 Belser she had mentioned you know got this grant it's a two-year grant we're into the last year now so I have some pretty far into it and pretty well along I have quite a lot of what I had set out to do figured out I've also put a lot that I had to change gears on so there's I'm going to talk a lot about challenges and things like that you know basic processing challenges you know supply challenges all there's there's so much that we set out to do so I'm going to try and cover as much as I can in this hour so I would encourage you if you have any specific questions to seeking out after this workshop later in the weekend I'll be here all weekend I could talk for days about this so I can't do that so the background I went to school for I got a bachelor's in science in integrated equal social design got out of that and started farming I really love it still do it and grow still growing at it and eventually just kind of was thinking you know maybe I should try and leverage some funding and do some research with my off of that degree and I decided to seek out Sarah I'd highly recommend it it's a very great program for somebody who especially if you have a you know mattress and science background there's a lot of the research end of things that is really kind of exciting and exhilarating so I want to start off with everybody can you guys see this at all is it kind of like okay I'm going to start off with tada nuts in a package completely sorted from shell those are hickory nuts so I just want to start off we are we we've we've done it it's it works we've figured out mechanic mechanized ways to completely process hickory nuts and get them completely out of the shell and separated from shells so I wanted to start off with that so it sounds like this doesn't even work we have gotten this done so I want to start off too with just posing the question is scale relative like when we talk about farm scale nut processing this is probably going to be it's kind of vague I guess is the best way to put it you know for some of us we might think you know a couple acres or who here grows nuts who grows 10 acres of nuts okay so I don't need to keep more than 10 acres 20 acres so we got okay so after 10 acres I saw like three hands go down I personally believe farm scale would be like a hundred let me just make that statement first it's not saying that it needs to be monoculture if this is that to justify costs of machines this even a tractor need at least 10 acres in production so for what I'm going to like propose here farm scale is the scale that justifies the cost why even get into it if you're not going to make any money at it and you're just you know it's like a hobby at that point which is fine but you don't need to buy 30 30 thousand 40 thousand dollars worth of machines for a hobby so that's the statement I want to make first and foremost so you know it's great if you grow smaller amounts it's great I will talk about models that will kind of get there's there's ways for people to get into this without having to grow a lot I guess co-op models other things of that nature but for the scale that we kind of the research to it's of a scale that would justify the cost of machines so what nuts did we look at who can identify these nuts which ones the chestnut which ones the black walnut what about the hazelnut what about well the last one is the hickory nut so great that's great de-hauling so we focused on mainly post harvest so post field processing like what after you get it from the field I can talk about that if you guys want me to but I'm going to put this is like a lot more just with the processing itself I want to really just be able to give you a solid run through on that if you have questions about harvest just ask at the end or sometime outside of this workshop the de-hauling when you get it from the field you know you have to get the hauls off like you saw in this photo hauls husks burrs whatever they're referred to as some of these are what they call free dehesant which means that it falls free of its hole or husk or burr whatever chestnuts hickories are in that category the black walnuts and hazelnuts the hazelnuts are somewhat free to us in my opinion but they don't they don't typically fall out of their holes depending on what variety and stuff like that and then the black walnuts of course do not they have a really mushy stain the kind of hole around them so we uh you can't see it at all but in this photo right there at the top we um we invested in a de-hauler that was manufactured by a guy from the NNGA he'd been at it for a long time uh it's basically just a giant cage around the car tire and it's driven by a motor so you just feed that and what we thought was um we're trying to adapt machinery to do all these nuts so say you grow you know 10 acres of black walnuts 10 acres of hickories and uh or no let me let me back up five acres of you know each crop so you like you can justify the machinery then but you don't have to grow monoculture right so we're trying to look at machines that can uh be easily adapted to uh basically process all the nuts that we set out to research so um we made a lot of alterations to this machine after it came in uh you can kind of see on the right hand side uh we added like a pto shaft so you could uh and there's a three-point hitch on it uh and then a motor on the other side so you could either plug it in in a facility and run it in line or you could just slap it on the back of the tractor take it out to the field and de-haul in the field whichever you prefer um on the right hand side you can also see uh we we bagged it for the hickories we're we're we're needing to like weld smaller like it's a rebar cage and it's got issues