Hey gang, welcome to my channel if you've been here before and if this is your first time here, super glad you stumbled upon my channel. There are videos on this channel that can help heal more than 90% of any health, wellness, or body image challenge. I'm Kelly. I am taking you through a full day of eating today. I am on a gut overhaul, gut cleanse. So today's gonna be a full day of eating based on intuitive eating. For one, I eat intuitively. I did have an eating disorder for about, well, just over a decade. And so I don't track any macros. I don't count any calories. But I do eat with an individualized approach. So I eat according to how my body metabolizes foods. I am an advanced holistic health practitioner, individualized diagnostic nutrition and weight loss specialist, say that five times fast. Anyway, I'm gonna take you through what I eat in a day. So the gut cleanse I'm on right now is also a complete sugar detox. It's for getting rid of all excess water retention, all inflammation also. Everything is anti-inflammatory. So it's just a super, super healthy way of eating. I also make sure that every single main meal of my day has complete proteins, healthy fats and healthy carbs. If you wanna know why, I have linked a couple of videos below where I explain all that in more detail. But basically, your body needs complete protein. It builds all of its cellular structural walls out of complete protein. If you're not getting complete protein, the cell walls are more like plywood, cardboard, easily damaged, easily invaded by free radicals, which is anything that can damage or kill a cell. You also need healthy fats. Healthy fats are so, so important and they cannot make you fat. And especially if your ancestry came from somewhere that had heavy winters, your body is going to thrive on lots of healthy fats and lots of complete protein, which is most of us in North America, I'd say, and also healthy carbs. So your body considers anything that never once came from an animal as a carbohydrate. The word carbohydrate comes from the word carbon. Anything from the earth is a carbohydrate to your body. So all of my main meals will include that.  So if I have a fruit as a snack, I'm gonna have some nuts or some nut butter with that. If I'm gonna have raw veggies as a snack, I'm gonna have some hummus with it and such. So come along with me. Let's get into breakfast. I'll show you what I got. It's my clock AM and I'm gonna have my first snack. Then I will get on to walking. I always go for a walk every day. I go for sometimes two walks. I like to work out a good three times a week. Anyway, that might give you a little background as to why I eat the various things that I do, but intuitive eating is all about listening to your hunger. So you eat when your body needs food. You only eat as much as your body wants to eat and you're able, at this point, after enough history with nutrition and food to tell what your body really is needing. Cravings can be suspicious. Sometimes you'll have a craving and it won't be a craving for what you think it might be like chocolate. Often that's a craving for magnesium and things like that. So anyway, let's get on to this snack. It's unbelievably cold. My eyes watered the entire lunch time. Let's get some lunch going and let me show you a really cool device that I purchased. So this has gotta be the coolest egg making device I have ever seen. It's just got a hot plate there. This is for putting the individual eggs on. This is if you wanna make poached. This is for if you wanna make little mini omelettes. Let me show you how it works. Eggs. I actually got it from Indigo. So I don't know what's that in the U.S., like Barnes & Noble. Indigo is a bookstore of all strange things. It comes with this and on it has lines like hard, medium or soft. Now, I really like a good medium egg and this makes them really soft. So I fill the little cup to the hard line and that's about just over medium if not exactly medium. That I'll show you. And if you haven't heard of this before, steaming your eggs rather than boiling them makes the shells pop right off. I'll show you. So if you have an Instant Pot, that's what I used to use. Use your Instant Pot. Put a cup of water in as many eggs as you want in there. Set the timer manual for a minute till you get perfectly medium eggs and the shells will come right off. But let me show you how to use this. So this is by Dash, Egg Cooker. Oh, they also made a really cute little egg bite maker. If you like the egg bites from Starbucks, look at that. I haven't used this one yet. We're gonna use this. So what you do is, again, I am gonna fill this to the line that says hard there because let me tell you the line that said medium was very soft. So you just pour the water into the hot plate area. Then you take your egg and on the larger end there's a pin in the bottom of this. You poke the egg. And you'd think it would break the whole shell, but it doesn't.  I'm only making two. Flick it on and it makes the eggs. I'm actually gonna time it, I haven't yet. 12.56, so we'll see how long it takes to make these eggs. And in the meantime, I'll prepare the rest of my lunch. This is one of, if not the only bread I've found that is cleanse friendly. It's carb-wise bread. 10 grams of protein for two slices, which is amazing. No sugar, no gluten, nothing artificial. Almond flour, psyllium husk, sea salt, flax seed, flax meal, egg whites, water, pumpkin seeds, grain-free baking powder and distilled vinegar. And it's only 120 calories for two slices. If you go to the Slice of Life website, it'll show you purchase locations. So I'm gonna toast two slices of this. Alternatively, you can use rice cakes in place of bread. Gonna have one of these bad boys. This is Zevia, so it's zero calorie. It's a cola, it's got a little bit of caffeine. No sugar, no artificial sweeteners. It's carbonated water, stubby leaf extract, tartaric acid, natural flavors, caffeine and citric acid. So very, very healthy cola option comes in all kinds of flavors. You don't want any aspartame. Tiny bit of cumin goes on everything because it's a natural fat burner. I really put it in all my meals. Everything but the bagel seasoning. I'm telling you, amazing. You can get it on Amazon. I found this one at home since. Seriously, if you haven't yet, go to home since winners and marshals for your spices if you're in Canada, because you get amazing spices there. I put everything on the avocado underneath the eggs. I just find it to work a little bit better. Eggs are done. So I'm gonna run these under some cold water, stop the cooking process, but still leave them nice and warm. And then I'll put them on my toast. Now I know it's not an A plus for presentation or anything. Delish, very fast, very easy. Oh yeah. And I guess it took about eight minutes. Took up the eggs? Voila. So it's not that great to take a whole whack of supplements in terms of pills and capsules every day. So I get what I can in powder. This is aglutamine. Aglutamine is great for exercise recovery.  It's just awesome. And these are the collagen that I take. So bovine collagen is for everything inside of your body, like organs, tendons, ligaments, joints and to keep your gut healthy. Marine collagen is great for the outside, hair, skin, nails. So I'm gonna use these two. I'm also going to hack a chocolate milk or milkshake out of this by putting some cacao powder in my blender with some ice. Check this out. And you can also use a frother. So this is the frother for my Keurig. It makes hot and cold frost things. It's so good. It's so good. We're gonna use my Breville Boss. Now for blenders, if you're taking any kind of a powder, so protein powder, greens powder, you need to make sure that it's bioavailable in your gut, meaning small enough particles that your gut can properly absorb it. So what you wanna do is get a blender that is equally as powerful, if not more powerful than the Vitamix. I used to burn out blenders all the time, making my own protein bars. My favorite homemade protein bar recipe is linked below. But this blender, it's BPA free, is fantastic. It makes all kinds of good stuff. And especially good for green smoothies, bioavailability of micronutrients. Get you one of these. Paid for itself a million times over. And if you haven't seen my other videos, Disney obsessed picked up these sweet vintage Disney cups at a Foley market. Yes. That's awesome. So good. You can also thicken this by putting avocado or pureed pumpkin in there. Wow. Amazing. I'm gonna try. And because I'm still not totally full, you can't really have cereal on a gut cleanse. There's sugar in every cereal. This is just plain old rice puffs.  I'm also gonna add some of this granola for good measure. This is the healthiest granola I have ever seen. Ever. No sugar. Sunflower seeds, coconut chips, pumpkin seeds, rithritol, cold pressed coconut oil, hazelnuts, pecans, Brazil nuts, cinnamon, vanilla, powder. That's it. I'm still hungry. I don't even know, but I am still hungry. It's probably cause I'm working so much. The most energy sucking thing we can do is think. So anyway, I'm gonna make another snack. I am having some powdered almond butter on rice cakes with a cleanse friendly blueberry jam. Another thing that is rarely heard of. Let me show ya. So there's no sugar added. This is just powdered almonds. So I put it in a little dish. You mix water in with it. That's gonna be our almond butter. Basically it's all of the protein and far less than half the calories, which is not always best cause you get a lot of healthy fats and regular almond butter, but the amount that I eat every day. This is helpful. Healthiest blueberry spread I have ever seen by nature's hollow. This stuff has no sugar added either. The ingredients are just water, xylitol, rithritol, pectin. Just good stuff. Now the best rice cakes that I have found are from Smart Bite. I wrecked the package, so I will put a picture of it on the screen. But these rice cakes are awesome. Keenla's good for you. It's also a complete protein. Ta-da! Dinner's soon. What's up gang? It is about 5.30 and I'm already hungry. So tonight we are going to have a taco bowl. That is on the menu because that is one of the easiest gut-friendly, gluten-free, dairy-free, anti-inflammatory, all of that jazz meals. And I just love them. Let's go. If you haven't got a rice cooker, I highly, highly, highly recommend this. So we're gonna have some basmati. Also cooking your rice in broth is delicious. If you have a good bone broth, veggie broth, whatever, chicken broth, so good. Oh, and you wanna put a little bit of butter in there. I really like earth balance, soy-free, the best dairy-free butter. Healthy fats, right? I've already made a