 I'm Ryan Schmidt and I'm an entomologist and I work at Echdices Foundation located at Blue Dasher Farm. We're out here in rural South Dakota by Esteline. It's a non-profit that is working, designed to work closely with farmers and ranchers that are trying to figure out how to implement regenerative practices on their land. And so we work very closely with that and we have a firm belief that as researchers that are trying to help farmers we also need to kind of be farmers ourselves. So that's why Echdices is located on a working regenerative farm, Blue Dasher Farm here in eastern South Dakota. So this is a roller crimper that we built with funding from SARE and this is designed to terminate cover crops if they're at the correct stage. This piece of machine, the idea came because we had a lot of farmers in the area that were interested in using a roller crimper to control their cover crops in the spring time before they put in their cash crops. And the problem they were running into is there weren't a lot of available in our areas in South Dakota and they also cost quite a bit of money which was a big hang up for a lot of producers that were trying something different on their farm. Roller crimpering was kind of a new idea so they didn't want to invest a lot of money if they didn't have the funds or weren't sure that it would work well with their operation. So a colleague of mine, Mike Bredesen and I were talking to some local farmers and we kind of came up with the idea that we could build one of these machines for not that much money and not that much time. And so that was the idea and we approached SARE to get some funding for it and the project took off from there and this machine is built from mostly scrap parts and that was the whole idea for cost savings from this. So the roller crimper itself is made from an international 490 disc and so that's the frame for it but if for whatever farmers needs they can scale up to different machinery that would work or scale down for different frames quite easily you can find very small discs or you can find quite large ones out there and this one we chose this size because it met the needs this is about 23 feet wide and it met the needs of the farmers in the area but it also was below what most farmers wanted from from new discs so it had no trade-in value so it was very cheap to get and then from there once we had selected that we went to work on finding the other scrap pieces that we needed to complete the drums on the on the roller so the drums we found in the salvage yard those long tubes you see there that we attached the blades those are probably out of the North Dakota oil fields we think that's what the scrapyard guy thought and they just so happened to be the perfect diameter which is 16 inches to to mount roller crimper drums and then we did purchase you'll see there are straight blades on the machine versus the chevron pattern and we did that because it was very easy for somebody like myself and Mike who had never well did anything or put together any sort of machine before to to assemble that versus the chevron blades that you typically see on a roller crimper that have required some kind of bending of the metal or cutting of it these were really easy to get from up from a steel manufacturer in the area they even cut the blades to length for us so then from there we just assembled it using expertise from our farmer cooperators who who knew how it showed us how to weld and how to assemble machinery so that's kind of what ectises is all about learning with farmers and ranchers and kind of providing some of the the expertise that maybe they don't have the time or the equipment to do themselves to do that research and for the farmers the final cost in materials for this project was roughly five thousand dollars which is what our goal was for this so material which is substantially less than what you find online currently a roller crimper of this size is probably thirty to thirty five thousand dollars so it's substantially less than that and the hours we put into it total are roughly a hundred and sixty hours which hopefully the next phase of this project is to release videos of our build as well as blueprints to the public so that people don't have to spend so much time trying to figure out how to fit all the pieces together