with the nuts that's basically falling through depending on the the hickories you bring in are really small they'll fall through the cage so we need to make some alterations on that side um this machine is really only used we found for uh the black walnuts and hickories it doesn't really uh the chestnuts um need very little uh and if they do it needs uh a lot gent more gentle of a touch uh otherwise you just pulverize the nut um chestnuts are kind of an anomaly in the net world because unlike the other nuts that are high in oil content the chestnuts are high in water content and their shell is very um you know it's it's just like it's just a skin really rather than a skin shell it's not hard it's very soft and uh yeah so we had uh we we had great success with the black walnuts and hickories on this so um after that um there's another great photo of the hauling so in this setting like you know if you had it in the field you could basically have it um you know on the back of a manure spreader or something like that or uh some kind of cage but this way I'm de-hauling and it's going right into my tank and all the debris and all the halls it's going right into the bed of my track so kind of played around with that so floating uh is what we did next uh not all nuts need this but um there's a lot of uh in our area at least since we don't get cold as cold as winters actually I'm really excited about next year's harvest as long as we get a good amount of rain because uh the weevils are really bad in our area and uh if we get hard enough frost it's not a big issue up north it's probably not as much of an issue but uh the weevil damage I lost 75 percent of my crop one year because of weevils so that was a really bad year um so floating uh is something we do to kind of mitigate that it also uh sorts out what we call pops or bad nuts un-matured uh nuts things of that nature uh bad nuts will float typically um they'll uh uh weevil if they have weevils in it they'll you know have they'll float as well uh we um we float in uh tanks at 120 120 degrees for 20 minutes to kill the weevil larva that may still be in the nut too so if if I bring in crop especially the hickories and black walnuts uh the larva can still be in the nut and have it has not hatched yet um so you can save some of that crop that might then potentially be a loss by simply just heating the tanks and so we're basically doing two processes at once in this uh in this model so um floating uh again you know with hazelnuts I'm going to say this right off that hazelnuts are a complete anomaly for these few couple processes because usually they get dried in their husk I don't know we should ask Mark a little bit about that but dry in the husk and then uh you know with the other nuts we usually deburr we'll do the floating and then dry if you don't float fast enough and it dries all your nuts will float so this is almost right immediately de-haul float and then they go into dry but hazelnuts you don't really do a floating like this um some people will sterilize in tanks um but it's usually just for other reasons to clean or uh you know the obsession with uh sterilized food products stuff like that so we actually float dry those husks down right husk the hazelnuts immediately float them right okay so yeah that was the one thing I was kind of running into at the hazelnuts is if I can husk them immediately then it's great because you can float them this I really like floating it's like my favorite part about any of the part it is one of the simplest um but uh it just saves you so much headache down the line because the worst thing to do is sell nuts and then you have like a weevil larva it looks like a maggot so it's not all that appetizing so it's the most the best thing to get out in the in the immediate uh is those weevils if you can deal with them right off the bat so uh drying yeah that's true so I just do heat but some people do like chlorine or they'll um bleach bath stuff like that which I don't touch any of that so drying is the next thing and this was probably the um most frustrating part of the uh of the entire uh grant was uh trying to master the art of drying and curing nuts uh I lost a lot of crop on the first year it was before say or even but uh uh they are extremely fidgety because they um and I'll talk about chest separately so right now we're just talking about the oil high oil content nuts you're trying to get them below like 15% moisture if I remember correctly so that they'll keep uh nuts will keep in shell for years without perishing uh they'll keep for even longer in a refrigerator in shell and even longer in a freezer in shell as soon as you crack them out of course they're really high in oil content so they'll start start to perish but um if you don't dry them they'll just immediately rot so uh what we have with our drying is two things we're trying to do is uh airflow so a lot of people just put their their nuts on racks Paul did you like do uh screens right onion bags yeah is but the thing I found with onion bags is they can still mold in the onion bags so airflow is like key this is number one you can do the whole crop with just airflow so what we ran into is we uh you can do the airflow for a couple weeks uh having to spread out on screens we can tweak it a little bit and then you can store them in onion bags afterwards so it's still getting a little bit of residual airflow but we scaled up this year this is my little uh jet engine this thing uh it's a grain dryer and uh we started playing around with that this year and uh what we ended up doing is we have these giant tote bags with uh hop bottoms a little chute so we can just attach uh this dryer to each bag that we fill and