 I've been at Scattergood a long time, Scattergood is a small, quicker boarding school, boarding and day school located outside of Iowa City. We have about 50 students, so we're very small. We'll start just a little bit about the school. The students are really involved in what we do at the farm, both by eating and by working and everything else, and it's really grown over the years. How much that we've had students involved and just make lots of opportunities. I have a mission that's separate from our school mission and there's four parts of that mission and the very most important thing is that students be involved. That the farm is a learning laboratory for the students. The second thing is that we produce food for the community. The third thing is that we do outreach to the community and the fourth thing is that we try to better the ecological impact that we're having on the planet. Like I said, all the meat protein that we eat at the school, we raise ourselves, so that's primarily beef, lamb and pork, but also turkey a little bit, and some chickens. Poultry processing is a challenge in Iowa. That kind of limits the amount of poultry we have, but we have some really good relationships with other lockers around, so we're able to provide all the meat that we eat. Then in terms of vegetables, this time of year we're still eating beets, cabbage, onions, collard greens, kale, sweet potatoes, carrots, winter squash. We're still eating a lot of stuff from the farm. We do have a high tunnel, but I haven't totally figured out how to manage that. I should have been here earlier to listen to Adam, teach me how to manage my high tunnel better. I have no excuses. I think I've heard Adam Montry speak like probably a half dozen times, and I still can't do everything that, or can't do one-tenth of what he does. But we do produce a lot of the vegetables that we eat, and pretty much from August until December, everything that we eat, we raise minus grains. We don't raise wheat or anything like that, and then this time of year it gets a little bit trickier. We also grow a lot of flowers. We don't market really anything outside of our community, and part of that is because I don't want to be in a position where I'm competing with farmer friends of mine, those who have to sell enough product to buy health insurance and put their kids to college and stuff like that. We intentionally try not to compete with those farmers. A lot of what we do is we feed ourselves, but also just try to create a beautiful environment to exist and work in. We've also spent a lot of time recently adding restored prairie, both to our campus and our farm. They're geographically linked, but it's about a third of a mile hike from the school to the farm on paths through prairies and pastures and stuff like that. It's a fun place to be, like I've been there 23 years. My daughter just graduated last year. My wife and I got married there, so I can't say enough great things about it, but it's lovely in there. Getting to the task at hand, what we're here to talk about is a youth educator grant that we got from NCRSAR in 2020. That grant was to fund planting what we call an uncommon orchard. We have orchards with apples and peaches and pears and stuff like that, but there were some things that seemed overlooked that could be grown in Iowa that we weren't growing in Iowa. Some more unusual things, and we'll discover what those are later, but also growing those things with an understory that is made up of native pregnant old grasses and forbs. This whole idea came out of a class that I taught. When students show up in August, instead of just like they've been free all summer and then suddenly it's like welcome back to school, sit down in a chair and be inside and look longingly out the window for eight hours a day. We tried to work against that, and instead we start the year with what we call farm term, which are interdisciplinary classes that take place all morning out on the farm. Quaker school, we start with some silence in the morning, and then everybody walks out to the farm. We divide up into classes, and the goal is to teach the social studies, language arts, sciences, everything through a single type of class. I most recently taught one on seed saving. We were dissecting flowers, we were learning about cultural, like historic seed saving, all kinds of things. We learned about prairies and stuff like that. We also actually started, like we had never saved seeds at Scattered Air before, so we actually started a program up. What else? Trying to think of the ones I've taught over the years, oh, I taught one on fences, which was really interesting. We built a fence because I needed to have a fence built, but we also just looked at border issues, and what are geographic borders and political borders and all these different things, and just sort of considered this idea of the history of barbed wire. It's so interesting. Who knew? We learned a lot about barbed wire, but just really looking at this single subject, in this case fences, but coming from a lot of different angles. The idea for this grant actually came from a farm term class that I taught that was agriculture and climate change. What we mostly did is we ran around different soil types on our farm, we would collect soil and then do various tests on them. People heard of the underwear test? Oh, so great, yeah, when you get some underwear and you bury it and see how long it takes to decompose, or there's a tea bag, you also do the same thing with tea bags, with a red tea or a green tea, and then a lot of different sort of lab-based soil tests. We were looking at our neighbor's conventional corn, our restored, we have a restored prairie that was restored in the 1960s, and another prairie that was restored just 10 years ago, so we're comparing those. Our pasture land, our cultivated vegetable, it's certified organic, but our cultivated vegetable land, we were just really trying to figure out what's in the soil, what makes it unique to