At Gateway Farm: Splitting with the 700-Series

All right. Well, finally we made it to the Gateway Farm. Here with Abby and Trent. We had a little bit of a hiccup on the way down last night, but you've probably seen one of our other videos that Trent, Master of Emergency Field Repair, was able to get our trailer all patched up. But here we are and, so, it's great to finally be here with you guys.

Thank you guys for making the trip up.

Yeah, so, so far we've had a wonderful visit. They’ve got quite a place here and I think later on in this video or in subsequent videos we'd love to show you more and certainly they've got their own channel. They put up lots of great content of all the fun stuff they do here, so be sure to check out their channel. Do you want to, you know, tell them where to go to see that kind of content?

Yep, we're mostly on Instagram and Facebook at The Gateway Farm, so those are two primaries, so be sure to check that out, but, you know, being our first visit here, maybe tell us a little bit about what your operation here is all about. This place is great.

So, we bought the land six years ago or seven years ago 2012. Or, 2014. There we go. And, we've just been building up to a diversified farm where we're going to have an on-site farm stand. We ship our maple, pretty much worldwide, and so we've just been adding a little bit every year. Four years ago, [this] was a sugar house. Right now, we're in production of building a barn to house a multitude of livestock and just try to be self-sufficient, but spread it with the people that we know and whatever we can ship, we're gonna try to ship.

So, Trent already let the cat out of the bag. Something that we hinted at on the drive up here. We've, you know, having never been here, one of the things we were most excited about was seeing this maple syrup operation that Abby and Trent have going on up here. When is the best season to come check out the syrup operation?

Definitely March. That's when the sap is flowing and the wood is being put to the arch to boil at a very high temperature and the smell of maple’s everywhere, so yeah I would definitely say, March.

All right, cause you can see behind us this is their awesome building that Trent built, so we'll get deeper into this later on. But, we're hopefully going to come back and they're going to show us that operation.

So you said you bought the place about six years ago. How big is the farm? Yeah, we bought it in 2014. We initially bought it with 321 acres. We, uh, the next year were approached by some neighbors that had adjoining land that they didn't really know anything about. Land-locked between us and another neighbor, so we acquired, we bought 24 more acres, so we're now at 345. About 300 of that is woodlot, so we utilize it with a skidder and a sawmill where we mill all our product that we use for all our outbuildings. Our own firewood, Sugar House firewood, my father's firewood. We don't sell firewood. Not enough time in the day yet, so, but other than that, we use the 40 acres of fields that we have. 20 of it is cow pasture, another, well, that's beef cow pasture, and then there's our milk cow and her heifers, and then pigs are rotationally grazed, so we've got, probably out all that, 16 acres of hayland and then we rent it and buy in more hay to sustain throughout the winter.

Well sounds like you’ve got a lot going on. We've talked about the maple syrup, something else that Trent just mentioned is, is it timber framing? Is that what that kind of work is called? Yeah, yep, timber framing is this is kind of old school, older style of beams and mortise and tenon instead of just 2x-material being stick framed. So the Sugar House is a timber-frame material that was all sawed off the land; pulled off the land for logs and milled right here. So, it doesn't go very far, it stays right here.

I think you were you were saying that some of that expertise runs in your family? Yeah, my father, my grandfather, grandfather on both sides [were] carpenters. One of them was during the Great Depression. He was a carpenter in Burlington, so it's been handed down, but certainly the the timber frame is kind of a niche to us. And, we really like specializing in that. It's not your everyday construction that, you know, a lot of people can do, so it's neat to be able to showcase a sugar house that isn't your ordinary.

The maple sugaring is also a generational thing. Yes, yeah, that's been eight generations of maple sugaring. And, then, what about the name of the farm? How did you come up with that?

You wanna say that one? Um, it kinda has a bunch of different angles to it. When our farm was being fundraised for because the development easements were sold into a trust, they considered this valley, when they were fundraising, as the Gateway Project. And, they came up with that name, because this is a stretch of road that kind of is the gateway into the town of Bristol and Bristol's town slogan name is, “The gateway to the green mountains.” You can see the Bristol, Vermont town sign has, “The gateway to the green mountains” printed on the sign, so it felt like there was a “gateway” in a bunch of different ways that way, and then, as cheesy as it may sound, this was like, a dream come true for Trent and I, and so it was kind of the gateway to our dreams. And, our last name is Rolo and it's often pronounced wrong, so we didn't really want to use the last name. I mean, there's seven different variations, so we didn't want to have just you know “The Rolo Farm” and we wanted something that was a little bit easier to say.

