Hello, everyone, and welcome to Farming Matters. I'm your host, Erin Schneider. I work with the Most Central Asian Cereprogram, and I'm here today with Marie Flanagan, our producer of the show. Hello, everyone. So I'm really excited to be here today with Anna Timmer with the cornucopia. And Anna is going to share with you all today more about her on Cerefarmor Rancher Project. Anna, welcome. We're glad you're here. Thanks for making time. Thanks for having me. One thing I wanted to ask is for the viewers who aren't familiar with the cornucopia, can you describe the cornucopia and where it is? So the cornucopia is about a 10-acre farm located in Sioux Center, Iowa. So it's basically smack dab in the middle of Sioux County. Sioux County is a lot of row cropping, and it's a lot of feedlots. And it's a lot of hog confinements. And so what we're doing here is very outside of the box thinking, but we grow, oh, boy, depending on how you count, anywhere from 40 to 80 different kinds of vegetables per year. We have about an 80 to 100-member CSA program that we're running, so community-supported agriculture. We go to four farmers markets a week. We do sell some wholesale. It's mostly retail. There's a couple colleges that are local that we like to work with, but they've had a lot of turnover in chefs the last couple years, which has made it a little bit more difficult to figure out, like, what do we need to have an inventory that works better for you? And there's a couple restaurants that we also sell to. We raise about 200 to 250 laying hens and about 20 ducks. So we bring eggs to market, and we raise about 3,000 broiler chickens on pasture every year. And what's your role at the cornucopia? I am the field team leader, which means that I coordinate all of the transplanting that happens at the farm. It's my job to know how much space this certain planting is going to take up and where it's going to go. And let's see, I work a lot with the summer employees that come out, so I teach a lot of harvesting techniques, sweetening techniques, a lot of what we do at the cornucopia. We're not certified organic, but we follow all organic practices, and so we're always looking for new and better ways to do things and to improve our growing practices and to improve the quality of the product that we're offering to people. And so I guess in 2020 and in 2021, the farm saw tremendous growth in sales. And so the demand was there for us to have more and to offer more, but then that means that we needed to grow more, which means that you're dealing with more weeds. And so we were just kind of at this point where we didn't really know what to do anymore about all the weeds. And we were really battling perennial weeds, like thistles, that we could just not get a handle on. And so on the way to the farmer's market at 5 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, my boss and I were just kind of talking about what are some of our options, what are we doing well, what are we not doing well, what are some solutions to solving these problems that we're having. And I thought to myself, well, farmers in Northwest Iowa burn their ditches on a regular basis. And prairies get burned on a regular basis. And why is that? Why are they doing this prescribed burning? And I knew that part of it was for weed control, right?  And so I started looking into it. And I realized that there isn't a lot of literature at all on prescribed burning in terms of what is it actually doing to the soil? Is it benefiting the soil? Is it actually hurting the soil? What's happening with annual weeds? What's happening with perennial weeds? Kind of just anything like that. And so the more I looked into it, the less I was finding. And so then that's when my boss suggested that I apply for a SARA grant to do some of this more in-depth research just to see what kinds of things were happening and not happening. And so this project would be what I would call phase one. And we just wanted to make sure that we weren't harming the soil health at all. And so we basically, I did a soil test before planting a cover crop, like an annual perennial cover crop. I did a soil test while the cover crop was growing. And then I did a soil test after burning just to kind of see what was there before we started, what nutrients are being taken up by the cover crop. And we did a perennial, or yeah, we did winter rye. So something that we could seed in the fall that would come back in the spring that we could let grow for the summer and then burn off after that. And so then I was able to sit down with a professor of agriculture from Dort University, which is located in the town that the farm is in. And then he was able to kind of teach me how to read a soil test, but also kind of talking through what was happening. You can go to the next slide. Yeah, so this is kind of just the timeline that we use. So I seeded annual or winter rye grass on September 27 of 2022. So I was approved for my grant in the spring of 2022. We watched the grass grow the summer of 2023. And then we mowed it a couple of times to prevent some of that reseeding that winter rye can do. If you let it go to seed for too long, we didn't wanna end up with another weed. We didn't wanna just end up with another weed that we were gonna have to deal with this coming year. And then on November 10 of last year, then we burnt the grass with the help of the local fire department. You can go to the next slide. Anna, I'm sorry. I don't know if you're gonna cover this later, but are you gonna talk about like working with the fire department at all? Yes, yep. Yep. So this is just kind of a really broad overview of the soil test results that we had. And the main things to look at would be so the first three, so the phosphorus, the cation exchange capacity and the nitrate nitrogen, there is not really a big difference between any of those numbers, which is what we wanted to see. We wanted to make sure that we weren't losing a lot of that kind of a thing. And there is, I guess with the nitrate nitrogen we did, we went from 72 to pounds per acre to 31 by the time we were postponed. But when I sat down and talked with the agricultural professor, then he said that the nitrate nitrogen is water soluble, meaning that it can get taken up in the air with evaporation or it can wash away very easily if you have a hard rain. And so that's more fertilizer, that nitrate nitrogen is in the form of fertilizer. The organic nitrogen and the organic carbon, that's soil fertility, like that's long-term soil fertility. And so those are the kinds of numbers that we wanted to see change and which they did. So as you can see, the organic carbon went way up there kind of towards the middle. The organic nitrogen also went way up. And so when we started our carbon to nitrogen ratio was 102.3 to one. So 102.3 carbon to one nitrogen. And you want that ratio to actually be closer between eight to one and 25 to one. So by the time we were done, I actually was able to get it down to 21 to one instead of that 102. So that part of the project worked really well. The other thing that we noticed was an increase in our one-day CO2C burst, which is the amount of soil microbials that are active. And so that's a measurement of like how active are those microbials along in the soil. You can go to the next slide. So some of the outcomes of this were, we learned that we should have probably used a different cover crop. When you drive on that winter rye grass, then it dies. And so, but we had to drive on it to mow it. Like we mowed it pretty high, but it would have been better if we could pick a different cover crop that we didn't have to do any of that with. And now we know from learning through this process we should use something like a sorghum sedan or something else kind of like that that would mimic the height and density of prairie grass