(light music) - On the next "Prairie Sportsman," uncover the story behind Alclair Outdoors.

Plus, join us as researchers test the Weed Terminator in a cornfield using robotics technology.

And we'll join Nicole Zempel for a fast forage.

This week, it's innovation and adventure on "Prairie Sportsman."

I'm Bret Amundson.

Welcome to another episode of "Prairie Sportsman."

We've got another great show for you starting right now.

(light exciting music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources; Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org; and by West Central Initiative, and Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.

(light music) (birds quacking) (ringing echoes) - Such a familiar sound for hunters, the ringing ears after shots fired.

Most hunters brush it off and don't think much of it despite the irreversible damage being done and the fact that preventing it is so simple.

Today we're learning about a Minnesota company that specializes in just that, Alclair.

(light upbeat music) Well, we're here at Alclair in Osseo, Minnesota.

You do everything right here, right?

- Everything.

- Explain what all is taking place in this building.

- Yep.

So in this building is where we manufacture all of our products.

And everything that we make is pretty much handmade and it's all done by the people you'll meet back there.

And we do everything from start to finish.

So everything comes in as raw materials and it comes out as a finished product for your ears.

- Well, can we take a look around?

- Absolutely, let's do it.

- All right, let's do it.

- [Speaker] I don't normally do this, but- - Alclair is a company that is focused on protecting people's hearing and helping them experience life in whatever way that they are through hearing.

So we make products for the music world.

So we make products for musicians that use 'em on stage to hear so they can perform.

We make products for hearing protection, for hunting, industrial, broadcast, different areas where you're around loud noise.

(upbeat music) This first part is where we actually do all the wiring, all the electronic components that we make come in as raw products.

And so in here they're taking those raw products and hand wiring them and building the face plates and all the electronics for hearing protection as well as all the acoustics for our custom in-ear monitors.

- [Bret] So this is what will go inside.

- This is what will go inside, yep.

- What fits in your ear then, essentially.

- Yep.

So this is the first, this is where everything starts when you place an order, is we hand build the internal electronics of your product here.

And that is kind of cool 'cause it makes us a little bit different.

Some, a few manufacture their own, most don't manufacture their own, they just have someone like us manufacture their products for 'em.

So it makes it great for repairs and in customer service because if you're sending it back in, you're sending it in to where it was made.

And so we then have all the abilities to repair it right there.

So in this instance, we're just trying to match that product to a frequency sweep that we have that's virtual.

- Oh, okay.

- Yep.

So this is just testing things before they go into the products from the very beginning.

- And that way you can make sure you're hearing everything you're supposed to be hearing.

- Yep.

Yep.

(upbeat music) So this is our 3D lab.

So this is where we actually take the physical impression that's made of your ear and we virtually turn that impression into your custom product shell.

So this is sort of the magic that goes on in the background to make the product fit you much more comfortably.

I mean, we'll send in their impressions.

So they'll go to an audiologist or a hearing aid professional and they'll get their impression done of their ear.

And then that impression, we scan it in a digital scanner.

And then where Zeshawn is, he's taking that digital impression and he's now turning that into a virtual mockup of your ear in a shell form.

So we don't need all of what the impression gathers, but we need a big part of it.

So then we can make something that fits comfortably in your ear and stays in your ear and protects your hearing.

So once he's done designing them, then they'll get sent to this bank of 3D printers over here that use just all different colors.

And so whatever color you chose for your shell, then we'll send it over here and we'll print that shell to match that color.

(upbeat music) So here's where we actually will router out the product, we'll detail it by hand, and then it'll come where Jen and Brandon are and they will take that product and they're going to detail it down into a finished product that looks beautiful.

And if there's any imperfections, they will drill it out and fix the imperfection and make a finished product out of it.

(upbeat music continues) And Will will take that product and he'll give it that final test I was telling you about where he's taking that product and running it through that same frequency sweep, but now it's the full sweep and he's gotta make sure that right matches left and everything is right and everything is correct the way you chose it as a product.

- [Bret] So what's going on here?

- So this is where if you have chosen to have artwork on your product, this is where Jasmine is gonna take whatever artwork you've given us and she will format it to fit on your ear and then she's gonna use this printer to actually print on the ear, whatever it is that you want.

It's kind of a cool feature.

- [Bret] So people can get designs, names, whatever on there?

- Yep.

If you can imagine it, we can print it right on there.

(soft music) When everything is finished, it'll come where Carissa is and she'll package it up and ship it out to you wherever you are.

- [Bret] Well, that seems pretty easy.

- It's a piece of cake.

Let's do it all day long.

My wife and I just, we just have a heart for serving others.

You know, it wasn't really about the products more, it was like how does this help you and serve you in whatever vocation or entertainment or whatever you're doing.

And so we were just led then start ourselves Alclair and that launched us into that world and then into the hearing world.

