 Okay. My name is James Pepper. I'm the chair of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board. Today is July 22nd, 2021. It's 10 a.m. and I'm calling the meeting to order. I have a few administrative details. Our executive director, Brenda Hare, officially started this week and she's joining us today. We're very fortunate to have her. Thank you for joining. Happy to be here. Our full advisory committee has been named at this point. We posted the list to our website. I think it's under our, where we post our meeting minutes and agendas. For now, we'll put it in a more prominent spot when we have some time. We are negotiating our final contracts with our two consultants currently. Once that's finished, our plan is to form subcommittees of our advisory group and with their help, really shift our focus, the board's focus to drafting our October and November recommendations for the legislature. And in the meantime, we're going to be finishing out our thematic meetings dedicated to the specific priorities established in Act 164 and Act 62. This week, we're looking at the HEM program, including some of the concerns around product manufacturing and testing. To really see what sort of lessons we can carry forward into the adult use market. Next Thursday, we'll be having another meeting, most likely dedicated to public safety issues, including highway safety and safe banking. We'll post an agenda once that's finalized, hopefully early next week. And then finally, last announcement, Kyle and Bran will be attending a meet and greet event. It's going to be a 1425 North 116 in Bristol tomorrow from 4 to 6 p.m. So the event's free and open to the public. So please feel free to go out and meet Kyle and Bran in person. Turning to the agenda, again, we're going to be looking at the HEM program today with Stephanie Smith, the head of the Cannabis Quality Control Program. And hopefully, Carrie Jagar will join us. He's the Director of Public Health at the Agency of Agriculture. Just from some of the board's initial conversations with Carrie and Stephanie, it's clear that the Cannabis Quality Control Program has a lot to offer us, has a lot of expertise that they've built up over the past few years. So we thought it'd be a good idea to really dig in today to see what we can carry forward to the high THC Adult Use Program. We also have some great witnesses from Fire Safety that helped develop certain aspects of the HEM program and has some thoughts for us about best practices for product manufacturing. We'll also be hearing from BIA Diagnostics and Crea Botanicals about some of the challenges and opportunities in the fields of testing and product manufacturing and extraction. So before we get to Stephanie and Carrie, is everyone had an opportunity to review the draft minutes from 7.15? Yep. Okay. I'll take a motion to approve the minutes. I'll move to approve the minutes from 7.15. I'll second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. Well, let's just jump right in then. Stephanie, are you ready to get going? I am ready to get going. Awesome. And for everyone at home, I'm just off screen. And hopefully you all can hear me. I made you a presenter so you should be able to share. So I'm going to share my screen now. From the beginning. So we're going to talk about the HEM program a little bit. And my name is Stephanie Smith for the record. I work for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture Food and Markets. And I manage the HEM program. And a part of that is the Cannabis Quality Control Program. I'm here at the agency. Just a little bit of background about me. I've been with the agency for almost eight years. I came to the agency to initially work on farmland conservation, manage the Act 250 primary agricultural soils review process related to Act 250. Section 248 and also made variance determinations and farming determinations for those individuals that were building structures on their farms and whether or not they needed to go through the municipal land use review process for the construction of those buildings. And so that's when I came to the agency and then I transitioned to HEM prior actually to coming to the agency. I worked at the Vermont League of Cities and Towns for many years and then also within the municipal assistance center. And then I also worked as a planner and a zoning administrator for the City of Montpelier and for the City of South Burlington. So I have a fair bit of experience in land use. At one time I was a certified planner with the American Institute of Certified Planners but I've let that lapse because I no longer really do that anymore. So anyway moving on to the presentation. Let's see here. I have a small overview of what we're going to talk about today. I'm first going to provide some HEM program statistics so you have an understanding of like the number of registrations, not necessarily our growth over time, but maybe a little bit of our contraction over time within the HEM program. I'm going to talk about the HEM program authorization including the cannabis quality control program and then other programs within the agency of agriculture that helps support the cultivation of HEMP and processing of HEMP within the state of Vermont and then I'll spend a little bit of time talking about the definition of farming which was initially introduced by Ryan Patch last week so I'll spend a little bit more time talking about that. So for some statistics these are some maps from 2019 and 2020 regarding cultivation of HEMP in the state of Vermont. Just to point out the legends for each of these are a little different because over between 2019 and 2020 the program contracted and so the dark green represented in the 2020 map is 300 or more acres. The dark green in the 2019 map is greater than 900 acres so I just wanted to make sure we're not comparing apples to apples in this image. But in 2019 the agency registered approximately 1300 individuals and we had over 9,000 acres registered for cultivation. We do not know specifically how many acres were actually planted in that year and the cost to register in that year was $25 regardless of the size of your operation and so in many instances where people were unclear or uncertain as to where they were going to grow they could still register multiple acres for $25 and then at least they were covered if they relocated their plot of land. So probably the reason for the 9,000 acres and however there's still 1,300 registrants. In 2020 we issued 590 registrations with about 1,600 acres registered in 2021 we're at 417 registrations issued 347 of those are for growing 78 of those 347 are for personal use cultivation 62% of our registrants are growing less than a half an acre of all of our grower registrants we have about six that are exclusively growing for grain or fiber and 775 acres under culture that are registered with us. From 2019 I mentioned that the