Um, is the sound getting through you? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sorry for the connection issues. I'm slightly late, but I think we have a stable connection now. Yeah. I'm I'm very happy to meet you. I'm sorry it's over GBC instead of in person, but I hope it'll be in person one of these days. Sure thing. Sure thing. Yeah. So how's it going? It's going well. And thank you very much for taking the time. We had actually planned, I'd planned to bring the whole team, the whole Asia team to Taiwan. We were hoping this spring, but maybe we'll just have to wait a little bit and we'll still be able to go because I'm very eager to bring the team to Taiwan. Mm hmm. Yeah. Looking forward to it. Thanks so much for for taking the time. I copied you on a letter that I sent to the president. Yes. About Google's what Google's doing to try to be helpful. And and Anita, who my colleague, actually, I should start with introducing my colleagues. Anita Chen, you can probably see. Hi. Hi. I'm no seed. Well, not really. I think you're the in person. That's right. That's right. We work with each other quite closely. Yeah. Yeah. And Tina Lynn. Tina. Hi. Hi. This is Tina. I'm in charge of the Google Taiwan. Yeah, we, yeah, we work together during the mask 2.0 during the E mask for all sort of different things. So thank you so much for for all your support. Thank you. Thank you. And then there's Lan there. Lan Chen. Hi. Hi. I cover communications in Taiwan. Nice to meet you. Nice meeting you. So because of social distancing, yeah, I actually have to keep them away from you. They were good. Yeah. Very safe. Good, good, good, good. Well, we're we really do want to do what we can. And I need to have shared with me a lot about what you all have been doing to deal with COVID. And I have to say, it's very fortunate that you have a vice president who has who's an epidemiologist. How many around the world have such well, actually, the epidemiologist because he literally wrote a textbook of epidemiology. I mean, that's that's the right leader in the right place at the right time. That's right. So and and congratulations. Only 444 cases. I understand they're now been 28 days without a local case. We're relaxing a lot of things. I mean, our professional baseball now have like thousands of all people in the audience. So we're life is migrating to the new normal now. Wow, I can't wait till that happens to the rest of the world. But but congratulations. It's so clear that SARS taught Taiwan so much about how to deal with a crisis like this and your way ahead of the rest of the world. And so I think the rest of the world is is very eager to learn from your success. On the policy side, it's really clear that you've had terrific, very smart science based policies on technology. What have been some of the secrets? What are the ways you deploy technology? And indeed, I must praise the ease of use of the Google places and map API because that's literally how our masquerading system hinges upon when we were initially distributed the mass through convenience stores. There is a GDG that's Google developer group in Tainan, one of the southern cities that's very quickly become the cultural capital and is already the capital for food. And you know how developers love good food. And so they have a group of people there that just started prototyping. Well, it's like Ushahidi, if you know that it's people who voluntarily report how many convenience stores still have masks and how many of them are out of stock. So it's a crowd reporting to a collective intelligence system. Yeah. And unlike many other map API providers, I think the GDG has already well equipped themselves so that they can prototype it in a matter of minutes, not of days. And that is essential because then it showed everybody what is possible. And the very next Monday I just presented that Google map API and visualization to our premier saying that we really got to support this guy and especially because he's at that time I think owes Google 20k US dollars in API credits. I really need to support him financially. And I'm happy that eventually the CSR team wrote it off. But I think this is a really good story of not your traditional PPP, which is a government setting the agenda for the private sector to enlist social sector support. Rather, this is the social sector setting the agenda and they enlist the public sector to work with the private sector such as Google to realize their design. So we become like vendors of those civic technologies. Wow. And I think that is really the key of the success of the fairness because then the real time map let everybody see that a pharmacy distribution is fair. You can go to a pharmacy, swipe your NHI card and see for yourself after a couple of minutes that a stock level decreased by nine. And this is participatory ledger almost like a blockchain that increased everybody's trust in each other instead of a daily publication. This is a real time publication. But transparency is the key. That's right. And you had already established a lot of credibility through policies that you've chosen as government. So then you're able to engage the social sector in a really positive and really beneficial way. Right. Right. To trust them with open data, as we say. Well, a lot of countries could learn from that. There are a lot of countries that follow a different model where there is less transparency and where the social sector isn't as supported as it is in Taiwan.  That's part of the story of yours. I was just talking to a journalist this morning from Wired and I said that when we had the first presidential election in 96, the World Web is already part of the culture. And so people know that there's a lot of things that could change because the power structure has massively changed with the World Web. And during that time, I think in a decade or so, even our constitution went through six or seven revisions.  But on the other hand, our constitution and our polity, the design of our administration and legislation is as malleable as the World Web itself. And people really put a lot of energy into thinking innovation also about democracy, not just under democracy. And that was, 96, was that Chen Shui-bian? That's right. The election of Li Deng Hui in 96. And then the next term is Chen Shui-bian. Chen Shui-bian.  This is now one year anniversary of marriage equality in Taiwan. That's right. The first in Asia. Right. Yes. Faster to Vietnam. At that time I thought maybe Vietnam would be the first, but you're the first. Yeah, or Thailand, but we're the first. And we got ahead because we work in a way that connects intergenerational solidarity because we introduce a truly innovative model that I call結婚不結 in, or we marry the bylaws but not in-laws. And that really convinced the people who are of a kind of elderly imagination of like the wedding is between a couple, but the marriage between two families. I'm like, okay, so marriage equality is about the bylaws, the same rights and responsibility, but it doesn't marry the families and everybody happy with that. Well, at least they can live with that. Yeah. Well, that's a lesson that other Asian countries could learn. When I was in Vietnam, Vietnam was the first to enable transgender people to change their gender on their identity card. That's right. And that's crucial. If you're trying to get health insurance, if you're trying to get health care, any kind of health care, that's critical. So it was a big step. There are lots more steps to go. That's right. Yeah, definitely. And nowadays in our kind of famously digitized health declaration card when you fly in to Taipei, the other gender is displayed prominently. So that people from Australia or other places where the neutral gender is recognized, they can actually just take that box. And very soon we will also roll out in our resident certificates as well, so that we'll have this national ID number that allows for a gender neutral and non-binary gender as well. So that is for foreign nationals, I mean. So I think that is another big step. People can choose to be non-binary in our software systems, not just in our legal systems. That's fantastic. Well, congratulations. And it's been really interesting for us to see how committed President Tsai is to a digital economy, making your services available digitally. It's digital education. It's, again, a model for much of the region. Cool. And you have played not a small role in that whole process. Well, mostly as an inspiration, I guess. My name being used in Japan or in South Korea, but it doesn't really sound like me or seem like me. It seems like they're using kind of a model of me to inspire their cabinet members. I'm fine with that remix, Creative Commons and all, but it doesn't really seem like myself. As long as you're associated with something you believe in and care about, then it's okay. That's right, exactly. Well, I'm sure Anita has told you about this. We've been really happy to be able to provide ad grants that would be helpful to the government, to SMBs, because we want to be part of Taiwan's economic recovery. Part of getting small businesses back up to speed, getting schools, students back up to speed. And we feel like we will be able to contribute. That's awesome. But if you have ideas, if there are things that we could be doing and that we're not yet doing, we are open. Yeah, so we're at the moment still at the kind of defending against coronavirus stage. But soon we will migrate to the revitalization stage, as you said, the recovery stage. But we don't call it recovery because we never really had a lockdown. We didn't close at all. So there's nothing much to recover from, but we really want to revitalize the economy. And there's quite a few plans in the works that will encourage people to spend more on the SMBs. Because it's true that during the coronavirus, even that we had no lockdowns, you see a large boom in, for example, food delivery services, online platforms and so on. They're primarily e-commerce. And so conversely, the large gathering places such as the wedding benches, restaurants and so on, they do suffer and they tend to be SMBs and not chain convenience stores or things like that. So we're designing a stimulus package. Actually, right after this video conference. And then I'll keep you posted when it comes to fruition. And I think there's plenty of ways that Google can help. Well, thank you. We would like to be involved. I also think it's going to set the tone for others in the region. Yours is an open economy. I know you are the first to get on board planes and make sure people were safe getting on and off planes. At some point, planes are coming. And that's got to start up again. Lights will start up again. You'll have more imported cases. It's not going to suddenly be okay. We're not going to suddenly see blue skies. And so we feel like the economic recovery, such as it is in the region in particular, is really a long-term process. It is. And we feel like the key is going to be small and medium-sized businesses, because they are what make up most of the economy in most of the countries in Asia-Pacific. That's true. And the mismies also are particularly, it gives them the reason for digital transformation. Previously, many mismies has no reason to digitally transform themselves, because they have a kind of flurry of business from the places that they used to run, like a physical store and things like that. During this time, everybody need to pause a little bit and think how to digitally transform themselves. And so I think, indeed, the larger companies, on the other hand, probably all have business continuity and high availability plans in place. So I think it's crucially important that we offer the particular tools and to know how to digitally transform the business itself, not just the way that it interacts with its customers. There are three tools that we hope are going to be useful. There's Digital Garage, there's Google My Business, there's the remote work page. All of those are skilling tools that we hope SMBs will take advantage of and help them move into this