 I'm delighted to be with you folks today. SAR is a wonderful program, at least from my point of view. This was our second grant with SAR. The idea was to bring up an educational, there we go, program for kids to give them a better idea of how wildflowers and bees and blueberries work all together. So let's go to the next slide. So who are we? Well, we're a small farm in near about 10 miles out of South Haven, Michigan, called Moss Funnel Farms. It's got something to do with my son's band, a music name, the funnel of music or something, going way back. Makes no sense, but it sounds good. So we grow blueberries using organic practices near South Haven, Michigan. We were in business about 12 years. We previously received a SAR grant to help teach blueberry farmers or to help other blueberry farmers in our area do a quick transition to organic practices. It was a really interesting project from SAR, and we were grateful for the opportunity to do this. So we already had been through the SAR process once, and we learned a lot from it. It was fairly rigorous. So it took us two tries, basically, to get the second grant, which was the one for bees please. The comments in 2017 review, or 2018 review, were that we needed to do more sharing of our project with other farmers. We needed to do more field days. I suppose everybody is required to do that. We needed to measure whether this project really was going to be successful, and if it was successful. There were some minor concerns about the insurance, and we did need to spell out a little better educational program. So those were the tasks that we had to undertake when we reapplied in 2018. Okay, next slide. So we tweaked the proposals to basically get more information out during and after the project was over. The Great Lakes Fruit Expo was a major place that we were able to show a very simple poster for how this project could be successful and what we had done. Also, we had participated in a couple of events there at the talking sessions at the Expo that helped us talk more about the program. We also worked with, got some technical help in putting the basically the little boards together that were along this trail we developed. We worked with the Michigan State Onomology program, certainly with Adam Ingrau who's on the program today. He was there, and you'll see him a little more in our video. We reached out also to the Peggy Notabard Nature Museum in Chicago, which has a terrific program on pollinators and our local conservation district in Paw Paw, Michigan as well for their support. We did add some metrics about and put in methods for people to use a QR code to evaluate the program. Plus we made sure the teachers that came out for the first run gave us their opinion as well as the kids and we clarified the insurance issues as well. Okay, next slide. So our target group for education, for getting people out to this site, and let me clarify what the site is. It's a two acre piece of land at the back of our back field. We have two fields and this, the second field has an open two acre spot next to the blueberry bushes. So in that spot we were, our plan was to build a trail for kids to walk, just simply to walk with lots of little stops along the way. I think we had like nine stops and the type of kids we were going after were obviously kids from the local area, great school kids. We also wanted to get families visiting. This is a very heavy recreational area, as you probably know, the South Haven area is just growing leaps and bounds as a very popular vacation spot in the last 10 years. And also we are basically a retail blueberry operation, so we have lots of you pickers coming to the farm in the summer. So we wanted to make this part of their experience at the farm. Next slide. So here's what we did. We got the trail up and running pretty quickly in the spring of 18. And that was the easy part, building the trail. We planted wildflower, we got some wildflowers planted there as well, perennials. And that's an extraordinarily expensive process we realized. And also the planter that we borrowed from our conservation district was so heavy that our 8,000 pound tractor went up in the air when it was trying to pull this thing along. And we also that year had a terribly difficult hot weather. So when we were building the little building there, it was, we were working a 95 degree heat to try and get it done. Next slide. So we wanted to make a kid friendly. I don't know about you folks, but when I go to various museums, both indoors and outdoor exhibits, most of the copy that's written for people to read as they as they go along a trail or a path is extremely complicated and very adult focused. And we wanted to make this as simple as we could and make it interesting for kids. So we really focused on the educational learning part of it. We built the trail on this two acre parcel in a one six mile figure eight configuration. And we put a little shortcut in it for little kids so that they could take part of the trail and not have to do it all. And as you can see, you can see that we built a little mound for kids to look over. It's kind of an interesting piece of geography because it's up high, the little buildings up high and it kind of swoops down to so you've got a nice spot for overlooking the whole thing. Next slide. So this is an example at the top here of one of our panels that you can see on the bottom left that they have these panels all along the field. We tried to be clever. We tried to make it simple for people. We also in our little kiosk that we built, we also had three panels there as well. They were designed with a lot of care and designed also to be cost-effective. So they're on vinyl and they stay out in the field year round. Next slide. We reached out to