 This project was a collaboration with another farmer, Steve Eyde, and an extension agent, Irene Graves. This was placed in 2014, 2015, 2016. What is quinoa? It is technically in the spinach family. When it grows up, the leaves, the hardwood, if you pluck up a leaf, it tastes just like spinach. It's a channel podium quinoa. It's considered a pseudo-serial kind of grain, native to South America, and it's gluten-free. It looks exactly like the weed or lamb's quarters. It doesn't distinguish itself until it's about a foot high. Then you can tell there's something different going on here. The objectives of my research project was to verify viable varieties that can grow in North Dakota, develop a producer-friendly way to plant and harvest. Typically in South America where it's grown, it's all hand-work. We're looking at mechanical options. We're looking at test harvesting methods, develop a direct marketing model, and educate the public. Those were our objectives. We're pretty good with that. This is my stand in 2014. That is all quinoa. That is not weeds. Every bit of that is quinoa. The good news, the height on that was, I think my lowest end was 36 inches, and on the high end, I think I hit within six. That I took was the very end of July, early August, and I think in about August 3rd, I had three and a half inches of rain, and that did weigh it over, so a lot of it didn't tilt over after that. If it gets too much rain, it will go down. What you see here, you see a little bit like light shining, that is the grain right there. I have a lot of the pluck-out belief is exactly what it's made of. I did sell some leaves at Farmer's Market as salad. No one had ever seen it. You never see that in a healthy store, but it is what it is. The why I chose that, so going back, a friend had me over. They served quinoa, and I said, I like this, and I like bringing things, and so it has a high nutritional value. This was a new crop in the area. No one was growing it. I like my adventures. It's definitely a biodiverse crop because there's nothing like it, so that sends me to the landscape and the taste, which we'll get into an issue with the taste later. So this is technically the first time I ever grew it. So after leaving a friend's house, I thought, okay, I could try this. I went online, found wild worth of garden seed at Oregon, and they sold quinoa. So this is in the garden at the time I shared with my mom, and I'll tell her there's challenges in sharing garden space with relatives because everyone has their agenda. So I planted 30 feet of this, and I rescued part of it from being killed under because she was in the process of taking it out. And I said, no, no, no, this is my row. And she said, no, it's weeds. I said, no, it's not. And so it was quinoa, but it looked exactly like the land scores. So I mean, if you don't know that, you're going to kill it under. This variety here is chili churri vanilla. It was the variety I ordered. And this was taken, this is end of September, and that year was pretty, we had a fair amount of rain that year. So this is the hardest color you get with that variety. Not all varieties will have that color or look. And then this in the garden, I cut by hand. I had to get it cut before it was going to snow, and I was going to shovel it out of my hand as well. So there were some challenges. But I got seen from it anyway. This is another take of the same garden. It does tend to start leaning down towards later in the fall. This was not from rainfall, but it did have, it did have any plants. I planted it very thick, but I also kept it watered. That's probably why it did produce well. There wasn't, despite the competition it had with rainfall. So the experiment, so here's what we now found, absolutely will not work. No tail does not work with this. It needs a prep seed bed. So if it's poorly prepped, it doesn't work. If you over seed, it'll get too competitive, and then essentially it just doesn't get very high. And you can't plant it too deep. That's an issue there too. So this is where I tried a year before I got the grant, a little bit in the field. This is where I tried it with no tail, with my favorite tractor, a John Deere 40. I need two cylinder fans out there. The tractor is homemade. My father made this years earlier when we used to raise silage corn. And if you had red areas, there's no way you're going to get in there. So after it dried out, he'd sneak in there with this tractor and that two row planter and plant it in there. And the neighbors were wondering, how did the corn grow? We know you didn't seed that, but there's a secret behind that. So that's a John Deere 71 corn planter that we mounted on a piece of iron. And what had to be changed for this experiment is the corn bottoms were swapped out for beet bottoms. Beet bottoms have a depth band, so you can't grow more than three quarters of inch below the soil. That's how you maintain your depth of control. I know some have tried it with a grain drill, but it's a thing a little too deep. If you put it in the grass seeder, well then it's on top, and it has to get rained. At least this way you can get it in the soil. And so the model 71 John Deere planter is a very universal piece of equipment. I don't know if there's a lot out there, but they have a lot of uses. Downfall, I had to deal with, is I had to make the whole seed plates. Once I drop it with some gear, the plates are spinning, you can order blank seed plates, but you didn't drill your own holes. So that was a crowded error because I used the smallest bit and then started dropping seeds and realized, okay, going through, but you can't get too big. If you got too big, then you had plumped holes. Because two seeds is one to one. That's a picture of the depth band there that's attached to it. And so if there are vegetable seeders out there, but this was the cheapest route to go. I think I paid maybe, I don't know, 30 bucks for the depth band or something like that, that I used. That seed bed for this year, we went over it five times to the Rolifex cultivator. There was manure up a year before and Jesse can attest to this. We go ahead with the manure, don't we? There you go. So that's why it was gone over that many times. Wheat free is best and in that field that year we were pretty good with because we cultivated, weighed, let things emerge. We got the weeds kind of under control. And it does well in the manure. For