digital era that the President and you have been talking about. And we want to make sure that they're appropriate for the Taiwanese context as well as for other contexts. I think Anita is trying to say something. Yeah, I was just going to add a little bit about digital transformation SMB. This is something that I, myself and Tina and Len here, we have actually been discussing with the Taiwan, Google Taiwan team. We'll have more details in the coming weeks, but it literally is centered around how we assist SMBs, especially important in Taiwan because a large portion of the economy in Taiwan is SMBs. And like Audrey said, they are particularly vulnerable to downturn like this. So we're talking about how we're going to use Google product and services to help them and also prevent them with tools. On digital transformation, that is actually a topic that we actually have been working on even before COVID. And at this point, it actually seems more important. So I've been talking with Tina's team on how we can help provide trainings, whether it's Google tools or it's non-Google tools. We want to go out there and talk to SMBs and then really answer their questions. And I attended a few of those sessions and I found that sometimes even just a session to walk them through very simple things, it's the piece of mind. It's letting people know that, yes, you are doing this right. And yes, you can ask us questions and you have support. That really is important. So all of these hopefully will come to some sort of final package in a few weeks. And Audrey, I'll definitely keep you posted when we have more details. I'm really looking forward to it. You will coincide nicely with our own timeline for the stimulus package. Good. The other thing we're working really hard on is making sure that we're putting out authoritative information. We're an information company. We want our information to be as authoritative as possible. I mean, the good news in Taiwan is you have TCDC that has been putting out authoritative information. We've been able to steer people to that information and not to the sources of the people who are trying to make money off the pandemic or those who are making up stories about the medicine that are not accurate. And we've actually literally removed millions of YouTube videos that were not accurate. We've been really, really ruthless during that. Yeah. I've heard that from the more than 140 mask distribution app makers. They say that as soon as they put any advertisement on it or as soon as they put a merchandise link, it just gets delisted from Google Play like within minutes. Right. Yeah. So nobody is allowed to profit from the accurate information thing. I think this is really nice. We think it's really important.  You've sent 17 million masks to countries that needed them, three and a half million to my country. I really appreciate it because you geared up so fast and you would learn so much from SARS and you knew what to do. And you were not profiting from this crisis. We are not seeking to profit from this crisis, but we are seeking to help countries get back on their feet, get businesses get back on their feet and students get back on their feet. We think that's going to be really important in the time to come. Very much so. Very much so. But whatever, please, I'd love to continue this dialogue. I'd like to come and visit with you when we finally do get to Taiwan. And we're really thrilled that the president was able to stop by our Google campus. We're building a new engineering campus. Our numbers in Taiwan keep going up. A lot of talent there. And so I think after India, Taiwan is the second largest in Asia Pacific in terms of number of people hired, more than 2,000. So we're committed. The commitment continues. We really are determined to be as helpful as possible at this time. Yeah, that's great. And I also welcome the news that this trans-Pacific fiber optic line is getting to its final stages of approval. So yeah, I think this is really symbolic geopolitically as well. It means that we're firmly on the side of liberal democracy and we're really happy to share the exchanges that we had with Google both on promoting renewable energy, on responsible counter disinformation strategies and things like that. I mean, we don't always agree 100%, but at the end of it, we always end up with something that we can all live with. And this is important, especially around East Asia, because often many jurisdictions take a kind of top-down approach when it comes to internet governance. And we're adhering strictly to the internet governance norms. And we always do norm shaping before legalization. And I think Anita also appreciate that in our previous work. Yes, definitely. Ted, if I can add a few things, I want to thank Audrey for all of her help. Last year, especially before the election, there was a lot of different opinions in Taiwan to how the disinformation phenomenon should be governed in Taiwan. But Audrey is a very important partner of ours and she helped us to communicate our position and our proactive measures to the government, to her other government fellow. So they understand what is important on this stage. And I hope Audrey, through 2019, all of the activities and initiatives that you and your fellow government officials now have a better idea of the proactive and self-voluntary measures that we have taken while ensuring that the internet remains free and open. Yeah, basically you implemented our control union norms without us having to put a law to it. Much better that way. Much better that way, much better than the other way around. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah, and you had a successful election. You had a successful and fair election. And early in 2019, I think we all had a lot of worries about that and how much misinformation might be used. I know we did a lot of training both on the executive side and the legislative side, where we've been very committed to fact-checking of all kinds and we're able to dig deep. And in the end, it was a successful and fair election. Yeah, and everybody learned the importance of timely response and humor over rumor. And even now, the spoke stock of the CECC is still trendy among all the different age groups. It's not just among young people, but the elderly also love their own child, the dog meme that shares ten sanitation rules and social distancing rules. So I would say that these trainings and these knowledge exchange sessions are really played a large part. That's really good to hear. And I'm also happy to report Audrey that we're continuing with similar activities and actually expanding it this year. Now, of course, COVID will also be creating shifting things to online. And again, I'm working on these plans, but when I have more details that are confirmed, I'll definitely let you know. But this remains a very important priority for us in Taiwan and we continue to work with outside partners like Taiwan Fact-Check Centers or MyGoPan and increase their capacity while we work together. And then again, later at a certain point, I'll let you know when we have more confirmed details. Okay, that's great. I also personally learned a lot with the interactions in your workshops with YouTubers and journalists and things like that. And because after going into the cabinet, I really haven't practiced so much at this YouTuber know-how. And I get to learn from the best this year that in your workshop, I just had a recording session this morning with Audrey, one of the YouTubers in Taiwan on the Taiwan Can Help That Us campaign. And that campaign again shows how the social sector can even take public diplomacy and uplift it into a very successful not just social media campaign, but actually real world campaign where there's a lot of offline support after the New York Times advertisement as well. And so I think YouTube also played quite a part in making this a reality. Yeah. I mean, the vice president has been a good user of YouTube and you're talking to Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. And Johns Hopkins has been one of the most authoritative sources for the world on COVID. That's right. And so I was really, it was really interesting to see him have an exchange with the dean there because he's an epidemiologist. He knows what he's talking about. And so he's just when he speaks, he's putting out authoritative information on the virus. And he's also putting out wise policy advice, science-based policy advice. And I just wish the rest of the world would listen.  But the crash course that VP Chen Jianren recorded, a crash course on epidemiology is on YouTube and it's being translated into like 17 languages or something. So that's also something that you can talk to at the end. And how to amplify that message. It's right on the front page of Taiwan Can Help That Us. That's amazing. And that's what, you know, that's what we need to be able to do. We need to be able to put out information. People who know what they're talking about are sharing. And he certainly does. Yeah. On this topic of YouTuber, I said I may have included in my one of my reports, but I think one of the different characteristics of Taiwan's YouTuber communities is that they really like to work together. So in early March, they actually came up with the idea of how about we, I think about seven of them, they recorded a clip because they are all very popular. They all have a lot of viewers. So record a clip to tell people how do you wash your head properly? Where do you, you know, where do you need to wear a mask? And they also talk about, you know, do not panic. This is a time that we work together. If we all work together, we'll get through the crisis. And they did this completely voluntarily and work with us. And that is really something, a really phenomenon project that you don't see a lot in other places. It's a genuine vaccine against the infodemic. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there are, I mean, that's the, that's the obverse, the reverse of what we're talking about. Those who are trying to take advantage of the pandemic to make money.  And they want to help those 23 million citizens. It's, it's quite an inspiration. Cool. So I don't know if you have questions for us or if you have any further questions for all three, but I mean, I'm happy to continue this inspiring discussion, but I also know that you have a lot of other missions and duties. Right. I think I need to explain my radical transparency ideas. So we make a transcript of this conversation. We will not publish the video unless you do. And then we'll send a transcript over for you to edit as you see fit. You can change any part that you have set. And then we publish usually after 10 days. That is my kind of rule entering the cabinets for all the conversations and interviewing, even internal meetings that I chair. Yeah. Great. I'm all in favor of transparency. I think transparency is a way to govern well. Use maximum radical transparency, if you will. That's the governance in my view. Yeah. Excellent. That's the only thing. So very nice meeting you and looking forward to meeting in person where we don't have to wear a mask each. So before we all sign off, can I take a photo of the two of you? Of course. Sure. Let me turn off my own, my own camera. So it's only the two of you. And I think all three, you need to maybe either push your computer back a little or you move your chair. Yes. Okay. Like this. Yes. I think this is good. All right. Let me. Okay. To control comment for you, right? Okay. All right. All right. Ready guys? One, two, three. Wait. Control ship three. Sorry. Pause along. Ready? One, two, three. One more. One, two, three. All right. Perfect. Yay. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. I look forward to meeting you in person. Very much so. Very much so. We're going to come and have some good meals and Taipei and learn about all that you're doing and learn and we're inspired by your model. Yes. Very much so. And so have a good local time and see you next time. Thanks very much. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Anita.


