 Hi and welcome. I'm Erin Schneider. I've worked with the North Central Sustainable Aged Research and Education program. Welcome to Farming Matters. It is a program of the North Central Sustainable Aged Research and Education program, and we're really here to highlight insights from the farmers and what they've learned from their on-farm research, which really covers a wide spectrum under the umbrella of sustainable agriculture. My name is Leon Ponte, for short, of Mase Waqali Farm. It means I think the people's farm, and he will take you to his farm and his project in just a moment. I also wanted to introduce Marie Flanagan, who is the Sarah's Communication Specialist and the host of this program. And so Marie, thank you for orchestrating behind the scenes. I'm going to quiet here on this end and just let you just share your story about how you know, tell us about your farm and what kind of how you arrived at your project and what other farmers could learn from you or with you in your project journey. Yeah, so my name is Ponte Leon Sores. I use he, him pronouns, and I have a, I think it's technically like 0.8 acres farm. The project wouldn't have happened had I not lived in California for a while. So, you know, the libraries there had much more information about Mexica people or indigenous Mexican people than I ever had access to here in Kansas. I just started learning about the different codices that do exist. And a quarantine codex is the one that I found the instructions and so I found some instructions. I was already practicing no till I was already planning and planting corn. My state project was a comparative yield analysis so I was utilizing the instructions that I was speaking about earlier from the quarantine codex about how to how to grow cultivate corn. And just like no till practices like I would have used how to not found the instructions. And they were quite similar. So when I say comparative yield there were a lot of things that were were very similar so row spacing I kept the same density in the row I kept the same water given to it kept the same nutrient input kept the same. And the really only main things to it were mounting at three various stages of the corn's growth so the mounting it was what was really being tested in that I think and after doing that study I did three different samples the first one was pretty successful and it yielded I think between five and 7% more in the ancestral instructions then in the then in the no till instructions so go check the report and double check me on that I guess but then the second sample flooded it was it flooded just it was an outlier it was a flooded outlier was like an island of corn like standing in a corner. And then the third sample did really well as well was within that range to so significantly more yield to the ancestral instructions with that corn. Can you talk a little bit about how you got how you got your seat. So the seed that I use for the project and for breeding projects on the farm generally is from the plant induction station so the USDA has a bunch of different seed banks around the country active breeding research stations and as a farmer you can apply for different sessions or seeds. At the various seed banks and so the Guanajuato that we were talking about the lot a conico it was obtained originally from an application to them so as a farmer I can write I'm doing this research. I researched within your seed bank the seed this is where I want to pick that one and you kind of go into more detail on that. And you, they also include cultural research within the like application process so they can award that to people who are also quote unquote just doing cultural research as some as some might say but like, I thought it was really important, and I made an application for corn for that project. Since then I've made an application and received the seeds for beans and squash to do the three sisters. Also crops from Guanajuato and peanuts, which are also from Guanajuato to this air project also provided a really valuable tool it was one of the pieces and things that wrote into the budget was a double wheel with a U bar attachment so you can hill corn when it's, you know, taller than three inches. And, and that helped a lot with the project and I still use that today I still let the other farmers at the incubator farm use it, I can, if I wanted to get other attachments for it and swap them out and use it, use it as well. So we do have three other wheel hose with attachments on them that have been collected over time, and our communal use on the farm. So I'd say one of the one of the top units on the farm is for sure the wheel hoe collection. I can't say anything bad about the Jang Cedar if I have a really well prepared bed. It's nice that we have communally sourced one of those. In the world that everybody always talks about broad fork this broad fork that and I'm not mad about broad forks, but there's definitely other tools that I enjoy working with a lot more. I was already practicing no till I was already planning and planting corn. I forget how I learned about the sale grant. Unfortunately, but heard about it and was like, Okay, I can actually do cultural work professionally within being a farmer growing produce and doing that obviously the most the bulk of my work. And so I was like, Why not let's sign up for it and I was like, Well, if I'm going to have access to this I'm going to try to find access for two undergraduates which they ended up being my researchers and it was a really good experience for everybody was really cool and so I liked incorporating more people in the project and I think that really elevated the final report to so I'm sure we'll link to the to the final report and all that but Ashley and Paula's ethnographies are one of the best parts