little bit of ground turkey, so I'm just gonna heat that up in a pan. I also make my own taco seasoning at home. I will link the recipe below in the description box. I already shredded up some goat mozzarella. Goat cheese is much easier on our body than dairy and won't cause the same kind of inflammation or water retention. Is it just me or does anyone else really not like the tomato seeds in their dish, like this gunk? Nope, not happening. Easiest way to have jalapenos in your dish, but I have a leftover red pepper that I need to use. Normally I'd use these, but I'm gonna use that red chili today. This way. Now is when I put the cheese in because then the hot rice and the meat melts the cheese. Earth Island is the best brand of dairy-free cheese if you choose that over goat. And now we wait for the good stuff. I forgot to mention you should put crushed up tortilla chips on your taco balls. These are Benitos. I will put a picture right here. Restaurant-style white bean chips. The ingredients of these guys, whole white beans, sunflower oil, rice flour, tapioca starch, and sea salt. That's it. I also love black bean chips, six grams of protein per serving, and it's just black beans, brown rice, safflower, or sunflower oil, and sea salt. Normally you put them on the top, but. Delicious. Pepper. Sea salt. Cumin. Be careful, the salsa that you get does not have added sugar. Normally I like to use Neil Brothers. Here's a picture, but I'm out. I just finished it yesterday, so we're gonna use Tocitos medium, no sugar added. And also, I use this as sour cream as well, because it tastes just like sour cream, any plain yogurt, and it's much better for you. Now I know the presentation isn't great, but I'm telling you, this bad boy is delicious. All right gang, that brings us to the end of the day where dessert happens. It is around 7.30. I really like to eat dessert by 7.30, because then it doesn't impact my sleep, and my body can work on doing all of its assimilation, metabolization, and all of that, rather than digesting. Anyhow, let's get on with dessert, and I will show you what I have. Dessert is very much like breakfast. You'll notice a lot of the same things. We're gonna start by putting the berries in a bowl. Then we're gonna top that with some yogurt, some more Stevia will go in, nutmeg, cumin, cinnamon. We got our walnuts back, pumpkin seeds, unsweetened dark chocolate chips.  I do have a recipe for healthy granola. If you wanna see a video of that, let me know. But let's get on and assemble all of this. I think there's already too much yogurt in that bowl. That brings us to the end of the day. I hope you enjoyed my full day of eating.  If you would like to see more videos like this, please let me know in the comments. Please ask any questions you might have for any Q and A's. And just other video ideas in general. What do you wanna see? So if you thought this video was helpful, informative, or entertaining at all, please give it a thumbs up down there, so that really helps to support the channel. The most support ever though really does come from subscribing and I am so grateful to any and all subscribers. That really is where us YouTubers get our support from for creating all of this content. If you would like notifications of each time I post a new video, please hit that little bell notification icon down there and you will be sent a notification each time I upload. And until next time, have super amounts of fun in your life. Have super amounts of fun eating whatever it is you like to eat for you and I will see you in the next video. Bye.


10 African countries with the best roads. Africa has long been regarded as a laughing stock in terms of infrastructure development, economic performance, and social welfare. This is gradually becoming a thing of the past, as many African countries have aggressively pursued infrastructure development as a means of propelling them to upper-middle income and first-class status. It's an old adage that where a road goes, development follows. African governments have made significant investments in quality roads in order to contribute to long-term development. If the roads are in poor condition, access to essential services, such as medical care and agricultural produce, transportation will be severely hampered. Hello there, you are watching Africa Reloaded. Before we begin this countdown, please like and subscribe to our channel and also tell us about the road situation in your country. 10. Cape Verde Poor in natural resources, prone to drought and with little arable land, the Cape Verde Islands have one reputation for achieving political and economic stability, good infrastructure and development. Driving in Cape Verde is reasonably straightforward. Cape Verde also has advanced infrastructure that have helped improve the quality of roads in the country. Bananas and coffee are the most important export crops. The seas around Cape Verde are rich in many different types of fish, but fishing is done in the traditional way, which is considered more of an art form and is not practiced on a large scale. This country has many good and well-teared farm-to-market roads. 9. Botswana Botswana is another African country with excellent roads on the African continent. It might interest you to know that before independence, Botswana had just 15 kilometers of paved road throughout the whole country. Fast forward two decades later, this nation has some of the best roads in Africa. Botswana's major roads are torred and driving conditions are generally favorable. Botswana's transportation is provided by an extensive internal network of railways, highways and air routes that crisscross the country. Botswana's transportation sector has been critical to economic growth for 23 years since independence. 8. Kenyat Kenyat is not only one of the few African countries with incredible and high-quality roads and advanced road systems, but it is also the second East African country with the best roads today. The network of roads and highways spans 161,452 kilometers. According to the physical planner and the town planning department of the local authority, the common road sizes, road carriageway plus road reserve are 9 meters, 12 meters, 15 meters, 18 meters, 25 meters and 30 meters. 7. Morocco Morocco has one of the best road networks on the African continent. The government has built approximately 1,100 miles of modern roads in the last 20 years, connecting most major cities via toll expressways. In terms of infrastructure, housing and living standards, this country is among the most developed in Africa. Morocco is also one of the best African countries in terms of quality roads and road systems. The roads are excellent and navigation is simple. Morocco has approximately 56,986 kilometers of national, regional and provincial roads. 6. South Africa The condition of South African roads varies greatly. In general, road conditions on national routes and tall highways are comparable to those found in Europe or North America. The garden route is undoubtedly South Africa's most well-known road, offering a unique and picturesque drive. SA, which has the longest road in the country, the N2, covering a distance of over 2,255 kilometers or 1,401 miles, is also one of the African countries with quality and beautiful roads. 5. Mauritius Overall, the Mauritian road system is quite good. Mauritius has two types of roads, highways and side roads. The highway is divided into two sections. One connects the north to the south, from Grand Bay to the airport, and the other connects Terouj to Iban. The Mekhande Route at Maydukab, located between the Whimsical Sea and the endemic forest of the south, has been named one of the world's 10 most beautiful roads by Le Petit Futepe. Mauritius is one of the most developed countries in Africa today, and it also has some of the best and highest quality roads in the continent. 4. Côte d'Ivoire Côte d'Ivoire is ranked fourth on the list of the best roads in Africa by country. The road network in Côte d'Ivoire is considered to be good. This is especially true for all of the country's trunk roads that connect all of the country's regions and major townships. The road network is especially well suited for long-distance transport. Intercity travel is comfortable and reliable, with daily routes connecting neighboring West African capitals. There are several bus lines that run through Abidjan, and while they are inexpensive, they can quickly become crowded, making taxes the more logical choice for visitors. Ivory Coast's road network spans 85,000 km, with 75,000 km unpaved, 65,000 km paved, and 224 km highways. Rwanda is also one of the top countries on the continent for having high-quality roads that benefit both passengers and drivers, including cars driven on Rwandan roads. Paved roads connect the capital, Kigali, to the majority of the country's major cities and towns. Rwanda is also connected by road to other African Great Lakes countries, through which the majority of the country's imports and exports are made. The main roads in Rwanda are in good condition, but many side roads are only passable with four-wheel-drive vehicles during the rainy season. Rwanda has 12,000 km of road, and 1,000 km, 620 miles, of which are paved. The rest are dirt roads of varying quality. Two, Egypt. Egypt is the second-best African country in terms of quality road network and road system. It is one of the few African countries with world-class roads. Because of national projects, Egypt's road quality rose from 118th to 28th in the world. Egypt has a 65,050 km road network, of which 48,000 km paved, and 17,050 km unpaved. Egypt has constructed a highway network that spans the country and extends for approximately 18,000 km. Cairo and Alex are linked by two highways. Other roads link Cairo to Port Said, Suze, and El Fayo. Highways total 18,000 km in length. One, Namibia. Namibia has been named the African country with the best road quality for the fifth time in a row, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report Index on road infrastructure quality. Namibia was ranked 5.2 out of 7, beating out South Africa and Rwanda, both of which were ranked 5.0. Namibia is ranked 23rd in the world higher than some advanced countries such as China, India, and Italy. Windhoek, the best road in Namibia, is the flyover. Namibia's roads are free of potholes and cut across the country. Even unpaved roads are smooth. Thanks for watching to the end. Before we end, we would like to find out how the roads in your country are. Tell us in the comments section if they are better than the ones we have mentioned in this video. Remember to like, share, and subscribe to Africa Reloaded for more educated and exciting content.


