Hi everyone, my name is Kim Bryson, thank you very much for inviting me to be participating in this. I'm going to be talking about drones in research in relation to agriculture, in fact in education as well. And I think my talk quite nicely segues into some of the things that Guru has been talking about because the buzz of today's agriculture is around these disruptive technologies, internet of things, big data, drone technology, smart agriculture, they're all buzz words and commonly tossed around and there's been a number of big conferences in the agricultural space and farm management space about how such technologies can be of value to the agriculture and to the whole food science issue of producing good quality food in a sustainable way. What we've done at UQ is look at how we can incorporate things like an internet of things, a multi-sensor mesh network to collect real-time biophysical data which we store in the university's cloud and we've done that around the whole thousand-odd hectares of the University of Gatton's regional campus which is a multi-enterprise agricultural centre and we've also incorporated a second multi-sensor mesh network around 10 kilometres away from the campus that will look particularly in relation to, we've set up a living laboratory there is what we called around how we can use this real-time biophysical data with drone technology to look at biomass of pasture in particular but that can end up going obviously to various crops and vegetation as well. So this network that we've set up, it's very flexible, we work with technology from libellum, we can look at different types of communication protocols so we're not just looking at Wi-Fi but we're looking at other types of radio interfaces that allow us to transmit data in real-time over long distances and through buildings and trees etc. And it's a network that is basically self-healing and we have a number of these nodes set up across the campus, here we go, smart agriculture, smart water, smart environment and smart security, this last one being the smart security one being essentially the ability through the network to turn things on and off or open and shut gates which of course is really important from an agricultural perspective. The agriculture one looks at, well in fact I think my next slide looks at the types of data that you can gather from these sensors when it's installed and we have all of these nodes and most of these sensors around the place. So we're collecting a lot of biophysical raw data in real-time which we store in the cloud and have a dashboard to essentially access. The idea is that this is done through open source so that at the end of the day people can have access to this so turn may be interested in it, other people may be interested in using it remembering it's subtropical information really for people who are interested in the agricultural space but we're looking to certainly make that available at the moment through eduroam to people who are involved in eduroam rather than anything else. We've tried it on an open network and that we found that it had a risk of the university being hacked through our system so we closed it down from worldwide access to eduroam access. So lots of data biophysical data coming in and here's a diagram that tells you that we've got data coming in from these various nodes into our cloud and then we're using that data within the educational environment now to develop various essentially data uses. So we've got research projects in here but we've got farm operation that is something that we want to do because we'd like this to be developed far more into the agricultural farm space and of course our education component. Type of data you can get you can modify all of this through our data dashboard or you can look at a QR code and get through to it. So that's the start but when we have this large amount of biophysical data what else do we need and what for and of course we want the data for things like passion monitoring and management, animal monitoring and management, crop monitoring and management and education and more data. We want to get more data. So drones provide that or satellite data or remote sensing data provide that capability of putting aerial data on top of our essentially ground and ground data collection system and if you go back to the future or we're going back to the future in this because remote sensing has been around in agriculture since the early 1970s and the problem for ag in relation to remote sensing were two main data. One was data, cost of acquisition and processing, the revisit frequency, the things that Guru has talked about actually and also a lack of skills available in the agricultural sector for this type of data to be used efficiently well in a cost effective manner and agriculture people or people in agriculture can be very easily turned off technology. You know what is the point of technology if it doesn't deliver me a cost benefit in terms of what I'm doing and if it costs me a lot and it goes wrong and I can't do it when I want to do it then it's not worth it. So we needed to do something about this lack of skills and what we've done here is look at developing the special skills that are needed to understand spatial variability in agricultural remote sensing. We've set up an agricultural remote sensing lab here at the campus and what we're doing there is we're trying to integrate students from different disciplines across the academic world so engineering students come down and work on agricultural projects in relation to things like building drones and understanding what drones can be used for, building sensors and understanding what those sensors can be used for in agricultural monitoring in particular but that does involve of course environmental monitoring. So our waste water management site is probably one of our most recorded biophysical data sites and we get them to do hands-on work so they understand the issues and the risks. We want to use them because they're cheap platform to carry high resolution sensors you can see here a spatial variability in a paddock at ground level you can see a bit but when you look over here at an aerial photo of that paddock the variability is huge and that means dollars to a farmer so we want to collect that data so we can optimize production efficiency and quality and we then also want to minimize risk and environmental impact so drones from the perspective of an agricultural person could enable us to do better in the smart food production game almost certainly enables us to do better in the smart environmental management game and for us as educators smart skills development because it's lots of skills involved and it's fun to do and one of the things we have in the Australian sector actually it's worldwide if difficulty in getting students into the agricultural industry sector and I'm meaning across the board not just you know grains or horticulture but across the board. So at UQ we've got five DJ Phantoms that we use for teaching we've got four bespoke quadcopters we've got three bespoke hexacopters and 10 mini agricultural drones which are the ones nowadays because these are the ones that I've talked about the 10 mini ag drones are the ones that we use and I'll just talk a little bit about them in the next few minutes they're easy to fly and there is an article out in 2015 about what why we're doing this and what we're doing. The design and build principles around this business of getting students of all disciplines to understand what they're doing we go through a design process trial and error using open software to look at designing these things we purchase the parts for them we they build them they test fly or they learn to fly learn to solder things like this undertake the project and write a report. So this is a classic problem-based learning or active learning scheme that we can make get students to do. Here are the types of drones that we've investigated and used over time you can see there's certainly date range here and as much as anything else this small mini UQ mini ag drone we designed and built because we under we want to fly under the two kilo limit of CASA because if we had to get every student certified we couldn't do this so this little mini ag drone which I'll talk about in a bit more detail a little bit down the track is the one that we're now flying and it this with a camera that looks at getting a normalized difference vegetation index image is less than one kilo. So the first student project was in 2013 where the student literally took a DJI Phantom with a little normal red green blue visual camera back to Fiji this was his school in 2003 this is a Google map this is his school in 2013 which is the image that you can see outlined here and he literally calculated the difference in mango clearing basically so he looked at change in mango so this was the first project that we looked at then we started getting a little bit more creative we developed a drone that could carry a multispectral camera and we started looking at prickly acacia which is a serious weed environmental weed up in central Queensland big problem from an agricultural perspective because it shuts out cattle from using the pasture underneath and we compared some of that data to satellite data and found of course that these drones creating a better resolution on the ground gave us more data. This beneficial bug drone a hexacopter weighing