This is actually where we manufacture the silicone that goes into our custom hearing protection and musician plugs, impact products.

This does make us a little unusual because we're actually, we're very vertical in this area.

This is what I started doing years and years ago was polymer chemistry, designing, and compounding silicones to make products for the hearing industry.

And we make the products here and we use 'em for our own purposes, but we also ship 'em to distributors and audiologists all over the world.

- So you're not outsourcing anything really.

You're doing it all right here.

- Yeah, we're doing it all right here.

So the hearing protection that you get is like the silicone hearing protection that you get is literally formulated, compounded, 3D imaged, and then made to fit your ear right here in the factory.

- [Bret] In the same building, Marc's brother Rick does hearing tests and helps people recognize and treat hearing loss.

I wanted to see how my hearing has held up after a lifetime of hunting and shooting.

- It's important to get a screening regularly because you know, we think about our eyes and teeth and getting those appointments on an annual basis, but our hearing for some reason gets left by the wayside.

So it's important to probably get a hearing screening, you know, if there's no obvious signs, at least every couple years, just to kind of get a baseline established and to kind of follow it as it progresses over the years.

- Well, I've definitely tried to be diligent about protecting my hearing, particularly when it comes to being out there hunting or shooting.

But I'm curious to see what kind of damage I've done.

- Yes.

- Can I jump in the booth?

- You can jump in the booth.

I'm going to put some inserts in your ear to start with.

So this just goes around your neck and then these little inserts go in your ears.

So the first thing we do in a hearing test is kind of what we were just talking about.

We are trying to establish when you hear a tone in your ear at different frequencies.

And so I'm gonna give you a pulsating tone, kind of like a beep beep beep off in the distance there, it might be a high pitch tone or a low pitch tone.

It even might be louder or softer.

All that is not as important as what we're trying to determine, and that's the softest level you hear that tone.

So all I want you to do is listen for the tone and when you hear it, however you hear it, even if you very faintly hear it, I just want you to let me know.

Just say, now we're okay, raise a hand, do whatever you wanna do so just acknowledge you're hearing it.

Then it will go away and then it'll come back and each time you hear it, you just let me know.

So we'll start in your right ear.

(upbeat music) So that's a basic pure tone hearing test just to determine when you hear tones of different frequencies.

And it gives us an idea of how you compare to a normal status, kinda like a vision test being 20/20, we do a hearing test that same way.

Now additionally, once we would, you know, find and indicated some loss of hearing, in other words, some degree of hearing loss, there's some additional testing we would do.

Basically, you know, in terms of identification, red is right and blue is left and the circles and x's and this chart is just represented a volume going down in frequency going across.

So lower tones to higher tones might say base to treble, or in speech, a lot of times it's vowels to consonants.

And so then we kind of measure hearing loss against normal.

And actually, kinda like your eyes, 20/20, 20 decibels across the board is considered in the normal range.

So now we've got an interesting look at here.

So your right ear you can see is perfectly in the normal range right throughout the frequency range.

So you've got excellent hearing in that right ear.

The left ear, interestingly enough, is perfectly normal out here to about, oh, 1,500 hertz, 2,000 hertz is still good, but for some reason, and it's probably in effect of something that has happened in that left ear, and it very easily could be and probably is some level of loud sound exposure over, and sometimes it depends on right-hand or left-handed shooting.

- 100% right-handed shooting, my left ear takes a lot of the sounds.

- So you've got this little divot here in the left ear where you've got the kind of like similar to yours.

I mean, you got that same little divot at 4K.

So at 3,000 hertz, 4,000 hertz, you kind of start coming back up in the six and 8,000 hertz range.

But you have this little divot in that left ear.

So you do have the beginnings of a little hearing loss in that left ear.

- [Bret] And hearing loss might lead to bigger issues than not hearing your buddies give you a hard time after a miss.

- There's been a lot of studies lately that have found that some, they're finding that dementia has a correlation with hearing loss because what's in, you know, like I always say, when you see, right, you know you're around people, you know there's something going on, but if you can't hear, then you're really not part of that group of people because you're not engaging with the conversation.

You don't hear the mood, you don't experience what they're laughing at and all these things.

And so you sort of get into a shell.

They're finding that hearing instruments, if people start using them earlier in life, when they find out they've got a hearing loss, if they start using them earlier in life, it could put off some dementia that could be coming your way.

And a lot of people, you know, spend thousands of dollars on hearing instruments.

I mean, if you think hearing protection is expensive, wait till you have to buy a hearing instrument, you know, and that's what's kind of cool about the hearing, you know, the active hearing protection because it's giving you that, then it stops during the shot, it shuts down and protects you and then turns on instantly so you can hear all of those things.