its own little micro environment, but also how do the actions that we inflict on the soil, how does that impact, and it was really interesting. We also had the advantage that we visited a number of permaculture sites around eastern Iowa and just were able to talk to experts and hear what they had to say, and then it really became clear to us that perennial food production, shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, perennial food production with a native understory is a great way to produce food for yourself, but also perhaps sequester the carbon to help alleviate some of the causes of climate change. This is my third youth educator grant. We're kind of like in a sweet spot for NCR, say our youth educator grants, because we have a captive audience of students and then just a lot of people thinking about different ways that we could incorporate them into the farm. There we wrote this YENC 2153. I don't think there's anything posted yet up on their site. We had to ask for an extension because things got a little bit crazy when it came time to order trees because of the pandemic, so we actually just had our final approval and stuff like that. So I think that at some point when everything is all taken care of, it'll be up and you'll be able to search it and find our results and stuff like that. Here are some of the photos that we did in this class. The most important thing is that you can't really teach a class to teenagers about existential despair. Nobody needs that, but especially 16-year-olds don't need that because they have a life ahead of them to sort of experience some of that existential despair. So it became really important like what can we do, that's the most important question. So we did a number of different things, just discovering, learning about our soil and stuff like that, but we also built a hugelkultur bed, which was really fun, just as a way to keep that stored carbon in the wood, keep that present, but also helping to raise food for us. Do people know Tom? Tom Wall of Red Fern Farm? He's more of an Iowa rock star than maybe a Missouri rock star, but that's a Red Fern farm and they grow a lot of chestnuts is what he's primarily known for and has been doing it for decades. But it was really important that at this class that we were able to say like, yeah, there are some problems and some ways that we could live with the situation is figure out ways to grow food for ourselves, but also figure out a way to question that carbon. Really good stuff. So the timeline, I think we got the approval for the grant in like January 2020. So we had some old pasture that was kind of poorly located. I had tried to farm it with vegetables a little bit, but it was a little bit too erosive, so we only did that for one year and it just made me too uncomfortable to put it back in pasture and I've had a little bit of experience taking stuff out of pasture and putting it into cultivation. So I kind of took that on and we just had a, you know, we have a small 50 horsepower tractor with a rototiller and tilled it, sewed some buckwheat on there, let the buckwheat grow, flower, mowed that, tilled it again and repeated with the buckwheat. So twice hitting that area with buckwheat, the buckwheat, the goal of that is to suppress the weeds. So we, tilling kind of killed, it was mostly brome that was left, brome and some red clover and so the tilling kind of helped take that out, but then by tilling, you know, you're bringing up a lot of varied weed seeds. So hopefully the buckwheat was, the intent was to sort of suppress those weeds a little bit and then we didn't till again after that second. So then when we sewed the understory, we just sewed on top of that. Fall 2020, the students did a lot of research and just talking to these folks and a great thing about a SARA grant is it really makes you think about how are you going to include other farmers? How are you going to rely on the expertise of others? And so that was really helpful for us. Tom, who was in that previous picture, he farms about 45 minutes from us. Henry at Berry Patch Farm, Nevada, Iowa, much further away from us, but we did a zoom with him and he's been doing perennial agriculture for decades as well. And then Sarah Folch Jordan of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. Do people know Xerces? Raise your hand. Okay, great. Yeah. Sarah is based out of Duluth, but she frequently comes down to Iowa, which is just so good for Iowa. And she put together our working with us, like the students researched a lot of different possibilities and then interviewed her and figured out different things. Ultimately, when it came time to put the mix together, she did the mix, which is really fun, like the stuff that she came up with. So then winter 2020, I think it was about this time of year, January, I thought, oh, I'll order the trees now. And everybody was sold out. I guess it would have been 2021. So like December 20, January 2021, everything was just sold out. So I got an extension on the grant, said like, we'll just manage the understory for an additional year, which is actually not bad practice. And then we were able to order the trees last fall 15 months ago. We did sell the understory. We got our seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery, a great nursery located in Minnesota. We get a lot of our prairie seeds from them. And then managing that, we're just mowing it a few times. And then finally spring, like 10 months ago, we planted the fruit trees and bushy. And this is the mix of the understory. Yeah. A lot of these things are just like minuscule quantities. And you can see from this point, these are the grasses, but then everything else is ford. And we're going for mostly low-growing things that could withstand some traffic but wouldn't outcompete the trees too much. So Xerces and Sarah have done quite a bit of work with Orchardus, primarily in Wisconsin, a little bit more in Iowa now. And so they had sort of a mix that they were comfortable with. But