around about 2kg more when we've got this white thing underneath it designed by an agricultural science student which is now going to the has been invited to be put on display at the science and technology museum in London for the next five years in their display on innovations in agriculture over time so this is actually an old innovation now this is about 2013 2014 but it is an instance of when people started looking at using drones so this is a box full of beneficial bugs which the farming industry the farm group that we worked with wanted to see if they could develop drop beneficial bugs these bits coming out into the middle of a paddock instead of as they customarily do drive around the outside and so this was a very successful product project with industry involvement that then started really introducing this sort of technology from the education from the classroom into the actual agricultural space so that was great. The net drone was another one where we were asked to fly under hail netting for one of the largest seedling producers in Australia and here is the netting you can see it's a lovely picture if you appreciate it this sort of color variation the drone is flying here and it was called the net drone project we were looking to see which one of these seedlings in you know 250,000 small tube plants were germinating or not and here you could see this sort of resolution that you could pick up from a standard multi-spectral camera you could see the two-coddeliden stage here and you could introduce students to the idea that you are looking at three different bands so a little bit of physics you're looking a little bit of spatial variation because you can see where in this one where my cursor is where things haven't grown and then when you go up here at two-coddeliden stage you get that interest for a student as much they can actually see a plant germinating and they can see where it has not and what you do is you get them to calculate what the cost is to both the supplier and the buyer when they get a tray of seedlings and something hasn't germinated so that links it to the economics of the producer here is our mini-ag drone we've been flying it now for a couple of years we've used it at the beginning of this year for 35 students to do some projects it's based on Raspberry Pi technology we've upgraded it because we found that the GPS wasn't crash-hop but in this sort of thing I've got 10 drones which might cost me a hundred bucks each to repair but that means that students can crash them and that's that's good for a student to be able to do that and over here you can see them flying in on campus sort of data that you can get out of this quite basic no IR or an NDVI data camera is you can pick up this information quite nicely at an operational scale so again I'm trying I'm guess I'm not at that I'm not trying to get these students to be as knowledgeable as we might think from a research perspective but an undergraduate level 3 agricultural science student they go out with this knowledge and will then be able to develop their skills in the real world after that we are developing various sensors that can fit onto this small camera so the most recent one is a multispectral sensor again multiplexed Raspberry Pi cameras that enable us to choose very high-grade research filters of specific wavelengths when we're wanting to look at something and this particular camera at the moment is being used on top of one of our IOT multisensor mesh network to collect aerial data of the biomass of that paddock across which of some 50 hectares I believe that has a multi-sensor mesh network on it so this camera is is is now working so this was when it was being developed you can see how it's been set up for little Raspberry Pi cameras and we use Python to make sure everything goes well this is a drone that is no longer flying but it was an attempt at us delivering a drone that could pick up the RFID tags in a cow's ear from a distance and it works at about 20 meters but you know we're talking a big drone now with a big antenna and whilst it worked from an operational perspective and from the idea of trying to keep things down to a level where we're not flying above CASA's regulations this became essentially unusable and although I have an engineering student who wishes to try and reduce this in size this is something that we're not at the moment moving forward to but it is an idea it's an example of some of the ideas that come when you start talking to the industry players and asking them what they want they they wanted something like this because normally you have to stand behind beside the cow or the cow has to go through some cattle gates and literally swipe it with a hand swipe but you've got you know a thousand head of cattle that's a really difficult really time-consuming thing to do so this was about trying to improve the efficiency of being able to look at these cows in in the paddock and the sort of data we could get from it was was was really quite good so what's the types of research and learning involved is electronics and avionics which is not normal in an agricultural sense but it's really useful if you're going to get into this side of spatial variability analysis the design and build side of things we look at programming physics maths and chemistry of course because we're looking at the electromagnetic spectrum things like spectral indices and crop growth indices and chemicals and plants so if you're trying to engage a student in learning about maths which they really don't want to do you bring in something like this and it changes their perception of both learning about the maths and then how it can be used in real life when it would appear to be from a classroom perspective completely dry and equation driven. Plant physiology animal welfare and food traceability are all issues around management that we can also talk about when we use these tools and most recently we've had these sorts of projects going on drone and sensor development for crop monitoring and diseases computer vision development for monitoring pests basically but we could be doing it in the piggery or we could be doing it out in the environment for say wildlife people we've got a master of engineering student looking at developing a robotic arm for capturing these small drones out of the sky for autonomous recharging again it's an academic project probably not to not to be used operationally because of the issue of autonomous flight but very useful for the master engineering student to understand why we want that from an agricultural perspective so we want to increase obviously the reach of our drones flying and then we've had people developing automated underwater cameras to monitor phytoplankton which we can then link to our IOT and and our aerial imagery of the lakes obviously the IOT has applicability elsewhere that may not involve drones like in the equine health area and the development of this visualization dashboard for our monitoring purposes and for staff to access and as I say anyone on EDURO to access some of this data that we're collecting and as I say this is a project the RFID monitoring of cattle is something that would that we're still sort of looking at but the idea is to reduce it in size as the electronics become smaller and we don't have to have such a big antenna involved which means a bigger drone and more weight etc and start starting to contravene cattle regulations so we're looking at a whole range of things both from an education and research perspective but mainly the research is about getting is about interesting students in learning about this stuff which I think is going to be key down the track in terms of capability development for our industry both agriculture and environment or managed landscapes because without these kids coming in we're going to run out of people in terms of as they get older they're not going to be able to continue to do this so that's my presentation and I hope you enjoyed it thank you very much


So one of the things that we want to do with our agents is essentially this big fancy $5 word called problem-solving and We want to do this in a number of different ways, but the first one we're going to focus in on is sort of a little bit of a review from 316, but this idea of Searching and specifically as you can sort of see from the terminology It's something that I'm calling an uninformed search The way you can think about this is that I have some kind of goal that I want to achieve I want to find the best configuration. I want to pick the best move You know some type of goal condition to be met, but the problem is I'm at some form of a starting point and when we look at that idea of something being an uninformed search the issue is that when I'm looking around I don't actually have sort of General sense of where that goal could be this starting point and this search may actually have Branches out that are leading down their own Pathways that aren't getting me to the goal and so I have to kind of do this And so when we think about that idea of problem-solving just very quickly, you know Some problems are already solved. You know the distance between two points you plug in this formula It takes care of it But when we're dealing with that searching sort of mechanism One of the biggest issues is that it can become very large or even infinite a way to think about this is again let's think about the idea of just a Rook