 So, Rebecca and I, we operate Fair Share Farm. This is the farm. We're in Northeast Clay County, Missouri, North Kansas City. So that's our house. We've got a barn, our new fermenting facility, a high tunnel, two different fields that we operate. We tend to use more in the spring because it dries out quicker. We have an irrigation pond here and a solar panel. The irrigation system is solar powered. We started in 2003 and first CSA season was 2004. This year we had 130 members, our members work on the farm. That's part of the CSA operation. Rebecca's a fourth generation farmer. We also have some hens at this point. And so this is our CSA. Like I said, we're a participatory CSA. That's kind of the traditional model. Our members are required to help two to three times a year to come out with the harvest. It's one of the things in our survey. They say they actually like it almost the most about the farm. We grow 40 different types of vegetables like most CSA farms. Our approach, we're not certified organic and we consider ourselves a biological farm. We tell people that what we do is we think of the soil as the plant's stomach. You're going to feed the soil, you grow cover crop, you turn it under, the biology of the soil digests and decomposes that matter and that's what you feed the plant with. Just like yourself. You eat a piece of broccoli, it goes into your body, it gets digested by the probiotics in your body. And we also like to say you are what you eat so you are what your plants eat. We feel all the cover cropping and biological methods that we've used over the years really helps improve the nutrition and the flavor of the crops. We feed the soil a balanced meal. We try every year to either give us cover crops, compost or hay mulch, straw or organic fertilizer and we cover crop pretty much all year long. So we do a lot of mulching. We buy compost. There's an organization called Missouri Organics in Kansas City. We can get, that's enough for about 20 beds of 20,000 foot beds, about half acre. We use Fertrell Super-N as an organic fertilizer that we can apply. It's easy to put down. We have one, we actually now have two movable henhouses. We like to move them into areas where we have cover crops growing and have them use that as a food source as well as their ration. Like I said, we grow a lot of cover crops. This is Crotalaria and Sorghum Sedangrass here, buckwheat. We have an electric tractor. So it's an Alice Chalmers G. There was a serigrant from a while back that from a farmer in New York State, Ron Colsa, he converted it from gas to electric. You can see the batteries on the back there. It essentially runs like a golf cart. This was our field day that we had this year. So another thing, like I said, we've been farming 13 years using biological practices. Last year I decided to compile all of our soil data. So back in 2003 we actually got a grant from the State of Missouri, a Sustainable Ag Demonstration Award. Joan is familiar with that. She signed off on that. And we were able to get money for soil testing. We got a manure spreader, money to buy cover crop seeds. And so that kind of got us started. And just want to kind of point out here, you know, the whole point of organic or biological farming is to improve soil quality. If you do that, then the plants are going to grow. So we have this first sample. There's only one. I don't think it really is a baseline as much as this. So we started out with about 2.6 percent organic matter on our farm. And for a while every year and then we skipped and we just kept taking soil samples. And you can see as time went on here, we went from our ranges being less than three in the twos to where we get down here towards 2013, 15, our ranges have gone up. So you can see we've basically raised our soil organic matter by almost one and a half percent. And that's one thing that we're really proud of. And we like to show this, this is a graph, that this is what organic farming can do. I don't think it's talked about enough. If you look at from like 2008 until now, with the acreage that we've grown, calculated that we've added about 250,000 pounds of our organic matter to our soil, which relates to about 350,000 pounds of carbon dioxide that we've sequestered. So that's something that in agriculture you can do just kind of a matter of course. We think that's important. You can see that it kind of bounced around and went down and then up. For a while we took a while, a lot of years for us to really get our cover cropping going. You can see the improvements. So like I said, the biology of the soil is important and we've always kind of wanted to do value added but didn't really want to slave over a stove and make tomato sauce for people. And what we've decided to do is to do fermenting. So we like how that kind of ties the biology of the soil to the biology to the food to the biology of our digestive systems because they're all really the same thing. So sauerkraut's obviously one fermented food most people are familiar with. Here's Rebecca. It's a little blurry, filled with some jars with kimchi in our new kitchen. And there's a facility built on like a 