then with the Sarah grant money, Sarah was like, ooh, let's try some new things. And then ended up going way over budget, and then Xerces picked up the rest. So they were really helpful in this whole process. People admired that long enough. It's pretty impressive. Yeah, it's lovely. I don't have the eye. Like I can't walk through our Orchard now and identify. I can identify like four things out of the many that are there. And it could take a decade or more for some of these things to really establish and get going. But it was fun revisiting this when I was putting together this slideshow. This is how, again, so in the mail, you get this box and it's like, it's not very big, but it's worth $1,500, and you take out this zipped block of seeds, and you're just shocked that you think that you went into the wrong business. That's always my impression is like, why am I raising tomatoes when I should be growing these things instead? So you get this little bag that's filled with gold-plated seeds, and to make sure that you don't broadcast all your seeds in one area, you sort of divide your field up into any number of things, and then you string those off, and then you just plant that smaller area. If you're trying to plant too big of an area, you're going to end up with thick spots and thin spots and all kinds of problems that way. My big takeaway from this is that if you're doing nine areas, you want to have 10 buckets of seeds, because you're always going to have thin spots, and you want to be able to have some extras that you can go back, because once they're on the ground, you're not getting them back. So remember that this is a good takeaway from this, and here it is in action. So you can kind of see the upper right, so this is what we were sowing into, and March 22 a year ago, two years ago, and we just call those spring mustards. I don't know what that is. So what you're seeing there is kind of a problem plant. It's a really early season mustard that flowers really readily, so that's an important one that we want to mow before those flower seeds set. But you can see the pink flags, so we had it marked off, and that's our middle school, some of our middle school students out there spreading seeds. So then the trees, so again, this was in consultation with with Tom Wall and Dee Henry and other folks, and again, recognizing that we already have peaches, apple pears, stuff like that. So I ordered much earlier, we're able actually to get these things, so that felt really good. I've never heard of medlar before, have people heard of medlar? It's supposed to taste like apple pie, but be mushy and weird. I can't share like any results because we just planted these, you know, like a year ago, so I can't tell you like, oh yeah, quince grows beautifully in eastern Iowa, like we have no idea. And I can't talk about medlar other than that we planted it and it seems to be living, so these are some of the other things. We hit the Asian pears, we grow a lot of apples, but we don't spray like we're certified organic, and I just don't have time to really manage our apples, so they're kind of organic by neglect more than intentionally, so we make a lot of applesauce rather than eating, you know, fresh apples. My experience with Asian pears, we have grown some Asian pears off and on over the years, is that they're just much easier to manage. You get a hand fruit that is much more appealing without spraying. Like we planted on about 18 foot centers, and most of these things, we did three of these varieties, some things we did four. These are the students planting last spring. Of course we have deer and rabbit pressure, so we put a tree shelter on every tree, and like before things went dormant, I was out walking through and it seemed like there was one, one quince I was kind of, I'm sure of, and then one of the plums was maybe not doing well, but out of 56 trees, everything else seemed to have survived. We'll see what happens, you know, in the spring, but heading into the fall. And it was, we had a weird precipitation summer, you know, mostly dry, punctuated by really heavy rains, and then a really dry fall. So we were able to irrigate, irrigate the tree tubes, so important. Oh, here we're hauling hoses around to irrigate, yep. And then we did a row of berries as well, and again, things that we probably should have been growing, but hadn't been growing up to this point. Again, this is more of like a demonstration project, like I don't have like data to share, or I can't say like, you know, these are the big conclusions, because we won't know for a long time. So the native prairie is rejuvenated by fire. What are you guys, you guys planning on burning in your orchard? No, no, no. And that's, yeah, so we do have the picture that's sort of in the background there is another prairie that we put in, and it's mostly forbs. And fire, and again, I'm not a prairie expert. So if somebody knows better than I do, feel free to correct me. But fire sort of selects for grasses primarily. So, so in this one that we've had going for 10 years, and it's just gotten better and better and better each year, we only mow that. And the first year we mowed it four times, or three times, or two times. And now we we only mow it at the end of like now. I haven't even mowed it yet, like I still have everything's tall to catch the snow because we were so dry heading into winter, I wanted to keep it up. So so we'll just mow in the prairie, but we'll mow in frequently. Like we won't mow until we'll probably select, you know, as the fruits ripen and stuff like that. But we'll let it go. One challenge we had is that it was interesting, like I was seeing so much white clover out in there. And I have to see, like there are so many different, there are a couple of different prairie white clovers that were put into the mix. And and at first I was like, where did all this white clover come from? Like this is this is absurd. And and I thought it was a big problem. But now I need to get some people