 My name is David Karki, I'm with SDSU Extension and work as Agronomy Field Specialist. But for the last two years or so, I and my colleague, Amanda Bachman out of Peer Regional Center, are also co-coordinating SEAR efforts in the state. Dr. Amanda Blair, who received a partnership grant from SEAR, and Dr. Blair received her PhD from Purdue University in 2007, where she focused her research in the area of meat science. In the same year, she joined the faculty at SDSU, where she's currently a professor in animal science with both research and extension appointment. Dr. Blair's research is focused on understanding the effects of pre and post-natal management strategies on growth, body composition, and meat quality of beef cattle. Her extension programming is focused on connecting producers with the processing and product sites of industry, as well as enhancing consumer understanding of meat production and products. In addition to her work with SDSU, she ran just with her family near Sturgis, South Dakota, raising and marketing Angus cattle. Well, good morning everyone, and thank you again to the organizers for the invitation to be here and to share a little bit about our SEAR partnership grant. Along with myself, I have a great colleague, Dr. Christina Baker, who's a great resource for anyone that is interested in the meat processing side. She's great with the regulatory aspects, HACCP, all those good acronyms that you get to learn when you're in the meat side of things. But the title of our project was Enhancing Producer Resources to Build Small Meat Processing Capacity and Local Meat Demand. And this was awarded in 2021, and we'll wrap up in March of next year, or March of 23. So just a brief background of kind of how we came to this grant. It really was sparked by COVID. And many of you could follow the narrative of what was going on in terms of decreased meat processing capacity, empty store shelves. We had a backed up supply chain that turned into over finished animals. For many species that was detrimental. We saw euthanasia have to happen in many species. It exaggerated labor issues for large processors and some small processors. And again, this culminated in empty store shelves in terms of what was available for protein. So we started to get calls in our office and our roles as extension meat specialists and a lot of interest in building and expanding and growing the small and medium sized processing capacity in the U.S. So we really saw this shift to a demand for small local processors. And we also, at the same time, and I think this had been building prior to, but we saw a shift in consumer preference for more direct from the producer or direct from the processor type product. So more of that local interest, where's my food coming from? Get to know your producer. So that was kind of coming in prior to this, but it really was COVID was kind of a way to emphasize that and people had to pay attention. So what we saw was a lack of small processors to meet this growing demand. So we worked together to develop this grant. And I've got a slide here. These are just headlines that we saw. Large small processors all across the board. Everybody was putting out pressure leases and saying, we need more processing. We need more processing. The big guys were saying it, the small guys were saying it, the producers were saying it and consumers were saying it. So these are just a collection of some of the headlines that we saw. So SCSU, we kind of got together and said, what are we gonna do to respond to this collective challenge? And we focused attention on the development and sustainability of small meat processors. So we wanted to create additional outlets for market-ready livestock. So that was some immediate response of trying to connect some resources through our networks to get through some of that oversupply. And then we wanted to start to work to reduce this future supply chain challenge and enhance direct marketing opportunities for producers. So those were some of our goals, just collectively, not necessarily totally focused on the stair project. To that end, we pushed out some content in terms of passive workshops. Dr. Baker did a series of butcher block talks, processing short courses, and then culminated in the Sarah Partnership grant. So these are just some additional efforts to help this be successful. So the overall goals of the project were to establish resources for individuals and groups looking to build, renovate, invest in or operate small processing facilities. And we also wanted to assist our partners with initial business development and guide some feasibility discussions. Because sometimes finding out that you shouldn't is just as important as finding out you should and how to do it. So our objectives, we had five objectives. First was to familiarize our partners with the regulations and requirements of the meat industry. For any of you that have been in the meat industry or looked into it, it's not the same as fruits and vegetables and other food products. It's regulated by an entirely different entity. And so we worked a lot with our partners because many of our partners were producers that weren't in the meat industry yet. So they had to learn those things. We wanted to aid our partners with regulatory decisions based on their business goals. So these might be questions as to should I be a custom exempt processor, a state inspected facility, or should I go to a federal regulation side? We wanted to provide technical assistance and processing techniques and skills necessary to operate meat processing facilities. We did this a lot through case studies. So we work in the SDSU meat lab but hey, let's take people out to the folks that are doing this and doing it well and build some networks and some learning communities around this so that they can learn from each other. We wanted to educate partners on sanitation of food safety practices because sometimes this is the, one of the bigger issues is understanding some of those food safety regulations in the meat industry. So we walked them through those and helped them find resources as they continued through their process. And then finally assist partners in development of realistic production goals. Sometimes it's as simple as saying, most people don't realize that the slaughter side of the meat industry is actually kind of the easy part. It's all the fabrication and how do you get through all that meat and store it? All these things that not everybody necessarily thinks about on the backside of it. Logistics are a huge challenge. So the actual project components, we used a case study model and pulled in partners. Our first case