Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. Welcome to Annesheed. I am Abdul Razaki Ngutia. Or if you like, you can call me Razaki the Golden Boy. Piazakunipata kwenya Facebook, Twitter na Insta, lakini hiyon takupati hapo badae hivi sasa nipuna mwenzangu. Ambae ako tayari, akumzima kama... Siniu, kwa mbevi. Piazani. Munyei tuha pa minimaliza. Yua itwa Fatma Yakuba. Assalamualaikum. Waalaikun salam, warahmatullahi wabarakatu. Asante sana kuni karebisha hapa. And I'm so happy to be here in the Sheed Show. And this being Ramadan and... I'm so excited that we're here to remind other fellow Muslims, I'll say they are, how to prepare for it. Because it's starting on Monday. So, well, I'd like you first of all to tell me, you know, when it comes to the Ramadan, every time when it comes to the Ramadan, people don't understand what exactly is the meaning of the Ramadan.  They don't know that it's a month in the calendar and all that. So, Islamic month, I think, most of the Muslim people they know about this, it is the nine month of the Islamic calendar and it's one of the five pillars of Islam. So, every Muslim has to fast on this month. Not everybody, but those people who are healthy. I have this idea. Kwa yuleamba enafunga. Is it just everybody who fasts? You know, there is this crazy thing. First of all, let us to talk about the crazy things that happened during the Ramadan. And yuleamba, you've gone too fast. And in the middle of the day, you feel like... Umia kula kama umesa hao.  Has it ever happened to you? Ya, it happened once, especially during the first week, the first day especially.  So, no, no, PK, and then you first eat the first pallet.  And then you speed it up.  But you didn't forget, it's okay, you're allowed to continue fasting because if you... But some people, when you feel like, when you feel like you're in a bad situation, you feel like you're in a bad situation. So, no, but some too, I mean, in my mind, maybe I'm a peak. I can imagine you cook all this process you take while cooking with Maliza and make her food and then you start eating.  Is that even, does it make sense to you? It doesn't even sound logic. Well, it doesn't make sense, but there is this question. I think we should post to the viewer. You know, when you're ready for the Ramadan, how exactly are you prepared? I'd like you to comment on our Facebook page, that's at Y254channan. And just tell us what exactly you have done to be ready for the month of Ramadan. And also just comment there and we'll be very glad to receive from you. So, yeah, so you know, Ramadan is just coming up on Sunday or Monday. What have you done to prepare yourself? As if you also have to tell us, you've got to tell us as well. Okay, to prepare myself for Ramadan, obviously, I'm ready like mentally. I have to be prepared mentally. And also prayer wise, because there is no point of me fasting the whole day and then I'm not praying to be pointless. So I have to pray like the five daily prayer, even if I'm walking or I'm somewhere and maybe there is no must. Interesting, any concept here that you have to pray the five daily prayers? Exactly, that is like preparing yourself for Ramadan. It's part of the preparation. There are some people who don't pray. Yeah, I know them. When I told them that I'm praying for Ramadan, I told them that I'm praying for the month of Ramadan. What month? I told them that I'm praying for the month of Ramadan. Thank you very much. But what I want to tell you is that for Ramadan to prepare me to eat this kuzingine, it's not going to be enough. In my reality, we only become like faithful Muslim, kufa tasala and doing everything right only during Ramadan. We also have to live this kind of lifestyle even when we're not fasting. I have this Christian friends of mine who ask me when you're fasting, do you not take anything in the middle of the day? And I tell them, yeah, we don't take anything in the middle of the day. And they're like, how about water? And they say, no, you don't take water during the day. And they ask you, so you fast from six to nine. I think you should make it really clear because I always sometimes find and for the sake of our friends who are non-Muslims and they're watching this show, they really wouldn't have to understand exactly what's going on when you're fasting then. You know, when you're fasting, when Muslims are fast, you know, we have different types of fast. We have the fast that Christians do and also we have the fast of Muslims do. Somebody took me to the fast of Muslims do. When we fast, we do the dry fast. So complete dry fast. No eating, no drinking, it's just dry fast. So we are starting to fast from, is it done to sunset? Yeah, so yes, that is how we fast. No taking anything until sunset. So, so you see, if you're fasting, I'd like us to talk about what's allowed and what's not allowed. It's very exciting that, you know, I like the way Islam is structured. You have to follow, you know, there is a clear direction of what is supposed to be, but there are some things like in the hadith it said, among the things that are haram or allowed and some things that are not allowed in Islam. They are very clear, but in between there is some elements of confusion here. If I may ask you, and also for the sake of the viewer, if I've eaten, say, meat last night or in the morning when I'm taking my suhur, alafu kati kati asiku, I just realized that there is a piece of this taken with me in my teeth. Or you brush your teeth before you went to bed after suhur. Or let's say, you go to sleep after suhur.   No, you don't go to sleep. Like maybe after doing the fajur prayer, then you can go to sleep. Well, yeah, but that's still not allowed according to the sooner to go to sleep. So you want to tell me if you wake up for suhur at around 4.30, some people they prefer to wake up very early in the morning.  It is allowed, but then you're forgetting a very important sooner here. When you are going for the fast, it is said that you delay to take your suhur. You don't wake up early and eat early and then wait for fajur and then you start your fast. You eat closer towards the fast that's among the sooner.  