Hello all, welcome to WFHR's Rapids Report for this May 22nd, 2025.
Have your host, James Jamel, off here.
We're joined right now by one of our favorite people, Janelle Wears, with us, Agriculture
and Educator with UW Extension.
Janelle, how you doing?
I'm doing fantastic.
It's nice to be back so quickly.
Yes.
After kind of going, you know, hit and miss with our schedules and all that, it's been
really nice to have you back on a consistent basis, especially this time of year.
This is a little bit of your wheelhouse this time of year, where we're talking about
a lot of things that you are really key about.
And you brought a great one to us today.
Soil texture composting.
Yes.
So when we are thinking about growing plants, it all really begins with the soil.
You know, the, the soil, the health of your soil, understanding your soil texture, that's
really the beginning of, you know, whether or not your plants are going to be successful.
So I wanted to start off with soil texture, and then we'll move into composting and
the benefits of composting.
I have to, I'm so sorry.
I just right away, I didn't get a chance to look too deep into these and I kind of like
that because I'm with the audience and really on the edge of my seat with a lot of this.
But I did get to see this opening part and this, you already, I don't know the last time,
I always learn when I talk to you.
I don't know if it's happened in the first minute before.
I don't think I knew this, this opening thing where you're, you're beginning here with
soil.
I, I don't know if I ever really thought much about it.
Maybe it's the city boy of me or something, but I just think of soil, think of earth.
This is quite interesting to me.
Yeah.
So when we're talking about soil, what soil is, it's really just rock that has been weathered
down through erosion processes over and over a long period of time.
And when that rock, we've got all sorts of different types of rocks on the, on the
United States, on the earth, but when they get weathered down to their most basic pieces,
there couldn't be either a sand particle, it'll be a silt particle or a clay particle.
All right.
And so when we're thinking about what is soil, soil is a combination of those particles
mixed with pore space and it's P-O-R-E, pore space, right?
Now if you have a perfect soil, and I'm not sure if a perfect soil actually exists, but
as imaginary perfect soil would be about 50% of those clay, silt, and sand particles,
and then another 50% of pore space, okay?
Okay.
Well, and I'm sorry, 45% rock material, and then 5% organic material.
So that's going to be broken down pieces of like leaves or maybe bits of macro organisms
that have died, like earthworms that have died in the soil, things like that.
So 5% that, 45% of your rocks, and then the rest is pore spaces, okay?
And those pore spaces, that's 50% of the soil, and all those pore spaces are either going
to be filled with air or they're going to be filled with water, right?
Now when you're thinking about soil that's got all really heavy in the sand particles,
then you end up with really, really large pore spaces.
Large pore spaces tend to get filled up with air.
Small pore spaces tend to get filled up with water.
So if you've got a really, if you've got a soil that has a really high percentage of clay,
you've got really small pore spaces and they tend to fill up with water and stay filled
with water, right?
And that's the reason why clay soils are sticky and heavy, and sandy soils are, you know,
one of the benefits of a sandy soil would be that it drains really nicely, right?
Now either one of those soils, one that's a little bit too heavy with clay or one that's
just drains a little bit too nicely with the sand, both of them are going to have some
downsides to them.
With those sandy soils, you're not going to retain nutrients or moisture very well, right?
That moisture retention, we notice if you're, if you happen to be in the sandy area, you'll
notice in the, in the summertime, you know, we drain so well that we end up to be a little
bit on the dry side more, more likely, right?
Those heavy clay soils because they don't drain well, they tend to be, you know, water
logged and heavy and sometimes it's more difficult for plants to really grow in those soils.
So first of all, what are some things that we can do to protect our soils?
Yeah.
If you're in a sandy soil or a clay soil, you can run the risk of ending up with compaction,
all right?
Compaction probably happens a little bit more easily in a clay soil, but even if you have,
if you live in the city, so I think of that as more of an urban soil and you are a homeowner
with, you know, a typical landscape, you're, even if you have really sandy soil, that can get,
that can get compacted over time too, all right?
So we really want to do whatever we can to avoid compacted soils.
So a couple of things that we can do to kind of protect our soil from being compacted.
If we're thinking about our vegetable gardens or our perennial beds, try to keep in mind you
want permanent beds and permanent paths, the more that you're walking around in your vegetable beds
or your perennial beds, you're compacting that soil.