in chess for a second There a rock how many different moves can a Rook do well it can go to the left It can go to the right it can go down it can go Forward or up and it can do this any you know amount of times as long as it doesn't hit another Marker and if it does and it's the other team obviously you take the piece But more to my point when we think about sort of that that pathway and specifically when we are dealing with something being infinite a Rook could go up and then for whatever reason, you know The opponent does a move then the Rook goes down and you know Ignoring other parts of chess where you know stalemates can occur The Rook can just do this back and forth for the rest of eternity And so that's kind of a big issue especially when we're trying to find again that mythical Goal that we have to somehow search all the possible Moves that pieces can do to find and so that's actually where we start to kind of get some terminology to at least kind of focus in on this idea of our search space and then specifically our goal Condition again that idea is that the search space is everything from the starting point and all of what we would call It's branching out points so all of those possible moves that I could be doing at chess and then Specifically when we think about so again chess that idea of the goal would be a checkmate But more specifically a checkmate in sort of my favor rather than not my favor And so again, we want to search until we find some pathway From that start to that goal a good example of this is let's use this as an Simple example This is all of the airports in America for the sake of my example I'm not going to build this graph for all of them. That would be insane But more specific to my point. I want to get a pathway from Raleigh Durham all The way over to Seattle now. What are all the different paths that I could take well We could take sort of the one that's intuitive to us as people and typically is the one a lot of people take And that would be oh well I can take sort of this Transition flight from rdu into Charlotte, which is then going to take me all the way to Chicago And then I just sort of take a four-hour flight from Chicago to Seattle Yeah, that is one solution, but that's not the only possible solution And in fact, this is technically a solution going from rdu down to South Carolina Charleston then into Jacksonville, Florida Why not stay in Florida for a little bit? Do you know what I mean? Where we hit Panama City and Pensacola, then we jump back to Atlanta to Tulip. Oh, Tulip. Oh What? Memphis Dallas Denver Salt Lake City and then finally Seattle Both of those are going to get me there. And so both of those paths Are Valid they took me from my starting position and led me to my goal condition Now when we think about sort of our Agents and designing out intelligent Systems that's actually where sort of that performance measure starts to come into play again If we're thinking about sort of that real-world circumstance of I want to book a flight from The East Coast to the West Coast some of the things that I might think about are something being the shortest possible route And you know, I only want to be in the air for eight hours out of you know 16 right, I don't want a lot of layover. So obviously this route Takes me there again. This one also would help out if the goal condition was to minimize the number of hops So I don't like to be in layover. So again, I want to try my best to do a non-stop I don't have that option here. And so again The best I can do is only having to stop into two airports along the way but sort of the Counter to that is, you know, some people it's about cheap I don't mind if I have to go from rdu to Charlotte to Memphis to Kansas City to Denver to Salt Lake City then to Seattle because it's $200 less and I Got time on my my plate. So again, that is another Potential solution that I could be where are you? There you are. That is another possible solution that I could work towards and so again when we start to think about this idea of Searching it's sort of a cat and mouse game. Think about it like the Options that you learned about when we were dealing with linear versus a binary search Both of them are gonna get you sort of to that ultimate path Again, if we're thinking about this from searching a list I want to see if an item exists in a list and where it is. Well, both of these will do it linear will do it in O of in and if our list happens to be sorted we might be able to achieve some sort of Sort of boost in efficiency through that binary search and we'll see a few of these different sort of points along the way So when we start to think about that idea of search and one of the things you've seen a number of times already is I have driven I've drawn out these different little lines sort of coming out of my starting point And what we look at that is sort of what I'm forming is something that we call the search Tree now the search tree again is all the possible sort of actions or moves of our agents so moves as well and Again, we're just exploring them almost as if this is the next action I'm doing During the search process one big thing that you may have noticed is that? Technically speaking I can go back to rdu. I could hop over from rdu to Charlotte and then right back again This is that Rook and here's just a minimalist design of a Rook That's that Rook design where I could go up and then I could proceed right back to my starting location Because there's no nothing stopping me from doing that in the system Again, it depends on what your sort of strategy is in a game of chess You may want to go back to places versus when you're dealing with airports and trying to get from one Side of the states to the other you don't really want to go back At all and I don't think many airports will let you it then unless you do a round-of-trip either way My point being is at least for the sake of my demonstrations I'm going to work off of an assumption that we don't have sort of those moves available So I don't have sort of the ability to go to rdu in the case of many of the examples I'll be working off of So just a little bit of a different kind of look we've seen sort of that idea of chess We've seen that idea of sort of the airport But one that I would like to present is this idea of something known as the in Queen Problem now in Queen problem and what you could probably see from the pictures is I have some number of Queens in this case I've got four Queens and I happen to have an in by in board or in my case a four by four board The sole purpose of sort of this problem this little thought experiment is can I position those Queens in such a way that? They're not going to be able to attack each other and if you look at sort of this good Example again that Queen can go up Down left and right or in a diagonal motion and in each one of the possible moves that this One piece can make again. You can see it's not going to attack or hit any of those other Queens Versus sort of a bad configuration. This would not meet our goal condition We do have two Queens that could collide with each other But one of the things is again if we're trying to design an agent to solve this out It becomes a search and so what we're looking for rather than it being sort of that goal of I need to find a Particular location is more this idea of something becoming a target location. I could start with sort of my I'll use a three by three just for the example sake. I could start with sort of this three by three Board and maybe that first Branch in my search is deciding which one of the I don't know I'll say rows do I work off of so this could be row one this could be row two and this could be row three and Then all of the branches Sort of at this level could be referencing column one Well, let's arbitrarily say that I have selected sort of this first pathway So column one is going to say let's see what happens if I explore How do I there's a queen row one well, can I then branch out could I put in column two Row one or could I put in column two row two or could I put in column three? Row three so or sorry column two Row one row two row three. Well, let's see I couldn't do this this one is going to be invalid I couldn't do this one because again, that's also going to be invalid But I could potentially put it here at the bottom where sort of my left and middle Queens aren't going to hit if I keep on panning this out. You'll see that I actually can't solve it on a three by three grid, but it's good enough for demonstration sake and that actually sort of presents me with sort of my last little takeaway to start is We're going to be seeing a lot of grids in sort of this course. They they present a good Novel way to help wrap our brains around things and you can tell oh, well, you know I could move to this location to this location to this location tile tile tile I'm at my goal tada But one of the things that you could think about is when we're dealing with say for example Sort of these two points the starting point and sort of that that b6 What we're really dealing with here is an idea of it being Sort of two different tiles one of them happens to be my tile My starting point and then there's some kind of relationship Going on between these where in this case they are neighbors. Oh, I have an edge suddenly Going on between them and then you could see that there's technically another edge Going to the up neighbor And then let's say from b6 b6 also has its own up and to the right so up and to the right And that's a different way we could explore things So the way you could think about that again taking that same grid idea These lines are just sort of represent representing the idea of something being a Neighbor And one of the things that you can also think about is again I'm working off of the idea that these are all weighted as a one But there's nothing saying that oh, well, you know if I'm dealing with Different terrains and say a video game sense. There's nothing saying that this terrain Transition couldn't be two and then this transition couldn't be four and this couldn't be five Maybe i'm going up a hill and then now i'm going Down a hill so three and then a two Two One one right i have to traverse this giant mountain before i can get the goal Or i could take sort of this scenic route where uh, it's a nice little koreen Maybe a two here just to change it up Right i can have different pathways and we'll see sort of this action a little later on but both of these paths will again lead me to Sort of my route


