Design Thinking for Specialty Crop Innovations in the Field and Classroom

Sam Wortman, Associate Professor, Agronomy and Horticulture Author

10/09/2024 Added

10 Plays

Description

Design thinking for innovation is a systematic, iterative, and creative process for solving problems and developing new products, practices, and services in plant and landscape systems. In this seminar, I will share an example of design thinking for innovation in my research, leading to commercialization of the RootThru Weed Barrier. I will also discuss classroom strategies for engaging students in design thinking through the creation of their own innovations.

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[00:00:00.140]The following presentation is part of the Agronomy and Horticulture Seminar Series at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[00:00:07.740]Hello everyone. Thank you for being here today. I'm Rana, a master's student from this department and also a representative from Agronomy and Horticulture Graduate Student Association.
[00:00:21.900]Today, we welcome Dr. Sam Wortman. Thank you for joining us in the fourth seminar of this fall semester.
[00:00:30.000]So, Dr. Sam Wortman is the Associate Professor in Environmental Horticulture in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture UNL.
[00:00:37.980]Today, Dr. Wortman will share about innovative design thinking research and classroom strategies to engage students in design thinking through their own work.
[00:00:47.120]For the participants, both online and offline, we will have questions and answers.
[00:00:51.880]We will have a Q&A session 10 minutes after the presentation.
[00:00:54.500]Without further ado, let's welcome Dr. Sam Wortman.
[00:00:57.660]All right. Thank you, everyone.
[00:01:03.840]So I'm going to get two parts to this presentation.
[00:01:06.360]One is I'm going to start out actually talking about teaching and kind of generally what design thinking for innovation is and how I try to teach it in the classroom.
[00:01:15.080]And then I'll try to share an example of design thinking in our research program.
[00:01:20.200]All right, so why design thinking for innovation?
[00:01:24.460]Problem solving and innovation skills are now expected for supervisors and managers.
[00:01:29.980]And hopefully we're all in the business of preparing our students to become those higher level people in industry who are the supervisors, managers, directors.
[00:01:39.000]And this was illustrated nicely in a recent paper I was able to find from some folks in Australia who looked at non-technical skills needed for the current and next generation agricultural workforce.
[00:01:50.180]So these are, you know, we're assuming that everybody needs technical knowledge, right?
[00:01:55.060]We need to be teaching core science of agronomy and horticulture, soil science.
[00:01:59.300]But what are those non-technical skills that we're always hearing from employers about, right, that they want our students to have?
[00:02:04.780]And this is a table from that figure that shows some of the skills domains that employers are looking for.
[00:02:12.300]And what I thought was interesting was if you break it down by the types of employees, right?
[00:02:17.320]So going from seasonal to entry level to supervisor and to manager.
[00:02:22.160]And going from left to right here, we've got a one would be not needed.
[00:02:28.200]So the employer surveyed said, yeah, they don't really need those skills.
[00:02:32.460]And four and five would be mostly needed or extremely necessary for people in those positions, right?
[00:02:38.540]So interesting that you see for things like creativity and innovation.
[00:02:42.340]Seasonal entry level, we don't want that.
[00:02:45.840]No, don't bring your creativity.
[00:02:47.300]Right.
[00:02:47.820]But as you move from left to right, you see this nice trend where creativity and innovation is mostly necessary, if not essential.
[00:02:56.040]Problem solving skills is essential for people in those manager and supervisor roles.
[00:03:02.000]Right.
[00:03:02.300]So we want to be preparing students to succeed and go beyond that entry level.
[00:03:07.400]So given the importance of these skills, I developed a course for students to really practice this.
[00:03:15.140]And so this was one of the first courses I developed back in 2017.
[00:03:18.420]It was called Innovations for Agriculture, AGRI 375.
[00:03:22.400]The goal was for students to kind of pick a sustainability challenge in any type of ag system, identify opportunities for innovation.
[00:03:31.580]They did a lot of prototyping.
[00:03:33.100]And I really didn't do much technical knowledge transfer in that class.
[00:03:39.260]So it was an upper level class.
[00:03:40.700]And I expected that students were going to bring to that class some of their technical knowledge.
[00:03:45.120]Whether they were in animal science or agronomy, whatever it was.
[00:03:49.060]So what I provided for them was just a framework to practice some of those problem solving and innovation skills.
[00:03:56.160]We had a big focus in that class on prototyping.
[00:03:59.620]So we spent three or four weeks at the Nebraska Innovation Studio where they learned how to use the laser cutters and the wood shop and the welding and all that stuff to basically just give them some tools and experience to be able to take an idea.
[00:04:15.100]And actually make something.
[00:04:16.380]A lot of that came out of conversations with Dave Lamb and folks in Angler who said, like, our students just, like, need help getting across that threshold between an idea to a prototype or a creation.
[00:04:27.040]So that was kind of the central thrust behind that class.
[00:04:32.180]But as we got into the third, fourth year of that class, a couple things happened.
[00:04:37.600]One was that curriculum changes, right?
[00:04:40.540]And we had other curricular needs emerge.
[00:04:42.460]And I only had so much time.
[00:04:44.420]So we decided to kind of sunset that as an individual course and instead think about
[00:04:50.080]how we can get that into other courses.
[00:04:52.240]So the other thing that happened was it became clear how important that background technical
[00:04:57.080]knowledge was.
[00:04:57.840]Because if you think about professional designers, they have their problems identified for them.
[00:05:03.400]So probably the most famous professional design firm is IDEO.
[00:05:06.580]They're based out of Silicon Valley around San Francisco.
[00:05:09.580]I always show my students this classic example of the Whole Foods.
[00:05:14.320]Shopping cart.
[00:05:15.120]So there's a viral YouTube video from about 10 years ago where they go through and they
[00:05:20.360]show how this group of eclectic designers with backgrounds in psychology, biology, business,
[00:05:25.600]whatever, they come together and they design a new shopping cart for Whole Foods, which
[00:05:30.700]was their customer.
[00:05:31.320]And that's the thing that they created.
[00:05:33.420]But it really just demonstrates to students that design process.
[00:05:36.840]But the key thing is that that problem came to them, right?
[00:05:40.280]Whole Foods came to them as a customer and said, we need new shopping carts.
[00:05:43.940]Our students, I'm expecting them to identify the problem.
[00:05:46.900]So they need that background technical knowledge.
[00:05:49.320]So it's important to identify problems, but also to explore meaningful solutions.
[00:05:55.780]So you can come in at a surface level and you can identify and come up with solutions,
[00:06:00.980]but they're not going to be very deep, right?
[00:06:02.920]If you don't have the necessary background knowledge, again, within the constraints of
[00:06:07.420]a 15-week course.
[00:06:08.940]So that's why we developed innovation modules that are about three to
[00:06:13.560]four weeks that are now nested within these two courses that I'm going to talk about,
[00:06:17.320]specialty crop innovations and cover crops and agroecosystems, which I co-teach with
[00:06:23.140]Dr. Baish.
[00:06:24.300]Okay, so this is the framework that I share with students in those courses, which is design
[00:06:30.880]thinking, the engineering design process.
[00:06:33.360]And there's lots of these types of figures out here.
[00:06:35.600]This is just one that I like.
[00:06:37.180]Here it's called the engineering design process, but it's really used by folks in a lot of
[00:06:42.240]different disciplines.
[00:06:43.180]Artists, landscape designers, engineers.
[00:06:45.460]And so it just basically follows these six steps of starting with identifying the problem,
[00:06:52.780]exploring solutions, designing some solution to that problem, then actually creating something
[00:07:00.320]from that design, testing it out, learning something about it, and iterating, right?
[00:07:05.940]Making it better and improving that design and kind of staying in that wheel as long
[00:07:10.660]as you can until you have to deliver that final.