And it's on Sport Stories, with the Euro League women's new season set to get on the way basketball world governing body FIBA has listed some of the top players to look out for with Nigerian's Eveline Akato making the ranks. Euro League women is the premier women's basketball competition in Europe featuring the top 16 teams from the continent and the world's best players. The regular season is set to commence on Wednesday and all clubs have been active during the off-season looking to bolster their rosters for the new season. During the off-season basket lands, French champions in 2021 announced the signing of the Nigerian. Highlights in some of the top 10 players that could make a huge impact when the season begins and Wednesday FIBA named the Nigerian among those the rated highly ahead of the competition.


Hello. Happy to be here at the OFA conference or rather in my car recording from outside a local business with high speed internet. Rural internet and COVID and this is the best I could come up with. So I'm, yeah, thanks for joining me. Looking forward to talking about a topic I love with you all. So without further ado, let's talk about mulberries. So I just want to give a brief overview of what this presentation is going to look like. I want to give a little background about myself and my farm, some projects I'm involved with. And then we'll get an overview of mulberry, look at a few different species, and then we'll talk about beef production, fruit production, potential diseases, and then how I'm using mulberry on my farm. And we'll brainstorm some ideas for how this might benefit all of you. So again, thanks for joining me. My name is Weston Lombard. I'm the owner of Solid Ground Farm. Solid Ground Farm is it's like a sort of research and education slash creation center. We're in Southeast Ohio, Appalachian, Hilly, Hilly land. And we do workshops and educational programs and have this experimental agroecology, agroforestry. I've been doing this for about 12 years. And I'd say I got into this idea through, I guess sort of through philosophy and like looking for purpose and meaning in my life, trying to find greater connection with nature. I just wanted to find a way that I could like interact with the outdoors in a beneficial way. So that led me to agroforestry and permaculture. I started experimenting and researching and eventually hosting workshops so that I could learn more about certain stuff. From that, I sort of developed different speaker series and weekend events and all that stuff at the farm as a way to sort of fund my farming hobby. That's grown over the years and now we offer several different programs. And most of our income actually come from renting space in the summer camp and play space elementary school. We do also we've got a CSA, we sell direct to consumer. But at this point, I'd say 10% of our income comes from actually selling produce and most of it comes from rent and rent. And that has allowed me to play around without a lot of expectation and given me freedom to explore different crops. So that's sort of how I have come to Mulberry anyway through this experiment. Briefly about the different programs we offer this youth outdoor adventure summer camp. We're trying to connect children with the outdoors, show them meaningful interactions with nature and help them build relationship land and each other. They spend a lot of time foraging through I've got forest gardens and vegetable gardens and all this. And they, you know, pick carrots and eat them and hang out under the mulberry tree. Most of the fruit on the farm actually gets by kids at the summer camp or at like we do a hundred person farm table festival. A lot of the food gets processed for that. The rest of the year, we have a place based elementary school and sort of like outdoor focused. We do projects around seasonal happenings. I run a eco entrepreneurship by new projects like make apple cider or roast chestnuts. Now we're making acorn coals and mulberry. So a lot of fun, but all of these projects together have this focus on like, I guess, building. Culture around the local sourcing of our food and basic needs. So we're trying to think of ways to interact and have a relationship with our land as if, you know, we belong there and as if we're part of we're developing our our role and how we fit with all the soil, water and plants and animals. Super experimental, super fun on this process. Like I said, I experimented with a lot of different crops, but gradually came to notice that the most productive and most consistent crop on the farm were the wild mulberries growing like underneath the walnut trees along the fence. And that was actually where we were getting the best production. So I slowly started looking at different cultivars and planting more and more trees. Eventually I applied for a SARA grant and got funding to collect local and regional cultivars and test them out on the farms. I planted probably 50 cultivars. Who knew there were so many different types of mulberry, but I've tried them all at this point and have been planting different configurations, doing different pruning methods and really trying to learn everything I can about this underappreciated crop. So that's where I'm coming from. I'm going to try to share everything I've learned and read about mulberries in this brief time. So I'm going to jump right into it here. In case you don't know, mulberry, it's a deciduous, at least intemperate climates tree from the Maraceae family. Same family as figs, breadfruit and Osage orange. These are all very vigorous adaptable trees. Mulberry is typically a diatrous, meaning it has male and female flowers on different trees. Only female trees produce something to be aware of. Male trees produce a large amount of pollen that can trigger some people to produce. Anyway, back to the tree in general. Why are we going to plant mulberry trees? I was first exposed to mulberry in literature in J. Russell Smith's book, Tree Crops, a Permanent Agriculture. He calls mulberry the king of crops without a throne. It's not yet recognized for its potential. Some of the reasons it's so great are, one, it is very vigorous growing and adapting. The mulberry is found worldwide in most areas that are not arctic. It can survive in wet soils and dry soils, on mountain tops, on most conditions. There is a species of mulberry that will survive. There are actually 200 species of mulberry worldwide and thousands of cultivars. Today, we're going to talk particularly about two species, the native Morris rubra and the imported Morris album. Adaptable, vigorous, and also very precocious, meaning it bears fruit at a young age. A grafted tree that you get from a nursery will start bearing immediately. It'll have a few fruit on it, even in the pot. Then, increasing in production, it takes about five years when it reaches good production. Then, we'll continue to increase over its life. They say a mature mulberry tree can produce and bushels. Some of the challenges are actually getting all of that fruit, but we'll talk more about that later. Delicious edible fruit, people say it resembles a blackberry. The fruit varies in flavor from bland and really sweet to tangy and complex, depending on the cultivar. It's typically soft and bruises easily. One of the reasons we don't see mulberry more commonly in a supermarket are because of its short shelf life. These are the two reasons most commonly attributed to a lack of prominence. One, that it has a short shelf life, and two, the birds love it. Two, gorge themselves and then leave purple marks all over your backyard. Beyond that, mulberry is super nutritious. It's worth growing just for its health benefits. J. Russell Smith writes about villages in the Middle East where they actually harvest mulberries in the summer, dry them to preserve them, and then eat them as almost a soul food source through the winter. They're really high in protein and all these different vitamins and minerals and can actually sustain someone as a meal on their own. This bottom picture is some mulberries that I dehydrated. They're quite delicious. You can buy them now. Their market is like a super food. Most of them come from Turkey and they're sold for like $5 to $15 an ounce. These benefits are in the fruit and the leaves are also super healthy. It's been used as a medicinal Chinese remedy for thousands of years, and there are a lot of claims as to its health. I think it's being looked at most as that anti-accident reservatrol has anti-cancer properties. I know there's research about influencing blood pressure and helping with diabetes by eating mulberry fruit and using leaf tea. It's also said to increase brown fat content in our body.  It keeps them warm and it has a lot of energy in it. Build up your stores by gorging on mulberries in the summertime. We're going to focus on Morris Alba and Morris Rubra. So Alba is the white mulberry. Don't be fooled by the name. The fruit can actually be white, pink, purple, and even red. There's often confusion about this and people sell what is labeled as Morris Rubra because it has red fruit. That's not necessarily the case. Morris Alba comes from the Himalayas and has been cultivated for thousands of years by the Chinese and later in India for silkworm production. Leaves of the sole food source of the silkworms have very high nutritional demands and they can only eat mulberry. They have a single stomach like we do. So this food, it's very digestible and very high in protein nutrients. So it's also great as a livestock and human food. Alba is interesting. It was brought to the US to try to start a silk industry in the 1600s. There's a great story about that. We went through a phase of mulberry mania where individual mulberry trees were being sold for thousands of dollars on the speculation that they would produce amazing silk. And there was a big craze that eventually burst when the silk industry didn't pan out. And that was for a number of reasons. I think labor costs in the US were too high and we just didn't have the quality control that other countries were implementing. So millions of trees were planted over that 200 year period and some places they were even mandating that every landowner had to plant mulberry trees. So these trees, the seed is easily dispersed by birds when they eat the fruit and poop it out and it has since naturalized and spread across the country. It's now considered invasive. That's I think worth a discussion. I don't want to discount Morse Alba out of hand because of its invasiveness. It's a very useful tree and it, unlike other invasives, it doesn't typically form like pure stands and it doesn't necessarily out compete native species. So while it does spread and we'll show up along fence lines and other areas that aren't road. Its main concern is that it hybridizes with the native Morse rubra and these hybrid offspring, then replace Morse rubra in the wild Morse rubra is now threatened may even not really exist in pure forms already. The most genetic testing is shown that that almost all wild specimens of Morse rubra house and Alba and at this point after 200 years of. So if you are really. concerned about introducing invasive species you should check in your area and see the status of Morse Alba if it's already there. There's