 Hi, I'm Tom Buller. I'm the county extension agent for horticulture here in Douglas County, Kansas, so just outside of Lawrence. And today I'm talking about the partnership project. We're working with three farms in Douglas County, so Mellowfields Farm, Red Tractor Farm and Moon on the Meadow. What we're working on is trying to figure out ways to control weeds in organic production systems of fall direct seeded vegetables. It's kind of a mouthful, but last year in the fall I asked some local producers what problems they were having in growing vegetables in Douglas County, and weed control was the unanimous concern specifically in those fall direct seeded vegetables. So beets, carrots and spinach are the crops we're looking at and trying to figure out how to control weeds. So I started doing some research to try and figure out what's the best control method. I came up with the idea that stale seed bedding is a good control method, and also possibly occultation is a good control method, but there wasn't quite definitive research exactly on how to do that stale seed bedding and some of the specific techniques of applying those here in Kansas. So stale seed bedding is a technique where the beds that you're going to plant into are formed ahead of time and you try and get the weeds in that top germination layer to germinate and then kill them before you plant without bringing up more weed seeds. So you can't do a rhodotilling to kill them. You have to do something mildly, very either mildly invasive or non-invasive. So we're actually trying two different techniques for stale seed bedding. First one is we're going to use a flame weeder to terminate the weeds after they germinate, and the other one we were using a new tool, a new to us called a power hero, which instead of rotating vertically like a rhodotiller does, it turns horizontally so it's not bringing up new weed seeds into that germination layer. So hopefully if we can get those weeds to germinate, kill them, then we can plant the crops into them without those same weed control problems. So we put together a research project through the SARA partnership program and working with a variety of different farms here, most notably for today. Kevin Prather here from Mellowfields Farm. I'm Kevin Prather, Mellowfields Farm in Lawrence, Kansas, and we're participating in the SARA partnership grant largely because we've got some strong weed pressure, pigweed is an issue on our farm, and in the summertime trying to germinate direct seeded crops for fall harvest has been a real big challenge. So we're excited to try some overlapping techniques to get a control of our weed pressure issues, occultation with tarps in combination with power harrowing and flame weeding. We feel like we're going to be able to get that nipped in the bud and under control.