[00:07:13.040]So, again, really trying to help students move from ideas to creation.
[00:07:18.980]All right, so I always tell students, you know, step one, how do we identify problems
[00:07:23.720]or challenges that you can work on to solve in these systems?
[00:07:30.000]So we hope that we can teach our students to go to the scientific literature to find
[00:07:34.320]some of those problems, right?
[00:07:36.200]Many of you in this room have made careers out of working on some of these problems,
[00:07:40.900]right?
[00:07:41.900]So we hope that, you know, our students are going
[00:07:42.900]to agronomy journal and in hort science and finding things, papers like this to say, okay,
[00:07:47.780]maybe this is harvest quality and pre-harvest losses is something I can work on, okay?
[00:07:54.060]But that's not always the best place.
[00:07:55.400]They can also look to things like vegetable grower news and trade journals, right?
[00:08:00.200]To see what are people talking about, what are issues that growers are struggling with.
[00:08:04.520]In this case, they were talking about drought in California.
[00:08:07.260]And then I encourage them, you know, the good old coffee shop, right?
[00:08:11.100]Just get out and talk to growers.
[00:08:12.760]And listen to them and hear what their issues are.
[00:08:16.480]And, you know, in the absence of a coffee shop, go to the digital town square, right?
[00:08:21.740]X or Twitter or Instagram or Facebook to see what issues people are having.
[00:08:26.160]This is Steve Strasheim, who's a small-scale vegetable grower in Iowa.
[00:08:30.940]And he's a great follow on X now.
[00:08:34.540]He likes to share things like this, which are, you know, in this case,
[00:08:37.820]he's repeatedly left his drip irrigation system on overnight in his high tunnel.
[00:08:42.620]And flooded out his crops.
[00:08:44.300]So here's a very simple problem solution, right?
[00:08:46.540]He clearly just needs a timer on that irrigation system.
[00:08:49.320]So, you know, following people like this, you can start to get a sense for what are
[00:08:53.300]these challenges that we could maybe address.
[00:08:58.580]So then I asked students to explore those issues, right?
[00:09:02.680]So this looks a little bit like problem ID, and they're going to use some of the same
[00:09:06.100]tools.
[00:09:07.100]But I encourage them, you know, to get out to local conferences and grower meetings to
[00:09:10.880]find out.
[00:09:12.480]What solutions are being proposed?
[00:09:14.580]If you're going to a conference like this, you might start to see some of the early stage
[00:09:19.700]solutions that people like us are proposing.
[00:09:22.380]Again, scientific literature to look for prototypes and proof of concept.
[00:09:27.240]Back to social media, this was an example of a grower who was sharing some of his solutions
[00:09:32.480]to no-till vegetable production, what he's tried, what's worked, what hasn't worked.
[00:09:37.060]So again, growers aren't just going to social media to complain.
[00:09:40.400]They're also sharing some of the cool things that they're doing.
[00:09:42.340]And how they're innovating.
[00:09:44.420]And then again, actually talking to these growers.
[00:09:48.380]So step three, design.
[00:09:50.580]Students will say, I'm not artistic at all.
[00:09:52.980]I can't draw.
[00:09:54.980]That's not for me.
[00:09:56.600]So how am I going to design a solution for the problem that I'm interested in?
[00:10:02.260]So the first thing I say is, really, all you need to do is write down your idea.
[00:10:07.100]Or just sketch it.
[00:10:08.100]It doesn't have to be pretty.
[00:10:09.100]Put it on a sticky note from one of the papers
[00:10:12.200]that I share with students.
[00:10:13.200]I like this quote, which is that, "Sketches are mini-hypotheses in a what-if scenario."
[00:10:17.120]So you're just starting out by saying, what if we did this?
[00:10:20.660]And that may just be jotting down an idea or a very simple sketch, putting it up on
[00:10:24.840]the board, circling back on it, and maybe improving it later.
[00:10:28.740]We also do our best to try to cultivate this type of collaborative environment where we're
[00:10:32.820]all kind of working together in small teams to try to come up with these solutions.
[00:10:37.820]So not all drawings look as nice as some of these da Vinci-style
[00:10:42.060]drawings.
[00:10:43.060]You know, we try to encourage students to use modeling clay, Legos, 3D printing.
[00:10:48.320]So there's some very simple AutoCAD types of technologies that are just drag and drop.
[00:10:54.020]So Tinkercad is one of those.
[00:10:55.980]So in the early stages of this course and these modules, I was having students 3D print
[00:11:00.740]at Innovation Studio.
[00:11:02.600]So they could just drag and drop different shapes and create things.
[00:11:06.020]I had students, one student group made a roller crimper and a tractor out of
[00:11:11.920]just using Tinkercad, right?
[00:11:13.360]So they just took all these other shapes, they put them together with paper clips,
[00:11:16.360]and they made a roller crimper to terminate cover crops.
[00:11:19.420]OK, so I have a great idea and design, then we're encouraging students to create
[00:11:27.340]and prototype. So this is the hardest part for all innovators, but especially students
[00:11:32.860]on a short timeline juggling 12 or 15 other credit hours, right?
[00:11:37.180]It takes oftentimes a lot of time and resources to
[00:11:41.780]prototype, but it's the most important part of this whole process, right?
[00:11:45.320]Because this is another paraphrased piece from another resource that I share
[00:11:49.880]with students that really step four is where you go from being an inventor to
[00:11:55.320]an innovator. Inventors come up with ideas, but the old saying, right?
[00:11:59.420]Ideas are cheap. Innovators are the doers and makers.
[00:12:02.720]We talk about change makers in CASNR and they take action, get things done.
[00:12:07.720]They test things and ultimately make them available to growers and to
[00:12:11.640]stakeholders so that we can see that change happen.
[00:12:15.240]Okay. So I'll talk about some of the prototyping here in a little bit,
[00:12:19.220]but also step five, they've say they prototyped it,
[00:12:24.000]but how do they go about testing it?
[00:12:27.000]So one of the core things I have students do is customer discovery, right?
[00:12:33.680]And I see Daniel here.
[00:12:34.860]Daniel's done some customer discovery with some growers in Nebraska and the
[00:12:39.860]customer discovery,
[00:12:41.500]worksheet is also challenging for students because they have to take their
[00:12:44.780]idea or their prototype and they have to talk to somebody who actually might be
[00:12:48.880]interested in using that product, solution, technology, or idea.
[00:12:52.580]And that can be scary, right?
[00:12:54.980]Because you might not get positive feedback.
[00:12:58.100]And so I've got a set of open-ended questions that they have to ask to not
[00:13:03.240]always gather specific information about their product.
[00:13:05.600]So this is not a pitch.
[00:13:06.580]They're not calling this person up to say like,
[00:13:08.680]would you buy my product, right?
[00:13:11.360]Generally, do I have this right?
[00:13:13.140]Like, do I have the problem right?
[00:13:14.500]Is this, am I on track with this solution?
[00:13:16.740]So you're focusing on, you know, behaviors.
[00:13:19.840]You're not pitching.
[00:13:21.440]You're asking open-ended questions and just gathering information because the goal is
[00:13:24.980]that you want to make, you know, you want to make your prototype better.
[00:13:28.040]You're not at the final destination yet.
[00:13:29.960]Then we also try to encourage on a short time scale students to actually do some testing.
[00:13:34.700]We do that in the greenhouse, the high tunnel.
[00:13:36.660]We try to work with growers where possible to do, actually test these things.
[00:13:41.340]Using kind of an on-farm research approach.
[00:13:44.060]Then ultimately, I ask students to make one iteration.
[00:13:48.900]I have to demonstrate how they took that customer discovery or that on-farm research or greenhouse research and actually made their thing better.