Well, the name is great. I think that's a great story, too.

Yeah, it just kind of seemed like it fit.

And people think Vermont, they think green mountains and this is as authentic as it gets. I mean, we're in this beautiful little valley. What's the name of the river that runs through here? Baldwin Creek.

Okay, so, they've got water, they've got well water, everything. I mean, there's so much we could go into today, but Trent also mentioned that they don't sell firewood, but they sure split a hell of a lot of it. Tell us a little bit more about your firewood side of things.

So, the maple sugaring, before we added some newer advancements into the reverse osmosis and some advancements on our actual sugar arch that helped with efficiency, we were doing about 50 cord of firewood just for sugaring. Just one season's worth. One season, yeah. And then we've got it down to the point right now where we're about 15 cord. Last year was a short season and we did 12 or 13. Year before that, we did 22 cord, so we're kind of in the average of 15 cord and then our house is five cord of firewood. So there's never, you know, we're always splitting firewood somewhere for something.

Now, the house, how much of your annual heating is the firewood? It was 100% until last year. We actually invested in a heat pump that does mostly October and May weather. Once it gets below a certain temperature, we like to do wood stoves, so it's just not costing us a lot of electricity. But, we've got a big wood stove in the house to keep us warm when it's negative 20, so when it's kind of mild, with the wood stove going, yeah when it’s 40 at night, 35-40 at night, then it gets 60 in the day and you're starting a wood stove, and then you're opening all the windows, so we said it was just that intermediate couple of weeks, you know, spring and fall, that we wanted to take care of.

So, where are you getting the wood because you've got all of this land? The wood is all off of our property. All right. You're logging your own land. Yep, if we're logging our land, we'll save the tops of the trees for our personal firewood. If it's a sailable saw log or if it's something we're gonna mill or when we thin out our sugar woods, we're taking whole trees out and, you know, whether it's saw logs or we're keeping it for firewood. So, I mean, this sort of gets into how we got to know Abby and Trent and how this question of, you know, splitting firewood came up.

What have you been using so far to split, you know, anywhere from 20 to 50 cord a year? I assume you’re not swinging an ax? No. we stopped that a long time ago. We've got a three-point hitch, handmade by my grandfather 50 years ago, 40 years ago, and it's kind of slowing down and needs some work. We've also hired a guy with a firewood processor and had some issues with that, so we're trying to kind of just stay localized to ourselves here. Self-sufficient. Yeah.

So, it sounds like the tractor mount, which works for a lot of folks and you've certainly got the tractors, but, yeah, you know, it's got a productivity issue. You know, you're doing a couple of cord a year for your cosmetic fires or a little additional heat. That works great, but I think your workload kind of gets beyond what a tractor mount can do. So, I think that gets into the RuggedMade splitter because, you know, Trent and Abby reached out and had talked to us about our splitters in particular 700-Series, which seems like it probably is a good fit for someone who, you know, needs more than your store-bought, you know, smaller, slower machine. Probably need some speed.

Now, do you tend to operate by yourself or with help? What's the typical splitting session like for you? All of the above. If we get an hour, Abby will go out there by herself and split. If I can line up somebody to help, if Abby's doing chores around the farm and doing stuff, I'll have somebody help and we'll split for a couple hours where there's just one person splitting. We have a conveyor that we use a lot of times into our dump truck. Nice. That's with the three-point hitch on our tractor, but this hopefully, you know, being self-sufficient, I can use the bucket of the tractor and transport the tractor instead of using our dump truck. So, a lot of pros to that and, I mean, the idea is that we don't have to have a tractor tied up all the time. Yeah. You can go out there and start it and split for a half hour if you want instead of trying to make a five-hour production out of it.

Well, I think it's time to break out the splitter. I mean, we came all this way to come see the operation here and bring the splitter up here. Let's open the trailer and roll it out. Sounds like a plan.

Watch out, Maddie!