but something that we didn't have to mow throughout the summer. Our carbon to nitrogen ratio improved significantly, which means that we have more natural microbial activity. So there's more decomposition happening. There's more nutrients available to the plants. We have better long-term fertility because of this. We got just better long-term soil health. When I was doing my research for this, some ecologists believe that the reason that the soil in Northwest Iowa or why the soil in Northwest Iowa is so rich is because of these prairie fires, which is also part of the reason why I was inspired to do this. And so what happens is fire travels close to the ground when it burns. And so the plants get cut off, like that grass gets cut off at the bottom and falls on top of the fire and kind of smothering it out, which creates this really nutrient rich charcoal, which they call biochar. And you can actually buy biochar to put on your gardens for increase, like as a fertilizer basically is what you can do. And so part of this then was also trying to see if we could recreate that biochar naturally so that we had better long-term soil health. We had hopefully better weed management and we didn't lose any nutrients. That was the other thing that I really wanted to check up on was to make sure that we weren't losing nutrients in any of the smoke. I can go to the next. So some of this future application would be, we're planning on for this coming year, we're gonna use a way more diverse blend of cover crops and we're gonna try more heavy crop rotation, like throughout the entire season. We're trying to get more towards having long-term fertility as opposed to using fertilizers, even if they are natural ones.  And with the fire department, then Sioux Center, the town where I'm at has a volunteer fire department and there's, actually it's very common in Sioux County for farmers to burn their fields. And so this is like, this is something that they do on a regular basis where they do prescribed burning for other farmers. And so that was a really easy way for us to just say like, oh yeah, hey we have this plot that we would like to burn and then, yeah, and then it's good practice for them and yeah, all that kind of thing. So. Oh, thank you Anna. So burning like conditions need to have a sweet spot, right? Where did you, would you like stick to a fall burning? Is that pretty common? Or would you wanna like tweak with maybe spring and then direct seed right after that because you have that like helping with the seed prep thing or what would be some tips there? I think the reason that I picked fall burning partly was because we weren't quite sure how this was gonna go, right? Like this is like you can plan, plan, plan and that doesn't mean that it's gonna happen.  And then if we did end up with some weird fertility issues then it wasn't gonna necessarily affect everything that we were gonna try to plant right after that. And we do like to leave different sections. We kind of have a rotation of sections of ground that we like leaving fallow for sometimes a year, sometimes six months kind of depending on how things are going. And so the section that I did my project on was the one that we wanted to leave fallow. Especially since the year before we had onions there and the weeds were like 10 feet tall over my head.  So we'll see how many of those weeds actually come up again this year. I don't know, we'll figure it out, but. Any advice for other producers who might want to start doing prescribed burning? For people that wanna do this, kind of like timing is everything. And so like being flexible, like I've only tried one cover crop and we're, if we do it again, we're gonna try a different one and just kind of doing personal research and like having that like personal growth mindset. I think at least in some of the conversations that I've had with other producers about my project or just other producers in general, sometimes there's a little bit of this fear that like what if I fail? And like honestly what has benefited us the most is the spirit of curiosity and this like the idea and the spirit of like being okay to take a risk. And you know, like it might pan out really well for you, but it might not and being okay with accept, like you have to accept both aspects of that. So you also mentioned like one thing that revealed was sort of like a healthy hone in on the cover crop mix you wanted to plant this year.  Or you're kind of like, I don't know or yeah. Yes, I think we will probably, we'll definitely choose a different cover crop probably sorghum sedan. And then we'll be able to like, we like using the natural method, like the natural processes that are already like in creation as opposed to buying it. Like there's, we buy like an organic fertilizer and like it's a cow manure base, but we don't necessarily need like all of the phosphorus or all of the whatever that's coming along with that. And so this kind of like plants really need a lot of nitrogen. They don't necessarily like, they take out phosphorus, but not nearly as quickly as what they take up nitrogen. So we're also trying to like find ways of adding that nitrogen back in without adding like way too much of something else. Cause then you can get disease problems and pest issues. And so we really like the rebalancing that this actually did. So yeah, I think we plan on, I mean we'll see how the summer goes, but we do plan on bringing and if anything, like we've, we are planning on using cover crops, like a way wider variety of cover crops than what we've ever used before to just kind of try to like work with more of those natural methods and weed barriers and like planting buffer strips for beneficial insects and just kind of like trying to, yeah, do more with that. Thank you and a pleasure. Pleasure is all ours. I appreciate your time and just wish you all well. So I'm happy burning this was fun. I do that. Oh yes. May or may not be a pyromaniac in heart.


I know the law will be called for September 29th, and I'm not used to anybody doing things early. It's the Constitution Day today. So we thought we'd do that. I know it's also another day. It's the, I know the 198th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, but it's also the 39th anniversary of your 39th birthday. Right. It's not really a gift, it's just a little souvenir of the occasion here. We'll have many copies of these very sharply over for distribution within your own staff, and I think we'll be sending copies to, if you don't object, to all the members of the agency heads, and of course some of the speakers and vice-presidents and all of them. Listen, I think they want us to come in and sit down here in a good atmosphere. We decided that the menace will use the day and the occasion. Do they see the entire Constitution in the back of this place? It's a little hard to read, though. I think, of course, this is wonderful, and I think the 200th that's coming up is, I made it a point to read a number of constitutions I've been able to read, including the Soviet Constitution. I was surprised to find that there's some terms in there and things that they're guaranteed to their people, sings in ours. Exactly. Except that they have never implemented them or let them have those freedoms. In 77, I was over in the Soviet Union on a personal invitation which Brezhnev had attended, and given an email, I was here at a White House dinner before him, and when we had our session in his office in Kremlin, I gave him a very special copy of our Constitution. He said, oh, we have one now, a new one, just like yours, just like yours. It's about that thick. And I didn't cross-examine. I thought I was a guest, and I'd better be a little polite. But then I suggested to him that he could have saved himself a lot of work to just take ours and copy it. Then I presented him with a facsimile of