All right, thank you, Gary. As Gary said, I'm Ashton Bulleen. I've been teaching at Auburn High School for the last five years. Previous to that I taught at Conestoga High School and previous to that I taught at Omaha Bryan High School where I started the first Urban Ag and Natural Resources Academy. That's where I kind of started to become interested more in sustainable practices, being in an urban location in Omaha and having students that didn't have a typical agricultural background and trying to figure out ways that I could get those students excited about agriculture. So I carried that passion with me through at Conestoga where we had a school farm and now when we started at Auburn, it's a little bit more obviously rural than Omaha but I still have a lot of students that don't come from a farming background or don't come from an agricultural background and so figuring out ways to get them excited about it. So I'll start off telling you a little bit about my agricultural education program so you can understand how everything fits together. Two years ago we got a grant from the Nebraska Environmental Trust in the Nima Hot Natural Resources District to put up a greenhouse. So this picture up here of our greenhouse. With our greenhouse we have rain collection barrels as well and we have tower gardens. So those are the aeroponic tower gardens located in this picture here. We have three of those. We have one in my classroom, one in our media center and one that we took down to our elementary so my students go down to the elementary and teach the students there about the plants and they keep it in their media center as well. We just wrote a grant to get another tower garden and that'll go in a daycare. We have an aquaponics system in my classroom. I don't have a picture of that. We worked with whispering roots to put in an aquaponics system with tilapia and then here we have a native landscape that we worked with green and Nebraska towns to install all native pollinator friendly plants there. Then that's the inside of our greenhouse as well. We have these hydro tables. We have electronic leaf to talk about water evaporation and controlling the amount of water that we give our plants so we're not over watering or under watering. And then these tables all have a basin that fill from underneath so we can talk about the importance of putting the water on the roots rather than the water on top of the plants and it recycles through the system as well. So to complete kind of that process we wrote a grant to get these garden towers and it's kind of confusing because there's a difference between tower gardens and garden towers. Tower gardens are the ones that are all hydroponics. These have soil in them so these are through the garden tower project. So we started looking at these. It's a nice vertical farming system so a lot of times with my students I try to talk about the need to grow up rather than out especially as a lot of them don't live on farms. They live in town or in apartments. And we talk about how we're losing more and more land turbine development every day that these are a way that we can grow up instead of taking up more space. They're nice because they recycle water and nutrients. The water all filters down into the space in here and we can get nutrients there. It utilizes kitchen scraps in this tube through the middle. There's a tube that opens up, the cap opens up and you put your kitchen scraps into there so we started working with our school cafeteria on that. It's nice that it's mobile and has the ability to rotate so if you were to put it, our greenhouse is nice because there's sun from all sides but if you were to put it on like a porch or like a apartment you could still rotate it to get sunlight. So the way these work is ideally you should put worms inside the tube by composting worms and you have kitchen scraps, the worms compost the kitchen scraps, push out a lot of the nutrients to the plants but then we also can catch the nutrient tea down in this bottom and pull out the drawer and put it back into the system as well. So it's about seven to nine cubic feet of soil is what you need and there's kind of about one third, one third and one third is ideal for this type of system. Obviously light, the nicest that it does rotate to provide lighting on all sides. Obviously need to water it but it's good because we can recycle the water and leachate out through the drawer at the bottom and then seeds. This comes with the companion seed planting guide to talk about where you should put plants and what grows best as well. The composting system on these towers.  This is the tube that I was talking about and here's where all the soil is. This is another picture of that tube that has holes that the worms can move in and out depending on the type of environment they're in. You'd need approximately 250 to 500 ridwigglers or 25 to 50 earthworms depending on how many you want. It can really be pretty flexible and about one to two handfuls of food scraps every day. So kind of nice that we're teaching, I was also able to teach my students about food waste and the amount of food that we waste in our cafeteria every day and how we can utilize that to help compost to grow our plants. When I was writing the grant we had to think about how this would meet the three pillars of sustainability. So the first one is economically viable. The primary cost of the project is the actual farm tower. So the cost associated with this project would be minimal after the grant. There wasn't going to be a lot of money we were gonna have to use after the grant was originally funded. We can tell the produce at the farmer's market or to teachers to cover the cost of the seeds and the seedlings and the nutrients will come from the food scraps. So that was good, we didn't need to buy any extra fertilizer with it. Part of this stayed true. We did not end up selling any of the produce. We didn't have to cover the cost of the seeds and the seedlings. We were able to get Orschlands in Auburn. They had a bunch of the seeds at the end of the year and the seeds that they don't sell they give to us now.  Obviously as seeds get old the viability isn't as good. You don't have as great germination rates but they still work great for our greenhouse and that actually works out better because then I can talk to my students about viability and I've seed packets from 2015, 16, 17 and 18 and so we've done germination tests to see that as well. So it ends up, didn't work great but it ends up being a good learning tool for my students. They're ecological sound. The system will be self-contained so it doesn't harm the land air and water. It actually can serve soil and the land by using less land because they can grow up rather than out. I wouldn't have space in my greenhouse if I had to grow all of these plants growing outward. Erosion is nice because we can keep all that soil. We can, any soil that falls out we can just put right back and we have them in the greenhouse so we don't have to worry about wind erosion as well. In the summer we move them out but we can kind of block that as well. And the system has less water loss due to evaporation. The waters are cycled through the system which is good. And then finally it's socially responsible. We can use this to teach students about growing their own food which will increase the local food movement and some of the produce will also be donated to students in need in our community. We need to donate in most of the produce either to our school cafeteria or to students in need. So our goals for this project, first of all to practice problem solving and critical thinking skills as they construct the pieces of the farm tower. So that's something that students today don't always have the skills to work hands on and to problem solve. These towers come in a box just in pieces and I didn't guide my students through learning how to set these up. I said, here's the stuff. Divided them in a group, gave them each a tower and they constructed the five towers on their own. It took a little bit of time but I think that that's an important skill that we're teaching students today. Students were in charge of selecting plants that can be grown with the farm tower without pollination or by hand pollination. So this is a good one to just talk about pollination with my students. Right away we got these, I think it was probably in February when we got the towers last year. And they're like, oh, let's plant tomatoes and let's plant