not much that's going to change that, but you may not want to introduce it where it doesn't exist. However, there are it is the one that has been bred for the longest, it's called cultivated to have bigger, more productive leaves for the silk industry and these can be fed to livestock and humans. So leaf cultivars are the Alba it has smoother leaves. So when we're talking about livestock feed we're talking about Morse Alba. It's also great for people that they steam the leaves like you would break leaves like wrap them up in wrap rice and steam. Eat the eat the young ones steamed, but quite healthy and delicious. There's also a market for the root root bark is used in Chinese medicine. Alba is typically smaller, maybe growing 25 feet tall 20 feet wide. It can be, but and regrows vigorously. And it forms this really dense tree like in the picture here and even in the middle of this tree where little sunlight penetrates, it's still ripens. So that's something special about mulberries. It's like exceptional fruiting. Additionally, it fruits on all species almost every year without fail, which makes it worth growing just for that, for that reason. This was the first year in 10 years that I haven't gotten fruit. And we actually had three consecutive late frosts. So it leafed out the flowers and leaves were frozen and killed. It leafed out again and produces secondary flowers, which is very unique. Those were frozen. I leafed out again produce tertiary flowers. So it really wants to make fruit. But then those are also killed. And at this point in the summer, I think I got like three or four roots from 100 tree. So it has its limits, but it will do its best to fruit. It typically leaves out later than most fruit trees. So it's not usually an issue, but climate change, everything is pretty crazy. So again, grafted trees, rooted cuttings, they'll fruit right away. Seedling will take maybe five years before. That's Alba. This is Morris rubra, or likely a hybrid in this picture, but it's native to Ohio. These trees get quite large. They're found usually along stream banks or in forest coves. They can tolerate wet soils and can actually like be flooded in underwater for a year and then bounce back the next year if the water received over after two years, they'll die. They don't like to be, they don't like to be in the water and like a well-drained soil. But they'll uniquely tolerate alkaline soils and wet soils, and they do better in shade than Alba. The rubra, between rubra and Alba, you can almost plant in any situation. Alba likes more of the drier soils. The rubra can tolerate the wet Alba, the more acidic. The rubra has both more complex, better tasting fruit, often bigger fruit. It also has established relationships with our native ecology. So it's a very wildlife feed for about a dozen, maybe I think it's nine caterpillar species that it supports, dozens of mammals. This isn't a picture of mine, but I actually came out to a tree and there was a woodchuck in the tree out eating, I think the branch, the fruit and the leaves off the tree. So all manner of creature love mulberry fruit. They can be hard to distinguish, especially with all the hybridization. Typically, the rubra will have bigger, more deeply lobed leaves that are slightly hairy on the underside. They're duller, green and not glossy like the Alba. And you can actually go to this website and they'll do side by side comparisons. The bark is actually quite distinctly different to this grayish bark on the rubra and the Alba almost turns an orangeish color as it ages. And you saw the cut down pictures of the stump, the hardwood is actually like this very yellowish orange color. Here's a chart that shows the differences. But typical rule of thumb, if you find it in a forest, like in the middle of a forest, it likely it could be red mulberry. If you find it in town or like growing along a fence line, it's probably white mulberry. But yeah, they do have some, I think, I think differences. Red mulberry will never have white fruit, whereas white mulberry will. So which one to plant? It depends. If you're not a purist, there are more options. A lot of the hybrids are some of the best fruit producing. What I like to do is plant out red mulberry seedlings and then graft hybrids and red mulberry cultivars on. However, if I were doing it for leaf production, I would do Alba. This nigra also originating in Asia is supposed to have the best tasting fruit of all the mulberries. And this is what the mulberry orchards in Europe and the UK are of Morris nigra. And they, unfortunately, I think it's more the humidity of our winter that they don't tolerate. They can, they can do up to like six B, I think, but, but typically, I think nigra would be a gamble here. I haven't even tried it just because what I read that it wouldn't work. But maybe in certain circumstances, it'd be worth time. We weren't, we aren't going to discuss nigra anymore, but we could. Okay, so getting into mulberry leaves. Like I said, almost all livestock, I can't think of any that would not enjoy mulberry leaves from rabbits to chickens might have to dry, dry it and grind it to eat it. Pigs will strip the leaves right off of the tree, as will goats and sheep. It's often collected on the young shoots and then run through a wood shipper, and you are a shredder and you can feed that whole, all of that to cattle, they'll eat the bark and the young people compare it to alfalfa and say it's more nutritious than alfalfa. So if you're trying to compare it to something else. There's lots of studies showing it increases milk production and goats increases egg production in chickens. It's typically not fed as a as a lone food source but in combination with other, but it's a great addition. There's some studies you can check out I, I don't know a lot of the science behind it, but I do know that the leaves are very high in different minerals, nutrients and actually have a lot of protein. So they're very high quality forage how I've been using them is both for human consumption. I collect the young leaves and dehydrate them and then use them to make a drink of mulberry leaf tea every day. I'm sure it's really healthy. Who knows but it's got a pleasant taste. And fetch is a very good price. So if you just look online, it retails for seven ounces $7 an ounce. I'm sure it holds sales for a lot less but a tree makes an absurd amount of leaves. You can harvest in the tropics they harvest leaves up to like seven times a year. In temperate climates I think we can do two leaf harvestings.  You can get a lot of crop from it. I'm stripping the leaves also when it leaves back out it produces food again so it's the way to stimulate a second round of fruiting as well. How we care for the mulberry depends on whether you're growing it for fruit or for leaves and as does the spacing and whatnot, which I guess I will get into momentarily after I show the proof of my statements here. This is our pet, our pet sheep enjoying mulberry leaves. So I have these growing in the pasture as like shade trees. And then I'll either just break and bend the branches down so they're in in reach, or I'll cut them and bring them into their paddock if that's the case. So these two lived mostly off mulberry leaves through this winter. Actually I cut them in the summer and bring them whole branches and what they didn't need I dried in my tree hay. But yeah so I cut it and then I just put it in the shed to dry. And it stays green and just dehydrates so it doesn't mold or spoil. They call it tree hay and you just have to like somehow get it in an area with some ventilation and it will dry out and then you can feed that all through the winter. So I've been experimenting with that and I find that they definitely relish the mulberry leaves in all seasons. Edit to pigs and sheep primarily. So leaf cultivars are very widely available in other countries. Here, most nurseries sell fruit cultivars. And these are some that I've found to be suitable, although there are definitely better ones out there. I just don't know how to access. So Kokusa is one of those bred in Korea. It has really big fruit and also really big palatable leaves. Some leaves strip really well off the tree. Kokusa actually like posts and bark with it when you strip it so it's better for like cutting the branches. Armin is another alba cultivar that has big fruit and big leaves. They're often a correlation between the two. If you want to do this on the sheep you can get more alba seedlings. And again half will be males and half will be females but all of them will have nutritious leaves. I love to get my hands on some cold, hardy leaf cultivars. I know those ones that have higher nutritional content and more protein, higher digestibility and all that, but not yet available. So for leaf production, typically they do sort of tight spacing. This is from a book on mulberry cultivation by an Indian author. This hasn't really been done in the U.S. So there's not like a lot of information on how do you grow mulberries for leaves in the U.S. So this is sort of an extrapolation from temperate India. They're doing it. They do a three by three spacing, irrigated and fertilized, and they yield six to nine tons an acre of leaves. As the soil gets less ideal, the slope steeper, you might consider a 10 micron spacing. And so with this tight spacing, you can imagine the trees, you know, 20 foot trees. How's that work? Well, you either compass it or pollute it. And these are both great strategies for they both increase the longevity, the life, lifetime of a tree, and they continuously keep it within a harvesting height and allow for multiple year after year harvest. So the first step is you plant your trees, you let them grow for a few years to get established, and then you cut them at different heights depending on what you're going for. So this is an example of a pollard. Pollarding is essentially cutting them at above livestock or deer browse so that the new growth isn't eaten off by some sort of animal. So in the few planted. Sorry, my pictures are sort of hard to see your plant in the first year prune the lower branches to try to get a straight trunk. Keep doing that in the second year. And then in the third year when you've got a, you know, four inch or so diameter tree, you cut it down at four or five feet. And then that will you cut it down. Sorry. In the winter when it's dormant. And then in the spring, it will shoot up all manner of regrowth from the top.  And dehydrate them, whatever you're going to do, let it regrow. And then you can even time you can cut it again or strip the leaves again. And as long as you give it a month or two before the last frost to recover and store up energy for next year, you can do this year after year. You can obviously pull nutrients from the soil. So you'll have to fertilize and irrigate if you're doing this continuously. You can also do it once a year and have less of an impact on the land and less need. This picture is a copis system. Same idea.  This, there's systems where you can harvest mechanically that I think prefer like a copis method method. And then how you prune these, how you make the cuts is cut it down. It has all these vigorous sprouts growing.  