 Hi, I am Stanley Smith. I farm organically in southeast Minnesota near Lewiston. I grow organic corn, soybeans in alfalfa and oats, and I have a small beef herd. I am in a Sare project with open pollinated corn. I hope to find a variety that grows well in my area. And then I would like to test and see how much nutritional value the open pollinated corn has above and beyond conventional corn. In my corn plot I have six different varieties, open pollinated corn and one variety of hybrid corn. The hybrid corn costs $235 for 80,000 kernels. The average cost of the open pollinated corn is $90, but then there is also shipping cost because some of it is not grown locally. Some of it comes from New York. You have substantial savings in seed cost and then hopefully we will have much better nutritional value. That is the second part of my Sare grant is I will be testing the varieties for nutritional content to see how much you can save putting them into a feed ration. One of the reasons why I went with open pollinated corn was cost of hybrid corn. Today's hybrid corn is costing as much as $235 a unit and it is shipped in as far away as the European Union or South America. I would like to grow things locally and open pollinated corn is grown locally. Small farms can be put back into business growing their own corn or they can grow corn for their neighbors. I realize that open pollinated corn has a reputation of having poor stock quality and I think that is going to be a problem. If you are going to hold it for shell corn, it also has problems with germination. Instead of having 95% germination, germination will probably be closer to 90%. But you can adjust that as you plant to make sure that you have the proper population. Usually they recommend a lower population because of the stock quality problem and that is generally what I have here as a lower population. We will have a field day on the farm and you are all invited. Watch the network and we will post a date.