All right, guys, so here it is. Here's our RuggedMade 728-30. We talked before and we thought that this would be a good fit for you. Having talked about what kind of wood you're splitting, how much you're splitting, what kind of furnace you're putting into, but maybe tell folks a little bit about what your needs were for that kind of stuff. Yes, certainly. The house is gonna be shorter than the Sugar House and that's mostly hardwood. Okay. So, definitely, you know, I think our wood stove is 20 inch, 22 inch, so it's about in there but the Sugar House is as long as we can get it, but we don't really like handling four foot sticks of wood, so 30 inches is ample for that and the fire box is actually eight feet deep, so sometimes we'll stack two rows of, you know, wood lengths inside the fire box to get it more longer, even heat. But, yeah, it's just a mix of hardwoods and softwoods for the Sugar House. Mostly longer but straighter grains so speed is always a killer, you know, as we always want to go as fast as possible. Unfortunately, when you're splitting firewood, I think with the, you know, the volume you're doing and you're not even commercially selling it, it's just for your own use, so yeah, the 728, you know, that's got, I think, plenty of power to split what you're splitting. You know, we're not talking about taking down some you know giant old tree full of knots you want to move and, as we, later I think we'll head over to this woodpile, do a little bit of splitting. Absolutely. And we can break out the stroke restrictor, which is, you know, it's an attempt to kind of give you the best of both worlds. You know, most people know about these, you know, return detents and you kind of want to be able to keep your hands free, but if you're only splitting 20-inch, 18-20 inch rounds, this is going to allow you to set that stroke restrictor, save that extra cycle time, and speed things up. So we can get in some of the details when we get over by the wood pile. And then, yeah, we'll talk about some things like, this has got the log lift. I mean, that really, I think, is going to be key. That's a key for me! Yeah, and it really, I don't know, doesn't matter how big you are or how many people you have. It pretty much takes three people to really keep up with this thing. Yeah. We borrowed one from a friend a couple years ago that had a log lift and, you know, I was like, “Wow, I don't need a log lift.” but just to stack five or six rounds there and you just roll them in and, I mean, it's the efficiency was a lot faster, even though we didn't really use it myself for the lift purpose but it had a tray, you know, a table you could just stack your next blocks there with. Yeah. I mean, it's great having the tractor with a bucket or a Bobcat to bring the logs over to the staging area, but still just having that be able to lift it up. And, even if you just leave it up as a work table. Right, yeah. You know, that was the three splits part of it was just having it as a work table. Yeah. So, we've got the four-way on there. We’ve got some other things we can talk about but, anyway, so I think it's time to probably head over to your wood pile and … sounds like a plan … get it fired up and split some wood.

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So that's, you know, basically what we call storage or transportation mode. You know, have people, like, throw a tarp over it.

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But, we're gonna raise that just enough to get this in there. Other than that, it's good to go.

So we got our, you know, our log lift and our out-and-back with our detent and I got a four-way, and, all right. Let's choose the first log. All right. You have at it. How small do you usually go? We burn anything. I like to call them overnighters. Yeah. If they're big, they're overnighters.

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So right now we got this unrestricted, we've got the 30-inch stroke going, we're going to split a few this long and then we'll put the stroke restrictor in, get it down to, we'll probably put in the 20-inch position, since a lot of this log looks like about 18-20 inches.

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There we go. All right. Go for it.

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Does that need to get smaller? No, that’s perfect. That’s an overnighter. That's a Sugar House cut right there.

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Why don’t we throw that stroke restrictor in? All right. Well that batch went pretty well. Yeah. So, these holes are where you get the choice of a 20-inch cut, a 24-inch cut, and then unrestricted is 30 inches on this machine. And then, this is the storage spot for the stroke restrictor.

I think that that log must have been 31 maybe.

All right. So this little guy is just going to kind of psych out the valve's detent mechanism and save you some cycle time. Now, you do one cord. I don't know if you notice the difference, but you do 10, 15, 20 cord. Oh, no. That, yeah, taking off that foot every time is a big difference. You can crank down pretty tight on that because you don't really want it to rock and then, yeah, let's go for it. These usually like a bit of choke to start.