[00:13:57.440]I just want to share some examples now of what some students have created.
[00:14:03.940]To do that, I'll show you kind of the general assignment prompt.
[00:14:07.120]They start out by defining and exploring the problem.
[00:14:11.320]It's just a one- to two-page super-informal paper where they tell me what their problem is,
[00:14:15.800]and then they have to show what have other people done in the industry to try to solve this problem,
[00:14:20.180]because I don't want them just recreating what's already out there for a solution.
[00:14:24.280]They've got to show three current, presumably partially inadequate solutions to those problems,
[00:14:30.620]and then where that gap is that they're going to innovate.
[00:14:33.780]Part two is then designing and prototyping.
[00:14:37.660]At a minimum, they have to come up with a 2D design to share.
[00:14:41.300]But ideally, we're pushing them towards a minimally functional prototype.
[00:14:45.840]So I mentioned I'd come back to this.
[00:14:47.260]The minimally functional prototype, we get a lot of students that are interested in web or mobile apps, right?
[00:14:52.600]So decision support tools, for example.
[00:14:54.400]The good thing is those are fairly straightforward to prototype.
[00:14:58.860]There's apps out there that are sometimes free where you can make kind of a shell of an app or a website.
[00:15:04.100]Even easier than that is PowerPoint.
[00:15:06.720]So you can actually use PowerPoint and just the animation function in PowerPoint to move,
[00:15:11.280]from slide to slide, that basically acts like a website or a mobile app.
[00:15:15.440]So that's the most common way that we've seen students do this.
[00:15:19.220]Also, just Excel.
[00:15:20.260]If you've got a decision support tool, like a fertilizer recommendation calculator,
[00:15:24.600]an irrigation calculator, things like that, Excel is a great way to test those concepts.
[00:15:29.460]Okay, part three then is the testing and customer discovery.
[00:15:33.900]They have to contact at least two potential customers.
[00:15:37.000]I let them, and they have to come up with, they have to list four people
[00:15:41.260]to reach out to, and they have to successfully connect on two.
[00:15:43.860]If they get deep enough in the process, I then give them a pass
[00:15:47.980]and say you can contact an expert stakeholder,
[00:15:50.040]which may have been some of you in this room in the past,
[00:15:53.360]because then they go, well, can I go talk to Stacy?
[00:15:55.600]Stacy really knows a lot about hydroponics or whatever.
[00:15:58.300]And I say, okay, we've got 24 hours left before you have to present this thing.
[00:16:03.100]Go talk to Stacy, right?
[00:16:04.120]But ideally, I want them talking to people out in industry to get that feedback
[00:16:08.400]because we get some cool things happen when they do that.
[00:16:11.720]And then they come into class and they pitch their prototype.
[00:16:14.540]And this includes the market potential and the impact.
[00:16:18.820]Oh, thanks.
[00:16:21.140]The market potential and the impact.
[00:16:23.060]And we basically create a shark tank environment, right?
[00:16:26.440]So I give students some money, not real money, it's monopoly money,
[00:16:30.860]and they get to invest amongst their peers.
[00:16:33.540]In the past, I've brought in some people from Angler or from Invest Nebraska to come in,
[00:16:41.320]and kind of raise the stakes for students a little bit.
[00:16:43.800]And that's nice, because then people from Invest Nebraska will say,
[00:16:47.560]like, that's great, you won this pitch competition, you should go check out this resource,
[00:16:51.740]because you can apply for grants to get money to actually take this to market.
[00:16:55.680]Okay, so a few highlights here.
[00:16:59.020]I warned Caleb that he was going to be up here.
[00:17:01.320]But I just want to share four examples, just so you can kind of see, like,
[00:17:05.500]how far students generally can take this in this kind of three to four week module.
[00:17:11.200]I don't know if you can hear anything from that first class where, in some cases,
[00:17:13.420]they had the full semester to work on it, and oftentimes the prototypes got a
[00:17:17.020]little bit further down the road.
[00:17:18.060]So this is the compost table.
[00:17:19.980]The problem is cold nighttime temperatures and high tunnels that limit our
[00:17:23.500]ability to extend the season.
[00:17:24.760]So Caleb's solution was a mobile compost cart to generate passive heat without
[00:17:29.520]sacrificing production area.
[00:17:30.920]This was the 2D design that Caleb created, influenced by local recommendations
[00:17:36.520]from growers.
[00:17:37.100]The big feedback I remember that Caleb was getting from growers was, that's
[00:17:41.180]great.
[00:17:41.440]I like the idea of using compost to kind of use microbial metabolism to create
[00:17:45.960]some passive heat in the high tunnel.
[00:17:47.380]But high tunnels are super valuable, and I can't sacrifice production space to
[00:17:52.340]put a heap of compost.
[00:17:53.300]So Caleb's approach was, well, let's put that compost in an enclosed structure
[00:17:57.540]that can basically double as a greenhouse benchtop space, especially if we put
[00:18:02.600]seedlings on top of that benchtop, and that's going to provide some bottom heat
[00:18:06.580]for some seedlings and transplant plugs that we could grow on in the greenhouse.
[00:18:11.160]Another example was automated row covers. So the problem was unpredictable frost
[00:18:17.100]events and trade-offs of having crops continuously covered to protect them
[00:18:21.980]from frost. So this group of students, their solution was an automated
[00:18:26.280]retractable row cover system, and they were inspired by pool covers, right? So
[00:18:32.320]this idea that you could have an automated crank or spool system that
[00:18:36.380]would pull row covers on and off of a hoop system or even just a floating system where
[00:18:41.140]it's just laying on top of your plants. But the idea was that it would be
[00:18:45.580]integrated with your weather station so that in real time as a frost event was
[00:18:50.020]coming it would unwind and when the frost event was over it would spool it
[00:18:54.580]back in. And the idea is that you're going to get better photosynthesis
[00:18:59.140]because it's not continuously covered and you're not relying on one person to
[00:19:03.420]be constantly checking the weather and protecting that crop from frost. Another
[00:19:08.640]example from Brad Kindler who's now
[00:19:11.120]in the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum. He developed a sickle roller crimper tool.
[00:19:16.120]The problem there was we talked a lot about cover crop mixtures in our cover
[00:19:19.620]crops class and we can get incomplete termination if we try to just use one
[00:19:24.260]tool like a roller crimper to kill that cover crop. And so he looked at stacking
[00:19:29.960]multiple tools into one implement. This is what it looked like. He basically put
[00:19:33.920]a sickle bar on the front of the tractor,
[00:19:37.360]had a roller crimper on the the back of it so that it went through and
[00:19:41.100]sickled things standing up first, knocked them down with the roller crimper,
[00:19:45.100]and then also got that crimping action to to kill anything that was left. So
[00:19:49.680]more complete termination. Then the last one I'll share is Sprout because I
[00:19:55.260]mentioned that a lot of folks are using web-based decision support tools. So the
[00:20:00.360]problem here that the student identified was a lack of local cover crop knowledge
[00:20:03.840]as a barrier to adoption. So she developed a web and mobile app for
[00:20:08.420]farmers, researchers, and extensionists to share data
[00:20:11.080]experiences and resources. And it was beautiful, this thing that she developed.
[00:20:15.200]This was Natasha Zurek, who was at the time a PhD student at Cornell. And so on
[00:20:20.740]this page it was essentially just a discussion board that was themed by
[00:20:24.820]mixes or establishment challenges. But the bread and butter of the Sprout tool
[00:20:29.200]was really a map where cover crop users could enter information about what they
[00:20:35.140]were growing, their seeding rates, their termination
[00:20:37.640]time, and a general kind of review of their experience with that cover crop
[00:20:41.060]so that you could kind of get more local recommendations for what species or
[00:20:46.340]seeding rates or planting times are going to work for you. So Natasha has
[00:20:51.800]given a couple presentations since then about the her development of this web
[00:20:55.280]app. Okay so some reflections on design thinking for innovation in the
[00:21:00.980]classroom before I shift to talking about research. Overall I think the
[00:21:05.940]quality of innovation design is positively correlated with technical
[00:21:09.940]knowledge of the problem.
