 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Hot Topics 2021 Hot Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Jenny Rushlow. I'm the director of the Environmental Law Center and associate dean for environmental programs. And we're very pleased to welcome you all to our online presentation today. Each of the talks in the Hot Topics series is worth one Vermont CLE credit. So if you'd like to get that credit, please keep track of which talks you attend for your records. We'll have time for Q&A after the presentation today, but you can type your question into the chat at any point during the lecture. So please don't hesitate to do that and we'll get to as many as we can in the remaining time after our speaker concludes their remarks. Today, we are very pleased to welcome VLS Professor Pamela Vesselin. Professor Vesselin is an assistant professor at VLS and teaches civil procedure one and two, administrative law, professional law, and courses in animal law. Sorry, professional responsibility. She joined the VLS faculty in 2018. And before that she practiced animal law in North Carolina where she represented individuals and nonprofit organizations and focused on the legal needs of pet owners in underserved communities. She received her JD cum laude from VLS after which she clerked for the Vermont trial courts and earned an LLM with honors in food and agriculture law at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Her research and scholarship focuses on industrial animal production and the constitutional implications of regulating animal treatment at both the federal and state levels. Today, Professor Vesselin will present a talk titled The CAFO. Okay. Sorry, I'll say that again. Turn, turn, talk. I'm not sure where the feedback's coming from. Professor, would you mind muting for a moment and see if that doesn't affect you? Okay. The talk today is titled The CAFO version to alternate realities in administrative law. Please join me in welcoming Professor Pamela Vesselin. Thank you, Dean Rushlow. It's a pleasure to be here. Normally I do the hot topic in person and I see all those of you getting your CLE credits and I hope you were doing well on the other side of the divide here. As Dean Rushlow said, my topic today is entitled The CAFO version 2.0, Alternate Realities and Administrative Law. Based this title on a concept that I put to you as the beginning of the story and that is that the CAFO model as we know it today has taken economic efficiency about as far as it can go. Stunning advancements though in genetic engineering offer us at this point two distinctly different possible futures for CAFO agriculture. On the one hand, one possible future for CAFO agriculture uses intentional genomic alteration or genetic engineering to manipulate and select for traits at the animal's genetic level. IGA can be used to extend input, output efficiencies beyond the limits of selective breeding or it might be used to breed animals that need specific customer or consumer preferences or medical needs, perhaps even allergies. Or they might be engineered to mitigate well-known environmental impacts such as the emission of methane from dairy cattle. The alternative, however, of CAFO 2.0 although it draws on related genetic engineering technologies produces a completely different model and that is one that uses cellular agriculture or cellular reproduction technologies to produce animal end products but not the animals themselves. What am I talking about? Lab cultured meat, cultured meat, synthetic meat, anything, whatever, it goes by many names but I'll probably refer to it mostly as cultured meat. This is technically grown from a cell in a process that I'm going to briefly touch on in a few minutes but it essentially creates the end product without going through the process of birth through slaughter stages of live animals or any of the externalities or most of the externalities associated with them. So that's a big choice. And the choice between these two futures really lies with the administrative state where the USDA and the FDA as a division of HHS, Health and Human Services are basically engaged in, for the most part, a regulatory turf war that is aggravated a bit by what I would say potentially dubious congressional authority and certainly unclear executive policy direction. So these are what I want to talk about today and kind of ask some questions at the end of things to think about as we move forward. So why do I say the CAFO as we know it today is basically tapped out and it's about as efficient as it's going to get? Well, think about where we get for the most part meat, poultry, eggs, dairy from upwards of 90% to 98% are produced by horizontally consolidated, vertically integrated, small handful of producers that breed and raise, slaughter and process almost all of the meat, dairy and eggs sold in the United States. They have a almost complete monopoly and monopsony and antitrust laws have at least to this point not been used to address that. A big secret or not a big secret, a big cornerstone really one of the secrets of success for the CAFO is minimized input costs by input costs I mean the amount of land, feed, water, labor, expenses that are used to produce meat and dairy. Because of high density confinement of animals on a CAFO they the animals themselves require less land obviously feed in