 My name is Ben Samuelson. I am here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I got a SARA grant through SARA, of course, a graduate student grant to support my work on a topic of my particular interest, not my main thesis project. I was able to study compost extracts and their application to soil or to seeds for preventing disease in cucumber specifically on mine, and also promoting lettuce growth, as well as comparing various ways of testing what's in the compost extracts chemically and biologically. After I graduated from undergrad, I was interested in using gardens as classrooms, and I thought that the experience of growing food was such a valuable one that I wanted to be involved in sharing. And as I did that work for several years, I kept coming back to the science because I had studied biology as an undergrad, and I mean coming back to the science and applying to different grad schools. And so I would be interested in soil scientists I applied here, and I had a sort of general curiosity, and then I was interested in plant reading I applied there. Well, actually I applied to this school for plant reading and genetics, but I didn't really have questions to back up my curiosity, and when I met my current advisers, and I was looking at programs again, I had developed an interest in using compost specifically as an inoculum for soil health reasons or plant health reasons, and I felt like there were some really important questions that I didn't know the answers to that would be useful for people and that had certainly inspired me. So I wanted to have that latitude and support to learn how to do science, but in this particular topic that really spoke to me. So the couple of important highlights are that in testing compost extracts, you can use a lot of different methods to ask or answer the question of what's a living in here, what are the organisms, and depending on what method you choose, you're going to get a really different picture. Whichever method you use, and whatever picture you find, at least in this work, I wasn't able to connect that with an outcome. So it's really hard to predict what these amendments will do, because they're such low rates that they're really functioning as maybe an inoculum, maybe some sort of chemical signaling to the plant or to microbes in the soil already. It's those questions are not what I approached in this in this grant, but we definitely showed that they weren't functioning as just a fertilizer. So when it came to actually doing something that might be useful, some of them were able to prevent pithium in like the most pithium infected soil you can imagine, which is damping off. It really hits cucumber seedlings hard, and I mean mainly you want to make your soils not conducive to pithium, but even when we did that on purpose to make pithium thrive, these compost extracts, just dipping them briefly in, dipping the seeds briefly in the extract, some of those extracts were able to bring mortality down to, or yeah, down to 50%. So half of the plants lived, and if there was no compost extract, it'd be like one in 20, and some of the compost extracts also produced one in 20 viable seedlings or living good ones. We didn't come any closer to predicting which extracts would be pithium suppressive. Then when it came to promoting lettuce growth and inoculating residues, so the imagination or the system we were trying to simulate would be if you're terminating a cover crop, or maybe you're tilling under some kind of crop residue like a straw or stover, you could have like a sprayer on the front of a tractor and then a disc on the back, and you could apply extracts directly to the surfaces of these residues before they go underground. We were guessing that maybe that would affect lettuce growth in the greenhouse in that simulated system. We tried several extracts and several residues, and when the extract was what I thought would be bad extract, you know, not much to look at under the microscope as far as fungal hyphae or microfona, those two extracts that looked what I thought to be bad actually increased lettuce growth by 50%, but only when they were applied to the alfalfa residue. So without getting too much into like the design and all the different treatments, again, there were some pretty surprising effects of these inputs because they're not, it's not nutrition, we're not supplying vast amounts of chemistry to the plant, which we know could explain growth differences. Instead, it's something else that's going on, but we certainly can't predict it from what we saw under the microscope or in the fatty acids of these extracts, which is another way to look at microbes.