[00:21:11.040]Even on that condensed time schedule I do think that there is benefit in
[00:21:15.720]working with students in a higher level class where you're already talking about
[00:21:19.040]that technical knowledge and then asking them to do this innovation design.
[00:21:23.340]Customer discovery is challenging but rewarding when they connect. We've talked
[00:21:28.500]about recruiting a pool of potential customers and experts to improve the
[00:21:31.920]experience but it's challenging to know what students are going to work on right
[00:21:35.880]so having pre-identified customers is we have not done yet.
[00:21:41.020]Because of that challenge and then pushing students from design to
[00:21:45.380]creation and prototyping is an ongoing challenge because of time resources and
[00:21:49.600]sometimes collaboration is needed so I think this is maybe a good design to
[00:21:54.080]think about for the future which is working with other classes on campus
[00:21:57.980]particularly in biological systems engineering where they've got senior
[00:22:02.580]design students who are just looking for design projects right but they maybe
[00:22:06.700]don't have the technical knowledge in these sub-discipline areas to be able to pull
[00:22:11.000]off a project so about three four years ago I worked with one of those senior
[00:22:15.800]design projects to develop an applicator for sprayable mulch films and they did a
[00:22:22.000]great job they developed they had a very special pump system that could handle
[00:22:26.100]highly viscous liquids and solutions or suspensions rather they had a hopper
[00:22:32.560]here to store the solutions they had you know the battery here they had
[00:22:37.640]special tires that could get through the field and
[00:22:40.980]and so that was I think a good success of they got to get some prototyping and
[00:22:45.060]design skills I was the customer so I'd love to try to bring those two groups
[00:22:49.740]together our students with the technical expertise and some of those engineering
[00:22:53.340]students who can help us bring our ideas to creation okay so shifting to research
[00:23:00.360]now I just wanted to share an example of design thinking for innovation over the
[00:23:05.280]past four years in our program so the problem that we were working on was
[00:23:10.960]weed management in narrowly spaced high density specialty crops this is a
[00:23:17.560]planting of radishes on a small farm in Minnesota and it's hard to see the
[00:23:22.540]radishes here because there's so many weeds in and around the radish problem
[00:23:26.920]is you can't mechanically cultivate it because the plants are so close together
[00:23:31.200]herbicides are tough because you've got limited options
[00:23:34.780]the result is that a lot of this comes down to hand weeding and so our solution
[00:23:40.940]that I'll show you how we work towards is what we call the root through weed
[00:23:44.620]barrier that's designed for these types of crops
[00:23:47.640]so this is the part of the presentation where the university implores me to
[00:23:52.380]disclose my financial interest because spoiler alert this ends in
[00:23:56.520]commercialization of a product that is for sale so you have to take
[00:24:00.360]everything I say from here on out with that grain of salt
[00:24:02.860]okay so we use the engineering design process so I'll circle back
[00:24:08.320]on how the development of this product
[00:24:10.920]was influenced by design thinking so identifying the problem right what's the
[00:24:15.620]challenge so we know that mulch is a critically
[00:24:18.060]important management tool for specialty crops
[00:24:20.120]if it's not high density narrowly spaced in our program
[00:24:23.520]we use mulch right so we're using a plastic mulch a biodegradable mulch a
[00:24:27.760]paper mulch something to provide soil warming and
[00:24:32.000]moisture conservation or soil cooling if we're trying to grow
[00:24:35.400]for example broccoli and getting it started in July when soil temperatures
[00:24:38.920]are really hot
[00:24:40.900]we're also looking for weed control a lot of our growers are either certified
[00:24:48.340]organic or certified naturally grown or pesticide free so weed control for those
[00:24:53.920]growers is the most important function that we need out of that mulch mulches
[00:24:58.460]can also improve crop quality by creating a barrier between soil pathogens
[00:25:02.340]and the fruits or crop part that you're going to harvest and the problem though
[00:25:07.360]for those high density narrowly spaced crops is that plastic mulch is not
[00:25:10.880]compatible and the reason is that the number of holes required limits the
[00:25:16.560]function of the mulch I had some students get creative in class last
[00:25:19.280]semester and we were in the high tunnel so they took that plastic mulch film and
[00:25:23.240]they planted high density crops in it anyway and in a high tunnel it works
[00:25:27.360]right no wind in the high tunnel right with the sides down so they were able to
[00:25:31.700]direct seed some radishes by hand into these long incisions in the mulch if you
[00:25:36.300]were to try this in the field it would not last very long because the wind
[00:25:39.380]would get underneath there and rip it out
[00:25:40.860]it's also on a commercial scale not very practical because seeding into that is
[00:25:46.500]going to be challenging and so just generally the number of holes or the
[00:25:51.300]surface area required to grow that high density crop kind of renders the mulch
[00:25:55.020]useless and you still get weeds that come through those planting holes and
[00:26:00.120]then if it's a plastic mulch film we're still worried about end-of-life
[00:26:03.060]management so we're part of some efforts based out of Washington State to recycle
[00:26:08.380]plastic mulch film there's been a lot of advances there
[00:26:10.840]but it's still a very small portion of the end-of-life pathway for plastic
[00:26:14.660]mulch film most of it is landfilled or incinerated
[00:26:17.460]and so we're interested in biodegradable or compostable alternatives
[00:26:22.120]so identifying our problem defining our problem our objective was to develop a
[00:26:27.440]mulch system that is compatible with those direct seeded narrowly spaced
[00:26:30.760]crops like lettuce or spinach or carrots comparable to plastic mulch for
[00:26:37.380]weed suppression 100% bio-based and compostable so we don't
[00:26:40.820]have to landfill or incinerate it we did want to help out the certified
[00:26:45.220]organic farms where weed control is of utmost importance and we looked at hand
[00:26:50.720]weeding as kind of our benchmark right we wanted to find something that was
[00:26:54.000]more economical and fun than than hand weeding okay so moving on to the
[00:27:00.680]exploration we started out by exploring materials right so this story starts
[00:27:05.820]back in 2013 when I started working with 3M on evaluating a non woven
[00:27:10.800]polylactic acid based mulch that at the time we were looking at as an
[00:27:15.360]alternative to plastic mulch film in traditional crops like tomatoes peppers
[00:27:19.740]and cucurbits and it worked fine but two main problems with using this as a
[00:27:25.740]replacement for plastic mulch film in traditional traditionally mulch crops
[00:27:29.680]one was it didn't provide the same soil warming benefits that people expect in
[00:27:34.680]tomatoes peppers and cucurbits and the second thing was just the cost it was
[00:27:38.460]considerably more expensive than plastic mulch
[00:27:40.780]film and so when you're looking at it for just the apples to apples function
[00:27:45.100]it didn't it didn't provide enough of the benefits relative to the cost but it
[00:27:51.340]did provide excellent almost complete weed suppression and so I looked at it
[00:27:56.020]and I said is there a different way that we could use this material which is 100%
[00:27:59.680]bio based and compostable and provide weed suppression in a different type of
[00:28:04.020]system or crop so in 2019 we we tested this idea of could we use this because
[00:28:10.760]it's semi permeable can we put a seed on top of this material cover it with a
[00:28:15.320]little bit of soilless mix or compost get it to germinate have that root grow
[00:28:19.980]through it and then and grow it to maturity so that we can get that weed
[00:28:24.920]suppression and so that's what we did we we grew carrots we grew some romaine
[00:28:29.120]lettuce and those are the romaine fibrous romaine lettuce roots and we
[00:28:33.800]were able to harvest a little batch of carrots there we did a little experiment
[00:28:37.220]and publish that work as a proof of concept and so
[00:28:40.740]we found that this is potentially a suitable material to grow these direct
[00:28:44.640]seeded narrowly spaced crops so we had kind of finished that exploration phase
[00:28:49.620]and moving on to design so make a drawing or a model or figure out how
[00:28:56.380]this is going to work at scale so we
[00:28:59.740]We identified the material, but we had to come up with a way to make this work for growers.
