 Welcome everyone. I'm Joan Benjamin with the North Central Region ZARE program and it's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. This is the farmer's forum that we sponsor and we are a USDA funded organization. We give out grants to farmers and ranchers, researchers, educators, graduate students, so we have a wide variety of grants that are available and they're all that innovation and getting solid problems in the farm of the ranch. So if you want more information about ZARE you can visit the exhibit room and see our table there or go to www.zare.org. And I'm going to introduce our speaker, Chris Neal, today. He had one of our farm of rancher grants and actually he said several grants to our program in different topics but today he's having some fermentation which is a really hot topic and then we'll turn it over to Chris Neal. Alright, yeah. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Sarah, for, I've gotten, this is my fourth ZARE grant. So, if you haven't gotten ZARE grant, you know, I would encourage you guys to do that. I'll pass out a little thing about value adding to vegetables through fermentation. That's one of the outcomes of my ZARE grant and just a quick hand, who has done some fermenting? Okay, it's a hot topic like Lee Jones said, I'm no sand or cat, okay? He's not here, is he? Sorry. But yeah, you know, this is kind of like the Bible for me. The reason, I'm going to go through this real quick and then I have all this food up here for you guys to eat. I know lunch is right after this. So, you know, I want to have some fun here today. Here's some pickles. I'm assuming some of you folks are growing vegetables. Okay, so, we actually, I'm primarily like the Paw-Paw guy. That's how I got started. And then we got into goats because animals don't eat paw-paw trees and then we got a high tunnel and then we've grown all these vegetables and that's how I got into fermentation. So, you guys probably know that life fermentation is this ancient tradition around the world where people preserve vegetables. It's no rocket science. It's pretty easy really after you get the basics down. What we do is we have a facility where we're inspected by the Ohio Department of Agriculture for cheese production. So, you know, I'm used to jumping through the hoops of ODA and I was like, I saw this as another opportunity to jump through some hoops and learn how to bring a product to market. It's all about these lactic acid producing bacteria and when that bacteria is working on your vegetables, it's lowering the pH and that's your food safety control point that you have to keep an eye on. So, and that's it. It's pretty basic. Obviously, sauerkraut, pickles, kimchi are some of the ones that you might have heard of, some of the fermented stuff. We've done some experimenting up here. You guys can come up here and sample and tell me what you think. So, yeah, here's some rough looking vegetables but you can actually, you know, it doesn't really matter what they look like. They're going to chop them up and ferment them. So, that's one of the biggest benefits of fermenting is that, say you didn't sell it at the market or say you don't have a market and instead of just rotting or you feed it in the hog to put it in the compost pile, you can get a recipe, do a little bit of processing and you're making a preserved product that you can sell later for actually more money. So, yeah, that's, it goes from that raw product into a little package and so you can sell it at a store. We primarily sell all our stuff. We're from the Athens area and sell mostly at our farming market but we do have a couple retail accounts in Athens. So, yeah, your value adding to your vegetables and I've been a big promoter of this value adding concept because you want to make money, you want to survive and I mean, obviously you love what you're doing and that's good value to that but you want to pay the bills. So, this is a way to take up something that maybe you can sell for a dollar and turn it into something you can sell for three to four dollars. And again, preserving your vegetables, if you're unable to sell all your fresh vegetables, this is a great opportunity for you. And then, get a good recipe, you're obviously, you're working towards something that tastes good and people like what you're making that you have happy customers and they're going to come back and buy some more unless they get into fermenting at home. You guys probably heard about all the health benefits of fermentation. That lactic acid bacteria is like your probiotic in your gut and like your immune system, a lot of it is in your intestinal tract and so, you're going to be able to absorb the nutrients in your food and it's partially digested by this bacteria and so you're getting more nutritional value for less energy and it's a good thing. I kind of have enjoyed doing it because it's kind of a creative opportunity to, you know, expand our business. That's the way I looked at it and I learned a lot and it's definitely interesting stuff, you know, it's like when I show up I get people like, what's that smell, you know, it's like, what's that rotten smell, you know, it's like, it's like kimchi, you know, it means stuff like that. And you sell people and they say, yeah, I did my fridge and it was stinky. My wife calls it the dragon line of