strawberries and let's plant peppers knowing that these were gonna be in our greenhouse. And so at that point it gave me a good opportunity to talk to my students about the importance of pollination and how we can't really pollinate because we don't have any of the bees or the pollinators in our greenhouse. So we either had to hand pollinate or find plants that didn't need pollinated. We can learn about vermiculture and the benefits organic matter. So I gave it a good opportunity to talk about the benefits having the food waste in our system. We could observe how worms play a role in the tillage of the soil without high intensive tillage operations and the benefits of earthworms and composting worms. We learned about raising worms and composting food scraps from the cafeteria where I said that we could learn about the food waste that we experience in our cafeteria and what we could do to help that. We planted seedlings and transplanted seedlings. So just learning the basics of planting seedlings, which to some of us we might think that that seems second nature of how to plant a seed. But I've had many kids where we didn't have plants growing and we couldn't figure out why and I watched them plant and it might say plant the seed of an eighth of an inch deep and they were just sticking their whole finger in the soil, putting the seed and covering up. That's something that seems second nature to some of us, but it's not to students. And so even that is just a small learning goal that we had. Students were able to learn to monitor plants for disease pests and deficiencies and then simply learn how to harvest crops. It was really cool for my students to see that you didn't have to pull the whole lettuce plant out of the tower that we could just cut it off and it would regrow itself. That was something that they had never seen before either. You can see in this picture, this is kind of neat because we had some people come to our greenhouse sale in our greenhouse. We also sell other bedding plants, flowers, vegetable crops to the community and you can see one of my students squatted down helping the student, just a kid that came with his mom to the greenhouse sale. He wanted to plant in the tower so my student got to work with him for that was pretty cool. As far as budgeting goes, each of their towers were about $350 and then we had worm, soil, water, ziplock bags to store the produce and rubbery containers and seeds. Our timeline was, we got him, so yeah, it said March, the farm towers we ordered seedlings we started in the greenhouse so our farm tower can begin growing produce as soon as possible. In April, we wanted to have our towers planted lettuce, spinach, kale and other greens is what we started with just so we didn't have to deal with trying to figure out hand pollination right away and those were pretty easy to grow things. Those spinach didn't grow great but we had lettuce, kale, arugula, things like that growing great. Then around May, we wanted to start harvesting the greens in the middle of May. Soon as we were able to sample the first set of lettuce, spinach, kale and other greens produced and the remainder was donated to the school cafeteria, our families in need. This was a cool part of our project. I had kids that said, I don't eat lettuce, I don't eat vegetables, I don't eat green things, they had all the excuses in the book as to why they didn't want to try it but as soon as they tried I actually had a student say, oh, this actually isn't so bad and we had the opportunity to talk to them about how good produce tastes when you grow it yourself, when you have that pride in the produce. And then we were able to donate a lot of it to our school cafeteria and the families in need. We wanted to donate through the backpack program but the backpack program does not allow fresh produce to be in the backpacks so we kind of had to find some of the students kind of on our own. I would just ask students if they wanted to take home some lettuce and that's kind of how we got around that. And then in summer we wanted to continue to grow throughout the summer, donate to families in need. We could also sell it to teachers or it's for the farmer's market so we haven't taken any to the farmer's market but we have sold just to teachers in our building. They've done a free will donation if they take any of the lettuce home so that works out really good as well and then give it to the students who are tending to the tower gardens. In terms of promotion and outreach which is a big part of the SARE grants making sure that the message of sustainable agriculture can be transferred to other populations and other people. So we had several news articles that my students wrote and put into our local newspaper. Our local newspaper is really great at wanting to promote students and any of the work the students are doing so they published a lot of our articles that we wrote. We have a Facebook and a Twitter account so we try to get interest for our program through using our social media outlets. Taking things to the home and garden show is also a great way. We plan to take us to the home and garden show and that didn't quite work out in our schedules that first year. And then for sure as flyers and posters I had some students make posters on sustainable agriculture and they could use our towers as the basis for those posters. We did some class debates so I had students debate over the garden towers, tower gardens, conventionally produced food, our aquaponics system so they researched it and really had a debate which was good because it got them thinking about the system and which one they thought would be best for our program. And then I also was able to use this for curriculum and lessons as well. As I said in our goals talking about simply planting, talking about pollination, talking about soil, soil structure and how we can use worms to go to no-till which is nice. We had several success stories through our program so first the garden tower served as a special horticulture project for Jacob Cook, one of my students. He was a student who came into my program with a little agricultural background but he soon realized that he was really interested in plants and unfortunately he took plant science and horticulture before we got our greenhouse so his plant science and horticulture class was primarily in my classroom. He didn't have a lot of that hands-on experience so when we got our greenhouse he came to me and said, Mrs. Bolline I'm so sad I didn't get to take horticulture when we had the greenhouse and so with a lot of persuasion we convinced our guidance counselor to let him take horticulture again and so in that horticulture class we made the tower gardens his special interest project and he did a lot of work. He did some experiments with them. He was in charge of basically the groups and what they were going to be planting and so it was kind of a really unique project for him and that was good because Jacob is now a student studying horticulture at SDSU and so it really gave him some like an individual project for him where he could kind of explore his interests. Being able to say I ordered 3,000 worms on the internet today really raised some student interest. If you said that in the hallway the kids all wanted to know why you had worms in your room that was really an interest point for a lot of my students. When they found out I had 3,000 worms in my room and 3,000 worms actually doesn't take up a whole lot of space but they thought that was pretty cool. Kids that even weren't in my ag classes wanted to know where the worms were and what we were doing with them and I had a lot of boys that wanted to know can they buy it for fishing bait? So that was really fun and kind of a success story of it. Is it piques student interest because then we could use that to start to talk about why we bought these tower gardens and what they can teach us about sustainability. Students learn to be innovative in experiments so here again I have a picture of the students putting together the towers and they worked in partners and each pair got a tower to put together and so the students had to learn how things go together. Can we do this without reading the instructions or do we need to read the instructions? What kind of tools do we need? And so I thought that was really interesting to see the students work hands on and try to problem solve. You know, they're trying to look at each other trying to see what the other group was doing and I thought