[00:29:03.600]And so this has been a bulk of what Caleb has worked on for his PhD is kind of developing the system.
[00:29:09.060]So we use a regular mulch layer that we would use to lay plastic and put it out in the field in our long 200 foot rows.
[00:29:16.680]But then we add a step where we're applying compost in a thin layer on top of that bio-based weed barrier.
[00:29:23.320]So it kind of disappears on us.
[00:29:25.420]And then we take our seeder and we seed directly into that thin layer of compost or on top of it.
[00:29:31.300]And then we irrigate on top of that compost and bio-based weed barrier because it's semi-permeable.
[00:29:37.980]So water can go through it down to the roots.
[00:29:40.060]And then that's it.
[00:29:42.240]So we're basically front loading all of the management to that planting event.
[00:29:46.340]And eliminating any weed control that happens between seeding and harvest.
[00:29:50.820]So these are the carrots that we harvested.
[00:29:52.660]You can see that weed barrier hanging out there.
[00:29:55.380]And carrots about a week before they got harvested.
[00:29:58.020]Okay, so we had our design for how we were going to make this work in the field.
[00:30:03.260]And so we kind of fully entered that creation phase then.
[00:30:06.800]And the creation phase was really thinking about what's the right material or construction for these types of mulches.
[00:30:11.980]So we looked at nine different mulch constructions across three crops in four years.
[00:30:17.140]They varied from just our baseline, what we started with, which was just polylactic acid by itself.
[00:30:22.580]It had two layers, a spun bond layer, which kind of,
[00:30:25.340]kind of looks like a spider web, and then a melt blown layer, which looked more like a felt blanket.
[00:30:29.860]Those get kind of melted together, and that was the PLA only.
[00:30:34.960]Then we also wanted to explore this concept of a fertilizer-enriched mulch
[00:30:39.660]to see if we could integrate nitrogen and weed management.
[00:30:41.960]And then I'll talk about the latest iteration, that root-through weed barrier,
[00:30:46.660]which is a PLA paper composite.
[00:30:48.300]This is what that fertilizer-enriched mulch looked like.
[00:30:51.860]This is soybean meal enriched in that middle layer.
[00:30:55.300]For some, a little bit of nitrogen mineralization for that growing crop.
[00:31:00.700]Lettuce, carrot, and strawberry were the crops that we've worked on the most.
[00:31:04.660]And then we've looked at different planting strategies,
[00:31:07.020]broadcast, traditional furrow or row planting versus transplanting.
[00:31:11.120]Okay, so trying it out, right?
[00:31:14.360]Testing these ideas.
[00:31:15.340]So I'm just going to share the highlights from the first three years of field trials.
[00:31:20.820]If you want more details, Caleb, when he defends, will share.
[00:31:25.260]Like a full hour of data from some of this work.
[00:31:28.440]But these are just one page of highlights.
[00:31:31.120]PLA-only mulch reduces weed emergence by about 80 to 90 percent, regardless of the weight
[00:31:36.960]basis or even whether or not we have fertilizer in there.
[00:31:39.500]So some weeds, including small grasses or even a few pig weeds where those cotyledons
[00:31:44.940]are super small, some of those can sneak through that PLA-only membrane.
[00:31:48.960]So an average of about 85 percent, which we weren't totally satisfied with.
[00:31:54.080]So that's where we'll get.
[00:31:55.220]Into some of those iterations, some evidence of nitrogen immobilization
[00:31:59.500]from the carbon rich PLA and the compost that we put on top.
[00:32:02.820]And that was some of the why we wanted to put fertilizers into the mulch.
[00:32:06.500]Unfortunately, we found that it had very small effects on
[00:32:10.560]on that nitrogen immobilization.
[00:32:12.580]And it's also a fairly expensive manufacturing process
[00:32:15.500]to get the fertilizer into the mulch.
[00:32:17.380]So we decided that that's probably not going to be a sustainable option.
[00:32:21.480]We found that these mulches are helping us
[00:32:25.180]with first year matted rose strawberry establishment.
[00:32:27.520]We get better canopy area and more rooted daughter plants.
[00:32:30.360]And we see this as a big opportunity for this type of mulch.
[00:32:32.920]Matted rose strawberries are typically like a five year production system.
[00:32:37.260]You spend the first year of that strawberry crop
[00:32:39.760]just getting the plants established.
[00:32:41.700]You're actually not harvesting any berries.
[00:32:43.460]You're in fact, you're pruning flowers off of the plant
[00:32:45.840]to try to put all the energy into vegetative growth
[00:32:49.040]so that the goal is by the end of that first year,
[00:32:51.580]you're filling in the bed top and covering it so that you've got
[00:32:55.140]a good weed competition.
[00:32:56.580]If you're an organic grower and you're not using herbicides,
[00:32:59.340]your only option is hand weeding because you can't mechanically cultivate
[00:33:02.940]because you've got these stolons, these runners going every which way.
[00:33:06.660]Right.
[00:33:07.320]So you can't cultivate and if you can't spray, you are hand weeding.
[00:33:11.280]And so we really see this type of technology as a as a winner
[00:33:14.700]for those matted rose strawberry growers.
[00:33:16.920]And then for carrots and lettuce, generally what we're finding
[00:33:19.940]is that yields are kind of unaffected, meaning that there's no
[00:33:25.100]penalty for growing through the mulch once you get it established
[00:33:28.140]compared to a hand weeded weed free control.
[00:33:30.900]So yields tend to be equal to that hand weeding.
[00:33:34.380]One thing that we do observe in this modified planting approach,
[00:33:39.240]putting seeds into that compost instead of direct soil,
[00:33:42.080]is that, as you might imagine, that compost environment is very different.
[00:33:46.060]It gets warmer and drier, right?
[00:33:48.260]Because we've got more pore space between those compost particles
[00:33:51.560]compared to a clay based soil or mineral based soil.
[00:33:55.060]And so this is data we actually collected in Costa Rica
[00:33:59.060]that showed that in that on top of the mulch,
[00:34:02.940]you can see soil temperatures are anywhere from one to two degrees Celsius warmer during the day.
[00:34:08.180]And then even when we're irrigating regularly,
[00:34:10.840]you just can't get volumetric water content equal to direct soil
[00:34:14.580]just because of the differences in texture, right?
[00:34:17.080]So it's a warmer and drier environment for establishing seeds.
[00:34:21.880]So we wanted to use that information to iterate and make this
[00:34:25.020]idea better.
[00:34:27.120]And that's what really led to the formation of our company,
[00:34:30.960]Sage Eco Innovations and the Root Through Brand,
[00:34:35.160]to focus on those next iterations.
[00:34:37.000]So we formed this company to basically commercialize this
[00:34:41.000]product and others like it.
[00:34:43.340]My partner, Ignatius Kodoma, is a former engineer at 3M.
[00:34:47.900]We worked for many years to try to commercialize some projects
[00:34:51.320]with 3M, and ultimately their benchmark is post-it notes, right?
[00:34:54.980]So, they look at weed barriers and they're like, not a post-it note, right?