water and it takes fewer people to take care of them. Now consumers and animal welfare advocates, public safety, public food safety advocates have been pushing back for various reasons on some of the most confining practices like battery cages for egg laying hens and gestation crates for breeding cells. So there is some, that resistance actually that's one way that the CAFO model has really met its end. But another cornerstone and one that doesn't get as much press is the advanced selective breeding practices that is the creation of very specific breeds that have certain traits, traits like certain amount of white meat on broiler chickens versus dark meat. So qualities of meat, size of eggs, size of a litter. So that's reproductive traits. Today's cows and pigs and chickens, et cetera, grow larger more rapidly and convert feed to energy more efficiently than anything that even closely resembles the types of, the versions of these animals of 50 to 75 years ago. And they're also supplemented with various pharmaceuticals, most of them either unregulated or as far as dispensation goes, but certainly under-regulated. Just some examples of what do I mean. Specialized breeds, these are closely guarded intellectual secrets belonging to the producers. Nearly all of our milk today comes from cows that produce three times as much milk per year as cows of 80 years ago. Chickens that are bred for meat, often referred to as broilers, they grow twice as large in half the time it took to reach maturity in 1925, so nearly 100 years ago. For some perspective of what that type of rapid growth means, if you grew that fast as one of these birds, by the time you were two years old, you'd be 350 pounds. So think about your two-year-old skeleton bearing that much weight. Egg-laying hens today have been selectively bred to produce now that the standard is, I'll say, on average 280 eggs, some of them boast as much as 300 eggs a year. But egg-laying hens initially lay somewhere around 15 eggs a year. We're talking about a 20 times increase in egg production. Despite these radical changes in animal productivity that have been available to selective breeders, traditional breeding methods, haven't really done much to mitigate animal suffering. Although, as sort of an anecdote, there have been producers that have tried to claim this. Back in the early 2000s, Smithfield claims, Smithfield farms claimed that it had isolated and eliminated what are called the stress gene in hogs, with the result being that Smithfield hogs suffered less stress than hogs raised by their competitors. This story is told in Matthew Stolle's excellent book, Dominion, that was published in the early 2000s. Of course, that's pure nonsense. It's not that it isn't possible today necessarily, but it certainly wasn't verified. Now, is it verifiable? Potentially. Ethologists, those who study animal behavior, might be able to support or refute this type of claim with animal studies, but that was just, that claim was nonsense. The reality is that breeding for conformity and activity has led to chronic suffering from excessive burden on the animals' metabolisms, their internal organs, and their skeletal systems. And the result is, for example, dairy cows because they are producing offspring every 12 to 15 months and being milked nine months of the year by the time that they are past their height of productivity and sent to slaughter, many of them have depleted calcium. They suffer from osteoporosis and other stressors on their skeletal systems. And this is really where you hear about downer cattle or lame cattle that go to slaughter and are unable to stand up or walk on their own when they reach slaughter. So that's just one example of how animal welfare suffered due to selective breeding. Now, selective breeding hasn't also, much hasn't been done to address the considerable and mounting environmental and public health externalities of mass animal confinement either. Although some advances have been made as it relates to pharmaceuticals and combinations of foods that are fed to farmed animals. So we're tapped out on efficiency, that is production yield using the technologies that we have, but the environmentalists and animal advocates still aren't happy. So this is the end of the line for KFO 1.0. Here's, we've got this choice, as I mentioned at the beginning of what's next. So we're turning to door number one, genetic engineering. This is not selective breeding. Selective breeding is you take two animals that have traits that you would prefer to carry on and you breed that way. Genetic engineering is actually the intentional invasive disruption of the normal gene sequence at the molecular level. And then there's another type of animal produced using genetic engineering called transgenesis. This is the introduction of foreign genetic material, say from another animal or bacteria to alter the traits of the animal. The traits that are selected for in the genetic engineering process, at least the ones that we've seen so far, are of course, as you would expect, market driven. They respond to the demands of producers, first for traits that have economic impacts or perhaps to mitigate costs of regulations. So some examples. This has been around for a while. This genetic engineering of farmed animals. That is, when I say been around, I mean that scientists have been exploring this