So we really want to avoid, avoid doing anything that's going to add to that compaction.
Definitely don't want to rush in the spring.
I was wondering about that.
Let everything thought out completely, thought out and drain.
I think we're past that point this spring.
Sure, sure, that's positive, yeah.
But it's something to think about people who get so excited to get out into their gardens,
you know, because sunny day and March and they want to get out and those gardens and start working
and like, oh, let's, let's wait just a little bit.
So where I was talking about those sandy soils or those heavy clay soils,
there are things that you can do to help with either one of those problems.
And that's where the magic of compost comes in.
Yeah, and this is something that has been talked about for a long time.
Our whole lifetimes compost composting a lot of this.
I love that it's become much more in the lexicon, more and more people are talking about and doing it.
But I do like the idea of really taking some time to talk about why people are doing it,
the benefits of it and everything, because I don't know that we get to that too much.
I think it feels like we kind of skate past that part where, hey, compost is important.
But the why part we haven't hit on enough, I think, and every day household kind of knowledge.
Yeah, I think a lot of people, you know, I think for a lot of people, if you just
have a surface understanding of composting, you might be just thinking about, okay, well,
there's the whole removing excess waste from our solid waste systems, right?
You know, if you've got vegetable ends abruptly, you know, if you put that inside of your
compost rather than sending that to the landfill, that's going to help us on that end of the
spectrum, the whole waste stream issues, which would be fantastic. That's huge. That's absolutely
huge and necessary. But there's also some other benefits to composting that I think people don't
realize and really getting to the gardener's point of view, right? And so with the gardener's,
you know, like I said, we're always struggling. I mentioned that perfect loamy soil that's,
you know, 50% or 50% pore space and it's going to have equal parts of the sand-silting
clay to equal 45% and then you've got a nice 5% organic matter. Like I said, I don't know if
that actually exists anywhere. But that's what we're shooting for, right? And so if you're in the
central sand and you've got pure pure sand that you're fighting, adding compost is going to help
you retain moisture. It's going to also help you also retain those nutrients. You're not going to
have as many nutrients, either running off or leaching into our groundwater. You want all those
nutrients staying available right there where your your plants will be able to make use of them.
So compost helps clay soils by helping them drain a little bit better and then by sandy soils
by retaining those nutrients in that moisture. That's not it though. I didn't think so. I was
wondering though. So, you know, compost really I kind of think of composting and adding compost
to our soils is kind of like how I talk about planting pollinator gardens and here when we're
planting pollinator gardens, we're doing agriculture for pollinators, right? When we're adding
compost to our soils, we're doing agriculture for our microbes and our macro organisms in our soil.
We're bringing them something that they're going to use. They're going to eat. And when as they
eat it, it's going to increase the diversity of the different types of microorganisms and macro
organisms. So, macro organisms, I'm talking about like grubs and worms and all these all these
other types of organisms that live inside the soil as well as the bacteria as like the good
bacteria that we want inside of our soils to. This can increase the disease resistance of things.
It's remarkable as well. Yeah. In fact, there have been studies that have shown leaf mold in
particular, which leaf mold is a compost that's just made just from leaves, right? Just from
fallen leaves. Leaf mold in particular has had beneficial effects against certain types of nematodes.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It shouldn't be surprising after this time, but it still is some of these
things in the way that the connection that they have. There's so many connections that are
happening in nature that we aren't even aware of, right? And the few that we do know of, I mean,
there's just fantastic and amazing, you know? And I think people don't realize when we think about,
you know, increasing biodiversity, we're talking usually what people are, what comes to mind is,
you know, like having, you know, bird species, right? Or maybe plant species. But diversity in our
soils is so important for our soil health. We want a nice, vibrant ecology inside of our soils.
The more vibrant and diverse that ecology is, the healthier the entire system will be.
