 I'm an assistant professor in horticulture at UW Madison and the State Extension Specialist for Urban and Regional Food Systems. Here we're doing a trial on tomato production for organic and low input systems. We're experimenting with hoop house production versus field production because a lot of farmers in this area are now moving to hoop house production for tomatoes because it's a season extension technique and it also improves marketability and yields. So we have about 40 varieties in the hoop house replicated and in the field. We're taking agronomic data on the varieties in both management systems and we're also looking at flavor because that's one of the key traits for direct market growers. Tomato varieties are very diverse obviously and a lot of growers choose heirloom varieties in order to keep the market quality and the flavor up but those are sometimes more difficult to grow so what we would like to do is look at newer varieties that have been selected for organic agriculture and for flavor and see if those have the agronomic characteristics and the flavor that growers market growers need in this environment. So Kit Healy is my graduate student she's working on the project and she's primarily responsible for the management and data collection here so I'll let her tell you a little bit more about the project. There's a variety of objectives that we have for the study and some of the main ones are to look at the difference between hoop house production and field production and to try to get some information to growers as quickly as possible about what some of the benefits and what some of the drawbacks are of using hoop houses so they can make informed decisions about their management. Another goal of the study is to identify certain genotypes in the tomatoes that we have that perform well in both in organic systems in our environment and perform well in either of the two environments that we're trialing so we sort of have this layered genotype by environment interaction that we're looking for so and that will lead hopefully to future breeding programs where we can work with growers, chefs, other food systems stakeholders to try to develop varieties that everybody can get excited about and that work really well both in terms of consumer preference and in terms of agronomics in our environment. So we have six other sites where people are growing a subset of the varieties that we're growing here in addition to two check varieties and every farm that's growing our tomato trials is growing that check so that we can sort of use that as a baseline to establish environmental variation and then look at which varieties perform well in the different environments on top of that. And the farmers have also been really involved from the beginning in setting the priorities and kind of doing the visioning piece of this also so it wasn't like Julie just came in and said hey everybody listen up this is what you're going to do it was very inclusive from the beginning which has been a real treat to get to know so many farmers and chefs. So we are trying to focus on unique varieties the chefs wanted novelty and then the farmers wanted varieties that taste really, really good but have better disease resistant. So there are varieties out there that are resistant to some of the major diseases but they often don't have the flavor and so what we're trying to do is test a range of varieties, heirloom and modern, modern by heirloom crosses to see if we can get both disease resistance and flavor in one variety and that's really been a challenge I think for tomato breeding maybe because of some of the history of breeding more for wholesale markets but when you look at the disease resistant varieties they often fall short in what the growers are looking for so we're trying to combine both of those.