and attempting to create the ideal breed of certain farmed animals really internationally. So in Seoul, Korea, for example, scientists produced a GE strain of pig that had twice as much muscle as regular pigs. So the pork that was produced was higher in protein, lower in fat. And if you Google this, you'll actually see these pictures. It is bizarre to see a pig that's ripped really, has muscles that you can see. A similar double muscle trait was developed in a breed of cow called the Belgian blue by selecting for genetic defect that creates extra muscle. Of course, this is not without its issues. The calves born of Belgian blues, they're so large that they actually require cesarean births that can't be born naturally. Cows, that is dairy and cows bred for meat, they are of course significant producers of the greenhouse gas methane. Studies in the UK and in the University of Alberta, Canada, which is not coincidentally the largest beef production region in North America are one of the largest. As well as the USDA Agricultural Research Service continue to fund research projects related to breeding animals that emit less methane, that basically addresses the amount of methane that is released during their digestion process. And then finally, there was another study in Canada known as the Enviro Pig. It no longer exists today, but the transgenic pig was bred to address the phosphorus that is in hog farm waste. That's a major contributor to Alba Blooms and initially was developed by scientists at the University of Gelf as a way to mitigate damage to local water bodies. Used genetic material from a mouse and E. coli bacterium. It was successful in terms of it actually created a pig that actually did do that. It digested more of the phosphorus, less of it was released in the pigs waste. We'll return to the Enviro Pig in just a few minutes. Now in the US, you are probably aware of or have heard of the aqua advantage salmon. This was first actually developed as far back as 1989 by a company that goes by the name Aqua Bounty. The FDA actually approved of the development and sale of aqua advantage. This is genetically engineered salmon. This is transgenic actually. It uses a coding sequence from a chinook salmon. I'm not going to get into the actual genetic engineering of it, but it is developed to grow again like broiler chickens almost twice as large in half the time. This is of course for marine based or it's basically water based aqua production of salmon, so farmed salmon. Now just because the FDA approved it doesn't mean that it is available today. It has been the subject of over a decade of litigation and its latest status is still or it's ultimately what will happen to it is unknown and I'll return to that as well. And most recently in December of just this past year, the FDA approved an IGA pig called the gal safe pig. That's G-A-L-S-A-F-E. It's got the word safe in the title, so it must be safe, right? It's this type of pig was or this breed of pig was approved for both human consumption as well as the development of human therapeutics. And that is as far as the human consumption and why it was developed. It was perhaps you've heard of this mysterious allergy to meat that is occurring in some of the southern states. It's been linked to a certain bite from a certain tick, but when somebody develops this allergy, they really can no longer eat red meat, beef, pork and lamb. And so this gal safe pig has been developed so that people who have mild or severe allergic reactions to what's known as this alpha gal sugar that's in red meat, this pig does not develop that and so it can be consumed by people with this allergy. Talk about reacting to market needs. Now, GE, genetically engineered animals could also be developed to eliminate or mitigate production diseases that come from high density confinement of genetically conformed species. So when you have a whole lot of animals that are genetically in conformance with one another when one of them gets sick, their herd usually gets the same thing. And so the risk of infectious diseases running through a facility of thousands of animals is high. Well, for example, since the 1980s, there's been an illness that goes by the acronym PRRSV, it's porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus. This virus over the past decade has just decimated the pork industry. It's basically a virus that little piglets get and once it has infiltrated a facility overnight, there'll be mass deaths because these piglets just basically aren't able to retain water. And there's no vaccine for it and scientists have been working madly for years to come up with some way to address it. Well, turns out that intentional genomic alteration seems to be offering a potential solution to that. Obviously, the industry is hot to get that approved. It's also possible that genetic engineering could be used to address some welfare concerns. That is like breeding dairy cows that don't have horns, so they don't have to be dehorned or aren't dehorned. Or, for example, sex selection, such as dairy cows being bred so that they will only produce female calves and not male calves. Male calves are unnecessary to the dairy process, dairy production process. So do that as well as egg laying breeders have hands lay only female chicks as opposed to male chicks. Again, male chicks are unnecessary in the egg