just aren't even growing weeds very well, and then the surrounding woods. So to determine kind of just an analysis of the area. And what we have found actually is just bacteria. There is zero diversity in all the parts. It is basically the same everywhere, even in the woods. There's little bit of fungal hyphae, but none of the higher level predators, which we'll get to see videos of, and don't need to remove the names of. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this changes. And what's really great about this method is once we have this compost, we make an extract with it. So we just take a small bit, put it in water, and then we do a soil drench in the fall. And then the microbiology will do its thing, nutrient cycle, and then come spring, we'll fertilize, we won't till, we'll just plant into it, and hopefully you can see a yield increase. So that's the plan. Yeah, that goes. You have to be determined. So let's play this video while we talk some more. Okay, press play. We're going to press play. We'll just click it. Anybody know how to do that? Press play? Try. It usually has like a little bar at the bottom. Yeah, there we go. Okay. So this is a sample from our bioreactor 3 from the sheep bedding that was still last season. This was just taken a couple days ago, and it's spliced together. So there's clips that are both at 10x objectives and 40x objectives with the shadowing microscope. So this allows us to see the living organisms. And I'm learning, so I'm not going to try to identify all of them, but there's definitely some kind of score, maybe a maybe fungal hyphae thing going on here. So we have seen some additional of the level of the higher predators that are going to be eating the bacteria and added to those new chains. But the reason that we wanted to test this method and why we were so interested in it is if, basically, by developing the microbiology, we reduce or hopefully eliminate a lot of our input costs. And on a small scale, operation is going to be quite a significant percentage of our returns. So that's really our main goal is to just not have to be dependent upon buying those resources. But there is some management styles that have to happen in order to do that. We need to eliminate telling or reapply the biology if we're going to tell. We can't use any fertilizer, whether it's synthetic or organic. Certified organics are also out as well. That includes certified organic pesticides that are still chemicals that kill microbiology. So it is willing to take that time to just let it balance itself out. So there may be some, you know, a couple years in the mix of that. So we will have some plots that we... Yeah, there's a nematode. They're a fast movement. They're actually not bad. There are some that live in an arid condition that will eat roots. But for the most part, they are eating biology and adding to new chains. I believe they're a little terrifying. But so basically, we're just hoping to monitor what we have and really be able to read the test subjects to see does this campus work. So we don't know. We'll find out. So happy to open it up to any questions. If anybody wants to know more, you can also go to their website to see our proposal and then our reports should be up there in January. And then our website, www.wellcansyfarm.com, will also have some information about where we are now, hoping to get that page up by the end of next week. Anybody have any questions? Yeah, so the question is, do I do the testing myself? And yeah, I am in the process of getting my lab tech certification to do this. So part of this program was getting trained into the analysis. But it's new to me. I do not have a science background. I have a business background. So it's really cool because I think a lot of people actually can do it because it's just counting. There's a little bit of ID involved and then it's just numbers. I don't need to know the specifics of the species, for example. It's a condition based. So as long as the compost is aerobic, the species aren't going to be pathogenic. If it goes to anaerobic and loses oxygen, then we've got problems. So I'm monitoring for conditions and then counts. But there are people that are starting to do this kind of testing and making it more and more available. So the goal will be hopefully that more people are doing the microbiology analysis and you can just send it in and get more tests. We'll provide a number of acres. You can say, this is what I'm growing in vegetables. What am I going to need to... Right. So the question is, is there going to be kind of an analysis of sheep, bedding, quantitative analysis of the recipe? And to a degree, yes. We will have... This is how much bedding we brought in. This is roughly how much compost we got out. I don't know how great we'll be on our accuracy of all of that because some got lost in the process. But yes, that is the goal. But I think that because it is so location specific, like what the sheep are eating is going to be different than what the sheep are eating in the far 200 miles away. So there's a lot of so many factors. It really is place specific. So it's the concepts that can translate, but maybe not the recipe, if that makes sense. But maybe it will. But yeah, we will provide information about how much bedding input went in, how much compost came out, and what the effects were. That's a close-up view of an nematode. And the way that I didn't talk to identify them, because they're basically just making sure that there's not group feeders, because those could negatively affect your plants. And you're looking at the top part of the head, and the way that the lips and the internal digestive system of their look, you can kind of identify. So the group feeders have this sphere type of appearance that is more obvious, and I don't think that's one, because, you know, it's not perfect. But there, you can slow them down with the lighter and kind of get a better look at what you're dealing with. But like I said, we only had a few, and we wanted to see many more in order to have a proper nutrient cycle. This one is a close-up. So both of these screens were at 40x, so that's the highest objective that I have. And the little dots that are moving around are bacteria, and then most of those in there are just aggregates or are soil particles. You can see ones that kind of look like glass, that's sand. And then it's either a cisterin or maybe that's kind of going dormant on the top left that's got little weird things in the center. That's how you tell it's something alive. And then this last one is either a nice example of Pogo Hypey. So you can tell it's different from a root because it's got sharper edges and really clearly defined outside of rims. And so they actually are quite easy to tell the difference between roots. So you can get both ends. Now, if you're just getting a sample that's going across the whole screen, you might not be able to tell. But, yeah, you just focus in and out and you can kind of see it get blurry and then more focused and you just kind of play around with that. They can look like abstract art in the screens. Anybody else have some questions? Yeah. So how do you focus on microbiology and incorporate maneuvers without introducing E. coli? So that's where the thermal composting comes in. So if we get the time and the temperature that eliminates the pathogens and then in addition to that the E. coli, for example, is an anaerobic bacteria. So if we keep it aerobic with oxygen, we won't produce that. So that would be minor for that. Because I can't tell if this is E. coli. The bacteria in here from this screen, I can't tell what kind of bacteria it is. There are certain bacteria that have different shapes that are bad or pathogenic. I call them bad guys. I'm not a scientist. And they're very specific shapes. So there are some clear indications that your soil has gone anaerobic because you will see them. And they're very obvious. Anybody else any questions? I think that's our time.