the inkwell that was used to sign the Constitution. I don't know if it registered with him at any rate. We had a little funnel bridge. Well, you know what? I can't claim that I've read all the constitutions in the world, but I read enough that I believe. Hello, President. Let's go back to North Carolina. Hey, Jack. I think we're going to have to sit for a minute or so. Hello, Jack. What are you doing here? I'll tell you the front. We've got a thunderous ovation at MC State University. Two weeks ago, a third. Temperature changed a little bit together. It's a little warm here. I'm still trying to get used to students' cheerleaders. They burned me and effigy then. These kids were judgmental. Cheerleaders. I had told them outside. I did that. They said, what did that mean? I told them, that's deaf language where I live. They said, great. What does that mean? I thought they were giving them fingers. I don't know what I mean, I don't know what I mean. I did. I returned it. If I was those cheerleaders right down in front, I didn't get the sign. Oh, they got delighted with that. 18 September 1985. This is a meeting with the president and the speechwriters in the Oval Office, right on camera. Right on record. I have a care budget. And there was one of all things that I've never seen in there. If I was holding up a sign, break off relations with abandoned Israel. But no, they were most enthusiastic. It was a very rewarding experience there. So if you got your distance in Boston to you, you were going to have a few of them. Probably came down from the bottom. Mr. President, this is just to get together with the speechwriters. And we thought it would be advantageous for them and for you. Maybe there would be sort of an interchange here. You could speak your mind on what she wanted in some of these speeches in terms of trolley spending, trade, animal, east-west relations, foreign policy generally, whatever it is that you just tell them what you want to see in those speeches. Well, first of all, I'm dissatisfied. But I've always, years passed out there in the mashed potato circuit, I've always believed that specificity is the soul of credibility. And by that, I mean we're possible where something of fact and figure can be used instead of eloquent appeals and rhetoric. And maybe I've subjected you to this one before, but I remembered years ago when I was talking about big government and this was long before I was any part of government and thought I ever would be. But I remember an example once, an old farm program. And believe me, back there, it was just as controversial as it is now, just as harmful. Now, you're going to go on for a whole page talking about freeing the farmers and what should be done there. But I got one figure example that did it all. And that was that, if I remember correctly, the numbers that I had found. That was that there were six farm programs, federal programs, to encourage poultry raisers to increase egg production. There was a seventh government program to finance the government purchase of surplus eggs. Well, I think that tells it all. I found another one like it was, a country club that had some landed on to just alongside a couple of its fairways. And it wasn't used at least to a farmer who raised corn on there. And then the country club got to the place where they decided to use that land and extend the fairways and two holes longer and all of that. They got a check from the government for taking corn land out of production. This is great. Hi, Mr. President. How are you? Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to see you. Chairman, how are you doing? Good to see you. You're offering my wife as a recommendation. I'm glad that that. My wife is going into the whole antique business. The bank is giving her a problem. You know, they take the chair. They go, oh, Mr. Baker, will that be enough? At first they had to give way to Mr. Baker. She says, I think maybe I could get a letter from the president. It might take a little longer. Would that be as effective as they gave you? Listen, mom, I want to hear from you, but this thing, you know how I feel about the tax reform when I just come from hearing tens of thousands of people in a mass outdoor rally cheering wildly every time I mention it and every facet of it. And I know what you're doing and I appreciate very much the cooperation. What I'm concerned about very much is, and I know the leadership has talked about maybe having to go home before we can do this when that means next year. But I think there's something we have to consider politically. Danny Rastinkowski is working as hard as he can to get this thing out. The worst thing in the world that could happen to us for next year is to have the Democratic-dominated House pass a tax reform bill and have the Republican-dominated Senate go home on recess, leaving it there until next year and how they would use that against us. Let me tell you where we are, because I think we can do it. I have said in the past, get it to me by October 15, we can make it this year. Really, I can do it even if I don't get it till 1st of November. Assuming that the Congress stays in, if Tip O'Neill and Bob decide to go home Thanksgiving in the adjourn, then I can't make it, but presumably they would keep us in for the tax bill. Or at a minimum, let the people go home and leave the committees there. Let the committees work on it and go to Congress when we have to call the Senate back. We can get it if they don't go. What I'm worried about, more importantly, is trade. Because if I were the Democrats, what I would do is put a barrier. I'd like to briefly describe the current approach towards being per diem, and then also outline the legislation that we're proposing for your approval. First of all, as far as the current system is concerned, we really have today a two-tier system for some 400 high-cost cities. We're reimbursing the federal travelers for its actual cost for meals and lodging up to a ceiling of $75 per day. It's a very expensive, very paper-intensive program overall. For the smaller cities, we're reimbursing the federal travelers for its actual cost for lodging and providing a flat rate $23 a day for meals up to a ceiling, an overall ceiling in those cities of $50 per day. Any change that we make in the ceiling requires a congressional approval. Just to put it in perspective, the total travel cost food and lodging for the cities all through with similar legislation. I think there are really three major issues that we need to deal with and three problems that we're having overall. The administrative costs in the system are too high. We're spending $160 million a year administering food lodging in the whole per diem system. That's roughly 10% of the budget for food and lodging. The problem we have is very paper-intensive. Yes, what was President, I would like to have you in this scope be a very thoughtful reading type, study type post. No, I've never seen you with your hand to your face, right?  I'm usually great. Just like you're this, yeah? Or I can turn. You can turn this way. Cross your neck. That's it. That's it. All right. If you don't want us to feel right, but if you do a thought and do a little bit of the window just for your body in that position but look towards the window because if you're just in a thoughtful type of balance, I'd also like to have you just very thoughtful. Right about it here. If you'd like to be looking towards the window, be looking in that direction.  I don't want to take it. I don't want to take it. I don't want to take it. My hand has a hand. No, it's okay. It's all right. If the light comes out, if it, if we get good color, it's okay. I can look at it. Oh. It's an ocular case. And on the way, I just said that I'm the first president I made in this place was truly, what is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this?