And so the joy and the satisfaction and the happiness of being there is amplified, I guess you'd say, you know, back to what it should be, you know, being in a duck line and hearing everybody talk or ribbing each other or you know, nice shot, Bret, that's what it's all about, you know?

It's kind of what happens before and after the shot.

We just get these things in our mind where these loud noises are not gonna harm us because it is, it isn't just something that is right in your face up front, you know, you don't see it until later on.

So yeah, I think a lot of people just don't consider it, but every time that you have these loud impact sounds, whether it is a gun or an impact wrench or any industrial product being manufactured or anything like that, if you're unprotected, you're damaging your hearing.

And we had always made like hearing protection for friends, family, employees, whatever, because it was part of what we do.

And we had made 'em for ourselves, but we just never were ready to sell them.

And part of that was always like, they're just too darn expensive.

Like they're just, they're expensive, they're expensive to manufacture so they're expensive to buy.

And so we worked with another company that makes a filter that was used in our musician plugs.

So musicians wear, if they're not wearing monitors, they're wearing a music filtered hearing protection that allows the overall SPL levels where they are to come down, but yet they can hear relatively flat rather than if you put your finger in your ear, all the high frequencies go down, and they create a product that actually has like a filter on top of that that will close when there's a loud impact sound.

And so that's built into a silicone earplug.

So now you can hear, if you have normal hearing, you can still hear through that.

And then when there is a gun blast, it shuts off, and they are the coolest thing and they're much, much cheaper than an active product.

The coolest thing is hearing from someone who says like, "Man, I haven't heard a pheasant cackle in years."

And they didn't realize they hadn't heard a pheasant cackle, you know, they did when, you know, they always have been cackling, but at some point in their lives that cackling just faded away and now all of a sudden it's back and what a joy that is.

It's all of a sudden, like something's back, you know, they're like children again and they have a smile on their face and a little twinkle in their eye when they talk about it.

And it just, that's what makes us get up every day and do what we do.

(upbeat music) - [Pete] Once we know that information, we can send this robot out into that same corn field where we already know where the corn plants are and it will be able to navigate through those corn rows.

- You're gonna look by the bases of oak trees.

(light music) - [Bret] In a small rural Minnesota city, a University Research Center is pioneering designs for solar-powered robots that could revolutionize non-chemical weed control in farm fields.

- We have been doing work in robotics since 2017.

There's a company in Norway that's been doing research with these robots.

They're not quite selling 'em to anybody yet, but they were, it was something that we could purchase as a functioning robot with four-wheel steering and then it's configurable to whatever width and length you want to adjust it to.

- [Bret] The West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, Minnesota first developed an autonomous cowbot to remove weeds in rocky cattle pastures that mowers couldn't reach.

Then researchers moved on to design a robot that could cultivate agricultural crops.

- We listed about 30 different concepts and will those down to a half a dozen that we wanted to investigate farther.

We tried to laser, we tried electrocution, we tried a number of different things and we finally hit on the, just sawing 'em off with a saw blade or a trimmer, if you will.

- [Bret] "Prairie Sportsman" was at one of the Research Center's first trials of a robotic Weed Terminator.

- [Eric] You're really here at that early stage.

We still have a lot to learn.

- [Pete] The parts that we're using on this prototype are actually commercially available trimmers that you would purchase at the store and use use in your yard.

The two in the middle are following a straight line through the row and then the two on either side, one on either side are actually kind of bumping up against the corn plant as they go along the row.

It's mostly meant for late term corn.

- You can cultivate a crop up until a certain point.

Once the crop is a certain height, you can't take a tractor and cultivator out there anymore.

And that's when the Weed Terminator, as we termed it, coined it, takes over and can go out and do the weeding from that point on.

- So the corn is gonna be maybe two and a half, three feet tall, all the way up to the point where the corn starts tasseling and pollinating.

- [Eric] We're cutting about two inches off the ground, two to three inches off the ground.

The corn canopy is gonna close and those weeds will not go to seed.

- If we can keep the weed from going to seed, then we can keep the weed pressure down in future generations, future crop years.

(light music) - [Eric] We're making vehicles of the size that can be electric.

We can basically charge the batteries in these robots with solar energies.

- [Pete] The system that we have in place right now is GPS guided.

And so as long as the robot has electrical energy in it, we could drive day and night.

- We've got four researchers working under Dr. Volkan Isler, part of the Computer Science Department on the Twin Cities Campus.

They're all working on different aspects of the navigation and the control system.

- We are making it do what it does autonomously.

(light music) Right now what we have is something where we use GPS information.

So like what do you have on your phone when you walk around and when you drive in a car, you get the GPS information.

We similarly have a GPS module on our robot.

We use the information from the GPS to do the navigation.

- [Pete] Most of the corn in West Central Minnesota is planted with a GPS-assisted tractor.

And so they already know where the corn plants, where the corn rows are located.