In LibreOffice 5.1, Impress includes some great new features to help you make better presentations. For instance, you can now equalise the widths and heights of multiple objects. Just select them, open the context menu, choose shapes and then one of the equalise options. A new toolbar button has been added, Display Mode, which lets you quickly switch between different editing and master modes. If a slide has a background image, you can now save this image using an option in the context menu. When you're working with enhanced shapes, you can now edit the details of control points via the Position and Size dialog box. This gives you much finer control than using the mouse pointer on the handles. Finally, there is now a button on the Presenter console to restart the timer of a slideshow without restarting the slideshow itself.


We are in the regenerative agriculture session of the Indiana Small Farm Conference. This is, my name is Tamara Benjamin. There's Nick, Joanne, thank you, Richard Perkins. And we should have Liz Brownlee in the barn, it looks like Liz. Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna put up each of your slides as we go along. I'm gonna start out with, let's see if I can pull up Joanne's. Joanne and Paul Mosier own Holy Cow Farm. They're in Monon, Indiana. They produce beef, pork, lamb, and they've been direct to market farming from since 1994. So go for it. Okay, so yeah, Paul and I, actually Paul bought our first farm when we were seniors in high school. So we're high school sweethearts. And he wanted to be a farmer and he started out as a corn and soybean farmer. And so that's just what you do. We bought a bunch of old equipment, basically salvaged stuff and he started doing corn and soybeans, just traditional cropping. After we got married, we bought a cow and so we started doing beef. And then after a while, we realized we weren't making any money and so that was a problem. And so we were always throwing money at the black hole and we loved farming. We were basically our grandparents had farmed but we were the first ones, our parents didn't farm. So we were kind of a skip generation so we had to start from scratch. And so what we did, we weren't making money so we said, well, we've gotta do something different. We had about 172 acres that we owned or were buying. And the farms that were north of us around that time that we started looking at other options, options that would go well, that were regenerative, the farms around us were selling for about $10,000 to $14,000 an acre. And we said, whatever we do, we've gotta be competitive with this because corn and soybeans weren't doing it. And so we decided, hey, let's just start turning everything into grass and let's start grazing it. It seems like the most logical thing to do, it's a natural way of doing things. Why not? And so we started putting up fences while our neighbors were tearing them down, we started putting fences up and we started planting grass. And so we started just bit by bit because we cash flowed all of this. So it had to be practical. And so we started with 20 acres, 10 acres, then 20 acres and then we went to 40 and then we took our whole hundred acres here at our home ranch and turned it all into grass. And so we got cattle and then more cattle and then sheep and pigs. And we just started adding to it. So our first step basically was to grow grass and that might sound simple, but it's not always simple. And so that's just what we started doing. And we did a diversity of species. Evidently, Paul's really good at growing grass. But we noticed our biggest thing for us when we started going from conventional farming to growing grass was that the quality of the seed made a huge difference. So we grew grass. So we just consider those our solar panels that we can harvest the sun's energy. And so then we decided to turn that energy into something useful and we started grazing it. And so the cows and the sheep, they started eating everything and then they're recycling nutrients and it was, it was just, it's awesome. It's just nothing like watching animals graze. It's peaceful, it's relaxing. And so, but the thing was to have the farm, we had to turn that grazing power into something to make a living off of. So then we started feeding families. So we turned, we became an official, we started, let's see, in the late nineties there, we started doing holes halves and quarters of offering beef and stuff. But in 2012, we started going really wild and harvested a beef and a pig, put them in our freezer and just started selling direct market. And so since then we've been doing direct marketing to basically feed families with our, with the protein that we grow on the farm. And so it's been working beautifully. It's something we could raise our whole family on plus feed other families. And I just love, I just love working with the people. That's the fun part. So we're restoring the land. We're adding beauty to it and we're feeding families. So it's just like a triple win, but it isn't always easy. So. Perfect. Thank you so much. That was Joanne Moser and we are gonna go to Richard Perkins next. Richard, I know you don't have slides. So if you wanna just, you've got a whole bunch of slides in an hour or so. If you wanna tell us a little bit about your farm, Richard Perkins comes from Ridgedale Farm in Varmland, Sweden. So it's the night, it's getting towards the nighttime for him. He's the author of Regenerative Ag. He's our keynote speaker coming up. Does a lot of permaculture, farming, design strategies, capitalizing on patterns and resilient features and of natural systems. So go for it, Richard. We're up at 59 degrees north in Sweden. So that's pretty extreme farming climate. We have about three months, frost free plus or minus about 20 days. It's a very small farm. We're focused on how to make small profitable farms, which everyone told us was crazy in an economy and regulated country like Sweden. We're about 32 acres, mostly forestry, but it's about 11 acres of pasture that we derive most of our profit from. And we bought this farm for about $100,000 eight years ago now and spent just a little more than that, implementing these systems. We've basically run perennial systems, trees and grass, but they don't necessarily pay back so quickly. And over the last seven years, we've basically 3D printed this onto the landscape based around a key line layout. Key line's been a very big part of my design career work. And we put in agroforestry systems to create the bones of the farm system. There's about $30,000 of crops up above the pasture, not really taking up any room. And then we run our animals in between. So it gives a framework for the layout of the farm that makes water do a lot more work. And then between those alleys, we pull a key line plow, which is just a highly optimal subsoiler. And during the short time as videos here, I'll skip through them. We've built about 10 inches of active topsoil and seen amazing results in our pasture. We had the record 150 year drought two years ago where people were selling off half their beef herds because there was gonna be no winter forage and we still had grass up to my shoulders in full rampant reproduction. And we've done that through the key line plow and through having very dense amount of animals in a very small space. And the reason I've become a poultry expert is not that I particularly love raising chickens, but for a small farmer, they're the most effective livestock because of the density that you can have on a farm. So we focus on pasture boilers, which remain an excellent enterprise for cash flow. Looking at different models for raising those effectively, including what's become Europe's cheapest approved slaughtery so that we can process the birds and make the money for the work we do on the farm. We do some amount of the pasture turkeys as well. And then we developed eggmobiles that are suited to our climate here. They're the built out of very cheap materials, simple roll away nest boxes, because unlike you folks in America, you're not allowed to wash eggs in Europe. So you must have clean eggs, you can't. I know that you have to wash eggs over there, but we're not allowed to wash eggs. Simple infrastructure for moving water around the farm to keep animals on the move. So all the animals are moving daily around. And during this, so we spend about $220,000 with a plan to pay that back in five years. And the farm is producing about $275,000 of crops in the short sort of five, six month production season that we have. We have very long winters here. So the hens go inside and that's a deep litter system. They get sold as during hens. And then in the spring, in about Maytime, they come out, the new flock replaces them. We put 1,000 tomatoes in there. And then our other main enterprise is a no dig market garden. We've just been listening to talk about no till. We do no till vegetable production, very intensive small scale with wood chip pathways and mushroom production, edible mushrooms in the pathways. All started in this very cheap, like the key thing about our farms, we've built everything up at very low cost using scrap materials and things we find. This is a lean to greenhouse where we actually start in our seeds. And today is the first day of seeding here in Sweden. So if that gives you any context of the season, using simple tools, appropriate technology for very efficient, high production market gardening. And we'll be talking a lot more about this. In 45 minutes time. So I'll show you a lot more slides then. We're doing micro queens as well. And yeah, this is what the farm looks like seven years in. And you can find out a bunch more. We put a lot of stuff on YouTube, et cetera, that you can find out if you're interested. Thank you so much. And we're gonna keep introducing the farmers and then we will definitely have time for the panel questions that you guys all might have. Next, we are going to go to Liz Brownlee. Liz and Nate Brownlee are a nightfall farm in southeastern Indiana. They work on rotational grazing with sheep, pigs, ducks, or not ducks, chickens and turkeys. They have a 50 member CSA on 13 acres of converted to pasture land that used to be in corn and soybeans. And they are the president of the Hoosier Young Farmer Coalition, one of the farmer groups that is very near and dear to my heart. So with that, I'm gonna pass it over to you, Liz. Excellent, thank you. So you guys, thanks so much for having me be a part of this. I know that Sarah is the sponsor for this session of workshops today about regenerative ag. And I just wanna give them a shout out because a lot of what we've been able to do and what I wanna share with you about today is focused on things we learned from their grant funding. So I'm just gonna dive right in. Tamara shared that, let's see, there we go. Tamara shared sort of what we raise, but there's one more component of it, which is people. Because one of the regenerative ag techniques that we really think is important is bringing people back onto the land and connecting people with their food. And so this little guy in the left corner is now like a teenager who would be super embarrassed to see this photo here. He's a CSA member and their families get meat from us every single month. And we try to bring people onto the farm as much as we can, partly through the Hoosier Young Farmers Coalition work as well. And that's been really important to us because we're in a rural community where a lot of the land looks like this. This is probably pretty familiar to you all. It's flat, it's open and it's corn and soybeans. And when we moved home eight years ago now, back to Indiana after working on farms in the Northeast, we said, we want to turn it into something productive and abundant.  