When you delay suhur, some people maybe they do that and then maybe you oversleep in the process. So you find yourself maybe waking up, maybe you oversleep and then you find yourself waking up during fajur prayer and you miss your suhur.  So it's better you wake up early than maybe a few minutes to suhur. Well, yeah, you have a point there. So my question was if you are eating, I mean if you've eaten something during the suhur and then somewhere in the middle of the day say during, you're nearly towards the prayer, basically during the day and then you find that you have a piece of meat in between your teeth. If you solo it and you know that you've soloed it, does it really break your fast? If you know.  Okay, according to my thinking and according to the teaching of the prophet, peace be upon him, he said that as the most famous supposed to eat wherever you start between your teeth is supposed to remove it and spit it out. So for me, I think if you take it in, that is going to be like you. You've broken your fast. Exactly. So I don't think it's allowed, but if you do it unintentionally, maybe you didn't know your fast is still there, but if you took it in intentionally, it's going to break your fast. So in your own words, who's not supposed to fast? I think, yeah, who's not supposed to fast? Who's not supposed to fast? We have, first of all, you can say, travel us. If you're traveling, it's not like, if you're traveling long distance, let's say from here to Ganda, not from town to town. So that way, you're going too fast, but if you're going for a long distance, maybe 12 hours flight or maybe three hours drive, more than three hours.  Let's just say maybe five hours and beyond, you're not allowed to fast, but you can pay back the missed days that you didn't fast. And also, a pregnant woman is not allowed to fast, also breastfeeding, and also our mom was just given birth, and also... There is something I'm a bit jealous about here. Why is it that, you know, when ladies are in the middle of the day, I mean, how do I put it? I'm trying to find the best words. I don't want to be so graphic. Okay, in a time, you're on the top of the month, if they understand what that is, and you're allowed to go without fasting, I think it's a very important thing for people to understand, but also they have to pay for it after the Ramadan and make sure that they pay for it before the next Ramadan. So what is the issue here? Well, I'm just jealous that you will be eating and fasting. So why are you jealous? Because you're going to pay for it afterwards, and you don't have any to pay. You should fast with us. No, I'm not supposed to fast with you, because if you did biology back at primary school, I think you understand why. They're not allowed to fast. They're exempted from it. Yeah, exactly. And it's something that people really have to understand that you're not supposed to fast. And also, I think also, there are some other people also not allowed to fast. I think you also know these. Maybe very sick people, diabetic people, because diabetic people, they have to take their pills, I think, every. They have to take it every time. They have this specific time during the day that they're supposed to take. So such people are exempted from fasting. First of all, before we continue with the sickness thing, I think we have to make it really clear because of the benefit of the viewer why this lady who's at the top of the month is not allowed to fast. I know you're a lady, you will understand it more than me, but also, let's just put a little more information into this so that we can accurately guide them into why they're not allowed to. They are allowed to eat while it's in the month of Ramadan. And the information basically is, you're not allowed to fast during the time when you're having your menstrual cycle because when that is happening, you know this, I don't know if I should call it sickness or the kind of difficulty that lady goes through. It's not a sickness, it's a process. Okay, yeah, the process. Thank you for giving that correction. That process that the lady is going through at that time and there are so many things apart from mood swings, there is also just the difficulty that's experienced there. And I also think the body changes and could also be right if I say that when you're undergoing this process, you have to, you're losing blood, which means you have to eat to make sure that you maintain a healthy body or how should I put it? Is that the correct way? Okay, when there is a woman or a lady is not allowed to fast when they're having their menstrual cycle, it's mainly because at that time, the body is going through a biological change and also their system is not on its right on its normal state. So this lady is losing a lot of blood and then she gets so weak. So when you add fasting on top of it, I think it's because maybe some maybe medical problems or maybe she may even collapse. So maybe they've been as cues. You know what they say that when a wakini is naive.  So that maybe after when you're done with the Ramadan it's over, you can pay back these. On days that you are. If it's five days, if it's six days, three days you have to pay them back. It's a must. There are two things that we have to make clear here. First of all, Islam is here to make, I'll just say it from the hadith, it's the din that was brought to us through Prophet Muhammad Peace be upon him to guide us and to also help us. And so the intention of Islam is not to make worship hard for the believers, but it's to make them, it understands when there is a point where you have difficulty. And so one of the difficulties that's there is when someone is experiencing the menstrual cycle or when someone is sick or when someone is traveling basically, something that they have got to understand. But I have a question about this. They say like the reward of someone who fasts all the Ramadan, like the all of 31 days, 30 days precise, you get all this reward. Is it the same with this lady who was