Thank you for coming This is Todd Clark.  So he is Gonna represent for me. He's gonna represent Kentucky farmers. He's one of 84,000 farmers We have that many farmers in Kentucky because of the work of this man the guy on your left. That's Mary's grandfather John Berry Sr. He his work with the Burley tobacco program ensured that Farmers on small and medium-sized farms could earn a living growing a little bit so he Because of his work farmers stayed on the farm and their kids grew up with the language and culture of tobacco Sort of glued them together in community That program no longer exists the thing that helped farmers earn a living could send their kids to college That's gone. Some farmers still grow tobacco in Kentucky Todd Clark grows tobacco, but They're really looking for something else to give them a dependable income or else they're selling their farms If they have a big farm, you can grow corn or soy beans You don't make as much per bushel, but you have a lot of bushels So you can you can make a lot of money in the farms in Western Kentucky do that But the trouble with corn is that the price goes way up or way down right now It's way up but it can go up and down and so doing the same thing you can hit the lottery one year and go broke the next year and so Central Kentucky farmers and Eastern Kentucky farmers will will rent property to grow Corn so that they can make money when the money's good, but they also want a Another source of income so that they can kind of even out those bust years most people grow beef Todd grows beef and he grows Chicken and layers chicken for meat and layers also and he started growing lamb last year and he rents out a couple of houses also so There are people in Kentucky who think that Todd's success and other farmers success is Crucial to the prosperity of Kentucky Weddleberry is one of those people Mary's dad and he got together with a bunch of influential friends and Public servants a few years ago to figure out if Louisville Which has 1 million people in a 3 billion dollar food account economy if Louisville could help give farmers Another living a different kind of living and we we talked about food now agriculture is a lot of things. It's corn. It's resources it's bourbon, but food is food is one of the things that's Considered agriculture. So what they decided they needed was somebody to introduce the market and the farmer and Make that connection. So as a food journalist for 30 years I had written a lot about people who grew food and a lot about restaurants who who served the food I was a dietetics major in college. So I knew that to live well We needed to eat well and if we were going to eat well the food had to taste good so local food seemed to me a real natural fit between being good and and Tasting good so as a reputation having a reputation for Supporting local agriculture. They hired me to make this connection between the farmers and the market now I'm not the only food activist in Louisville far from it. Actually Louisville is lousy with people who care about food so you can picture this big room of Highly intelligent active enthusiastic people and it's like a big cocktail party. So you go over here and you meet this guy and he He wants people to earn a better living if they're working in the food system and this woman over here. She wants to Grow food in neighborhoods that are underserved. She wants gardens There are people who worry about obesity. There are people who worry about corner stores There are people who worry about carbon footprint and water quality. They're all working on pieces of the broken food system I would contend that if you help this guy You can you can fix the part of the food system that matters most no matter which part that is So if you help Todd you can help farm worker salaries If you help Todd you get antibiotics out of animal agriculture if you help Todd Well, none of his chickens are going to be processed into nuggets So you're probably going to help people's health too So I guess my vision my vision of the food system is a little different from people who are working in a city In that I feel like a food system is changing the local food system is about changing where food grows how consumers get the food and Where that food is served so that changing the local food system is really about creating a way for people to make a living farming cooking distributing Processing local food that a great food system is one that sticks around even after the time after Michael pollen and Wendell Berry quit writing about it I feel like a great robust food system is one that's going to lift all boats a Few years ago. I was doing some research and I well it wasn't years. It was last year doing some research on a Trying to find people more like me because I thought there were answers out there and they're not but there I thought there were answers out there and I ran across this Urban planning document. It was pretty sophisticated done for the Chicago area and they had done a lot of research there were a lot of stakeholders and There was a food there was a local food system chapter to it I was thrilled and I went right to it and They said that Illinois is a 48 billion dollar food market that 46 billion dollars leaves the state They said that if more people bought local food that it would help the economy Well, there's no surprise there, but Here is the graphic of the local food system that they Illustrated their chapter with what interests me about this graphic is the access point the access point for all of Chicago land is a farm stand The access point according to this Document is the people the point at which people purchase their food at places like farm stands markets and Restaurants Todd Clark can't make a living in a farm stand Todd Clark raised 75 beef on Grass last year. He wrote he raised 7500 chickens. He had 750 layers and he could have sold more But he didn't have a market for it Two months ago Jefferson County Public Schools, which served 60,000 kids lunch every day Contracted to buy chicken and Todd is now going to increase his flock by 11,000 birds still he could grow more he Could probably double that and he's hoping that more schools will buy next year But even so 11,000 chickens were 11 plus 7500 chickens will be about a fifth of his salary of his income so He it can't make a living selling 11,000 chickens at farm stands He can't make a living selling 22,000 chickens to restaurants He needs and other farmers need Institutional buyers they need distributors they need aggregators. They need processors But let's go back to the cocktail party The man who's worried about food about wages for farm workers the people who process Todd Chicken make twice as much as the people in a Purdue factory make Access more than 80% of the kids who eat lunch at Jefferson County Get them free or at reduced price Environment environment of Todd Raises his chicken on pasture so they make the ground more fertile his cows have better forage to eat He doesn't use chemical fertilizer, so there's no contribution to the dead zone There's no ammonia haze hanging over his community and He's raising these chicken. He's making the land productive that could not otherwise be plowed There's a lot of land in Kentucky in Kentucky that should not be in row crops Health health if you've ever bought a pasture raised chicken You know how lean it is but in addition his chicken are raised without antibiotics and without arsenic The other advantage is that Todd's chicken will never be emulsified attitude preserved Paddied breaded fried and frozen So that children eating Todd's chicken will be will be learning to eat chicken and not learning to eat junk food all because We want him to make a living. I believe That to change the food system we need to To think about wholesale This is a few of the companies in the fortune 500 They're the top food companies. There are about 20 of them. You can see there on the right what their Annual revenues are This is without Walmart and without probably a million other Companies This is the annual revenue of farm markets. I think we have to engage The wholesale market To give people farmers a living We have to engage the wholesale market to raise all of these boats I Think if we agree that all if all of our Resources are limited if we have only so much time and