 And now please welcome Leslie Shaller. Well, thanks so much, Kate and Madison for helping me get through this virtual workshop. As Kate said, I'm Leslie Shaller and I'm with the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks. If you're not familiar with ASNET, we're headquartered in Athens County, but we work throughout the 32 counties of Appalachia, Ohio, and also do a lot of work throughout Central Appalachia. So I am an old hand. I was thinking how many times I've attended the OFA conference. I would say it's probably maybe been close to 35 or 36 times. And obviously, this is my first virtual conference. So in terms of what we're going to spend time on today, for those of you who might be familiar with ASNET, we do work very much within the food and farm economy in Southeastern Ohio. I have been, again, as I mentioned, a longtime OFA member, former board member. And ASNET has always had, really, since the late 80s, early 90s, this longstanding partnership with OFA. So I am delighted to be here. So let's talk a little bit about this conference workshop. The session overview, Expanding Appalachia, Ohio's artisanal meat production, is really going to focus on about four different topic areas. We were very fortunate in 2020 to receive funding from North Central's chair, Sarah. And we're really going to do a shout out in terms of some of those project objectives and really highlights from the project as it's materialized, even in this time of COVID. We'll talk a little bit about what I like to refer to as the ASNET infomercial. So you'll get a bit of an overview of ASNET's meat processing facility up in our Nelsonville Food and Farm Enterprise Center. And then because I think it's really always there now over this last 11 and a half months, you know, really talking about some of the pandemic pivots within the meat sector in Appalachia, Ohio, and really some of the challenges and opportunities I've seen over the last year, not just here in southeastern Ohio, but really throughout Central Appalachia and certainly even nationally. So I hope this will be informative. What I'm hoping is that if you feel comfortable using the chat box, you know, we're all Zoombees now at this stage in our lives. So if you're feeling like you're ready to share, as Kate said, we sort of have a protocol in terms of how we'll do Q&A today. But it would be great to have a sense of who's in the room. I see some friends and familiar faces, but I would love to have you introduce yourself. So your name, whatever hats you're wearing, if you do operate a farm or a food business, having that name would be great. The session is really going to first cover some of our processing and marketing priorities, especially highlighting the funding that we received from the SAR grant. And then I'm going to, as I really sort of rate some of the challenges we've had, really implementing those objectives and priorities, I'm going to talk about some of the COVID-19 impacts. And I'm always looking through the silver lining here. So I think in the meat sector, we've had some pandemic positives. That is a good thing. And I'm hoping some of these trends, some of these changes will continue on into the future, whatever that new normal looks like. Hopefully by 4.30, if we have some time for engagement, we'll be able to unmute folks and I can field some of your questions. Or just if you have feedback that you would like to share, we'll have that opportunity. And then as we finish up the session, we'll talk a little bit more about some of our capabilities within our Food and Farm Enterprise Center, how we work with the Ohio Department of Agriculture's meat division, especially with our inspector on site. And then some of the training and technical assistance support that our staff at ACENet provides. We'll wrap up with some next steps and resources, ways to suggest how you might want to connect with ACENet if this is an area of interest for you. So we'll try and stay on time. I know Kate will help facilitate as we go through this session. And I suspect that we may have maybe some other people joining us. So we'll welcome them along the way. And again, a good shout out to Madison for helping us with any technical issues. So if you are noticing, you know, maybe some problems that we might need to troubleshoot, please again feel free to use the chat box. So in 2020, ACENet received $39,407 from North Central SARE. And really, we started out with three project objectives for that budget. One was to help our farm partners and ACENet staff, especially our experienced staff working in the meat sector, to increase locally sourced artisanal processing. And to really provide hands-on training because we want to see increased poundage. We want to see more product variety. And we definitely want to see a sales increase for our regional livestock farmers utilizing our meat processing facility, or in many ways tapping into some of the marketing and value chain support that ACENet staff also provides. One of our objectives was to promote workshops and on-farm tours that encouraged more livestock producers to follow sustainable ag practices and hopefully to create a stronger supply chain. Hoping that many of our operators within the region would start to look at some of the services, some of the processing opportunities that our facility provides to increase the rate of production for local meat products. We know that