And these, it sort of grows over time and you get this gnarly like hand looking thing. And each year it gets a little more bulbous, funny looking. So it's constantly sort of growing a little bit as your copis. And copis trees, I don't know about mulberry in particular, but copis trees can live for like thousands of years. You can continuously supply leafs or if you let it grow longer, people weave with mulberry or use the inner bark for fiber. Let it grow even longer between cutting and get big diameter polewood for firewood or fence posts even I think the heart would have more it's rubra. It's fairly rot resistant. Anyway, copising and polluting a great way to increase production. It's a turning to fruit. So this has been my main interest. The fruit, like I said, it's delicious. It's nutritious. It's very versatile on anything you can do with like blackberries or something. Like mulberries or wine, pies, jam, jellies, juices. I did a lot of smoothies. Mostly what I did was I froze a lot of fruit when I throw it in the smoothies or I did a little experiment with dehydration. I want to get a, it'd be nice to find a system that was outdoor. I use a lot of energy and takes like 12 hours in a commercial dehydrator to dehydrate it. But then they're shelf stable. A great thing to do. So fruit is ideal for humans and livestock, particularly pigs and chickens. So I've experimented with this, and I have found that the animals will hang out under the mulberry trees waiting for the fruit to drop. And then do a great job of cleaning it up and and fattening themselves on its production. Kids, of course, love mulberries. We talked a little bit about the challenges, birds, short shelf life. So really harvesting it for market or something, I would hand pick it directly into the sale containers and then like take it that day or the next day to be sold. And tell consumers to eat it, you know, right away, pretty much the most reasonable thing I think is to do a you pick where people come and eat it directly from. So to do this. It's important to keep the trees small. Morris rubra can grow up to 75 feet, if not pruned. So there's going to be and it's vigorous grows a lot each year. So there's going to be a lot of a lot of pruning, which means a lot of leaves to share and a lot of wood to burn. So it's a very giving and productive tree. And you have to do what you can to keep it, keep it small and within reach. Another interesting thing about mulberry is it's ripening window. So a typical mulberry tree might have a two to three week ripening window where every day. A little bit of fruit ripens over three weeks. Some hybrids called ever bearing cultivars will ripen small batches continuously for maybe three months, or maybe they'll have a season in June and then they'll have another little season in in August or something. And if you plant a lot of different cultivars, you can have a really long mulberry season lasting from June through August is the harvesting. And then with like one cultivar now cook pizza is the one that they sort of ripen together over a two week period. So here's just some kids at the camp on doing what they do every day of pick up. So you can see this there's quite a bit of fruit on each on each tree. Yeah, so it's very it's very productive. And again, I love the taste mulberries are delicious. Let's look at how we're going to train and prune them for food. So this is sort of what I've been going for is branches spreading out that I can walk under the fruit hangs underneath, and I want to be able to walk all around the tree, or at least bend the branches down where I can, where I can reach. So I've achieved that primarily through bending the branches so I sort of take them and like crimp them as I go. And I've noticed that that albacult of ours respond well to bending and they're quite pliable. Occasionally with the rubra, I end up like whooping they tear at a crotch and break when I try to bend them. They're less conducive to bending. I don't know if that's true generally across the species but that's in my observation. So bending helps keep them horizontal and promote this like lateral growth and pre production. So what ends up happening though is when you bend the branch and the next year it shoots up a bunch of vertical growth above that. So that has to constantly be managed. So they can be multi-stem just trying when they're young to create this shape. And then I can sort of leave the scaffold structure and just do annual or biannual pruning to keep it small like this. So I've got another diagram I've drawn as well. So first thing you want to do is get it at the branches sort of above a deer brow tight. So you prune it up to a straight whip cut off the young branches and then a heading cut at the top will encourage it to send out a lot of branches right at the tip of the tree. And then those you want to bend over to create this nice scaffolding. And that can be done by here people use bamboo or two by fours to tie the branches to and try to get down. I've seen people hang weights or cinder blocks from the trees to bring them down and you can also do that bending mechanism. And so after that is established and every year it'll send up these vertical shoots. And what I've been experimenting with is letting the tree fruit. So in June, I'll come into harvest the fruit and I'll just cut the vertical growth, pull it down, take the fruit off, and then I can feed the branches to the livestock. And that sort of keeps the tree from taking off vigorously up in the air. And if you do that every year on cutting out the vertical growth, it will keep sending up the suckers every year. It'll need that, but it'll also really develop strong lateral branches that you leave.  What I've seen a lot of people doing in Asian countries is developing these mulberry tunnels. So it's essentially maybe 10 to 15 foot spacing and you're training the branches in towards each other. And then you walk underneath harvest as you go. So that'd be really great for a you pick is creating one of these mulberry tunnels. Another great way I've seen this done is managing it. More like that copper system where you have a multi stem trunk that you're periodically cutting back so you make half, half the shoots one year, and then half the shoots the next year. So you're just continuously keeping it small, but allowing an amount of it to to harvest. But that is the biggest challenge is you want to keep it small so that you can harvest the fruit. What cultivars are best for fruit production. As part of my Sarah grant, I wrote a booklet that contains a lot of this information. I need to update it to both of ours that did well during that period we've since had some really cold winters and they have died. So here's a list of cultivars suitable for like zone five that I've really liked. My favorite is actually a local one that I got from our farmers market manager named Kit Parker. So it's like a rubra hybrid. It has really complex tasting fruit, it's long, maybe an inch and a half long, and it has a tangy complex flavor and is very prolific ripens over a long window so it's like an ever bearing. And I've been grafting on to a lot of my wild seedlings. So whenever, you know, I find a wild tree growing I'll take a scion and graft female variety on to it so I get so I get the standard is Illinois ever bearing it's very cold hardy produces tasty big fruit. Um, if you know anyone who's growing mulberry has heard of Illinois ever bearing silk hope is from a town called silk hope in North Carolina is introduced by a J ballard, the late a J ballard he recently passed away he was like our regional mulberry expert, you know very diverse mulberry orchard. He introduced silk hope and thought it was the most promising mulberry cultivar a lot like Illinois ever bearing, maybe slightly bigger, maybe slightly better tape. Very similar. Uso is that Korean Korean cultivar that ripens precipitously, it's got big black fruit, maybe even bigger than silk hope. I like it both because it has big nutritious leaves and it's good fruit production, and it ripens all at once you just done with the season quickly. The dwarf is my favorite, but it keeps dying on me when the temperature dips below negative 15 degrees. So it's not quite ideal for us, but it has a short inter nodal distance this picture is already dwarf so it has a lot of fruit and a small space, and it doesn't get as big as other all varies. Very good flavor, very big fruit, naturally small tree. So if you're in like zone six, I would try a Gerardi dwarf right all around. Carmen, if you want a white fruit variety, which the birds tend to leave alone more Carmen I think has the biggest, a best tasting of the white fruited ones that will grow in our area. So it comes from is also cold hardy. It comes from Canada I believe earlier is super cold party as well. So anywhere north, north of where I am zone zone five and up the most cold hardy to my knowledge or Illinois ever bearing in Collier, and I imagine capturing Carmen in from Canada also. This is a great website. It has information on each cultivar and everything like to know about mulberry so that's from Mark Travis, and this is a picture from that website as well. So I was under the impression that mulberry was mostly pest and disease free, which was one of the benefits of planting it I've since learned that nothing is truly without pests and diseases, especially in southeast Ohio with our humidity. And especially when you start planting a bunch of things together so that was one of the drawbacks of bringing all berries from all over the country and planting them together on my farm is that pest and diseases started showing up on 10 caterpillars. You know you can just scoop them off and smash them. The birds eat the eat the fruit deer love the leaves different caterpillars love the leaves. However they always bounce back like leaf defoliation is not a big, big issue. The more problematic ones are the borers, which I've been educated that the borers should not be a problem. Have healthy trees that are well irrigated and mulched and cared for that has not been my style of growing. I've planted a lot of things, sort of letting nature take its might not be the best strategy. And so I have started getting some border damage they drill into the end of the bark and eat the can be I'm going to eventually kill three. And words problem I've had show up is this very I'm canker that's been here. It's a fungal disease that spreads by wind and insects and sort of enters leaf scars or areas where the bark has been damaged. You can spread it by pruning. It starts to eat the eat the cambium form these sunken cankers and will eventually spread around the entire branch until it girls it and kills anything above it.  