Hey there friends, thanks for checking in the last time I got on here I said that ammo was becoming more and more available and that the price did not reflect any Decreased, but at least it was available. How many times throughout the winter? Did you go online? Put ammo in your cart and by the time you went to purchase it It was out of stock and you would check daily on all these sites that it was constantly out of stock Well that changed, but the price didn't reflect any change It was still outrageous a dollar round of 9 millimeter even more $60 a box of 50 for target loads That's what many people were paying because it was in stock and then it was out of stock all sudden it was gone people were paying those outrageous amounts and We had other people saying this is gonna take over five years just to get back to any bit of normalcy I never said that but I thought perhaps this could be true, you know, there was no end in sight Well now what we are seeing is that the volume is still up and the price is starting to decrease Across the board you're looking at rifle rounds handgun rounds shotgun loads. We're seeing More availability at lower cost Why is this well first off? It's the summer months and across the entire gun industry summer is typically very slow January February March those are big money months for the gun industry Guns are at an all-time high Ammo's at an all-time high and demand is at an all-time high in terms of cost and the people Lifting out their wallet and making those purchases, but now we're seeing finally a decrease in cost without any supply Limitations, you know, you go and see that the there was a two-box limit and yet the shipping was 15 bucks It was like good grief. When will this ever end? You know, it's just so expensive Sterling 115 grain 9 millimeter a box of brass case ammo. It's from Turkey I never even heard of Sterling. Maybe I have I just don't recall 1995 a box of brass target loads. How about bulk? You're looking at blazer brass training loads $192 and 50 cents for 500 now you know a hundred and 40 for 500 during normal times would be Acceptable maybe a little less maybe a little more. It's at a hundred ninety two Six months ago. We would have been jumping at all this It would have been gone like that, but it's available now and there are no limitations from what I've seen on several sites I spent most of my morning checking this out before I got here and made this video steel case tool ammo That's out there five fifteen ninety five. I should say a box of fifty Some people won't use it. Some people will I I use it. I don't care. It seems to work Okay, in the guns that I fire fifteen ninety five. Here's another one for fifteen forty three That's not bad. Now we remember back when it was eight nine dollars a box of fifty Well, we're not seeing that yet, but we're seeing in the mid fifties Once again a couple months back. We would have been jumping at that opportunity. It is available now Now the one thing that I have said in the past is that get your ammo By once cry once by by bulk perhaps if you could if you could swing the cash But get your ammo so that when the sky rockets again, and it will we won't be in a situation Where we get no range time because the cost is too expensive and we don't have any all right This is nothing new. It's like a big roller coaster in terms of ammo and guns guns are becoming available You're looking at shotguns and handguns and rifles like it's they're all Becoming more and more available. We have fewer first-time buyers which the data suggests fewer Nick checks and we are having the summer months where people aren't so Involved in the gun industry and the ammo is available 45 ACP. That was another tough one I'm seeing PR VI or Preview well, however you say it twenty nine ninety five a box now I remember paying twenty five dollars a box of target load 45 ACP here We have twenty nine ninety five a box. Is it a bit elevated? Yes, but not like it was and Are there limitations? No, not that I've seen by all that you want At that price now. Yes, you're gonna pay shipping But if you consider local as well, I'm seeing the same or similar costs locally My buddy trees are blowing bought 50 round boxes of nine millimeter for twenty dollars a box brass loads just yesterday We talked about this and I'm seeing it in my local area as well. So It's becoming available. We're seeing many reasons why it has become available But for the first time in a long time, I'm seeing the price decrease. It's not where it was But it's nine millimeter anyways and forty five about five bucks more per box And you know what that's a little more livable than 60 dollars for a box of target loads Which was outrageous people were buying it But it's available now at a little cheaper cost and it's time to hit the range and be gun guys Once again, because we have been sitting on the sidelines too long. We've been complaining for too long We got new guns and now we have ammo available and now finally It's time to shoot them if you like videos like this, please subscribe and share I always appreciate thumbs up button. Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


When I was 20, I took a job to earn pocket money while making up for my earlier underachievements at the local community college. My new employer was one of those full-service residential cleaning companies. I won't say which one, so to protect the innocent, let's just call it Clean Bro. I was one of two types of people who worked the mops for Clean Bro. 20-year-old punks who had spent high school in the bottom of a bong, like myself, and 40-year-old losers who didn't care how dirty they got during the day, so long as they could afford to wash themselves off in cheap beer at night. There were also plenty of upstanding folks in the profession, but they tended to sign on with companies that cared more about their employees' work ethics and less about the kind of documentation that came standard with being born here. Unlike the competition, Clean Bro exclusively hired dropouts and burnouts because we worked for peanuts, and because corporates seemed to have a knack for attracting government scrutiny for both groups, then cleaning up other people's messes was something to do while running away from our own. Everyone came to the job from somewhere less than ideal, and most folks left it for pastures that were no greener. Clean Up jobs came in a pretty wide variety. The most common one was picking up after a kitchen fire. Some sleep-deprived stayed-home mom would put dinner on the stove, then nod off on the couch. The smoke alarm would blare and give the kids a good fright, but everybody would make it out safe. The fire department would hose it all down with grey water, leaving behind a colossal mess of smoke-stained ceilings, waterlogged drywall, shattered drinking glasses, and smashed dishware. Once the claims adjuster had taken his look, the homeowner would call Clean Bro and not roll up in my company van and company overalls to spend the day scrubbing soot off windows, prying up crack tile, and sucking ashes into the world's most powerful shop vac. The next day, carpenters would swoop in and put the whole thing back better than new. With the insurance payout, half these houses had nicer kitchens by the time all was said and done, and I usually got a pretty good tip for my trouble. Some of the cleaners refused to work anything worse than a fire rehab or flood restoration, but as a young fellow I like to think I could stomach anything, so I ended up taking a lot of the worst jobs too. For example, every couple of weeks Clean Bro got called to work, a suicide scene. Now, it's not as bad as you think. By the time I pulled up in the van, the coroner had picked up the body, the cops had asked their questions, and the forensics teams had scraped together whatever evidence they were going to. At that point, the homeowner was usually left with little more than some bad memories and a stain, and it was my job to scrub out the stain. The more considerate ones left hardly any mess at all, choosing the bathtub for their final resting place before cutting their wrists or swallowing a handful of pills. Sometimes there would be a dark ring revealing the tub's last high watermark, but usually there was no sign at all of what had happened there. Still, the homeowner would normally have me pull out the tub entirely, leaving behind a hole that they'd fill with something new. I guess they didn't like the idea of taking a shower or bath in the same place where a loved one laid dead and decaying for hours, days, maybe even weeks before being discovered. They hired me because, in my area, a lot of regular contractors can't touch a tub that's had a dead body in it, owing to occupational health regulations. But