customer demand continues to grow, but there's sometimes a lot of hiccups within that local food value chain. So expanding the value chain coordination with marketing, making sure that our warehousing really created more capacity for storage and distribution assistance. And then we've also helped with quite a bit of financial counseling to help prepare and link livestock farmers who are maybe transitioning from direct markets to more wholesale channels. Initially, we hope to really focus over the period of this project on food service and institutional channels. And when we talk about some of the pandemic challenges, we'll see that we've had to make some pivots there as well. So that's what we hope to cover. So how have we utilized the funding? Well, thank you, thank you, thank you, Sarah. This has been a great project for us, not just in our ability to utilize some of the budget to purchase more processing equipment, to get our meat room a little more set up and to really create more capacity for storage in both our walk-in cooler and our walk-in freezer at AceNet. The other thing that I would reflect upon over this last year has been really this funding oftentimes has allowed us to leverage other investment. So that's been another, I would say, sort of a side effect, a positive side effect of the SAIR investment. So we're always appreciative of being able to leverage any investment, especially as it builds capacity within our food and farm enterprise center. It also has helped to support our two staff members, Adam Cote and Chris Cooke, to really do one-to-one training in our meat room. Many of our new producers have participated in what AceNet commonly refers to our intake process. If you visit our website, www.acenetworks.org, you can see a whole variety of ways that you can connect with our staff. We've tried to host some workshops since COVID that have been primarily virtual, and we have not been able to implement some of the farm tours that we hope to do this past summer and fall in 2020. I'm still hoping with some of our other grant programs, especially maybe as the vaccine becomes more available to everyone in our community, that we might be able to hold more in-person events. But right now, a lot of our work has been either doing meetups or workshops on Zoom or go to webinar, and we've also experimented. I won't say they are high quality videos, but we are adapting and learning how to do video tours of our facilities as well. The other thing I really want to be thankful for and acknowledge is what a great partnership we have with our Ohio Department of Agriculture meat inspectors. Getting products ready for wholesale channels can be pretty daunting. And I think the role that AceNet plays, especially with our incredibly committed staff, Adam and Chris, really allows livestock farmers the support that they need to walk through the process. I think it would be really hard to navigate on your own, and having this type of funding that really allows us to invest in that one-to-one technical assistance is really helping both our farmers, our livestock operators, even maybe working with some of our local artisanal butchers to reach new markets, markets that they would never have had the opportunity to reach in the past. So I always like to really showcase and hopefully this will maybe prepare you as a little visual appetizer for your dinner that's coming up. But we just have amazing livestock producers and artisanal butchers making products that they were never able to make in the past before we had our facility implemented. Again, the bricks and mortar, whether it's the Food Venture Center in Athens or our Food and Farm Enterprise Center in Nelsonville, it's really important to have these facilities available for farmers to do all sorts of value-added processing, but it just doesn't work with the whole sort of wraparound services. So these are products that typically many of our legacy processors within the region wouldn't likely have the capacity to create. So this was, I would say, a challenge that we've heard over the last 10 years or longer from many of our livestock producers. They had great feedback from their customers, often listening to the comments from their customers at a farmer's market or maybe if they were doing any kind of direct sales through a CSA. And they were disappointed that they couldn't always create the types of, the types of, I would say, recipes and products that really are on trend. Many of our livestock producers are following sustainable agriculture practices. They wanted to make sure that that story was part of their marketing messaging. So a couple of posts here. Again, we've always used our very social platforms to the best of our ability, but I think we've become even more reliant on them over this last year with the pandemic. It's not as easy to have people in our facilities, although we have been validated by our City County Health Departments as essential services. So over all this time, ASNET, both our Athens and our Nelsonville campuses, have kept running. But that said, we've had to take a lot of precautions and institute many new procedures and protocols. One of the advantages, I think, for our livestock producers using our meat room, is it was always a dedicated processing space. So usually only one user is typically in that space at a time. Generally, they're scheduling a complete day or two thirds or even 