 We are in the regenerative agriculture session of the Indiana Small Farm Conference. This is, my name is Tamara Benjamin. There's Nick, Joanne, thank you, Richard Perkins. And we should have Liz Brownlee in the barn, it looks like Liz. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put up each of your slides as we go along. I'm gonna start out with, let's see if I can pull up Joanne's. Joanne and Paul Mosier own Holy Cow Farm. They're in Monon, Indiana. They produce beef, pork, lamb, and they've been direct to market farming from since 1994. So go for it. Okay, so yeah, Paul and I, actually Paul bought our first farm when we were seniors in high school. So we're high school sweethearts. And he wanted to be a farmer and he started out as a corn and soybean farmer. And so that's just what you do. We bought a bunch of old equipment, basically salvaged stuff and he started doing corn and soybeans, just traditional cropping. After we got married, we bought a cow and so we started doing beef. And then after a while, we realized we weren't making any money and so that was a problem. And so we were always throwing money at the black hole and we loved farming. We were basically our grandparents had farmed but we were the first ones, our parents didn't farm. So we were kind of a skip generation so we had to start from scratch. And so what we did, we weren't making money so we said, well, we've gotta do something different. We had about 172 acres that we owned or were buying. And the farms that were north of us around that time that we started looking at other options, options that would go well, that were regenerative, the farms around us were selling for about $10,000 to $14,000 an acre. And we said, whatever we do, we've gotta be competitive with this because corn and soybeans weren't doing it. And so we decided, hey, let's just start turning everything into grass and let's start grazing it. It seems like the most logical thing to do, it's a natural way of doing things. Why not? And so we started putting up fences while our neighbors were tearing them down, we started putting fences up and we started planting grass. And so we started just bit by bit because we cash flowed all of this. So it had to be practical. And so we started with 20 acres, 10 acres, then 20 acres and then we went to 40 and then we took our whole hundred acres here at our home ranch and turned it all into grass. And so we got cattle and then more cattle and then sheep and pigs. And we just started adding to it. So our first step basically was to grow grass and that might sound simple, but it's not always simple. And so that's just what we started doing. And we did a diversity of species. Evidently, Paul's really good at growing grass. But we noticed our biggest thing for us when we started going from conventional farming to growing grass was that the quality of the seed made a huge difference. So we grew grass. So we just consider those our solar panels that we can harvest the sun's energy. And so then we decided to turn that energy into something useful and we started grazing it. And so the cows and the sheep, they started eating everything and then they're recycling nutrients and it was, it was just, it's awesome. It's just nothing like watching animals graze. It's peaceful, it's relaxing. And so, but the thing was to have the farm, we had to turn that grazing power into something to make a living off of. So then we started feeding families. So we turned, we became an official, we started, let's see, in the late nineties there, we started doing holes halves and quarters of offering beef and stuff. But in 2012, we started going really wild and harvested a beef and a pig, put them in our freezer and just started selling direct market. And so since then we've been doing direct marketing to basically feed families with our, with the protein that we grow on the farm. And so it's been working beautifully. It's something we could raise our whole family on plus feed other families. And I just love, I just love working with the people. That's the fun part. So we're restoring the land. We're adding beauty to it and we're feeding families. So it's just like a triple win, but it isn't always easy. So. Perfect. Thank you so much. That was Joanne Moser and we are gonna go to Richard Perkins next. Richard, I know you don't have slides. So if you wanna just, you've got a whole bunch of slides in an hour or so. If you wanna tell us a little bit about your farm, Richard Perkins comes from Ridgedale Farm in Varmland, Sweden. So it's the night, it's getting towards the nighttime for him. He's the author of Regenerative Ag. He's our keynote speaker coming up. Does a lot of permaculture, farming, design strategies, capitalizing on patterns and resilient features and of natural systems. So go for it, Richard. We're up at 59 degrees north in Sweden. So that's pretty extreme farming climate. We have about three months, frost free plus or minus about 20 days. It's a very small farm. We're focused on how to make small profitable farms, which everyone told us was crazy in an economy and regulated country like Sweden. We're about 32 acres, mostly forestry, but it's about 11 acres of pasture that we derive most of our profit from. And we bought this farm for about $100,000 eight years ago now and spent just a little more than that, implementing these systems. We've basically run perennial systems, trees and grass, but they don't necessarily pay back so quickly. And over the last seven years, we've basically 3D printed this onto the landscape based around a key line layout. Key line's been a very big part of my design career work. And we put in agroforestry systems to create the bones of the farm system. There's about $30,000 of crops up above the pasture, not really taking up any room. And then we run our animals in between. So it gives a framework for the layout of the farm that makes water do a lot more work. And then between those alleys, we pull a key line plow, which is just a highly optimal subsoiler. And during the short time as videos here, I'll skip through them. We've built about 10 inches of active topsoil and seen amazing results in our pasture. We had the record 150 year drought two years ago where people were selling off half their beef herds because there was gonna be no winter forage and we still had grass up to my shoulders in full rampant reproduction. And we've done that through the key line plow and through having very dense amount of animals in a very small space. And the reason I've become a poultry expert is not that I particularly love raising chickens, but for a small farmer, they're the most effective livestock because of the density that you can have on a farm. So we focus on pasture boilers, which remain an excellent enterprise for cash flow. Looking at different models for raising those