as a clean bro cleaner, I had all the necessary training and safety gear to touch dirty things. Some of the dead were less polite, though. Folks who went in bed, which included a lot of elderly types taking the natural way out, left behind a pretty big mess on the sheets and mattress from the various liquids that tend to exit the body upon death. Blood and vomit were pretty common additions from the cutters and overdosers, respectively. The cleanup involved little more than wrapping everything in plastic and hauling it out for a proper biohazardous waste disposal. A service clean bro provided for a reasonable fee. There were the really rude people. The ones who decided to swallow a bullet because it's quick, they tended to take the longest to mop up. I'll spare you the details beyond that. Worse than the mess itself was the thousand yard stare on the face of the spouse or parent who had the misfortune of discovering the body and seeing their loved one in that state. You just knew those people would never be the same inside again. Now, if all of that makes you reconsider your professional choices for a career in cleanup duty, perhaps you'll think again when I tell you this tale. I'd been working at clean bro for about a year when I got sent on a job early one morning. My boss didn't give me any details, just the address and a work order with a phrase basement deep clean telling me someone would explain it to me when I got there vague instructions were always a bad sign. I packed up one of the boxy clean bro vans with a full set of gear then headed out. The place was hard to find tucked off a back road in the woods at the edge of town and satellite navigation was barely a thing yet, let alone GPS enabled smartphones. After making a few wrong turns, I figured I was in the right place when I spotted one of my fellow cleaners Kurt waiting in the driveway by his beater civic. It wasn't unusual for folks to get cold in straight from home to work a rush job on their day off. Kurt was that other kind of clean bro cleaner, the 40 year old burnout. Fortunately, he was reasonably reliable, preferring to stay sober at least until the job was nearly done. He was smoking a cigarette while some slick 30 something in a suit holding a binder was shouting and waving excitedly at him. I recognize the guy, a real estate agent from a local bank that often hired clean bro to make foreclosures presentable before putting them on the market. Those jobs were some of the worst, even though there was rarely any blood or gore. Instead, we had to deal with the knee deep residue of evicted hoarders or work without lights and running water where drug addicts had ripped out wires and plumbing to sell for scrap or risk getting shunned by a disgruntled ex homeowner looking to exact revenge on whatever poor Schmuck was standing on his property at the behest of that damn bank. I was almost relieved when I recognized the house as a different case entirely. About six months earlier, it came to light that a bunch of disappearances throughout the state had been the work of some local psycho who was using his basement as an abattoir. The evening news had run a shot of the killer's house to introduce a couple weeks of nightly updates on the story. Such a normal fellow, his neighbors had told the cameras, so clean, they said. I'd been with clean bro for a few months at the time and the reports made me wonder if I'd learned enough about removing stains to make a murder scene vanish completely. But by now, I was a pro. Maybe this wouldn't be such a big job after all. Besides, they'd already found the guy hanging from his basement ceiling so at least there was no chance of being the next lucky contestant in his game. The cops had gotten a break in the case when a student at the college dodged and attempted kidnapping. They released a pretty good sketch to kick off a statewide manhunt. The police had gotten some leads in the area, convenience store clerks whose stories were backed up by grainy security video. They started canvassing the area, someone found a front door standing open and nobody at home and I imagine they started peering through windows until they spotted some probable cause. Once they realized what they'd stumbled across, the cops must have figured their suspect opted for a literal noose over the figurative one that was drawing tight around him. The real estate agent spun around when he heard my van pulling up the secluded driveway and flashed a look of relief before turning red again in agitation. He was already yelling at me before I had the van in park, squeezed between Kurt Civic and a silver coupe that screamed self-indulgent prick. I calmly stepped out, walked to the back of the van and began unloading the gear while he blathered something about having booked us weeks ago. Something about an open house in two days, something about lawsuits, and something about hard-working red-blooded Americans instead of lazy goddamn immigrants. Yeah, I got here as soon as I was called, sir. We'll work as quick as we can, pal. Way above my pay grade, guy.  I didn't say.  He tried the knob, which turned, but of course the door was stuck. I could tell this guy didn't really want to be here, and I couldn't wait to see him go either. I was about to volunteer to try when Kurt spoke up. Let me see if I can open that for you, sir. He said, in a way a lifelong service lab like Kurt could be literally respectful while implying the deepest loathing imaginable. The agent seemed inordinately relieved as he stepped back all the way to the entrance to the kitchen as if ready to sprint back to his Audi. I instinctively braced myself as Kurt gave the door a single sharp shove in just the right spot, popping it free and releasing the most unholy smell imaginable. I reeled backward, my eyes watering, my stomach and my throat fighting over which direction my half digested breakfast was meant to go. I kept it down and blinked away the tears as I heard Kurt wheezing for breath through his tobacco stain lungs. For a moment, I envied his burnt out sinuses, since he seemed only barely fazed while I was on the verge of passing out.   Kurt and I put on our masks, which helped enormously with the smell. The HEPA filters pulled anything biohazardous out of the air, although you could still tell something had died down there. I descended the narrow basement steps and found a pole chain dangling from the ceiling. I gave it a tug and was disappointed with how little effect it had. The killer had apparently decided to do his part to save the earth. By installing one of these new helical compact fluorescent light bulbs, the kind that take a while to warm up. In its weak greenish light, combined with a dim morning sun filtering through a row of six inch high basement windows, the room looked like a pretty unremarkable basement. A gray concrete rectangle with a few round steel posts supporting the joist above. Kurt awkwardly passed a heavy lighting rig down the stairs to me and I plugged it into an outlet on the wall, pumping 2000 watts of halogen glory into the concrete room. I immediately wished I hadn't. Under the dim fluorescent light, the floor had just been a gray plain and the room was full of shapeless gray furniture. Our artificial sun had revealed that I was, in fact, standing on a pool of dried blood that was nearly the size of the house's entire foundation.  Again, I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say, I was glad we had full body plastic suits to wear for this kind of job. Takes a long time to make a mess this big. Kurt muttered as he reached the bottom of the stairs and turned slowly to take in the view. Kurt and I got to work. And after a little while, I barely even noticed the noxious smell leaking in through my mask. We laid out drop cloths to avoid tracking gore around. We wrapped the soiled furniture and tools and plastic to haul away. We found the bulkhead door up to the backyard, but it was padlock shut, so we broke our backs pulling things up the narrow steps to the kitchen, looking like germophobic movers as we emptied the basement onto the front lawn. The day wore on and as we took our lunch break, a clean bro disposal truck stopped by to pick up the large bio contaminated debris. The driver was a friend and it picked up some subs for us on our way over. Kurt scarfed down bologna and American cheese on white, but I didn't have much appetite for my chicken parm. When he'd finished eating, Kurt lit a cigarette from his bright orange Zippo, and I was in a surprisingly cheerful mood, despite this being by far the nastiest call I'd ever worked. He told me all about his less than illustrious career in cleanup, how he'd been cleaning for 20 years and worn the overalls of half as many different companies throughout