To that point, as you mentioned in your notes here, Janelle, the compost acts as a buffer for the
soil as well. Yeah. It acts almost kind of like a chemical buffer. So it will help with any,
if there's any pH extremes that happen, it also will help, it'll help with taking up
high levels of salt concentration. So here, a really easy application I'm thinking of here is if you
have a garden bed right next to your driveway, and it ends up having like a little bit of a
dead zone on the edge, right? Or maybe even your lawns got a dead zone along the edge because of
the road salt, adding some compost here is going to help, you know, absorb some of that excess
salt concentration. And it'll also help with fixing heavy metals inside soils and alleviating some
of that toxins in the soils. Although, you know, if I had a heavy, if I had a reason to think I had
high heavy, heavy metals in my soils, I wouldn't rely only on compost, but compost could help as a
just here. Good note though. And then one of the other things to keep in mind is it also helps
moderate soil temperatures. Because compost is dark in color, it's going to absorb more heat,
and that's going to help with the spring fall. So if you put down compost in your vegetable garden
in the fall, this is because it's a nice dark rich color in the spring, it's going to help
everything fall out a little bit faster. But it doesn't just hope warm up the soil in the depths
of summer and the dog days of summer. If you've got about one to two inches of compost on your
perennial beds or in your vegetable garden beds, the soil underneath tends to be a little bit
cooler than if it didn't have that compost mulch on the surface. And because the soil is going to be
a little bit cooler, it's going to retain moisture a little bit longer, which is always helpful in
the dog days of summer when we have that dry spell in July. And the cooler that that soil is,
the slower the evaporation is going to happen.
Janelle, now that we're kind of understand a little bit more of the importance,
the purpose, what it can do, and everything, I want to get into the idea of making compost,
the compost materials, and everything. Because that's the other part of this that I thought was
interesting. And I just wanted to pull up on the Wisconsin-Rabbit City website. I know that they
spring compost update they have over there. If you want to check that out, everybody. And this is
we're talking a little bit in our pregame. This word compost, composting, some of these things have
just been, I've been hearing so much about it in the last couple of weeks. And the other part of
the under-undered this was hearing people say, well, I can make my own compost or I'd like to make
my own compost and some of that. So it's kind of cool to see this this topic where it is right now,
where it's not uncommon to hear people talking about these things and the importance of them.
As far as making your own compost and getting into the materials of it, what do you got for us there?
Yeah, so composting is not difficult. It really, really is.
So one of the things to keep in mind is the greater the variety of things that you're adding to
your compost, the greater the different types of microorganisms that will be participating in the
processing down your broccoli ends or your leftover leaves into a nice rich material that
will be high in nutrients that the plants will be able to utilize easily. So when you're composting,
you want to have a ratio of three parts browned materials or carbon-riched materials to one part
green and the greens are going to be high in nitrogen. So you'll either hear brown
brown materials to green materials or you'll hear carbon materials to nitrogen materials.
Okay, so how do you know which is which? Well, the way I kind of think about it is anything that's
fresh and juicy, those are going to be higher in a nitrogen content and so those are going to be
things that we're going to keep in that green category. Okay, those are the things like I mentioned,
you know, your vegetable leftovers from, and when I say leftovers, I mean the debris,
the stuff that you're using that inside the kitchen before you cook. Okay, we'll get to things that
have been cooked in a minute, but here I'm talking about just kind of that leftover vegetable
pieces that you're not cooking, that type of stuff. You can't always rely on color though. If
you're thinking about adding coffee grounds to your compost pile, which is a super cool idea,
keep that, keep in mind even though they're brown, they're high in nitrogen. Okay, yeah,
so really kind of rely on is it juicy or is it dry, right? If it's dry, it's probably going to be
something that's rich in carbon. And so those carbon-rich materials are going to be things like
shredded newspaper. It could be dried leaves from last year. In fact, that's one of my favorite
things to do is I save a couple garbage bags of dry leaves from the previous fall. I keep them
next to my compost up in and then as I'm adding green materials, I'll add some brown, you know,
I'll add my leaves as a brown material. If you don't have leaves though, shredded newspaper
would work just fine for you. Something else to keep in mind is things that are of animal origin
tend to be higher in nitrogen, so all that and this kind of gets back to not necessarily has to
be green in color. This could be things like if you're adding manure and it needs to be an herb
before manure. Okay, no omnivore manoeuvres, right? But if you've got chickens or rabbits and you
want to add their manure to your compost bin, go right ahead, blood meal, feathers, all of that
type of stuff would be considered greens. What about drier type materials, like what are your
materials and stuff? Yeah, all of those are going to be higher in the carbon content, so those
would be the things that you would be thinking about those as your browns. You mentioned coffee
grounds earlier, and I know for me and my mom, when we were first getting into this topic, it feels
like in the 80s or something, that was one of the first things that I feel like was brought up.