effectively, including what's become Europe's cheapest approved slaughtery so that we can process the birds and make the money for the work we do on the farm. We do some amount of the pasture turkeys as well. And then we developed eggmobiles that are suited to our climate here. They're the built out of very cheap materials, simple roll away nest boxes, because unlike you folks in America, you're not allowed to wash eggs in Europe. So you must have clean eggs, you can't. I know that you have to wash eggs over there, but we're not allowed to wash eggs. Simple infrastructure for moving water around the farm to keep animals on the move. So all the animals are moving daily around. And during this, so we spend about $220,000 with a plan to pay that back in five years. And the farm is producing about $275,000 of crops in the short sort of five, six month production season that we have. We have very long winters here. So the hens go inside and that's a deep litter system. They get sold as during hens. And then in the spring, in about Maytime, they come out, the new flock replaces them. We put 1,000 tomatoes in there. And then our other main enterprise is a no dig market garden. We've just been listening to talk about no till. We do no till vegetable production, very intensive small scale with wood chip pathways and mushroom production, edible mushrooms in the pathways. All started in this very cheap, like the key thing about our farms, we've built everything up at very low cost using scrap materials and things we find. This is a lean to greenhouse where we actually start in our seeds. And today is the first day of seeding here in Sweden. So if that gives you any context of the season, using simple tools, appropriate technology for very efficient, high production market gardening. And we'll be talking a lot more about this. In 45 minutes time. So I'll show you a lot more slides then. We're doing micro queens as well. And yeah, this is what the farm looks like seven years in. And you can find out a bunch more. We put a lot of stuff on YouTube, et cetera, that you can find out if you're interested. Thank you so much. And we're gonna keep introducing the farmers and then we will definitely have time for the panel questions that you guys all might have. Next, we are going to go to Liz Brownlee. Liz and Nate Brownlee are a nightfall farm in southeastern Indiana. They work on rotational grazing with sheep, pigs, ducks, or not ducks, chickens and turkeys. They have a 50 member CSA on 13 acres of converted to pasture land that used to be in corn and soybeans. And they are the president of the Hoosier Young Farmer Coalition, one of the farmer groups that is very near and dear to my heart. So with that, I'm gonna pass it over to you, Liz. Excellent, thank you. So you guys, thanks so much for having me be a part of this. I know that Sarah is the sponsor for this session of workshops today about regenerative ag. And I just wanna give them a shout out because a lot of what we've been able to do and what I wanna share with you about today is focused on things we learned from their grant funding. So I'm just gonna dive right in. Tamara shared that, let's see, there we go. Tamara shared sort of what we raise, but there's one more component of it, which is people. Because one of the regenerative ag techniques that we really think is important is bringing people back onto the land and connecting people with their food. And so this little guy in the left corner is now like a teenager who would be super embarrassed to see this photo here. He's a CSA member and their families get meat from us every single month. And we try to bring people onto the farm as much as we can, partly through the Hoosier Young Farmers Coalition work as well. And that's been really important to us because we're in a rural community where a lot of the land looks like this. This is probably pretty familiar to you all. It's flat, it's open and it's corn and soybeans. And when we moved home eight years ago now, back to Indiana after working on farms in the Northeast, we said, we want to turn it into something productive and abundant. And that means bringing these rural communities back to life and bringing the soil back to life is a big piece of that. So we started with 13 acres and that 13 acres is doing really well. So that's where we raise most of our animals. And right now we're tackling adding another 35 acres of silvopasture this time. And we're doing that because the land and our animals told us to. The sheep that we raise, we were just buying in feeder sheep at first. And there's this one portion of an old hayfield where my brother had planted a bunch of burrokes. And we just decided to graze the sheep there one day. We were kind of out of space. It was really hot. We wanted the shade and they loved it. And we realized very quickly, they were happier and we were happier. And around here, these burrokes, they're actually called cow oaks because the cows love to eat them. And graze on the bottom leaves and the sheep do too. And so we said, great, when we plant more trees, we're gonna include burrokes because they do well in our soils and the sheep love them. The other lesson we got from our animals in the land is persimmons. They do super well in our wet, poor soils around here. And so we were harvesting some persimmons for ourselves and we just gave the seeds to the pigs. You know, the leftovers after we had cleaned them up and the pigs sucked the seeds clean. They love the persimmons. They're just little sugar bones, right? That's why we love them too. And so we said, great, we're gonna plant more persimmons. And so that's what we're doing right now. We've got a silver pasture establishment where we've involved people in the plantings. This is a group of college students that helped with the group of planting. We bring in neighbors and CSA members to help us plant. And we get a lot more done and people have a good time and have a sense of accomplishment. And they wanna know how the trees are growing, you know? And I'm happy to report that some of the trees are doing really well. So this fixtures from just a couple of days ago, we went out and this tree is three years old now. It's a sugar maple. We will probably never harvest the sap from this tree, but someone will. And that's sort of all that matters. So we've planted about 1,000 trees on the farm now and the idea is to get minimum shade, but hopefully, you know, products we can sell and forage for animals. And I just wanna add in here that a sergrant, if you guys are wanting to know more about Silvopasture Establishment, we were a site for a sergrant research project. And we learned a number of things. It looks like maybe the text is a little wonky there, but one, on-farm research is really fun. We're nerds and we totally enjoyed it. But two, they were testing