that was really exciting and then also just innovating when it's coming to planting. I let the students choose the plants. They chose where to plant them. They wanted to start them directly in the tower or if they wanted to start them as a seed separately. And I think today we don't let kids play enough and this was a good opportunity to let them play around and really have some interest in it. They're aesthetically pleasing. They just look nice. We can put out, we can roll them outside our greenhouse when it's nice out and that's again kind of gets people looking like, oh, what are those? And it gives us a good conversation to start. We had several visitors get to experience our towers and learn about sustainable agriculture so that was also neat. Since our students had some stake in it since they were the ones in charge of it they had their tower that they were growing and they wanted to make sure theirs was growing better than everyone else's. They liked to talk about them. We had the National Watershed Coalition come. We had National Association for Conservation Agencies come. The Neemah County leadership classes visited and we had seventh grade science classes come and visit when they were learning about growing plants. So it was a neat opportunity and gives us a really physical thing for kids to talk about. We can talk about sustainable agriculture all we want to students but until they can see something it doesn't really hit home with them and so this was a really good opportunity there. Although we had a lot of successes we had a lot of challenges too and we're still kind of going through some of those challenges. So we struggled keeping the worms alive a lot. We've ordered three different batches of worms now. The first ones we got, so this is Jacob in this picture and he just took control. I said Jacob we're getting these worms to figure out what we need to do. Well when it said to put soil in the bins we were keeping them in some rubber made totes until our towers were ready. He just grabbed some top soil from the greenhouse and that doesn't hold water very well and so our worms were constantly drying out so we lost that batch of worms. So then I ordered a second batch of worms and the second batch of worms came and we opened it up and they were in a frozen ball like it was ice frozen. So they were already doomed and I called the company and they said oh we'll send you out some more real quick and I was like well we should probably wait until it's warmer in Nebraska and so that batch was already doomed. We got a third batch. Things have been going really great. They stayed alive. When we got them we were just gonna put them into the towers in January and I went on maternity leave and I thought my middle school kids had it. They were, I thought they were doing good. They stayed alive for a while but they started whenever they put moisture on the worms they just sprayed the top of the worms and didn't actually get all the way through the soil. They just did it until it looked wet on top. Worms need a lot of moisture. They will dry out really fast. When they start to dry out they will crawl out of the bin and so I went in one weekend and there were 3,000 worms we ordered. I don't know how many were dry on my floor in my classroom everywhere. So again that's a good learning opportunity for students to talk about responsibility, talk about following instructions, talk about doing our research. So we're gonna order our fourth batch of worms here soon and hopefully maybe we'll keep this batch alive. They've progressively lived longer so that's good. He must compost the right foods. We learned about which foods you can compost. Again, Jacob I let just take control. I really like my students to experience the positives and the failures. I think that that's important. And so I let Jacob take this project and this was his and he went to cafeteria said I need whatever food you're gonna throw away can I have it. I just let Jacob take it. I didn't worry too much about it and I went into the greenhouse probably a couple days later and it smelled so bad. And Jacob had got all of the broccoli and cauliflower from the cafeteria and put it in a rubber made tote and put the lid on it in the 90 something degree greenhouse. It smelled terrible. But it was a good opportunity again to talk about what foods we can compost, what foods we can't. Talking about we don't put meat in them, we don't put dairy in them. We're not going to put broccoli and cauliflower in a closed container in 90 degree heat. Wait a few days. That we dumped outside and it still smelled outside. So that's pretty good. But we got, it was a good talking point again. We did have some gnats. Again, that's related to composting the right foods and the right amount of foods. Making sure that you have the right amount of foods that your worms can eat and get through all of that. We did have our center compost columns collapse a few times so the center of them it's just plastic and they're not really held together. So they did kind of collapse, which isn't a huge deal. I talked with the tower garden people. They have a support group on Facebook too. And they said, well, that's not a big deal. Like worms can usually get to where they want to be where they need to be. But this is also a good problem to have because my students the second time, this is our second time putting the towers back together. We took them all out and cleaned them out. Now they're figuring out ways that we can try to make that column more sturdy using wire and things to hold it a little bit more sturdy. We're still trying to figure out the best watering method as well, which is again a good experience. I had, we still don't know where this stuff came from but some watering systems appeared in our greenhouse over the summer. Somebody must have dropped off some totes that we needed some watering system. And that's really cool because my students are learning to put that together. They're watering halos that connect eventually to the host system. And so they're working on putting that together and seeing if a tower with that system is going to be better than our system where we just water with a hose. And the nice thing about that, a lot of times to me are gonna start using just our rainwater instead of the hose and filling buckets from our rainwater system and putting them into the towers. As far as future plans, towers will be reconstructed by February. We have one more tower to put together. I have just a small group of students working on that while some other students work on other things in the greenhouse. And we're dividing them into teams to research and develop a management plan for the greenhouse. So the students have five towers. There'll be about two to three students on each tower. I'm gonna divide those and they're going to figure out a method for collecting the brown. So the cardboard, the grass clippings, things like that that the worms need for their carbon. Method for collecting greens and the list of appropriate food scraps. So how are we going to collect those? Are we gonna ask individual students at lunch to say whatever they're gonna throw away? Are we gonna ask the cafeteria? Are students gonna bring stuff from home? And then again, what would be appropriate? Probably not broccoli, probably not cauliflower. It's a good opportunity to talk about how a lot of fruits will increase your fruit fly population and gnats in your tower as well. The students will have a worm feeding schedule and a management plan. So rather than putting off 3,000 worms and a couple totes, we're gonna divide them. You're in charge of your worms. You're in charge of your worms. You're in charge of your worms. So that hopefully students can take some more stake in this project and realize that they're keeping, you know, they're in charge of these worms. Are you gonna be able to keep it alive? Cause this group over here is, their worms are doing great. How can you compete with that? Then a planting map and a schedule. Students will pick which plants they want to grow, when they want to plant them, when approximately we're gonna be harvesting. And then as well as a watering schedule since that was one of the problems we've had is figuring out the watering schedule. We were either over watering and growing. We were getting a yellow fungus to grow or we were under watering and everything was drying out. So figuring out what the best way to water is. And then students will hopefully be able to utilize