laying production process. So the sky's the limit, right? Let's look at door number two now, the cellular meat. This is obviously a very different type of CAFO. Lab-based or grown meat products are actually not grown on a farm at all, but in a bioreactor. Today, there are a number of companies in the tens, I would say over 20 companies that are actively funded and developing beef, pork, chicken, tuna, salmon, even eggs. And very recent technologies in stem cell, biotechnology has been able to, has really made this a possible substitute to animal production for these products. Whether it's cultured meat or use of CRISPR technologies, basically what happens is that a cell in an animal is isolated, nutrients are added to it, and reproduction or proliferation occurs. It's extremely sensitive process. It's extremely expensive. The very first proof of concept was served in London in 2013 for the ticket price of $330,000. The prices come way down on that, and the process is actually something that could very well be a scalable option for production of meat. In fact, Singapore was the first nation to formally approve cultured meat and began serving it just a few months ago. It sees the development of cultured meat as a way that the country can actually begin to create its own food supply. Right now it imports more than 90% of the food consumed in Singapore, and so it's developed this program called 30 by 30 initiative that it intends to produce 30% of its own food domestically by the year 2030. The upside environmentally of cellular agriculture is pretty obvious. Studies show that depending on what is being developed environmentally, the production can use 7 to 45% less energy. The emission of greenhouse gases is anywhere between 78% and 96% emissions, and of course land use is also minimized to something like 1% of the land used for current CAFO agriculture. Now depending on what technology is being used for the initial biopsy or development of the cell and what is grown in the lab, it may be extracted from alive animals so animal welfare would not be completely eliminated as a concern, but compared to the 9.5 billion animals that are raised and slaughtered for food in this country every year, it's really no comparison at all. So wow, we could go in either direction and the science is certainly getting us there pretty quickly. There's that maxim in law school that the law always is at least a decade behind science and I'd say it's well beyond that. The question really of the adoption or the choice, do we throw our eggs in the basket? Sorry about that. That is using genetic engineering to create animals that address some of our environmental concerns, perhaps even our animal welfare concerns, maybe we can find the stress chain or should we be looking to eliminate the animal agriculture industry as we know it all together? Can they both occur? That choice, which way we go, what shapes the next version of animal agriculture depends on a number of factors. And by the way, if you're interested in cellular agriculture, I commend to you an excellent article by Brian Sylvester, as in Sylvester the Cat and other authors from a Kentucky Journal of Equine and law from 2020. It's called From Petrie Dish to Main Dish. And so that article does a really nice job of laying out not only the regulatory concerns but some of the adoption concerns for cultured meat. But I'm going to narrow this down and do a little comparison of a couple of different factors. First of all, obviously if we're going, if cultured meat or genetically modified animal products are going to be sold for human consumption in the United States, there must be some type of regulation, right? Well, yes, their food and ag law will come into play here. And there are two primary agencies that have either asserted authority or are in dispute over it. I will say first that this is not an original opinion, but our food and ag law system is not ready for either of these technologies. Anybody familiar with food law knows that already we have a fractured system in which the USDA and the FDA, a division of HHS, are working sometimes together, but there's a division of regulation over the production and sale and transport and labeling of food. We can put it in pretty basic terms by saying that the USDA is essentially tasked with the slaughter and processing and sale to point of purchase of products that are strictly livestock meat, poultry, and it shares responsibility for eggs. And so derived from the animal whole, that would be more USDA. There are two main federal laws in play here. That's the Federal Meat Inspection Act at 21 USC 601 and the Poultry Products Inspection Act at 21 USC 451. These laws are not so much laws that deal with the animals as they are alive, but the results of the slaughter process and so these are mostly food laws. There's inspection of processing facilities. It's a big part of it as well as accuracy of labeling. So that's the USDA. The inspection part of USDA for federal meat inspection and poultry products inspection is called the FSIS, Food Safety Inspection Service. This is a division of USDA. This agency is tasked with, they're at the slaughterhouses, they are inspecting the meat processing as it goes. And they have a role to play, at least as the USDA asserts, in the poultry meat process. Same applies for the Poultry Products Inspection