 I'm Jason Bonham. I'm Travis Crafts. Welcome to Wall State Community College in Hanceville, Alabama. Why do I specifically farm? It's just one of those things that kind of came natural to me as part of a family farm. It's just what I've seen grandfathers do, dad do. So it just kind of was something I grew up with and wanted to do myself. Well, as I was growing up, I thought I would never do anything like this. I had to work in my mother's yard and everything had to be 2-a-t all the time. If I missed wheat eating with a single blade of grass, she'd make me go back there and hit that one piece even if it was a pair of scissors before supper. So I thought, well, whenever I grow up, I'm never going to do anything like this. So when I bought my first house, I got to look around. I was like, the yard really needs some help. And so that's kind of got what my interest got started in it. And then I found out there was a program down here, so I started class down here. And I'm still here 20 years later. Here we teach agribusiness classes and a whole lot of different things fall under that. This will be anywhere from turf management, landscape, design, greenhouse management, greenhouse crop production. We've got a lot of variety of classes that we teach here. In the greenhouses here at Wallace, we grow a variety of things. A whole lot of flowers, annuals, some perennials. We do some vegetables, including tomatoes and pepper plants like that that you want to start indoors early. We do some trees and shrubs. And you see in the background that we do some ferns and many different types of succulents. We have five acres here and we got a little over 20,000 square feet under cover. Right now we have a total of 16 students. Most of these students, we do have a couple of lab assistants that work here with us in order to get a lot of this stuff done. Because that's a seven-day-a-week job. It's not just an eight-to-three type thing. Covet has really affected us in the way that we teach classes. In the past two years, we have to do a lot of things through virtual. And that's not always an easy thing to do when it's supposed to be more of a hands-on type thing. So we have to give them projects at home to do like killing weeds using vinegar instead of actually here using another type of chemical. So it has been a pretty good bit of a challenge because we are a non-profit organization. We actually sell here. We can't compete with any of our local people. So we actually sell here on campus in this particular greenhouse that we're in right now. We're kind of essentially located between Birmingham and Huntsville. So we do get a lot of our student clientele come from both areas from different directions. So their friends and family will come down here and purchase from us as well. We have a couple of companies around here locally that we buy some things. And then other things come from Park Seed up in North Carolina. We do a lot of stuff with our co-op system. So this is our classroom. This is the only classroom we have in the building. You can see we've got it lined out here with computers. And that's mainly for our landscape design class. A lot of the stuff we do is a lot of hands-on type stuff. And this week we've been teaching about different types of fertilizers. We do have a smart hub in the classroom. It's just like a big giant computer we can also use as a whiteboard. And it does a whole lot of different features. And then of course you can see we did a lot of our calculations of stuff on the board. This is one of our large lab areas. You can see in the background back here we've got a whole lot of equipment. Different cabotas, John Deere gays, tractors, John Deere and Kays. All kind of small engine equipment back here. And on either side of the room we have flat filler machines. We use one of them that we use only for nursery type mix. The other one is a greenhouse type mix. So this is where a lot of the happenings go on out here. All our transplant and our seed starting, grafting, even small engine classes happen out here. This is another one of our lab areas that we use. We use a lot for a small engine class. We carry down the engines. You see back here in the background we've got several engines and different things sitting back there. We take all those all the way down completely down to the bare crank shaft and put them back together. At the run when you start and at the run when you finish. That is a bit of a challenge. The reason why we teach that class is because if you're anywhere in the agricultural or horticulture field and you use a type of small engine, whether it be a blower or weeder, mower, tractor, whatever, that kind of helps get the idea of how it works and then what you would need to do to maintain it and to fix it. There were some small repairs. So in this greenhouse right here we're getting ready for our spring plant cell. So in here we've got a whole bunch of our little seedlings. We started these seedlings over here on the mist line. And some of our cuttings and stuff are over here. And then as they spend 24 hours or so on the mist line we'll take them off and put them over here on the benches here in the greenhouse and then grow them off from there. This is a bunch of stuff that's been done just in the past couple of weeks. Go on to the next greenhouse. So this is our number one greenhouse. We actually redecorated it at the Fern House and you can see why because we've got so many ferns in