fermented foods, you know, like if you start eating it, you know, you've been eating fermented foods today. You got to make sure that, you know, you share your food with your loved ones. And again, the maximizing the value of our assets are, you have the kitchen. So it's like, I'm going to use our kitchen as much as we can and you have your food safety permit and you can get other permits and all you need for fermentation is the food safety permit, which is like 75 or 50 boxy years in Ohio. This is one of our helpers, Badger, somebody might know Badger. He doesn't have his beard net on there. I didn't want to put this picture on there, but I only had Badger's beard net. Badger's been coming out and helping us do some packaging of fermented foods. Here's our high tunnel and I just took this picture yesterday, so it's kind of in our downtime, but we had a bunch of the daikon we grew in there for kimchi, the Napa cabbage, we had some beets, carrots, which we put in our root kimchi. And, but also if you don't have a high tunnel obviously your garden, your source of your vegetables, or you can buy them from people. It's cheaper if you can buy stuff from other people than how busy you are. So this is kind of showing, we're kind of prepping the pickles. So we put our pickles in these kind of jars and these are reusable, so we charge a dollar deposit on these jars. And people in Athens kind of like that, you know. And we sell them to them basically for dollars. They don't bring back, and we're not out of anything, but a lot of people will bring back. And we actually, at some of the retail accounts we have too, they work that system, so we're not a recent bunch of plastic waste. Great leaves, oak leaves, these are things that we get off our farm that when you put them in your pickles, they actually keep them firm. And that's kind of the agroforestry kind of thing. So, yeah, we got started because there was a gal that was working for us, her name's Helen Shaw, and she was an open goats for us. And she had worked on gardens, she was mostly in the garden, but she wanted to get out on farm, and we had dairy, we needed help with dairy. And so we kind of took her interest and she started working with the gardens and growing the fermented foods and starting this whole process. And turned to a full-time job for her then, because I don't know if she was open to goat, but she was working in the garden, she was doing the kitchen work with the fermented stuff. It utilized her facility again. You put all this money into your infrastructure, you want to try to maximize the use of that. And we learned a lot. We did a lot of experimenting, and through this grant, we were able to do even more experimenting. Most of the time things work, but occasionally things don't work out. And then, like, we liked having those added things that are at farmer's market, but we sell, like, off-cost stuff, we sell our cheese. A lot of people are going vegan, so this kind of worked out where we were like, we had, you know, actually cheese is one of our biggest selling. This is an option for vegan people. Like Joan said, it's a hot item, so the kids at OU are excited about it. And added value to our vegetables. And that's all we actually did. We didn't grow vegetables to sell vegetables, we grew vegetables to ferment. So, does anybody here have a facility? Okay. Don't be intimidated by getting a facility. Okay. Some of the basic things are here in this picture. You have to have a sink to wash your dishes. You have to have a hand wash sink. Now, cleanable, wipeable surfaces. Lights, so you can see what you're going to end up with. And that's pretty much it. Hit water source. If you are not on public water, you have to have your water tested. We're on public water, so that makes it easy. Not that the water's good. I'm going to say that. It's not my favorite. So, if you make this investment into a facility, you're going to be able to do a lot of value adding, which if you look at who's making the money, I think a lot of the processors of agricultural products are needed. So, yeah. Do you have a home kitchen or a house kitchen? You might be able to do a home kitchen as well. Home kitchen is on, as you say, on your label. This is a home product. Then you'd be inspected by your local health department instead. Can you repeat the question? Yeah. This question or statement was more about a lot of the requirements of producing in a home. And I actually don't have a lot of background in that. In Athens, we have this great shared-use kitchen called ACENET. So, when I started doing our pop-up processing, I worked down there. And then when we started making cheese, we upgraded this building to make it an ODA inspected facility. I actually don't have a lot of experience with home processing. You mentioned that you might not be able to have pets in your home or things like that. But, hey, if you really want to do it, you're going to kick the dog out. I just wanted to add, I do baking out of my house and under Ohio, I'm classified as a, excuse me, a cottage business. So, I'm allowed to sell a certain variety of products within the state of Ohio. Once you get into what they call highly perishable foods or, you know, cheesecakes, things like that, then you need, if you're going to do it in your home, then, yeah, there's no pets, and you need