so the where the where the nut is stored it can also be dried essentially so it's a really great system that we kind of we just put a false bottom so that the nuts don't fall through the hopper bottom there's a small like piece of hardware cloth on the bottom and then uh you can attach this we have a little 90 degree angle uh docked on that that attaches to the bag and little stands for the bags you know so that this can go underneath and uh basically you can dry with heat too and they make heats uh heat attachments for this you can basically dry in a day what you would be taking months to dry so as far scaling up we see this as like this was one of the things that was really breaking us was we couldn't scale up because we could only batch dry and the what we could batch dry we couldn't dry fast enough to then get to the next batch before it rotted essentially so in this scenario you can you can dry quickly in probably thousands of pounds of crop before it would any of it would rot so the chestnuts of course again they're like 50 water they would work in this but what happens with chestnuts and this is one of the things we ran into with a lot of growers and when we would talk to them is that there's more incentive to sell chestnuts fresh because what you have by the pound you know when it's 50 percent moisture what they say is about 2.25 uh if you had 2.25 pounds wet that would be one pound dry so you need to you need to double your price for what you're selling dry and then if you think about peeling the chestnut cleaning it packaging it at that point we're probably talking about something that costs close to $30 or you know I've I've seen some at lower and we'll talk about some machinery we can try and keep costs lower but really that's what we run into so drying we drew we did do some drying but what we're trying to play with is hitting uh getting them peeled at the highest moisture content we can because really all we're trying to catch is selling everything out of shell because there's more appeal to a customer they can buy it eat it right away stuff like that I grew up cracking nuts you know you know they was fun for the kids but a lot of other people like don't like doing that so that was the main goal so we're trying to uh figure that one out I'll talk a little bit about that later though but uh sizing in shell would be the next one this is a really great I love this machine it's uh you've ever been to like a kids uh playground and they have like a giant plastic tube that the kids run through and slide down or whatever this is uh up at um empire chestnut company in carleton Ohio it's in their facility this is what they size the nuts in they just drilled holes in it and attached the belt to it and it rotates and set a slight angle it's called the angle of repose it's just the angle at which a product will slide and they just go through and they have all these holes in the bottom in the or hoppers at the bottoms that the nuts will just fall into as they go down to shoot so that's one option I've also seen um uh shoots uh rebar shoots that will just fan out the rebar will just widen as they uh go down the chute and uh they'll have a series of hoppers underneath that that works out really well too um that's what I did it's a very low cost method and it's non mechanized so um there is a couple options for that the reason why you size in shell I found is that it's easier it offers a few complications though with processing but it's easier to then crack and do all the subsequent processes if you do batches with the size of uh nut that you you know if you have your nut size uh pre-cracking and everything you will you will uh you will mitigate a lot more of loss in uh shell being mixed in stuff like that um it also you can catch like say you have a very large crop very large nut uh you have a larger amount of larger nut crop you have uh you know say a thousand pounds of you know golf ball size take green nuts um you can recover a lot more sizable nut pieces from that by doing this uh which has a higher value on the market um kernels of a larger size typically sell for a higher price so um sizing this cracking the whole thing uh it does it does well for uh um catching that value the cracking the cracker I use is uh it's a I've played with a lot of crackers there's a lot of junk out there uh I didn't buy in the moha bee have you heard of that one it is awesome it is great and there's three models he makes he just retired two years ago but he passed off the operation to uh his son-in-law who still makes the machines as far as I know they're online as of I don't remember when but uh they they're not really tech savvy so you want to take my card and try and get and reach with them I do have their number uh but there's times when I've gotten on and the site's down or none of the stuff comes up it's uh they they could sell a lot of crackers if they could just mohabe mohabe it's the first letters of his his name his wife's name and his last name uh and there's the mohabe one two and three so they make different scales there's like countertop there's a little bit bigger and then there's the commercial one which uh um I ended up getting it's it's a really simple cracker that's what I like about it the only thing I'd say is uh the pin on it has grooves so that like you can adjust the plate against that pin it's uh and then the pin kind of squeezes it into that against that plate and cracks the nut I wish that I could get different sized pins or with uh different sized grooves pins with different sized grooves but it's something that I've been meaning to call them about and get manufactured and uh it would be a very simple adaption for like different nuts like