50% of a day in our room. So that enabled us to not have too much of a break in people's ability to use that space. So that's been a great thing. So let's talk about some of the successes. When we first applied for this funding, we were seeing a lot of demand from some of our institutional buyers, our Farm to School initiatives, especially those in Athens County. We also have great relationships with some of our Farm to College institutional buyers, Hawking College in Nelsonville and Ohio University in the city of Athens. So our expectation was that we were going to use SARA funding to really explore and prototype more product lines that could go into educational institutions, buying pipeline, and also looking at some of the ways our local health care institutions maybe could source more local meat products. So obviously a few hiccups there. The facility equipment and our capacity to refrigerate and freeze more product lines have definitely, I would say, positioned us at some point to increase the institutional buying relationships. But to a large degree, we've been more dependent in terms of food service wholesale from our restaurants, our breweries, our wineries that have remained open. So many of them were dedicated, I would say, market partners sourcing lots of local ingredients. But I think as more of our producers have experimented with product development, really create a stronger dialogue between those market partners and having some of the new equipment in place has allowed us to at least shore up some of the restaurant food service opportunities. The great thing about ACENet in our Food Ventures Center, we have a lot of caterers, food truck operators who are tenants. Many of them have also pivoted and are doing more prepared meal products. So there's been good synergy now, I think, in terms of their purchasing and really increasing their purchasing of local meat ingredients. We also have an incredibly innovative entrepreneur and that's Becky Clark of Pork and Pickles. And she's really been able to expand her business. She was on a pretty amazing growth trajectory, even pre-COVID. But now she's experimented and has tried some new things. Again, I think being part of this larger network, working in shared use facilities, she's really seen some new opportunities and we'll talk about those in a minute. So as I mentioned, this project wasn't free of obstacles. The food service purchasing from schools definitely has not materialized to the hopes and aspirations we had when we actually prepared the scope of work. And then I think, and this is a longstanding problem, but it's been maybe even a little more challenging with COVID. There's still a lot of hiccups and a lot of obstacles in terms of the pipeline from our local regional slaughter facilities. So even though people are bringing whole carcasses into our meat processing facility, if there's any sort of discombobulation within that pipeline, within our slaughter facilities, it still creates some obstacles. So again, a great shout out here. It's Facebook posts from Pork and Pickles. They've had an amazing relationship over this last year with one of our expanding craft breweries, Little Fish Brewing Company. In fact, they're getting ready to expand and open a second location in the Dayton area. So we see if anything, the demand for local meat, as many of our breweries and wineries have taken off as real positive. So just a bunch of photographs here. Again, I just always want to acknowledge that ACENet does this in partnership with our entrepreneurs. Obviously, we're learning from them on a daily basis in terms of what their needs are. But I think, as I've always mentioned in all my presentations, when people are affiliated with ACENet, they're part of a larger network. So it's a community of farmers and market partners and processors all working together in really a win-win kind of local food value chain. If you ever take a look at Ohio Magazine, again, Becky Clark just got a big shout out. Some great earned media. I think this was, I can't remember if it's the December. I think it's maybe the January issue of Ohio Magazine. So any kind of shout out about local meat production we see as a big win. And then, although we've been disappointed to not get the traction we wanted to with our local schools, the fact that there's been so many shutdowns, even the higher ed institutions have been hosting more virtual classes than having students back on campus. Although the spring semester now, OU has welcomed some students back. Some of our local food heroes, John Gutenkantz of Avalanche Pizza, a longstanding relationship working with livestock producers. If you've ever had an Avalanche Pizza, you're probably sampling all sorts of local meat products from pork to beef to poultry. So John took that experience, those connections with our livestock producers and processors, and then really turned it into meeting the food security needs within our communities. With schools shut down, it meant a lot of kids weren't getting fed. So Avalanche has worked with a whole variety of partners. They've created all sorts of packaged lunches, box lunches, and they've been distributing them throughout the county, probably to about 30 different locations and partners. So in some ways, not as we expected it to happen, we do have kids now eating a lot more local meat because of some of these partnerships with these incredibly generous