inspections and all the other. But if you go to the Ohio site for that, there's a lot of information. Okay, so I'm going to repeat the gist of that. You can get a cottage industry license and there's certain products that are in that license category. But you need to find out more about that by going to probably the Ohio Department of Ag's website. Hey, and I would encourage you to always have a good relationship with your inspectors. No, seriously, I mean, if you have this mentality that these people are trying to put me out of business, they're actually here to help you produce a safe product so you don't go to jail or someone who doesn't die. So, I've always had a great relationship with our inspectors and, you know, you call them up, you say, hey, I want to do this, what do I have? What are the hoops I have to jump through? And, you know, I think that it's very easy to work with and they're working for you. They get paid by the state and their tax dollars. Yeah, you'll get inspected every year. The ODA guys come down. I have a food safety inspector, but then I also have a dairy inspector. And, you know, after we've been through the dairy stuff, we get inspected every month. Our milk gets tested every month. Our cheese gets tested every month. They'll show up, they'll look through all your records. And as long as you're, you know, doing your due diligence to record what's going on in your keep your facility clean, you shouldn't have any problems. And the basic thing about fermentation, though, is like I mentioned earlier, was the pH. And actually with cheese, it's the same thing. You're lowering the pH. And does anyone here have a pH? They're not expensive. You can get them online. We've got some pictures of ours here. There they are. There's two different versions we've used. The one on the left is the one that we started with. And we switched to this other variety recently. It's really important to do the calibration. There's the calibration chemicals in there. If you'll have a version for a 4 pH or a 7, since we're trying to get below like a 4.4 pH, that's, you're going to use the 4, which is that pink liquid there. You'll put your test on the bottom of your pH meter and that pink stuff, press this button, does this little calibration thing, and then you're zeroed into correctly being able to test your pH. Are there specific pH meters that are approved by OVA? The question was, are there specific pH meters that are approved by OVA? Haven't had that conversation. They've never said anything about ours. There are a lot of different varieties of pH meters. You can spend, like these are around 100 and some dollars, but you can spend a lot more if you want. So, yes. With regulations, do you have to worry about your pH being below 4 and your instrument not calibrated below 4? Well, you're going to calibrate your meter at that solution of, which is 4. But if your pH is 3.5... You're good. Okay. Well, you just want to be lower than 4.4. Okay. And if you're lower, you're better. But if you want to, you know, that gets into your flavors, like how sour do you want yourself. But was... Why is the pH so low? It's food safety. It's E. coli does not grow below 4.4 and that's the thing that's going to kill people. So, if you get... If you're into this value-added stuff, a little bit of food science you need, and I am no food scientist. Okay. But you just... You are now. I mean, I guess I kind of am. You know, it's the critical control point they call it. HACIP plans, hazardous, what's that called? Yeah. I mean, that's the kind of stuff you need to get into. And we have ASNET, Athens, or the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks, where I kind of learned a lot of this stuff and they encourage you to go to these workshops where you learn about this stuff. I've been in this for many years now, so I did that a long time ago. My wife's making the goat cheese and my cheese development and HACIP plan now for our facility. There's always more to do. But the gist of it is E. coli is not going to grow above 4.4 and that's it. You know, that's the main thing you're worried about. Well, sorry, below 4.4. Any other questions? Moving on. One of the most important things though is you need to keep records. And it doesn't have to be fancy records. You just have to have something that you can show your inspectors that you collected your critical control point data. And so we have to collect different things for the cheese production and it's not super high-tech or anything like that. It's just a little file that they can come and look at. Yep, you're doing it. Okay, no one's died and we haven't heard any trouble, so we're moving on. This is our license for frozen foods because that's one of the things we do with the PAPAs. But you've got to have your food safety permit first. That's, I think, like 50 bucks a year depending on the size of your facility. And then whatever else you might do in your facility, you might need another permit for that. Like an A-SNET, they have a bakery license, they have a canning license, they have a meat processing license, a seafood processing license and all this stuff. And the A-SNET works with the firms that are down there to get these licenses to learn all the ropes about the laws, about your process. But I mean, seriously, if you guys can fill out paperwork and