you know I'd like to have a different sized pin but um it works on all of them works great on hairless uh and uh I was doing um over oh yeah over 10 I was doing a lot a lot with hickories and black walnuts though it was a lot less because um hickories and black walnuts are what they're they call them uh ribbed so you have like a lot of nut meat and shell uh intertwined uh so to completely separate the nut meat from shell you almost pulverize the nut you're just uh cracking it down to kernels and everything just trying to get everything separated so that because if it's not separate it's lost it's attached to shell that nut meat is not usable you know I can't sell it if it's got shell in it so um there's some uh operations we played with afterwards that might shake it loose but we found that it's just easier to crack it down to the point where uh it's completely separate from shell and um what happens in that though is you get a lot of mill loss is what they call it and it's they call it mill loss because it's this powder that uh is a result from you know pulverizing the nut and I'll talk a little bit about um uh what we're looking at for value-added uh incomes on uh stuff like that but right now we're losing a lot of that we're losing about 25 of the crop to mill loss uh for the black walnuts and hickories um here's nuts that worked really well uh chestnuts we have uh you don't actually crack chestnuts you peel them because again I was saying that the shell is very thin um there's some issues with uh that like I talked about the moisture content um we uh actually I'm gonna say I'm gonna save that one for another slide but yeah we're we're we're working with a student group to try and design a peeler that can peel at a higher moisture content sizing they would know that machine is everybody can tell what that is anybody use seed cleaners on their farm there's is it horizon or uh company in Ohio that makes those seed cleaners yeah I know you know but I I can't remember the name I was trying to remember it this morning but there's they make great uh seed cleaners there's a manufacturer of them in Ohio they come in different sizes you can get one that's just like about the size of this table up to I think this is the largest they go um in all they do is there are a series of trays that vibrate and have screens on them of different sizes so like you know product will fall through each screen if it's really small um or uh we'll we'll pass over and be sorted into a different shoot there is an aspirator on this which is really nice too but essentially there um we were using it post cracking to size our product so we can again I can catch uh shell uh shell and nut meat of a larger size and separate the shell from that and sell it as a larger kernel higher return at the market there so um and then also again separating out that mill loss uh getting my different sizes uh in that and then you know uh his nuts was kind of it was a mute point there was only a few uh the cracker was so efficient at you know I had so little loss in the cracking or damaged nuts in the cracking that really it was great I did it anyways and it did get a little bit of the shell out too but um uh just kind of like you know just really for the black walnuts and hickory is you absolutely have to do this so um other things that you can use for sizing they do make actual uh sizers they're they a lot of them are like the the uh playground shoot thing that I showed you uh they do that um and one thing I don't like about those is especially for black walnut and hickory is you have to continuously the you know the the shell is really jagged like you know rigid and gets stuck in all those holes so it's nice about this is you can just go up to the machine there's hammers on the machine that will actually tap the tray so it doesn't get stuck as much and then you can also just go up to the machine and clean out those screens really easily so I always just thought about this probably being the best option for black walnuts and hickory is but there's other options if you're getting into other nuts um and different scales and those machines as well all right so separating this is the this is the big one and um I can admit it's been more than a headache for me but uh there's a few options uh for each nut um aspirators work really great for hazelnuts and uh chestnuts I've experimented with air legs which are essentially kind of like aspirators essentially aspirators air legs and cyclones fall into a group of like you know you're just applying air to the product trying to blow away a certain amount of product or a certain size product or a certain density of product and then catch another one down line so those three some some people use them all in line so they'll run them through an air leg aspirator cyclone I think is the order um to uh you know separate certain uh size of product and again so sizing before you go to separating is really important for that purpose because if we're talking about like size the machine operating off of relative density or something like that having all the same size product going in will increase your efficiency of the machine as far as separating the shell from nut meat so you know if you have shell and nut meat of all the same size going in the machine you'll hire will be more likely to have just nut meat in one output and just shell in another uh again those work really well for the hazelnuts and chestnuts uh they also work really well for the black walnuts it's a little tricky uh I had to like there's um heartland nuts in Nebraska uh they run their black walnuts through uh it's a rerun aspirator I think is what it's called from uh do you have the rerun aspirator too