only so much money Why would we dedicate that time and and money to asking a farmer to take four heads of broccoli to the corner store? When if we nurture one institution, we can help the economy. We can help Environment we can help health we can help access some food is More expensive Excuse me One more point about institutions and individuals. I think I think what we need to do is engage more Instead of going to the corner store. We need to go more to institutional buying the last three November's I have organized Farmers meetings with the Jefferson County Public School system. This is Mary Courtney She has come to the these three meetings Her husband is a conventional farmer. He grows corn and tobacco They had two children the time in the first meeting and she Ran a CSA to give to diversify their income and and give them more income Since then she's had her third child. She's left the CSA world behind she's concentrating more on wholesale food sales and And sells to Jefferson County mostly by the bid process which happens once a year They bid once a year and get the bid and and and go on But the other day she called and she said that the mini bell peppers that she grew Did not have a buyer and she had thought about calling the Gleaners to come get them But she called me instead because she thought her kids love these bell these little bell peppers so much that maybe Jefferson County or some of the other schools would want them the their kids size They're super sweet. They're bright red yellow and orange and so So she thought that would be a good fit now Jefferson County has a fresh fruit and vegetable program Which means that they serve fresh produce to elementary school students in 40 schools and underserved neighborhoods Um So Jefferson County Jumped on the chance to buy her peppers. They bought 1,400 pounds Um Mary knows a fast food distributor. I mean a fresh food distributor who Sorry who can um Who could backhaul her peppers into these 40 schools and so So the deal was sealed. So I'm thinking well if you're if you're a proponent of food access Is there anything better than a 1,400 pounds of mini bell peppers going into 40 schools and underserved neighborhoods? If we're a proponent of health, is there anything better than 1,400 pounds of mini bell peppers going to To elementary school children who they're you know, these bright colors. They're very nutritious And if you're if you're uh Environmentalists, is there anything better than having one truck go from the country into the city and putting all these schools on its route? It just seems to to work for everyone Mary can't make a living off those 1,400 pounds of bell peppers even when you count the 800 watermelon and 60 boxes of squash She's already selling Jefferson County this year In fact, I'm gonna guess that she made about $5,000 on that transaction and she still has to pay her people What what mary needs is for her produce distributor to sell Three or four times as much produce on his routes Can you predict why he's not doing that? Do you know why he can't sell more produce? Any pardon me people don't buy it because The price People say it's too expensive price is way too high. I think oh, we love we support local food We love local food, but the price is just too high.  No no more discussion What they really are saying is we have a contract with tyson and we get um kickbacks for honoring that So we don't really want to buy local food or they're saying $3 a pound is way too much to pay for tomatoes. We're never going to do it and I I will say yes Uh local food is sometimes more expensive, but sometimes it's not But sometimes let's go the distance. Let's say it is more expensive What does that look like logical extreme? Sodexo is a multinational corporation that in kentucky serves makes Does dining services for six colleges and university Berea college is trying to make a deal with this guy to buy mozzarella cheese. Kenny. Kenny mattingly um Has 200 acres with dairy catalana. He grows feed. He doesn't give his cows hormones His cheese is twice as expensive as Cisco cheese and Cisco cheese is the second highest food cost in dining services at berea college So I asked kate The sodexo rep. How are you going to make that work? And she said we're going to serve less cheese um Meatless mondays at berea are cheesy mondays at berea So the first thing they're going to do is cut down the amount of cheese that they're serving on meatless mondays and serve more vegetables and whole grains So with one business decision we have 1600 kids at berea eating More helpful diet. We've got a Farmer making a better living. We've got a community that's benefiting from the taxes from that farmer and we and his employees ranks grow Oh and Cisco isn't losing money. So That's more expensive food. Okay, so let's contrast that with the economic model set by the chicken processing plant in in western kentucky that allows That that processes boneless skinless chicken breast that sells at walmart for two dollars and fifty cents a pound They're advertising right now for a worker who will make nine dollars and 36 cents an hour Hefting totes of 35 to 75 pounds for eight to 12 hour shifts and 40 degrees He'll make 19 thousand dollars a year, which puts him well under the federal poverty line for a family of four If he has a family of four he will qualify for food stamps, Medicaid free lunch free breakfast head start summer meals Uh supplemental feeding for pregnant women and children energy assistance And weatherization So my tax dollars are subsidizing your ability to buy boneless skinless chicken breast at walmart meanwhile our I've only got two minutes left and of course I've got 20 minutes more to say so But I will just say, you know, they tell me to the I'm supposed to leave you with one thought And I and I do have that thought but really the subliminal thought is never eat boneless skinless chicken breast again So so meanwhile we are entrenching the uh the horrible lifestyle that we are uh We're colluding to keep these people in indentured servitude these food service workers and we are um You know with environmental degradation still goes on and on so um l plus we've got a Community that has to spend its resources to support the living of the of the workers rather than having the taxes that the workers earn contribute to the um to the robust economy of the of the community so Uh So I have lots of stories and no time to tell them and I'm sorry um, but I want to say that Uh at the University of Louisville Sodexo we've spent two years trying to get them to buy beef local beef and local product when I first went in there The the food service director said we can't buy local beef because the only beef we can buy that's local is it's a whole beef And we can't we can't do that of course not and so Um, so we've been working for two years. They buy a little lettuce for orientation We have a special meal that celebrates the harvest. We're we're pushing that local food and um in april He realized that the only way he could afford to buy local beef was to buy a whole beef So he's buying a whole beef. He's bought a whole beef every single week since april He can leave his chef can leave and that whole beef is coming through the door every week so To me that's a change in the food system I'd like to say that I understand that food Local food can be expensive There's some local food that will never be cheap boneless skinless chicken breast that's antibiotic free and local is never going to be 250 a pound but jefferson county public schools can serve dark meat chicken and um, it's not as cheap as chicken nuggets So our chicken nuggets a better choice so, um I just want to suggest that I think that that High price is a The high price of of local food is a straw man That's meant to stop us in our tracks to go right up our brain stem To make us say it's not worth working on it's not worth fixing the the food system I'd like to say that when someone says The cost of local food is too high that that's a call to action We hear it as a call to action that the high price of local food is the starting point Where we program shift That the minute we hear I can't afford Local food We see it not as a conversation stopper, but as the point to move forward if we can When we hear The cost of local food is too high if we can engage our frontal cortex and say Not okay. I understand, but the cost of food is too high. How can we make this work? Thank you for your time


Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Unfiltered with Pastor David Pastor. Thank you for joining us today.  What's your thoughts on that, Pastor? What are my thoughts on joyless Behar? My goodness, if there's ever been anybody misnamed, it's Joy, because I have never seen any in her. So, I mean, let's just begin that way. So they were discussing, from what I understand, I saw a clip of that, John, and what they were discussing was something related to the scandal that has erupted, and finally is getting in some kind of news, even though it had erupted prior to or the discovery was made prior to the recent season of elections, how that the president, Joe Biden, had documents that were found in different locations, some Pen Center, as well as other places, but they were aware of that just prior to the midterms.  Now, I don't necessarily like to roll down political lines. You know, my politics, we have conversations quite often about the things that I most certainly believe about those who are running our country at the moment and all. And because I don't really find it a good thing for me to bring up in church constantly simply because I want them to be edified in the things of the Lord. But I do have strong opinions and all as it relates to that, and I can say this, what do I think? Well, I think that it's wrong, it's always wrong, to just to broad brush somebody. You know, I'm not necessarily a Trump fanatic, I'm not. I think that President Trump, former President Trump, did a lot of good for this country. I never did appreciate the bombastic way that he approaches things. I never liked the bullying, and I most certainly never believed that he had the kind of demeanor that would bring honor to the office that he held. I had my problems with that. But at the same time, I also saw the accomplishments. And for that, I was very grateful. And this is a man who unabashedly, at least openly stated how he loved the United States. I have no reason to believe that he wasn't telling the truth.  I have no way to believe that. I've never seen evidence, nothing's ever been brought up that he is. And so that to me is just an unkind and inaccurate kind of a word to say about the President. On the other hand, nobody could dispute the fact that the President, nobody can dispute the fact that he's been a liar in the past. I mean, it's a reason why he wasn't even able to finish his first run for presidency. It was proven that he, and it's demonstrated openly, it's when the press used to actually report the news instead of form it. But he was plagiarizing a British politician's speech.  He's claimed that he graduated at the top of his class when in fact he was more close to the bottom. He's claimed that he had a full scholarship when in fact he did not have it. He's claimed to have multiple degrees that has been demonstrated he never earned. I mean, how can you say that? He says that he's just common Joe when this man has made millions of dollars and nobody questions where he got his money from. How do you own three homes when you make a Senator salary? How's that work? And so to me, it's just the nonsense of the deceived mind. I mean, there's no openness to an idea that perhaps there's some things wrong that we ought to fix. Instead, we make excuses for the people we like and ignore the absurdity of our arguments on their behalf. And so I have a problem with that. So when people like Joy Behar and the others who are part of the view, they're unsaved people. One claims to be a believer from what I understand. I'm not sure if that's the truth, but none of those people are anyone that I would listen to. Why would I? And so for her to say what she said on TV about Trump, I just think because he's a public figure, she gets away with saying it. I just think it's wrong. So I really believe the United States has gotten the President it deserves. We as a nation have turned away from the Lord, John. As a nation have plummeted in terms of attendance in church or belief in God. I mean, it's plummeting. All the recent statistics demonstrate that. And so when you have people who are elected to the Supreme Court, who are placed on the Supreme Court, who cannot give a definition of a woman, who cannot say that because they say that they are not qualified to. Yet this is a person who's going to make judgments on laws. It amazes me and that you can choose your gender. I used to joke about that. I used to not so much joke, but I used to point that out. I'd say just because you're saying something that that doesn't mean that you are that I could say that I'm a six foot eight blue-eyed Swedish person. And then the church used to kind of laugh over that. I said, but everybody would recognize that that's simply delusional on my part. And now you actually can do that. And people don't know what to do with it. You can have a woman, a senator who claims to have a Native American heritage when she doesn't have, she has maybe, I think it was like point zero, zero, one or something like that. Like if you had a thousand people in the room, maybe one of them were Native American. And yet she got position in major university. She was elected on basis of at least part of the basis of for claim for that particular Native ancestry and nobody says anything about it. So John, I really think that today in politics, there needs to be a thorough cleansing. It really is a swamp. There's no doubt about it. And when you have, when you have a former president's home rated by the FBI and they're holding documents and pointing documents out. And then you have the sitting president who had no right to take those, those classified documents because they were under the presidency of Obama. When he takes them, and it's found in at this point in four different locations, and he says, Oh, it's secured in my garage. We all have garages. How secure are they? Really. And, and people are making an argument for them, John. That just shows you how sick America is and how deceived it really, really is as a nation. And so I just, I just pray that justice prevails in this, John, to be honest with you, because it is mind boggling how much hatred for Trump there was and remains. They're still, they're still campaigning against him. And he's been off out of office for two years. And they still are campaigning. Why? Because they fear him. He represents something that, that they don't have. He represents patriotism, a love for this nation, a care for the military, a normalcy of, of human relationships. I mean, when you have, when you have, quote unquote, drag queens who are speaking to our children in public libraries, but you can't have a Christian sharing his book, you know, like recently happened, they wouldn't allow him in, I forget his name at the moment, you might remember him, but he used to be in, in a show. I can't remember his name, but people who were listening. Was it not Kurt Cameron? Kurt Cameron, or Kurt Cameron. Yeah, they wouldn't allow him in to read his, his Christian themed book, but they allow, they allow drag queens in to influence the mind of our children. This is how perverse America has become, John. And so I think that we're in need of a thorough cleansing. And the only thing that can cleanse this world, this nation of its putrid sin is going to be the gospel. Amen. One last thought, you know, it isn't going to be through electing another sinful man, it's going to come through the church awakening to Christ, sharing the word, seeing lives transformed, and perfectly the church itself waking up, because there are a lot of people who voted Biden in, who are professing Christians, and there are millions who didn't even vote, you know, and so we got the government that we deserve. So I just, I believe that we need to get it together with the Lord. Amen. And you know, one, one last thing to add pastor, the, just the mentality of our current administration to, we talked a little bit about this off-camera, there was a female basketball player, alleged female basketball player who wouldn't stand for the national anthem or for a flag and gets busted for carrying dope marijuana. And she sent, she's caught in Russia and she's released.  And I don't understand that reasoning. And again, it's that. It's catering, John. It's catering to a particular voting bloc. She was African American and a lesbian. They're catering to certain voting blocs. That's what they're doing. They're doing that by allowing 130 different nations crossing our borders, where we are putting them up. Taxpayers are paying for them. Some are going into New York and they're in a $500 a night hotel and they're trashing it. They're trashing it. And this, this is what's taking place. I'm telling you, they'll put them into certain hotels, but they won't let them into other places where rich people live. And all, you know, that to me is amazing. But yeah, we see it. We're not blind. And I pray that, that we awaken. As a nation, we can awaken. The church needs to call out. Yes. Keep our eyes on Jesus Christ. Amen. And so, well, church family, with that, we do want to invite you to come join us tomorrow evening for our Wednesday evening service as your pastor, David, you're taking us through First John. Chapter five. Chapter five. Wow. That's how long have we been in First John? It's probably longer than most people appreciate. But it's been a fruitful study, a rich study. So I'm looking forward to our Wednesday evening service. Great opportunity to invite your friends and family. Church family, we have our 830 and 1045 service on Sunday morning. And Pastor, you're taking us through the book of Mark and joining that study as well. And in church family, we have something I was going to bring it. We have our men's Super Bowl breakfast on February, Saturday, February 4th. Great opportunity to invite your friends and family to come out and join us. Your friends, your co-workers, Anthony Munoz will be joining us. All-star offensive linemen, hall of fame offensive linemen from the Bengals. And there was one more thing that I was on the tip of my tongue and I just forgot. Oh, next Wednesday we have communion. Still a little bit of time, a week from tomorrow, we have communion. So it's always a fruitful time when we're able to take our eyes off and just focus on Jesus. Amen. And so Pastor, thank you for joining us. Church family, thank you for joining us. We look forward to seeing you. God bless you.