undergoing menstrual cycle and she missed like few days? Is it the same with the four passage like y'all? If she pays for those days then, I don't see any difference as long as she's paid for. So we will get the same reward. I believe so. Mashallah, that's good. And also the second thing that we all have to understand including the view about the tom is that when this lady has been allowed to eat during the month of Ramadan and in the 21st century we always go to work and we go to public places, both men and women. So if you have a reason to break your fast and eat during the day, I think it's also very important to do it in private, not in public because it's going to mislead people about that. So when you're saying that it's good to do it in public, do you mean that let's say for example I'm in town, I'm in the city and doing my stuff and then maybe I feel like going for lunch. I'll be eating in public at the restaurant. So do you mean I should just buy maybe to kawai and go maybe eat somewhere, hide myself and eat? Okay, hide yourself. Why should I just eat in the restaurant with other people? It brings controversy, brings confusion to people. They will be wondering exactly what's going on and I think it will also be uncomfortable for the lady to start explaining all you know I'm encountering this particular process. I know you will not be comfortable to explain that. This is some people like some people have seen this happening but I'm not going to mention where exactly. So I see this person eating and what they do they put some pills there like let's say a potadol just beside or maybe a syrup they put it beside their table.  So on a kula to say don't. So you see so I think did you think these people are pretending some are cause why do you have to put this medicine there so that people can see? You yeah you have just reminded me something but we're going to make it this really brief because you know we also have to go and take out musical break and address also a little bit but first I'm going to make it really brief. First of all you know the ayah in the Quran where it says those people who are performing acts of worship for the sake of pleasing other people they are not pleasing Allah and also there is this hadith which says that you will get there what exactly your intention is. So it's wrong for someone to put the medicine there and start eating and so that when you come around it will be self explanatory for you that this guy is eating because he's sick and it's during Ramadan and it's not correct. I think right now we should be wishing people should be able to just you know just fear Allah to the best of your ability. So I think that if you've been eating all these days and it's just one month once a year that's which are a lot too fast so I think you should just do it like obediently because you've been eating like all the time and it's not like you're not going to eat in the evening you're still going to eat so you should just eat a whole lot exactly. So I'd like to wish you all Muslims are very very happy Ramadan and also to appeal to the viewers that you know all of you are Muslim brothers and non Muslim brothers and sisters we love you so much and it is very exciting month of Ramadan and you're not excited. I'm so much excited because this is the month that we're going to get so much reward in it it's going to like cleanse us mentally, spiritually we're going to get closer to Allah. Exactly. So it's a very holy month. I think we should also say to our non Muslim brothers and sisters to join us within this month of Ramadan. We're not only allowed to come and eat with us in Tabur also to fast with us. Yeah. So this is a very good month where we're supposed to be very peaceful. We are also supposed to fear Allah. We're supposed to be kind. We are supposed to do every good thing. There is also a forgetting this one thing that we are supposed to do the most we are supposed to read the Quran. Yeah, to read the Quran. Like they're supposed to make sure like every day if you just read one Juzul like every day you're going to finish it by the end of the Ramadan. Yeah, fantastic. So right now we're going for a very very interesting musical break. But remember to hit us up on our first page and tell us exactly what you think how you have prepared for your fasting in the month of Ramadan and for you all you can ask us questions and we'll be very glad to respond to the comments to the best of our ability. But right now let's get the music. Don't we? Yeah.


Good morning and welcome to the 17th meeting in 2015 of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee. We have apologies from Dave Thompson MSP and Michael Russell MSP and welcome Christian Allard MSP to the meeting. Agenda item 1 is subordinate legislation. First item is to consider two negative instruments. The welfare of animals at the time of killing Scotland amendment regulations 2015-SSI 2015-161 and the common agriculture policy non-IAC support schemes appeals Scotland amendment regulations 2015-SSI 2015-167. I refer members to the paper. Do you have any comments on either of these? First of all, on the welfare of animals item, we don't. I suppose it would be interesting to know how many water buffalo there are in Scotland. Maybe the agricultural census will tell us that, but it would be one of these interesting ones to know, I suppose, as well. That's the non-IACs one, isn't it? There's no other comments. The committee, are you agreed that we don't wish to make any recommendations in relation to those instruments? We are agreed. So future meeting details, the next one on the 20th of May, we'll consider draft letter of the committee's annual report and hope to take evidence from the chair and chief executive of FirstMill. We'll also consider a second draft if required of our letter to the Scottish Government on mandatory public sector climate reporting. We now move in to private session, as agreed at our previous meeting, to consider the first draft of that letter. I close the public part of the meeting and ask for the public gallery to be cleared.