[00:34:58.920]So, they're looking for scale and volume and we can't quite deliver that no matter
[00:35:03.780]how many vegetable farms there are, so we just decided to make this venture on our own
[00:35:09.880]to replace some of the more petrochemical-based plastic products.
[00:35:14.580]Our first step was to apply for a Department of Economic Development academic R&D grant.
[00:35:20.220]If you're not aware of this program, it's fantastic, it's not one of the more competitive
[00:35:24.940]grant programs that maybe we're used to applying for.
[00:35:28.140]They often have more money than they can use in a given year.
[00:35:31.980]So if you have something from your research program that you're interested in commercializing,
[00:35:35.780]the academic R&D grants are a great tool for you.
[00:35:39.800]There's a modest match of 20% for ag-based products compared to a 50% match if it's non-ag.
[00:35:46.040]So very ag-friendly.
[00:35:49.500]And so this is where we are now.
[00:35:50.640]So we've got a partner in Minnesota who sells our products on Amazon.
[00:35:54.900]We have three different weed barriers, and that's the one that I want to talk about.
[00:35:58.260]So the PLA plus paper mulch aim to address those issues that I've mentioned, which is
[00:36:05.740]we wanted to get weed suppression above that 80% to 90% threshold.
[00:36:10.400]We also wanted to improve moisture retention near germinating seeds.
[00:36:14.300]And that's why we brought in the paper, was that it's more hydrophilic.
[00:36:18.120]It's going to keep moisture in that seed zone a little bit longer.
[00:36:21.080]It was also just an economic reality that that melt blown layer that I talked
[00:36:24.860]about, the one that is a little bit like a felt fabric, is really slow to make.
[00:36:30.780]So it's a lot of time on a manufacturing machine and it's a lot of material, a lot of resin.
[00:36:36.040]And that PLA resin is pretty expensive compared to polyethylene resin.
[00:36:41.900]So we wanted to replace it with paper, which was less expensive.
[00:36:45.980]And so we also started to look at some different planting approaches where we put the seeds
[00:36:50.340]in a broadcast pattern versus furrows or rows.
[00:36:54.820]We'll talk about this, but the reason that we wanted to look at these two different approaches
[00:36:58.080]was that with the broadcast method, it works really well unless you get a torrential rain
[00:37:04.880]event right after planting.
[00:37:07.320]Then we invented a new term for the soil scientists in the room, compost erosion, right?
[00:37:12.840]So after that like two inch per hour type of rainfall event, the compost can wash off
[00:37:18.780]your bed top, even with just the slightest amount of slope.
[00:37:21.960]And so that's a situation where you're going to have to replant.
[00:37:24.780]So to avoid that, we developed this furrow approach where we make furrows in the soil,
[00:37:29.740]then we cover it with the bio-based film, and then we're just putting compost into that
[00:37:33.140]furrow.
[00:37:34.140]And that seems to solve the issue of erosion.
[00:37:38.560]So the PLA plus paper mulch did reduce weed density in our most recent trials by 91 to
[00:37:46.400]95%, regardless of whether we were using this broadcast or furrow approach compared to bare
[00:37:51.300]soil.
[00:37:52.300]So at least so far, we've been able to improve.
[00:37:54.740]We'd suppression a little bit.
[00:37:57.540]In terms of yields, we do see that the broadcast methods we harvested across a couple of different
[00:38:03.100]dates here and the broadcast method, we get a little bit more yield compared to bare soil,
[00:38:09.140]but really not different from the furrow method.
[00:38:12.300]And most of those yield differences are just driven by planting, planting rates and just
[00:38:17.380]final plant density.
[00:38:18.620]So lettuce density on the bedtop is much higher when you use that broadcast approach compared
[00:38:24.140]to.
[00:38:24.700]Growing in furrows or bare soil.
[00:38:27.380]And then of course the broadcast you get smaller leaves.
[00:38:29.820]If you think about baby leaf lettuce, right?
[00:38:31.720]Very small leaves.
[00:38:33.020]It's good for that.
[00:38:34.020]But if you want the bigger leaves, you got to go with the furrow method where you've
[00:38:37.280]got more plant spacing, lower populations.
[00:38:40.840]But what we were interested in was this overall establishment success rate, right?
[00:38:44.720]Because that's what we were aiming to improve.
[00:38:47.640]So the furrow method did seem to give us a little bit of a modest improvement in establishment
[00:38:52.660]success.
[00:38:53.660]We didn't have that torrential rainfall.
[00:38:54.660]We didn't have that rainfall event after planting, so couldn't really measure that.
[00:38:57.700]But just generally a deeper layer of compost in a furrow did help with establishment.
[00:39:03.120]And then this really low success that we find in the bare control is really a result of
[00:39:07.200]hand weeding.
[00:39:08.200]So every time you go out and you pull those weeds, you inevitably are bringing up some
[00:39:11.340]crop with you, especially when you're planting at a really high density.
[00:39:14.760]So that's where we're losing a lot of the plants in bare soil.
[00:39:18.580]Okay, so a brief look at the economics of this type of mulch system.
[00:39:24.620]So when we sell these rolls to a grower, we sell it at wholesale costs, which comes down
[00:39:30.460]to about 35 cents per linear bed foot.
[00:39:33.360]We work with small scale growers who think in square feet, linear bed feet.
[00:39:38.680]So that is approximately 10 to 50% more expensive than your typical plastic geotextile barrier
[00:39:46.800]or a paper mulch that organic growers can currently use.
[00:39:50.840]You do have the added cost of some type of compost or soilless media.
[00:39:54.580]Compost around us would cost a grower about six cents per linear bed foot.
[00:39:59.360]The application costs, tractor costs through the field on a custom rate would be less than
[00:40:04.320]one cent per linear bed foot, so we'll call it a penny.
[00:40:07.220]So all in, this type of system for a grower costs 42 cents per linear bed foot.
[00:40:12.580]That's about 3% of the gross revenue potential for organic spring mix lettuce here in Nebraska.
[00:40:18.760]So Shadowbrook Farm, for example, sells at about a rate of $14 per linear bed foot.
[00:40:24.540]for the same type of product.
[00:40:27.940]And so again, we're comparing this back to hand weeding as a substitute for hand weeding.
[00:40:32.100]So Caleb has done a great job over the last three years of monitoring how much time our
[00:40:38.600]team spends hand weeding the bare soil controls.
[00:40:41.920]And it's about four minutes per linear bed foot across the whole season.
[00:40:45.520]That's sometimes four, five, six weeding events, right, to keep it close to weed free.
[00:40:50.780]So at a $15 average worker rate.
[00:40:54.500]And that four minutes per linear bed foot comes out to be about a dollar per linear
[00:40:57.980]bed foot and weeding costs.
[00:40:59.960]So our break even is about 1.7 minutes per linear bed foot.
[00:41:03.680]So as long as you're spending or would be spending more than 1.7 minutes to weed that
[00:41:09.100]bed, this mulch system is more cost effective.
[00:41:13.660]And that does not consider opportunity costs, right?
[00:41:15.900]I can say, Caleb will back me up, that hand weeding is the least fun thing that students
[00:41:20.860]do on our team.
[00:41:22.120]And I think that growers feel the same way.
[00:41:24.460]One of the motivations for this project was about five years ago, I talked to a student
[00:41:29.860]who had interned on an organic farm over the summer.
[00:41:33.580]And what she told me was, I spent 75% of my time hand weeding carrots, just carrots, right?
[00:41:40.760]So that high density, narrowly spaced crop.
[00:41:43.820]And so it wasn't one of our students, don't worry.
[00:41:45.900]So it was not a bad internship experience.
[00:41:48.000]But anyway, this kind of made it clear to me that like, there's an opportunity cost.