those who have cattle, a lance quarter and livestock carriers go hand in hand. So it does like that. Ideally, what we found with research is that 12 to 24 inches rows are best if you go up to Oregon and not get them back to Washington, WSU and their plots with Kevin Murphy. They had 12 to 24 inch rows. My planter is on a 30 inch row which is typical for corn and ideally between plants 6 to 8 inches. So that was another trial and error with my seed plates is that I should have spaced the holes a little bit more and almost got it right. But that's trial and error. Germination within 7 days again looks like a weed cannot have chemicals. So competition, you have more than one year of data on that. This is what it looks like when it emerges. So here I had a little too thick this year the way it did. So a little bit choked each other out so some one and some just kind of went away. And everything you see there is except that is not quinoa but everything else in this picture is. So germination was quick. This is what chemical damage looks like because within 7 days of germination I got drifted on and it took out a section of that field and so it cups very quickly. And this was within 24 hours of drifts of this photograph. This is the field that I planned at the end of this year. I can tell it's emerging in here. That's what it looked like at the beginning. There's a lot of organic matter in this field next door I tested. I think I'm in the 8% area. Growth. So here looks like last quarters but then I have other things in there. I got a 2 row generator on the same tractor so I could keep the rows clean. I had the shields to protect the dirt from going over. I know that sometimes you've got a vendor or it would be one brand that takes a little better but the shields I took off were from a 1940's model corn cultivator that dad had not used since he was a kid. So we made it work. So there is a weak competition there. This ground was not certified organic at the time but it would be considered transitioning. That was a challenge that if I could do it over I would have had winter ride the year before and then planned it and I would have had. The weak competition this year wasn't bad. There we go. So my highest was 59 inches. That's 58. The load was 3 feet but I think on average I was in the 50 inch range. And again this is taken about an hour before sunset and I got a purple tint with the variety here. The varieties were grown from Wild Garden Seed out of Oregon Cherry Vanilla and brightest civilian rainbow the two varieties. There are several more out there if you visit WSU and Postbop not Pullman they test like 50 varieties a year. I'm not sure how many come out of South America but I wanted to distinguish this because part of the experiment was also testing amaranth not Homer amaranth but burgundy amaranth that's next door and so I had the only burgundy field around that can withstand a lot of rain and it will stand up in it. By the time we harvested this the quinoa was grouping the amaranth will stand up straight until frost and then the burgundy color disappears in 24 hours which is a bummer because here's my pretty field that's now depressing that's another view of it so yeah it was when once it got so high it didn't provide the canopy to keep things from growing and there was a point where once the top of the plants hit the bottom of the tractor I knew I'm going to cultivate this is this little area here that is where the chemical drift happened in there so that was the area that wiped out because it in 24d moved in well it doesn't exactly do a blanket cover but it settles an interesting area actually where in front of me there was some too a few random amaranth plants ended up in there too that wasn't a big deal this is one of my field tours that was a different plot I should tip it out I don't like photographs of myself but anyway if we do what it grows you couldn't do nothing the other grower he had narrow rows see what happens if you didn't cultivate it you can cultivate it or do companion crop a lupin was applied in the other grower's plot he had more weed issues and so I think if maybe I hypothesized if we didn't have the initial repressure the companion crop would have worked out well but for that year it didn't pan out very well harvest so generally you should have a killing frost so it can dry down and it did not dry down it had the maturing color it just wouldn't dry down until the killing frost drying weather so after the frost it took a while for it to dry we swapped it anyway we could have straight cut it but we felt swathing it would guarantee that it's going to dry down the frost and you want a moisture level like flax under 11% so what I do is I go out there grab some grain off my hand stick it in the moisture tester and test it and then once we felt at one point I realized the grain is dry enough the plant matter is not because once you get in the combine in October we waited that long because it just didn't seem to dry down and the frost came late that year and it's like the window for opportunity at that time for it to be dry enough it wasn't until like 3 in the afternoon and then once 6.30 came we could tell that the combine would start a little bit and it's like okay it's getting wet we have the L2 cleaner it's a certain alt crop so with threshing because it's such a small seed with the stocks and whatnot it was easy to plug though it wasn't a hard gun plug but the line Airbnb was setting 350 on this model and so 50 points meant the difference between pulling all your grain off the back end or plugging up so you had to be really precise with that that was a challenge we had and the trash that was a shocker when we looked in the hot bird and I'm looking like where's the grain check success and I knew the grain wasn't blowing off the back end and I just see like plant matter and I dug in it and I could find grain we had someone clean it and you got it separated so with the trash we ground it with our oats for cattle so it didn't go waste by any means there's still other things in there so because we swapped it we also had some pigeon grass in there so I mean some things challenging so there was some other seed in there because we got everything when we swapped it and like on the plant itself the seed starts pretty low on the plant so where you cut it with a swatter you do get the pigeon grass or wild buckwheat and so I had for a 2B