restaurant and food truck partners who are helping increase food security throughout Athens County. So a surprise, but I'm hoping now as we build this community of younger eaters turned on to the wonderful taste of local meat, I'm hoping if anything that will encourage more of our food service partners, both in our restaurants and our educational and health institutions, to say, yeah, we can get more local meat circulated in our communities. So yeah, lots of pictures here of products that are being made in our meat room. And then one of the other pandemic positives, a lot of this has been, I would say, spurred by national media attention, but many of our independent grocers and more specialty retail stores have also increased sourcing. The by-local commitment, especially in Athens County, has always been important. And I think we're innovators at all levels with our 30-mile meal brand program. But I really feel like since COVID that that attention to local, that commitment to sourcing from our farm neighbors has been reignited. So whether it's Keller Market House up in Lancaster or two independent grocers in the Athens area, Siemens Cardinal Market or Kindred Market, they're all doing an excellent job of showcasing local meat products. So just some pictures there. Again, I always sing the praise of Becky Clark of Bork and Pickles. One of the things that she saw early on was that many of her livestock farmers that she works with had some losses or some decreases in sales. Maybe some increases at farmers markets if they sold there. But we needed to come up with some new ways to really get local meat out directly to customers. So she has created and she's just an extraordinary marketer. Really check out the Facebook page of Bork and Pickles. These are just some snapshots of some of the things that she's doing. She also started yet another new business called Totes Local. And although it features many products from local producers, many of them tenants and clients of Aisnet, she's created this opportunity that didn't exist for many of her fellow meat processors. So whether it's primatera farms, poultry products, some of the other cheese and dairy products from Snowville Creamery, it's obviously allowed her to sell more of our her artisanally butchered or processed meat product lines. But it's also lifted all boats, so to speak. And it's given more customers the ability to buy local, especially local meat if they weren't purchasing it. Or some of these producers didn't have stuff on the shelves of our grocery stores. So let's talk a little bit about who's in the room. I'm going to probably segue in this next section of the session into more information about our meat processing capabilities at Aisnet and how to get in touch with us. But I'm really interested to hear from who's attending this session and why you're here. Who are you and what resources do you need? And are any of you currently selling some meat products at this point in time? So you're more than welcome to put that in the chat and I can read it off. Or if anybody would like to raise their hand, I can call on you and then you'll unmute yourself and talk freely. Rachel, why are you here? Yeah, so I'm the Begin Farming Program Coordinator at OFA, so I'm interested in connecting beginning farmers to resources like Aisnet. And I also am working with Aisnet on a LFPP, a local food promotion program, assessing and planning for processing infrastructure that might be needed by livestock, pastured livestock growers. Specifically, we're trying to evaluate whether a mobile meat processing unit would help the central Appalachian region. So if you are interested in that project, I'll put a link in the chat to join us. We're listening, we're holding listening sessions and planning for consumers, producers and folks who work in the infrastructure arena so that we can understand whether mobile meat processing or perhaps collaborative cold storage or something like that can help ease that bottleneck that Leslie mentioned about livestock producers having enough access to processing capacity to even get their products to Aisnet and do value-added production. Thank you, Rachel. So it seems like so long ago, but during the Strickland administration, I served on the Statewide Ohio Food Policy Council. And back at that point in time, we were looking at how do we increase and really meet the challenge of some of the legacy slaughter facilities processors that we have in the region. So looking at, especially with, I would say, this growing trend of customers wanting more locally and sustainably sourced meat product lines, the local food promotion program grant that Rachel and Angela Blatt and Paul Dorrance from Pasture Providence, we're all partners on this with Aisnet as the lead. They're really doing the hard work. I will give a shout out to those consultants. We're trying to figure out, is this another possible solution to some of these challenges? We're excited to see some new processing facility management coming online, especially in southeastern Ohio. But even with our meat processing room, we're still stymied sometimes because we don't have enough availability, a steady pipeline of whole carcasses that our livestock operators or our artisanal butchers can process. And Denise in the chat did say she dabbles in grass-fed beef direct sales via in-laws and access to butchering is a challenge in Guernsey County