pay attention to a few key details, you can do this stuff, it's not rocket science. You've got to have this basic stuff around your facility and scale food processors. This is our walk-in cooler. So again, we're trying to maximize, we have all this stuff for cheese, we do other stuff, so hey, why not use it for it? Maybe make some more stuff. Use it or sew it more. So you want to make some fermented stuff, you need a recipe and a plan. And obviously some of you people have done this before and you might have had some recipes like better than others. So keep in track of your recipes, find tuning your process and your recipe down where hey, this is really nice, I like it. That's kind of where we're at right now because we've done a lot of experimenting but we kind of want to get down to where we've got our five or so products that are going to, we're trying to kind of commercialize a little bit so we want to have a standardized product. And you need somebody who's going to pay attention to the details. Let's see. The thing about when you're processing, like say you're making pickles, okay, you're going to wash your pickles and there's a recipe on the back of that with a little flyer for sure I gave you. You're going to wash them, you're going to put them in a bucket, you're going to put the brine in the bucket and then you're going to wait the material so it's below the brine and I have some pictures coming up but basically you're going to have it at room temperature for about five to seven days, it could be a little longer and that's where that bacteria is working at room temperature and if it's too cold, it's going to take longer and if it's really warm, it might be faster. So what we'll do is we'll be monitoring the temperature of our place where we'll have some pictures here where they're at room temperature and when they're done, I mean we're going to be checking the pH every day or two and then when they get below that 4.4 if we're happy with the flavor and stuff or we might let it go a little bit longer then we just take the weights off and everything else, put a lid on it and put it in the cooler and store it and it's stable at that point. Can you do a little paper or paper strips to do the pH testing? So it's like, I don't feel like cool. Yeah, the question was, is can you use those pH strips and I don't think that that's going to be sufficient for what you need. It's, spend a hundred bucks, get the pH lighter. Well, if I just wanted to do this in the hobby, if you want to do it as a hobby at home, you don't really even need a pH meter. I mean because you're going to taste it and if it tastes really nasty, don't eat it. If it tastes like you think it should, then you're okay. I mean, so it's kind of like a foolproof method as far as if it's going bad, you're going to know. And you'll be able to see the bubbles, it's fermenting if you have it in a glass jar. Okay, the question was, do I ever heat the water in our brine? And no I don't. We never heat the water in the brine. The main thing about the brine is you want to dissolve that salt because you could layer in salt in with your vegetables. But then it's not going to be distributed equally around. So that's why you want to dissolve it in the water. So that when it's in there, it's going to get everywhere. So that's the key about that. This is showing how we're checking the pH of one of the products we make called cat-dukey, not to be confused with cat-dukey. That's one of my marketing lies. So yeah, you can see how, all right, 3.76. Check, it's safe. We're putting it in cool. Just that simple. This is really simple stuff. So those are all different batches? Yeah, we were doing big batches of stuff. So you don't try to get the same product and the same pH level? Well, if you want to do super big batches, you can do that. But we mostly focus on like a five-gallon bucket size. And so that's worked for us. No one's ever said, this is so different than the last batch. I mean, it's pretty close. So I didn't repeat the question on that. Sorry. Yes, sir? On your buckets, how do you use like an airlock combination or just let it breathe freely? Well, I got a picture here coming up about our buckets. This is a recipe kind of thing where we had, we keep our batch numbers and we'll put that on our label of our buckets. And so that batch would be the date that we made it. And then just some of those detailed questions you want to be asking like, and this is for pickles here, like how many pounds of pickles, how many grave leaves. We've, has anybody ever heard of spice books? Mm-hmm. Okay. We use spice bush because we're into like non-native forest crops and stuff, or sorry, non-timber forest products and native crops. We use the spice bush berries instead of pepper for a lot of times. So you'll see we wrote spice bush down on a couple of these. And then you'll see the date. We packed it. We checked the pH and put it into the cooler. So you, again, it's just like record keeping stuff. But that's really important when your inspector shows up. These are some food processing tools that we got partially through our Sarah grant. And this one right here, the big tube looking thing is a root peeler. Pretty neat little thing. You can put like 20 pounds of roots in there and in like five minutes they're washed and peeled. So we really have gotten