homemade one yeah the raspberries are really easy to make uh the rerun aspirator runs off a shop back or at least that's the way it's designed you can add a blower to it um but uh it's sold that southern nut and tree um is the company there uh that sells those machines they also have a lot of other machines that highly recommend uh but they um they have to pull the damper on that all the way down to even get so the throughput on that machine for black for uh for black walnuts is pretty ridiculous it takes a long time to run the product um for hickories we found this machine to be extremely extremely uh efficient it um it's a it runs on batches which kind of stinks but uh it can do about um uh 50 pounds at a time it only takes about five minutes to run what it is is basically a giant vat of water I don't really have a great photo unfortunately but it's a giant vat of water that arm with the crank on it swings over and uh tightens down uh this plate tightens down on the top all your products in there in this water bath and uh so it's shell and nut meat all in there and you close that down and you put it under vacuum for five minutes and uh so under pressure for five minutes and what happens is um the shell absorbs water more readily so it's got to be timed perfectly all this and you know it it they'll sink you open back up and to skim off your nut meat so uh we got it down our whole goal with any separation for this research was if we can get it below five percent shell we're doing something right because you know if you really everybody handsorts at the end I wish it I wish it wasn't true but we all we all pretty much hand sort at the end uh but uh even people that use optical sorters but um uh if we can decrease the amount that we have to that's a huge overhead for any person who's processing so this got it below I was going around two percent on some batches if I got timing down real well um but uh so that was for hickories uh other uh machines we tried out were gravity tables anybody know what a gravity table is extremely fidgety machine I'll say that in the instruction manual for the gravity table we tried said something like do not attempt to uh run this machine without uh a degree in blah blah blah blah blah gives prone to giving severe headaches like all this it was a big headache and we didn't get any results from it but they used gravity tables for like almonds a lot uh usually just for holes you know that separates on relative density so it works on the same principle I guess as an aspirator but basically we found that it would have to be such a different relative density to actually get it to work but the benefit of it is that it's a you can continuously run product on it and all it is is essentially a table that vibrates it has different shoots on it and what happens is you can adjust the angle and basically the and it has it it's like you got a blower on the bottom sometimes too you can damper that though but it will just essentially just kind of yeah it's like air hockey great example it's like air hockey um but again we didn't get any really great results with that so um I think that covers everything with separating let me just yeah okay hand sorting uh a lot of um this is again uh chestnut empire or uh the empire chestnut company uh again they everybody handswords pretty much it's not something you can get around uh it's something you got to be really diligent about of course because you know somebody buys a product from you they butt into it and break the tooth that's a lot of viability involved so uh you know hand sortings usually there's inspection tables this one's on a conveyor and you can adjust the speed and there's a really bright light that shines down and people just sit there as it goes by and pick out any shell fragments they see or any you know weevils or whatever um what uh what I'd say about that though uh uh if if I had the money and if they made an appropriately scaled do we have any engineers in this room anybody with like a mechanical engineering degree or something like that optical sorters if anybody wants to make a whole lot of money and do the world a really great good make a optical sorter that doesn't uh cost a hundred thousand dollars and uh would be small scale uh would be appropriate for this like they use them on everything rice uh all the major industry is doing any kind of sorting they use it for hardware uh I'm talking about like nuts and bolts they use it for recycling these things have um optical cameras at various points in a in a line or a shoot and a little air gun and a computer program that will read off uh so they sort by three things uh size color well I shouldn't say all of them sort by that but they have the potential to sort by size color and um shape so I can type in sort jagged things out or something and it will basically so like nut meat you know it's smooth shell jagged little uh they will read that with the cameras relay that to a uh uh an air uh mechanism that puffs air further down the chute and it will literally just like hone in on it and shoot it out so you can rerun all your product too because you do get a little bit of loss in that so it blows out whatever product with it but you can continuously rerun and catch uh that product so that's that's the future of sorting basically unfortunately and this is so important I just want to read the tidbit about code the USDA standard for confectionary grade nut meats right shell particles for 400 pounds so imagine so imagine yeah one it's uh one particle or uh one shell particle per 400 pounds is the USDA standard I remember reading that and being like oh my god so uh you know and I've I've bought from farmers that aren't getting that