 So I'm going to give a very quick introduction, hopefully, to what we've done through the partnership grant and then turn it over to Sam to get into some more details about the actual tools and some things that we've learned. So our goals were to, as I said, foster partnerships between growers and ag professionals to improve our understanding of these tools and hopefully bring some new ideas. Sarah has done a lot of excellent work in the past with cultivation tools. You may know this deal in the field series and various videos that have been done through Sarah. But there's also some new information out there, particularly from manufacturers in Europe that we thought would be helpful for growers in the Midwest, particularly organic growers. So this was fairly much focused on organic production, although I think a lot of the themes and the tools are also applicable to more conventional farms, particularly as labor costs go up and issues with herbicide resistance and so forth. So our goals of the partnership grant were to broaden understanding of in-road tools from Europe and application to the North Central region. We had a somewhat unique opportunity to go to a conference on what the Europeans call physical weed control, which is what we call mechanical cultivation. Every three years they have a conference and there's a number of researchers who have devoted their lives, particularly in Europe, to understanding mechanisms and some of the different tools. So we were able to go to that and also visit some farms, which I'll talk about. And then our second piece of this was to bring those tools back and to share what we learned through a field day which we held in Michigan called the Midwest Mechanical Weed Control Field Day. And then the third part of this which we're still working on is development of some educational videos and materials to further expand sharing of that information. So the European Cultivation Tour, as I said, had a few different pieces, the Cultivation Conference and then key to this was farm visits and interviews which we tried to integrate both into the field days and our videos. Two graduate students, Sam, myself and another master's student went. The grant allowed us to bring farmers. So these we were funded through other grants primarily but this allowed us to bring farmers along which was incredibly helpful for getting access and opening farmers up to their systems that I think it would have been difficult to do as a researcher but when we brought a grower to those farms they were very excited to share. So we visited farms in Switzerland, France and then Netherlands and then subsets of us also visited several of the manufacturers particularly Sam and he'll talk a little bit about that. We tried to videotape and interview and record as much information as we could during that tour. Then each of the farmers based on what they'd seen and you picked a tool or two that they liked and brought those back to their farms in the Midwest and trialed them. So we had three farmers, here's one of them, Les Rogenbach, a small scale organic vegetable farmer who was taken with some of the new forms of finger weeders that were being used extensively in Switzerland. We also had a small grower in Wisconsin doing pull behind torsion weeders, another form of in row tool that Sam will talk a little bit about. And then another grower who looked at a couple different tools, both the fingers and torsions in the context of their farm. So that was the on farm tool testing and then we had this field day which was towards the end of the summer. We tried to bring manufacturers in to share what, in kind of a trade show we brought Jean-Paul Cortens who's a very experienced vegetable farmer in New York State to share his concepts of mechanical weed control and some of the tools he uses. And we also had most of the day filled with demonstrations of a wide range of tools and we had perfect weather except that it was 95 degrees but it wasn't raining which was the key thing we were worried about when you're trying to do a cultivation field day trying to get the crops and the weeds right at the right stage. So everything came together except for maybe the heat but we had the forethought to include root beer floats which we held back until we got evaluations back so that was our motivation there and that worked very well in a 90 degree day. So just a few stats on who came to this field day. We were surprised with the enthusiasm. We had to shut down registration at about 140. People coming from all over the place mostly the Midwest. Sam and I were recently out in Oregon where a couple growers there had thought they might wanna come but they decided better of it but we were able to go out and share some of those tools with them. Mostly farmers, about 75% farmers. Random other occupations, some educators. We had most of our extension educators from Michigan involved with vegetable show up so that was nice. Favorite parts of the day that I think the demonstrations not surprisingly were very appreciated. A few people like the root beer over here on the least favorite part not surprisingly the heat came up and then what else was there here Sam? Oh, none, that's good. No least favorite part. I don't know how that works. Everybody has to have a least favorite part but anyway. So we got very good reviews, very good attendance. Generated a lot of excitement and partly as a result of that we're gonna try to continue this rotating through different parts of the Midwest. And then finally educational videos as I said we're in the midst of putting these together. We're really focusing on some of the newer tools particularly the in row tools and Sam will show you some of that. And I think for transition here I'll just show you the introduction that we have for those videos at this point which kind of gives you a flavor of where we're headed. As part of the generous grant through your second standard the Friday Lab at Michigan State University has worked over the last year to gather valuable information and the past and the right knowledge on in row video series is the qualification of Sam Shianoff as driver skills. 