 Well, first, I'd like to thank you for having me and also for the funding for my SARE project, which was great. So, North Coast Lamb Co-op, we're going to be talking about ultrasounding today. And I suppose the theme of my presentation is you can't manage what you can't measure. So, the objective of the project was to provide quality lamb to local restaurants and groceries to recruit producers to participate in selling lamb locally and to assist members in producing the required product to man it, which is consistent quality lambs. Now, about three or four years ago, the American sheep industry did a study they called the Roadmap and they found some problems in our industry. For example, the average American only eats about one pound of lamb per year, 70 percent of all the lamb consumed in the United States is coming from outside of the country. One of the things they found was that we have too much inconsistency in lamb. And so, you would have one lamb going to market, which has a great loin eye and lots of meat and another one that has a small loin eye and lots of back fat. So, there's a lot of inconsistency in the industry and we need to solve that problem. So, I think I just mentioned these bullet items, but the excess fat and inconsistency are probably, was determined to be the biggest, detraction from the lamb, premier status and buying slaughter animals on weight is a problem. Everybody finds it much easier to just drop off your lambs in Ohio at the Mount Hope auction house than to try to direct market. So, you have a lot of inconsistency and when you look at an animal you can't tell the quality of that meat sometimes. Some people say they can, some people can go and, you know, do their body score and think that they know what they're getting, but there's a lot of inconsistency. And so, buying at weight and yield provides no incentive for any producer to start producing that value added product that the American lamb industry feels that we need to be moving towards. This is another image from the American sheep industry's roadmap market and as you see here they're talking about marketing lamb and some direct marketing. And specifically what I'm going to be talking about today is our project which we focused on a co-op of marketing. The average size of a sheep farm in our state of Ohio is about 40 head. So, even if you're lambing at 200 percent, a lot of these restaurants that approach you and say we'd like to have lamb for our business, they'd like 500 lambs. If you've got 40 youths lambing at 200 percent, which most people lamb at 160 to 180 percent, there's no way you can supply that demand. So how can we get farmer A, B and C all producing the same quality of lamb and putting them together to market to give a quality consistent product? Again, the typical thing is the auction, another problem that we found is that the auction houses, all these lambs are being shipped to packers out of state. And we know that when local food is consumed locally, that means more money stays in our local community. So that was another one of our goals here. And based on the multiplier that can generate quite a lot in economic development locally. So I'm going to give, there were three farms involved in this project, but for time's sake I'm just going to talk about my farm. We are one of the Kaga Valley National Park Farms located between the city of Akron and Cleveland and Peninsular Ohio. And one of the things that we did was in the project is we reviewed all of the data on who consumes lamb, you know, the reasons for it, et cetera. And based on the literature review, we were able to determine based on population density and demographics of who lived within a one hour, half hour and 15 minute drive of my farm what my potential market would be for lamb. As you can see here, just with a 15 minute drive from my farm, I've got, you know, 769 people who would be buying from a farmer's market and 384 based on extrapolating this research that would be buying from the local market, let alone restaurants. So the point we're trying to illustrate here is, you know, knowing who your market is, knowing what your demand is and clearly there's more demand, potential demand and then look at here, you know, we have, we have close to 3.6 million people with a one hour drive of our farm and the village of Peninsular, which is in the heart of the National Park, is also a tourist area. So we have 2.6 million people at village, visit the village every year. So a lot of potential to market lamb. How do we meet this demand and what is our competition? Our biggest competition is not other producers. We need to come together to market our lamb. But our biggest competition is Australia and New Zealand. And again, 70% of lamb is, is that's being consumed in the States is coming from those countries. Now, the interesting thing was, is that we have locally a better loyni. Now, in research on the yield of meat in lamb, they've determined that the loyni between the 12th and 13th vertebrae is the best indicator of overall the quality of meat and lamb that you're going to have producing out of your lamb product. So take note of this, because this is what we're going to be using in this project. Again, before I mentioned that we have too many breeds and too many producers. And so, you know, what we need to be working with in the industry, which I just mentioned, is, you know, this is what the produce, the consumers want. And this is what some of the producers are supplying. So how can we move from here to here? Or how can we have a group of people market together and have this quality product? So our solution was to use this, this muscle eye measurement as an attribute necessary to come together as producers to sell to restaurants at the higher value. And so we're using carcass ultrasounding of lamb crops for the market acceptance into our group. And if people aren't up to that speed yet, perhaps we can help them market their lamb to another market, maybe as, you know, lamb stew or ground lamb or something like that. And then help them bring them along so that they can produce quality lamb with the higher producers. So we borrowed this measurement from seed stock producers. So one of the many things