My name is Michael Willis. I farm near King City in Northwest Missouri. I farm with my parents and my brother. I started farming full time in 2010 after I graduated from college and my brother returned to the farm in 2014. This project was looking into using the roller crimper on a terraced, irregularly shaped field, hilly ground, which is pretty common in our area. A lot of research had been done, kind of in test plots in universities where it's square, flat and level. And so it's kind of to look at how do you operate the roller crimper in those more complicated situations on the types of fields that we have. So the roller crimper for the project that I did, I bought it from INJ Manufacturing out of Pennsylvania. The website's listed there. I'm sure probably by now there are other places that also sell it. And you can just check prices for different widths of roller crimpers for pull type, front mounted, rear mounted on there just to give you an idea of what kind of cost you might incur by adopting it. Or you can also build your own. There's plans available from the Rodale Institute website. I downloaded them and I couldn't make heads or tails of them. I don't do a whole lot of welding, but someone who does a lot might be able to do that and save a little money doing it that way. And for the project that I did where it was designed to do the roller crimper in the single pass, you roll and crimp and plant simultaneously, this one was designed to mount onto a front mounted three point hitch. You can add a little bit of water to the roller crimper on their design that adds a little weight to it. I did that in the project. Whether it's really necessary, I'm not 100% sure I added, didn't feel it quite half full. So I think it helps a little bit, but I think other factors that I'll get to later, such as crop fertility, having a really good stand, those are more essential than just the weight of the roller crimper. And so on those tractors, a lot of you'll find they don't have a front mounted three point hitch on them. You might have maybe a front end loader that you could modify to accommodate a roller crimper, or perhaps you might have one of those old Daigleman blades on it that you could modify something. But just doing a quick Google search, those are just some different manufacturers I find online. A lot of them you can look through their websites and they'll oftentimes have their three point hitches designed to be set up for certain brands and makes and models of tractors. So you can just kind of search through those to get an idea of what your cost would be. Or another option is you can go to something like Craig's Leist Auction websites and you might be able to find a pretty good deal on a front mounted three point hitch there. So the one that I had, it's one of the LeForge three point hitches. And the front arms on it, unlike most rear three point hitches, they don't have any left or right sway to it. Once you put the arms down, they lock into place. There are these pins that help lock in there and there are two settings that it offered. You could either set it in kind of a looser setting that had about an inch or two of give to the arms. And that's the setting I chose for doing the project because I figured as you'd be going through the field, say if you ended up hitting little bumps and stuff rather than relying on the flotation of your hydraulic cylinders to pull the roller crimper back down, having that extra gap allowed you to adjust to the terrain in a much quicker fashion. And that is one thing I would add on whatever tractor you decide to use. Make sure it has the option on the hydraulics to put it into a flotation of that way or not pushing the lever or however you have set up like a joystick or whatever that it doesn't just constantly push the roller crimper against the ground. It actually just lets the weight of it drag it to the ground. And some tractors have been in summer easier to engage float than others. So this is using the roller crimper. This was May 23rd, 2013. This was cereal rye planting corn into it. And as you can see, it is rolling pretty well. This field actually is one of the later planted fields of rye. And so I thought that maybe it was going to be a little bit later in maturity, but where it accidentally had gotten some fertilizer applied to it that was intended for wheat, I think having that extra boost of fertility allowed me to get into the field sooner and roll and crimp it more effectively. So when to roll and crimp, most publications will read, they talk like it needs to at least be at the emphasis stage. But just like in the picture you'll see, you'll see these little yellow flowers dangling from all the seed heads on the rye. And you know, rye will be kind of variable if you bought maybe a named variety, they might be more uniform in their maturity. But you know, you'll see maybe a few heads out there with some flowers on it. But once you see it more uniform, that's when it's better to start trying to roll and crimp.  And you always want to keep in mind that, say, if you have a cool spring, that tends to push that maturity date in a little bit farther for rye. So for operating the roller crimper, kept it at normal planting speeds. And the one thing I noticed is you do not want to turn too sharply, or at least with the three-point hitch that I had, where those arms were fixed, what would happen is the roller crimper, once you'd set it down on the ground, it would just want to keep going in whatever direction it started at. You could adjust it a little bit, but if you tried to turn much, you would start bending those arms, and they were just a solid chunk of metal. So I lifted it up and the arms sprang back into place. So there was no damage done, but I don't think I'd want to tempt fate on that, because that'd be a great way of sinking $3,000 plus down the drain. So this is an example of we have one field where that's just too sharp of a curve to take with the roller crimper, but something like this one over here, where this kind of a gentle curve that goes along the waterway, I was able to adjust to that fine without any problems. So when starting out a field, I'd usually do at least four passes around the outside, just like a standard approach of field. If I could do even maybe six or eight, that would be even better, because it just gives you that much more room to maneuver around where that roller crimper on the front, it does change how you want to turn your tractor, because as soon as you turn, it goes way even farther than the direction that you've turned. But around the edges of the field, sometimes you might have some terraces that end at the edge of the field or little berms that feed into waterways. And so this is an example of where around it things flattened for the most part pretty well, but that right there was where I was going toward the terrace. And then when it went up and over, there was this lag time where the roller crimper wasn't making contact with the ground, because the arms were still holding it up and the flotation of the hydraulics wasn't enough to let it get back down to the ground. So the way I approached that was, you can see my lovely Microsoft paint art here, did boundaries around the outside of the field just went the same direction each time. Then once I was doing subsequent passes inside the field, once I reached that area where I had trouble with right of standing, I just keep driving toward it. And once I got into that area, since if you were doing beans, if you wanted