out, how do you establish trees within a pasture actively grazing? And they've got some really good data about what worked on our farm here in Indiana, but like for other farms throughout the Midwest. Last thing I'll say is the new project on our farm is, we actually have a veggie farm that has started on our land and we're really pumped about this because we think this is a regenerative practice because we don't have time for everything, but we do have a lot of fertility from our animals and the veggie farmers have expertise about how to care for the soil and raise really good food. So we're teaming up and they actually just got a sergrant, a farmer rancher grant to look at biodigesters from our spent bedding and their expertise turning it into really good compost. So we're pumped about that and excited to have more people on the land. I think up next is Nick Carter. He's gonna talk about the farm that he had in his sergrant. He's the CEO, I think of the market wagon, which is something we may be not gonna talk a lot about, but also something to definitely look into. It's a pretty cool program. So, well, first of all, yeah, great segue. I think I'm only on this panel because I completed a farmer rancher sergrant and I'm gonna be just sharing in my brief show here what we did and what we learned. I feel like I'm way underqualified to be a regenerative ag panelist. We are just getting started. My farm is on the northeast side of Indianapolis. We have 20 acres. We run a farm stand. So we are lucky enough to live right among a massive population of consumers. So we run on farm stand where about 90% of our stuff is sold right there. We don't have to go to market or anything else. It's, and we do, the other 10% is market wagon, as you mentioned. But I am a fourth generation Indiana farmer. I mentioned earlier in a question, my dad farms. He was doing no till before no till was cool. And so I learned from him and he is, we are together converting the 80 acre home front, just like the Mosgers, we're doing the same thing. It was corn and soy, we're converting that into grass fed beef and pork production. We can't have beef and pork. We were technically inside of Indianapolis city limits. And so that's a class one livestock, not allowed here, but we have goats and chickens. And so what we did with the stair research of our 20 acres, 16 of it is in certified forest, which is a DNR program in Indiana. And one of the key tenants of that program is that you're trying to restore native hardwoods, but this forest is just completely overridden with honeysuckle and also multi-flora rows and a few other invasive, just invasive to just destroy the understory. So our stair grant was designed to see if we can eradicate that with purpose, right? I mean, it's hard to ask a farmer to go out and spend a lot of time eradicating an invasive species if there's not really a monetary value to it. So one of the issues is, I know a lot of people probably use chips, chip drop, but there's concern around like allelopathy, other things that are going on in chip drop. Honeysuckle is one of them that can actually sprout from green trimmings, just like sycamore and some other things. So we were gonna mulch this and it's allelopathic or as believed to be. There's not been a lot of primary research on it, but the leaf droppings and the trimmings from it appear to be allelopathic in nature. So why put that on your garden, right? So we decided we could use sweet corn as sort of our test bed. We do a lot of sweet corn here and we could see if this was going to impact germination rates because, well, first of all, corn is pretty hardy and it has a really standard germination rate. So you know what it should be. And so we can run test class and see what we were gonna do. What we expanded it a little bit. So what we did was we harvested the honeysuckle and brought it for the goats to eat. And then we would chip what was left, right? So the goats loved it. They dug into it. They would eat these things down in like a day. They'd have them picked completely clean. And then we took the branches that remained, chip those and use that chip for our deep litter. So we don't move our chickens over pasture right now. We use deep litter in a fixed house and then we have unique ways of getting green matter for them to eat throughout the year. But then we also used a Johnson's Sue composter. And then of course we spread that onto the fields and we used a test plot. So we spread this like 90% honeysuckle chip over about an acre. And then the other acre we just did conventionally and the germination was about the same, right? So we didn't have any kinds of issues that would suggest a lilyopathy preventing germination of the seeds. And the honeysuckle was not a bad forage especially if you are like we are supplying some protein supplement and also there's plenty of other forage that they have, we have a lot of pastures. So it's a pretty low crude protein but it didn't have high sulfur. It wasn't hard on the rumen. They enjoyed it as you know, goats like brows. The problem was the labor. So I tried my best to figure out an equivalency to actual forage here. What you see here took about two hours to harvest. And if you really boiled it down to the leaves themselves with the goats we're gonna mostly eat it's about three bales of hay. So it just doesn't pencil out to actually go on harvest this stuff. So then we called an audible in the middle of the grant project and we decided to actually go, oh, the other problem is by the way when you cut these honeysuckle out of the forest floor and you can paint the crap out of that stump with all the brush killer you want, it's coming back. As a matter of fact, so they spread subterranean, right? So we were not actually eradicating it. So the audible we called was to just start grazing. We had to get a special permit from the DNR because they to date, they don't allow you to graze in certified forest, but we worked out with the DNR they gave us a permit to do this as an experimental basis. And what the goats are doing now is they're coming to where the honeysuckle is and they are defoliating, right? This is a one day, it's really amazing to watch a goat graze on brows. They will stick their tongues out. They'll grab the leaves and they'll defoliate which we believe will have as much of an impact at killing this in the long run. It's gonna take a lot longer as herbicide will because if you just completely defoliate that plant time and time again throughout the growing season don't allow it to put out any propagate in any of its own seed or berries. We should have good results. That's what we are hoping for. So that's what we do. And of course we have the sweet corn as I mentioned we have 400 layers, we have 12 brood. Goats, they are meat goats. I grew up on a dairy. I never want to do that