into this thing called a root kimchi. So when you've got like Jerusalem artichokes and carrots and daikon rashes, I mean, that was really killing us as far as labor. This thing's awesome. If you ever want to try it out, let me know. Because it's sitting around most of the time. Yes. It's like the question was, is it a peeler or is it a tumbler? It's a tumbler. There's water that flows through it the whole time. And that chamber there, that little tube on the bottom is where the waste comes out, that black tube. And then that chamber thing opens up and they just fall out and they're pretty much clean. The question was, why do we like to peel them instead of use the whole thing? And this is basically a labor saver. I mean, because we could scrub them all down. But man, with those roots, there's just a lot of potential contamination. And you want to get all that dirt off of there. Like especially something like a Jerusalem artichoke. It's a nightmare, you know. There's just little nooks and crannies everywhere. The thing next to it is basically like, it's a motor that spins stuff and you can put different attachments on it. So we can slice and grind and all these different things. And again, these are the kind of thing that after you do it by hand in your hand, somebody a decent wage to do it, you're like, wow, we're not going to make anybody do this. And so you got to invest in some equipment if you want to make money. Okay, so this is our high-tech how we weight things down. We got our bucket. We put the stuff in the bucket. We put a plate on top of the stuff. We put like a five gallon glass jug. Sometimes we'll use different size weights or different type. But usually it's a glass jar with water in it. And then we put, the white stuff is like a cheese cloth. That's some of the, we use a cheese, it's called cheese bandage. It's like a plastic cheese cloth that we use for cheese production. But it's pretty much, it's a lot more durable and cleanable than the traditional cheese cloth. And then the string, you just tie it around. And so that's what you wind up with, is just a bucket with the plate weighted down with that cheese cloth around to protect it. Because what's going on is, when we do a lot of our fermenting is in the fall or like in the summer. So there's bugs out. So if you don't keep that thing down, you know, you might have fruit fly or something like that. That helps protect your product from contamination. Yes, sir. The question was about, he had heard about the cheese cloth being underneath the plate. And I've never done it that way. It sounds completely plausible if you wanted to try it. But I've never done it that way. Sir, do you keep it open like that or do you like the air getting into it like that? Or could you use a smaller weight in the top? Okay, the question was about, why do we leave it open like that? And could we do it a different way? And the answer is we do do it in different ways, but we always have the cheese cloth on the top. You want to have air being able, you don't want to have a sealed top. You just want to have your fermented product underneath the bottom. That's the key. I think you want to develop an aerobic aspect. Absolutely, anaerobic is not good, not tasty. So here's what we do is we stick them on these shelves like this. And I put the heater in there to show you that sometimes you might want to be controlling the temperature. And then you can't really see it, but this little thing right here is, there's a little thermometer up there, that little square thing, where you're keeping track of your temperature that your ferment's at. If you're outside temperature, if it's cold and it's harder to heat your facility, it'll just take longer to do your ferment. And unless you're in a big hurry, that's no big deal. Just got to keep an eye on it. Is ODA care about temperature at all? Or are they only care about the pH? The question was, does ODA care about temperature? Or do they just care about pH? And the answer is they just care about pH. The question is about grape leaves. Where do we get our grape leaves? And we just get them from any grapevine. There are no special grape vines. Just any vines, granite, grown in a tree. It's a nice reason to take a hike and go collect a few oak leaves. We just use them in the pickles. And the dilly beans. We use them in those too. Yes, ma'am. Were the grape leaves that you said oak leaves, too? You just wash them and put them in the brine like a bay leaf? Okay, the question was about oak leaves and grape leaves. And what do we do to them? And we just wash them and put them in there. So I found that the oak leaves are really good at producing a crisp pickle. And it's an ancient tradition, I think. Yes. Okay, the question was about, is this the same room that we do the processing in? And how is our facility laid out? And the answer is that this is really not in our main, what we call our mate room. This is kind of like a hallway back to our walk-in pool. So this was just like a spot off to the side. And it's all cleanable and wipeable surfaces. So our whole facility's kind of got the stuff that we need. You know, when we started doing this, our inspector, he knew nothing about this stuff. I actually worked with him and we got educated together. And they haven't had any problems. So they were like, well, you're doing