So we started with 13 acres and that 13 acres is doing really well. So that's where we raise most of our animals. And right now we're tackling adding another 35 acres of silvopasture this time. And we're doing that because the land and our animals told us to. The sheep that we raise, we were just buying in feeder sheep at first.  And we just decided to graze the sheep there one day. We were kind of out of space. It was really hot. We wanted the shade and they loved it. And we realized very quickly, they were happier and we were happier. And around here, these burrokes, they're actually called cow oaks because the cows love to eat them. And graze on the bottom leaves and the sheep do too. And so we said, great, when we plant more trees, we're gonna include burrokes because they do well in our soils and the sheep love them. The other lesson we got from our animals in the land is persimmons. They do super well in our wet, poor soils around here. And so we were harvesting some persimmons for ourselves and we just gave the seeds to the pigs.  They love the persimmons. They're just little sugar bones, right? That's why we love them too. And so we said, great, we're gonna plant more persimmons. And so that's what we're doing right now. We've got a silver pasture establishment where we've involved people in the plantings. This is a group of college students that helped with the group of planting. We bring in neighbors and CSA members to help us plant. And we get a lot more done and people have a good time and have a sense of accomplishment. And they wanna know how the trees are growing, you know? And I'm happy to report that some of the trees are doing really well. So this fixtures from just a couple of days ago, we went out and this tree is three years old now. It's a sugar maple. We will probably never harvest the sap from this tree, but someone will. And that's sort of all that matters. So we've planted about 1,000 trees on the farm now and the idea is to get minimum shade, but hopefully, you know, products we can sell and forage for animals. And I just wanna add in here that a sergrant, if you guys are wanting to know more about Silvopasture Establishment, we were a site for a sergrant research project. And we learned a number of things. It looks like maybe the text is a little wonky there, but one, on-farm research is really fun. We're nerds and we totally enjoyed it. But two, they were testing out, how do you establish trees within a pasture actively grazing? And they've got some really good data about what worked on our farm here in Indiana, but like for other farms throughout the Midwest. Last thing I'll say is the new project on our farm is, we actually have a veggie farm that has started on our land and we're really pumped about this because we think this is a regenerative practice because we don't have time for everything, but we do have a lot of fertility from our animals and the veggie farmers have expertise about how to care for the soil and raise really good food. So we're teaming up and they actually just got a sergrant, a farmer rancher grant to look at biodigesters from our spent bedding and their expertise turning it into really good compost. So we're pumped about that and excited to have more people on the land. I think up next is Nick Carter. He's gonna talk about the farm that he had in his sergrant. He's the CEO, I think of the market wagon, which is something we may be not gonna talk a lot about, but also something to definitely look into. It's a pretty cool program. So, well, first of all, yeah, great segue. I think I'm only on this panel because I completed a farmer rancher sergrant and I'm gonna be just sharing in my brief show here what we did and what we learned. I feel like I'm way underqualified to be a regenerative ag panelist. We are just getting started. My farm is on the northeast side of Indianapolis. We have 20 acres. We run a farm stand. So we are lucky enough to live right among a massive population of consumers. So we run on farm stand where about 90% of our stuff is sold right there. We don't have to go to market or anything else. It's, and we do, the other 10% is market wagon, as you mentioned. But I am a fourth generation Indiana farmer. I mentioned earlier in a question, my dad farms. He was doing no till before no till was cool. And so I learned from him and he is, we are together converting the 80 acre home front, just like the Mosgers, we're doing the same thing. It was corn and soy, we're converting that into grass fed beef and pork production. We can't have beef and pork. We were technically inside of Indianapolis city limits. And so that's a class one livestock, not allowed here, but we have goats and chickens. And so what we did with the stair research of our 20 acres, 16 of it is in certified forest, which is a DNR program in Indiana. And one of the key tenants of that program is that you're trying to restore native hardwoods, but this forest is just completely overridden with honeysuckle and also multi-flora rows and a few other invasive, just invasive to just destroy the understory. So our stair grant was designed to see if we can eradicate that with purpose, right? I mean, it's hard to ask a farmer to go out and spend a lot of time eradicating an invasive species if there's not really a monetary value to it. So one of the issues is, I know a lot of people probably use chips, chip drop, but there's concern around like allelopathy, other things that are going on in chip drop. Honeysuckle is one of them that can actually sprout from green trimmings, just like sycamore and some other things. So we were gonna mulch this and it's allelopathic or as believed to be. There's not been a lot of primary research on it, but the leaf droppings and the trimmings from it appear to be allelopathic in nature. So why put that on your garden, right? So we decided we could use sweet corn as sort of our test bed. We do a lot of sweet corn here and we could see if this was going to impact germination rates because, well, first of all, corn is pretty hardy and it has a really standard germination rate. So you know what it should be. And so we can run test class and see what we were gonna do. What we expanded it a little bit. So what we did was we harvested the honeysuckle and brought it for the goats to eat. And then we would chip what was left, right? So the goats loved it. They dug into it.  They'd have them picked completely clean. And then we took the branches that remained, chip those and use that chip for our deep litter. So we don't move our chickens over pasture right now. We use deep litter in a fixed house and then we have unique ways of getting green matter for them to eat throughout the year. But then we also used a Johnson's Sue composter. And then of course we spread that onto the fields and we used a test plot. So we spread this like 90% honeysuckle chip over about an acre. And then the other acre we just did conventionally and the germination was about the same, right? So we didn't have any kinds of issues that would suggest a lilyopathy preventing germination of the seeds. And the honeysuckle was not a bad forage especially if you are like we are supplying some protein supplement and also there's plenty of other forage that they have, we have a lot of pastures. So it's a pretty low crude protein but it didn't have high sulfur. It wasn't hard on the rumen. They enjoyed it as you know, goats like brows. The problem was the labor. So I tried my best to figure out an equivalency to actual forage here. What you see here took about two hours to harvest. And if you really boiled it down to the leaves themselves with the goats we're gonna mostly eat it's about three bales of hay. So it just doesn't pencil out to actually go on harvest this stuff.  As a matter of fact, so they spread subterranean, right? So we were not actually eradicating it. So the audible we called was to just start grazing. We had to get a special permit from the DNR because they to date, they don't allow you to graze in certified forest, but we worked out with the DNR they gave us a permit to do this as an experimental basis. And what the goats are doing now is they're coming to where the honeysuckle is and they are defoliating, right? This is a one day, it's really amazing to watch a goat graze on brows. They will stick their tongues out. They'll grab the leaves and they'll defoliate which we believe will have as much of an impact at killing this in the long run. It's gonna take a lot longer as herbicide will because if you just completely defoliate that plant time and time again throughout the growing season don't allow it to put out any propagate in any of its own seed or berries. We should have good results. That's what we are hoping for. So that's what we do. And of course we have the sweet corn as I mentioned we have 400 layers, we have 12 brood. Goats, they are meat goats. I grew up on a dairy. I never want to do that again. And we've got another couple of acres of produce diverse. I mean peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and the like. And that's our farm. And what we want to do now is we have 30 minutes to ask questions to these amazing farmers kind of from all over the world we get to say today all over Indiana and Sweden. I do have some questions but if others have questions please put them in the chat or you can jump on and just say your question here. One question is where can we get more information about Sarah Grant Nick? Lace McCartney, I don't know if she's on. I don't know Nick if you want to talk about it or Liz and Nate, both of you. There's like. It's surprisingly easy. Go to, I think it's just NC, well in the Northeast, in the North Central region it's ncsayer.org or just Google North Central Sayer. Right on there and go and look for what we did was the farmer rancher grants. They're relatively small.  Right? You're going to do something that you wouldn't ordinarily risk the time and money to go out and try and do. And I've now completed over the course of the last 10 years, my dad and I combined have done four different projects and each time we've learned a ton and it's really been good.  And if you go, I'll just kind of answer it. It's the first question I sent you out. What's one or two practices that you've adopted that has really improved the health of your soil? And how were you able to tell by, you know, adopting it that your soil changed and kind of what did you notice that was different? Let's start with Joanne. Okay. So, well, the biggest thing was putting the grass species out there that turning it to the pastures. We had a lot of, it's crazy because we had a serious weed issue. The Palmer amaranth started taking over a farm when we were doing corn and soybeans and we were literally like walking through the soybean fields and pulling them by hand just to try to get the Palmer amaranth out of there because nothing was taking care of it. And so when we turned that pasture specifically into just a pasture, then we didn't spray anything. We just started grazing. And so the mouths would get down there and graze it while it was little and the animals didn't care, they just ate it.  