again. And we've got another couple of acres of produce diverse. I mean peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and the like. And that's our farm. And what we want to do now is we have 30 minutes to ask questions to these amazing farmers kind of from all over the world we get to say today all over Indiana and Sweden. I do have some questions but if others have questions please put them in the chat or you can jump on and just say your question here. One question is where can we get more information about Sarah Grant Nick? Lace McCartney, I don't know if she's on. I don't know Nick if you want to talk about it or Liz and Nate, both of you. There's like. It's surprisingly easy. Go to, I think it's just NC, well in the Northeast, in the North Central region it's ncsayer.org or just Google North Central Sayer. Right on there and go and look for what we did was the farmer rancher grants. They're relatively small. They can't be used for permanent equipment but they cover, they basically take out the risk of loss from, you know, you're going to do something stupid. Right? You're going to do something that you wouldn't ordinarily risk the time and money to go out and try and do. And I've now completed over the course of the last 10 years, my dad and I combined have done four different projects and each time we've learned a ton and it's really been good. I'm going to throw a softball for all of you guys. And if you go, I'll just kind of answer it. It's the first question I sent you out. What's one or two practices that you've adopted that has really improved the health of your soil? And how were you able to tell by, you know, adopting it that your soil changed and kind of what did you notice that was different? Let's start with Joanne. Okay. So, well, the biggest thing was putting the grass species out there that turning it to the pastures. We had a lot of, it's crazy because we had a serious weed issue. The Palmer amaranth started taking over a farm when we were doing corn and soybeans and we were literally like walking through the soybean fields and pulling them by hand just to try to get the Palmer amaranth out of there because nothing was taking care of it. And so when we turned that pasture specifically into just a pasture, then we didn't spray anything. We just started grazing. And so the mouths would get down there and graze it while it was little and the animals didn't care, they just ate it. And so now you go out and look in our pasture. I don't think, actually, I don't think I've seen any, I know I haven't seen any large Palmer amaranth, but so yeah, just that grazing and putting the multi-species out there was just huge as far as our weed pressures. So I just know when the weeds are going away, the soil and everything is happy, yummy, yummy stuff. So, yeah. Richard? Yeah, I can echo that point as well, it's fun. I think like a major shift for me is like really understanding that we're farming microbes. Like if you're focused on vegetables or chickens or cows, you're kind of missing the most fundamental bits. And what I've seen through our approach with plant grazing and just always managing so carefully not to overgraze grass, is the resilience and the diversity and the health and vigor of plants is just incredible to see. I've been documenting that, that people can see on YouTube if they're interested over a long period of time. And then the same is true in our vegetable gardens, like the only pests and disease issues we've had in our entire market garden operations is rust spots on beet leaves, which is not even a big deal. And it's testimony to a healthy micro-population essentially. And so I think that, yeah, putting priority and focus on the right thing is being the biggest influential thing in my practice that's really given me confirmation that we're doing the right thing. And I always like to say like nature's going this way or it's going that way. It's moving in exponential, like life and decay are equal opposing forces moving in an exponential pattern, you could say. And once you put a few pieces of that jigsaw together, you can hopefully be humble enough to step back and get out of the way. And that's kind of a critical role of a farmer, I think, as opposed to sort of modern technicians that I was taught at ag school. That was pretty philosophical. I will definitely say we're going to be using that one on our next promotion of this conference next year. So thank you. Liz and Nate, you wanna go next? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we did all the things that are on the list, right? You're supposed to use cover crops when you're converting land to pasture these days and you're supposed to plant a diverse fix and now we're adding the trees. I don't think anything we're doing is rocket science per se, but I think we are getting some really good indications from the land that it's starting to work, which is really exciting. So that's what I wanted to share with you guys. Like we see more insect life all the time, like dragonflies, for instance, which I get really pumped about because they eat mosquitoes. But the other insect that we're seeing that tells us like, oh, there's a whole functioning ecosystem happening now is a couple of summers ago now, we saw our first carrion beetles. And these are these really big beetles with like bright yellow on their backs. And I saw them and thought, oh no, it's like some pest I've never heard of and this is bad, what is this thing? And we noticed it was on one of the paths we walk in our pasture on like a dead bull or something like that that we had probably hit while we like drove feet out or something like that. And we were watching it and they were all over this dead thing. There were a bunch of them went inside and looked it up and it turns out they're really positive indicator. They only show up when there are dead things that need to be decomposed. So they're present in places that have manure and functioning the tritivore action. And that just made us feel really good. Like, oh, this is working. These practices are showing up in the soil. In ways we don't even understand yet, we were still learning, you know. Awesome, Nick, there's a bunch of questions to Nick in the chat if you wanna answer some of those at some point. I've been trying to keep up with those. Somebody's been asking a lot about goats and they are definitely escape artists. You've got to train the kids young to the electric fence. If you don't, they will not respect it when they get older. But hot wire can contain goats. Don't believe anybody who says that they can't. It's just gotta be hot. We went to rural king. We got the one that was raided for elk. We figured that ought to do it. You just got shocked the crap out of me. What have we done to improve soil here? So, I mean, I'm only three years in here at this