the region. A note of nostalgia in his voice. Having the biggest messes disappear gave him a kind of satisfaction that I at the time couldn't quite muster. I'd never seen Kurt so chatty, but I was content to let him talk himself out before returning to the task at hand. We hit things hard after that, hoping to finish the job without having to come back as early the next morning to make our deadline. Our boss at clean bro always showed appreciation when we made one of our bank clients happy since they offered plenty of the toughest but most lucrative jobs. All the big stuff was out and the layers of caked on blood were starting to wear away under the industrial solvents we deployed between opening the basement windows and setting up a massive industrial fan blowing down from the top of the steps. We'd managed to clean the worst of the fumes. The mopping was sweaty work in full hoods and masks and I was starting to feel weak from skipping lunch, so we decided to take them off and risk the air. The smell was now entirely tolerable, although I did catch the occasional whiff of death as the afternoon wore on. The sun was setting as we started to wrap things up. Thanks to chemistry, mobs, and old fashioned elbow grease, the concrete floor was clean enough that you could eat off it, assuming you had no idea about the horrible crimes that had been committed there. Anything else that had been soiled was either off the property or in the back of the van. Curt and I nodded agreement at a job well done and then, just as I turned to haul the first load of cleaning equipment back up the narrow basement steps, I heard a sharp pop above my head. I'd clipped the fluorescent bulb with a mop handle, shattering it into a fine silver powder that drifted down like snow. Working under the glow of our industrial lamps, I'd completely forgotten it was there.  Most people just vacuum up the dust and broken glass without a thought, which is a great way to spread the poison around your house. As a certified cleanup professional, I had both the training and the sworn duty to do the right thing in this situation, even if it kept me from going home for an extra hour. Curt smirked at me, shaking his head as he pulled his HEPA mask back on.  I followed him back to the van with a half empty bucket of solvent and fetched a sticky lint roller, a fine broom and dustpan, and a jar intended for hazardous chemical waste. Curt packed the rest of the equipment into the van while I performed the delicate duties of saving the world from a thousandth of a gram of mercury. Loading in and out were my least favorite parts of the job, and even though it was Friday night and I didn't have much to go home to, I was pretty slow about it. I timed it so I would finish, just as there was nothing left but the lighting rig, and that was the only thing keeping the darkness at bay now that the sun was gone. I swept the final flakes of CFL dust into the jar, then reached up to unscrew the wrecked bulb's base from the fixture. Just in time, I remembered to tug the pole chain and switch it off first. I was sealing the jar's lid when I heard the snap of Curt Zippo. I was about to admonish him for smoking in a client's house when I saw he was using its light to get a look at something against the wall, outside the searing beam of our flood lamp. The better prepared cleaners carried a penlight with them, but Curt was more of a travel light kind of guy. He was poking at some antique furniture that had witnessed the basement's horrors and escaped unstained. It was clean enough to sell to some depraved collector of serial killer memorabilia which meant we weren't supposed to touch it. It's bad form for a cleaner to snoop through a homeowner's property, but I guess the poor dead psycho wasn't going to mind. Looks like the cops missed one. Curt said, letting out an amused whistle. What? I asked, not sure I wanted to know. Curt held up a severed finger in his nitrile gloved hand, giving me a glimpse of it before dropping it into a small bag for biohazardous waste that he'd already pulled from a pouch on his plastic bunny suit. I guess when the killer is dangling a few feet above a stack of his own victims, the forensic guys feel free to phone it in. Shaking off my mental image of the spare finger, I brought the jar of mercury-kissed glass shards out to the van, securing it in a chest reserved for the deadliest of deadlies. I wasn't allowed to carry anything else when transporting something so very dangerous. You've got to love policies created solely for corporate liability ass-covering. I'd left Curt behind, figuring he could bring the lighting rig out when he was done collecting souvenirs. He was taking his time, and I remember just how unwieldy the rig had been when he handed it down to me. So after hanging at the van for a few minutes, I locked its doors, another anane-hazardous chemical waste policy, and went back into the house to check on him.  Then, like the killer who comes back for one last swipe at the hero, a gust of putrid wind hit me in the face. I blinked the tears from my eyes again to see an odd shadow on the wall, tracing the outline of a tall, slender figure. Its torso spread to the ceiling, and its legs stretching across the floor, the whole shape swaying unnaturally. I was still reeling from the unexpected lungful of noxious air, which was cleared by a chill draft blowing through the concrete room. My pulse quickened, as my gaze swept across the space, scanning for some demonic intruder, but saw nothing there. Instead, I spotted a glove draped over one of the bulb enclosures of the lighting rig, two fingers dangling in front of the beam and fluttering slightly in the draft. The glove was just starting to melt in the searing halogen glare, so I yanked it away before it glued itself to the metal frame. A red smear across the glove's palm turned out to be a message. Thanks, it said. Kurt, what the hell? I yelled. Cleaners pranked each other all the time on the job, but this had crossed several lines. I scanned the shadows again, expecting to see him doubled over in suppressed laughter, but I was alone. Then I noticed the cool breeze was drifting down from the open bulkhead door up to the backyard. How'd you get that open? I asked the empty room, but no reply came. Come on, man. I whined, hoping Kurt would return to help me. After a few seconds of silence, I pulled out my tiny mag light and unplugged the halogen flood lamps, leaving myself standing in near total darkness. I held the flashlight in my teeth as I hoisted the lighting rig with both hands, wondering how I was going to get this piece of clean bro property back to the van without adequate light or help. I wasn't exactly afraid of the dark, but I did feel kind of vulnerable trying to hold that rig around an unlit basement slash murder factory on cue. My imagination, or maybe it was an empty stomach, supplied a spooky noise. Which got me moving toward a shaft of moonlight. Without help, hauling the lighting rig out via the broad bulkhead door was easier than squeezing it up the kitchen staircase. And with the job done and no other working lights in the basement, I figured there was no point going back inside. I slammed the bulkhead shut and lugged the rig around to the front of the house, just in time to see Kurt Civic backing down the driveway, pivoting and disappearing into the night.  I suddenly felt very alone as I ascended the front steps one last time, locked the front door, and turned the key into the lock box hanging from the doorknob. There were no exterior lights on and the neighborhood was sparse and mostly dark. Finding it entirely too quiet, my imagination provided more creep show soundtrack and in a moment I was back in the van reversing up the drive at a dangerous clip. Given how he'd left me like that, I was almost glad when Kurt no showed for a fire rehab job a couple days later. Instead, the office called in a pretty pothead girl who was new to the cleaning game and I was happy to show her the basics. Now, it's not unusual to work with a bunch of different cleaners over the course of a month, but after a few weeks I noticed I hadn't seen Kurt since that basement job. He'd hardly seem grossed out by it, so it didn't make sense that he would have thrown in the towel like I'd seen so many newbies do their first suicide call.  