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When you cut, do you use any measuring tool, like those magnetic things? Just my eyesight, yeah. But, what do you usually cut, like, if you think you're cutting for the Sugar House? If I'm cutting for the Sugar House, I'll cut like 26-28. Because if I, it's a 30-inch splitter, I always try to have, you know, a couple inches. Yeah. And the house can take, I think, 20-inch, but I generally cut 16 just because the fire box, like, when we go to bed at night, we put in five good pieces and try to stack them like Lego blocks, so overnight, yeah, when you're like, mid-winter for the house, often are you restoking the furnace. We stoke it in the morning and then probably afternoon, we'll put a couple pieces in and then at night we stoke it before we go to bed. So, two good stokings. And then maybe two partials, two little ones just to keep the fire kind of going through the day. Do you keep the fires going when you're in like, peak maple syrup season? Yeah. Yeah, peak maple syrup is pretty much still, I mean, it's not as much because the daytime is above freezing, so we don't have to have it cranking. It's a Jotul F500 or F600 and it does really well. It's a non-catalytic converter, so we like it. Especially with oak, it keeps the poles going. Yeah, cool. All right. Well, I see you picked a couple more. Yeah, they're not little. Yeah.

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Come on, guys. You guys start stacking the firewood. Why? What do you mean? You want to be warm this winter? I'm just kidding, buddy. That was like, fun, almost. Yeah, I mean, what's nice about the log lift is just because you're strong enough to lift those suckers, you don't want to do that 50-100 times. Go over there, pick it up, no that's awesome. Yeah, so the way we set it up, one of the newer features we added is you can get this valve platform. That's right. It’s angled. So that was based on a lot of feedback from customers. Some people still line it up this way and run it this way, but what we found is that that kind of 45-degree angle is nice and we put the log lift on this side, but that can be moved over to the other side. I think a lot of folks, where they're just, they're always going to operate it by themselves, they kind of create a cockpit over here. You got your engine, your valve, and your log lift all on one side. Or, you can just flip flop? Yep, just flip flop it so it's kind of… Well, and the other thing is some people feel really strongly about one person, yeah, just moving logs. One guy, one person's splitting. Yeah. Definitely. Because, I mean, it's still kind of, as fast as it's going. One’s gonna be busy just bringing logs, yeah, you're really a minimum of two to keep up with it, but you can run it nicely from the other side too. But it could be swapped back the other way and some people have kind of a strong feeling about handedness. They want their left hand on the log and their right hand on levers or vice versa. This lets them choose. But, that's how we set it up for you.

And, the other thing we did is this tank - notice there's tons of room, especially if you mention, you know, you've got multiple tractors here. If you're going to bring in a bucket, you got lots of room but so we put this tank in the most rear, the rearmost position, but if you notice there are some additional bolt holes, that's also kind of if you were, you know, building this yourself you would decide where you want that.

So if you don't want all the standing room, maybe you're always operating on one side, you could move it farther forward and then that nose weight, that tongue weight, would be a lot lighter. Yeah. So here you got the advantage of the room. The price you pay is, it's heavy to move around. That's awesome. So if someone’s doesn't have a tractor, they might want it. And that's just four bolts. You could do that after the fact. They're just, there are a lot of machines where you're kind of stuck, kind of doing one of these, to be near where the action is. Yeah. So we figured prioritize ergonomics even if it means making [it] a little heavy to move around.

The more comfortable you are, the safer you are. Yeah, most splitters, I mean the majority of splitters, kind of live in one spot where you do your splitting, so we figured we'd focus on that. Yeah. It's not something you're moving around three times a day. Yeah. And if you are, you might just set it up a little differently. Yeah. This is awesome. No, it's very sturdy. I like it. It's not flimsy out to the front at all.

Yeah, the bipod leg tends to handle even when you got pretty big log out here. Yeah. Or, you know, stack up three or four at a time. That definitely works. So, no, like I was saying, when we were splitting, I've used a lot of splitters that when you come out to a full stroke, it'll really squawk and bog down the motor, so you always jump to let your hand off or when you go back it really makes a squawk, and this one doesn't do that at all.

Well, you know the 728 the 28-ton, I mean, that's focusing on speed but still a lot of power. Our 22-ton machine, the 300-Series, that tends to split most of what people are splitting, unless you're just taking down some monster stump with knots and stuff. Yeah. We don’t like doing that. And that's, you know, there's really not much out there that's gonna split that anyway but so here you get a nice compromise between speed and power. Still got the 22-gallon-per-minute pump, and, you know, 420 CC engine, so anything that you should be splitting, it'll pretty much go through. And, really, all I ever do, from time to time, is, you know, something that's like, you knocked that one off, you know, slopped around 180 and it went right through it. Yeah. If it just hits that knotty grain the wrong way, no matter what you do. Yeah. We're certainly used to that. Yeah. So that one? Oh, don't you worry. Yeah, we're gonna do all of those.