Act. Another division or another agency in USDA, AFIS, that's APHIS, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. That has been traditionally the agency that's taken the lead on approving the use of the introduction of genetically engineered plants or crops for human consumption. So traditionally, AFIS of USDA has been the one that spearheaded the work to approve of the use of, say, a soybean that is resistant to roundup, but is, sorry, roundup ready is what I'm trying to say. Soybeans, for example. Now, that's not, AFIS is not actually apparently going to be the section of the USDA that is in charge of or has authority over genetically engineered animals. Instead, the FDA has claimed authority over genetically engineered animals. And this was somewhat of a controversial move back in the early 2000s. The FDA, of course, its main statute that it enforces is the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. One section of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is the Animal Drug section, and that's at 21 USC 360B. That's little B. And the Animal Drug section of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is a part of the law that the FDA, in which the FDA approves the use of certain pharmaceuticals in the four animal use, whether it's an agricultural production or treatment of animals, say that a veterinarian would prescribe in treating your dog, for example. But the definition of drug in 360B is read by the FDA to mean that it also covers the process of genetic alteration. So the FDA basically asserted itself as the agency that was charged with or had the authority to lead the process of approving or denying applications for genetically engineered animals, whether it's for therapeutic health, therapeutic or food consumption. The USDA did not take kindly to that, nor did a number of food safety, consumer safety, public health, and animal welfare advocates. And so when the FDA first asserted this authority, it did so as it applied to that aqua bounty, aqua advantage salmon, the transgenic salmon that I said grew so much faster and had been the subject of so much litigation. That first challenge was challenging the FDA's authority to actually regulate GE animals under the food, drug, and cosmetic deck. Ultimately, it won that case or at least has won it, at least it would seem. A Northern District of California judge ruled that the FDA indeed squarely has the authority to lead the charge on approving GE animals. Still, this now the initial approval was in 2015. In 2019, the court said that the court affirmed the FDA's authority and yet still you can't buy aqua advantage salmon. And that is because while it's gone through multiple additional challenges in court as well as there being uncertainty about how to label it and Congress has had to at least attempted to step in and decide how to label genetically engineered animal food products. But right now, why you don't have aqua advantage salmon on your table or at your store is that the same court in California granted partial summary judgment for the challengers which includes Center for Food Safety and the Institute for Fisheries Resources in a case that challenged the FDA's acts under NEPA. That is, did the FDA take a hard look at what the risks were for fish farming and transgenic salmon when it could get loose or be released in some way to some external body of water and then breed say with other salmon, what would be the effect of that? Now the FDA didn't conduct or have aqua bounty conduct in environmental impact statement. And so right now the court essentially has directed the FDA to go back and correct for that. So there you've got some of the legal challenges for genetically engineered animal products. It's not just going to be getting approval for the food safety, the safety for human consumption. There's also the environmental aspects and NEPA is going to play a large role in that. I should say that in one of the last days of the Trump administration, former Secretary of Agriculture Sunning Perdue on the way out the door signed a memorandum of understanding with the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, not the administrator of the FDA who refused to sign it, signed a memorandum of understanding saying that the FDA would transfer a great deal of its authority to the USDA in order to speed up approval of GE animals like the pigs that can combat or resist viruses. So right now there is some dispute about which agency has regulatory authority where that stands. Now, if you're interested in this, I would Google Center for Food Safety, ALDF, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, letter, IGA animals, something like that. And you'll pull up on the Center for Food Safety site 13 or so groups got together and wrote letters to the secretaries of HHS and Secretary Vilsack at USDA, urging them to take a look at this, to take a look at this situation and to dissolve that memorandum of understanding and have the FDA resume its authority because it alone has the, at least it has more incentive statutorily and it has the experience to insist on more testing for the safety of these animals, not just the animals as used for human consumption, but the animals themselves. So trying to wrap it up with some of the other concerns, the whole regulatory process is one issue. Now, the USDA and the FDA have actually