100-year-old tobacco barn. And those are a couple of our products. So that was part of the genesis for this project. We do grow some things that are more fruiting vegetables like cucumbers to make pickles and jalapenos to make pickled jalapenos. But the idea was going to grow a lot of cabbage. So we want to do it the simplest way possible, least amount of labor. And so the roller crimper and planting into rolled down beds is something that we wanted to work on. So it's been quite a long project. So you see here 2013, first step was to plant rivets in the winter or in the fall so that the following spring we'd have a crop to roll down. The idea was that we would so crimp these down. We also trialing tomatoes in rolled down cover crops. And then in July, late July, plant the fall brassicas into that. And then in September, seed the rivets for the next year. So we'll go through all that. So 2014, no-till brassica. You can see here this is a flail mower that we had. And part of the project also was to get us a better flail mower. That one's a little lightweight. There weren't a lot of safety guards on it. But one thing it did show is that in talking to Ron Morse also, who's our technical advisor, Dr. Morse is from Virginia Tech, so you don't need to buy a roller crimper. We had that in there originally and then we took it out. To roll down a cover crop, the flail mowers have a very, very large roller on the back of them, very, very heavy. So all you really need to do is to drag the flail mower through a bed without the mower going to roll down the crops. And this is what it looks like. So 2014 all started out really well. We had a really nice rye-vech crop. We rolled it down. It looked like this. It looked really good. The vech came back up, which isn't unusual. It's more viney. It doesn't really have the stem like rye does. It'll just break. We mowed that off. At the same time, we were doing a trial. So we did the rolled-down beds. And then we used our spader and we tilled in beds. And the idea was to compare rolled-down production versus tilled production. Rolled-off the rye-vech. But then, as you can see behind our farm crew here, the bindweed started coming in. We had other areas where the grasses started coming in. So we were trying, sent these guys out here, I think it was maybe 75 foot. I don't know if it was even that far. And it's like, okay, let's just see how long it's going to take. So it took like five hours of personnel time to handweed this area. And then it just came back anyway. So we tried another thing. We had this organic herbicide called Ground Force, which is just like a citric or acetic acid. And so we tried spraying that. And then we sprayed the whole thing. And it didn't matter. It just all came back. It's not a systemic herbicide. It just kind of kills the top growth. So the main focus of this whole project. The first year, we just had to abandon the thought of even planting into this. We did, I'll show you, with the no-till planting aid. We did try to run the machinery, but we didn't plant into it. So no-till planting aid, it's basically a furrower, and it's a system that Dr. Morse developed. And so he helped us in building the no-till planting aid. So it's a way to just pull furrows in the rolled down cover crop, and then you can plant into that area. So you can just look. He has a lot of literature on this. You can go online. You can buy a toolbar. You can buy this and that, and you just kind of build it. But we had this equipment laying around the farm. So it was like, well, we're going to kind of farm hack the whole thing. So we had this toolbar, which looks like it's a squirrel toolbar. And after I bought the clamps, found out it's actually a diamond toolbar. And then the shanks, you know, one's longer than the other. Are you saying these colters, they were really too small to use. So I kind of roughed it up. So these are one of the things we bought were these colters. You really need them to be big. If you have a lot of rolled down cover crop, it has to be able to cut through it. This shank wasn't going to, there just wasn't enough space there. So we really, we had to get a piece of steel and drop this straight down. And then it turned out that they're still kind of too close. We had a bolt and extension onto that. You can kind of see where this is a square on a diamond. And then you got this little bit here. We didn't cut that off the first year. So it worked. It worked well, just like he said it would drag through. You just had a furrow going there. We have a waterwheel transplant, or the idea was we'd space the waterwheels at that distance and pull it through and be able to plant. But I'll show you those pictures before. You can see that already all this vineweed had grown back in. So last year we couldn't do it. I'll go into that. This year, I kind of fixed it up a little bit. You can see here I cut that off. That was really catching on the cover crop and causing a problem. And you can see here the steel, that's the extension. We spent money and bought a diamond clamp. So it worked really well, pulls right through there. You can kind of see it cuts down maybe