I don't think, actually, I don't think I've seen any, I know I haven't seen any large Palmer amaranth, but so yeah, just that grazing and putting the multi-species out there was just huge as far as our weed pressures. So I just know when the weeds are going away, the soil and everything is happy, yummy, yummy stuff. So, yeah. Richard? Yeah, I can echo that point as well, it's fun. I think like a major shift for me is like really understanding that we're farming microbes. Like if you're focused on vegetables or chickens or cows, you're kind of missing the most fundamental bits. And what I've seen through our approach with plant grazing and just always managing so carefully not to overgraze grass, is the resilience and the diversity and the health and vigor of plants is just incredible to see. I've been documenting that, that people can see on YouTube if they're interested over a long period of time. And then the same is true in our vegetable gardens, like the only pests and disease issues we've had in our entire market garden operations is rust spots on beet leaves, which is not even a big deal. And it's testimony to a healthy micro-population essentially. And so I think that, yeah, putting priority and focus on the right thing is being the biggest influential thing in my practice that's really given me confirmation that we're doing the right thing. And I always like to say like nature's going this way or it's going that way. It's moving in exponential, like life and decay are equal opposing forces moving in an exponential pattern, you could say. And once you put a few pieces of that jigsaw together, you can hopefully be humble enough to step back and get out of the way. And that's kind of a critical role of a farmer, I think, as opposed to sort of modern technicians that I was taught at ag school. That was pretty philosophical. I will definitely say we're going to be using that one on our next promotion of this conference next year. So thank you.  Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we did all the things that are on the list, right? You're supposed to use cover crops when you're converting land to pasture these days and you're supposed to plant a diverse fix and now we're adding the trees. I don't think anything we're doing is rocket science per se, but I think we are getting some really good indications from the land that it's starting to work, which is really exciting. So that's what I wanted to share with you guys. Like we see more insect life all the time, like dragonflies, for instance, which I get really pumped about because they eat mosquitoes. But the other insect that we're seeing that tells us like, oh, there's a whole functioning ecosystem happening now is a couple of summers ago now, we saw our first carrion beetles. And these are these really big beetles with like bright yellow on their backs. And I saw them and thought, oh no, it's like some pest I've never heard of and this is bad, what is this thing? And we noticed it was on one of the paths we walk in our pasture on like a dead bull or something like that that we had probably hit while we like drove feet out or something like that.  There were a bunch of them went inside and looked it up and it turns out they're really positive indicator. They only show up when there are dead things that need to be decomposed. So they're present in places that have manure and functioning the tritivore action. And that just made us feel really good. Like, oh, this is working. These practices are showing up in the soil. In ways we don't even understand yet, we were still learning, you know. Awesome, Nick, there's a bunch of questions to Nick in the chat if you wanna answer some of those at some point. I've been trying to keep up with those. Somebody's been asking a lot about goats and they are definitely escape artists. You've got to train the kids young to the electric fence. If you don't, they will not respect it when they get older. But hot wire can contain goats. Don't believe anybody who says that they can't. It's just gotta be hot. We went to rural king. We got the one that was raided for elk. We figured that ought to do it.  What have we done to improve soil here? So, I mean, I'm only three years in here at this farm at Mud Creek Farm. I just wanna share a quick stat. I mean, my dad, he was getting teased for no till in the 80s, right, and he's kept all of his soil tests going all the way back. We averaged about 1.9% organic matter when he made this change.  I've had to teach him and try to pull him along into some of this new stuff. But even in those production crop fields, he's had about three to three and a half percent organic matter. That took 25 years, but there's results going there. Here on our farm, I got a couple of things that I wanted to share. One is, I mean, some of you might be thinking, sweet corn, well, no culture, that's not regenerative. And one of the things about farming is you gotta sell what people wanna buy. And we're right in the heart of the city. And I can plop a hundred dozen sweet corn out on a table by the road and make $1,000 in a day. So we do that. But we move it around, we also chop and drop it, right? So once we picked it, I have a bush hog that go out and basically, and bush hog it down and let that sit. And that has helped to suppress weeds that would come up over time. We run the goats over the garden when it's all done in the wintertime, you know, in the fall. And another little thing that I thought of as I was thinking about this question, Tamara, was maybe counterintuitive, but my dad, again, he's the guy that taught me to farm. 37 years old, I'll still talk about like, dad's teaching me how to farm. We never stopped learning. And he was here helping me get this set up. It was fallow land when we bought it. And the first year, there was one section that was sort of at a, it's bottom ground. It was sort of at a delta, a tributary coming down the hill on its way to a creek. And so it's flood plain, it's a hundred year flood plain. So it does get standing water every now and then. And in that area in our first year, we had just horrible germination through this area. And the reason you guys could probably figure out is compaction, right? Standing water on silt ground over the course of the 40 years that this place had been completely untouched. It was, that soil was so compact. There was no oxygen in it. There wasn't microbial life underneath it because it was just concrete, right? It was really compacted.  And I was like, you have to teach me because before I could drive a tractor, you went no-till. So guess who's never learned how to put a plow to the ground? So we put plowshares down and we deep ripped it and then just sit down and also rerouted some of the drainage, right? So we had, we put a ditch in and rerouted drainage so that it wouldn't get a lot of the heavy setting standing water will compact soil really, really fast. And so I think that that tied into kind of what Ray was talking about, right? The timing and knowing when you need to disturb. And in that situation, we had to rip it. We had to start over. We had to pull it up and get oxygenation going in there and undo the compaction. So don't feel like a plow is like sin. You just gotta know what you're doing with it. Why are you doing that? Thank you so much, Nick. That was really helpful. I think there's a lot that you kind of, you know, reiterated what Ray was saying as well. I think you guys really matched up. There's a question that says for all of you, what is the most profitable product you produce? Richard, do you wanna go first? Well, it's a difficult one. The whole focus of my book was doing a comparative analysis of all of the different enterprises that you might employ on a small farm, the most profitable of which is past your turkeys for us. But we don't have a market here.  But all of our enterprises are kind of running at a similar scale. I'd say time input-wise, it would be the pasture of meat birds that will generate the most income. Okay, Nick, you wanna go next? Yeah, my most profitable is the eggs. That's the most profitable enterprise we have on the farm. If you wanna know my most profitable crop, it's sweet corn. It's actually pretty low labor, pretty low input if you're doing it right. Interesting. Liz and Nate? Exact same as Richard. So the turkeys are number one, and thankfully we do have a really good market. Thanksgiving treats us very well. And I would say even if you're on a very small piece of land, think about 10 to 12 turkeys because they're really good for the ground, they're excellent foragers, and people will pay a premium for a turkey at Thanksgiving for a special meal, that they might not for just a Tuesday night dinner. And then the pastured broilers is right behind that for us. And I'm seeing these comments about Thanksgiving and Christmas and whether they work or not as a marketing tool. And just having ground turkey as an option to sell at the farmers market extends that's interest from customers beyond. And we don't see much of it from our other vendors. And so we can ask for a good price on it because it becomes more expensive to part out the turkey, but then there's not much competition yet. And so it is able to get what we would need to match the profit levels of a whole bird. And then, yeah, again, the meat chickens, like Richard mentioned, they, we didn't wanna be chicken farmers, but they just make a ton of sense for what we are doing. It's a quick turnaround, customers are used to chickens. And because of both of those reasons, that's what we do the most of. And so that becomes a key factor in what is most profitable scale. And they're also really important for our pasture. The fertility that they leave behind is critical to trying to rebuild these really, you know, heavy clay soils. Cool, Joanne. So I would say probably the most profitable product of our farm has been our children. Free labor is awesome. And they get work experience. So it's a win-win, so, yeah. No, so, but that's our, I mean, number one, that's best. But as far as like products that we move off of the farm, our grass-fed ground beef is probably the most profitable when we harvest some of the more mature animals that aren't necessarily our prime cut ones and we harvest some of the other ones and we just grind those. But because of how processing has been this last year, year and a half, we have had to add an on-farm butcher shop to be able to make that a continued profit. Because otherwise it was like, we wouldn't be able to do anything. So, yeah, that has been very profitable for us. Okay, and I'm just gonna let this one open to any of you that wanna answer. What advice do you all have for those of us who are unlikely to raise animals, especially like small urban gardens, but still wanna maintain good soil health? Something I would love to do and haven't figured out yet is worms. Nate was actually on a trip up to Wisconsin that Purdue led and they got to see Will Allen set up with urban vermicomposting and I got totally excited about it and then it got to the bottom of the list. So I would say, I think that's one way to have fertility happening in a very small space. And it's hard for us to take animals out of the equation because that's what we built everything on. But that puts me in the mindset of being closer to towns and urban areas and one of the things that I've been jealous of from other farmers that have access to those population centers is, schmoozing with the resources you have and get the people that are vacuuming leaves off the street to dump them on your farm. Like take advantage of the resources that you have that aren't animals. So you can find organic matter and it comes with the bummers of shredded up water bottles and stuff from the crews because they just toss them in there with it as well. But you've got access to things that we don't even having animals here in the country. And you might check out the SARE. So the SARE website is neat if you wanna do a project, right? You wanna do on farm research, but they also have a database and I think someone posted in the chat like all the projects that have happened in Indiana recently, but you can look all around the country. You can see what farmers are up to. And so there's some research about using leaves or grass clippings or things like that to try to build fertility from sort of scavenged sources. If you're in an urban area, you gotta be careful about grass clippings because of what's coming with it on the chemicals. But I'll put a plug in for chip drop. And if you've not heard of it, chipdrop.com, I think it's chipdrop.com. You just sign up and your name gets put on a list that they publish out to Arborists, right? Who are out there chipping up wood. They have to pay to drop that wood at a place that's going to turn it into mulch