everything right. So this is basically what you wind up with in your walk-in cooler. This is what we're winding up with is a bunch of five gallon buckets with lids. And so what's going on is there might be a plate on top of the pickles. It keeps them below the brine. And then we just put a lid on the top. And then they just sit in there until you take them out and pack them off. Yes? The question was about this being an ancient tradition. How did ancient peoples utilize... They didn't have a walk-in cooler to put their stuff in, what did they do? Well, it's a lot like cheese as far as you would put it in a cave or you would put it in some place like a root cellar that's cold. The temperature we keep our cooler at is a little colder than we keep our cheese at when it's aging. So yeah, basically if it was a little warmer, it would just keep working and keep souring. And it might not last as long maybe. But if you're hungry and you're eating it, I mean it's disappearing hopefully. Yes? The question is what is the critical temperature to stop the fermentation? And I would say 40... You're looking at what is your cooler temperature. And it's like about 33 or 40 is where you're slowing it down a lot. I mean it's still probably fermenting. But I've had stuff that has been in the cooler for over a year and a half. You know, you take it out and it's still crispy and great. Yes? The question was about best buy date or sell by date. And we actually haven't had any issues with stuff going bad on the shelf. Because as long as we've got enough brine in the top... Well I'll show you some pictures of some problems that we have had. But really it's the stuff... Let me show you some pictures on that. Most of the time you're not going to have any problems. But you can run into a problem. So mostly you stick it on the shelf and it's a good refrigerated shelf. Are you legally required to stick a best buy date on the product? No one... The question was are we legally required to put a sell by date? And that conversation has never come up with my specter and myself. Yes? This gentleman's comment is that the best buy or sell by dates are not regulated by the ODA. And it's just something that a company might do to ensure the best product for their customer. Any other questions? We get our buckets... I get them from Lowe's. They have BPA freeing buckets and it's just convenient and they have them. But you could get pallets of them from different suppliers. Well they are food grade buckets. You get different color buckets. They're all made with the same plastic. But the white buckets, the tan buckets and one other color... I called the company and they said basically it's all made with the same plastic. We had to just pay money to the FDA to get these ones approved. We've only approved these three colors. So we try to always use white buckets that say BPA free. But occasionally if we were running out of buckets and they don't have anymore at the store sometimes we use another color bucket. You'll see like there's a blue bucket in there. You don't want to use the different color buckets. So ideally you plan ahead and you have plenty of supplies to not run out. Okay so a lot of people have heard about a lot of vegetables that you ferment. And you know when we were researching this stuff we didn't really see a lot of tomatoes because they're high acid food. But the tomatoes have worked out really well for us. And so I wanted to show you how well they hold up. And we've got a salsa up here that I want you to try. So what we do is we do like peppers, garlic and onions in one brine. And then we do the tomatoes in another brine. And then we'll take them out, do a little bit of food prep with that food processor and make salsa. So yeah these are, this is our table at the farmers market. And we've got like four different kimchi right now. We've got this beet green daikon kimchi which is a little milder. Then we've got your more traditional kimchi which is a little spicier with the napa cabbage and the daikon. Then we've got the root kimchi which is Jerusalem artichokes, ginger, carrots, beets, daikons. So that's another, it's just that one's a little more gingery for us. And then we've got the kakduki which is a milder version of kimchi, another Korean recipe. And then we've got a salsa there. We've got these sweet spicy beets which we didn't use the purple beets. We used the white beets kind of because the purple beets, we kept having some issues with them. They get this like mold on the top. And so we tried this other version. You guys check these out, they're kind of weird. You know, you might like some people like them. Then we've got the dilly beans and the cucumbers. And we've done, let's see, I also brought a sriracha sauce. We've done a bunch of different sriracha sauces. Peppers, you know, like doing straight up peppers and garlic and onions. We did those together. Here's our farm logo. And like I said, we started with paw paws. We got into goats. And that's like our whole thing that we're working on. The goats don't eat the paw paw trees. They eat everything else. And then they fertilize the soil. Has anyone been to the paw paw festival? Okay, you've got to come down, put it on your calendar mid-September. This year Joel Salloch has come to speak on Sunday. And we're excited about that. Last year we drained 