the towers from the Nebraska Agri Science Fair. There's a Agri Science Fair held every year in April at In Lincoln with our State of Faye Convention. So hopefully once we get these towers going, students will be able to complete experiments on them for the following school year. And then science classes, we will learn about the towers on visits to the greenhouse. So we're working on trying to get the science classes at Auburn to utilize the towers, the greenhouse, the aquaponics, the rain barrels as well. We've had a few things that have come in from the science classes, but hoping to let those students also experience it. Not every student can take an agriculture class. At Auburn, if you're in choir and band, it's really difficult to be enrolled in an agriculture class. So hopefully by encouraging the science classes to get involved, we can also get those students involved and interested in sustainable agriculture and what we can be doing even if you don't live on a farm. The next session kind of goes into grant writing. And so I wanted to talk a little bit about our grant writing process and some things that I have been able to learn through grant writing. All of the things we went through at the very beginning were grant funded, either from grants written by me, grants written by my administration, our curriculum director, our superintendent. So in terms of grant writing process, it's important to read the entire grant and the study of product fits the grant and the goals of the grant. So it's a lot easier if you're looking for grants and you're thinking what do I need that would fit the goal. For me, I keep a list of things as I go to conferences, as I go to conventions that I think are really neat and really cool. And I just keep a list of those all the time. I have an Excel document. I just write down things that if I ever have an unlimited budget, these are the things that I want for my agricultural program. Then as I come across grants, Gary's been really helpful with that because he works in our county and so he's been able to really remind me of when these grants are due, grants that are upcoming, and how any projects that I have could fit the goal of that grant. Create a detailed budget. I think that this is really important. I've helped other ag teachers write grants and a lot of times they just say, well I want $2,000 to have a sustainable ag project. You need to be consistent about what you're going to do in very detailed about what your budget's going to be. You could see in the budget that I put on the screen earlier, I had a budget for Ziploc bags so that we had somewhere to put the lettuce once they was grown so we could send it home with the students. I had a budget for seeds. I had a budget for, you know, I included the shipping cost. The more detailed your budget can be, the grant committee is going to look at that and think, okay, they actually do have a plan for where this money is going and it's not going to be wasted. Include quantities, amounts, tax shipping, as I said. Consult with an expert or the company. One of the tower garden people, they really helped me come, or sorry, it says for garden towers. The garden tower people helped me come up with a budget as well. And I said, this is what I want. I want five of these towers. What other things do I need? Can you help me come up with that budget? Utilize all of the funds. It's important that you're going to utilize the funds that are given and that grant committee knows exactly what's going to be purchased with those funds. Make sure you create smart goals. So you have quantities, amounts, tax, shipping, things like that. You're consulting with the company again. What are some goals that I could have? An example of this, we had a really lofty goal of producing a lot of tomatoes, cucumbers, things like that. Well, not realizing how difficult a hand pollination a cucumber was. If anybody's really good at that, I'd love to hear about it because it took us forever to try to get any cucumbers to be pollinated. And so our goal in the grant was to produce X number of pounds of vegetables. And we learned very quickly that we couldn't produce cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, things like that. And our lettuce and kale didn't weigh as much. So we didn't get to that goal, but we had a goal in mind at least. And then utilize your funds for those goals. And sure that the project or outreach is or a continuation plan. This is a good example. My husband also applied for a SAIR grant one year. The same year I applied for one. His was on the farmer side. Mine was on the educator side. And then we found out that I got a grant and my husband's grant got denied. I thought that was pretty funny, but gonna find out. He didn't write anything in the grant about project outreach, project continuation. How is he going to tell people about the things he learned through this grant? And that's a really important thing. Whether you're writing a grant for SAIR or writing a grant for another company, letting that grant company or committee know these are the ways that you're going to get your ideas out. My husband's not the kind of guy that wants to go to conventions and talk or really talk to many people at all. He doesn't want to write news articles. He doesn't want to post it on social media. He just wants to do his farming and be done with it. Well, again, I told him, I said, if you would have said, how are you going to tell people about this? Have a field day at your house? Probably have a better chance of getting it. So some things to do that. Writing news articles or journal articles. Any social media that you can get it. So if your farm has a social media page, talking about this was funded through this grant is always helpful. Public events. So we wanted to go to the Home and Garden Show. That didn't end up working, but we did host the people from the Watershed Coalition and the Conservation Agency. Those are really helpful. So if you have like a Home and Garden Show in your area or a conference that you can be at, that's going to be beneficial. And then brochures, flyers, posters. That was something that I, it's nice for me because I have the opportunity to have, you know, I have 13 kids in horticulture right now. 13 kids in horticulture. Your job is to create these because then they're learning through that.  But it is a good opportunity to not only get your business name out, but to get out the grant funding committee is really nice to do some promotion on their behalf as well. And then always creating the curriculum or lessons. So we did some lessons on vermiculture and raising worms. And I could do that with not only my horticulture kids, but my eighth grade agriculture kids as well, which is beneficial. So as producers, any curriculum or any lessons that you can do is going to be really beneficial, not only to the grant committee that oversees that, but also to teachers. Speaking for a teacher myself, I am always wanting guest speakers or farm tours. So if you have a grant and you can get an agriculture class to come out to your farm to tour it or get a science class to come out and tour it, I know that a lot of teachers would be more than happy to be able to come out and see the things on your farm as well. So that's a great way to get that project outreach. I think June said about two 10 and I think I'm right on spot. So if you guys have any questions, I'd be happy to answer those questions as well. Okay, so the question was, do teachers at Auburn get any like benefits from writing grants? And I haven't seen any of those benefits, I guess. It kind of started, my grant writing frenzy kind of started when Auburn got a revision grant, which is our grant through the Nebraska Department of Education to start an agriculture program. So my salary was grant funded my first year. So that's how they were able to justify starting an agriculture education program. They had one in the 70s, I believe, and it just kind of faded away. But I do think that that is a really great idea because I started writing grants and it kind of got to be contagious. I was really excited for all the things that I was getting from my classroom. But there was a time when I had to take a step back and stop because you think that all the work is upfront. When actually the grant, writing the grant is actually not that hard. It's all of the follow up paperwork and things that you have to do to follow up, making sure you're sending in your receipts, especially if you're