I started to wonder if Kurt had seemed a little too happy with that particular cleanup. He'd been more amused than disgusted by the finger he found and come to think of it, he couldn't have tossed it in with the other bio-waste in the van since I had the keys. The freak must have kept it, maybe even used it to write his screwed up glove note. I started to figure out that either I'd witnessed the inspiration of a brand new psychopath or I'd been the sole guest at his retirement party. His 40-something burnout look did bear a passing resemblance to that police sketch. My suspicion grew when, a couple months later, some detectives came to visit me about a fraud investigation centered on Kurt. They told me something about closing his bank account the day after I'd last seen him. Something about maxing his credit cards by an easily pawned jewelry, something about abandoning his car at a park on the other side of the state, and something about a lack of friends or family to question couldn't have been much cash, officer. Gold chains weren't Kurt's style, detective. I have no idea where he could be heading, sir. Maybe Kurt's a serial killer, I didn't suggest. The house sat on the market for several more months through a few stagings and open houses, but thanks in no small part to my efforts, it sold to some family who needed room for all their kids and couldn't afford a place with a zero body count in a good school district. I guess there's no such thing as ghosts though, because they stuck around. I stuck around too. After I'd worked a few more years at Cleanbro, they had a scandal with a crew of cleaners who use small jobs to case for burglaries and big jobs as their roving drug lab. It took the cops long enough to figure out that by the time they were busted, everyone in the region knew somebody who'd been burned by the Cleanbro bandits. The supply of calls dropped off a cliff and rather than wait for the axe to fall on me, one of their most reliable workers at that point, I used what I'd learned in my community college business classes to put out my own shingle and build a solid local brand doing the same shit work as ever. I still had to put in long hours and get my hands dirty. A national corporate presence and a cushy executive office suite was still a long way off, but at least I was getting paid more than $9 an hour for my trouble. I actually started to like the work, watching the worst day of somebody's life vanish into a hefty bag or swirl down a drain. Business boomed, the town grew, and the woods were chopped down to build suburban subdivisions and corporate office parks. The whole thing with Kurt disappeared into distant memory, never to be resolved like so many of life's weird coincidences. That's what I thought for the past two decades anyway. A few weeks ago, I was sitting at my desk when I received an odd call, the kind where the homeowner doesn't want to give any details over the phone, just an address. A bashful caller is always a bad sign. I recognized the street name and decided to check it out for myself before fobbing it off on one of the 20 year old dropouts or 40 something burnouts that ride my payroll on their way from making whatever mistakes they're trying to outrun to those mistakes catching up with them. It was the same house where I'd last worked with Kurt, and after two decades working in the region, I found it pretty easily, even without my GPS enabled smartphone. The neighborhood had grown up around it, and with new windows and a fresh coat of paint, you would never have guessed it was the kind of place a serial killer had called home. The current homeowner was the oldest child of the couple that had bought the house so many years ago. He was in his 30s now and had kids of his own living there. Most people had forgotten the place's reputation, but something had come to light that would certainly jog folks memories if it got out. He couldn't afford to dump the house and move, and he didn't want to stir up anything that would cause trouble for his kids at school or lead them to discover that they were growing up in a slaughterhouse.  He pushed aside a wardrobe from its spot against the concrete basement wall and revealed a steel door behind it, secured with a padlock, with a healthy curiosity and a pair of bolt cutters. He got it open without stopping to consider the basement's dark legacy until it was too late.  The cops found a mass grave in there, sealed up airtight for more than a decade. By now, the coroner had hauled all of the bodies the detectives had asked their questions of the dumbfounded homeowner, as well as his parents, siblings, and wife, and the forensics team had scraped out a bunch of evidence. But they all seemed to be phoning it in again. Mold spores and decay patterns indicated that the small room had been sealed since before the family had moved in. And these were almost certainly the uncounted victims of the home's previous resident. Nobody wanted to face the embarrassment of having overlooked this much the first time. There were two things funny about it, though, if your sense of humor can abide a stack of corpses entombed in what was now a cookie cutter suburban development full of smiling children and friendly dogs. Most of the victims had been loaded dead and dismembered, but the one on top had been hit on the head and sealed inside alive, left to suffocate on a stack of rotting bodies over the course of several hours. A fate surely worse than death, followed by death. Even stranger, the cell had contained an empty bucket of emergency rations that had once held enough packaged food to keep a person alive for almost half a year. The homeowner led me down into the basement, where an unholy smell awakened some long buried memories in the back of my mind. The sense of smell is said to have a direct line to memory, and this stench forced me to recall an entire day spent down here mopping up the leavings of some psychopath's extended wet dream. Under the weak bluish glare of the basement's bare LED bulb, the homeowner pointed out the shape of a wardrobe by the wall, and my heightened memory instantly recognized it. It was sitting just a few feet to the left of where it had been when Kurt and I had cleaned this place out. In its old spot, cut into the concrete wall, there was a steel door, standing slightly ajar and wafting the stench of hell itself into the room. Oh, God, I forgot how bad it is down here. The homeowner said, retreating to the kitchen and leaving me alone at the bottom of the steps. A lengthy career of solvent fumes and suicide cleanups had left me reasonably immune to the worst effects of bad smells, but I almost followed him anyway. God, I wish I just followed him in cold and brayden and malick to do my dirty work, but my curiosity got the best of me. I pulled out my mag light from its loop on my utility belt, gripping it for safety against I don't know what, and walked over to that steel door. I checked out the wardrobe first, saving the worst for last. My mind flashed an image of Kurt pulling a severed finger out of one of its drawers with one hand, lit by the flickering glow of a lighter in his other hand. The wardrobe looked heavy, with broad solid feet, and it probably would have taken a three-man team to pick up and move. Then, I spotted the telltale tracks of casters cut into the decades of dust that had fallen since Kurt and I had cleaned the place. Looking back, I realized that there had been no dust to speak of, even when we'd started, after the house had been supposedly unoccupied for six months. I gave the wardrobe a nudge, and it was clear, the hulking thing had hidden wheels so it could be slid around easily and with it no longer flush against the wall. I could even see a small handle bolted into its back. I turned my attention now to the steel door cut into the concrete wall, standing about four feet tall. In the corner, there was a brown smear which I recognized as old blood as if someone had hit it or been hit by it. Very hard.  I inhaled deeply through my mouth, tasting that familiar rake and held my breath, then I pulled the handle. Inside was exactly what I'd imagined. Plenty of caked on, congealed, decaying blood, and little bits of nondescript debris coating the stone walls and floor of a four foot square cell, but nothing that was still shocking after so long on the job. The space was tucked under the house's front door landing and easily missed protrusion from the otherwise rectangular foundation. I leaned in with my flashlight and looked closer, certain there was something to find, something to understand. Brown smudges on the walls could have been illegible writing or feeble attempts to shift the stones. Someone had spent their last moments awake and alive in here, the final movement in a madman's symphony. And suddenly that was all I wanted to know.  And that's when my thousand lumens of maglite brilliance caught something bright in the corner of the concrete cell tucked in by the jam of the door. I focused my beam on it, taking a moment to resolve the soft edged rectangular shape and recognize it for what it was. It was an orange Zippo lighter, its lid singed with soot from burning until it ran out of fuel.