So, it sounds like the way you guys are going to end up using it is going to really take advantage of what we tried to put into in terms of one length for your house, one length for the sugar shack, because that's not every person whose got those two different kinds of applications. Yeah. That's really cool. No, I really like that. Yeah, that just saves you a lot of time right there. Yeah. All the ones we're used to, it's one size. Yeah. And if it is a longer one like, 30, even some of them are 36, you know, just when you're splitting 20-inch rounds, you're burning a lot of time. Like you were saying, what 16-18 inches for your house mostly? Yeah. 16-18 inch for the house. Yeah. So this 20-inch position seems like it'll work great for that. That gives you a little bit of room to finagle the log in there. Yeah. If you don't cut it perfectly. Yeah. Everything I do is perfect! Oh, yeah. Well, it seems like when it comes to the timber framing, I see some real craftsmanship there. Well, thank you. We're gonna look at that closer in another visit. No, that is, I mean, you know your way around these machines, but those are pretty much the features. I like this. Our last one that we used didn’t have that. Yeah, that is wicked.

Well, I didn't even know you guys had a conveyor, so when you mentioned that. For the tractor-mount one. Yeah, it's got a little green elevator we put a rubber belt on that runs off a generator, so we would be perfect because all this little loose stuff falls through and then you just throw your chunks on there and you're handling it less.

Can it be positioned right at the foot of the catcher tray? Yeah. Okay, yeah, so that's… We made up, ah, it's metal but then we made up a 2x6 lumber on the side, so it's a V-groove and then there's a catch basin, so it'll fall down in there and it just tumbles until it grabs it enough to go. That's perfect.

Yeah, we have a lot of folks… no, that’s awesome because if there’s something you kind of want to resplit, you're not picking it off the ground every time to put it back up there. That's what it's all about. I mean, people want to split. They don't necessarily want to be picking logs up and definitely not handling the same wood three or four times off the ground. You only handle it once. Yeah.

The conveyor belt is really closing the gap between this and a processor. It’s not a processor. If you don't know, it was pretty darn fast. So, you have that conveyor going up and down? Yeah. Do you use totes or anything like that? We don't. We've thought about it, but we just usually if we're transporting anything, we'll put it in the dump truck, whether it's my father's wood or if we're going to the woodshed and we want to just split for a while. We'll split and then we just dump it at the woodshed and as we're pulling, it'll just slide down the truck as we're stacking. Yeah. No, actually, yeah, you could probably have your bucket right there. Yeah the bucket will go right there, and we just stack it. I mean, it's a pretty good size bucket. Yeah. It's red oak, but you want to keep it? That's yours.

What do you have for a Deere? I didn't see what model that was. It’s a 2555, older 1984, pre-electronic everything. No DEF, no nothing. Yeah. You can actually maintain it in the field! I had an injector pump going and took it out, put four new injectors and injector pump in it right in the yard here and runs awesome, so no. It's older equipment, definitely. Yeah, well you mentioned the excavator, you know there's some people who will go out of their way to get an older machine that's pre-def, pre-fuel, pre-electronic controls. Yeah, yeah. You can work on it.

It seems like everything you guys are doing here is very geared around self-sufficiency. Oh, yeah. No, we try to fix anything we possibly can, ‘cause you hire somebody to come in and fix it, that's just cost you that much more.

Now, you know some of the folks back at the office were curious, you know, there's so much homesteading going on. We're curious where do you guys position yourselves in the world, you know, farming versus homesteading? Are these…? More-so farming. I like to say homesteading, you know, it's neat, but… Well, we're doing everything that homesteaders are doing in the sense that, you know, we're growing our own meats, or raising our own meats. We have the milk cow, we're doing the syrup, like, we consume a lot of our own. We try to be self-sufficient, but we take it just like that one step further. Farming, the big thing is the meats in general have to be USDA-inspected. Okay. When we bring animals to get processed from the farm stand that has to be federally inspected; the whole process, whereas homesteading, I feel like, we could just do it here, you know, we have no problem. If we were going to eat a pig by ourselves, we would butcher it and do all our own work, but we can't legally sell it. So, that I think is the biggest differentiation to me for homestead to farming. Yeah. But I think it's cool when the when the difference gets a little blurred because, you know, I think for so many people it's a financial thing. It's a lifestyle thing, probably more than anything else. And, you've got people who are making it work on, you know, a couple of acres. And then, you're on 300+ and, but, I think it's just great to see. There's a lot of similarities. Yeah. I think the difference might just be scale and difference is probably who you talk to, too, you know, but I think the way you're doing it really highlights how farming has always been a business. Yeah.