and then sell the mulch to landscapers the next year, which I don't, I'm in the wrong business apparently. If you get paid to take in your raw material and then you sell it later. But of course, what a lot of people are cautious about with chipdrop is like we talked about, you don't know what's in it. You'll get poison ivy, you'll get sycamore, you'll get things that can sprout from the green shoots. So what, I mean, I can't say I've proven it, but what we've tried to demonstrate here is let it sit for a year, right? So compost the chips, right? Let them sit and rot and then use them next year. Don't be in a hurry to put it on your garden and that will alleviate a lot of those risks. That was a great idea. Never thought about that. You're right though, they're trying to get rid of chips. Richard or Joanne, do you have anything else? Otherwise I'll go on to another. Sure, I do. Yeah, it's interesting who and Nick say that. I forgot how you love to use generally in America, you use a lot more chemicals now. The statistics of how much ag chemicals gone to lawns. It's quite unfamiliar. And here in Europe, we don't, people value their lawns, but they're not dosed in chemicals in the same way, I think. But it's really easy to, you know, I come from England where we have allotments and allotment was what a family was allotted to produce their own food. It's a very small space. Most people have a backyard bigel in that. It's very easy to grow a family's food in a very small space. Like self-sustainability is very, very useful compared to farming for a living where you have regulations and economy coming in, but can easily bring in the idea of worms for composting your food scraps. You can bring in municipal compost. You can use wood chips. We love to, you know, I got taught no dig market gardening with people like Charles Dowling who pioneered that in the UK. We integrated that with wood chips so that we would have totally clean work spaces to be able to walk around in, you know, shoes even in saturated weather conditions that we have in the spring. And you can add perennial vegetables to that. You can add trees or bushes if you have space. If you've got a bit of a bigger yard, you can add a couple of hens and have all your eggs. It's really not so much work to produce the family's food needs. And if you wanted to make an enterprise on a tiny scale and you have a marketplace, there's all kinds of options like microgreens if you're in an urban population and you have access to chefs, et cetera, you can make a living in a tiny greenhouse, you know, 13, 14, 15 feet by 10 feet, you know? So it depends. There's a lot of needs unpacking in there, but you can do a lot in a tiny space and you can really close your little nutrient loops of your family house. So it's a really nice thing to be able to do. That was great. Joanne, do you want to offer anything else? Otherwise, I'll go on to another question. So go ahead. I just reiterate, we've used wood chips in a few areas where we weren't, where we were trying to improve the area and it's just amazing. After, I think we have a pile that's been there 10 years and it's just amazing how that has broken down and it went from really tall pile to just breaking down naturally on its own with just some vegetation on it and just turning itself into yummy soil. So yeah, good stuff. And can I add one thing to that?  We've noticed that some of the towns around us also have wood chip setups where you can just go and fill up a bucket or your pickup or we've taken our livestock trailer and filled it up when we needed a bunch at once and none of the arborists around us had any and none of the power companies did. So you might check into the municipalities around you. It's not as awesome as having it dropped on your place but it might suffice. And when you talk about getting it dropped on your place and letting it sit, because that is a really good idea if you have that ability, if you have that space. It's our easiest place for arborists to back up to and drop their chips is right across from our neighbor's porch. And so we've had to deal with the realities of having neighbors staring at wood chip piles and education, you know, what that means and how that's a good thing for them as well as for us. So, you know, it's all pieces of the puzzle. Super. I'd love to add to that. Just because someone was asking me the questions of like what we've started doing is taking King's Traferia, the wine cap mushroom and you can inoculate that into the pile of wood chips while it sits as well. And when you spread that out as pathways around the garden, you get a like 20% yield from those mushrooms over the next four or five years. So, you know, we're putting down 50 cubic meters of chips every five years. You can produce in the garden now scale, you can produce a couple of tons of edible mushrooms and the way that mushrooms have evolved with humans and animals is that they pop up along the sides of pathways naturally whether the spores are carried. And what you find is that they don't pop up in your pathways because you're walking so it's compressed in the middle and they pop up on the edges where the crops are. Some go into the beds, but they're only there for three or four days so it's not in the way of your crops. That's a really nice way to do it and they can also synthesize some, you know, if there's any heavy metals, things like that, it will help with the cleaning of that wood chip too. So that's a fun little idea for you. I love that, a fun little idea. Okay, next one is how do you start testing or understanding what microbes you have in your soil? I do. I've never done it. A soil microscope. Simple soil microscope for about 150 bucks. You need certain things. If you look up on YouTube, you'll find people like Lane Ingham and you can find out the basic core needs. You basically want binocular vision with 10 times magnification. You want 10, 20, 40 times objectives. You need a 1.25 ABBE condenser and a variable light source and then you can make your own 400 times magnification slides. And then you can see for yourself what's there. You'll start to learn what the organisms look like in their movements, like protozoas and the different creatures like nematodes and bacteria, et cetera. Obviously you're not seeing them in super high definition but you learn by their movements and activities what they are. And then you can make things like compost tea out of your compost and you can see if it's worked because it's either full of life or it's not. And because you're creating the right conditions that facilitates healthy aerobic populations, as long as you created the conditions, you know that you're creating the healthy microbes. Likewise, you can do that in your soil. So we use a probe. It's just a cylindrical tube that you take soil samples at the depth all the time. And so every year I can document is my pasture life increasing in diversity or in micropopulation? Now it's not super scientific in that I don't know what any of these 5,000 species of bacteria do, but all I can think is that however complex we think we understand it, it's way more complex than that. And I could give you 18 soil encyclopedias that I have on my computer and they would still lead you to no clear understanding of how to treat the soil and I can tell you in 20 minutes. And so there's a point where that information is not useful anymore. And sure it's from the geek out on, but you see with your eyes and senses if things are moving the right way in your garden or on your farm and you can measure those things for yourself that you don't need to rely on anyone outside. I'm not a big fan of soil testing because I can see and observe what's happening with my plants and animals. If they don't get sick like ever, then something's going good, right? Obviously it's more complex with breeding, et cetera, but it's very nice to be able to measure things for yourself and deepen your own understanding so that you feel resilient and you feel clear about your decision-making and what's worth your time to input on things. So I really recommend getting a microscope, lots of literature out there about making compost, compost teas, all that stuff. And it's really fun because you get to play physicists and biologists and chemists and that's what farming's about. Great answer. Okay, I have another question. How have you built community on a local level around your mission and connecting people to the land and local food sources? Liz, do you guys want to talk about that first? I think we have invested a lot of time in this question. We really felt strongly when we moved home that we did not want to sell into the urban markets but we wanted to serve the smaller farmers markets around us because we have several farmers markets within 20 to 35 minutes as opposed to driving an hour and a half or two hours. And that has meant that we've had to pull our community into conversation. So how have we done that? We've been serving on the farmers market committees. That's one way. If you are not serving on your committee, go and do that. It's a lot of frustrating conversations and a lot of worthwhile conversations. And that can be one way that you can leverage community resources to get people talking about food. We have events on our farm, especially for our CSA members, not right now, but we're lambing right now and our plan had been last year and this year to have an open barn day where people could come and see the lambs. Things like that, we have school groups that come letting people know that you do that, that you are open to some basic field trips and tours. I think that can go a long way. If you have a community newspaper around you, they're always looking for content. So we had written a couple, I think there were letters to the editor, but then they just said, would you write a monthly column? And so we did that for a really long time. Yeah, we did that for like five years and they actually paid us, which was amazing. I don't think they're doing that these days because everything's so tight for newspapers. But it was really great for us. It led to precisely zero sales, but everybody would come to the market and say, we love reading about your farm. It makes me think about how my grandfather used to do this or I'm so glad you're doing that. And so it was an engagement that was incredibly easy on our end. And it was a good excuse to sit down once a month and say like, how's it going? What's working right now? What's not? That reflection was really useful. So, and they've got a new farmer doing it now, which is really neat. Somebody who's in like year two. So that's been a good piece of the puzzle for us. I think those are some of the low hanging fruit that we've been tackling. We're near a college as well. So we've taken advantage of having classes come out, having work days and events, teaching things. Yeah, that's the other thing. So I would say don't be afraid to have people come work on your farm. It's a double inch sword for sure. But I really feel strongly that people need meaningful work. I think a lot of people in this world sit at a computer or do something they don't believe in because it has a paycheck and they have to. So to have an opportunity to do something that is tangible and has an end result that they can see, really sticks with people. My advice there would be that when people say they wanna come work on your farm, what they mean is they would like to come work for two to four hours and then hang out on the porch and drink a cup of tea. They don't wanna work a 12 hour, 15 hour day like you need to. But that's okay because there are other benefits to having them there. Joanne, do you wanna talk about what you're doing? Sure, so we have several on-farm field days I guess or on-farm days where people come and we have a really large customer base. I have like a large email news list and we email newsletters when I'm