 My name is Aero Rutella and we're at Nessinkig Farm in Lichfield, New Hampshire, Southern New Hampshire. This is a mixed vegetable farm of 35 to 40 acres of vegetable crops and it's a certified organic farm and I've been here 17 years. So the vegetables that I grow here are primarily direct sales to restaurants and especially food purveyors that sell to restaurants and hotels. A lot of culinary herbs, salad greens, more exotic things relate to Asian crops because most of my workers are Southeast Asian. Basically cover crops are the foundation of the farm. On an organic system one of the ideas is to feed the soil that if you take care of your soil then you're going to get healthy plants that are going to come from that. Here where this farm is in Southern New Hampshire I found that the best way for me to add biomass or organic matter into my soil, to feed my soil comes from utilizing green manure crops. We don't have access to animal manures in this part of the state. I'm using two different green manure crops and they're used a little differently. Start out in the spring. Areas that either I have bare soil or it's winter kill crops from the previous year I couldn't get into a fall seeded cover crop. I put in peas and oats and peas and oats is quick growing cover crop for the current growing season and then starting in August and September as I take pieces out of production on vegetables that were seeded that year then I'll seed fields to winter rye and hairy vetch. As soon as I can get on the ground I'll seed field peas and oats, spin it on and then lightly harrow it in. And one of the things I really like about is that also brings in early income. I'm at earliest income in the spring because the young pea shoots are very popular with the restaurant trade and also with Southeast Asian or Asian chefs. And usually within about four to six weeks of seeding I have something I can start to harvest. That's a really good starter for the spring time. The pea tendrils are pea shoots, pea tips, different names for it. It's not something you can sell tons and tons per acre. I have tons of it. In fact that's one of the reasons I'm growing it for is the biomass of the nitrogen that the peas are fixing that. So that's but on a normal year I probably can realize gross sales between say eight and ten thousand dollars on five to seven acres that might be seeded to field peas and oats. What we have here is a strip that I started, it was a strip of hairy vetch and rye. I started turning it over probably mid-April and everything was broken down enough that I was able to transplant my tomato plants probably about the third week in May. And meanwhile the rye and vetch on the beds next to it were continuing to grow. Just about at this stage is the point where you want to knock it down. What I'm looking for is for the vetch to start to go to flower or the rye to be at pollen stage. And what I like to do ideally is to cultivate once with my tractor and then I'll knock it down with the mower. And then once it's down we'll use the straw as a mulch for the tomato plants and then we'll bring in some steaks and do a basket weed system to bring a trellising for the tomatoes up out of the mulch. I'm utilizing the straw from the strips to start with the mulching process, but I try to have a block of rye and vetch nearby as you can see behind here. And I'll mow that down as I start to mulch these. I'll have a good close by area where I can bring in more mulch without taking a lot of labor moving mulch from one area to another area of the farm. By looking at the cover crops as biomass, I mean two things that are very important for the farm is nitrogen from the fixing of nitrogen and the legume that's part of the green manure and biomass is very important. So I want to maximize my biomass which is bringing it to full maturity. Strip system was hairy vetch and rye over wintered and then cutting strips in the springtime. I use it for wide space crops or crops that I choose to grow in a wide space and that may not traditionally be grown in wide spacing but pumpkins and winter squash, easy to plant in 10-foot centers, that works very well and so I can have 5-foot wide beds with the adjacent 5-foot wide strip of the hairy vetch and rye. Tomatoes, I have wide spacing so I can get a good airflow for disease. What we're doing here with green manure cover crops is I'm using them to confuse Colorado potato beetles. I cut strips, plant the potatoes, I try to do my weed cultivation and healing so that the potato plants are well established and then at that stage I knock down the rye and vetch and usually by then it's late June, early July and that's the first the potato beetles even come into the field. They don't need to have a big mulch on the ground like I would put on the tomatoes. I just want to have some contact with the straw on the potato plants. With this method I've never had to spray more than twice and for potato beetles and at best it's a spot spraying. I don't spray the whole field because good portions of the field there won't be any potato beetles at all. It's usually on an edge of where they'll come in to the end of the rows or an edge of where a field of Solanaceous crops were the preceding year and they'll find a few a few rows. This is my spader which is the primary tillage tool on the farm. I use it for incorporating pretty much all of my cover crops. It uh he's operated at slow speed and so that's you know one disadvantage is that when you're bringing that organic matter into the soil and that I can't move very fast because it's a lot of biomass is chopping in there but once it's in the ground and I've made a couple of passes then I can go in with a field cultivator and do a very rapid pass make a nice smooth seed bed and then I'm ready to go. It's like a number of shovels and it just cuts clods. It does a good job of chopping the straw into the soil but you get nice clods in that and then over time that they can break down slowly so it's much gentler on your soil structure and it doesn't oxidize all that organic matter you're trying to bring into the soil. When I first came here there was a rototiller so that's what I learned on for primary tillage but I really didn't like what did the soil. I really beat the soil up like an egg beater and I and I heard about spaders being much better for soil structure and better at incorporating biomass not oxidizing it so this seemed to be a much better implement for improving my soil quality and that's really you know important for me is is uh doing the best I can for my soil