I think a lot of people lose, have lost the sense that it's always been a business. Even if you're more self-sufficiency-oriented, I think all the different businesses that you bring in from the framing, the maple syrup, yeah. Well, really taking it to another level. It's kind of, you know, the same thing with anything. 100 years ago everybody was self-sufficient; their own meat, their own eggs, their own milk, and then we got into the central location where everybody stopped doing that [and] went to their, you know, jobs and just went to buy stuff. Now, I think it's kind of coming back more where there's going to be more smaller farms and not these bigger large commodity.

I think when we talked, Trent told us a little about a little bit about his family background and generations and farming, and I think there was some auto body and auto repair work in there. Because, my grandfather ran an auto body shop and my great grandfather was a blacksmith and on my mother's side, my mother grew up on dairy farms in Ohio, Mississippi, New York. That’s awesome. Upstate New York? Yeah. That's where my parents are from. Yeah, so but I think you also have, you know, a background in this kind of stuff, So, what, how did you, what made you want to stay with this kind of lifestyle? I just loved it as a kid and I think that most kids kind of blossom and flourish in a farm setting where they can get in the outdoors a lot. Yeah! Free-range kids! Creativity: it makes their mind, you know, think of ways to stay busy. I think like what we were just talking about more as time progresses more people got away from the farming and the homesteading and, you know, I had a lot of friends that were just mind-blown by the farm that I grew up on and so I realized that it was quite the blessing and I enjoyed the lifestyle and we both went to college for agriculture, so we just knew it was something that we wanted to continue and, you know, you look at his hands, you know, we like to work with our hands and be outside. And so yeah, the farm has been able to give us that opportunity. But yeah, I grew up on a dairy farm and my dad grew up on a dairy farm and his dad and his dad.

Yeah, one thing I love about this as I say, like, from I think about my family background. From the dairy farming, I didn't grow up in that environment, but that farming element to the auto body mechanical stuff and then, I like when it all comes together. I like machines. Yeah! And then, you've got the, you know, the what we're splitting or what you're farming and I just get a kick out of it. Yeah. It’s fun. One way you're still tied into it, you know. Yeah.

So, anyway, we've really enjoyed coming up here to visit and we're gonna leave this beast with you for a while and we're looking forward to hearing you know how it works out for you and seeing how you use the wood and just keep powering through and doing. You've got so many projects going on, you know, buildings and land, no I love it. I'm sure your audience is loving it and I hope, hopefully you know, our audience is going to start to get a better taste of what you're doing up here and I'm sure they'll visit your other channels, too. Have to get their hands on some Gateway Farm syrup. Oh yeah! We'll send you home with some. Yeah, for sure. And then you guys will come back in March. Yeah. Roll up our sleeves, do some work. It’s not a spectator sport, I assume. It can be! You want to cut this one, bud? Yeah. Okay, let's cut it real quick. Right. One last cut. Okay? You wait a second, buddy. Oh, nice stack! Ready? Where do you want to cut it? Right there?

There. That make you happy? Yeah. Now let's put that, we’ll let the next generation stack that. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe go grab a couple of beers. Yeah. Well, Abby and Trent, [we] had a really nice visit. Thank you for spending some time with us and showing us around the Gateway Farm. Thank you for coming up now. Met the dogs, met the kids, I think we've seen a lot, and we had some fun with the splitter, so I think that's going to be great for you and we look forward to kind of hearing what you find, how it works for you, and as we get into the winter, how soon are you thinking you're going to start, you know, piling up the wood for, you know, heating? This weekend. This afternoon. All right, no time to lose. Yeah, yeah. No, we appreciate you guys making the effort to come up here and allowing us to try your product. Yeah. We're looking forward to really using it. Great, I mean, any excuse to, you know, get out of the office and come up to the Green Mountains of Vermont, you know. I'm usually a White Mountain, New Hampshire guy, but this has been great. Green Mountains. Yeah, I might be born again. It's really, it's really beautiful up here. All right, so we plan on coming back in the spring because we want to see the sugar operation. I am also a hardcore pancakes guy, so blueberry pancakes and maple syrup, Vermont maple syrup, is what it's all about. So we're gonna come back and see this whole operation while it's up and running.