as well and would love more access to processing. Great, well, thank you, Denise. We would love to have you check out our facility at some point. So feel free to get in contact with us or go to our website. I'm gonna talk about some of our videos here in a minute. And it looks like Charlie has his hand raised. Charlie, you can go ahead and talk. Okay, can you hear me okay? Yeah. We can hear you great, Charlie. Okay, this is Charlie Esselgrove and I'm from Ross County. And my main reason for being here is as much curiosity as anything, I am a farmer, a long-time farmer. We raise organic grain, livestock and dairy. And I'm mainly interested just to kind of see what the landscape looks like. I've got several young people and operating in the area here that are starting up farms and are in the early stages of their farming career and they're looking at direct marketing meat. And they're doing very well, especially this past year. I mean, everybody I talked to is can't keep up with demand, but they're running into that old issue of slaughtering facilities. They can't get slots. And I just wondered what the landscape was looking like around the rest of Ohio as much as anything. I will say that I don't know if this is a direct result of the pandemic, but we do have two new slaughter facilities being built in our area right now with a third in the planning stage. Now, the two that are built, one is operating and the other one is soon to be operational. They're going to be custom cut only. So nobody would be able to retail through there. But they're gonna take a lot of pressure off of the facilities that are here that you can retail from. And then the third one that is being planned he's talking like he says if these other people are going to just have custom cuts that I'm gonna go the whole way and get completely inspected. So we could sell meat or get meat processed there and ship it wherever we want to. So that remains to be seen whether that's gonna happen. But it's interesting that there are some businesses starting up. And just as a side note, I don't know if this is significant or not, all three of these facilities, these are members of the playing community that's growing by leaps and bounds around us here. So that's just what's going on in South Central Ohio and just kind of wonder what was going on around the rest of the state. Well, Charley, it would be great if you would share some of that contact information with us, both ASNED and I'm sure OFA as well. Rachel and Angela and Paul as we work on this local food promotion program grant too because we're doing a variety of different focus groups having that information available would also be important. Okay, I will do that. Okay, thanks a bunch. Kate, anyone else? I don't think so. I think we're ready to move on if you are. Okay, we're kind of right on my amazing timed agenda. This is like maybe a first for me. I usually tend to talk too much. So let's talk about where we are. So ASNED is headquartered in Athens County and our two facilities, the Food Ventures Center which opened in 1996 is in the city of Athens and our Nelsonville facility, the Food and Farm Enterprise Center is really part of a larger mixed use business incubator facility. It's in a building that's about 95,000 square feet and about 20,000 of that building is now dedicated for food processing. So a lot of our Food Ventures Center constraints, we really grew out of that facility probably over 10 years ago, our packaging, our labeling, our larger dry storage warehousing, our aggregation for produce, grading and packing, all of that typically is up in our Nelsonville facility. So in 2017, 2018, we raised money from USDA, from the Appalachian Regional Commission from a variety of other philanthropy funders like the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation of Nelsonville. And we created two separate dedicated processing rooms and one of them is the meat processing room. We also have a veg prep room, although I think that's evolving as we speak, we're even getting some additional funding to do some botanical CBD production in that space. So a lot of medicinal botanicals and CBD is another trend that we're seeing. Currently our meat production room can only operate Monday through Fridays because we have to have our inspector on site. And we've seen a little bit of a drop maybe in production since COVID, although I would say we're still usually having folks in there three to four days a week, there's probably 14 to 18 days a month that are scheduled. But ideally we could be open five days a week. There's sometimes opportunity depending on people's process flow, there has to plan what they're doing on any given day where folks don't need a whole eight hour shift. So it is compatible with good scheduling and good transition clean out protocols for even two producers to use the meat processing room in one day. That said, it's still limited. So we are not the be all end all in terms of the growth that we believe is going to occur within this meat sector over time. But it's a great starting point. And I think when we looked at the opportunity for ACENet to go down this road, we were hoping that this would maybe encourage more entrepreneurs to either maybe if they were inheriting a family business of a processing facility to do some additional investment and upgrades or as Charlie was just telling us the opportunity for more facilities