of the report. Their writing is just so powerful and so for thinking of you know sustainability within agriculture and and having a component like an ethnography on research. I think it's important to like engage with agriculture in a way that I think is socially responsible because we as farmers should find the joy in our work. You want to share a little bit about what you discovered or learn through outreach on your on your grant project or how are you able to connect what you're doing to your the broader community. The current research was really interesting because it manifested itself in so many different ways right and so it got to go to community meals which was beautiful so it got it got turned. The corn was turned into harmony and and using a puzzle day that was really, really beautiful and delicious. It's sold to the restaurants as well so it got eaten by many different people at restaurants to and that's talking about the economic factor and within Sarah research and trying to help farmers out that's that helped me out for sure to have to have a crop to bring to market. This is the blue corn though because the, you're not supposed to sell what you grow from the from growing out the seeds from the from the plant induction station at least in in like a first stage right because some of that's like, you know seeds that are used for breeding purposes are not even necessarily seeds that would produce something that you could even eat so I could have had to work two years to get to corn, for example. I think that was that was nice and yielded in a way that was responsible for land use to so. So the corn that I am breeding here's a cob that I planted the rest of it but here hold that nice and steady if I can here's someone that's left on that cob that didn't get planted out so it. It is a, it's called a little take conico is the race of the corn. The end of the end of the corn is one of the ways that you read kind of like what kind of corn it is to it's kind of rounded. But this is a small cob that it produced as well. So it's white purple and white and purple speckled or purple and white speckled almost kind of looking. One of the ideas is to breed a lavender color masa essentially so that's kind of like thinking product and that's that's kind of the goal of what I'd like to to produce with this with this corn. And so I guess for the use of the corn there's the community meals there's restaurants. So I've been able to experiment with it I count that as like something really important, and then it's cultural stewardship again so going back to that I mean this corn is from Guanajuato it's from like where my great grandfather came from to so. There's some very deep connected roots in that to this past week. I found some wheat la coche or some people call it corn smut I guess. It's a delicious mushroom that I cooked and ate a lot of because it's a really low it's it's really awesome. And I brought up this air project again so it's there's been a lot of continued conversation I think is another outreach component because I mean the research project ended already right like the it was a year long thing and there's still a bunch of connections being made because of that too. What advice would you give other producers who are interested in this idea of, you know, looking at just different land race varieties or early varieties as well as doing like cultural stewardship as part of the project to. I think it's really important for farmers to be able to have the space to do cultural work within within these research projects. And really, as I said, you know, has not only just like produce stories for content I know that's like the business answer but like has also just created connections and ways for ways for people to connect genuinely about the work that you're doing to and so. It's really important and and great that it is encouraged to do cultural work within Sarah, because that adds a component that you can't just like business XYZ yourself into. I was just curious about like what's what's next on the farm, like you talked a little about the three sisters or where, where are things taking you as a result of whether it's this project or what you're drawn to these moments. Yeah, it's a project. It's going on to continuing the breeding work, including that within my framework of my business and and what I do as a farmer professionally. And so it keeps me kind of on my toes with with what's happening to the plants the scientific components of that. Yeah, I mean it is established and kind of directed in a lot of ways as a beginner farmer if we want to talk on that too. That you don't have to just like buy seeds from the seed company and throw them in the ground and stick with those varieties but if they're you know like in my case are a bunch of ancestrally connected plants that you could steward instead and and farm and do it to some actual feasible scale to make you be able to sustain being a farmer. Then, you know you've got a pretty good pretty good thing going for you and yeah I hope other farmers have that opportunity as well. The, the corn fact we need the corn fact is some of this corn that was steward in a lot of ways that weren't directly related to how much can this yield smack up against each other and how much land. The corn was breeded to that point and where it's been bred now the plant itself sometimes will grow and have this gel on some of its aerial roots so those are the roots above the soil. That gel creates a symbiotic relationship with an organism that then eats nitrogen from the air and fixes it to the corn sometimes at the rate of 40 to 70% of the nitrogen that corn needs to grow. Thank you for continuing to learn the future story of your work and thank you for just sharing your heart and your farming and things in between.