73 kegs of paw paw beer. All made at Ohio Micro Burris. All the food vendors have like paw paw dishes. We have a lot of educational things. Check out our website, OhioPawPawFast.com. The paw paw is the official state native fruit of Ohio. And so it's your duty as an Ohio citizen to come down. And have a good time. And there's a picture of a paw paw. I want to do this chance for you. I had a couple serigrants with paw paw, so I figured this would be okay. And there's some goats. And so we're seasonal. We only know goats from like March till Thanksgiving. So we're getting ready to have a bunch of kids. And Sasha and Celeste who work for us, they're here today. So you might run into them and talk about goats. And now actually I've become a county commissioner. So like I'm like kind of like this is my second year. So I'm kind of like kind of like trying to let let go a little bit of the farm because I'm trying to do other stuff with like recycling and energy aggregation and community involvement with politics. So I'm like really relying on my staff to do a good job. And they are. That's great. That's it. You mentioned anaerobic. I do anaerobic fermentation. And I think the difference tastes great. But I heard you from a used probiotic doctor and a maker who says that there's only anaerobic that you can beat to a moldy. So he had a comment about anaerobic fermentation and how that might be most applicable for beats. Yes. Did you discuss with the state official driver non-liquid acid fermentation where you don't develop a low pH and state requirements on a community in that case? The question was, did I talk to the ODA about non-lactic acid producing bacteria, not getting a low pH? Not really. Mostly when we were having this conversation with our inspector who didn't know anything, he called up to ODA offices and said, hey, this guy wants to make sauerkraut and stuff. What's that? How do we deal with this? And he said pH. We don't talk about any other way besides pH being a critical control point. Do you use crocs at all? The question was, do I use crocs at all? And the answer is no, because I don't have any. And if I had some, I might, you know, and obviously I would say there would be a benefit of not using plastic. And maybe in the future we might find a source of crocs and go that way, but right now we're just using plastic. Yes? The question was, what kind of equipment do we use at our farmers market because this is a refrigerated product? And see that cooler right there? That's all I use. Do you have to take an office in there or anything? Yes, we're inspected at our market by our local health department and our health inspector will come around and get your thermometer going out. And if she tests you, you better be in the zone. So, and yes, you do have to have a thermometer in each of your pools. Now, not every place in Ohio is going to be regulated the same. We've got a very sympathetic to small farmers health inspector. Other counties I know are requiring you have plugged in refrigeration. Unfortunately, even though Athens County, we have one of the best farmers markets in the state, we don't have that kind of infrastructure. That's one of the things that we're working on trying to get our permanent location together. Yes, sir? The question was, have we ever tried any fermented pawpaw products? And yeah, we did. We tried some sodas and they were pretty bad. We did a spice bush berry fermented beverage which didn't turn out too bad. So, we did a lot of experimenting and the pawpaw, it's tough. I mean, it's challenging enough on its own. Have you done the kombucha and then the second fermentation added pawpaw to that? Okay, the question was, have I done the kombucha and then in the secondary fermentation added the pawpaw. And I've done the kombucha at home but I never added pawpaw to it. But yeah, if I ever had less things to do, I might try that. The question was, do we rely on just naturally occurring lactic acid producing bacteria or do we inoculate it with some other stuff? And most of the time, we're just relying on naturally occurring stuff. Because we have the cheese and we've got whey, we have incorporated the whey a couple times. Sorry about that. Because we're a goat dairy and goat whey is kind of goatee, that can be a turn off for goat phobic people. So, we've tended to not rely on whey. It happens naturally at the right temperature on its own. Yes? Can you handle some babies? Do you peel them first or do you peel them whole? The question was, when we're doing tomatoes, do we do them whole or do we peel them first and we just do them whole? Well, those were just like, maybe we cut off the top or maybe there was a bad spot or something. So, most of the time, you can see here. Right, we don't cut them until we're turning them into salsa. So, it's actually a really fast way to preserve your tomatoes. You've got a place to store them in the cooler. We've used any old kind of tomato. We haven't done a lot of, like, experimenting with this or that. A lot of these are like slicers and they work fine. They work really great. The question was, is do we add the oak leaves or grape leaves to the tomatoes and no we don't. Alright, so you guys want to try some of this fermented food before we run out of time. Come on up here, grab a plate and sample away and thank you for coming.