to really open up. I think it's the supply pipeline that we still have to figure out. So if mobile processing is one component of creating this value chain, this local food value chain, that is obviously something that we're exploring as well. So over the past two years, I really always like to acknowledge our funders because we can't do this without them. We've secured a USDA beginning with farmers and ranchers grant. That was again due to finish up at the end of 2021. I think we're gonna probably have to do a little bit of an extension on that timeline. It also included farm tours and its scope of work. So I really don't wanna give up that opportunity to get more folks to learn from one another as peers and really we find so much power in all sorts of not just our facility tours, but our agricultural tours as well, the bread and butter, what OFA has done so well all these decades. We feel it's pretty important to stay committed to that. We also have another current USDA rural business development grant, lots of acronyms here, RBDG, which is allowing us to buy some additional equipment. So we're adding another walk-in. We're purchasing another blast freezer, which is really important for a lot of these meat products because a lot of our limitations in terms of our walk-in storage can be a challenge as well depending on how long things need to be stored. So more investment on the horizon, that's exciting to see. Again, shout out to our Department of Ag folks. We have been able to, now that we've been up and running for a couple of years, work with our inspectors to allow some of our producers to sell across state lines. If you want more details about that, I'm the grant writer here. I'm the rain maker, but Adam and Chris on our staff can really talk about some of the changes and some of the opportunities on our horizon there. I always encourage people to visit acenetworks.org. You can go to our staff page. Adam is really the coordinator of all our food and farm enterprise activities in both of our facilities. Chris has been with us just a little over a year now, but he's been pretty much headquartered in our Nelsonville facility. He works very closely with our meat inspector on a day-to-day basis. So their certifications can really help anyone walk through this process. So if you're a livestock producer and you're thinking about doing some value-added processing maybe that you couldn't accomplish with your current processor, I would certainly encourage you to get in touch with Adam and Chris and look at some of the opportunities. We have found because acenets marketing staff work so closely with buyers at all levels from restaurants to retailers to institutional buyers. We wanna see these wholesale channels grow. I think we've learned again over this last year that if anything, the values of sourcing local hopefully are going to stay with us. And I think there's a much deeper appreciation now from customers whether they're buying direct at a farmer's market or looking for local meats in the meat case of our community markets. So our staff really skilled in developing hazard plans, hazard analysis, critical control point plans. I just have a couple of what I consider rather daunting slides here in terms of you know, some of the challenges we've seen as folks are trying to figure out their labels, you know, how do they meet all the regulatory compliance but still accomplish what they need to do in terms of labeling their product. So two of the photographs here, a couple of different product lines from Farmer and the Ridge. Again, their home is Jackson County and Pork and Pickles, Athens County. You know, you can see that they have to have the regulatory meat inspection environment sticker sort of where they're processing from in the ASNET facility. But they're also putting multiple labels on. So we help people oftentimes develop their logos so that they can have stickers that really identify that these are items that are locally produced. Becky, I think Clark again of Pork and Pickles, you know, with her chef background, she's also very interested in developing marketing materials and even additional labels for some of her products to help guide consumers how to best prepare their products as well, her products as well. So, you know, just some of the challenges here, it's not as quick as perhaps another food entrepreneur coming into one of our facilities. It's a slightly longer process to go from product idea to product that's ready for wholesale markets. But our staff, again, working very closely with our inspectors can guide anyone through these processes. So whether it's labels, you know, whether it's HACCP, all of this we really look at in terms of marketability as well. We definitely want everyone to be in compliance, but we also wanna make sure that any product that's being produced in one of our facilities also has viability in terms of sales, that it's something a buyer wants, whether that's a direct consumer at a farmer's market or an institutional buyer at a healthcare facility. So I would encourage you to reach out to our staff. If you go again, shameless promotion here, acenetworks.org, we have lots of videos, tours of our facilities, videos of many of our producers at work within the meat room. So, you know, if you're just really hungering for that video of sausage being made, if you can see that by going to acenetworks.org, searching our