that seed stock producers are measuring when they're trying to say why their lamb is better to buy for breeding stocks than someone else's is they're measuring things like birth weight and weaning weight and, you know, was it a twin and of course, you know, the muscle eye, carcass weight, et cetera. So we focused here on the ribeye, the loin eye between the 12th and 13th vertebrae. And the nice thing about the ultrasounding is you don't have to kill the animal to see what you have. So you can actually go in there and ultrasound and find out what quality of lamb you're producing. And the good news is that while maternal characteristics are hard to encourage in the lamb industry, the terminal meat characteristics are the easiest to develop in your flock. So for this project, luckily I had already gone out to and gotten certified as a national sheep improvement certified ultrasound carcass scanner. And this is just what the scanner looks like with an ultrasound machine here. And you're basically the sheep has to be shorn and you provide contact on there and then you grab an image on the screen marking that so you match the ear tag and you have the weight of the animal. And then a later point in time after you've done the entire flock or in our case what we did was a random sample, then you can go back and measure the loin eye. So again, this is just another statistic here showing that we know that fat death is a problem and that muscle loin eye has a value in terms of selling your lamb at market. And there's a lot of studies on there and a lot of literature. And if anybody wants copies of any of the secondary source review or reviews, be happy to share these data, just let me know. So instead of, it takes time, it takes about one to four minutes to scan each animal and you have to have a good holding system and you know, there's a cost involved with it, you know, for people's time and labor. So instead of coming up with a model where we would go to every flock that want to participate in this co-op and scanning each and every single animal, we decided to use a random sample and we actually copied a methodology that was used in Ireland to do this where the actual national industry funded a project where they went out and they did random sampling. So what we would do is we did, for our farms, we did a random sample of all of our animals and you know, by myself as a technician we did both males and females and we noted their dates before we scanned our sheep, we had all of our records for our sheep and we also had weighed them that day that we scanned them and this was all plugged into a database. And the graphic that you see on the right side of the screen, which is hard to read right here, is the sort of checklist of what the scanner brings with them, what they're responsible for, excuse me, over here and what the producers are responsible for and that's basically a holding system and warmth enough that the ultrasound equipment will work and electricity, et cetera. So getting to our results, we scanned our several flocks of lambs randomly, scan them and this included both spring, fall and winter lamb crops from the three farms and we found that no flock had an average linoin under 2.5 square inches so that became our standard for as a group, anybody that wants to join our group, you have to have a 2.5 square inch linoin to participate in this as putting together these lambs to market to grocery stores or restaurants in northeast Ohio. So by setting this minimum linoin and grouping the average lamb linoin and putting these lambs together for marketing, we felt that we'd accomplished our mission by creating consistent quality and then for those, in our case, we didn't have anyone, but for those who would be, have more back fat and less muscle eye, then that becomes a measurement by which they can look to improve their crop in the future with, you know, various management tools. So I feel like our project was a success in terms of demonstrating the ability to produce consistent lamb for multiple producers, but I think our biggest challenge in this project was that despite showing this and we've been doing some presentations in Ohio and et cetera, and our biggest challenge is getting to people to make change because it's really easy to just take your crop of lambs and drop them off at the auction house and be done with it all and not be measuring all of this. So it's going to take a little bit of challenge to talk people into why they should, you know, be gathering all of these data and measuring their sheep. So my closing thoughts today would be that I think that, you know, using this tool, which is already out there being used by seed stock producers, commercial flocks can really improve what they're doing and come together and market locally directly and especially those breeds like ours and our particular case where Dorsets, which do ACs and lambing, we have a really good opportunity to expand and have hot house lambs all year round. And what we see the next steps is really marketing lamb and continuing the marketing as the healthy red meat. There's a lot of data out there also, which was in our literature review of, you know, there have been studies how it's more flavorable and has more positive nutritional value, et cetera. So our strength and the position to probe the market lays in the attributes of the lamb and making sure getting all this literature out to folks who are potential consumers and then using something like this ultrasound scanning for acceptance into the co-op group of lambs that we're marketing together to make sure that we're delivering high quality product so that everybody has a great experience eating the lamb. And that is what I wanted to cover today. Here is my contact information, too. So if anybody wants any of the literature reviews or data or methodologies or information for you, feel to contact me. The question was, do other livestock producers use the technology of ultrasound? And I would answer that by saying that it's very common in the beef industry. And most of the ultrasound scanners actually do both beef and lamb, and lamb tends to be on the side, you know, side business. So what we need to do is get more people certified to