And then you cut back to fusarium canker is first identifying it, and then you cut back since six inches below it and burn or those of the wood in a sanitary way. So I have now found this in most of my trees and I've been cutting a lot of them down or cutting them back. Unfortunately, but if you get it early. It's no big deal you cut it out. And just get rid of it whenever you see it. Here are pictures of the boards mulberry trees they tend to bleed when you cut them. So a lot of sap comes out. So that the little you see little holes and then those holes bleed. And then that sap tends to mold and turn this black white color. But the real damage is inside where those little beetles are eating, eating the inner layer of cambium. So one could potentially spray something toxic on them, or you can cut down three on this thing about cutting down mulberry tree is that next year it grows right back and you got a tree again. So not a huge loss. Okay, so a lot of information to digest there I know how are we going to use this on our farms on low hanging fruit like the easy applications are if you have an existing orchard. Interplant between them with mulberry it tolerates park shade. So can fruit underneath the overstory tolerate it tolerates jug loan from black walnut. So it's particularly good as like a interplant with large nut trees if you got a test nut orchard or walnut orchard or something like that even oaks and hickory is it can do well in between each tree. Another benefit you'll get from it in addition to the increased production is that if you let the leaves fall and decompose, rather than feeding them to the livestock it's a ton of organic matter it's really nutrient rich, and it will like build organic matter in your soil and kickstart the biology down there. So great for that. There's a there's a myth that the Chinese held back the goby desert by planting mulberries along the edge and just leaf fall would keep away the certification by holding in moisture and building organic matter. And also I've read a study about how there are bacteria living on the leaves that as water falls on the leaves these nitrogen fixing bacteria drip off the leaves into the soil and actually add nitrogen. Good good anecdotally, I read that it's a good companion plant for apples to probably for those same reasons of building, building organic matter. So I do in my system I've got in between every fruit tree there's a mulberry tree. I've recently planted just a small 200 tree that I'm going to try to make into a mulberry tunnel and do a you pick. I think that's a great small farm activity you can have an acre of you pick mulberry that you train to a mulberry tunnel. Root is really high value, in fact it's a good price you can additionally sell the leaves and feed any excess planting it exclusively for livestock is also not a bad idea. So here's a semi dwarf apple tree, and then a grafted mulberry sort of below it. And so in both directions, they'll be mulberry on all four sides of that apple tree. And my orchard is pretty diverse so it's like a lot of Asian pears and heirloom apples all interspersed. So for livestock. He me planted in the orchard. It's a great shade tree very dense shade. The fruit fall will be enjoyed by by poultry. And by by pigs on the leaf fall even the leaves when they fall in autumn are are still nutritious and will be gobbled up by by pigs or goats. So just having a tree in a pasture is a benefit for a number of reasons, food production trade. Increasing the soil biology all that. But I like that you have this planting up a plot of it and polluting it and carrying that to the livestock or dehydrating it as a winter feed source. mulberry does, you know, help old soil in place so this could be done on a hillside where you can't grow hay necessarily, and just on on generally degraded soil mulberry can tolerate that. And so having a patch for water production is a great idea. Let's see some chickens eating mulberries here. mulberry is a particularly good livestock plant because it tolerates high nitrogen content of like fresh chicken newer or fresh pig newer and readily sucks that up and converts it back to use and a lot of plants won't get that hot, hot compost. But mulberry loves it. Other other little ideas I've had. I've been planting around my livestock fences, sort of future replacement posts, every 10 feet around the perimeter of my fence I put a mulberry on these could later be polluted and fed grown directly over the fence into the pasture. And then when, when my fence pokes wrought out in 20 years I'll have a new established Fenthrough already in place is bring my fence along that. I don't know if we mentioned spacing for fruit production. I like about a 10 foot spacing if you're going to keep them small. If you're just going to let a tree grow. It's more like 25 foot spacing because it will get big. As you saw in the video with the chickens the trees get quite large. And if they aren't pruned, most of the fruit will be lost to birds, or will fall on the ground for livestock. I get a lot of calls from people who have read my Sarah project online and then want, want to know how to establish them all very orchard or that sort of thing. The method I prefer is feedlings are very cheap. You can get them for $2 a piece and out 500 seedlings. Two to three years later you can come through and graft them all to cultivars. What I would do is I would probably at the same time I planted seedlings, I would select a dozen cultivars and the, you know, three years later which cultivars are performing the best. And then you'll have the scion wood from those trees to cut and graft on to. I like to do a bark inlay graft. When the trees have like part of the leaf out in the early. I think there's a market for leaf tea business domestically. Mulberry is great.  I have not found a domestic mulberry orchard. Other than AJ bullets. I know I know they're out there but there doesn't seem to be a commercial mulberry farm yet. You could burst. Yeah, these are a lot of documents and resources. I recently started a Facebook group for temperate mulberry growers. There's a lot of knowledgeable knowledgeable people on there. So I encourage you to join. Reach out to me by email or phone with questions. I'm always happy to help. Here's some nurseries that I support and have purchased from. Our bezons nurseries out there that these guys have have the cultivars I've listed. And again, if you find my Sarah research project online, take those cultivars with the grain of salt hoping to update that point. Here's my contact information. I'm happy to answer questions. Sorry again for being in my car here. Thanks for having me. I'll talk to you later. Thanks for watching everybody. I'm happy to answer any questions if you have anything else on your mind. Thanks for a great presentation. I'd heard long ago that you could take a branch from a mulberry tree and stick it in the ground and you'd have a new tree. Is that accurate? So that is accurate if you live in a temperate area with with a tropical area with different mulberry cultivars. There are some that root here, but it's it's it's more difficult than in warmer climates. I've had I've had limited success and only with certain cultivars. They do root fairly well from softwood cuttings taken in my early summer. There was a question in the chat about maybe dipping them in a rooting hormone. That definitely helps. But still it's like each cultivar is a little different and how well it roots. And a lot of them don't root well from hardwood cuttings. Although, you know, I hear people getting 10% success from rooting Illinois ever bearing, for example. But but much higher higher success rates with with the softwood cuttings and still using a rooting hormone on those as well. I'll ask another one. I apologize if you said this and I missed it.  Yeah, so you can't sex them until they start to flower, which could take a few years from a seedling. And the flowers, they're sort of similar looking. But if you look closely at them, it becomes easy to distinguish. I don't know that I can describe it very well, but you'd have to look at a side by side picture online.  Female ones look more like immature fruit, like if you can imagine this like really tiny green mulberry fruit. But they're pretty, they look quite similar if you if you don't have a comparison. Sounds like sexing chickens. Yeah, it's not as bad as chickens. Listen, there are a few more questions in the chat. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. So the best way to start them. If you're trying to do it yourself, they do start well from seeds. You've got to stratify the seed. I haven't actually had a ton of luck with this. I tried freezing them and saving them for the next year and then they did not germinate. I hear they're supposed to germinate well. Cuttings are an option. Mostly what I do is I buy seedlings.  The fastest way is to buy a grafted tree, but you'll end up paying $20 to $25 where you can get seedlings for like $2 a piece. And then rooting the softwood cuttings is another option. Someone asked about the living fence concept, mulberry or black locus. I've done that both with black locus, like planting for replacement fence posts and I'm experimenting with willow. I think they all will do great. The best would probably be a mixture of several species including mulberry. You'll get different nutrients and have a more diverse supply. You don't need more than one. Would you recommend using multiple of the species when creating your orchard male and female of each? Obviously you can buy them for specific reasons, but is the more diversity better or will it hinder the purpose? So that you don't need a male tree to get fruit. The fruit will actually be seedless if there aren't any males present. Although it's wind pollinated so it can blow in from anywhere. But if you're going for fruit production you might as well just do all females. And yeah, it's nice to have a diversity of cultivars just in that longer ripening window and different flavors and all that. But there's no need to have a male. The pollen can actually be sort of noxious. There's a ton of pollen and it bothers some people's allergies. And a cool fact that the male flowers release the pollen at half the speed of sound. So it really like explodes it out into the air. It can be hard to tell what kind of mulberry if you already have one on your farm. I check out that North Carolina article on comparing rubra to alba. But again, if it's if it's sort of a mature tree, you can look at the bark and like the fissures between the bark on a alba will be the sort of like orangish yellow color. And it just looks it looks sort of yellow generally the roots are super yellow. Whereas with the rubra the bark is is darker. Alba again has these like really glossy bright green leaves and rubra has sort of a dollar green, a little bit of hairiness on the leaf. But telling the civic cultivar, if it's a wild tree, it's probably just a seedling.  In the chat someone's asking about propagating from male and female trees. So what I do is I find the female trees that I like the fruit from in the winter you cut off on the little shoots of like one year old growth. And you can store it in like a zip lock bag in your in your refrigerator until early summer. And then you graft onto the males by cutting them down and you'll have to watch a video on how to do a bark in like math, but then you can convert the male into a female in that way. So if you have fruit that you like growing in the neighborhood or on a tree, you can use that to propagate to other trees. Often they do the best like the local cultivars are obviously well adapted to your situation so they're worth growing. So the rootstock the gender of the rootstock doesn't matter. Once you've got over it it doesn't matter but any any branches that come out from below the graph will still be the old variety.