I don't know if it actually came from a repital source, it just felt like one of those things like,
oh yeah, that's something you can use for composting, so I really appreciate you bringing that one
up in particular, but are there others that we should be per cautious about? Yeah, yeah, so in this
category, I think of this category as the yeah, but we want to think about it. I want that
as a title, so we're putting goats together. So, first one, cardboard and corn cobs,
you know, so some real recent research has come out, and my opinions on cardboard are a little
bit more reserved. They used to recommend using cardboard, but the idea here in and with corn
cobs, the idea here is you just need to really cut them down quite a bit if you use them in large
pieces, if you use the cardboard in large pieces or the corn cobs hole, they're going to take forever
in a day to decompose, right? Okay. So, you want to chop that stuff up. However, I did recently read
a journal article that talked about the presence of PFAS in cardboard, and so here I have a
little bit more hesitation in using cardboard and any sort of gardening capacity where it becomes
broken down in the soil. So, also as a weed barrier inside the garden too, I used to like the idea
of like a thin cardboard, like cereal boxes. I've used those in the past in my raised beds,
because they worked fantastic, broke down nicely. I have some reservations now. The literature,
just the research hasn't gotten far enough to say, you know, hey, this is going to make an impact
in your soil or not, but there was a suggestion that it may, and so on now, like I said, I would say,
you know, maybe we could use something besides cardboard. The whole point of this is to help,
and to help the earth help your garden all these things. Anything that can mess with that, I wouldn't,
I don't think it's even worth really taking the risk. Just my opinion, just my thought on it and
everything, but I also want to note that I see where people are going with this, and I love that
the heart of it. They've got all this cardboard. I've got all these Amazon boxes or whatever,
what do I do with them and stuff, and I want to do some good. I want to do something good with it,
which is where a lot of this stems from. Well, maybe I'm sorry, I don't know this stuff,
but maybe we're composting began. Is the idea of, hey, I've got all this extra stuff, instead of
just throwing it away, what can I do good with it? How can I repurpose it so much of this stems from
that? So I think that's really cool that people want to do that with these things, but certain
stuff, it's not, it's kind of defeating the purpose in some ways for lack of a better way to put it.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, when it comes to PFAS, there's just so much research that needs
to be done yet for us to know, and so now that, you know, I was something that I hadn't even,
wasn't even on my radar. Typically, my first thought when I was reading about PFAS was, like I've
mentioned, as a lead barrier, and it's just, I'm not saying don't use it because UW-Madison extension,
everything we share is evidence-based. I'm just saying the evidence isn't clear yet,
and whether or not it is good or not. So it might be worthwhile to not use it until the
evidence says one way or the other. Yeah, and I encourage people to keep an eye on those storylines
and see where they go, and they develop. Now there are some things that we can give a hard
no, we're like, no, don't definitely not use that. Oh, well, before we go there, I wanted to mention
a couple of other things. So another one would be, and I hope I pronounced this correctly,
I was going to YouTube how to pronounce it and I forgot. Apple pumice. So what we're talking
about here is if you are a classic one, make an apple cider, or maybe apple, apple sauce,
but when you've got the skins and the cores of the apples, right, that after you've processed them,
yes, you definitely can add them to your compost bin, but you want to be careful because what will
happen is you'll have a, it'll actually kind of form a seal, and that seal will make it so
that way you don't have good erration in your compost bin, right? And so the types of bacteria that
are really doing the heavy lifting in your compost bin, they require oxygen. There are some types
of bacteria that work in an anaerobic environment and anaerobic just means there isn't any oxygen
available. Thank you. I mean, I knew that, but the audience might not have, I didn't know,
I did not know that. So I mean, that's not to say that if you put a, you know, a big thick layer
of apple pumice on the top, nothing will break down. It's just going to require that anaerobic
bacteria and it's going to be a much, much slower process. So instead, what we can do is, let's say
I've got a bucket full of, you know, these apple pieces and I want to incorporate that into my,
into my compost bin, I can totally do that. What I want to do is break it up, add some of the
apple pumice and then add maybe some, some of our browns, our shredded newspaper, our,
