 I'm Lou Lego. This is Elderberry Pond Country Foods and we're located in Auburn, New York, which is in the northern tip of the Finger Lakes. We are a very diversified fruit and vegetable farm. We have about 100 acres and 70 maybe of that is tillable and at any one time half of that is in a permanent cover. Either Timothy and Alfalfa or some other thing that we can cut. The permanent cover crops are principally for giving the land a chance to rest and to revitalize the soil with deep root cover crops and also to eliminate weeds that have accumulated during the period the land was in production. Then the rest of the farm which is in production, we do a lot of intercropping. One of the things that we think is unique that we do here is that we use a lot of hybrid mulching. We'll have a living cover and then within that living cover crop area we'll put rows of plastic within a living mulch and use the advantage of the living mulch to keep the plastic covered and to give it longevity and also again to make it a more workable environment so that is no bare soil between those sheets of plastic. This is the first year of one of our hybrid mulch fields. It was planted in rye in October. The way we normally would do this is we would plant the whole field in rye and then come in on the same day and lay the plastic. This year we tried something a little different, tried planting the rye between the rows of plastic and don't really like that as well because you ended up with a little bit of a band along the plastic. Plastic in these plantings is all one and a half mil embossed plastic. In this case it's black although other colors work also. We lay it with a mulch layer, the most basic plastic mulch layer that you can put down. It's not a raised bed, it's flat on the ground for moisture. After the fifth year the plastic amazingly because it's been protected by covers and by the growth of high growth in the aisles is very flexible. So we come through here with a mulch lifter. It comes out in one piece. In this case we're planting tomatoes into the hybrid mulch system. So the way we will do this is we'll burn holes at a three foot spacing. We then take a shovel full of menorah and a shovel full of mulch on each side of the hole. Then we come in, set the plants with the menorah mixed into the soil and then cover the plant with mulch to keep any weeds from coming up in the hole. We then set a cage on top of that hole for the tomato to grow up into. With the rye it's important to let it grow as tall as it can and as vigorously as it can. The rye is cut, the reason it's cut is to protect the plastic from the sun to make it last a long time. It also is a good crop with improving the soil and keeping the weeds down. There are two ways to mow the crop, either with a tractor mounted sickle bar mower or a large tractor mounted sickle bar mower or what I prefer is using a smaller hand walk behind sickle bar mower where you get a little better control and can determine where the straw is going to fall a little better. The goal is to try to get it to distribute somewhat evenly between the plastic and the ground. In this particular planting of tomatoes we will let this rye that's been cut reseed later in the summer when it thins out a little bit we'll go through here and seed annual ryegrass with clover. Overseed it right on top of what's here. Then that annual ryegrass will die next year, the clover will take over and that will be the permanent alleyway mulch for the next five years rotation. The clover is mowed several times a year to keep it down depending on the crop. With a high crop like tomatoes clover can be allowed to grow pretty aggressively but with a low crop it's useful to keep it fairly well mowed. It actually likes being mowed it comes back with increased vigor so it's a good crop for that. These strawberries are growing in our hybrid mulch system and they're growing on black plastic. In here the plastic has been in now this is its fifth year it's had four previous crops on it including melons and tomatoes and peppers and cabbage and now it's in its final cropping with the strawberries. To maintain the fertility in the plantings for the four or five years under the plastic it's very necessary that the field have been in alfalfa or in a good nutritive cover crop for three years prior to placing the plastic in the strips. Then in addition to that we'll use pelletized chicken manure in the holes at planting to give it a boost for the growing system. It's amazing when you rip this plastic up in the final year next year when we take this up the soil under this will be absolutely beautiful.