who have better eyes than I do and to come back and see like, OK, no, this is a native clover and maybe this one isn't. But we have had to do go out and do some, you know, hand, you know, remediation. Sauerdoc, you know. It appreciated all the tailing I did. Just put it that way. So if you got doc, dig it before you tell. I have a question. Oh, and then there's been a little bit of burdock and stuff that we just go out and dig. Yep. Sorry. What are you growing in your huddle culture mounds? Mostly cucurbits at this point. Carrots. What's that? I'm sorry. Did you say carrots? No, cucurbits. So like a winter squash, big vining things, because it's so hard to manage that it's hard to keep it weeded that I wanted something that was assertive and and that we could maybe just weed it once or twice. But then it would like sort of take it over. We actually couldn't do anything with that for the first three years, because I think that we were putting some pretty. We needed the wood to break down a little bit more. And did you mulch it after you covered it with dirt? Did you? Yeah, we solarized it. So we just have some old high tunnel plastic that we put on it to keep the weeds down until we planted it. I didn't do that on mine. I just made a little shallow coogle mound. And I grew the I grew so much basil this year and just tons and tons. And really, I just threw the seeds. I didn't even bother trying to space them out. I had I just had a ton of basil, different varieties. I just threw them all together, mixed them up. So if you want to try that out, you cannot fail. Interesting. Yeah. We're I'm with Casey Farm School in Kansas City, and we're not nearly as established as this. But we've been doing we have a new 11 acres that were yeah, going to restore some prairie, do some community garden and a lot of different spaces. So I love watching like the kiddos do all of that. So it's like more of a logistics question. But like when you were doing the class and the design and everything, like, did you keep most of that design on paper? Did you do it on computers? Like, how were the kids engaged and like really being part of the design? Yeah. So what do you mean, precisely by design? Like the paper, were you doing Excel? Were you were they involved? Like, yeah, when they were when they were researching the trees and the the understory species, most of that was just like Google Sheets. Because then they could, you know, spreadsheet, share it with everybody. And then it was easy to to have Sarah up in Duluth look at it. You know, that was that was the easiest way. It got to be a really complicated spreadsheet. Like every student had their own, you know, yeah. And then and then I had to go in and clean it up a little bit. But especially before Sarah took a look at it. But but yeah, that was the biggest thing. And and I'm trying to think for the trees, you know, there's just many fewer trees involved. And once we got past, you know, mangoes and stuff like that, it really, you know, limited what they wanted. But but that was more sort of conversational, like, you know, and people doing research. And so it wasn't like every kid working on their own because there's just, you know, the possibilities were fewer. OK, I'm just curious about the students, you know, are they like FFA school chapter or how do you find the collaboration with them? Ah, with the FFA, no, the students that you are. Yeah, so we're not like FFA, like, you know, we are sheep. We don't doctor, you know, I feel like a lot of production ag is totally different than what we're doing. And so we have like heritage, heritage, heritage breed hogs and and, you know, we grass finish our beef and grass finish our sheep and stuff like that. So I feel like our curriculum doesn't really mesh with a lot of other curriculum. But what we try to do is the farm term that we do in the fall is really important. There's four or five different classes. And and we just try to to meet the students where they are, what their interests are. So they self select into these various classes. But just being able to to get them to sort of think holistically, you know, about, you know, their world, you know, it's not always just divided up into little discreet content areas. You know, it's often the world is messier than that. And so I think that that's a big thing of what we do. And but yeah, I've reached out to our local FFA teacher a little bit and and she's just not interested in what we're doing. Also, we're like we're organic and there's like maybe one other organic grower in our county who's like 10 miles north of us. You know, there's not it's not like we're in the county east of Iowa City, like in Johnson County, where Iowa City is, there's lots going on there. If we're in Cedar County, much less going on in terms of that. So I think that we're kind of the weird farming neighbors. I just had a quick question about how you plan to manage directly around the trees. Like I didn't see any like mulcher or anything. Is it something because it's a prairie instead of grass that you they'll be able to grow next to the trees? Or do you have plans for managing around them? That's a great question. So what I've heard some from some people concerning, especially like wood chip mulches that you just invite rodents to come eat your trees in the winter. So we intentionally didn't do that this first year. And then we decided to really keep them water and really try to give them a really strong first year so that hopefully, you know, roots are well established and the trees are really healthy. We're not going to spray herbicide. I don't know. We'll have to see how it goes. I, you know, I have I throw a bush hog on our tractor and I go out there and I hit things, you know, when it was time to mow. You know, next year, I'll probably just do that twice. But I may take a little smaller riding mower and maybe just buzz around the trees. I don't know. Again, I'm here to early five years from now. This would be a much better presentation.