video page and really looking at what people are doing within our facility. As many people mentioned during our feedback session here just a minute or two ago, demand is growing and we've gotta figure out how to get more local and regional meat products, especially sustainably raised meat products into the hands of local customers. So now is the time, we really appreciate both the funding support that we've received from North Central Snare and also, as I said earlier, you know, I miss not being in person at an OFA conference after all these decades, you know, it was always like going to the well for me, seeing my peeps hanging out, learning stuff. So it's a little more challenging now, whether this is an OFA session online or maybe you coming to our website, following us on Facebook, looking at our YouTube videos. We know that it's not optimum, we'd rather be seeing you in person. But again, we're open, our staff is flexible, if you would like to come for a tour, we are doing small group tours. So that's always something that can be on your horizon as well. If there's folks in your county or in your subregion who want to learn more and really have more of a hands-on experience, getting to know what ACENet has to offer, we're available and we're ready to help, that's what we're here for. So again, the local food promotion program grant, if you're interested in learning more about that, that work plan hopefully is going to finish up within 12 to 16 month timeframe. We started late last fall on that project and should have a feasibility study completed. So that will be shared. And then just as OFA has done a lot of work around assisting beginning farmers, our beginning farmers and ranchers grant, as I mentioned earlier, probably will at some point, I'm hoping by summer or even this fall be able to schedule more farm tours with some of our regional innovators here in Southeastern Ohio and also host some on-site workshops within our Nelsonville Food and Farm Enterprise Center so people can really see folks at work within our meat room. So just a little more shout out in terms of how to get hold of ACENet, we do put out a monthly e-newsletter so you can always go to our website and sign up for that. We probably post the most on our Facebook page, but you can follow us. We do occasionally tweet, not very often anymore these days, but I would definitely encourage you to reach out to Adam, to Chris. If you have questions for me, I can always be found at Leslie S at acenetworks.org or you can go to our website and find any of our staff members' email information. So Kate, I'm gonna open it up again. We're doing great on time. We've got maybe eight minutes left. So I would love to hear some feedback. Has this been informative? What else would you like to know from ACENet? Charlie, do you have a question or is your hand still up from before? I think it's still up from before. I'm sorry. Oh, no worries, I just wanted to make sure. So what's your feedback though, Charlie, as long as you're not muted at the moment? Has this been of interest to you or? Yes, it has. One, I did not know that you had facilities to further process if someone wanted to go that route. So that was news to me. I think that'd be very beneficial. We're probably not in striking distance of our people here being able to use that just because there's really not a good easy way to get from here to Athens and it's been that way for a long time. So, but it's interesting to know what's out there and I will pass the news along to the young growers up here in case that's something they would want to consider. I'm not sure they realize that ACENet is available to do this sort of thing. So, yeah, I got that much out of it that the information about what is going on, it's nice to hear that Paul and Rachel and some others are working on some issues. Do I understand trying to get more slaughter facilities going or a traveling? Is that what Apatoir? Is that what I understand is going on there? Yep, trying to lay the foundation so that we might be able to pilot that. Yeah, that would be great. I know that it's a tough thing to do from what I've talked to people in other regions of the world that has done this, but it would be good. I remember, here I'm dating myself, but probably 25 years ago, I think Leslie made some mention of that, that there was talk about doing that back when Strickland was in. And I think there were some pretty good designs and a lot of enthusiasm for it. But if I remember right, the head of the Department of Agriculture at that time, put his foot down and basically says not on my watch, if I remember correctly. And so that was the end of that. But I remember at the time that I always have thought there could be a tremendous amount of poultry raised in Southeast Ohio, in Southern Ohio, if there was slaughter facilities available. And I think we're kind of missing the boat on that by not having a poultry facility especially. We're getting more for the larger animals, but poultry is a real problem for people. So I think a focus on that would be really good. So as the old timer, Charlie, as someone who's been doing this for a long, long time, there's always a cat at some point in the Zoom call. I feel like there is a shift happening. We're really impressed with our meat inspectors now. And it was discouraging as we transitioned from the Strickland administration and the statewide food policy