I didn't say that much I've had plenty of product come in when I was kind of testing this out uh that I've I've learned to chew carefully uh so um there the the optical sort is really that's the major thing for us right now is if if we don't the cheapest one I could find was like maybe 40 grand uh but they um they were skeptical whether or not they're like you have to have a computer program for every product so that you run through it so I would have had to buy the machine it was designed for beans so I'd have to have them also pay their technician to come and set it up because these things are like like extremely involved they have specific they fly technicians in to set up the machine there's a computer software that you have to learn uh so they'd have to design a computer software for me to do each nut so if you can if any of you again if you can simplify this machine get it under the lower cost that I think is going to be what uh breaks this wide open essentially uh I hate hand sorting machinery development so that kind of ties into this machinery development uh slide we have a student group that we hit a wall with the chestnuts like I said with the peeling so we're trying to and I had designed one was doing so much other machinery development kind of just had chestnuts on the back burner they finally approached me and wanted to build it so this year we're we're going to be testing trying to peel chestnuts at like they come in at 50 percent moisture content where our goal is to be able to peel at 30 but usually you have to dry it down to about 15 percent so if we can again like what they do in France and some other places they apply steam to peel their chestnuts we're trying to just do it with a low cost high speed blower and an anvil at one end and shatter than not essentially so we'd end up with pieces in theory rather than whole chestnuts but um still if we're catching more of that moisture content we're not losing our weight and uh you know having to double our price so um uh and it's again the peelers they have these days in in France the way they do it it's a it's way too much involved heat steam all that it's machines I think started out at like 30 grand and you couldn't probably build one for cheaper just with how many mechanisms were involved with trying to get that off the chestnuts have so they have their shell the thin skin and then a thin skin underneath that a little brown skin it's extremely bitter it doesn't taste good so you have to kind of get both off so and that's what happens when they dry is you know since they're 50 percent moisture they kind of like shrink away and this happens with all of us they shrink away from their shell and kind of like rattle in their shell and it makes it easier to crack and separate that way but uh with the brown skin on that it shrinks and that's that's really key for the chestnut to get that brown skin off because it shrinks and that brown skin will um basically flake off you peel one fresh you're there kind of just picking it away so you do have to dry it a bit but hopefully not too much again so you can catch that uh that weight and not have to double the price um other machinery development talked about the optical sorter uh the hauler is one that we're really trying to develop more I want to I want a hauler that can do every nut with easily just you can husk hazelnuts that will debur chestnuts if I need to uh dehaul black walnuts and dehaul uh hickory nuts uh that would be my dream right now we're just having some issues with the chestnuts um and actually I'm gonna be multi like really for me a machine if it serves one purpose I like I want a machine to serve multitudes of purposes like I need a machine to do more than just one thing if I am going to justify buying it and uh so what we're finding is we can use um the air leg or this machine actually to de-husk uh the hazelnuts um and you know there's just always that thought in the back of our minds is you know okay we found out it does this okay let's what else can it do and just start playing around so I'm always in the machinery development just kind of looking at what uh else machines that I already own or would like to own can do besides what it's advertised for or stuff like that so 50 perfect all right so value added products this is pressing oil from my mill loss this is like the biggest epiphany I had you can press oil from your mill loss and it makes a great oil black walnut and hickory nut oil it's a high heat very earthy flavor delicious um and as it turns out the beer brewing industry um prefer that you have with they're going to use nuts for beer brewing they prefer to have the oil pressed out of it a lot of them are roasting the what they're doing is they're burning off the oil before they put it into beers so if I can press oil sell the oil and from all all this from my mill loss somehow I would never have even been able to sell except for probably feed which we'll talk about but uh I can press the oil from that sell the oil and then sell the cake too so it was actually I'm making more money off my mill loss now potentially than just selling the nuts so I encourage you all if you are thinking about getting into this think outside box you know you everything's for sale you don't you don't have a blade of grass on your farm that shouldn't have value in your mind you know whether it be economical environmental whatever that mindset can help you out a lot as far as making your farm profitable so I did that with the mill loss from black walnuts and hickory nuts like I said I didn't really have much with the hazelnuts other value-added products we kind of are experimenting with is like nut butters we did we're looking at doing