come to an understanding when it comes to culture of meat. They have signed a formal agreement that basically says, here's, these are the different responsibilities that each of the agencies will take and the development of it. The question to me, though, is not how will the different agencies regulate, but how will they be championing it or who will champion it? If you think about the USDA and you think about, especially Secretary Vilsack, we've seen him before, he was the Secretary of Agriculture under the Obama Administration, not, and while he was away during the Trump Administration, he headed up a lobbying group for the dairy, dairy industry. This is, this is somebody who has a long background in industrial animal agriculture. There is, there, this is the, this is what USDA does. It promotes and supports traditional conventional producers. Is it going to be able to, will it have the political will to mount the kind of effort that it's going to take to promulgate regulations, to conduct studies, dispense research and development funds in furtherance of cultured meat as opposed to genetically altered meat. The, the USDA has spent a fair amount of, of money on in supporting the development of the genetically engineered side of, of the, of the alternate realities. On the cultured meat side, there are numerous investors, including some big names like Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Richard Branson all, they're supportive of companies that are developing cultured meats. In addition to the potential or not potential, likely years of litigation that could take place for either of these, the introduction of either of these technologies large scale. There's also the question of, and a related question of labeling, how will it be labeled? Furthermore, how will consumers accept it? Who's going to eat this stuff? Now, I think for the, the cultured meat question is really the more interesting of the two. If you're a vegetarian or a vegan, you already perhaps are eating plant-based food, meat substitutes or maybe not at all. You may have noticed that the companies that make plant-based meat substitutes have finally hit on a decent, a decent title, plant-based as opposed to some of the really poor branding that used to use like gluten nuggets or something like that. But they appeal to people who already don't want to eat meat or they want to cut down on the amount of meat they eat. So are those, is that the same target demographic as the cultured meat would go to? Or how would companies that produce cultured meat, how will they cross that chasm and get enough of the general population, the general consumers to see this as a viable substitute? Because you can bet that the industrial agriculture industry is going to work very hard to launch the campaigns of franken foods. That's going to be, that's an obvious thing that we're going to see, this scaring people off. So the money that will be thrown at trying to brand and market these will be something else. Finally, I guess I'll leave you with a question of whether or not we should be revisiting or visiting the idea of some additional regulatory authority, whether it's an additional division of USDA or FDA or perhaps a standalone agency, maybe created by Congress that oversees the animal welfare aspects of both of these technologies. Right now it doesn't exist. Most of our food law has very little to do, as I said, with the animals while they're still alive. And so the concerns, especially as they relate to genetically engineered animals, really are quite daunting. And so there needs to be some method of, there needs to be a voice for animals and the protection of them at least to some extent. Should we actually approve of larger scale production of genetically engineered animals for food? And so with that, I'll just stop if you have any questions or any ideas or want to share anything about this topic. Thank you so much, Professor Veselin. For our listeners, our viewers, we have a few minutes to take some questions from the audience. So if you'd like to pose a question, please, if you're watching on our website live stream, you can click on watch on live stream that icon at the bottom of the video, and that will bring up the chat box where you can add your question. Or if you're watching on our Facebook live stream, you would add your question to the comment box below. And we'll try to get through as many questions as possible. Okay, first question for you, Professor. What are the perceived human health concerns due to consumption of genetically modified meat? Perceived or actual? I think the question was perceived, right? Yeah. Okay, so when the way that the FDA would be go about approving the use of genetically engineered meat from, say, the galsave pig would be to actually test the quality, the end product itself, the pork, if you will, not the pig while it's still alive, not necessarily the concern is mostly for the end product. Is it as safe or is it safe to be consumed? And so it really is all about the consumer's experience or the consumer's health and their safety in consuming it, not necessarily the safety of the animal. Now, there is some wording in the animal drug section of the FDCA that potentially allows for the FDA to look into or require that companies show that the process itself is safe for the animals, but that has not generally