council was disbanded. But a lot of that interest and the aspiration for some of these innovations continues on. So whether it's been other advocates throughout the subregions, keeping policy moving forward, whether it's the exponential growth that we've seen in the farmer's market sector throughout the state of Ohio, I think there's more, I hope, maybe I'm delusional. I think there's more open-mindedness now because even inspectors see how much demand is growing. So I'm hoping we're orientating ourselves a little more to problem-solving instead of the hard no, because we see best practices in other rural places across the U.S. And it's just as a larger network of stakeholders, it's getting us all comfortable with some of these ideas. And that's where the investment in some of this feasibility analysis is important. You know, I kind of get the same feeling, Leslie, that there does seem to be a shift in the wind a little bit. And I think a lot of that has to do with the newer generation coming up. You know, we've aged out a lot of the old inspectors and people that basically early in their career, they saw a lot of these processing facilities shutting down and in their mind, I think that was a, to a certain degree, they felt that that was progress, getting all these little people out of the way. And I think the young people now are starting to realize what we lost with that. There's nothing I can really put my finger on one thing, but it just seems different, difference to me. So it's really gratifying to see. Yeah, I mean, and I always say that Athens County, you know, Southeastern Ohio, I mean, we've had such an active OFA chapter all these decades that I always say we're kind of an innovation hub down here. I'm gonna not be too modest. So there's a lot of... I would agree with that. Yeah, there's a lot of younger folks who are taking the lead now. And when I say younger, people in their 40s and 30s, you know, unlike old timers like me in their late 60s. So I'm really glad that I think we're demonstrating that there's market demand and there's new entrepreneurs at all levels who wanna take up this mantle and get stuff moving. Anyone younger than us, Leslie, is a young person. Oh, that makes me feel good. But I never feel old, that's the problem. I don't know if you... I saw that Denise had you, I waited for a second. Did you have a question? I was just gonna make a comment. From listening to folks and from myself and my family, like we know that getting an animal slaughtered is a problem area. And I guarantee the feedback through the initiative you guys are working on is gonna say, yes, we need mobile processing and we need more access. But I'm curious how feedback is being sought from the folks who are interested in purchasing. So I know the little bit I've gotten to dabble in direct sales with grass-fed beef is the buyer wants more and I don't have it. Fast enough becomes an issue. So I think in the whole story, as we put together the story, hearing from the consumers is gonna be just as important to show that the demand is phenomenal too. And that's part of the scope of work. So Rachel, you might wanna answer that question. Yeah, so we're really trying to address this from three prongs. I'm looking at the consumer end and that includes also the small retailers and talking to those folks who engage with customers. And then Angela is looking at the infrastructure component, which is regulatory and what are the actual options that are out there in other places. And Paul is kind of coordinating the response and contributions of producers. And we also are trying to be very intentional about not duplicating work that's already been done. So the state of Ohio, in the state of Ohio through extension and other projects has actually done several feasibility studies and issued reports about both mobile processing and the lack of processing in general and even proposed solutions. We really want to work with ACE NET's business planning services to describe the next step because you're right, like we're not, I don't think we're going to hear other than from regulators that it's a bad idea or that we like don't need to work on processing or increase capacity. Like that's just a given. It's about defining what the next step is and for us aligning those networks of producers, consumers and possible processors and to create the momentum to build a business that would work, that, you know, because we kind of all know that something needs to be there. Yeah, so I would love to continue this conversation about that project with you, Denise and others in the future for sure. Yeah, please reach out to us. Yeah, thank you for adding more to the scope of the project, their information about the scope of the project and Leslie, as much as I've talked about like my personal connections, I am the Southeast Ohio educator for central states. So you and I are going to get more excited about that. Yeah, another, you know, incredible hope that I have. It's more capacity there. Okay, well, I've kept you past time now but I really appreciate your comments and your participation. And please, please, please follow us on Facebook because we'll have more information on these additional trainings, workshops, focus groups. And then we always have updates on, you know, all the equipment and building renovations that we do. Thank you so much, Leslie. This is a great day. Thank you. Thank you.