Welcome to my paper presentation on role of signal enhancement ratio in evaluation of residual disease in breast cancer after breast conserving surgery and neojuven chemotherapy. Myself Dr. Alan Johnson, 30 APG resident in the department of radio diagnosis and imaging aims profile. Following breast conserving surgery and neojuven chemotherapy for breast cancer, several modifications occur in the treated breast which can cause difficulties in image interpretation, especially when a local recurrence is suspected. It becomes challenging to distinguish whether it is a post treatment tissue modification or a tumor occurrence. In detecting residual disease and determining its extent is important for further treatment planning. If there is no residual disease in the breast then further surgery is unnecessary. If there is a small amount of residual disease then patient might benefit from a reaction. If extensive residual disease remains in the breast then mastectomy might be the treatment of choice. MRI is often used in clinical practice being considered more sensitive in discriminating between post treatment tissue modification and tumor occurrence. Several previous studies have reported the role of MRI in evaluating patients who have undergone treatment for breast cancer. However, these studies mainly focused on the morphological analysis of postoperative sites. But only little is known about the utility of kinetic evaluation including the washout kinetics in predicting residual disease in breast cancer. However, qualitative assessment of washout kinetics can prove to be difficult in post treatment breast MRI. Hence, quantitative assessment of washout kinetics may result in higher diagnostic performance in evaluation of residual disease. Signal enhancement ratio or SER is a quantitative imaging metric calculated from dynamic contrast enhanced breast MRI that reflects the rate of contrast washout inhalation. Hence, the purpose of this study was to determine the diagnostic performance of signal enhancement ratio in evaluation of residual disease in breast cancer after breast conserving surgery and neo-ageven chemotherapy. We retrospectively reviewed breast MRI studies of patients who met our inclusion criteria, which were patients who went, who underwent dynamic contrast enhanced breast MRI at our 3D system for assessment of residual disease after breast conserving surgery for neo-ageven chemotherapy. And either had received a follow up pathological proven diagnosis after undergoing reaccession or mastectomy or had lesion stability come from that more than one year of follow up. In DCE MRI images were acquired before contrast and sequentially acquired in five phases after contrast administration with a temporary resolution of 68 seconds. SER is a unitless index that reflects the rate of contrast washout between the early phase and the delayed phase after contrast delivery, which is calculated by the formula shown here. Where S0 is the signal intensity before contrast administration, S1 is the signal intensity at 68 seconds, and S2 is the signal intensity at 340 seconds after contrast delivery. SER was calculated on a voxel by voxel basis with a commercial computer edit detection system, which generated a SER color map, and a small size region of interest was drawn in the SER color map to calculate the absolute SER values.  On follow up of the patients after MRI, out of the 14 patients, 4 patients were histopathologically proven to have residual breast C and rest of the 10 patients had no residual breast disease, breast CA. It was found that patients with residual breast CA had significantly higher SCR values as compared to patients with no residual breast CA. If we just consider only morphological characteristics like tick or irregular limb enhancement, nodular or non-mass like enhancement around the post-operative sites as positive for residual cancer, it yielded a sensitivity of 100% and the specificity of 50%. However, if we consider SER as a diagnostic criteria with an arbitrary cutoff value of 90, it yielded a similar sensitivity of 100%, but a higher specificity and a higher positive predictive value of 90 and 80 respectively. Illustrating a few example cases. This is a case of a 29 year old female who had undergone six cycles of neo-ageven chemotherapy for infiltrating ductile carcinoma. Subtraction image shows a large heterogeneously enhancing mass lesion with irregular shape and speculated margins. Corresponding SCR map shows areas of high SCR shown by the regions colored in blue. Absolute value was obtained by drawing a small 2D ROI which revealed a high SCR value of 161 and the corresponding kinetic analysis revealed washout kinetics. The patient further went on to undergo modified radical mastectomy and revealed residual invasive memory carcinoma with minimal treatment effect in the breast. This is a 40 year old female who also had undergone six cycles of neo-ageven chemotherapy for infiltrating ductile carcinoma. The subtraction image shows a heterogeneously enhancing mass lesion with irregular shape and speculated margins. The SCR map shows no corresponding areas of increased SCR. That means we cannot see any regions colored in blue corresponding to the enhancing mass lesion. And the absolute value obtained by drawing a 2D region of interest revealed a low SCR value of 21 and the corresponding kinetic analysis revealed persistent enhancement. This patient also further underwent modified radical mastectomy and the histopathology revealed no residual tumor. This is a case of 66 year old female who had underwent wide local excision for infiltrating ductile carcinoma. The subtraction image shows post-operative cavity with irregular, thick rim enhancement. Corresponding SCR map does not show any areas of increased SCR and the absolute value obtained by drawing a 2D ROI on the thick irregular rim enhancement and then cloning it onto the SCR map reveals a low absolute value of 34. The corresponding kinetic analysis revealed persistent enhancement. The patient further underwent re-excision which revealed no residual breast semen. This is a 30 year old female who had underwent wide local excision for infiltrating ductile carcinoma. The subtraction image shows post-operative cavity with irregular, thick rim enhancement. The corresponding SCR map shows areas of increased SCR as shown by the blue region along the anterior rim of the post-operative cavity. Small 2D ROI drawn here reveals a high absolute SCR value of 168 and the corresponding washout kinetic analysis shows washout kinetics. The patient further underwent modified radical mastectomy which revealed foci of residual tumor along the anterior margin of the post-operative cavity. Hence, SCR maps offer an easy method for quantitative assessment of washout kinetics of enhancing areas in post-treatment breast and in detection of residual cancer. Higher specificity offered by SCR in detecting residual cancer can help in reducing the number of unnecessary revision surgeries and mastectomies. However, studies with higher sample size would be required to find out a more accurate cutoff for SCR in identifying residual cancer. These are my references. Thank you for your patient listening. I would like to end by thanking the organizers for providing me this opportunity to present this paper. Thank you.