through a school because we have to go through another accountant to order everything. And so it's not just me, I get sent the grant check and then I just order stuff on my credit card and I get reimbursed there. It all goes through another system. And so if you have a local school where you have a say, I think that that is a great idea to encourage teachers because it's quite a bit of time that I spend doing the paperwork and all the reporting from those grants. From this grant. Yeah, this was a $2,000 grant. What have you noticed for a difference in the kids after the project? So I think there's been several outcomes. First of all, my students have been a lot more aware of where their food comes from. And it's really cool to see our cafeteria, just buys a lot of our produce from the food, from Cisco, things like that. And the kids at school don't want to eat the salad bar. But when we put our produce on a salad bar, we try to put out a sign that says produced in the Auburn High School greenhouse. And kids are a lot more apt to eat it because they're like, oh, that was the greens that we were growing on the greenhouse. Where I got to water those one day. And so we see a lot of kids becoming more interested in where their food comes from and wanting to eat the food that they grew. And I think that's really the biggest outcome we've had is the kids now knowing what process goes into growing their food and being more interested in eating the food that they produced. I think there's a couple of things I think our greenhouse is too hot when we were trying to plant it because it would bolt right away and go to seed. Our seeds are also pretty old. And so we just didn't really have very great germination rates. And the seeds that we got from Orson's came through a student who kept them at his house for a while. And so I don't think he probably kept them in the best environment either. I bought a lot of purple crops. Like some purple lettuce, purple carrots, some purple radishes. No, not at all. But it gets kids excited when they see purple lettuce. They think that's pretty cool. We planted some purple basil. So I just, I try to plant really weird, unique things to get students excited and wondering why is there purple lettuce on the cafeteria.


I think that we are desperately in need of good news in the world today. And this week, from the World Intellectual Property Organization, we do have some good news. A new treaty, the Marrakesh Treaty, to facilitate access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled is coming into force because the 20th country has ratified this Marrakesh Treaty. What does the Marrakesh Treaty do? It seeks to cure what's known as the Book Femin, that is the absence or dearth of works that are available in accessible formats like Braille for blind persons and other visually impaired persons. And it does so by creating a universal exception around the world to copyright, to enable appropriate institutions such as libraries and blind institutions to create an accessible format of the work without regard to the copyright. The second thing it does is it enables those accessible formats to travel around the world. So that a blind person, for example in Zambia, would be able to take advantage of an accessible format of a work that is available in the United Kingdom. So 20 countries, 20 states were required to bring the treaty which was concluded three years ago into force and that has happened this week with the accessions to the Treaty of Ecuador, Guatemala and Canada. We now need many more countries to join this treaty so as to create a world in which blind persons truly have the opportunity to participate in literacy in the same way that seeing persons do.


After Locofocos, or early libertarians in New York, clamored together to agitate for a new state constitution that would democratize the process of incorporating businesses, American economic history entered a revolutionary phase. For Locofocos, it was a blindingly bright accomplishment. But in hindsight, it was yet another troublesome compromise. By now, corporations are so commonplace, so ubiquitous, and considered so necessary, that we barely stop to ask whether it's ever been justifiable in the first place. Well, here to help me tackle one of the great relatively forgotten questions in libertarian history is Gary Chardier. He has a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge, he teaches law and business ethics at California's La Sierra University, and he's been one of the country's leading left libertarian thinkers for some time now. Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. So I think you have a particularly interesting sort of personal history of intellectual influence and change over time. Could you, Gary Chardier, give us your how I became a libertarian story? You know, I think like a lot of libertarians of my age, I'm 51, I grew up with Gold Right parents, I programmed computers, I read science fiction, and I was socially awkward. So it was a really, it was in some ways a pretty natural progression. I found myself radicalizing the views that my parents had, moving from their position, which was in many ways pretty conventionally conservative Republican, with a few interesting exceptions. And so I ended up embracing libertarian views by the time I was, say, 14 or 15, 14 probably. And I had kind of started down the path toward being a fairly radical libertarian. And then I got, as it were, sidetracked in college, as I think probably happens to a lot of people. I encountered issues in college that I hadn't really thought about sufficiently, issues having to do with poverty and social inequity of various kinds. And that sent me down a detour in the direction of what was in many respects probably fairly conventional social democratic politics of the kind you might associate with a lot of people in academia. But really I think largely re-radicalized me was the one-to-punch of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, two amazing guys who showed me just how awful the state could be in different ways and their support for the warfare state, their commitment to corporate privilege, and so forth. These things really prompted a great deal of cynicism on my part and led me ultimately to discover the work of libertarians like Roderick Long and Kevin Carson. And as a result to discover that there was a way in which my early commitment to libertarianism could be reinvigorated in tandem with a, I think, much richer and more thoughtful responsiveness to a range of social problems. And so I could come home, and yet of course not just come home, but come home now to astrand libertarianism that I had been at best pretty minimally aware of, the modern descendants of Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner and the 19th century individualist anarchists who really, as I discovered, were up to really fascinating things and whose ideas continued to thrive and flourish in the very capable hands of people like Roderick and Kevin and Charles Johnson and Sheldon Richmond and others. So I took a long detour and came home. I think that's the true answer. And you call yourself a left libertarian? I do, at least in context in which that's helpful. If you read the Wikipedia article, left libertarianism, you find that there are at least three different, rather different meanings of that term, including anarcho-communism, the sort of neo-Georgist position that might be associated with Steiner and Valentine and Tzuka, and then the kind of view that we would be inclined to embrace. And so sometimes it's helpful to talk about left libertarianism. Sometimes it's probably more useful to spell things out in more detail. Sometimes I'll use the term left-wing market anarchism, but I think context is everything. What exactly is the left part of that then? What do you see as sort of the leftist element in this kind of libertarianism that you ascribe to, which we'll dig into a little more here soon? Yeah, so that's a great question. Obviously there's no platonic universal that is the left. We find in different contexts quite different meanings associated with that expression, as a lot of libertarians will know, the origins of the left-right distinction seem to have to do with where people sat in parliament, but clearly that's a different world than the one we're in now, I guess the French parliament particularly. So there you might have thought that the basic left-right distinction was one between the friends of the