 My name is Eric Busbee of AT Busbee Farm, Woodstown, New Jersey. We grow 125 acres of fresh produce. We've been experimenting with no-till as a way to conserve our organic matter and help build our soils and protect against erosion. In this area we have light sandy soils that tend to blow early in the spring and for 20 years we've been using this annual ryegrass as a way to protect our soils against that. We started thinking about going to no-till as a way to help conserve our soils to further prevent wind and water erosion and to help try to build our soils organic matter levels. This is a field of annual ryegrass that was killed three weeks ago. Earlier in the season we try to wait as long as we can before we kill it because if it's young and tender it doesn't last as long as a mulch. In another week we'll come in and hit spray this with roundup again to kill any weeds that are starting to germinate and emerge and then we'll plant into it a week after that. Or some of this we're going to save probably for another four weeks. This will last the rest of the season. We don't have to worry about it decomposing before we need it. As long as you have enough residue you can plant a week, two weeks, a month later. It's going to last and it's going to be an effective mulch as long as you have this kind of residue. We found that it's important to mow this grass early in the season when it gets about a foot tall. We cut it back down to six inches. Do that a couple of times. That helps promote root growth and also limits how much vegetation you get on top because if you get too much it actually gets difficult to plant into. So we just use a rotary mower and come through here a couple of times and cut it off. In the future we're thinking about trying a flail chopper to more evenly distribute the clippings. This is our hull and trans planter that we modified for use in this no-till situation. We put this tape shoe on the front which consists of a couple of coulters to open up a ditch and then these packer wheels which pack in the dirt behind the tape. It makes it a lot easier to put in the tape while we're planting. That way you get consistent spacing between the tape and the plants. This is the benefit of having our sandy ground though. This will go into the ground. In heavier ground I would be concerned that it wouldn't work. The other modification that we made to this planter is that we added these no-till packer wheels to the back to pack in around the plant. These put more pressure to move this dirt which isn't quite as soft as it is if you have a plastic mulch and you have to add this weight too. These were transplants that were set two weeks ago. They were set into this grass that was killed twice with a roundup and this residue although it helps repress the weeds isn't enough to totally control for the whole season. So what we do is after we've pruned the tomatoes and before we put the sticks in we'll come back with a selective herbicide that helps control the broad leaves for most of the season. I wouldn't say that we have this no-till system perfected. We still have problems and I think that we have more questions than we have answers but I'm encouraged by some of the things we see and we're going to keep trying and make a mistake and hopefully we'll get better.