eight inches into the soil. So the no-till planting aid worked fine. Conclusions are you can farm hack it and maybe save a little bit of money, or it's not that hard to find the parts you need for a toolbar and everything else to make it with new parts. It's a great tool. It does what it says. And we still may use it. There may be times when it's really wet out and we don't want to till an area. And we can use this to create a planting furrow without causing a lot of problems. So this is Rebecca. This is one of our other field days. We had a field day each year. That same year, 2014, we did the same thing for tomatoes. So the idea with the tomatoes, we only, in the summer, we do a second planting of tomatoes in there. We call them our summer tomatoes. We use a hybrid. We'll cage them. So we took this 200-foot bed, that's our standard bed length, and rolled down a hundred foot of it. And then the other hundred feet we spaded in and planted into that to mulch. Here's the tomatoes that we hand planted in here. Unfortunately, I'm still searching for the data from this one, but it was really wet. I mean, when we dug the holes and put these tomato plants in, there was water at the bottom. It was a really wet year. So I don't know that the data from this necessarily would have been that good. And we did the same test this year, and I have much better information from that. But you can kind of see. We did hand weed this once. And for the tomatoes, it didn't work out too bad. The thing with the tomatoes are that you roll it down. Most of this happens in late May. That's when the rye has reached a stage where you're going to crimp it down. And the tomatoes, our summer tomatoes, will plant maybe the second week of June. So it will have died back, and we can plant right into it. So with the brassicas, you roll it down before May's over, and then you're not going to plant until the middle of July. You're a cabbage or something, and it's just sitting there all this time, and weeds have more of a chance to grow. Just wanted to go through this real quick just to kind of show you. We've done a lot of cover cropping. This is an example. We do cover crops in the spring, summer, and fall. This is like a summer cover crop of mung bean or beans and sorghum, sedan grass. So we'll let it grow. We'll flail-mow it down. That's what it looks like when it flail-mows. It's all nice and chopped. Then this is our spader. I don't know if you guys have ever seen a spader. It's one of the first pieces of equipment that we got. They had one at the farm in New York where we were. It's a really nice piece of equipment. You can see these shovels in here. So there's like a half dozen shovels, and they actually dig the soil. You can actually go through a bed so you had potatoes in, and you harvested them all, and go through and spade, and you can find potatoes that haven't even been damaged when you're all done spading. So it's not as pulverizing as a garden-type tiller. That's what it looks like on a good day. We have silk clay soil, so it's really difficult to always find the exact perfect soil moisture to spade, but that looks nice like that. We consider cover cropping kind of composting in place. We also have, in the past, taken the plastic off our high tunnel and cover cropped our high tunnel. So 2015 was going to be our second year. It's going to be a two-year project, but we suspended the project because of rain. So I don't know if you can read all this data, but you can see down here at the bottom. It was the first year I ever decided to keep rainfall records and just add a little log, and I kept the notes, and it was really interesting to have done it this year. Over the course of 74 days, we had almost 36 inches of rain, which recreates to almost a half an inch of rain every day for 74 days. Right in here, this is about the time that you would normally be rolling and crimping, and up till the end of May, we had 10 inches. And then the first week of June, we had 10 inches just in those couple days. We also had hail. So this, you can kind of see, this is total precipitation for that day, and we're right in the middle of the worst of it. So this is what strawberries look like after they've been pummeled by hail. Like Rebecca said, it looks like little tiny fairy punches on them, and when you count on your strawberries and they're just ripening and you get hail, it's no fun. And so we're trying to keep the project going, too, but like you can see, there was really no time period when this was ready to be rolled down that we could get in there. And I was doing everything I could to work on this project and keep the rest of the farm going, and there were a few times when I probably went out, went out there when I shouldn't have. So that was a lesson all in and of itself. This is more of the rain that we had. So we skipped 2015 and got into 2016. So one of the other parts of this project was to evaluate our cover cropping method. We had always just done broadcast seeding and harrowing. So that's how we would do our cover cropping. And you've seen some of those pictures. Things worked out fine, but it's pretty labor intensive. So