to plant over it again just to get a thick stand, you could. Or as you entered into that previously planted area, just lift the planter up and keep the roller crimper going. And that seemed to address it pretty well. One other issue I ran into is this was along the edge of the field along a waterway. There was just a small little ditch or divot that had cut along the edge of it. So when I went along the outside of the field, on the left and right hand sides of the roller crimper, it made good contact with the ground. But in the center where that small ditch was, you know, only had to be an inch or two deep. Since the roller crimper wasn't making contact with the base of the stem of the rye, it just bent it over. It didn't flatten it and crimp it. So if you do have a field where you're looking to use it, you want to make sure that any of those irregularities are taken care of beforehand. Because otherwise, if it doesn't make contact with the base of the stem, it just wants to spring back up. Another thing to look out for is on some side hills. The roller crimper I found would tend to drag the tractor sideways downhill. And if that ever did happen, don't turn to correct because that would just bend the arms. And it really made no difference in the trajectory of where you were going. I felt I found it was best to just kind of let the roller crimper guide you. And if you were getting too far off course, pick it up, back up, and start your pass again with the given direction that you were shooting for. So this is doing it on terraces. This would have been done June 13, 2013. And this is just a straight terrace on my farm. The way I approached this, where I was doing it with the roller crimper and a drill, I did one pass along the very top of the terrace, which didn't cover the full 15-foot swath of the drill. It only got maybe seven or so feet at the very top of the terrace. So then did passes to the side of that, where there still was standing ride that hadn't been rolled and crimped, and then passes to the sides of those subsequent passes. So it took a few more passes than just your standard planting. But in the end, I thought it resulted in pretty decent control. And so there's nine days later, you still see a few plants where they have a little bit of greenness to them. They're still standing. But after what we'd seen through this year, where we had a really wet year, and weren't able to plant beans until Rye was well mature. And so we had a lot of standing Rye in our fields come harvest time. This Rye that was kind of bent over from the wind and all the moisture that we had, we didn't notice it causing any problems with getting in with the soybean seed when we were combining. So I would think that things like this, where the stems already gnarled up, not necessarily rolling crimp, shouldn't give you too many problems come harvest time. Now for a curved terrace, kind of approach it the same way. But rather than following the curvature of the terrace, I just would do a straight pass and then go down the bottom of it. Then when I do be doing passes elsewhere in the field, would follow on the top and drive down it. And then on this end, follow along the side up and over the terrace. And then follow that same pattern until it was rolled and crimped for the whole field. And on some of those curved terraces or any terrace for that matter, you'll have your, if it's a closed outlet, then you'd have those risers that had some cereal Rye that didn't want to get too close to the riser and mash it down. So that was one thing that would escape you by doing terraces. But on the other hand, you usually tend to have weeds around there anyway. One thing that really struck me on rolling and crimping was the role that fertility played. This is where we grazed some cows on cereal Rye and you can see you have little areas where they'd, you know, manured and added urine. And when it came time to roll and crimp, those areas where it was more fertile, they, it rolled and crimped really well in those areas. Whereas surrounding areas, even though they might have been an anthesis, past the anthesis stage, they had more of a tendency to spring back up. They just tended to have a tougher stem in those areas that didn't have the ample fertility like these did. And that's pretty consistent with what a lot of other publications say that by adding fertility, particularly nitrogen, that does result in a thicker mulch and result in better control from the roller crimper. And it's the same principle here. If you have any thinner areas, thinner ground, the rye just doesn't get nearly as tall. It doesn't have that lush green stem that bends over well when you roll and crimp it. So here's doing soybeans, which this is kind of the same principle as this clip goes along. Most of it is flattening well, but there's some areas along the edge where there's kind of a hedgerow to the south of it. And I think it maybe shaded out some of the rye and it had a tendency to want to spring back up as well. But it was a pretty small area, so it didn't cause many problems. But you can kind of see them there in the foreground where they wanted to spring back up. So for the project 2013, we did corn and soybeans on the corn. We did some in a cover crop mix, about 15 pounds cereal rye, 5 pounds hairy vetch, I think about 5 pounds Austrian winter peas, 3 pounds crimson clover, and a pound each of turnips and canola, done after wheat. The corn was planted May 23rd. Lower seeding rate than I'd wanted, 25,000 seeds per acre. We skew a little bit lower seeding rate than where we are. We usually shoot for about 27,000 just because of experiences that it had in the past with higher seeding rates, how it kind of nipped them in the bud. So we've been sticking with some of those lower rates, but we've been trying to bring them up. In this instance, after the corn was planted, the weather turned wet and cool. After that date in May, and anyone who planted at that time, whether it was conventional till, no till, cover crops, had poor emergence. It just stayed too wet and too cool. The problem was where we had all that mulch out there, it locked in that moisture that we received.  And so we thought if we tried to replant it, we were just going to tear up the field more and probably cause more harm than good. So in the end, the mix was about 49 bushels per acre, 21 bushels per acre in the cereal rye that the corn was planted into. On both of those instances, I ended up spraying them afterwards because there were enough areas like in that one ditch that I showed earlier, plenty of areas where the cereal rye didn't completely flatten, where we had to spray afterwards to control the cover crops, like you can see there. In this instance, I think fertility played a big role. This is our first year of doing cover crops. And I thought, well, I had some legumes to it, and that's going to give me my nitrogen. I can roll and crimp it. Now, I think it's kind of like a Troy neighbor talked about. It's a process of building fertility up in order to get it to work in the way that you want. But that's how it looked about a couple months after, one month after that it was planted in not a bad stand, but there were plenty of other areas in the field where it collected more water and just didn't have much of a stand at all. This area was, the cereal rye was actually planted later, but it had that fertilizer like I was talking about. And that kind of impressed me on how well it controlled, that it flattened just like you'd see in the