Yo, what's up guys welcome back to the Johnny Q channel for this piece I'm actually on tiktok live right now and someone asked me to do a sample piece for their dispensary And I'm gonna be doing two different types of greens color white and black and match their store So let's get into it first. We're gonna start with black. You want a good base color, right?  All right now we spin it. So let's get in Final result looks something like this Look at that I think that's pretty dope. Well, I think that's gonna match the dispensary pretty close. I like it Hope you like it. Let's go, baby


So I'm very pleased to be able to introduce the two, like, without a doubt coolest people here at DEF CON. I feel embarrassed to share the stage with them. But this is Ivana Hu and Ben Dubau of the Omelos. Okay. So their title of their presentation will be While the Bots Distracted You, Hacking the Electorate. I'm going to give their introductions, too. So Ivana Hu is CEO and partner of Omelos and the non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Omelos is a cutting-edge technology company that exposes imminent risks among digital data. By utilizing machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, Omelos focuses on physical threats and identifies online campaigns of adversarial state and non-state actors. Ivana is also an expert in counterterrorism and countering violent extremism with field work in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sweden and Sweden, working on neo-nazi and Islamist violent extremists, which is incredible. Ben Dubau, CTO and President Omelos is the Ben began his career tracking the online propaganda of Jihadist, Shi'i extremists, white supremacists and the militia movement. Before joining Google where he aided YouTube in detecting ISIS content, helped the two develop Project Shield, provided subject matter expertise for the redirect method. In 2017, Ben co-founded Omelos with the mission to stop the weaponization of the internet by providing precise data and analysis on how state actors and foreign terrorist organizations manipulate the web to achieve their geopolitical goals. So oh my god Please welcome them. I'm very excited for this talk. Thank you So again, my name is Ben CTO of Omelos and with me is my co-founder and our CEO Ivana So last year I turned 30 and there is nothing that Ivana loves more than trying to make me feel Super-ancient for that fact and There is no fact that is more effective at making me feel super-ancient than that for teenagers 14 of the top 15 most popular celebrities are YouTubers a category that I honestly can't even consider a celebrity But if you look at the numbers, it's pretty undeniable So the Super Bowl average is about a hundred million views each year over the past decade But when you look at one of the top youtubers ninja who basically just records himself playing video games He's accumulated 1.9 billion views That's an insane number But it's nothing compared to Jake Paul the less said about what's on his channel the better But six billion views. He's accumulated on one single YouTube channel Now that's a mind-blowing number But these two put together are barely more than a third of the way to the number one YouTube star PewDiePie who on his channel has accumulated a staggering 22.6 billion views Now having the ability to reach an audience of this size to get them coming back to hear your message Over and over again It's impossible for that to escape the notice of governments and within the past quarter alone The US government has released over 300 RF keys that make reference to social media influence Sadly liberal democracies are playing catch-up here because channels owned by the Kremlin have accumulated 33.9 billion views on YouTube Now when I say channels owned by the Kremlin, I'm not talking about channels with names like American Joe 1776 or God guns in country I'm talking about channels with names like the official channel of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation How those earlier channels are important they get a lot of attention and rightfully so But bots and covert action are only a tiny piece of the overall information warfare strategy of the Russian Federation Over the next 30 minutes Yvonne and I are going to go over the history of that strategy starting with the beginning of Putin's tenure in 2000 when he released his information security doctrine laying out his plans for media consolidation We'll then go to the period starting with the Georgia war in 2008 and Continuing through the bullet and I a square protest in Moscow a period when Russian military leadership became increasingly Paranoid about losing their control over information flows in Russia We'll then go to a period described by Russian military planners as all-out information war beginning with the Euro made on protests and continuing to the 2016 US presidential elections Finally We'll go over our own analysis of where the current state of Russian information warfare stands And what we're doing to better understand how it operates and how it achieves its goals So let's start from the beginning on September 8th 2000 three months after poon were sworn in he released the information security doctrine and The doctrine calls for the bolstering for bolstering the state mass media Expanding their capabilities and promptly convey reliable information to Russian and foreign citizens And he warns against three things first Distributing of a number of countries towards dominance and infringement of Russia's interests in the world information space and to ousted from external and domestic information markets Second the development by a number of states of of information war concepts and Third it was about insufficient state control over the development of the Russian information market and this doctrine was put to practice soon after So before poon became the president the second Chechen war was started by his successor and after a string of terrorist bombings across Russia poon cited these Attacks as a primary reason for escalating the war and so at this point independent media was about 10 years old and NTV were non-governmental TV was the first to have a national audience And he ran a series of investigative articles that challenged pootons narrative For example, it reported on several false flag operations FSB agents were arrested planting bombs and the fact that explosions were announced two hours before they had actually happened So the Russian secretary press secretary in the hell lesson summoned the general manager of NTV And told him that he had crossed the line He then had the general manager jailed and told him that he could only leave the country if he relinquished all shares in NTV gas prom a state Enterprise bought up all of the shares so in Protest and in fear of their lives Reporters from NTV barricaded themselves in their offices, but to no avail NTV at that point had come under full government control and This began a spree of buying media outlets and creating new ones. So after NTV and 2002 gas gas prom also bought shares in TNT the top entertainment channel as well as Echo Muscovy the top radio station Two years later the leading newspaper which had criticized Putin's handling of a hostage situation They left about 300 school children dead. It too came under full government control a year later And then in 2006 Russia 24 and TV Zvezda, which is the official channel of the Ministry of Defense were launched And while the domestic audience within Russia is one of his target populations Putin's information doctrine also covered the much more expansive in International stage and so this in 2006 the state media agency RIA Novosti and along with funding from the federal agency for press and mass communications Launched Russia today. We're just later rebranded to a simply RT a started with the staff of 500 in addition to 200 reporters with the goal of providing a more complete picture of life in Russia Within three years RT along with arms manufacturers power plants and airports were added on to the official list of organizations of strategic importance to the Russian Federation Now the increased focus on international media coincided with a time of increased paranoia about foreign powers trying to take advantage of Russia an Speech that would become infamous before the 2007 international security conference in Munich Kuhni declared that the stationing of NATO troops on the border on the borders of Poland and the Baltic States represented a direct provocation against the Russian Federation The official military doctrine of the Russian Federation would soon list as the top national security threat The build-up of military potential of NATO and the location of its military infrastructure closer to Russian borders This fear soon became acute when in 2008 then US President George W. Bush Signaled his support for the ascension of the former Soviet state of Georgia to NATO Within a few months Russian troops would pour over the border into into the Georgian Republic Along with the military action Russian media went to work portraying the invasion as a humanitarian Intervention to protect the Osset minority in the north of the country Genocide blared the cry on on the lead story on the English broadcast of RT that day newly sworn-in president Dmitry Medvedev Declared that the actions of the Georgian side cannot be caught anything other than genocide once fiercely independent MTV ran a story where they Mis-translated the words of an Osset girl to make it appear as though she was thanking Russian troops for saving her According to the head of the largest Georgian language media conglomerate Georgia has lost the information war since unfortunately Foreign agencies frequently relied on Russian news sources controlled by the Kremlin Georgia's pro-western president had come to power in 2003 as popular protest removed the pro-russian and former Soviet minister president edward shavard nizay Because NATO won an ally on Georgia's southern border as a result of the protest Russian military planners long suspected foul play by NATO was at hand as a similar wave of revolutions hit the Arab world in 2011 organized on American technology and often with the explicit backing of the American government Russian military planners thought that they saw confirmation of their worst fears According to one of the most senior officials in the administration color revolutions are coups from the outside Based on information technology manipulating the people into protest This