My name is Luke Brubaker of Brubaker Farms.
We've been recognized as Keystone Farmer of the Year.
We've been recognized as Master Farmer.
We are regulated very heavily because of the size of our operation.
For us, we don't look at them all as regulation.
We look at them as benefits.
Our conservation practices have an economic value to them,
and this is what's so important.
We have about 18 best management practices,
but I think I'm just going to run across some of the top ones here.
Here we just had two and a half inches of rain last night,
and the ground looks as good as gold with our conservation practice there.
After your no-till for a couple of years,
your soil kind of gets like a full of roots,
and it's kind of like a sponge no-till economically.
And number one is you don't need to use all that fuel to plow until the fields.
If you have a dry year, you're going to get a much better crop
because it holds that moisture down there just like a sponge.
It's just the greatest conservation practice that you can have.
What we're going to now over here is to the digester.
You can see how it's blown up.
There's about 700,000 gallons of manure underneath that cover.
The gas is going through these pipes over these white pipes here
and going over into the generator there to make electricity for approximately 200 homes.
Here's where we separate the solids from the manure.
It's actually separating the undigested food fibers.
Right here is some of the separated solids.
It's basically passage in free,
and passage in free means no germs.
It basically doesn't hardly have a smell,
and after it goes through the digester,
the liquids and the solids are changed from an organic to an inorganic form,
which is much more readily available for the plant to use right away when you apply it on the field.
And also we use it to bed the cows because it's passage in free.
Right here there's a hole in the floor and there's warm air coming up through there.
We're just using excess heat from the digester engine to dry it even further
before we bed the cows or sell it to golf courses or to landscapers to get some of it off the farm.
All right, let's travel.
This here is one of the best carbon footprint heifer barns in the United States.
We have the automatic scrapers.
We have low-energy motors.
We recycle the bedding here from another barn.
We have low-energy lights,
and these animals here are free to move around and eat and drink and be happy and merry.
You can see how we have our streams buffered here.
It motivates farmers to do good practices because if the streams are clean,
our benefit is that we know our nutrients stand on the field
and our water is staying on the field to grow our crops.
The more land that we can preserve and farm properly,
we're going to have that soil that's going to be here that we can grow our food for our nation,
and that's so important to me, that we're going to have a good future.
Thank you.