videos that you see online. But because of the rain, and I think maybe the allelopathic effect of the rye and the nitrogen, I think the combination of all those things resulted in poor canopy, poor stand. Yes. Yeah. And the question was that, you know, where she had, they tried a cereal rye and planting corn into that on their farm. It had, you know, such, you know, saddening effects from the rye on the corn. That is one thing we're starting out with cover crops we've kind of had to work with as we've been doing it. We, if we ever have rye before corn, which we try to do more than mixes before corn, like if we can get like a corn soybeans, we cover crop mix back to corn rotation. We like to do that, but there aren't as many markets for wheat in our area. So we've been doing more like raising cereal rye seed for our own use since it seems to be more of a benefit to us than putting the wheat out there. Likewise planting maybe some more oats to use for feeding cattle or for our own cover crop seed use. And I think that if you terminate it when it's small, any of the allelopathic effect and the nitrogen tie up from it is diminished, you know, like if we'll do it say just a little bit less than knee high, we don't seem to have as many problems. There was one, I forget where it was, it was like in No Till Farmer magazine or something, but I think someone was talking about that they actually planted a little bit deeper, because I always thought, well, you have that residue on top, so you want to plant shallower because, you know, say if you're shooting for two and a half inches, well, if you have an inch of residue on top, well, that's going to fall you up. But they were still planting at least two inches deep. And he thought that that was the best way of avoiding some of the allelopathic effect. But really, for us, we try to stick more with cereal rye before beans. And if it is, you know, in areas like erosion prone areas, we'll sometimes put some before corn, but we usually try to terminate it small when we do like a herbicide pass. Soybeans 2013 did just a similar setup using the 15 foot No Till Drill. They were done at 160,000 seeds per acre. You can see them poking up there about eight days later through that cereal rye mulch. And there's like that curved terrace that I showed you where I did that diagram for the most part. Had decent control, I thought. Did have a little bit of rye around the riser there. But one thing I did notice that I think partly due to fertility, partly due to needing a higher seeding rate, the mulch left from rolling and crimping didn't smother all the weeds. And you could see like right there on the fairs tail, you can see where it had rolled and crimped and made a little bend in the stem and just kept growing right up. So since they were a Liberty Lane bean, I was able to chose that because I thought, well, I might need a rescue spray on it. So I did that June 22nd, did a second spraying July 21st. I don't think it was necessary, but where these were being grown for seed for a local seed dealer, they usually prefer if you can try and get as many escapes out of there as possible because it makes the whole cleaning process easier for them. But I think we could have gotten by without doing that second spraying. And just another example of where we had a garden plot. There's this prickly lettuce and you could see the stem just kind of grown flat underneath the rye mulch. And then once there was an opening shot right up through there. So it's, you know, if it's thick, if it's lush and green, that provides the best control. But even in that instance where it was about as lush as I think I could have gotten it, it was a, you know, well fertilized garden, there still were some openings that weeds could get through. But there's the soybeans that were planted there June 13th and the ending yield of them. They were 29 bushels per acre versus other areas in the same field that had the rye planted earlier and the rye was terminated with herbicides that yielded 36 and a half bushels. So gave up about seven bushels by doing the roller crimper and an adjacent field just right across the road that we farm that it had a similar setup, just a different variety of soybeans and yielded 50 bushels per acre. So I think that's also another thing when you're trying out any of the new practices with cover crops. If you have certain varieties that you know work well for you, have good emergence, seem to maybe I'd say are kind of like more workforce type. They seem to be the ones that we like to stick with because they seem to do well into those conditions. Now when I rolled and crimped the soybeans on June 13th, which I had to wait that long because since we had that wet stretch at the end of May, that was one of the first chances I could plant and even then it was still close to mudding it in, not that wet but pretty close. But the rye was already far enough along that once it was rolled and crimped, it laid it over and started germinating. But it didn't cause any problems for combining and really once it was all said and done, you can either say well it was a weed or it's a self-receding cover crop. So depends on your perspective on that and there it is the next year. The lurethworm there is providing good structure, helping hold the ground in place. So I decided well what am I going to do with it? So I thought well maybe I'll try you know using it for a rye seed where we've been doing some of that. One field did receive some nitrogen, the other I thought well maybe I can get some credits from where it was growing side by side with the soybeans. The fertilized area went 24 bushel per acre, 11 for the unfertilized, and one of the reasons for the lower yield than what we were anticipating with the rye was since it was a volunteer stand there were big gaps of rye that just didn't emerge. I even tried spotting some in but it didn't really make much of a difference. So areas where I had a good stand, it was going closer to 35 bushels per acre on the field that did have the fertility. 2014 tried it again and it was a similar situation. The forecast was calling for it to be wet for a long stretch so I thought well get in there and try and do soybeans. But it wasn't quite far enough along in the rye's life cycle to provide adequate mulch. So it actually the night after I planted it rained I thought well these were non-GMO soybeans I planted. I thought well if I have to spray this I need to get it done before they emerge otherwise that's going to kill them. Or it was at least going to land in my options with all that rye out there. But a couple of days later was able to get in there and it really didn't cut many ruts in the field. So if there is one thing about having that higher residue rye it does seem to make any of those rescue sprays a little more forgiving than say just in a standard no-till situation because that ample amount of mulch provides some cushion for the tires to go over the soil. And there's beans about 30 or so days later, close to a month later, and they you know were pretty clean in between you maybe would see a few weeds here and there. Ended up doing a post spray again because where we were raising for the local seed dealer they kind of put a premium on trying to have as little weed seed as possible. But I was really impressed with how well that rye mulch took care of the weeds. And here's just a side example I did with the project. It wasn't part of the project but I figured where I had the roller crimper might as well try it out. I used it in a garden setting so this was just a few days later in 2013 after I did the beans. I rolled and crimped a mix of rye and hairy vetch.  