the idea was to get a seeder. And I spent almost two years looking for a used grain drill, like six foot wide. And I had absolutely no luck finding one. So eventually decided to go to getting a vegetable seeder. So our Alice Chalmers G, we have a toolbar, and we have three Planet Junior seeders. And we can seed with that just off the electric tractor. So the thought was if I can get four new Planet Juniors, I could put that on the Alice Chalmers and we could use our electric tractor to do our cover cropping. But it turns out once the seeders came that these are newer ones and they're like twice the weight of the other ones. So that didn't really work out. So we had to get a toolbar so that we could just pull it behind our farm all. So these are vegetable seeders and we're trying to seed cover crops. But for the most part seeds are seeds. So we started looking at, well, you know, what's the seed plate for rye or vetch or whatever. And so one way to do it was simply to measure the circumference of the front wheel, which would be the ground tracking on it, open up the seeder and just spin the wheel for so many feet and count how many pounds fell out. And then we could calculate, okay, well, this wheel will get you so many pounds per acre or per bed, whatever we wanted. So I did that and every, like this hopper, it looks like these both had like vetch in them and those two might have had rye. These were offset so we wanted eight rows so I had to kind of turn around and go back down the other way and try and have the seeder go in between the other rows. So that didn't work out all that great. It worked out okay. And then the other thing was having two different seeds and two different seed holes and trying to keep all that perfect really was kind of a pain. So I went to just mixing the seed and you just use the largest seed hole and you calibrate it that way. So you mix the rye and vetch or the oats and peas or the Sudan grass and crotal area together, whatever it is you need, and you find the seed where you get, we're trying to get about about two pounds or so per thousand foot bed. So you can see here, we got one, two, three, four, five, like six rows here. This is a bed, so you really want like eight. So it wasn't too bad, grew pretty well. The peas were supposed to be separate inside there and some of those works, some didn't. So for the next time I did it, I tried putting it all on one side, figuring at least I'd make sure everything was on one side or on each side. This was the summer and some of that didn't turn out that well because it got very dry for a while and the seeds just sat there and so the weeds started to take over. But this is part of the trial where this area here was broadcast and harrowed in and these were with the cedar and it pretty much looked like that. We'd cut areas and weigh them. And so we did this two different times and so you can see from the top one the first time we did it in a spring crop, the cedar had a little bit better weight and then when we measured in the fall for one of the summer plantings, the broadcast had better weight. We took like a four by four area, just cut it down and weighed it. We kept using it. It does the cedar, it does give you a pretty good stand. It doesn't always look like it at the start. These are peas and oats and this is just interesting, it's so warm. This year this is actually a sun-hemp flower which we've never seen before because it's just been growing all winter long or fall long. So we feel the vegetable cedar can be used to seed cover crops. It's a multi-use cedar then if you have more than one use for it, if you're a vegetable farmer. We would advise combining two seed types and use the larger cedar hole, the one for the larger seed. Then you can just have all your cedars at the same cedar hole. We had it a little difficult to get eight perfectly spaced rows. And harrowing can be just as effective as the cedar, it just takes a lot more effort. So this is our second try at the No-Till Brassica, this is this year. So last September we put down Rye Vetch, that was a really, really wet year. And for some reason, you can see there's hardly any rye that came up, but we had a lot of vetch. So that's what it looked like in May. We rolled down the vetch, that's a picture of the new flail mower. You can kind of see that roller there that just helps roll stuff down. And this is one of the trial beds and pretty much the same thing happened. You know where we are, I mean all out here, it's a lot of grassland. And like between the end of May and then you have all of June and going into July, that's when grasses really, really want to grow. This area we'd never put down hay or anything. It was a relatively new area that we were, it's like the second year we used it. But when you have to wait around that long before you plant, at least for us, you just get too much weed pressure, especially from the grasses. So, it's easy to roll down with the flail mower. There's a problem because of the weed pressure from the grasses in the heat of the summer. You saw all the wet periods we had, it's really hard to implement the roller crimper and