This study investigated the potential use of synthetic calcium silicates and phosphates as carriers for targeted drug delivery for the effective treatment of cancerous tumors. It found that these compounds can be used to deliver chemotherapy agents to tumors while limiting their impact on healthy tissue. Additionally, the study showed that the release rate of the drug could be controlled by adjusting the amount of calcium silicate and phosphate present in the composite. This article was authored by Evgeny K. Papanov, Oleg Oshiklin, Olesya V. Kapostina, and others.


the flip-flopping of views yes i will say this that it can mean to me several things one anytime there is mixture yeah man in teachings right that is usually indicator that another spirit is working so that means you're gonna you're gonna switch it on right yeah yeah when there's mixture in the teaching um let me let me let me let me put a let me let me put a modifier when there is mixture without explanation there you go there you go yes yes that's an indicator that a seducing spirit is working because if i am switching positions a man of his statue with that many followers he needs to explain come on bro why the shift in positions come on uh to not to explain the shift in positions would be an indicator that another spirit is working if uh if if if i say this if i had a view here and later on my view changed but it but it starts to develop more to the scripture i still have to explain where you know what i used to believe this but god told me and god showed me yes wrong here yes this what it means here right yes yes i suppose as a leader yes you supposed to explain your position of your yes sir yes sir right so if i am switching and especially if the views are going contrary to scripture in my switch yeah yeah that is the end and there is no explanation that is the indicator that there's another spirit working jeez okay okay you don't switch those positions like that as who has followers yeah yeah without giving explanation i will say this as a leader if i am dogmatic about a belief and later on i switch jesus you have the responsibility to explain your switch come on bro you you you have the responsibility as someone who has influence and persuasion to explain your switch yes right and and and and and explain and i'm gonna tell you why many don't do it because explaining why you change will reveal that you were wrong wait a third one you broke a record keep going bro bring that heat yeah let's go let's get it it requires humility you will have to admit that man i was wrong yeah man i was wrong about this i was wrong about this i would thank god for his mercy for teaching me x y x y x y but if my switch jesus moves me further away from the parameters of the scripture and i don't give an explanation that's another spirit jesus okay okay okay okay now now let me say this i'm going yes go ahead yes go ahead if i'm your listener yes it leaves me confused it leaves me confused about okay which one do i believe right it leaves me confused uh this is why makaya was very instrumental and speaking of word to ahab let me tell you why because the people was present jesus the people was present what happens when you have a geromeya and a heroniah and both are saying thus says the lord but they move it in opposite direction come on people are left people are left to wonder who is hearing from god and it causes divisions brother t and it calls this unnecessary a radical division that satan will use because there's a lack of explanation come on that is sent panic and it's nature this is why this is why god this is why god used Elijah to expose the false prophets on mount carmel that's it bro because the people was confused right yeah if god be god serve him if be god serve him and the bible says and the people answer not not a word yes so when people are left confused it is god's antidote to bring clarity if not satan will use that confusion to bring diabolical division jesus help us today holy spirit that is a biblical principle help us lord help us lord right if god does not use paul to confront peter publicly his hypocrisy was creating a division that shouldn't be necessary jesus but but it takes humility to explain your position but but but but in the day that we're living in um a lot of people are political for the sake of numbers jesus so if it's a number games with you you're gonna side on the side that's gonna give you more more more publicity therefore you don't feel like you need to explain yourself but but but that lacks spiritual integrity um because you have people who are who to believe yes yes and now satan can work with individuals say you know what this is why i don't trust Christianity at all this is why i don't trust preachers at all i mean you you're giving satan opportunity to play on the weaker and that's not good bro let me say this and i need to i need to switch frames i need to switch frames and i want i want this to be clear i want this to be clear before everybody before the watching world god knows it have you and i had any conversation about what we were going to discuss tonight no i asked you from the airport i said do you have a you have something in mind or it's gonna be organic and you said let's let's make it organic so there's nothing that you and i rehearsed there's nothing i say hey man i'm gonna slide you this clip i'm gonna slide you this i'm gonna slide you that i'm gonna talk about this i just need you that i said i say any of that to you none none thank you just in case the the flip mode squad flip nation they come and they try to attack and all this other kind of stuff


Rice is our national occupation. My father, my grandfather, they also cultivated rice. As a farmer I am also cultivating rice. Actually this is good for our nation. Here they normally grow traditional local varieties such as what you can see in that field there and so these local varieties, they mature late in the season. You can see that this variety, it hasn't even started to head whereas this is a modern variety where we are in the grain-filling stage already. They don't tend to apply any fertilizer to their local varieties and they might get a couple of tons of cahectae. The local variety usually only produces 2 to 2.5 ton per hectare but the new high yielding variety that we are growing now it can produce around 5 to 5.5 ton per hectare. So we know that we can make much more productive systems here. First of all by changing the varieties to varieties which have much higher yield. Secondly we can have varieties that mature earlier which means that we can establish a crop after rice and we can again get a much higher yield of the crop after rice. We can actually fit 3 crops a year into the system by choosing varieties with the right duration. We can also improve water management in the rainy season by draining water out when there is too much water here and in fact the farmers are already doing that a little bit. This project is helping us on community level water management. The project staff members are advising us to work as a community and raise the issue to local government authorities. Now we are getting more support from this project. So there is huge potential for increasing the production from the lands that are here now. They are hardly used very well at all.