scan lambs. But it is a common practice in other countries. In England, Australia, New Zealand, everybody does it. You know, we're about 10 years behind, I would guess, from the rest of the world in our industry here. And, you know, it's just kind of interesting because, you know, our American sheep industries, the oldest livestock organization in the United States, but yet it's probably the least consumed protein that we have. No, well, everybody that we're we've worked with is is is keen on moving forward. And we also are finding that some people who also sell to the auction house are saying, well, maybe we should scan to show how much better ours are than other peoples. So while that's at the auction house, that's also a sort of, you know, marketing tool for them that they can say, well, we scan and we have, you know, we've got a three point muscle eye. In fact, we have an Amish producer that you know, one Amish producer produced, participated in this project. Another Amish producer has been asking to scan his sheep for me to scan a sheep before they go to the auction house so he can see what the quality of his of his lambs are each year. The average rate that people are charging for scanning an animal is about, I'd say, seven to ten dollars in animal. And then, of course, you know, the travel cost. But if you're good at this, you can scan them through there in about, you know, 30 seconds when you take your test to become certified, they give you four minutes. So you figure four minutes is your worst case scenario. The most important thing for making it all work is having the right handling system and not everybody has a handling system that is convenient for a scanner to keep them moving through at that rate. So that's another barrier, potentially, as if producers don't have a good handling system to manage the animals moving through. Oh, so what happens after you scan the animals? You're the we the the animals scan at that day have their ear tag numbers and have other data that the producers been collecting, such as the weight of the animal that day, its birth weight, etc. And so then after the animal is scanned, you take the images, usually grab more than one, just to be safe. And you draw an outline and you measure the actual loin eye. And then they get, you know, that spreadsheet back of their animals and what their loin eye is so that they can say, well, my two thousand and seventeen crop had, you know, an average loin eye of this or I had a range from this to this, so why am I having these these outliers and they can improve their production or, you know, they can make a better informed decision. And again, back to my theme of you can't manage what you can't measure. So this provides us with a lot more information, you know, considering that the ultimate product is, you know, meat in this particular case. I we worked with some different chefs in the Cleveland area on this project to get feedback from them. So we only worked with three particular chefs. But what people are, what they're finding is it's hard to find that that quality lamb. And if you need lamb and you just go by lamb, doesn't mean you're going to get what you want necessarily because you can, there's a lot of meat. And I'm hearing this nationwide, you know, there's a lot of meat going through these auction houses that is just a lot of back fat and not much, not much meat. So and people are so desperate for lamb because there's so little of it that they buy it, but then they're not happy with it. And so, you know, it's their credibility to is a restaurant. So they're going to want that that quality product. And if you sell them, I'm telling you, if you sell them one time, you know, a lamb that isn't quality, then they'll never come back again. I do a lot of direct marketing off of my farm and the ones that there's a few that don't get direct marketed, they get used for lamb stew and ground lamb and other dishes on the farm for the family or special occasions where we're not trying to sell the quality leg of lamb or the quality rack or or something along those lines. So if it's not good enough to sell the customer, they'll never come back. If you sell them something, that's of a low quality. The question is, are the restaurants? Yes. Well, my big problem again is supplying demand. So I need to I think the next step is recruitment, you know, so I need to recruit people and I have a friend who has hair sheeps. So she's going to get me over there and better start. I've never scanned his hair sheep yet. So I've got to get over there and do that next and make sure that there's no practice on that before we move on. We've also been talking to some of the local academics and maybe they get involved right now. The National Sheep Improvement Improvement Program is is working on recruiting more people to get certified as scanners so that this becomes more commonplace in the industry just like it is in the beef industry. Well, again, I would not be recommending that they try to tap that market. They might find other use for that meat such as you know, the lesser quality product that's maybe processed. But also it's an opportunity to say. You know, what are some is it management? Is it is it breeding? You know, what is it that I need to improve so they can begin to look at their flock and say, you know, I better get a better ram or maybe I need to start over. I need some better genetics or maybe they need to have better management what they're feeding them. It could be a number of things, but at least they can identify the point the fact that, you know, their lamb is not. Value added, you know, there's an issue. You don't necessarily know what the issue right. And the idea to with with creating the co-op is that this group will get together and we plan on meeting quarterly as we get people together in our region and just getting together and having maybe a guest speaker or presentation or talking about an issue and networking and sharing and mentoring. And so the idea is that not only will we have this tool available to everyone, but also that, you know, we'd share our knowledge and how we get everybody to succeed because if everybody succeeds, then the individual producer has a better chance as well.