17 researchers, manufacturers, and farmers in Switzerland, France, and a complex time cultivator on the front of wide research done by the greater partners carried out from the 2017 growing season and the information we gathered through large raffles in your advice we share here will assist members in the U.S. Choosing the best equipment for their system and using it. Okay, thanks for that Dan. So I got a graduate student grant from CER and that funded a lot of the trials that we did at the research farm with these in row tools and it also allowed me to go to Europe. And so I'm gonna tell you a little about that project. Okay, so the official name was Green Tools. I also played with the title of the down low on the in row. So let's see. So physical weed control, as Dan was saying, these are some ladies in the Republic of Georgia weeding cotton. And that's still how a lot of us weed on vegetable farms. And but another option, you know, of course is weeding with steel in the field and be it, you know, a wheel hoe, a walk behind tractor and Alice G or a $30,000 cultivating tractor. You know, there's all sorts of options and we were able to see a lot of the spectrum of that. So specifically what we were looking at was in row weed control, which seems to be the kind of holy grail of cultivation. And this in row area is kind of the high priced real estate, you know, where there's nothing growing here, you can be as aggressive as you want. You don't need to worry about anything. But here in the in row area, that's kind of what we wanna see where we did the best job we could on the between row. There's just a slight strip of uncullivated land remaining and then we can just kind of work that with our tools. And so that was the goal. The project was to learn more about that. And Dan was talking about how we worked with other farmers to do that. And another part of that was doing research at the Michigan State Hort Farm on that. Now we had spent a previous summer doing this research and learned a heck of a lot. But we also made a heck of a lot of mistakes. A lot of these tools, there's not great resources for how to use them. Or if you know great resources, please let me know. I think some of them are starting to come out. But we would kind of get these tools in a box and you take them out and there's no instructions and you just figure it out. And a lot of times, even if you had the tool working perfectly, what we realized is there's a lot of other steps that lead up to making them work right. And so we had a lot to learn. And part of that was being able to go to Europe. Here we're at the Stecati factory talking to the general manager. A lot of this machinery was invented and still made in the Netherlands, they're in the Netherlands. Here we're at the Hock Equipment Company talking with the owner Kus Havelaar about a lot of their equipment that they're making. And here, Theo Remisch from the Frotto Tool Company, he brought us to a farmer on the Netherlands and he explained to us his torsion weavers. So it was a really good opportunity to see from the manufacturers and the farmers who had 10, 15 years experience with these tools what they're doing and what are the ways to make them work. Yeah, so then we got a better idea on that and we came back and we thought, okay, what do we wanna do? And so we had these different treatments that we put together to trial out. So I'm gonna go over this maybe a little too briefly just because of time today and then like Dr. Nelson was saying, if you wanna hear more, please come in the afternoon and we'll get into a lot of detail. Get into the weeds as it were. So one treatment was nothing and it was hand-weeded later. We used a torsion weeder, we used a flex-tine harrow, we used a finger weeder and then we did a few combinations and we were thinking a lot of these tools work with different modes of action. Do they cut the weed? Do they bury the weed? Do they uproot the weed? And so we were thinking, if you could combine different modes of action on the same run, if you would have greater success. So we also used healing discs that are real precise and so some of the combinations were a finger weeder and then a healing disc right behind it, a finger weeder and a flex-tine harrow right behind it and then a torsion weeder with a finger weeder behind it with a flex-tine behind it, okay? And what that kind of looked like was something like this and this would be the torsion weeder with the finger weeder with the flex-tine harrow and then of course, you know, we do it alone. And one thing we learned from the manufacturers is that all these in-road tools should be run with knives in front of them. So each tool had knives running in front of them as close to the row as we could, you know, often say a three, four inch gap between knives. And as Dan's gonna talk about this