 Brian Tennis, this is New Mission Organics, also the processing facility for a statewide organization called the Michigan Hop Alliance. Michigan Hop Alliance helps a lot of smaller farmers from around northern Michigan help process their hops. They've got like a half acre or one or two acres they can't really afford all the processing equipment. So what we'll do is we'll buy their crop, process it through here and then we'll sell it for them. Just hand them a check. Instead of them having to buy like a $50,000 picking machine, we'll just run it through here. We wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't for the serigrant, that's for sure, because it's magnificent. This is, you know, we're one of the few farms in the country doing short trials and I don't know if we would have really had that much money to play with to do it. MSU five or six years ago, they had a seminar on sustainable crops and doing just other crops other than cherries and apples and stone fruit and one of the ideas that came up with this area would be hops. So we jumped on the bandwagon being craft beer fans. We've always had a real love for craft beer. Even when we were broke, we always bought good beer. Just not a lot of it. But when we found out we could actually grow hops, we're like, well, we'll give it a shot. We put in one acre and then eventually one thing led to another and we had to somehow figure out how to process it because you can't really hand pick anything over a quarter acre. So we came up with the Michigan Hop Alliance. It's basically a group of individuals who pulled their money to get the equipment, you know, because we obviously couldn't afford to do it ourselves. So pulled our resources, bought a wolf machine from Germany, brought that over here and then hammer mill, palletizer, vacuum sealer. We built our own host. So this basically is a self-contained hop farm now. We can go from this yard, process in this facility and then turn around and sell everything. So it's all self-contained. This is the property that we're on right now was originally intended to be a subdivision. Somebody bought 40 acres, they put it in a road, they ran electricity and they had it all re-zoned back into residential. So we're ratting and looting on a township. You've got to have at least 10 acres in order for you to have a house on it. So they divided the four acres into 10-acre parcels, they were going to sell it. And this was 2002, 2003, whenever they did that and the housing market at that time was, you know, starting a tank. So they never could get off the ground with it. So we eventually bought 30 of the 40 acres and had it re-zoned back into ag. So when we bought this parcel, there was no wells or barn or tractors or anything like that. We originally bought it just a camp on and one thing led to another. There was three acres of organic cherries that was on here, which is probably why the land was so cheap. Everybody knew what they were getting into. So we're like, yeah, we'll give it a shot. So we're actually living in Grand Rapids a couple hours south of here and we were driving back every weekend taking care of it. And one thing led to another and we moved up here and we pushed the cherries out a couple years ago and just replanted it with hops. The yard that we're looking at right here is one of the few short-twelled systems that you'll see in the United States. One is we're lucky enough to get the Variety Summit, which is a proprietary hop. There's only six or seven farms in the United States that can legally grow it. And through a grant program that we were working with the USDA, Michigan State University, Washington State University, and the University of Vermont, one of the growers in that study that we were working with Roy Farms, they held the patent to summit. So we basically begged them to put in a few acres up here. And they're like, well, first six times we asked them, they said, no. And then the seventh time, I think they just got sick and tired of us bugging them. So they said, yeah, we can do it as long as it's like a limited planting. They didn't want us to put in a thousand acres of it because it would basically dilute their market. It was actually bred and developed to be a semi-dwarf variety. So it only gets to be 10 or 12 feet tall. So the sidearms are a lot shorter and they're more compact, but you can get over 2,000 pounds an acre with Summit. It's just a really big yielder and it's a super high alpha hop, too. It's a really gnarly hop that's got characteristics of green onion, garlic, tangerine, lemon. I mean, you walk through the hop yard right before harvest and you can smell all those different fragrances in the yard. It's a crazy hop to grow and it's perfect for us because it's so cheap to put in an acre of short trellis because you're just looking at one wire basically down the whole line. The poles are only 14, 16 feet deep. So you drill down maybe three or four feet, drop a pole in it, and then keep going. Whereas tall trellis, poles are a lot more expensive. There's a lot more wiring involved and it's a little more difficult to put the poles in place. Most of this stuff is second and third year plants, like the big bushy ones, those are third year, but we do have some holes where we had to replant this year. And we had to start with rhizomes, too, because it's a proprietary hop. It's not like we could get rhizomes or plants from anybody else. So we had to get the root cuttings from the guys who held the patent. And the first year we tried just putting in rhizomes. And rhizomes, at best, your propagation rate is maybe 75, 80%. The first year we put in summit, our propagation rate was maybe 20 or 25%, which was crushing because you do all that work, you plant the rhizomes, and then you walk through six weeks or eight weeks later, nothing's coming up. So what we did this year, we got rhizomes again from the source, but we potted them up and stuck them in a greenhouse for two months. So by the time we turn around, take those rhizomes, put them in the ground, they're a pretty established plant. So the propagation rates that we're dealing with now are pretty close to 100%. I mean, summit is great, it's a fantastic hop, and we'll just keep planting short trellis, but we also want to experiment with some other short trellis varieties. There's a tea maker that we now can get, we haven't been able to up until recently, but there's also a couple varieties over in England that are semi-dwarf varieties that we're trying to get our hands on. So far it hasn't been, we haven't been successful, but as long as you have the plant, short trellis is definitely the way to go, but the key is getting the plant. The thing about the way we harvest, we'll just do like one rope here, where as opposed out in Yakima Valley where they've got seven or 800 acres of this, they'll actually have combines that drive over the top of the rows and knock the cones off kind of like a cherry picker, but that piece of equipment is a half a million dollars. So we're just making this work now. Beginning of the summer, we'll go through here, we'll drop ropes on the entire yard and then we'll train the plant, and then in a couple weeks here, probably mid-September so we'll just go through here, cut the bottoms and then cut the tops and throw them on a converted hay wagon that we've got, and just run it through this barn and the wolf machine will strip the cones off of it. So we don't have to do any hand picking. Fortunately, now in Grand Rapids, there's the Grand Rapids Brewing Company. It's the first certified organic brewery in Michigan, so we now actually have a market for the product. When we first started five years ago, this would be our fifth year growing hops. We grew them organically just because this farm was an organic farm to begin with and it's just something we believed in, so we kept going even though we didn't have a market. Most of this will go to Grand Rapids Brewing Company or to Brewery Vivant and to Shorts over in Elk Rapids. They're not certified organic brewery, but they love the hops so much that they'll pay the premium to get it.