It was a pretty thick standard rye and a thick standard vetch. But you know even a day later after rolling and crimping it you can already see the rye is starting to brown. And then we transplanted some summer squash into it because hairy vetch did not do as well rolling crimping. Some things you'll read talk like it'll trellis up the rye and then it'll terminate well. But in Missouri down at thea I think it's a Bradford research farm that they do. They've had similar results with hairy vetch. If they want to roll and crimp it they talk like they have to you know do multiple passes in order to get the hairy vetch to terminate. So just that one pass at the roller crimper really wasn't enough. But things grew well and this was a video but I don't think it's able to play. But we just know some we seeded in somewhere. I think this was actually just put in its seeds. But it made nice summer squash. They didn't sit on the bare soil so they didn't have some of that yellowing that you see on the bottom. So I was pretty pleased with how it worked in squash. So just some main points of it is definitely don't turn too sharply so you don't tear up your equipment for starting out. And this is true for any new practice you're doing with cover crops or anything. You know start small, pick your easiest laying fields and planting soybeans into rye is easiest. Like the lady back there was talking about you don't have that allelopathic nitrogen and nitrogen tie-up effect of the rye. The cover crop mixes I really like using them but they are difficult for the roller crimper because in the field where I did that they have different maturity dates. So when it's right to rolling crimp one it may not be for the other plants like canola. They tend to have more like a rubbery stem so they either would just snap off or they'd spring back up but they didn't really seem to want to flatten all that terribly well. By either having just a high fertility field or fertilizing your cover crop by having that ample fertility and that lush green growth that makes it easier to roll in crimp provides you a better mulch. On terraces the straight ones it's easier to do than the curved ones and having even level terrain trying to get rid of any ditches or divots in your field that also provides for better control. And weather delays that is one thing that having the roller crimper throws another management element in there. Say it might be the optimum time to plant soybeans well your rye may not be mature enough yet so you'll wait. Well then you might have a couple weeks where it's too wet to plant and during that time the rye is maturing so you always want to keep that in mind and always have a plan to fall back on you know maybe you just want to take that rye and harvest it for seed instead scrap doing soybeans you know try and be flexible with it and don't think well my plan was to roll in crimp and I must do it because mother nature mother nature may not let you. And be prepared for volunteer cover crops if rolling and crimping late like those where they seem to be kind of at that dough stage they still set on seed but there are ample ways to try and figure out how to utilize that volunteer stand and if all else fails having that residue I found did make a rescue spray more forgiving so that's all I got here so anyone has any questions feel free. The question was if we were terminating before corn but it's not at the right stage you wouldn't be using the roller crimper in that instance it would be where we just have conventional corn bean acres it would be terminating it with herbicides if the corn is for the zero rye is only you know below knee high or so. The question was on nitrogen source for corn we've used top usually we've done some side dressing urea in the past as a nitrogen source for corn we've also done some anhydrous in the past few years we've been looking to get away from that just because the more you read into it they talk about the soil health adverse impacts from anhydrous plus last year where we did put out anhydrous and we had such a wet year by putting all your nitrogen out then we locked ourselves in place with doing something that was going to take it up and where we had you know long stretches of rainy weather where we weren't going to be able to get corn in we thought well maybe we want to do something you know do more like just your liquid fertilizer first and top dress later which there have been some studies done down at MU I think or they had a field day a while back where they had good results with you know top dressing say with I think they used just urea at knee high so we're looking to do some more of that for our nitrogen source for corn this coming year


Hello everyone, my topic of this sharing is drone fly introduction updates and practice in AI model distribution. My name is Wen Boqi, I'm the maintainer of drone fly. I hope my introduction can let you know that the current state of the drone fly project. Drone fly provides fail distribution and image acceleration based on the P2P technology to be the best practice and standard solution in cloud native architectures. It is hosted by the cloud native computing foundation as an incubating lab project. It is designed to improve the speed of large-scale fail distribution. It is used in the field of application distribution, cache distribution, log distribution, image distribution, AI data site distribution, and AI model distribution. You can see that in the container registry of the Sensef landscape, there are two graduation level and incubation level projects. One is harbor as an advocate registry and the other is drone fly as an image acceleration and fail distribution solution. Project has more than 100 contributors and the maintainers comes from Ant Group, Alibaba Group, BatDance, Intel, Baidu Group, JiHu, and Dalian University of Technology. There are many companies now using drone fly to improve the speed of fail distribution and speed of image distribution, such as Alibaba Group, Ant Group, Intel, DD, BatDance, Qashu, Baidu Group, Xiaomi, Bilibili, and so on. The project commits in the past year have been active in contributions. Next, let me introduce Nethus, a sub-project of drone fly. It provides a content addressable fail system on the RAFS format. The most important feature is to let the container image are downloaded on demand in trunk and the trunk level deduplication cross layer or cross image to reduce storage, transport, and memory costs. It can reduce the end-to-end code start time of containers from menus to seconds. Maintainers comes from Ant Group, Alibaba Group, BatDance, and so on. Let's take a look at the important milestones of drone fly project. Drone fly has been selected and put into production used by many internet companies since it is open source in 2017. It joined the SenseApp as a sandbox project in 2018 and become an incubating project in 2020. In 2020, Nethus became a sub-project of drone fly and was widely used for image acceleration. In 2021, the drone fly version 2 was released. Drone fly is not only used in image acceleration but also has many use cases in fail distribution and AI model distribution. Now, drone fly focuses on three parts, image acceleration, fail distribution, and AI info. In the field of image acceleration, drone fly supports container clients such as container D, Docker, CIO, ORAS, and so on. It provides