study was, so a case study, these folks were gonna be willing to let us come into their facility. They were gonna answer all the questions, good, bad, the ugly, they were willing to share. So we went into a renovated older facility that was built in the 50s that did custom processing and was stayed inspected with and these folks had plans to build a new facility that would be federally inspected through FSIS and they also had a retail space. So those folks were willing to share with our partners and kind of again, share the good, the bad, the ugly, what they learned as they were going through. That was really important with our case studies was finding people that were willing to share and be a resource. Our second case study we toured was a new facility, relatively new that was built in 2019 that did custom processing and was also federally inspected and they had a value-added focus and provided kind of additional services such as private labeling and co-packing and had both retail and online sales. So these were two places that we physically, part of the money was for travel. We took our partners and we went and toured and spent a good part of a day with each of these case studies. We also had webinars to kind of preempt this, to build in some resources about business planning, financing options and we discussed some of the grants that have been announced. We went over regulatory and the inspection side and then operations and logistics from we had speakers talking about labor, technical skills, construction and floor plans, harvest and production schedules to give our, again, our partners a better feel for what it really takes to establish and be successful at a meat processing enterprise. So what we're working on now up until our deadline of March is to pull a lot of this into development of online resources and decision tools so that other folks that might be interested that weren't able to be a partner in the grant can still access this through SDSU extension. A little bit of the timeline of the project. We weren't looking for massive amounts of partners. We actually put in that we wanted to have three partners and we ended up with four committed partners and then we pushed this out as a press release to people, we thought at least with the webinars we could expand this and we were overwhelmed by the response. We had, I think, calls and interest and applications from 13 states and three countries so we were, I don't know, it was 60 or 65 people that were wanting to be partners on it but we didn't have the funds so we picked our four from the North Central Region and then we added another 20 participants that were allowed to do some of the webinars but also some of them also participated in the case study tours. We did assessments, an initial assessment before things began. We started our webinars in December of 22 and then the case study tours were in January. Our final assessment will be in March and then our resource development, like I said, is underway. What our planned outcomes were, we wanted to increase partner knowledge about the development of a harvest fabrication and processing facility and increase their confidence in taking that step toward their planned business venture and also to provide livestock producers with information necessary to plan and establish a meat processing facility because, again, our partners were folks that hadn't been in this industry before. So I'm happy to announce that we met those outcomes but we also had a couple other actual outcomes that were very exciting. One of our partners has purchased a locker to operate in southern Minnesota so took that step in July of 22 and purchased the facility and they were able to hit the ground running on a locker that already existed and they took over the management and all the business aspects of that and another partner has initiated plans for a new locker in central South Dakota and was recently awarded one of the USDA MPEP grants to move forward with their project. So that's very exciting from our four partners. We also had a partner that decided this is not the direction to go and, again, I think that's just as successful sometimes as learning what you shouldn't do. And I know I'm getting short on time but from a Sarah perspective, we think that the relevance to sustainability is that this project is gonna keep money in local economies, reduce transport and that's gonna help lower production costs. Also reduces emissions and we think from the social aspect of sustainability this is hopefully will create jobs in rural areas especially with these new facilities coming in and help build those relationships between producers and consumers because this will align with a lot of those direct marketing goals that many producers have. There's my contact information and happy to answer any questions that you might have about our Sarah partnership grant. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Blair. Can you talk about importance of building relationships for these projects? And I'm gonna hand. Well, obviously relationships were really the foundation of our project. Looking at our core partners, building relationships in and among themselves. We really rely a lot in a lot of the program I do on learning communities. So even a small learning community of our four partners were able to discuss their ideas and bounce ideas off of each other, things that might work in one place, don't work in another. And then we really valued that case study model where we could go into those folks that had established. We also had other processors come in help with a workshop. So it wasn't just our two case studies but we had other processors share their different perspectives. And again, we wanted to bring people in that were willing to share. You know, it doesn't work great to have somebody come that isn't willing to have that relationship and develop that. So that was really critical in our project. What advice would you have for somebody who's interested in applying for a grant? When we got into this, we wanted to make sure that we weren't reinventing the wheel. So we got on the Sarah website and they have a lot of all the past projects available. So you can go and look and sometimes that sparks ideas too. You know, if it's a different topic but a really unique way that somebody did something or put something together. I think that was really valuable for us was A, to make, you know, make sure that our idea hadn't been done before. But again, looking to say, well, we want to do it this way. And it looks like they funded similar projects that utilize learning communities and making sure it was going to be a good fit.