planting in it during the wet periods. And we tried doing like hand weeding and everything and that really is not an effective way to kind of make up for any problems that you might have. This is more rain, so this year at the end of August we had ten inches over a couple days and four inches a couple weeks later. So there was still a lot of this this year. So these are the summer tomatoes. So this is the same thing as shown you before. We grew a cover crop. One area we mowed it and spaded it in. The other one we rolled it. This is what it looked like right after we were done with that. You can see there's hay on the left. We mainly use hay. We're able to get hay off of Rebecca's family land next door. The one on the right is the rolled-down betch. So things started out pretty good, both of them. These are Belarus, I believe, or the tomato type. They're summer tomato. This is once they really started going. I don't know if you can really tell, but the hay mulched ones were really a deeper green. They're a better stand than over here. We weeded these once, but after that it was like, well, they're kind of on their own. That's the point. We don't want to be spending a lot of time weeding. What kind of hay was that? Was it native grass hay? No. What type of hay? It was like a lot of brome. There was some clover in there, but it wasn't native. We may be able to get native soon. Her father just seeded a lot of switch grass all over the farm, so maybe in the future. This year we had a lot of, you know, the fruit was really great. There was a problem when we first started going out to harvest, our irrigation had kind of, we had some complications with it for a while, and kind of the first fruits that we were picking had a lot of blossom end rot. Got the irrigation working, we watered a lot, and that kind of went away. And this is the data from this year. So you can see here that once with the hay mulch had three times the yield that the rolled ones did. They both had a decent amount of fruit set, but the hay mulch ones had a lot more firsts. This is mainly firsts, at least firsts trying to come off the field. So both the roller crimper, like I said, they keep down the weeds because you're going to plant them pretty much right away, so it's a much better situation. We are maybe considering trying this for the summer tomatoes a different year, and then mulching the rolled down areas right away. And that might really eliminate weeds and maybe then the rolled down crops will get a little more digested. You know, all that top growth, if you don't spate it in, it doesn't really get digested and you don't get as much nutrient release. So part of it is there just wasn't as much in the soil. But spated and hay mulch beds, if you can get a good spating, seem to work as well as anything. So these are some of the costs. So the no-till planting aid, with us already having a toolbar and a few things, was about $1,100. The flail mower I was able to find online. I actually came out here to Kansas somewhere to pick it up. And then the coal cedar with the hitch was a little over $4,000. So sorry, there's not more data about what we planted, but it did demonstrate to us that we tried and tried. It's not necessarily a system that's going to work in our area, in our soils for us. Did you ever get rid of the bindweed? No. Well, it's funny, the wet year, we hardly saw any bindweed on the farm. And we didn't really have as much this year as we had two years ago when I was showing you that. Rebecca applied for a permit from USDA to buy these bindweed mites, have you heard about them at all? No. So supposedly there are these mites that only attack bindweed. And somewhere out in Colorado, you can buy them. So she had to go through this whole process. It's like same type of paperwork if you're going to transfer smallpox across state lines. So she applied for it and we were going to do it the next year, but because of all the rain we didn't do it. I had a bindweed problem and cattle worked wonderful. They cleaned it out. My only concern was were they going to carry seed elsewhere, but they digest the seed. I had no spreading. So haying it would be an option if you can find somebody that's willing to buy hay with bindweed in it. Yeah, we're hoping maybe the chickens might do something to it too, but we don't know yet. Have you guys ever tried anything with like on your cover crop having an edible mixed in with the cover crop? For us? Yeah. Like as a cash crop? No. Well, I guess I shouldn't say that. We're growing daikons. So we eat tillage radishes and we're doing the fermenting. And right now we're kind of trialing. There's some varieties from Johnny and other places that are really more culinary. And I've tried the tillage radishes. But right now the batch that we did is really has a lot of bitterness to it. And I suppose if you're playing a whole bed of them you can just pull up 100 pounds and you're not going to lose a lot. But the whole idea of tillage radishes is to leave it in the ground. And then otherwise we don't have a combine. If we did we'd probably get a lot of buckwheat because buckwheat seeds it almost right away.