farm at Mud Creek Farm. I just wanna share a quick stat. I mean, my dad, he was getting teased for no till in the 80s, right, and he's kept all of his soil tests going all the way back. We averaged about 1.9% organic matter when he made this change. And most of his fields, I mean, he's still doing, by the way, guys, he's doing production grain crop. I've had to teach him and try to pull him along into some of this new stuff. But even in those production crop fields, he's had about three to three and a half percent organic matter. That took 25 years, but there's results going there. Here on our farm, I got a couple of things that I wanted to share. One is, I mean, some of you might be thinking, sweet corn, well, no culture, that's not regenerative. And one of the things about farming is you gotta sell what people wanna buy. And we're right in the heart of the city. And I can plop a hundred dozen sweet corn out on a table by the road and make $1,000 in a day. So we do that. But we move it around, we also chop and drop it, right? So once we picked it, I have a bush hog that go out and basically, and bush hog it down and let that sit. And that has helped to suppress weeds that would come up over time. We run the goats over the garden when it's all done in the wintertime, you know, in the fall. And another little thing that I thought of as I was thinking about this question, Tamara, was maybe counterintuitive, but my dad, again, he's the guy that taught me to farm. 37 years old, I'll still talk about like, dad's teaching me how to farm. We never stopped learning. And he was here helping me get this set up. It was fallow land when we bought it. And the first year, there was one section that was sort of at a, it's bottom ground. It was sort of at a delta, a tributary coming down the hill on its way to a creek. And so it's flood plain, it's a hundred year flood plain. So it does get standing water every now and then. And in that area in our first year, we had just horrible germination through this area. And the reason you guys could probably figure out is compaction, right? Standing water on silt ground over the course of the 40 years that this place had been completely untouched. It was, that soil was so compact. There was no oxygen in it. There wasn't microbial life underneath it because it was just concrete, right? It was really compacted. And so contrary to what, I mean, even, even, I mean, I literally, the first thing is, dad says, you're gonna have to put a plow to it. And I was like, you have to teach me because before I could drive a tractor, you went no-till. So guess who's never learned how to put a plow to the ground? So we put plowshares down and we deep ripped it and then just sit down and also rerouted some of the drainage, right? So we had, we put a ditch in and rerouted drainage so that it wouldn't get a lot of the heavy setting standing water will compact soil really, really fast. And so I think that that tied into kind of what Ray was talking about, right? The timing and knowing when you need to disturb. And in that situation, we had to rip it. We had to start over. We had to pull it up and get oxygenation going in there and undo the compaction. So don't feel like a plow is like sin. You just gotta know what you're doing with it. Why are you doing that? Thank you so much, Nick. That was really helpful. I think there's a lot that you kind of, you know, reiterated what Ray was saying as well. I think you guys really matched up. There's a question that says for all of you, what is the most profitable product you produce? Richard, do you wanna go first? Well, it's a difficult one. The whole focus of my book was doing a comparative analysis of all of the different enterprises that you might employ on a small farm, the most profitable of which is past your turkeys for us. But we don't have a market here. I mean, people don't eat turkey like they do in England where I grew up. But all of our enterprises are kind of running at a similar scale. I'd say time input-wise, it would be the pasture of meat birds that will generate the most income. Okay, Nick, you wanna go next? Yeah, my most profitable is the eggs. That's the most profitable enterprise we have on the farm. If you wanna know my most profitable crop, it's sweet corn. It's actually pretty low labor, pretty low input if you're doing it right. Interesting. Liz and Nate? Exact same as Richard. So the turkeys are number one, and thankfully we do have a really good market. Thanksgiving treats us very well. And I would say even if you're on a very small piece of land, think about 10 to 12 turkeys because they're really good for the ground, they're excellent foragers, and people will pay a premium for a turkey at Thanksgiving for a special meal, that they might not for just a Tuesday night dinner. And then the pastured broilers is right behind that for us. And I'm seeing these comments about Thanksgiving and Christmas and whether they work or not as a marketing tool. And just having ground turkey as an option to sell at the farmers market extends that's interest from customers beyond. And we don't see much of it from our other vendors. And so we can ask for a good price on it because it becomes more expensive to part out the turkey, but then there's not much competition yet. And so it is able to get what we would need to match the profit levels of a whole bird. And then, yeah, again, the meat chickens, like Richard mentioned, they, we didn't wanna be chicken farmers, but they just make a ton of sense for what we are doing. It's a quick turnaround, customers are used to chickens. And because of both of those reasons, that's what we do the most of. And so that becomes a key factor in what is most profitable scale. And they're also really important for our pasture. The fertility that they leave behind is critical to trying to rebuild these really, you know, heavy clay soils. Cool, Joanne. So I would say probably the most profitable product of our farm has been our children. Free labor is awesome. And they get work experience. So it's a win-win, so, yeah. No, so, but that's our, I mean, number one, that's best. But as far as like products that we move off of the farm, our grass-fed ground beef is probably the most profitable when we harvest some of the more mature animals that aren't necessarily our prime cut ones and we harvest some of the other ones and we just grind those. But because of how processing has been this last year, year and a half, we have had to add an on-farm butcher shop to be able to make that a continued profit. Because otherwise it was like, we wouldn't be able to do anything. So, yeah, that has been very profitable for us. Okay, and I'm just gonna let this one open to any of you that wanna answer. What advice do you all have for those of us who are unlikely to raise animals, especially like