And so once we know that information, we can send this robot out into that same corn field where we already know where the corn plants are and it will be able to navigate through those corn rows.

(soft twangy music) - We configured it for corn fields, for 30-inch rows, in our case.

This field that we are converting to organic.

So it has not had herbicide sprayed on it.

And as you can see, there are a lot of weeds in it.

The Weed Terminator is weeding one row at a time.

So that seems maybe pretty inefficient.

But what we kind of envision is maybe you have 30 one-row robots out in the field doing the same work that one 30-row implement pulled behind a tractor would do.

Farm equipment gets larger and larger, bigger and bigger because you're trying to increase the productivity of one driver.

And if you don't need a driver anymore, now we don't have to have stuff that's so large, we can bring this equipment back down to size where we can do a better job of weeding in one row at a time 'cause we've seen the actual plants and the weeds and we can deal with those individually.

- At Farm Fest near Redwood Falls, this past summer, we actually ran the robot up and down the rows of corn, weeding that corn and it was very well received.

Most of the people who saw the demonstrations down there were very receptive to it.

And I think mostly the manpower situation that exists in ag today, there's just not enough people to do the work sometimes.

Nobody said, "No, it won't work.

I don't wanna do this."

They were all, "How soon can we get this?

How many acres will it do?

How fast will it go?"

You know, so they're very interested in wanting to know more specifics about it.

(light music) In this particular case, it probably will be some younger farmers, farmers who could see the economic benefits of this.

Organic farmers would probably be the first ones to adopt this.

- Organic farmers have a much more difficult time controlling weeds than conventional farmers do.

Even in a conventional farmer who's maybe seen some herbicide tolerant plants like Palmer Amaranths, those aren't gonna just stay in his field.

Those weeds are gonna propagate and be all around the state and it's gonna be a problem for everybody.

The cost of building the robot was probably 60 to $100,000 all in with all the different tools and things we had to do and try and fail at.

And that's a lot of money for a one-row robot.

But again, this is the first one and this is kind of like how expensive was the first computer.

As things get manufactured more, then those prices go down.

- [Pratik] The next step that we are currently working on is how to integrate cameras on it.

The Jeep is not able to see what's coming in front of it, but the camera can see and detect weeds, can detect rocks, can detect gopher mounts, can detect a ramp.

So we are working on that technology right now.

- We've really only had the robot about a year and we're just working through some of the initial bugs and getting it to the point where we can test it in the field.

In the end, if it doesn't, if it's not cost competitive, it's not gonna be adopted.

So it's just like anything else.

I mean if EVs were always twice as expensive as a gas-powered vehicle, no one would, I mean only a few people would buy 'em, right?

So it's gonna have to, you know, you're always thinking about this five to 10 years down the road and if you just look at what say Tesla has done with EVs on the road and even autonomous driving on a highway and in traffic, and how much easier it is to have an autonomous vehicle in a corn field where you're not worried about pedestrians.

(light music) - We have another phase of this project that we are starting this next year where we're actually gonna have multiple robots and so we're gonna look at two robots out in the field at the same time.

We really had three goals with this project.

One of 'em was to eliminate herbicides, which we've done.

There are a lot of herbicide resistant weeds that Roundup won't touch at this point.

Removing the operator from the equation was one of our goals.

And then decarbonizing ag, our system right now doesn't emit any greenhouse gases.

We recharge it with a solar charging station that's got solar panels on it.

We're not using any energy off the grid to power this system.

I think once people start seeing a system like this out in the field and seeing the advantages of it, I think you're gonna get a wide variety of people to adopt it.

(bright music) (lively string music) - We were lucky enough to stumble upon hen-of-the-woods.

It is growing in a little bit of a wonky position.

What I would like to say about the hen-of-the-woods is that it is commercially sold as my maitake, kind of got this beefy flavor and I feel like if you do eat meat, it's excellent alongside red meats.

It's just a wonderful mushroom to prepare and it's excellent with rice as well.

I have found them early in September.

I have found them as late as I would say late November.

You're gonna look by the bases of oak trees, usually oaks that have a wound in it here as you can see, normally they're growing, it looks like a rosette coming out of the ground.

But again, this one's growing a little bit, a little bit wonky, but I'm gonna cut off a little bit here.

Alright, so this is just a really pretty, pretty mushroom.

The top, it's got kind of just varying shades of brown.

And then the bottom, the underside does not have gills, it has pores.

And then the spore print is kind of a buff white.

And so I'm gonna harvest the rest of this hen-of-the-woods.

They can become just massive.

One mushroom can last you and your friends all winter along.

(light music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Prairie Sportsman" is provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources; Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farm, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota, on the web at shalomhillfarm.org; and by West Central Initiative, and Western Minnesota Prairie Waters, and the members of Pioneer PBS.