king and the enemies of the king, the friends of freedom and social equality and the opponents and the friends of authority. And there's something to that. I guess when I've tried to spell out what I have in mind in talking about the left, I tend to think of what I regard as the best elements of the new left in the 60s, which obviously had itself a variety of libertarian elements. And so I probably stacked the deck by going in that direction. But I tend to think about opposition to exclusion, subordination, deprivation and war. And obviously that needs to be spelled out in a lot more detail. And obviously there's overlap with a variety of other positions there. But when I think about the left, I'm thinking therefore about probably speaking, a family of positions committed to social inclusion, unhappy with hierarchy in favor, therefore of empowerment and again, very much opposed to violence as a means of solving social problems. I think in today's context, one of the major monkey wrenches in a system like that is the corporation. Now this is an institution that libertarians have been attacking for centuries now, even though we might forget that in today's intellectual paradigm of libertarianism. There really is not much space for a left libertarian critique of the corporation, although it's been around forever for hundreds and hundreds of years. Libertarians have been talking about the problems with corporations. So I asked you here to help me tackle this issue of libertarianism's corporation problem. I remember several years ago when I was a young Austro-libertarian student, I was going to one of the year's more popular education events. And that people on a circuit always are sure to stop here too. And two of my favorite historians were there giving sort of a joint session on, I don't know, something like problems in the 19th century. It was about American history. And I asked them, I was beginning my own honors thesis as an undergrad working on William Leggett, one of these early loco-focos and critics of corporations. And I was curious about why did people like William Leggett and these radical Jacksonians, why did they hate corporations so much? And they thought they were monopolies and all this. I asked them, both of these historians, why did these people hate corporations so much? And they basically shrugged their shoulders. They had no idea. And they said they didn't know what to tell me. And I was hugely disappointed. I walked away from that event thinking these purported experts have overlooked one of the major questions in the history of their own movement. I just could not understand that. So then I spent my time in graduate school trying to answer the question. And I came to the history of loco-focosism. So now I want to ask you, can you briefly tell us what is the issue that historical libertarians or classical liberals, what is their issue against incorporation? I think it's great that you emphasize, that we're talking about a libertarian heritage of criticism of corporate power, quite possibly corporate form, that go back several centuries. I think modern American libertarians often have a kind of historical tunnel of inclusion in virtue of which libertarianism really somehow emerges, I don't know, post-World War II with a split between Murray Rothbard and the folks around Bill Buckley. And clearly there's a much, much richer heritage there. Later libertarianism, because of, I think, some historical accidents associated with the Cold War, has tended to be identified with the right. But the classical liberal libertarian tradition includes a whole lot of anti-status quo politics over many centuries that certainly feels much more left-ish to me. So it's perhaps not altogether surprising that there's been this concern about the corporation. And that's because it seems as if, first of all, the corporation has been a locus of state-secured privilege. The corporation has been a particularly visible example of the business entity or business association that secures and obtains a variety of cartelizing privileges and subsidies and so forth. That's certainly true in particular with regard to the corporate form itself and certainly the associated important feature of limited liability. So there's at least an interesting argument about the degree to which entity status, the idea that the corporation, exists in an important way separately from all those who were involved, whether that could be itself established by contract. But if it could be established by contract, as many libertarians have suggested, there's obviously the problem that what the state's done has been to artificially reduce transaction costs and make it at any rate much easier for people to simply opt into that form rather than to do so perhaps with the negotiation of alternatives on the table as they would if it weren't sort of pre-available in virtue of the general corporation statutes. There's also separately the problem of limited liability, which clearly has been a persistent concern. So we have, of course, two kinds of limited liability. Limited liability in contract and limited liability in tort. And so limited liability in contract, you might think, would be relatively easy to establish by contract. But again, if you did that, you would still have to negotiate. And there still would be alternatives on the table. And those transaction costs would have to be taken into account. Limited liability in tort, of course, is a, and I should say, just to back up for folks who are legal geeks, we talk about limited liability. The idea is that in a lawsuit, whether in contract or tort, the corporation's assets are at stake, but not the assets of the shareholders, the assets of the shareholders that are not themselves, so directly part of the corporation. So obviously this serves as a real incentive for people to invest in a corporation because they know that while they may lose their investment, their own personal assets won't be at stake at any rate. So limited liability in tort clearly is another matter entirely because here, so suppose, for instance, we're talking about a case in which the corporation poisons the groundwater and causes a bunch of people around a manufacturing plant to get cancer. So here we have a situation in which those people don't have, in general, any kind of prior contractual relationship with the corporation. So they can't agree by contract to limit any suits in which they might engage to one's concern just to the assets of the corporation as a whole. So you might think, if the shareholders really are owners, why wouldn't they themselves be in one way or another liable for the debts of the corporation? So if the corporation becomes liable because of, say, this instance where it's polluted the groundwater, why stop the assets of the corporation? So again, there are arguments to be had about that, but the point again is that the law simply solves that problem on behalf of the corporation without allowing for perhaps the kind of flexibility and the kind of potential risk that would have to be sorted out more carefully. So you've got these features of the corporate form itself that I think many libertarians have rightly seen as statused. And then there's just the fact that the corporation, once it exists, quickly becomes a locus, as I say, of state-secured privilege in various ways, and the corporation can become a means of concentrating wealth that then can then be used to, in one way or another, pursue ginnies from a political process. So all of those things, I think, have troubled people over time. Now, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about associationism in America, especially the power of people just simply associating with each other on a voluntary basis in basically clubs whose purpose would be to do a certain thing, like build a school in the town. You know, they would get together and form a town school association that would, you know, have the goal of building a school within a few months. And then they would go ahead and do that. And meanwhile, in Paris, you would have to petition the bureaucrat in charge of education to eventually come to your town out in the countryside and build a school, and it would take years. So de Tocqueville said, well, this American pattern of associationism is really incredibly efficient, and it explains a large part of their democratic culture, it's reflective of their democratic culture, and it helps produce this amazingly prosperous condition that they enjoy. You