flowers with the chestnuts since it's not a high oil you can grind it and sell it for flour and then we also got feed tests as of now we have feed tests on the black walnut and hickory it blows grain out of the water I'll just say that it's a very very good feed there's a certain percentage depending on what animal you're feeding it to that you should swine usually can eat a lot more of it than any other animal traditionally has been fed to them for a long time especially chestnuts it makes a really great meat and yeah that's it's a great way to fatten up an animal real quick I'll finish with that that does not do justice that photo in the lighting in here but that is just a sea of hickory nut kernels just completely separated so on that note I'm going to take questions if you have anything we don't get to in the next five ten minutes I think is what we have I'll be here all weekend yes that we just did with a hydraulic press so there's two kinds of presses you have like a hydraulic press or like a it's a corkscrew press hydraulic presses usually run in batches but a corkscrew will run continuously but the thing about the corkscrew is you don't get as much oil out so we're looking at doing hydraulic usually we had to get 2000 pounds the oil 2000 psi the oil would start to come out 5000 we'd start getting blowouts but if we could keep it at like 4500 if we could get a corkscrew press that would just operate continuous or would go up to 4500 we figured we'd be good but it's it's it's rare that you'll find a press that can regulate itself like that so what's nice about the hydraulic presses we can regulate our pressure get all the oil out so we're looking at larger scale batches or scaling up that way but there's ag I think it's ag oil press they make small countertop corkscrew presses that are pretty affordable but again I mean you could you could press oil with a log splitter you know if you wanted to so you know there's there's plenty of hydraulic means of applying pressure machines that apply pressure that are really affordable as well I think your hand was next the reruns the best we found this far I am banking I'm still holding out that the barrel float will work I tried it on the barrel float I've been working with the manufacturer of the barrel float to try and work out some kinks to see if that would work it hasn't worked for me yet I've two years in a row been running them through that and had absolutely no success but yeah because there's way too much hand sorting for us right now in the black wall that's way too much time in the rerun aspirator make it worth our money I guess essentially but yeah if we can if we can figure out a machine like really what it comes down to is that the relative density of the nut meat and kernel are too similar in that the shell characteristics don't it's just it's not like the hickory doesn't absorb water like they do so it might be that I need to bring it up to a higher pressure or but the I'm maxing out the machine right now that barrel floats the smallest they make of that machine but they make other ones that are they call them siphon floats actually when they're scaled up they they'll have like models that are continuously run or continuous you can feed them continuously we've been trying to send product to those manufacturers to test on that to see if that would work but yeah we're still kind of hitting the wall with our processing on the black wall that's yes the halls oh yeah I'm sorry last question was um what we're using for black wall separation and your question was what I do at the halls um that's an excellent question that is also for sale they uh shell kernels uh let me run through a few um one they they make great pellet stove stock especially hazelnuts they'll burn hotter than coal uh it's a really you can throw in your wood stove too so it's a great uh just fuel source um of course not the black walnuts because it's complete mush uh chris uh has actually done research he he uh de halls for hammons uh he does a lot with black walnuts he's a great person to ask about that uh but you've done a lot of research into composting uh it loses the jug loan uh in the composting process so it's a great uh fertilizer application high in uh it's like it's very alkaline I think is what it is and it's high in um uh is it mag what is it high in do you remember there's there's a few things yeah it's it's a very good soil amendment but chris's research in a previous serigrant is online on the ser website so smoking meat hickory nut shells can be substituted for the wood so there's a sustainable uh resource for smoking the wood it gives the same flavor to the meat so you can smoke with the shells rather than uh chipping the tree cutting the trees down and chipping it and uh smoking with that um uh hammons uh cells their shell and some other stuff like for they use it in respirators uh i'm going to talk a little bit about bigger industry stuff with applications they're selling it to the fracking industry all kinds of stuff so they uh again it's like everything's for sale you just got to think about what it can be used for so that's the ones at least on the scale that i'm operating at that i've identified and played around with yes in my opinion yes because and i've talked with a number of or uh he asked if they're still raw uh when they're heated to 120 the um empire chestnut company has done some research on that what they found is no characteristics of the nut has changed post heating so no oil degradation it hasn't done anything they're not essentially but by by typical standard yes it wouldn't be raw i guess but again kurt will be here you can look up the reports from this project but thank you yeah thank you