afternoon, these European style sweeps and knives, you know, a lot of what we have in the US are more like shovels. They're designed to dig real deep and throw a lot of soil. But what we were seeing in Europe is really flat angled sweeps or even these are literally completely flat and they're just made to slice, you know, a half inch deep under the soil and cut weeds and because they don't throw soil anywhere, you can get it really close to the crop. So anyhow, that's what this setup would look like. These torsion weavers can be adjusted to be closer further away from the row. They were on brackets that we made to attach to floating linkages so they would float with the ground level. These finger weavers come on a floating arm and so the down pressure with this nut here can be adjusted. So say you have more crusted conditions or clay soil, you can put more down pressure. If it's sandy, you can put less down pressure. And then with different nuts here, you can adjust them in and out. And then the FlexTineHero here, this is, we made this frame just to kind of facilitate the research to do one row at a time. But these are tines from the Laylee company and so each one, as you slide them forward or backward in the notches, you can put more or less tension on them. Okay. And here are these duo healing discs. So this is kind of what it looks like when we hill carrots and so they were nice. They were on gauge wheels so you could get real precise, they floated with the ground. You know and of course you could angle the discs in and out for more or less healing. So this is kind of what it would look like. We designed the trial with those treatments that I laid out here and we did that trial three times during the season. So each time we planted about a quarter acre of carrots, we decided to do the work in carrots. More popular crops for cultivation research are like transplanted lettuce, cabbage, maybe corn snap beans. But we thought that we really wanted to push these tools to the limits and see what they were capable of and we thought carrots was a great crop to do that either to fail hard or see how they could be used or not. And so as I say, we planted carrots three times during the summer, about a month apart, beginning of June, beginning of July, beginning of August roughly. And each time we planted kind of twice the amount that we needed for the trial. So this flag area here is all for the trial. But in back of where this photo was taken on the other half of the field is that much again and that's where we calibrated the tools which was really important. We didn't just go out there and start to use them. Most of the day when we would be doing the trials would be taken up with tuning in the tools which could be a very frustrating process but got a little easier as the summer went on. And so once each tool was calibrated, then we would run it. And one thing we found was that the combinations of tools, we had to recalibrate. You couldn't just have the torsion weeder how we had had it alone, with the fingers as we had had them alone. That was too aggressive. So everything had to get kind of redone. And the big things that we found were important in using the tools were the speed that we ran the tractor at. And also we had, do I have a good picture here? No. Also we had the top link on our three point linkage was a hydraulic. So that made it a lot easier to change the angle and I'll show you later on. So this is kind of the big picture. And when it came down to it, the nuts and bolts we would mark little plots in each area. We would plant surrogate weeds. So either mustard for a broadleaf or millet for a grass to make sure that we had weeds to count. The previous summer, Dan had wanted to do that. And I say, no, farmers wouldn't have surrogate weeds. You know, we have to use what's naturally there. But if there's not much naturally there, there's not much to count and then we can't give a good report to Dr. Nelson. So we would plant weeds, which was the thing to do. And so we would end up, you know, here's 103B from the second planting. Here's a close up here. Okay, so you can see we have some larger grass weeds coming up and we've got the mustard that we planted. You'll notice it's not a weeding mess. That's because we did as good a job as we could growing the carrots, planting them well, irrigating them uniformly, flame weeding them so that we could really have a size difference between the carrots and the weeds. And that was something that all the Europeans told us, you know, these tools aren't magic and you have to set the stage for the tools to work. You know, they're not robotic weeders that know which weed to pull out. You know, they have to be able to apply a force that the carrots can withstand and that the weeds can't. So anyhow, this is what it looked like before. Here we run the torsion weeder. This is what it looks like afterwards. And here's a close up. So, you know, you can see, and this would happen throughout, you know, each tool, we'd kill a certain amount of carrots generally ranging from say 60% survival to 100%. And we'll talk about that. So here's a video, for example, of the finger weeders running. And the thing to notice, and again, you know, I'll get into more detail this afternoon if you're interested, is that we've done a good job on between row weed control. There's just a very thin strip left. And also watch where the fingers are running. Because they're set very shallowly, they're just kind of crumbling the top layer. They're