know, how is the incorporation any different from an association? Is it simply that corporations are associations with, you know, monopolies or privileges attached to them? So what seems clear is that de Tocqueville's cheering for associations can't have been in any straightforward way cheering for corporations, because certainly many, probably almost all of the time he wrote of the American associations that performed these various civic goods obviously weren't incorporated. So clearly incorporation wasn't crucial for that. And the corporate form was certainly apparent in societies like England's, where the same level of associational freedom and associational vitality weren't had. So I think it's pretty important to treat those as distinct. Associations obviously are wonderful, and that's something that any free society is going to depend on the ability of people to form and reform a variety of free associations. But when the association acquires just straightforwardly as a result of state privilege, entity status so that it's no longer just the people involved, but it now has some kind of independent existence, when it can then go on to hold assets and to avoid liabilities in ways that depend on its having that entity status. And that's certainly when it becomes a pressure group in search of long-term privileges. Whether we want to say that makes it a something that's qualitatively different from de Tocqueville's associations, or whether you want to say no, this is really just a special kind of association. I'm not sure much turns on that, but what's clear is that the additions are troubling in a way that the associational form itself is not. I'm wondering why did so many liberal or radical thinkers who were anti-corporate over the centuries, why did they so closely link the idea of monopoly and corporation? I mean, plainly it was possible for smaller people, I suppose, people who were not at the very top of the power elite. It's possible for them to open corporations, especially like you said, in an environment like the US or Britain as time went on in the 19th century. But yet there was still this linkage of the idea of monopoly, like some medieval king granting out monopoly privileges to some special totes of his to go do the mining in this region or to go conquer some territory in America and then you own it all. And the idea of corporation, people pulling their capital toward a particular business venture. Why was there such a strong linkage for so long? So you're the historian and I suspect really could answer the question better than I can, but I have the sense that the fact that for so long the corporation was a special creation of the state made a huge difference here. So of course, first of all, for a very long time, the only entities that were described as corporations were state entities. So the city might qualify, for instance, as a corporation. So then you have kings extending this privilege of special status to favored groups. Well, I think it's unsurprising that these favored groups didn't just want to petition, let's say, for entity status or even for limited liability. They were at the same time getting special monopoly grants. And so I think it would have been quite natural for the king to grant a corporate charter that came with a set of monopoly privileges. And so because of that then, I think it would have been very clear to people over an extended period that when a corporate charter is granted by the royal authorities, this isn't just a kind of innocent inducement to business activity, but it really is intended precisely to confer on the king's cronies a kind of privilege that clearly otherwise would have been available. And so then when you move to general incorporation statutes, obviously, some of that element of cronyism goes away because the charter isn't just handed out on an arbitrary discretionary basis to the king's cronies. But at the same time, people are very much aware that when business people pool their resources in an entity that is separate from themselves and that therefore can give them a certain kind of insulation against poor choices, that in various ways they're going to be incentivized to engage in bad behavior. And they may well engage in utilizing the wealth they've pooled to seek privileges in one way or another in the state. So I think there's certainly been a progression then in the history of the corporation, but it seems to be that the early history set the tone and the fact that that early history was in the backdrop would understandably have made people suspicious. And the continuing mischief-making engaged in by corporations even after general incorporation certainly would have encouraged that kind of suspicion in the part of the public and certainly in the part of the cherry trees. Now, as I've covered on the show before, the triumph of general incorporation state by state, it happened in constitutional conventions and it started really with New York in 1846 and the Loco Foco movement to reform that state. And the corporation process was at the very top of their list and it was one of the things they were most effective in changing. They helped democratize the institution by generalizing who could actually get a corporation set up and how it happened and it extended limited liability to all sorts of different corporate activities and far, far more people than ever before could now incorporate their business. And there's this explosion of new charters in the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s and corporations just are everywhere at that point. It's not just railroads and bridges and steamboat companies and stuff like that. It's all sorts of things becoming incorporated.  They're ubiquitous. They're considered totally necessary, proper. They're rarely questioned as a good thing. And even we libertarians whose history is built on this, we forget that it was ever a question whether these are justifiable institutions in the first place. So I'd like for us to try to tackle some of the critiques of the anti-corporate left libertarian point of view here. Are we just a couple of modern day Luddites here arguing about something that is clearly a benefit? So, no, I think we're not. That's a short answer. It seems to me that given the alternative, the alternative that there would be specially privileged entities created by legislative acts and entitled to really unique legal positions, the push by the Locofocus for general incorporation certainly seems like a breath of fresh air and indeed an instance of, as you say, democratization. I think it's interesting to wonder what the Locofocus might have said had the risk of special incorporation not been on table, what kinds of arrangements they would then have favored if they hadn't had to counter that other possibility. And so while they certainly sought in pressing for the changes they did to level the playing field, clearly a more level playing field would be established in the case in which really the issues would have to be sorted out by contract and by common law court decisions and there wouldn't be any possibility of state intervention. So, yeah, I don't think we're Luddites to think that the general incorporation statutes, even if dramatic improvements on what preceded them, still in one way or another, unnecessarily reduced transaction costs and unnecessarily reduced risks while probably at the same time encouraging wealth concentration in the hands of corporations and thus perpetuating some problems. So, I don't want to at all be dismissive of the positive step that the Locofocus took, but I think we can do better over time.  