Welcome back to the Graham Miller show presented by Buffalo Wildlings. I'm Sam Murray joined now with Stevenson then soccer head coach Graham Miller and coach when we talked in the preseason I asked you what you wanted to see from your team in the non-conference schedule before you got into conference play and the two Things that you mentioned is can we handle the pressure and could we play consistently for 90 minutes? So how would you rate your team so far? Yeah, I think pretty well over the over the course of the over the 10 games that we've played so far I would say that we definitely have been more consistent and played for longer spells in games We're not as young as what we were last year So with only one freshman one or two freshmen starting. There's been a lot more consistency in our performances and You know, we handle the pressure. I felt like we handle the pressure against Stevens Tech and an unbelievable game here against, you know, number 16 team in the country And then I thought we didn't handle the pressure against us at Mary's team that were very good on the road So there's still some things that we're working out. But overall Very pleased with the effort very pleased with the intensity Especially during this, you know, hot part of the season They've definitely did their job over the course of over the course of non-conference play Yeah, you have to be proud of your team for, you know The last week that you had four games in seven days you go unbeaten in that stretch But only not even a blemish, but it's a tie against Stevens Tech that you mentioned So, you know, talk about the resilience and of your team and maybe even the depth that you had And that was and that's what we talked about, you know, when I took over this program three years ago The plan was to get depth in every position competitiveness in every position be able to You know when when somebody goes down hurt this next guy up and ready to go and obviously because of the Delaware Valley game getting postponed and moved to the to the Monday, you know The four games in eight days that doesn't happen very often and And if we look at those games, you know, the the Stevens Tech game went to double overtime The Delaware Valley and Immaculata and Eastern games were all played in mid-afternoon Where temperatures were close to the 90s So definitely the guys really hung tough. We played a lot of guys And, you know, I'm just impressed by by the depth we have in the squad and and the level did not drop And sometimes that happens when you make subs or you make changes to your starting lineup We didn't have that drop and it was great to come through In the tough circumstances playing that many games in such a short amount of time to come away with, you know Unbeaten in four games is something pretty special You've had eight players find the back of the net 10 of 10 different players have a point Has anyone surprised you or, you know, really impressed you so far? Well, I think the big thing is The guys are the guys are learning from last year. So, you know, we've already had the the Dillon Holly's and the The Jace Smiths, the Tag Lees, the DR Medtars who continue to just, you know, get better every year And we've seen that in their performances The sophomores, I think have really learned a lot from their freshman year AJ Morales who has played a lot for us and didn't score his rookie season And he came up with a big goal against Stevens Tech He came up with the game winner against Eastern on Saturday You know, he's at three goals in a year and that's been huge for him We've had some other of those sophomores, Jason Cahan That have, you know, came into it Diego Who have really, you know, learned from the previous year and they're getting better and that's what we want We want to see that improvement Every year and then Chris Gonzalez the freshman Who's come in as a center back and really Looks like he's been, you know, been playing with us for three years I mean, he's been so so natural in there and he's really helped us out in that center back position with Dylan and Jevon So we have more depth there. So overall You know, the guys are getting better. That's all we need and the same goes for the goalkeeping with Listele Tano He's did it again and it's great to see him Continue what he left off from his rookie season Yeah, I was going to mention him. He already has four shutouts on the air another additional shared shutout Where I think he played 79 of those those minutes in that game So now we're kind of flipping the page like you start conference play on saturday So what are your expectations as you as you enter maccom a lot of play? Well, we know we can't surprise them like we did last year, you know, we were picked last year to finish seventh and Obviously made our way up to fourth and and gave the three top teams a real run for the money and the sign And the semifinal now it's a little different. We're picked to finish fourth And the playoffs and now more teams are going to be gunning for us The big thing is we've got to pick up the home results, you know, we have, you know, the four home games They're key I always say four or five games are going to get you in the playoffs four or five wins Are going to get you in the playoffs and then it's up to you how much extra you want to do and The goal would be to be in the top three You know, we're picked to finish fourth But the goal is top three because you do not want to play in that fourth fifth game And then turn around two days later and play the number one team on the road So that's our goal our goals to be top three in the conference Feeling that we can do that especially with the players we've got we continue to stay healthy We continue to improve they continue to buy in and You know, let us say the distractions will be will be good for that Well, coach, we wish you the best of luck moving forward and we'll see you back here soon. I appreciate it. Thanks for head coach Graham Miller. I'm Sam Murray and this has been the Graham Miller show