not kind of digging in or anything like that. The goal is just to crumble. And of course that really would be affected by the soil conditions. And I've just shown you a successful example. We had plenty of ones that weren't so impressive. Let's see here. Oh, good. So you can see how shallow they're set and how, in this case, it's flicking some soil out and really just crumbling. These mustards are about as big as the carrots, so maybe we're not seeing exactly what we'd like there. But that's an example of the kind of work we were doing. In terms of in-row weed control, really getting at weeds in the row, not just close to the row. Okay, so yeah. So what happened? And what did that look like in terms of research? So as you saw earlier, we had stakes, we planted weeds, we counted the weeds, we ran the tools, and then we counted the weeds again. And then we looked at what do we see there? So here's the treatment where we did nothing. And what do we see? Carrots' survival percentage was 100%, not surprising. And the weed survival percentage was 100%. Okay, I'm not very surprised, that's what I kind of hope to see. But then we start looking at the tools and there start to be some differences here. And the big thing that Dan and I were interested in looking at is this difference. Because we're working in the row, we want to see that a lot of carrots survive and very few weeds survive. And so where are we seeing the biggest differences? Okay, so for example, here with the finger-weeder dual combination, the finger-weeder's running in front and the healing disc throwing soil into the row behind, we see a really good difference there. Still only 60% of our carrots survived. And I imagine many growers would not be happy with that. But a whole lot of the millet weeds and a fair amount of the mustard weeds died. As I said, that's maybe an unacceptable amount of crop death though. Well let's look at something that might be a little more acceptable, say 80% survival, 20% crop death, especially something like carrots or root crop, they can kind of bulk out and fill up the space of any carrots that are thinned out. And so here we see that, what are the tools that had about 80% survival? The finger-weeder did and the duo also did, the healing disc. And so that's maybe a tool that we'd wanna look closer at. If we were able to have decent carrot survival and only have 40% of our weeds left or even less in the row after killing almost all of them in the between row, I'd feel pretty good about that. And so we tried to look a little more closely at that and with this thing called selectivity. Okay, so how selective is the tools for the weed over the carrot? So the numbers here is the percent carrot survival, say 80% in that example, divided by the percent weed survival, say 40%. And so a number of one, like right here for the treatment where we did nothing, would mean that it's selective exactly the same amount. If 100% carrot survive, 100% weed survive, if you kill 50% carrots, you kill 50% weeds. That's not really impressive or doing anything for anyone. As you can see, that's what happens when we do nothing, okay? So what we looked for was higher and higher levels of selectivity, okay? So here we could look at the finger-weeder duo combination we did before. And so for millets, it was a selectivity number of 17 and for mustard, a selectivity number of five. Now those are just numbers, whatever. But what that means is at 60% carrot survival, which is what we had on average for the finger-dual combination, we had 4% millet survival, okay? Which to me, that's a very selective tool. It's able to kill the weed in the row while preserving the crop. Okay, let's look at the healing disc that we're a little less impressive with the selectivity numbers, but remember that they cause a little more acceptable crop death, not so much crop death. Okay, so here's a selectivity of eight on average for the millet and three for the mustard, okay? And what that means is that at 80% carrot survival, which is what we had, we have 8% millet survival. And so that means we're killing about 90% of the grass weeds, which as you might imagine, could be a big reduction in hand labor for weeding. So this is the kinds of conclusions that we looked for in terms of what tools had what effect on the weeds. We also took data on all sorts of other things like did the tools cause more disease or misshapen carrots? We found out that no, they didn't across. And we also took yield data, and that was a little less easy to interpret. So that's hopefully just an idea of the kind of work we were doing from the travel of Europe to learn about the tools from the research in the field and some of the conclusions that we worked on. If you're wanting to learn more about this kind of stuff, as Dan was saying, we'll be speaking this afternoon and having time to go into a lot greater detail. We started a YouTube channel. So these are more than just pictures. We did interviews with all the manufacturers. And so you can see those. There's a lot of slow motion videos. Dan and I showed some of those and you can see a lot more examples. And then also probably in the next month or so as these informational videos on the inroad tools come out, that's where they'll be. And the other thing, as Dan mentioned, the Midwest Mechanical Weed Control coming up this September will be in Atlanta, Illinois. And there's flyers around. Feel free to see me. I've got all sorts of handbills. And I think I'll leave it there. Thank you.