model clipper mill the 1.18 by 1.8 top screen and a 1.16 from a lot of commodity traders out of Chicago and for whatever size you ever know you have to and so these are courtesy of Steve Eyde this was his test when he started testing some things you can see it here that was the weed pressure he had his soil fertility wasn't as high as mine and he used a regular hoe drill where he plugged holes to get it to wet so he didn't have 30 inch rows it was much narrower but the weed issues were challenging but he ultimately did combine his he had a little more that site going into alfalfa to deal with some of the weed issues and so he had a little bit more weed challenges in that so our lessons learned seedback prep is very important on my site we did cultivate more than the other site we felt that made a difference having the correct planter or seeder your date so you got to wait until after a frost and I got in a little bit earlier and we weren't sure did we hit it at the right time or not because there's that line between are the weeds going to get ahead of us or are they going to catch up to us and the cleaning it is disappointing to look into hopper your combine or the plant debris in it but then I couldn't get every weed seed out that was a bit of a challenge maybe if we swathed higher maybe we could have avoided picking up the pigeon grass and the challenge with the pigeon grass is that it's above the same size as the keep one you can see the color wise you know that it's different in the future this plan was you want a different sieve for this combine you can peak out with the ideal planting date and a loop in between we didn't put harry vetch in a couple rows and oddly enough it didn't germinate super quick but it germinated enough that six years later I still have harry vetch here in there but it's not real bad saponin so what you buy in a store tastes good however there's a natural coating on the seed that is a pesticide and the EPA does regulate this as a pesticide so a scarifier is needed to remove that essentially it's a dust but if you grab the grain it is horrible it's like vinegar is sweeter so if you have a scarifier that's a photo of one you can get it cleaned off I've located a machine last year so that that is a challenge of marketing this is that consumers want so they can root the tree and cook so I tried rinsing it which works but drying it was really very labor intensive and without the scarifier you can't get it off so I couldn't grind it for flour for pasta this works well but I did grind a batch I didn't try to make cookies with it but the saponin was there I had to throw it out it was just too too gross tasting to try storage it should be pest free dry under 11% when you put it in market so in the US we import majority of it our demand here for quinoa has removed the diet of those living groups for centuries yay us that's the removal of saponin would impact the cost big time the cleaning is really I thought growing it okay we got a plan for growing it but cleaning it was an issue because no great elevator has a scarifier not that I have one yet local market I could get the $11 a pound though for what I could get cleaned that's what I got for the markets looking classes we held two different ones of how to cook food free making pizza with it and salads with it we had fun with it this was some nutritional facts Irene Graves did a session as you provided that I think some notable things are the protein I'm trying to find the protein here where's that at oh 16% 60% growth that's a high fiber it's a high fiber grain Irene Graves provided this for us she compared the size with lentils brown rice long grain and short grain brown rice so it was a very tiny seed so I was working with the seed plates there was a lot of testing with different size drill bits and there's another idea that is my own seed there compared to right there that's the little seeds we picked up in the field as long as we're hard to get out but what we did do a few consumers were willing to buy it until they were able to sap it in if you put it in water lukewarm water for about an hour I think even a half hour the water is going to get cloudy you pour it off add water again until it's clear if you had a fine screen colander then you could just keep rinsing it up and you could cook it that worked but most consumers want it ready to cook that's the demand of our consumers here so that's if someone's going to grow it that's something they have to consider what do consumers want questions? yes did you hear anything from the plant material? the uh... so when we combine it over the second year we moved things around the rotation and I planted it and the weed pressure was got to be too much so the decision was made to terminate the crop we put it under we cut it with a swapper and bailed it and our bails, what did we get? five and eight? nine? something like that you have stocks in that plant that are not as thick because it's on a far spot but still it's a hard stock it was bailed dry enough we fed that to the cattle they cleaned it all up, stocks and all which I thought was really weird that they would clean it up that well so if you work as a re-fertilizer re-fertilizer the cattle will take care of it and the grain was in there the cattle ate it and it was sapping on it I figured if they eat the whole thing it says something would the plant itself behind protein would it be like a kosher or something like that? the I wasn't sure, I don't know what the protein level the leaves are, the grain is high in protein that's a good question because I think spinach and the cattle didn't have any digestive issues no issues, no sick cows that was the first thing they cleaned up in the re-fertilizer it's like alfalfa, no, we're cleaning this up yes is it any production acreage in the US? you said you were working with Kevin Murphy we did, I mean I did three years is there, yeah is he creating lines for production acreage in the US or is most of it produced the majority is still imported there is some acreage in Colorado and I know that there was some large acreage in Montana but I never heard how it went and that was like four years ago up in Saskatchewan there is some large production acres up there in the Esteban area because Esteban has a processing facility but we still import them most of the majority of it do they scarify them to give back something? they get a massive portion