small urban gardens, but still wanna maintain good soil health? Something I would love to do and haven't figured out yet is worms. Nate was actually on a trip up to Wisconsin that Purdue led and they got to see Will Allen set up with urban vermicomposting and I got totally excited about it and then it got to the bottom of the list. So I would say, I think that's one way to have fertility happening in a very small space. And it's hard for us to take animals out of the equation because that's what we built everything on. But that puts me in the mindset of being closer to towns and urban areas and one of the things that I've been jealous of from other farmers that have access to those population centers is, schmoozing with the resources you have and get the people that are vacuuming leaves off the street to dump them on your farm. Like take advantage of the resources that you have that aren't animals. So you can find organic matter and it comes with the bummers of shredded up water bottles and stuff from the crews because they just toss them in there with it as well. But you've got access to things that we don't even having animals here in the country. And you might check out the SARE. So the SARE website is neat if you wanna do a project, right? You wanna do on farm research, but they also have a database and I think someone posted in the chat like all the projects that have happened in Indiana recently, but you can look all around the country. You can see what farmers are up to. And so there's some research about using leaves or grass clippings or things like that to try to build fertility from sort of scavenged sources. If you're in an urban area, you gotta be careful about grass clippings because of what's coming with it on the chemicals. But I'll put a plug in for chip drop. And if you've not heard of it, chipdrop.com, I think it's chipdrop.com. You just sign up and your name gets put on a list that they publish out to Arborists, right? Who are out there chipping up wood. They have to pay to drop that wood at a place that's going to turn it into mulch and then sell the mulch to landscapers the next year, which I don't, I'm in the wrong business apparently. If you get paid to take in your raw material and then you sell it later. But of course, what a lot of people are cautious about with chipdrop is like we talked about, you don't know what's in it. You'll get poison ivy, you'll get sycamore, you'll get things that can sprout from the green shoots. So what, I mean, I can't say I've proven it, but what we've tried to demonstrate here is let it sit for a year, right? So compost the chips, right? Let them sit and rot and then use them next year. Don't be in a hurry to put it on your garden and that will alleviate a lot of those risks. That was a great idea. Never thought about that. You're right though, they're trying to get rid of chips. Richard or Joanne, do you have anything else? Otherwise I'll go on to another. Sure, I do. Yeah, it's interesting who and Nick say that. I forgot how you love to use generally in America, you use a lot more chemicals now. The statistics of how much ag chemicals gone to lawns. It's quite unfamiliar. And here in Europe, we don't, people value their lawns, but they're not dosed in chemicals in the same way, I think. But it's really easy to, you know, I come from England where we have allotments and allotment was what a family was allotted to produce their own food. It's a very small space. Most people have a backyard bigel in that. It's very easy to grow a family's food in a very small space. Like self-sustainability is very, very useful compared to farming for a living where you have regulations and economy coming in, but can easily bring in the idea of worms for composting your food scraps. You can bring in municipal compost. You can use wood chips. We love to, you know, I got taught no dig market gardening with people like Charles Dowling who pioneered that in the UK. We integrated that with wood chips so that we would have totally clean work spaces to be able to walk around in, you know, shoes even in saturated weather conditions that we have in the spring. And you can add perennial vegetables to that. You can add trees or bushes if you have space. If you've got a bit of a bigger yard, you can add a couple of hens and have all your eggs. It's really not so much work to produce the family's food needs. And if you wanted to make an enterprise on a tiny scale and you have a marketplace, there's all kinds of options like microgreens if you're in an urban population and you have access to chefs, et cetera, you can make a living in a tiny greenhouse, you know, 13, 14, 15 feet by 10 feet, you know? So it depends. There's a lot of needs unpacking in there, but you can do a lot in a tiny space and you can really close your little nutrient loops of your family house. So it's a really nice thing to be able to do. That was great. Joanne, do you want to offer anything else? Otherwise, I'll go on to another question. So go ahead. I just reiterate, we've used wood chips in a few areas where we weren't, where we were trying to improve the area and it's just amazing. After, I think we have a pile that's been there 10 years and it's just amazing how that has broken down and it went from really tall pile to just breaking down naturally on its own with just some vegetation on it and just turning itself into yummy soil. So yeah, good stuff. And can I add one thing to that? I see there's a comment saying, you know, it's harder to get wood chips. We've noticed that some of the towns around us also have wood chip setups where you can just go and fill up a bucket or your pickup or we've taken our livestock trailer and filled it up when we needed a bunch at once and none of the arborists around us had any and none of the power companies did. So you might check into the municipalities around you. It's not as awesome as having it dropped on your place but it might suffice. And when you talk about getting it dropped on your place and letting it sit, because that is a really good idea if you have that ability, if you have that space. It's our easiest place for arborists to back up to and drop their chips is right across from our neighbor's porch. And so we've had to deal with the realities of having neighbors staring at wood chip piles and education, you know, what that means and how that's a good thing for them as well as for us. So, you know, it's all pieces of the puzzle. Super. I'd love to add to that. Just because someone was asking me the questions of like what we've started doing is taking King's Traferia, the wine cap mushroom and you can inoculate that into the pile of wood chips while it sits as well. And when you spread that out as pathways around the garden, you get a like 20% yield from those mushrooms over the next four or five years. So, you