our, our broken up leaves from last year, things like that, right? So you can totally do it. You
just got to be careful that you're not creating a seal over the top. You can help the process
along a bit with that. Another one is sawdust and it's the same thing. You're going to,
you can end up, it's very easy to end up with a nice layer of compaction on the very top. It's
going to make it so that way you kill off all of your aerobic bacteria and then the anaerobic
ones are going to kick in and things are going to slow down. Now one of my favorite uses for sawdust
is when you are, if you've got something, let's say, I've got, I've got a bunch of green material,
right? And I also have some raccoons that are in the neighborhood, right? Well, I can take a
little bit of sawdust and put that on the very top of my compost bin. That's going to reduce any
media odors. And I'm not talking about like funky decaying smells. I'm just talking about,
hey, fresh vegetables. The smell of fresh vegetables will encourage, you know, your raccoon friends
or maybe some other rodents or other animals to come and take a look inside your compost bin and
make a mess of it, right? So to reduce those smells, you can add some compost on the very,
or I'm sorry, you can add some sawdust on the very top. Just make sure that it's not too thick of a
layer kind of and talking about smells, right? Because sometimes people are worried that, you know,
their neighbor put up a compost bin and now, you know, they're nervous, like, great,
as the neighborhood going to stink now, right? Or if you are new to composting and you've heard
some horror stories about stinky compost bins and nobody wants compost bins because they smell bad,
that's actually not true. If you've, this is why it's so important to have that, that,
that just right combination of browns to greens is because you'll know, it's troubleshooting,
you'll know you've got too many greens and not enough browns because the, the smell will be funky,
it will be bad. The way to correct that is to add more browns. On the other end of the spectrum,
if you don't have, if you have too many browns, right, you've got a big thing of leaves and hardly
any green material in there, it's not going to smell bad, but it's just going to take forever to
decompose. You can kind of think of the greens as being the driver, that nitrogen is being the
driver of fast decomposition, and then the browns are just kind of maybe relegating it a little bit.
And now for the hard nose and some of those things that we're going to get into.
Yeah, so these, I mean, these are just an absolute no, you can, you do not put these inside of
your compost, especially if you're just your typical backyard composter. They're now commercial
composters are able to compost a lot of stuff, right? But what I'm talking about really is just our
backyard composters. So for, for these folks, you'd never want to add any sort of omnivore
feces, right? So I'm talking about cats, I'm talking about dogs, I'm talking about pigs,
we don't want to add anything humans, we don't want to add any of those feces to our compost bins.
The reason why is they might contain some pathogens that are going to be harmful to humans, okay?
So pathogens, I'm talking about bacteria and viruses, right? Or maybe even some weird fungus.
And in any case, we don't want any of those pathogens in, we don't, we, I don't even want to be
like touching any of those pathogens, right? Much less spreading them in my vegetable bed.
Another problem with, so along those lines, because sometimes people will wonder, you know,
hey, can I, can I put my cat litter inside the compost bin? That's a no-no, for the reasons I
just mentioned, plus that cat litter might contain some chemicals, too, that are not going to be good
for either the environment or for the plants that we're trying to grow. Next up is charcoal
perquets. Sometimes people wonder, hey, you know, can I add charcoal perquets to my garden? I
heard wood ashes and bad to add to compost bin. Can I add charcoal perquets? Charcoal perquets
are a little bit different. They contain sulfur oxide and a lot of other chemicals that are going
to be toxic to the soil. They're also probably going to be toxic to the microbes that are doing
the heavy lifting inside of our compost bin. Remember the compost bin, it, it's this magical
environment where we're taking material and we're feeding it to these microbes and the microbes
eat it and then they poop it out, right? And then now the, the nutrients that they poop out
are in a format. They're in a, they're in a state of being, I guess, where the plants can actually
make use of those nitrate or those nutrients. If you, you know, if it hasn't gone through the process
of decomposition, the plant doesn't know what to do with the end of a broccoli stock, right? Right,
right. Okay, so along those lines, wood ash, you know, should you be adding wood ash to your
compost bin? Probably not. You know, wood ash is going to change the pH of the compost pile.