Maybe take away a company's charter if they host Jordan Peterson or something? You know, that thought hadn't actually occurred to me. I'm just not interested in playing those games. I'm certainly not interested, I think, in any legal arrangement that lets courts or legislatures or executives, that lets any entity, whether in a stateful or a stateless society, just arbitrarily, willy-nilly fiddle with the legal status of individual entities. My preference is that we sunset the corporate form entirely and let people craft arrangements through contract and through argument in courts about where to draw lines, for instance, with regard to shareholder liability that really can be reflective of how things can turn out in the absence of state transaction saving, cost saving measures. I'm wondering, then, how exactly would that work, do you think? Especially in today's climate where there are so many potentially disruptive new technologies out there either underway right now, being developed right now in production and in distribution at the moment, something like the Bitcoin distributed ledger, that's in action and that could dramatically transform the way we do contracts. How do you think some of these things would work? How would people pool their capital together and limit their liabilities for actions taken by a gigantic corporation? Something like Uber that is potentially responsible for all sorts of liability. Why would people invest their money in an operation like that that is untested, charting new waters every day, trying new things? There's so much risk in that. Why do that if you can't use the force of government to protect your investment? It seems to me that if you're thinking about the kind of risky environment that we're in now, it certainly makes sense to ask the question, as courts I think are perfectly capable of doing, am I a passive investor or am I simply pretending to be a passive investor to shield myself from liability when in fact I really am more influential over corporate decisions than I perhaps like to advertise? We know, so again, this is all about the transaction cost issue, I think, we know that a court can, as the expression goes, pierce the corporate veil in particular cases when it does seem as if limited liability and entity status are being used to shield bad actors against liability for their mischief making even now. So it's not as if that's somehow impossible now, it's just that the pre-existing corporate form and corporate protections make that harder. So I think the flip side is certainly true, that you might well expect common law courts to begin with the assumption that truly passive investors in publicly traded corporations really did operate at enough of a distance from corporate decision making that they might not be responsible, not because of any general principle of limited corporate liability, but because their role is really not that of owners despite the language that's often used, I mean really they're not that different, perhaps say for banks lending money to corporations just that they have very good returns and you were going to say something. Well, I wonder about that because that seems to me a little like saying, oh, northerners had nothing to do with slavery, they were just funding the slave trade and sailing the ships and things like that. I'm not so sure that you can be a passive investor in a company. So that's an interesting possibility. I think one can ask the question I guess in the case of the investor, how much control does that investor have? I think it seems to me that's a factual inquiry about the extent of influence that the investor potentially has. And then one can ask the question if the investor has a certain amount of influence, do the investors seek to exercise that influence? And I do think again, unavoidably the courts would find themselves engaged in factual inquiries about that. So how precisely they would draw those lines, I'm not sure, right? I just think that unavoidably courts would find themselves engaged in kind of thinking that probably common law courts did to some degree in the 19th century asking, are we going to stifle productive investment from which we all benefit if we assume that any of all investors who are arms length investors are fully liable? And so maybe you want to respond, no, there are so many bad things that the corporations might do that it really is worth holding the sort of Damocles over the heads of individual investors. You might think, however, in those cases, I can imagine that there would be insurance arrangements that probably would be invoked in one way or another to provide shielding there. I have to stop and think about the economics of such arrangements. But I think the bottom line is a corporation that wanted to attract investment from anonymous members of the general public would, it seems to me, need to provide some kind of security there. You couldn't just assume in advance, I suppose, that a court would rule in a certain way. And so yeah, perhaps in that case, what you need to do would be to say, if you choose to invest here, recognize that the value of your shares is constrained by the fact that we do have to keep paying for this liability insurance for you, if you want to buy in, that's a possibility. And so that might be a certain kind of self-regulating mechanism there. Yeah, I mean, we'd have to talk more about the institutional arrangements, but that's unfundly. Well, now this leads me back to an earlier thread. I'm wondering again then, what happened in the 20th century for libertarians to stop concerning themselves very much with the question of corporations? Is Ayn Rand to blame for making us love and respect business people so much and their great business as entrepreneurs? Or is it really the fault of, I guess, the Cold War, which just sort of automatically identified everything with the smacking of the left with communism and libertarians can't have that, so we're on the right. What really happened here, or is it something maybe more sinister that we also have had our interests, material interests in the corporate form? Yeah, so I think great questions. It seems to me, as I've observed before, it really seems to me that the post-World War II identification of American libertarianism with the corporate sector is an anomaly. It seems pretty clear that there wasn't much enthusiasm for big business on the part of the so-called old right, and certainly not on the part of 19th century and earlier libertarians and classical liberals. It seems to me this is really this anomalous feature of the unstable alliance between the Cold War, Buckley Right, and libertarians like Rothbard and Frank Meyer. I think that political background undoubtedly matters, the sense that somehow the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I think almost always a bad basis for decision making. I think Rand surely has to bear some blame here for telling us that big business is America's persecuted minority. Rand herself at her best certainly knew how to paint pictures of business people who were anything but members of a persecuted minority and certainly not manipulate the system, but by saying things like that she certainly did encourage a kind of moral blindness, I think, on the part of the number of libertarians who came of age in the 50s and 60s with regard to the merits of not only the corporate form in the narrow sense, but the role that the large corporations played in American social political life. Whether there's also on top of that an unwillingness to face some of these problems because of our own economic interests, I mean, look, I think we always have to be aware of those kinds of possibilities. I teach at a university and undoubtedly some money that the university possesses, it possesses because some corporation donated it. I find myself sometimes willing to roll my eyes at criticisms by the status left, let's say of Charles Koch. Is that because I get a tiny grant from the Koch Foundation to run lectures? Maybe. I think we should be aware of that kind of thing, but I think there are all sorts of libertarians who don't have much, if anything, to do with corporate money, and even those who do in one or another receive corporate grants or benefit from corporate marshals are not, I think, is a general matter just unprincipled shields. Of course, you might expect me to say that. But I think it's more this broader cultural thing that really starts after the war and I think does include both the Cold War, right libertarian alliance and certainly the influence of Rand with her vision of corporate titans as heroic and probably the way in which that influenced the self-understanding of immigrant people. A special thanks to Professor Gary Chardier for joining me on the show today to talk about libertarianism's corporation problem. It may be too much to ask that you all come away from this, a bunch of rabid anti-corporate loco-focos, but I hope that it has at least provoked a new and fresh set of serious questions in your minds. The loco-focos were among the first generations who actually had to deal with the corporation problem as it was taking shape. They played a serious role in determining how corporations would look for the next two centuries. But today, we stand in our own swirling era of constant reform. We cannot afford to make the same mistakes they did.