know, we're putting down 50 cubic meters of chips every five years. You can produce in the garden now scale, you can produce a couple of tons of edible mushrooms and the way that mushrooms have evolved with humans and animals is that they pop up along the sides of pathways naturally whether the spores are carried. And what you find is that they don't pop up in your pathways because you're walking so it's compressed in the middle and they pop up on the edges where the crops are. Some go into the beds, but they're only there for three or four days so it's not in the way of your crops. That's a really nice way to do it and they can also synthesize some, you know, if there's any heavy metals, things like that, it will help with the cleaning of that wood chip too. So that's a fun little idea for you. I love that, a fun little idea. Okay, next one is how do you start testing or understanding what microbes you have in your soil? I do. I've never done it. A soil microscope. Simple soil microscope for about 150 bucks. You need certain things. If you look up on YouTube, you'll find people like Lane Ingham and you can find out the basic core needs. You basically want binocular vision with 10 times magnification. You want 10, 20, 40 times objectives. You need a 1.25 ABBE condenser and a variable light source and then you can make your own 400 times magnification slides. And then you can see for yourself what's there. You'll start to learn what the organisms look like in their movements, like protozoas and the different creatures like nematodes and bacteria, et cetera. Obviously you're not seeing them in super high definition but you learn by their movements and activities what they are. And then you can make things like compost tea out of your compost and you can see if it's worked because it's either full of life or it's not. And because you're creating the right conditions that facilitates healthy aerobic populations, as long as you created the conditions, you know that you're creating the healthy microbes. Likewise, you can do that in your soil. So we use a probe. It's just a cylindrical tube that you take soil samples at the depth all the time. And so every year I can document is my pasture life increasing in diversity or in micropopulation? Now it's not super scientific in that I don't know what any of these 5,000 species of bacteria do, but all I can think is that however complex we think we understand it, it's way more complex than that. And I could give you 18 soil encyclopedias that I have on my computer and they would still lead you to no clear understanding of how to treat the soil and I can tell you in 20 minutes. And so there's a point where that information is not useful anymore. And sure it's from the geek out on, but you see with your eyes and senses if things are moving the right way in your garden or on your farm and you can measure those things for yourself that you don't need to rely on anyone outside. I'm not a big fan of soil testing because I can see and observe what's happening with my plants and animals. If they don't get sick like ever, then something's going good, right? Obviously it's more complex with breeding, et cetera, but it's very nice to be able to measure things for yourself and deepen your own understanding so that you feel resilient and you feel clear about your decision-making and what's worth your time to input on things. So I really recommend getting a microscope, lots of literature out there about making compost, compost teas, all that stuff. And it's really fun because you get to play physicists and biologists and chemists and that's what farming's about. Great answer. Okay, I have another question. How have you built community on a local level around your mission and connecting people to the land and local food sources? Liz, do you guys want to talk about that first? I think we have invested a lot of time in this question. We really felt strongly when we moved home that we did not want to sell into the urban markets but we wanted to serve the smaller farmers markets around us because we have several farmers markets within 20 to 35 minutes as opposed to driving an hour and a half or two hours. And that has meant that we've had to pull our community into conversation. So how have we done that? We've been serving on the farmers market committees. That's one way. If you are not serving on your committee, go and do that. It's a lot of frustrating conversations and a lot of worthwhile conversations. And that can be one way that you can leverage community resources to get people talking about food. We have events on our farm, especially for our CSA members, not right now, but we're lambing right now and our plan had been last year and this year to have an open barn day where people could come and see the lambs. Things like that, we have school groups that come letting people know that you do that, that you are open to some basic field trips and tours. I think that can go a long way. If you have a community newspaper around you, they're always looking for content. So we had written a couple, I think there were letters to the editor, but then they just said, would you write a monthly column? And so we did that for a really long time. Yeah, we did that for like five years and they actually paid us, which was amazing. I don't think they're doing that these days because everything's so tight for newspapers. But it was really great for us. It led to precisely zero sales, but everybody would come to the market and say, we love reading about your farm. It makes me think about how my grandfather used to do this or I'm so glad you're doing that. And so it was an engagement that was incredibly easy on our end. And it was a good excuse to sit down once a month and say like, how's it going? What's working right now? What's not? That reflection was really useful. So, and they've got a new farmer doing it now, which is really neat. Somebody who's in like year two. So that's been a good piece of the puzzle for us. I think those are some of the low hanging fruit that we've been tackling. We're near a college as well. So we've taken advantage of having classes come out, having work days and events, teaching things. Yeah, that's the other thing. So I would say don't be afraid to have people come work on your farm. It's a double inch sword for sure. But I really feel strongly that people need meaningful work. I think a lot of people in this world sit at a computer or do something they don't believe in because it has a paycheck and they have to. So to have an opportunity to do something that is tangible and has an end result that they can see, really sticks with people. My advice there would be that when people say they wanna come work on your farm, what they mean is they would like to come work for two to four hours and then hang out on the porch and drink a