quite a large amount of a wide range of school districts in the area, but frankly it was late summer. People were still on vacation at the school districts. And so we were successful really with our local district. We got fifth graders coming in for the opening from the Bangor School District and our CS Michigan State official showed up for the opening. Adam was our prime speaker. We had a nice turnout of kids for the opening. Next slide. So it was a warm day. We had 90 kids out there, all fifth graders, great support from MSU like I said. The kids were terrific. I guess fifth grade is a special time for, it's just before the hormones kick in. And the kids are still interested. They're enthusiastic. They're not super young. They're kind of in a really, that's kind of a sweet spot I think for for education with children and certainly to be outside is a fun thing as well for a field trip. So we had a great opening day. Next slide. So we're going to see a video now of that opening day and you'll see Adam in there as well. We got the audio. You get some audio? Slave technical delay. Bear with us. There you go. You got it. The kids were engaged as you can kind of see. It was a little bit of chaotic but Adam did a great job of engaging them and we had some other, he brought a whole bunch of exhibits with and things which really added to that opening day. The teachers were very positive in their evaluations. Obviously somebody else could bear the load of the kids for a few hours and that made them happy as well. Next slide. We learned that the trail was the easy part. Weather was always a factor. It was very hot summer. We think we fell down a little bit on promotion but it came right at a very busy part at the end of harvest. But the content is definitely, we felt definitely was engaging for the kids. Next slide. So it started in the fall and really didn't get traction because the schools already were up and running and doing other things. We were swamped at the farm and it was hard for us to do both the farm and put an extra time at the bees please. We had designed it originally to be self-sustaining to be someplace you could just drive up to and not have to, you know, we wouldn't have to do much but that's a, you know, we passed out thousands of flyers for people on it on the thing and we just didn't get as much turnout as we thought. Last spring, this last spring we had a micro blast come through and as I mentioned earlier, this thing was at the top of a hill, kind of a hill rise and we built this thing very well. It should have been able to take a bomb hit. However, the wind got under it and a micro blast just toppled the whole little building down. So we need to go back out there. We didn't have any time this year because we were swamped with people trying to get away from COVID. So we're going to hopefully get it up and running again next year. Okay, next slide. The good news is that we're, we'll get things up again and running because we want to make our farm more, more thing, more of a destination. We want more things for people to do at the farm. So this is becoming a very integral part of our plan for 2021. We're going to make more of an effort to bring in summer tourists. Last year, as you all know, it was pretty difficult to work around the COVID restrictions. The thing that is satisfying really for us as a pollinator education for kids is hot these days. You can see maybe a little bit of a headline to the right here. Just about two weeks ago, I believe, Ravenna School District in Michigan received a hundred thousand dollar grant for pollinator education involving its kids. And that's pretty amazing, I think. That's a testament to the importance of the subject these days. So overall, I think this was a great experience for us. We need to tweak it and bring it back and somehow get more people involved in it. Our experience with Sarah willing to take gambles on projects like this and projects like Organic Farmer Education speaks well, I think, to the program and how it really does help farmers. Thank you. Any questions? Let me know. Thanks, Frank. That was awesome. What a cool way to incorporate agritourism and some value-added revenue into your farm. Such a cool thing to be able to involve kids. Yeah, can you just talk a little bit about how NRCS was involved with your project and how you partnered with them? Sure. NRCS is a great resource for us in our pop-up operation. That office has been incredibly helpful over the years to us in terms of getting buildings built and road built. They've just been an incredible operation. Jeff Douglas and Steve Baer, Steve Baer, for example, has come out and helped us do burns in the spring of the wildflower field. And that has been a real help to us. We were not able to get one done this year because of COVID. It was delayed and delayed and by the time we got it done, it was too late. We're hoping for next year. But that was, for example, a real help. Steve Baer was also out there for the dedication and he's incredibly good with children like Adam. So NRCS also provided the actually, we were able to do the two-acre parcel because of a set-aside that NRCS funded of those two acres of our property, conservation set-aside. And it's funded by FSA, but NRCS was the driver in terms of helping us identify that set-aside that eventually became the Beast Pleas Trail. So this is an agency, NRCS, that can be great help to anybody, I think, that's working on a SER project. You should definitely talk with those folks. And I also wanted to add a shout-out to Joan Benjamin and her group that really drive these SER projects and keep us straight and forward on the path to getting the grant application correct when we get it in there and pushing us to do good evaluations as well.