here. We've got all different varieties of plants in this greenhouse. We use a lot of this stuff for plant ID. And the ferns we use on campus. We use these for graduation and different events that we have on campus. We can kind of decorate the stage or just bring a little bit more of a homey feel to a room. As you walk through you can see all types of flowers. We've got different orchids, new guinea impatiens. We've got plants over here on the other side that we use for floor culture class. We actually do make flower arrangements. So here we do have six different types of greenhouses or not six different types. We've got six greenhouses, two different types. We've got two that are gutter connected and then other just regular Quonset house. One of them is a Gothic Arch type house and it's super tall. Some of these other ones they were bought in the early 70s when this program first started here at Wall Estate. And so we just carried them on and kept up with them. This is one of our smaller greenhouses that we actually use just for a shade house. We just use one layer of plastic over it. Just kind of hold plants over for the winter. And so they just sit in here that keeps them from going completely dormant. This is some of our stock plants. Over here we have a sales area or sales pad that we call it. And we have a sample of everything that we have in the nursery out here as far as deciduous and evergreen trees and shrubs. Here at Wallace we have three different hot tunnels. We've got them all lined up right in the row right here. This first one we use for our floor culture class. We actually only grow cut flowers. Right now we have some snap dragons left over from last season. We just left them in here to see how they do in the cold weather. And all this is a cover crop that we planted just to help for soil building and content. So we're in the high tunnel that we use here at Wall Estate with the Pest Exclusion Netting from Dr. A's project. I'm standing here beside the traps he uses for fall armyworms, cabbage loopers. There's several other. Eric Shavey comes up and checks these every two weeks to every month. Last year the traps came in really handy. I know that we were mainly looking at the e-grass of insects and the progression of insects in and out of the high tunnel to see where it was. But when we seen the fall armyworms fly because we had these traps and Eric coming here we were kind of able to predict when the fall armyworms were coming and we were able to do sprays and kind of protect our crops. So we have each trap set up. Eric put the different pheromones in each one to attract the insects to do the flights of the insects and the reports back to Dr. A and then that usually I think he publishes it in the IPM newsletter so we can kind of see when stuff's coming and know when to make management decisions. So this is outside of the high tunnel where we have Dr. A's Pest Exclusion Netting. We've had real good benefits and luck out of keeping insects out especially some of our larger ones. We've noticed that through the trapping and things like that. When it comes to the high tunnel I don't think I would have one now without the Pest Exclusion or doing some kind of Exclusion Netting. We also have three nursery houses here at Wallace. As you can see back behind me we got all different types of scrubs and things that we do in here and all this is student grown. We start from cuttings or seeds and grow it all the way up to a sellable product. This particular house right here we only left a shade cloth on yet where the other ones we try to overwinter just a little. We use extension resources probably once a week or more. Extension resources are invaluable. To be able to do common nowadays do a quick Google search to get information but you don't know if the information is correct, is it research based but you can go into the extension website, look through their publications and get knowledge that's research based that you know you can trust that'll benefit you. Yeah, publications, conferences, even individual visits people coming by and helping us out in different ways. I use the beginning farmer app. It's a great way it's, you know, instead of having to look up agents phone numbers or anything they're all in there to use the ID tools that are in there. That's the one I rely on and any kind of publications, the IPM newsletter any student that comes through my program I make sure they sign up for that IPM newsletter because that's the best way of getting continuing education and you can see what's coming to make decisions. We're constantly contacting them about different things and offering them a place as a venue to host different workshops and we attend those and they attend some that we have. Know as much knowledge up front before you go into it. Some have the idea they can just learn as they go. Do your study, do your research, come to Wallis, take classes, attend extension programs, just any kind of education you can get to have prior knowledge to flatten that learning curve. Learning curves now can be more expensive and get you further behind to be a good sustainable farm to move forward. You've got to know to make the right decisions to protect the bottom dollar. Don't go into debt. Only do what you can do. If you want to start out with a greenhouse and build just a small greenhouse first obviously get the best equipment you can possibly afford but don't go broke and don't go into debt doing it.