cup of tea. They don't wanna work a 12 hour, 15 hour day like you need to. But that's okay because there are other benefits to having them there. Joanne, do you wanna talk about what you're doing? Sure, so we have several on-farm field days I guess or on-farm days where people come and we have a really large customer base. I have like a large email news list and we email newsletters when I'm on it. We email newsletters biweekly and so they're used to hearing from us. There's always things of what's going on with the farm and so we stay in touch with these newsletters and it just is amazing how these people, I might not have ever met any of these people. Well, okay, I've met some people but I haven't met all of these people and then they just follow our story and they're there and they're listening but we haven't had that face-to-face interaction but it amazes me like five years later, all of a sudden somebody knows me so well and knows our farm, knows what we're doing. They're excited about the beef and all they did was just read our newsletter every now and then over the past so many years. They just hang with us on that adventure. But we do outreach through different farm events. We'll have like a pasture tours where we load everybody on the hay wagon and the kids drive the tractor through, well, my kids drive the tractor through the pastures and would they get to interact with the animals? We'll call the cows up and people love it because there's a lot of people that come to the farm and say, wow, it was the first time I ever really saw a beef close up or first time I've ever really seen touch to baby lamb. So it's, I don't know, including them on the adventure and having like just simple things, everything and just staying in contact with them all the time has helped as far as that community. As far as our local community, we've sponsored, we've donated meats to different like the volunteer fire department and different things like that so that we're outreached. We have a lot of signage so people local can come in and ask questions. And then we hire a bunch, not a bunch but we hire local people and a lot of retired people because they like to work and they're fun to be around. And so we just kind of reach out to our local community as far as donating time or coming and helping us do different projects. So yeah, the people is, I mean, we're doing this for the land, we're doing this for food but ultimately the people is, I think is the most important part. So. Great, thank you. Thank you both. Nick, do you wanna just chime in and then we'll end up with Richard and then I think we're done for the day, for this session, sorry, not the day. Yeah, I mean, we're very fortunate that, you know, we, I think in the mile radius around here, there's like 10,000 homes and we're in the middle of Andy. So we've held tours, we have our farm stand, we see people out there all the time. We've actually had a little bit of the opposite problem. I don't know if this is where we wanna go or just, I'll just mention it, you know, we're on 20 acres, our house is about 120, 130 yards away through the woods from the chicken barn and my oldest is 11 years old and they take care of the animals. Like I don't, they go down daily, they're doing chores. So we have people that have decided we're a park and they've given self-guided tours. So when random strangers meet my kids unattended on our own private property, that's been problematic. Not in, it's not in a serious way, but like we have to teach our kids, you know, safety and things like that. And so we've actually had to put up, unfortunately on cameras and no trespassing signs and I hate it, but we can't have, we cannot have unfettered access to our private property where my kids go and play and work. So that's probably completely in the opposite direction that we've had a struggle with that of people feeling way too connected to this land. So. That's interesting. Yeah, thank you. Richard, let's end with you and then we're gonna be signing off because you need to get over to your other keynote speech but you know, it's interesting to hear your perspective from Sweden. How do you guys connect to your communities? Well, I can say I've got a bit of a similar situation as Nick because we're quite a public site and do a lot of education work and have a very outward facing element to what we do. So we also get that thing of people sort of feeling like they can, you know, I've come out at six in the morning and there's photographers taking photos for a newspaper in the back of my, around the back of my house. And it's, you know, and then when I ask them to leave they're like upset that I haven't got time to talk with them and it's like you're gonna get slapped if you don't get out of here because you know, how would you feel if I come around the back of your house and take photos for you in there? So it's a funny territory. Certainly if you have an outward facing element and educational community element then that's something that comes with the territory. So echoing what everyone else has said, we have open days, but we're very, very strict about, hey, these open days are free. We'll feed you, we'll spend all day walking around, showing you around, we'll get old ladies in their 90s crawling, looking at the bugs in common, you know and getting super excited about something they've never thought about before. But it's like it's on our terms. It's on this day and this day, maybe even three days a year but you are not welcome to show up anytime outside of that because it's just not how we do. And the way that we build community through sales is we do drop off points. But that also works on our terms. It's not on the farm, it's in locations in three different local towns and we turn up for 45 minutes and drop off all our products. And so we get that little bit of customer interaction which is all that's needed to create food security when you have a relationship with your customers but doesn't have to take too long that I have to hear about Mrs. Jones's cats because frankly, I don't care about her cats. Like I need to get home and feed chickens, you know. So we maintain community through constant interaction but very short and just a smile and looking in their eyes, that's enough, you know. And that's worked well for a time management perspective for us as well. Super. Well, I just wanna say thank you again, everyone. Go to your emojis. Just wanna send a huge applause out to you and all four of you for what you're doing. You know, thankful for all of the sharing that you gave to us today. You know, hopefully the rest of you that were listening felt like you got some questions answered and you can start working towards having a more regenerative farm. And so again, just thank you all, all four of you for spending all this hour with us. Appreciate it.