been much of a focus by the FDA up to this point. Okay, thank you. Are there any examples of other countries that have done what they've done regulating this type of meat you think sets an example for what the US should be doing or perhaps the opposite, what we shouldn't be doing? So Singapore is the only country that I know of so far that's actually proved of the use of cultured meat. The EU has gone through an interesting season of litigation that's related. I don't know, perhaps you've seen there have been challenges to plant-based milk and meat products or meat substitutes. There have been challenges to labeling or advertisements that use the word say milk for oat milk or rice milk or soy milk, what have you. And that's something that we've pretty much already settled as it pertains to the same products here in the United States. The commercial speech doctrine really allows for that unless there's an identifiable cause for confusing the consumer. And the fact that the EU is dealing with that makes me think that the industry, that animal agriculture industry in Western European countries are mounting more efforts to challenge, this is my guess, this is my prediction, but I think that if the EU, when the EU starts to try and market or prove of either of these two types of, well, if it's cultured meat, that they can expect a serious challenge from Animal Ag. One of the things, I don't know if this is what the person was thinking about to ask this question, but in former Soviet block countries, like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, those that lived under communist rule for decades during the development of some technologies like, say, more advanced landlines for telephones. So while we were getting telephones in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, most people living in those countries, unless you were really wealthy, didn't have a landline. That is a phone, telephone hardwired in their house or apartment. And so when they gained independence, there was really the idea of going, introducing that technology didn't make as much sense as instead going for the next thing. And so that's why you see countries like Estonia and Poland, for example, really excelling in high tech. They've adopted the next technology, so wireless tech, they do almost anything over their cell phones, right? And I bring this up because I'm thinking about developing countries that are looking to do what Singapore is trying to do. If they don't already have an established and trenched CAFO system, culture need could be an opportunity there to leave ahead of the technology and use the next, take advantage of the bypassing many of the externalities that are plaguing us today. Thank you. I think we have time for just one more question. So that'll be, we've heard a lot about COVID and other pandemics potentially being caused by deforestation and loss of habitat, causing ecosystem disruption, and that can lead to animals that are produced for food, contracting a disease like COVID, and then passing on to humans. That's something that people have been told. Does that, the fact that that's happened with COVID, do you think that makes a difference, or have you seen a difference in this artificially grown meat as a result of kind of this moment in time that we're in? You know, I hope that it does have some impact. I think that, I mean, we don't even really know for sure whether or not that the initial transference to humans of COVID-19 was, or the coronavirus was, although it is a zoonotic disease, that is animals and non-human animals can contract it or be infected. It doesn't, we don't know, my understanding is we don't know exactly the source, right? We haven't found that yet. But you know, we do know is, we do know that that swine flu, for example, didn't have the same kind of devastating effects, but was a pretty serious flu back in the early 2000s. And that was a, that absolutely was traced to a, to the hog industry and kind of an interesting, to me anyway, anecdote. Swine flu very rapidly rebranded by the pork industry as H1N1 was that the scientists, essentially, it seems like the majority agree that it was first found in Mexico in some hog production operations owned by Smithfield. And there is even a little boy who was identified as patient zero as the one who became the first human sufferer of swine flu or H1N1 in this little town in Mexico. Has a statue of him in their downtown Plaza in the middle of the town as, as hopefully a tourist attraction. So my answer to that is not yet. And I wish that it would. We have such short memories, but the connection between mass animal confinement and genetic conformity and, and the, the rise of antibiotic resistance and, and the spread of, of zoonotic diseases is, it's undeniable, right? You know, I guess the question is, what are we willing to give up? What are we willing to risk in order to have cheap meat and dairy? Thank you. It seems like a good, a good, a good question to end on though. We know, we know there's, you know, there's not an easy answer. Okay. Thank you so much. Professor Bessel. And that was a really interesting talk. I want to thank our viewers for joining us today as well. And our next hot topics talk will be here on June 24th. Again, at noon Eastern. And we hope you can join us then. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.