wave of revolutions would soon spill beyond the Arab world and reach the Kremlin's front door and at the end of 2011 the largest protest in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union occurred at Boletnaya Square protest leaders met with the US Ambassador and the US Secretary of State explicitly released her support for the protesters Putin declared that the US Secretary of State set the tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal They heard the signal and with the support of the US State Department began active work TV dozed the only national broadcaster to report positively on the protest faced a federal investigation and Within 18 months would lose its license to broadcast Through this sort of censorship along with intimidation and in violence The Russian government was able to snuff out the protest movement But even larger turmoil was brewing next door and in 2013 tens of thousands of Ukrainians descended upon Medan Square in Kiev to protest the corrupt pro-russian administration of Victor Yanukovych Russian media was quick to portray the protesters as thugs Releasing videos seeming to show them doing nothing but beating up officials and causing habit The videos were matched with inflammatory stories with RT running a headline entered the neo-nazis Akuta by Nazis declared Russia won the leading broadcaster in Russia NTV released a documentary entitled ordinary fascism Ukrainian variant and the deputy chief of staff to Putin assembled the heads of Russian media Conglomerates and instructed them to portray the riots and protests as US back Junta of radicals and Nazi collaborators But the media blitz was powerless to turn the tide of events and on February 23rd 2014 Yanukovych resigned and a pro-western pro-eu pro-nato administration took over that very same day tens of thousands of Russian troops in unmarked uniforms Infiltrated eastern Ukraine and the Crimea Within four days Russia would declare that it had formally annexed Crimea That very same day chief of the general staff of the Russian Federation The highest ranking uniformed officer in Russia Released an essay that would form the basis of what today in the West is known as the Garasimov doctrine and in Russia as new generation warfare The central thesis is that the role of non-military means of achieving political and strategic goals Has grown and in many cases. They have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness It is necessary to perfect activities in the information space including the defense of our own objectives Garasimov painted a stark portrait Protests organized on American technology with the support of American and EU NGOs and civil society organizations and the explicit backing of American and EU government Functionaries had manipulated the information environment So effectively that now Ukraine the nation with the second largest Russian population in the world Was under the role of a pro-nato pro-western administration Six weeks later at the international Moscow security conference Russian military brass Raged against what they saw as the most significant loss in information warfare of their time Defense Minister Sergei Shorygu declared that foreign values are being imposed on peoples under the guise of expanding democracy deploying primarily the means of information warfare Garasimov declared that color revolutions are becoming the main means of achieving NATO's political ambitions and Head of the Russian-led treaty Alliance CTSO Nikolai Bujaze Declared that essentially a full-scale information war has been launched in the global information space and An information war has rules of its own Well-known American sci-fi author Robert Seckley Has said the saddest fact is that in an information war the one who tells the truth Always loses. He is limited by the truth while the liar can proclaim whatever he wishes three months later on the 13th anniversary of September 11 Thousands of phones in Centerville, Louisiana Buzzing unison telling residents to take cover indoors When residents went to Twitter to see what was happening. They were greeted by thousands of posts Claiming that ISIS had launched an attack against the local chemical plant This was the opening salvo in what would become one of the most intense and effective information warfare campaigns of all time While multi-billion dollar advertisers dream of getting a single story ranked among Facebook's top 20 most engaged with in the quarter leading up to the 2016 presidential election Four out of the top five most engaged with political stories on Facebook were fake news Spread with the support of Russian bots Well, these bots can be incredibly effective in achieving tactical and strategic goals They are only a small portion of the much larger overarching strategy that Russia employs in the information environment And so given all this historical context We wanted to actually start to quantify the effects of Russian information operations And so we started to look at this of their surface their sophistication across multiple platforms And we're going to show you some of their analysis here So in the six months leading up to the UK Brexit referendum we looked on YouTube the number of videos And how well they performed and so if you add up BBC BBC news and BBC documentary Together they so only produced one-sixth of the videos that RT produced on the topic of Brexit and That number translates to nine times and nine times as many views for RT videos and 12 times as many likes for RT videos With a 33 percent higher favorability rate rating rating for RT videos than BBC ones And we also decided on YouTube to look at every state media agencies that publish in the Arabic language And this is what we found so that's our whore, which is US government backed has about 220,000 million subscribers France to France 24 has a little bit less than one million RT comes in at 3.15 million which is slightly less than what BBC has at 3.16 and the Qatari run Al Jazeera has 4.06 million which isn't surprising because that Arabic is Al Jazeera's primary language And while the number of subscribers is important, we also looked at how many times these subscribers have actually watched the videos So the 220,000 Subscribers for Al Jazeera has about 190 million views France 24 Has 0.31 billion BBC has a little bit less than one billion views and Al Jazeera has 1.42 billion And yet to the tune of 90 million views RT beats out all of them at 1.43 billion and I'm pretty sure that Arabic is not a language that the Russians speak Where at least a lot of Russians speak? Right and so moving from YouTube To Reddit we looked at the amount of disinformation that was spread by the Russians For the most recent EU parliamentary elections in May of this year So the Russians put out almost about a thousand posts from 111 domains Which generated a little bit less than 50,000 more upvotes than downvotes and about 2800 comments And so and just to show the diversity of their operations We also decided to look at the to look at the domestic Domestic mass broadcasting Landscape in Russia and so this is by audience shares in Russia in 2019 of the top 15 channels 11 belong to the Kremlin Out of the remaining four to Have very close ties To the Kremlin as they are actually owned by the alleged personal banker to Putin Right and so I almost we're we strive to compile every single online media property of the Russian Federation across all social media platforms and news to really try to understand their narratives Sentiment as well as their overarching strategies But it's not just Russia that weaponizes the online formation environment There are many other state and non-state actors that do the same thing and we also want to track what they're doing online And once we have that very comprehensive data set of overt information operations data We we want to combine that with the covert size so looking at botnets and sock puppets Etc. So that we can have a full understanding of what they're trying to do and The step after that is to combine information operation strategies and capabilities with those of cyber security in The Russian military cyber activities fall under the overarching Umbrella information operations command so that their strategies are all aligned and we need to do the same thing it can be tempting to assume that Western values are Universal and that our understanding of media as the fourth estate as the Organizations that keep the government in line is how the press works everywhere in the world But to assume that with Russian media is to ignore what both Russian leadership and the ownership of these media Organizations are telling not only their staff, but the public According to Putin there should be patriotically minded people at the head of state information resources People who uphold the interests of the Russian Federation and keep in mind that accounts for about three quarters of all media in Russia According to the head of RIA Novosti the umbrella group that owns the RT and tasks the Russian Newswire service We are supported by the presidential administration and by the government You know there is freedom of speech in our country, but the period of impartial journalism is over objectivity is a myth or We can listen to Alexey Volin the deputy the deputy minister of communications who told a graduating class of journalists at Moscow State University a Journalist must firmly remember that he has no task to make the world better to bring the light of true teaching or to lead Humanity on the right path To put this as succinctly as possible We'll turn to the son of one of the most prominent Soviet journalists who today is the minister of defense of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu Who has said the media is a branch of the armed forces? What this mindset and its full realization can accomplish? I can't explain any better than the head of the Russian Federation can so I'm going to turn it over to him to close this out Thank you. Do we have time for questions? Okay, cool. I think So we have time for one or two questions Yeah, so the the question is how did we identify what posts in our reddit analysis were actually Russian disinformation so we relied on the EU's database EU versus info where they on every day update disinformation coming from Russia. It's manually recorded by Expert analysts so links to those sites are what we counted as Russian disinformation on reddit Okay. Yeah, please meet us outside if you guys have any further questions. Thank you. Thank you so much