three solutions for image acceleration. The first solution is to use drone fly to distribute image based on P2P technology, which is suitable for large-scale cluster. The second solution is to use drone fly and Nethus to distribute accelerated images, which is suitable for large-scale cluster and faster container launching. The third solution is to use Nethus to distribute accelerated image, which is suitable for faster container launching. In the field of fail distribution, drone fly supports large-scale fail distribution and use P2P technology to emanate the impact of origin bandwidth limitations. Nethus supports fail distribution of protocols, including HTTP, DFS, and so on. It also supports different object storage protocols, including S3, OSS, OBS, and so on. drone fly added DFS to expand the fail distribution capability. It can depend on different types of object storage, provides stable object storage capabilities. We have been working in the field of image acceleration and fail distribution for almost six years, and it has become the standard best practice in this field. In the field of AI infra, drone fly supports distributing data during AI training and AI inference. In the AI inference, drone fly supports Triton server and Torch server to use the drone fly distribution model. In the AI training, Flow8 downloads this site through drone fly, one running based on Druze FS. It also supports downloading a model and this site from Hackingface Hub by SDK through drone fly HTTP proxy. In the future, we will pay more attention to AI infra because we believe that P2P technology is the best solution to accelerate AI this site distribution and AI model distribution. Next, I will introduce why use drone fly. For example, Kubernetes cluster with 1000 nodes, and each node needs to download a fail or image at the same time. For the storage, there are 1000 concurrent download requests. One downloading fails in large batch, batch the storage bandwidth can easily reach the limitation. This will cause slower startup of containers and slower fail downloads in the clusters. How to resolve the problem? There are three solutions to this problem. The first solution is to increase the bandwidth of the storage. But no matter how to increase the bandwidth of storage, as a backend storage, it must have limitations. So this is not the best solution. The second solution is to use P2P technology to use the del bandwidth of nodes to eliminate impact of storage bandwidth limitations. This is also the best solution in large scale, downloading with drone fly. The third solution is to reduce the download fail size, remove the duplication during building and on-demand load during download to reduce the size of the fail. Let us deduplicate fails and downloads on-demand. So drone fly includes the second solution and the third solution. In the next part, I will introduce the architecture and important features of drone fly. Drone fly includes manager, scheduler and peer. The manager service, which is a management service, it is used to manage the relationship between multiple clusters. A P2P cluster includes scheduler cluster, state peer cluster and multiple peers. At the same time, manager also provides a dynamic configuration management, such as controlling the load limit of peer and state peer. It also provides a front-end console. User can easily operate P2P cluster. scheduler is a very important service in drone fly. Its main feature is to select the candidate parents for download peer. When the peer download is failed, control the peer to back to origin download the task. Peer is the client in the P2P technology. It can be the downloader and uploader. It will start a defcat daemon to distribution. It gets the parents by exchanging information with scheduler. For example, defcat will download fails with the command line, and defcat will call the gRPC API or for daemon to download fails. Manager includes a front-end console. It includes cluster operations, P2P metrics, user management, job management, and so on. User can easily operate the P2P cluster. This part introduces the scheduler. It is an important module of the drone fly. Scheduling will include two steps. The first step is to filter available parents. Unveilable parents will be filtered based on the parent's load limit, download state, and download piece cost, and so on. The first step of filter is completed, and it gets all available parents. The second step is to evaluate based on different features, and sorted based on evaluation. Finally, the scheduler will return the best set of parents to the download period. Earlier version of the scheduler was based on a tree to represent the network download top, and there is no filter step. It will cause two problems. First problem, it can only represent downloading from a single parent, and cannot represent downloading from multiple parents concurrently. The second problem is that there is no filter step, which may cause a bad node to become the root node of the tree. It will cause all nodes to download fail slowly. Therefore, the scheduler has two steps of filter and evaluation, to schedule best parents, and change the tree to deck so that filters can be downloaded from multiple parents at the same time. The latest scheduler can increase P2P network transfer speed. The community is now working on scheduler solution based on machine learning. It is trained using the data of prop between peers and the data of download cross, and predict parents based on the GN and MLP for download peer. The model will include downloaded features and network features for prediction. Of course, it is very simple to download once in a P2P cluster, but it is difficult to ensure the stability of downloading in a large-scale P2P cluster. And exception, isolation is very important for service stability. Twinfly provides three levels of isolation, including server-level, peer-level, and download task level. Service level represents managers, schedulers, and set peers that will isolate exceptions in the cluster if they are unavailable. Peer level represents that if a peer network is exception, this peer will be isolated from the P2P cluster. Task level represents that if a download task is exception, this task will be isolated from the P2P cluster. Exception, isolation ensures the stability of each downloading. In the field of AI inference, three solutions are provided. The first solution is to directly use the drone fly to distribute AI model. Users can use the drone fly to inference framework directly without doing anything. The solution for the model file system is to build a model file system through NATUS using the duplicate feature and on-demand load feature, and each trunk will be distributed through drone fly P2P network. The model image solution is similar to the model file system solution, but the difference is used image format. Many companies use this solution is that the advocate is simple, just an image version. There is no need to depend on other services, reducing communication between different departments. Of course, Triton server TouchServe and Triton flow serving can use drone fly based on plugins to distribute AI model. This will allow users to simply use the drone fly distribution AI model. The community has also open source the plugins. For example, Triton server can use the drone fly and point plugin to redirect TouchServe download the model request to the drone fly P2P network. My sharing is over. You can scan the QR code to follow drone fly and NATUS. Thanks to everyone.