And again, we changed the pH. We run in the risk of killing off our microbes and causing a
nutrient and balance altogether inside the, inside the compost bin. There are other things that you
can do. If you're curious what to do with your wood ash, I would recommend googling
UW-Madison extension wood ash in the garden. We've got a really nice fact she put together that
will tell you things to, things to be aware of how to use wood ash safely. And then finally,
absolutely no cooked food waste. Okay. I think this is a big one. Yeah, this, this is, this is where
you end up with stinky compost bins, no food waste. Here, I am talking about baked goods, you know,
those doughnuts that got hard, nobody ate them. You brought them home from the office party.
Don't put them in your compost bin. Okay. You also don't want to put in any dairy products, no meat
or fish scraps or peanut butter for that matter. The reason why is as they decompose, they're going
to stink because of, it's the fats in them. And the fats are the problem here, right? That's why
even baked goods, the baked goods have fats in them. The one time that I would say a cooked
item, you could go ahead and compost would be if you boiled green beans with just water.
If you just boiled them, then that's fine. The thing I'm really, really concerned about is any fats
though. Okay. So generally speaking, nothing cooked. You know, I, there's, I always learn when we
talk Janelle, I enjoy the conversation so much. It's not very often though that you say something
that doesn't make any sense to me. I've never heard of a donut going stale. I don't know if that,
that didn't know that could happen. I didn't have value. I appreciate you so much. There's,
there's some key ones in there. Real quick, I did want to bring up a stale bread. I know that
oftentimes we, we want to reuse that because we, especially we feel guilty, we let the bad,
bread go bad or something like that. And I know traditionally, you know, putting it out there
for birds and some things, you shouldn't be doing that either. And I don't know, that also
doesn't sound like it'd be good for composting. No, no, no, I would keep the bread out of the compost
too. It was an opportunity to bring up both of those things at the same time there because I think
that again, the common knowledge of, oh, well, I can throw bread to birds or something. No, please
don't do that, everybody. And also don't put it in your composted turns out, which I, I learned
that just now to myself. Yeah, I think about our bird issues and Steven's point, I'm assuming you
probably have the same geese issues along the river here too. Yeah, we definitely don't want to
be feeding them. It's not good for them. It's not good for us. It's not good for anybody.
I love, love, love white bread, but it is about as good for us as it is that. It's not really,
really, it's a little bit of a regret. As wrapping up, what about applying the compost? We've kind of
helped everybody along this process. We got to finish this. We got to go ahead and how do you get
it out there? Yeah, so just a couple of things to keep in mind. If you're looking for the very
best time of the year to apply your compost, it's going to be in the fall. Now that said, if you
didn't put down compost last fall, you can still put it down in the spring. One thing to keep in
mind when you're putting it down in the spring is you can want to apply it about a month before
you're doing any seeds, okay? If you're just going to be planting tomato plants in your garden,
you can put the compost in the day before or the day of. If you're going to be planting carrot seeds
or onion seeds or anything direct sowed seeds, apply it a month beforehand because believe it or
not fresh compost can actually retard the germination rates of some seeds. Yeah, so we want to do that.
I guess it makes sense, but I didn't thought of it like that. Otherwise, as we get further
into the growing season, if you've got some compost that you want to put down, maybe you've turned
your compost been a couple of times and it's ready to be used, go ahead and use it as a side
dressing for the rest of your plants. As far as the time of year, all those things, if you have
other questions, we certainly want you to go to some good sources for that as well, that there's
a lot of places you can go to learn more. Yeah, I'm really excited to share this resource. So my
colleagues down in the Dane County Extension Office have created a free self-study course.
If this kind of got you interested in really getting your teeth sunk into composting,
this is an excellent resource. It's free. It's a self-study. You can find it by Google
Inc. Wisconsin Composting Stewards Course. Again, that's offered by the Dane County Extension Office.
And Janelle, as always, if people want to reach you directly and talk with you, how can they do
that? A couple of different ways. So you can reach directly to the Wood County Extension Office.
That's going to be 715-421-840 or you can reach out directly to me. My email address is my
first name dot last name. So that's j-a-n-e-l-l dot w-e-h-r-at-w-i-s-c dot edu.
And if you miss an email address or anything like that, please reach out to us. We'll make sure
to get you the correct information. Otherwise, extension dot whisk dot edu. That's the website book
market and keep up the date and all the great things that are going on over at UW. We really
appreciate it Janelle. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks for joining us.
Well, thanks for having me. And thank you out there for joining us here for another edition of
WFHR's Rapids Report.