[00:41:54.420]Right there that when you're having that intern or that worker hand weeding, there's something
[00:41:59.640]else more valuable that they could be doing with that time.
[00:42:02.360]So it's not just the $15 per hour, it's the lost opportunity that you could be adding
[00:42:07.360]value somewhere else on the farm.
[00:42:09.100]Okay, so some reflections on the research component here.
[00:42:13.100]We found that non-woven PLA can act as a semi-permeable weed membrane.
[00:42:18.520]And then combining it with paper did help us to improve weed suppression and establishment.
[00:42:23.520]We found that
[00:42:24.380]major enrichment was really not worth the cost.
[00:42:28.820]PLA plus paper mulch is 100% bio-based and compostable.
[00:42:33.680]We've got certification pending on that.
[00:42:36.400]It takes like 10 months to get that compostable certification.
[00:42:40.100]We're waiting on the lettuce toxicity bioassays to show that taking the composted product,
[00:42:47.380]mixing it with soil and growing lettuce is not toxic to the lettuce.
[00:42:51.680]But everything else is cleared.
[00:42:53.540]We've got
[00:42:54.340]100% bio based certification from USDA.
[00:42:56.880]We do have a couple of organic farmers in Minnesota that are trialing this
[00:43:01.720]and actually got approval from their certifiers with one caveat.
[00:43:05.320]They do have to remove the PLA from the field whenever they're finished using it.
[00:43:09.520]The paper part of the composite can stay, but the PLA needs to be taken
[00:43:13.820]to a commercial composting facility, which is the preferred end of life outcome
[00:43:18.340]because PLA will deteriorate in soil, but it will take a long time to degrade.
[00:43:24.300]So, it's a good idea to get a paper that's based on its properties. Okay, so future research or iterations to improve this. We're finding that a lot of our early adopters are using the mulch for cut flowers and ornamentals in the landscape. So, this is a grower who is using it to grow zinnias. And so, it's a nice way to get a weed-free patch of flowers along a sidewalk or for a cut flower operation. So, we're interested in exploring those landscaping applications. Okay, so, as I mentioned,
[00:43:54.260]this work goes back as far as 2013. So, many thanks to the collaborators. Caleb has been the
[00:44:00.200]big leader on these efforts over the last three years. The rest of our lab team, Mia and Colin,
[00:44:05.700]we've done a lot of work to look at soil microbes over the years in these systems with Ray and
[00:44:11.660]Lisa Durso and Liz Jeske. Some of the folks that I worked with in Costa Rica on this were Manuel
[00:44:17.800]and Claudio. My partner Ignatius and Chris worked with us on this most recent project. And then
[00:44:24.220]I worked with some of the folks in Costa Rica with the cover crops class. Variety of different
[00:44:29.380]funding sources through USDA. And I think we've got time to talk. So what questions do you have?
[00:44:36.080]Thank you for the insightful presentation. Now we're open for the questions if you have any
[00:44:52.280]questions. Bruce?
[00:44:54.180]What's your marketing aspect of the product?
[00:44:57.140]I'll admit marketing the product.
[00:45:00.320]That is a great question and it is in progress. So just the long-term kind of goal,
[00:45:08.180]we're using Amazon to launch the products, but if you've ever worked with a weed barrier,
[00:45:14.820]they are big and bulky, right? So shipping is a challenge. So really for us, a better pathway is
[00:45:21.780]brick and mortar retail. So we're using Amazon to launch the products, but if you've ever worked
[00:45:24.140]so we've been using typical social media, Instagram, and then also ads through Amazon
[00:45:29.920]to market the product, right? Because you go to Amazon, you search weed barrier,
[00:45:35.000]it pops up as a search result, right? And then just getting a lot of our early adopters
[00:45:41.060]through Instagram to share their story, like Caleb. Caleb grew some Cosmos in his garden this
[00:45:47.580]summer. So getting those products and just those pictures and sharing out how people are using it
[00:45:54.100]but yeah, ultimately the goal is to get it into brick and mortar retail. Yep. Daniel.
[00:46:01.680]Oh, yeah.
[00:46:04.320]So I didn't quite get the, there was a disconnect in my mind about at first you said it was too
[00:46:12.840]expensive and then you are now selling it. Where does, how do you, how did you overcome the expense
[00:46:21.520]of the production? Yeah, good question. So
[00:46:24.060]the shift that we made was the application. And so the big expense disconnect was when
[00:46:33.700]we were looking at it as a apples to apples replacement for plastic mulch film. So we do
[00:46:40.420]have people using it for growing tomatoes and peppers, despite, you know, like it's kind of
[00:46:46.160]one of those, like we designed it for densely spaced high density crops, right? But what we end up
[00:46:54.020]finding, and you see this in like Amazon reviews, right, is that people get it, and they may use a
[00:46:58.660]little bit of it for that purpose, but then they still plant tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers in it.
[00:47:03.220]But as far as economics for a commercial grower, it would not be, and I tell commercial growers
[00:47:09.800]this when they ask, I say, this is not an economical alternative to plastic mulch film
[00:47:13.860]for traditionally mulched crops, right? There are more cost effective alternatives for those
[00:47:19.400]crops. This is really a solution where the economics work if you're comparing it to hand
[00:47:23.980]weeding. So, for black plastic mulch film, it's not a great option.
[00:47:30.540]So, the other question I had was, how does the paper work? You know, I have this idea,
[00:47:36.700]you have this woven material and then a piece of paper under it. Is the paper woven as well?
[00:47:43.540]No, but the paper is creped. So, the paper, the creped paper has a higher,
[00:47:53.940]water absorption and water holding capacity. And it's not, it's not as porous as the non-woven,
[00:48:00.880]but it is, especially when wet, it is highly porous to root growth. So,
[00:48:06.640]so we don't see any issues with that, that rooting through. Yep. Yep. Yep.
[00:48:13.260]Is this only for seeded crops or can you transplant into it? Yeah, good question.
[00:48:23.900]You can transplant into it a couple of ways. So we've actually seen again, where growers buy it,
[00:48:29.840]they plant a little bit of it to that spring mix lettuce or carrots, and then, but they want to
[00:48:33.980]plant the rest of that garden bed or, or farm to tomatoes or peppers, and they'll just use it like
[00:48:38.920]a traditional weed barrier. They'll poke a hole in it. Right. But we also see where people will
[00:48:44.400]actually like create a mound, right. And then put their, their plug into it. So it's still
[00:48:49.440]rooting through the barrier. You don't have a planting hole. But the other unique aspect
[00:48:53.860]of the PLA that we find, I gave a talk about this at a conference a few months ago. And
[00:49:00.420]it was somebody from NRCS came up and said, I really like this as a potential application
[00:49:04.840]for windbreaks. Because what they said with windbreaks, what we're seeing is that growers
[00:49:09.500]or landowners will plant a windbreak with geotextile, and then set it and forget it,
[00:49:14.800]right. And then as those trees or bushes grow, that geotextile, the polypropylene does not
[00:49:20.440]expand with the crop, and it girdles it, right. And then you get into these design
[00:49:23.820]situations where you have to go out and tear out each one by hand, and then you've got reduced
[00:49:31.080]plant health. So with the PLA, as with the roots, same with stems, we're able to expand with the
[00:49:37.260]stem of the plant. So for woody plants, we're excited about the potential for tree and shrub
[00:49:43.320]establishment. You also talked about using it with the strawberries in a five-year type of crop.
[00:49:53.780]Situation there compared to these annuals.