on it. We email newsletters biweekly and so they're used to hearing from us. There's always things of what's going on with the farm and so we stay in touch with these newsletters and it just is amazing how these people, I might not have ever met any of these people. Well, okay, I've met some people but I haven't met all of these people and then they just follow our story and they're there and they're listening but we haven't had that face-to-face interaction but it amazes me like five years later, all of a sudden somebody knows me so well and knows our farm, knows what we're doing. They're excited about the beef and all they did was just read our newsletter every now and then over the past so many years. They just hang with us on that adventure. But we do outreach through different farm events. We'll have like a pasture tours where we load everybody on the hay wagon and the kids drive the tractor through, well, my kids drive the tractor through the pastures and would they get to interact with the animals? We'll call the cows up and people love it because there's a lot of people that come to the farm and say, wow, it was the first time I ever really saw a beef close up or first time I've ever really seen touch to baby lamb. So it's, I don't know, including them on the adventure and having like just simple things, everything and just staying in contact with them all the time has helped as far as that community. As far as our local community, we've sponsored, we've donated meats to different like the volunteer fire department and different things like that so that we're outreached. We have a lot of signage so people local can come in and ask questions. And then we hire a bunch, not a bunch but we hire local people and a lot of retired people because they like to work and they're fun to be around. And so we just kind of reach out to our local community as far as donating time or coming and helping us do different projects. So yeah, the people is, I mean, we're doing this for the land, we're doing this for food but ultimately the people is, I think is the most important part. So. Great, thank you. Thank you both. Nick, do you wanna just chime in and then we'll end up with Richard and then I think we're done for the day, for this session, sorry, not the day. Yeah, I mean, we're very fortunate that, you know, we, I think in the mile radius around here, there's like 10,000 homes and we're in the middle of Andy. So we've held tours, we have our farm stand, we see people out there all the time. We've actually had a little bit of the opposite problem. I don't know if this is where we wanna go or just, I'll just mention it, you know, we're on 20 acres, our house is about 120, 130 yards away through the woods from the chicken barn and my oldest is 11 years old and they take care of the animals. Like I don't, they go down daily, they're doing chores. So we have people that have decided we're a park and they've given self-guided tours. So when random strangers meet my kids unattended on our own private property, that's been problematic. Not in, it's not in a serious way, but like we have to teach our kids, you know, safety and things like that. And so we've actually had to put up, unfortunately on cameras and no trespassing signs and I hate it, but we can't have, we cannot have unfettered access to our private property where my kids go and play and work. So that's probably completely in the opposite direction that we've had a struggle with that of people feeling way too connected to this land. So. That's interesting. Yeah, thank you. Richard, let's end with you and then we're gonna be signing off because you need to get over to your other keynote speech but you know, it's interesting to hear your perspective from Sweden. How do you guys connect to your communities? Well, I can say I've got a bit of a similar situation as Nick because we're quite a public site and do a lot of education work and have a very outward facing element to what we do. So we also get that thing of people sort of feeling like they can, you know, I've come out at six in the morning and there's photographers taking photos for a newspaper in the back of my, around the back of my house.  So it's a funny territory. Certainly if you have an outward facing element and educational community element then that's something that comes with the territory. So echoing what everyone else has said, we have open days, but we're very, very strict about, hey, these open days are free. We'll feed you, we'll spend all day walking around, showing you around, we'll get old ladies in their 90s crawling, looking at the bugs in common, you know and getting super excited about something they've never thought about before. But it's like it's on our terms. It's on this day and this day, maybe even three days a year but you are not welcome to show up anytime outside of that because it's just not how we do. And the way that we build community through sales is we do drop off points. But that also works on our terms. It's not on the farm, it's in locations in three different local towns and we turn up for 45 minutes and drop off all our products. And so we get that little bit of customer interaction which is all that's needed to create food security when you have a relationship with your customers but doesn't have to take too long that I have to hear about Mrs. Jones's cats because frankly, I don't care about her cats. Like I need to get home and feed chickens, you know. So we maintain community through constant interaction but very short and just a smile and looking in their eyes, that's enough, you know. And that's worked well for a time management perspective for us as well. Super. Well, I just wanna say thank you again, everyone. Go to your emojis. Just wanna send a huge applause out to you and all four of you for what you're doing. You know, thankful for all of the sharing that you gave to us today. You know, hopefully the rest of you that were listening felt like you got some questions answered and you can start working towards having a more regenerative farm. And so again, just thank you all, all four of you for spending all this hour with us. Appreciate it.


For these five entrepreneur teams, it started with a dream to launch a business. After a year of research, presentation, development, and mentorship, their dream may become a reality. Today, they'll have five minutes to pitch their business plan to a panel of experts ready to invest in their futures. From the Fairfield University, Charles F. Dolan School of Business, this is Fairfield Startup. Two summers ago, I started working on trading bots using algorithms to mess around with like financial technology and seeing the technology behind currencies was really interesting to me. So I knew that I eventually down the road wanted to build a blockchain app or just a network in general. So seeing that they had the startup on campus here was sort of my drive to pursue the technology more and see where I could go with it. When I first pitched this idea, it was just a cryptocurrency and nothing else and over winter break when I was doing some website development for a client, they were telling me how they have a cryptocurrency checkout system, but they were losing customers at the checkout cart because it just wasn't a practical form of payment. So going off of that, I pivoted more towards the merchant side of e-commerce websites where they can offer their users an easier way to pay with cryptocurrency. I really love the engineering behind all these projects that I do, but I would love to know more about business and how it can market my ideas. So I have been talking to a few professors on campus with business and technology and seeing where I can merge it. I'm dipping my toes into the business world, which is what I've always wanted. It's gonna be a great experience pitching to investors and getting that feedback that I need from audience members. It's gonna be a good experience. John Cain is dedicated to his field web development. Today, he'll present his financial technology business, STL, to the startup investor panel. Hello, my name is John Cain. I'm a sophomore computer science major and freelance web developer here at Fairfield University. I'm working with my mentor Peter Maragara in investment and operational due diligence expert. I also have several advisors with expertise in economics management and law who have been guiding me on building a foundation for this project before launch. So a little bit of background on my work last winter I gave website advice to an online medical cannabis dispensary here in Massachusetts. Cash businesses such as these are growing with medical marijuana markets worth nearly 74 billion in 2019 alone. While working for them, I learned a lot about the industry, including some pain points that come with running one of these businesses. For starters, these businesses are cash only. The problem with running a cash business, however, is that there are expenses associated with handling large sums of money, such as security and transport. Second, it can be inconvenient for customers to go to ATMs to which are large sums of money to bring into these stores. The same convenience can also become potentially dangerous for cash can be stolen before a customer even enters the store. For other cash business markets or for the dispensaries and states where banks are allowed to handle these transactions, credit cards come with some problems that at times can outweigh their own convenience. For one, they leave a transaction history. For an industry that is still in a legal gray area such as the cannabis industry, this can make or break a sale for some people. Second, some businesses choose not to accept credit cards for the sake of fees. While cryptocurrency has very low fees compared to credit cards and is sometimes referred to as digital cash, there are some pain points associated with it as well. First, cryptocurrency is still very technical and may be confusing to both customers and business owners who want to integrate a payment system that accepts crypto. Second, the volatility of coin prices may lead to a loss of sale for a business owner. The solution to these problems is a cryptocurrency payment and exchange portal for both e-commerce websites and physical cash businesses. As you will tackle the cash problem of cost and safety by allowing users to pay with a credit card at these cash businesses. Rather than buying from the store directly, they will be buying cryptocurrency to be sent to these stores, thus eliminating a transaction history. Finally, as you will tackle the crypto problems by automating the conversion of cryptocurrency back to cash and by offering smart tools to manage against volatility. In terms of our competitive landscape, none offer tools to manage against these holdings. Many of these platforms are too technical for both businesses and customers and many make users take holdings off-page to third-party exchanges to manually convert from crypto to fiat currency. In terms of our technology, SEO use Binance Rest API to both handle exchanges on the platform and run our smart tools. These tools will use technical indicators to watch exchange activity in order to provide service like automated trading, offer selections of coins to accept at a given time, show which coins have been the most volatile in the last week, along with countless others. Similarly, SEO will connect a Plaid API to our returning users or websites to link their credit cards to the platform to make checking out a simple blogging into your bank account. SEO will also act as a wallet storing cryptocurrency for the users who choose not to exchange the fiat. Ultimately, SEO wants to make cash business transactions convenient by allowing users to use a credit card all the while remaining just as private as cash. Second, SEO wants to save businesses money by introducing smart tools to manage funds and allow