 My name is Chris Anderson. Anderson Farms in Weathersfield, Connecticut. We raise approximately 100 acres of sweet corn. We have a total of 150 acres. We sell 20% of that on our own retail stand. And the other 80% is custom grown for other roadside stands and orchards throughout the state. In the last 10 years here at Anderson Farms, we've tried to improve our procedures and our growing efficiency. We follow the June nitrate testing to both save the environment and to defray some of the costs of fertilizer. And we also use a heat monitor to measure heat degree days for when to plant corn. What we've purchased is a ground temperature heat monitor. At the end of this wire there's a probe that actually sends the temperature up to the monitor. What that allows us to do is keeps track of the soil temperature high and low on a daily basis. So we can find out that the high soil temperature today was 77.7 and the low temperature this morning was 52.4. Push the reset button and come back tomorrow. What this enables us to do is we could determine the number of heat units that it takes for a piece of corn to break ground. And in order that we have a continuous volume of corn to sell, we try to plant enough so that we can pick an acre of corn a day in the summer. With the use of the temperature monitor, we're able to calculate how many heat units before we plant the next piece. And at this time we use between 50 and 60 heat units before we plant our next field, our next piece of corn. When the weather is warm like it is today, we generated, I'll figure it out real quick, you take the high temperature ground temperature that is and the low temperature and you add it up 130.1. Subtract 100 and you have 30 and divide that by two. So we had 15 heat units today. We've had a total of 53 heat units since the last time that we planted. So tomorrow we'll plant our next piece of corn. When the temperature is extremely warm, we might plant every three or four days. When it's really cold early in the season, we might plant every 10 or 12 days. We've developed a program so we can plant what we need to plant, we pick what we need to pick, and very rarely do we have a lot of extra corn left over that we have to harrow up. The cost of the monitor is about $700, but it doesn't take too many acres of corn harrowed up to pay for the monitor. It saved us a lot. The June nitrate test is a test that measures how much nitrogen is left in the soil and how much nitrogen is needed to be side-dressed so the plant can grow completely to when it's harvested. By using this nitrate test, we can actually pretty much pinpoint exactly how much more nitrogen, if any, is needed in the soil and we can side-dress accordingly. We come in when the corn is about 12 inches high or so and take a soil sample 12 inches deep, probably six or seven actual samples per acre. The university provides us with cloth bags and it makes the sample gathering very easy. We send the samples to the University of Connecticut and get the results back within 24 to 48 hours by fax. It's important that we get the test back so quickly because if there's a nitrogen deficiency, we can go in and put the side-dresser immediately. We try to keep very thorough records so that we can keep a real good track of what's actually happening on each of the fields, each of the plantings. We've probably cut our cost, fertilizer cost in half, I would say, since we've started the June nitrate testing.