[00:49:56.000]Yeah, so for the matted row system, we really want by the end of the first year, you want that
[00:50:05.380]whole bed top covered in plant material with strawberries. And so really the goal for the
[00:50:11.560]mulch is to hold the weeds back for the first year. And you're also going to get some residual
[00:50:17.960]suppression beyond that, but it's really that first year that we're trying to tackle. And we've shown
[00:50:23.740]Caleb's work that those daughter plants can successfully root through the mulch. And so we
[00:50:29.120]can get a weed-free establishment of the matted row with the product. We start from bare root. So
[00:50:36.560]that's an example where we are transplanting the bare root through the mulch. We poke a hole in it
[00:50:41.720]and then allow the daughter plants to root through without a hole. Yeah. Yeah, Richard.
[00:50:47.800]Back on the instructional side. Yeah.
[00:50:53.700]You mentioned a little technical knowledge is helpful to understand. My son teaches industrial
[00:50:59.560]design and occasionally in his students' studios, fairly often actually, they'll come up with ideas
[00:51:06.860]related to crop production or agriculture. Yeah.
[00:51:09.520]And occasionally he'll send me those ideas and often I will respond back to him, well, that
[00:51:17.000]really doesn't make any sense because they don't understand anything about soils or plants or
[00:51:21.640]growing crops. Yeah.
[00:51:23.660]So a question I guess is, have you explored the opportunity to engage your students from
[00:51:29.420]an agricultural perspective with students like in the College of Architecture or Engineering
[00:51:36.240]who have the design perspective? Because a little bit of design experience is really
[00:51:41.280]helpful to somebody that doesn't have that background.
[00:51:43.540]Right. Would there be an opportunity to interface
[00:51:46.120]studios in those two environments to work together on projects?
[00:51:50.040]Yeah, I think there's tremendous opportunity. We haven't, we haven't
[00:51:53.620]explored it in earnest. That one-off that I described with BSE, so Deepak was the instructor
[00:51:59.160]there, so we worked together on that. But that was just me as the client. I would love
[00:52:02.680]to have our students acting as the client to inform that technical knowledge. But also
[00:52:08.320]still being allowed to participate in some of the iterative design, even if they don't
[00:52:13.380]have the tools. So yes, that'd be the long-term vision, right, would be to kind of merge two
[00:52:20.340]classes to work on a semester-long project.
[00:52:23.580]Yeah, I like that idea.
[00:52:34.920]So who are the customers you're aiming this product at? Because my understanding of the
[00:52:42.460]vast amount of lettuce that's grown in the U.S., although I'd love to buy from local
[00:52:47.240]farms when it's available, is grown in California and Arizona. And I don't think they use mulch
[00:52:53.540]in their growing systems.
[00:52:55.580]Right. Yep. So to be sure, this is what we call a scale-appropriate technology. And so
[00:53:01.380]our target customers are growers selling at farmer's markets. Yeah, it's not going to
[00:53:07.460]be a solution for the California lettuce bowl. This is really like a Nebraska, Minnesota,
[00:53:13.240]Iowa. This is a small-scale technology. So again, where most of that hand-weeding is
[00:53:19.780]happening. And so the scale of production in
[00:53:23.500]California, they're doing some hand-weeding, but it's very supplemental. And in some cases,
[00:53:29.340]it's almost aesthetic. And I've actually talked to some companies in California that say some
[00:53:34.160]of the hand-weeding is actually just, it's very aesthetic in that they have employees
[00:53:39.840]that they need to keep busy in between tasks, right? They can't send them home. They have
[00:53:44.200]guaranteed hours. And so it's like, go find some weeds, right? And so that's a reality.
[00:53:49.520]And so, yeah, for us, this is our target customer is either the
[00:53:53.460]backyard gardener, urban farmer, and like one to five acre, small scale lettuce, strawberry grower.
[00:54:00.040]Yeah.
[00:54:00.680]Look forward to trying your product.
[00:54:05.060]Yeah, right.
[00:54:05.820]Thank you, everyone, for the questions. Probably we move to the online.
[00:54:12.160]So we have one of the questions.
[00:54:23.420]We often hear the thread ways that we spend plenty of time learning how to do things right.
[00:54:29.740]Methods, replication, data collection, and very little deciding how to do the right things.
[00:54:36.320]Those that will make an impact.
[00:54:38.720]How does your framework of steps help us to focus first on the latter?
[00:54:43.440]That's a very good question.
[00:54:46.540]I think to address that, you know, the question is kind of like, how do you know you're going
[00:54:53.380]after the right thing, right?
[00:54:54.540]And so part of this framework and part of it, they talk about at IDEO, it's one of their
[00:54:59.540]mantras is fail often and fail fast, right?
[00:55:02.740]And so it's this idea that like with that sketching format and kind of this iterative,
[00:55:07.800]you don't want to spend too much time testing things because you just want to learn quick,
[00:55:13.020]fail fast, fail often and iterate.
[00:55:15.000]And so that actually has been a little bit of a challenge, like that innovation mantra
[00:55:21.900]and idea.
[00:55:23.340]In kind of coming from an academic background where it's like, you do two years of field
[00:55:28.320]research and then you publish it, right?
[00:55:30.300]And so the pathway that I've taken as we've tried to iterate on this is we do end up publishing
[00:55:37.560]a lot of like preliminary studies or what they call like from the field reports.
[00:55:41.860]And I'll submit it as a preliminary report.
[00:55:44.680]And but oftentimes they'll be like, nope, come talk to me when you've got two years
[00:55:48.140]of field data.
[00:55:48.640]And it's like, I'm not going to get two years of field data because we're failing off and
[00:55:51.800]failing fast and failing.
[00:55:53.300]Often and failing fast.
[00:55:54.580]I don't I have no reason to replicate this because we've already moved on to the next
[00:55:58.560]iteration, right?
[00:55:59.340]We just want to share out what we learn from this past iteration and move on.
[00:56:03.260]And so there is a disconnect between, you know, that typical expectations and agronomy
[00:56:08.960]research versus this innovation approach.
[00:56:10.960]But yeah, that's my best advice is just try a lot of things, fail often, fail fast.
[00:56:15.780]Thank you for your answer.
[00:56:18.260]So we got one last question here.
[00:56:20.440]Controlling polymer amaranth is a major.
[00:56:23.260]Issue for organic corn or soybean producers, because it is resistant to a number of herbicides.
[00:56:29.560]Is there any opportunity to use plastic mulch in organic corn or soybean production?
[00:56:35.140]Specifically plastic mulch?
[00:56:38.720]Yes.
[00:56:39.120]So increasingly plastic mulch films, if you look in the literature, at least I've not
[00:56:44.400]been there to ground truth this, but in China, there is a lot of plastic mulch film that
[00:56:48.960]gets used even for maize production.
[00:56:50.780]And so I think.
[00:56:53.220]I think that there, there is an economical option for doing that.
[00:56:57.260]I've tried, I've spent a lot of time daydreaming about some type of physical mulch application,
[00:57:03.460]even just like narrow strips for in real weed control and corn and soybean, the economics
[00:57:08.280]are so tough.
[00:57:09.080]So yeah, it's you have, you've got to have a pretty bad herbicide resistant weed population
[00:57:15.120]to resort to a physical weed control.
[00:57:17.640]Yeah.
[00:57:19.420]Okay.
[00:57:22.620]So Dennis.
[00:57:23.180]This is actually our last question.
[00:57:24.560]So we wrap it on time, I guess.
[00:57:27.100]Thank you so much for your insightful presentation from the design thinking and how to make it
[00:57:32.160]to a real product and doing the research about it.
[00:57:35.500]So thank you everyone for coming here today.
[00:57:37.820]And we will still have another series of the seminar in fall semesters.
[00:57:42.600]And next week, we will have the seminar on October 10th about manures.
[00:57:47.800]So thank you once again for coming and joining us.
[00:57:50.880]Thank you.
[00:57:57.880]Thank you.

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Design Thinking for Specialty Crop Innovations in the Field and Classroom

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