businesses to carry less cash to the bank. SEO will be approaching our market with two tactics, the first being a face-to-face guerrilla marketing campaign. Through this, we will meet in person with owners of cash businesses and cater to specific needs and pitches. Through this tactic, we have already signed two medical dispensaries and a day trader up for our business pro platform. Second, we will run targeted ads in the background on LinkedIn to attract business owners to sign up for our services. This will cast a wider net while we run our face-to-face campaign after launch. SEO will generate revenue through two separate business models. First, we will collect a fee for all transactions on the network. The second stream of revenue will be generated through a subscription to our smart tools that are included with the business pro dashboard. The decision to split the generation of SEO's revenue into two models came after a series of customer interviews. There are two kinds of business owners signing up for our platform. First, there are those who want to exchange their coins to fee as soon as possible. They are not day traders and only see cryptos abridged to conventional money, so there is no reason to bog them down with trading tools. The second customer is the business owner who uses crypto as an investment, but does not have the second goal know-how of a day trader to take their funds to an exchange. Subscribing to the business pro platform will open up new tools to this business owner and ultimately save them money. Below is a financial projection from the next five years for revenue and profit generated from the transaction fees alone. SEO is targeting small to medium business that's generating roughly 500k in revenue. From this revenue, 5% will be from cryptocurrency and our cost structure is calculated to incorporate the cost of marketing for each customer, along with hosting an API cost. Going forward, the plan is to continue development and integrate with credit card platforms by the end of the summer. The cryptocurrency side of the platform is currently being wrapped up and code for my previous trading bot projects will be integrated to develop these smart tools. In the coming months, advice from expertise in law, online banking, and UI and UX design is more than welcome. My contact information is below and now I'd like to open up the floor for discussion. With the presentation complete, it's time for the startup investor panel discussion. John has the opportunity to promote SDL and secure pledges. John, how are you? Good, how are you doing? Good, thanks for being here today. My name is Michael. You're with Joe and Mary Ann and we're very, very happy to see you. We've watched your presentation. Very good job, by the way. We've watched multiple times and we all have a few questions for you. And I'll just kick it off from there. Is that good for you, Joe Ann? Joe and Mary Ann? Yep, absolutely. Good. So, John, you know, it's interesting. Number one, I was, I'm very impressed with you on this cutting edge of it appears to be crypto and the cannabis space, both the markets that I think are going to be gigantic over the next decade, you know, maybe and in perpetuity, if everyone's correct. I'm a chain link guy myself and I'm actually invested in some some kind of displays out in Colorado. Oh, great. You said I don't have a lot of knowledge compared to you, but what I will share with you, what I got from your presentation was you were looking to meet some value opportunity that you saw with cash and blockchain and privacy and cannabis. My thought is as I step back and I think about long term investments, I believe right now that in this country with the pandemic we're going through that these ideas of legalization of marijuana recreationally and medically will most likely be, in my opinion, accelerated nationally on a state-by-state basis because of the need for increased tax revenue. So I think that's an issue that you might be up against. So my question for you is have you given some thought about that and number two, I had an issue with, oh, not an issue, I wanted to understand a little bit. You talked about one or two medical dispensaries, then you talked about a crypto day trader that signed up for your platform. So it looks like you've got a bifurcated type of business that I'm not sure I and to me, based on my understanding of the cannabis market and I can put you in touch I want to put you in touch with the CEO of a company called 1906. I'm one of the earlier investors out in Colorado. They're inedible. But I do want to talk to you maybe not now but off-site about your crypto trading because the volatility in the crypto space is like the wild west. So those are my initial comments and I just wanted to see if you could talk to some thought about how if marijuana's legalization moves up faster, does your privacy issue kind of disappear? Right, sure thing. So in terms of the legalization of marijuana, with the research that I was doing with the legalization, I guess I sort of thought of three points. First, with the slow legal process, I thought that even if it is accelerated between state legislation and federal legislation, it feels like in the last few decades that the debate has been continued and maybe good luck through bureaucratic processes. And then my other point that I brought up was the high incarceration rate for marijuana and whether or not those people would be dismissed of the crime or not. And because of that, I thought that in the back of people's minds, there might still be this feeling of not wanting marijuana purchases being made public. Even if it is legal at the federal level, there might be that skepticism. If it is legal, but I have this history, what's that going to do for me? So I wonder if even if banks are allowed to adopt payments towards a cannabis company, are people going to be hesitant to pay with a bank card? And are banks going to be hesitant as well just because of how fresh the law is and everything? So in terms of that, that's how I felt about what was happening with the federal legalization. And because of that, I feel like there's still enough time for my platform to get some adoption and get a foothold into the market before banks come in and offer platforms to pay for cannabis. And then for your second question, I'm sorry, what was your second question again? You've actually answered it. I've got what I needed. And again, I'm impressed. I think you're more cutting edge than I am right now. So I do want to talk to you more about this after the fact. But Joe or Mary, do you have any follow-up questions? Yeah, Mike's into cannabis. I'm into art galleries. So can you tell me about the connection to art galleries? Sure thing. So I think you've really nailed the financial aspects of how to demonstrate a software business model. And that's pretty cool for a sophomore. So congratulations. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So with the art gallery, I didn't do too much research into the art galleries as much as the cannabis and other markets, but with the art galleries, from what I learned from some people in that market or area was that people are buying art as a medium of value, you know, just holding onto it as a tangible asset to hold. So with that, I just knew that people were buying art pieces with cryptocurrency and just being able to purchase art as a medium of value just like you do with cryptocurrency is a space where people are looking to buy with cryptocurrency, especially since it is mostly a cash business as well. Yeah. Well, as a collector myself, I think the aspects of privacy might be a niche situation, which is itself to a similar, I think you really explain the cannabis aspects of it, you know, to me much better in this short presentation. So it really rings, you know, rings true. So that might, those same privacy concerns might apply to the art gallery world as well as the auction, you know, the of which art is a part of, but the, you know, precious artifacts and things of that sort. Okay. Yeah, it's definitely a market that I'll do more research into. And within the coming months, I'll definitely reach out to people in that space and get their opinion and see where my technology can be applied there. Thank you. So, John, you're, you've been developing this really intriguing technology and, you know, congratulations. It sounds like you've done an awful lot in a short period of time. So that's pretty tremendous. So in this process, what have you done to protect some of the technology that you have been building? Any IP protection plans there? And then, and then also related to that. And I think part of what Joe was just mentioning, you also talked about second revenue stream that you have from your smart tools. I'm hopeful you could share with us a little bit about that as well. So in terms of an IP, most of the technology that I'm working with is open sourced. So in that regard, I would not be able to do an IP, such as, you know, things of sending Bitcoin or Ethereum over the internet. But I think what the special sauce for this business would be would be the combination of different open source tools. So right now it's a exchange portal. So we're connecting to Binance Exchange to exchange between US dollars and cryptocurrency. But that combination with our trading tools, automated trading and everything isn't something that you're seeing with other exchanges or other platforms that accept cryptocurrency. So in that regard, that is what is unique about our platform. I haven't done as much research into whether or not that would be something I could patent just because it is just a combination of different open source technologies. And then in terms of, I'm sorry, what was your second question again? You had talked about your smart tools and that was a second revenue stream. Could you expand upon that a little bit? Yeah, of course. So the smart tools were something that I had originally included in just the regular platform. My background with cryptocurrency was algorithm trading. So I was messing around with connecting to exchanges and seeing if a computer could handle trading and, you know, just see what it could do with the different cryptocurrency technologies and taking my experience with that. There are platforms out there that are just trading bots that you can buy and they're about, some of them are expensive, $85 a month. So from that, I saw the opportunity where, you know, you have two different kinds of business owners signing up for the platform. One where they don't see cryptocurrency as anything other than just saying, you know, I'm turning it into US dollars. I don't want to touch it. I don't want to save it. And then from that, I realized I should have a second platform where I do have this trading bot platform where they can invest in cryptocurrencies and either grow the value that they earn or just play around with the market and see what they can do with their earnings. Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. We're very impressed with what you're doing there. Thank you. Thank you so much. A little bit beyond me. I'll be honest, but I do want to talk to you some more. All right. Yeah, sure thing. Great, John. I want to thank you for being here and we look forward to seeing you in the award round. All right. Sounds good. Thanks, everyone. All right. Thanks. Thanks, John. Fairfield Startup would like to thank our sponsors for continuing to make the annual startup showcase possible. Thank you. Estial is presented and it's on to the final round. Visit fairfield.edu slash startup to watch all of the 2020 Fairfield startup team episodes. Vote for your favorite and tune in next week to see the winner of the CT Next Connecticut Innovations Audience Favorite Award. Thanks for watching Fairfield Startup. This has been a presentation of Fairfield University and the Dolan School of Business.