fees were $25 per registration currently it's it's a scaled registration fee $25 for personal use registration that still exists but the cost for indoor is different if you're cultivating I think it's a thousand dollars or three thousand dollars and this is my recollection I apologize I didn't write up all the costs but then it ranges for a hundred between a hundred and I think three thousand dollars for outdoor cultivation and the highest amount it's greater than 50 acres and then I also wanted to mention that about 99% of our registrants are growing for floral material and for the production of cannabinoids. So the Hemp programs is generally you know kind of begins with the USDA's domestic hemp production program so in 2018 there was a in 2014 there was a farm bill that passed that enabled states to institute pilot programs to for the cultivation of hemp Vermont you know right off the mark started registering individuals within their pilot program and then in 2019 the federal government took hemp off the controlled substances list and then asked USDA to develop rules governing the cultivation of hemp this is specifically USDA's domestic hemp production program is specifically addressing the cultivation of the crop does not address the processing of products in Vermont and so just some distinctions here hemp is considered an agricultural commodity hemp is legal to ship across state boundaries and be traded in commerce you can use the US postal service to ship hemp they have guidance on their websites and then by 2023 any laboratory that is testing for the purposes of compliance or testing hemp must be registered with the DEA so those are kind of some boundaries that are there are other things that USDA requires within a domestic hemp production program but I thought that these were some things that obviously are very different from cannabis so I wanted to highlight them in Vermont we have a broad authority to regulate hemp broader than what is authorized by the federal government we or what that is included within the US the domestic hemp program production program in Vermont we have the ability to not only regulate growing and we have the ability to regulate processing we have the ability to regulate or set standards for testing and to develop a marketing program for industrial hemp and that is a little bit beyond what USDA is looking at it was interesting when I was asked to come today I went back and through our old presentations that we made when we were beginning the development of our rules and I came across two slides that I'm going to share and the things that kept coming up from the industry through this process was there's a lack of a common vocabulary amongst folks in the hemp industry like what are we talking about when we say distillate what are we talking about when we say full spectrum and these are terms that you may be using in the cannabis program and so we attempted within the hemp program to establish a common vocabulary we didn't know very much about the industry and the potential growth in Vermont and what besides just the cultivation and the processing what other industries would feed into the cultivation of hemp and how with those markets expand so this is specifically hemp related but to what extent will individuals in the state of Vermont be interested in breeding hemp varieties for production within our state and how often will we ship from out of state so so these were these are unknowns and then and we actually don't even currently don't track the number of folks that are breeding hemp seeds in our state we do have there is a requirement but I'm not I'm getting ahead of myself I'm gonna stay on the slide the we needed to establish contaminant limits for the consumption of hemp so we've done that we needed to explore how other agencies can support the hemp industry and then what does the Vermont brand look like and so these questions you'll see that they're mostly kind of looking at a consumer protection angle they're not specifically related to the cultivation the agronomics of hemp they're not specifically related to I mean they are related to potency but it is a much broader conversation than I think what is what USDA is looking at from their perspective and so we saw that there are many opportunities collection data defining Vermont's brand and then to look at what existing programs within the agency and even within state government we could use to support the development of the industry in the state and again you did hear last week from Ryan Patch TJ poor and Barry Murphy with the Department of Public Service and Billy Koster and they all talked about the programs that they administer that can feed into they feed into hemp most definitely in some instances and then later today you're going to hear from fire safety as well which we've developed a close relationship with but these are other regulatory regimes and programs within the state of Vermont that lend support to the hemp industry specifically and certainly will likely be involved in in what you are all attempting to accomplish so specifically the hemp program we do register growers and processors we approve certifications for laboratories we determine when testing is necessary within that value chain so in an effort to provide opportunities for those that are growing and processing hemp in the state there are different points within the movement of the crop through to a finished product that we are requiring testing or results that can serve as proof of compliance with our rules we don't always require the same test at every stage but we require proof of a test having been conducted in order to serve as compliance and this is generally because the the folks that are going to have conversations with their growers and or their processors or their white labors or whatever we just want to make sure that there's a test result there but we let the industry or the market determine who's going to pay for that test and when that test will happen but people need to be in control of those records as it moves through to the end product we also obviously conduct inspection and enforce our rules one of the things I wanted to point out is the difference between the hemp program and the hemp and cannabis program specifically is that we register growers and processors we do not have any registrations or licenses for retailers we don't have any registrations or licenses for wholesalers your the wholesale definition I have it here is pretty broad actually we do have terms of art for aggregating and or brokering him or terms that we use within our program and those individuals we consider our processors I think for simplicity sake within the program so if you're going to aggregate hemp and then sell it to another individual you have to register with us as a processor and one of the reasons we're requiring that even if they're not actually doing any true like processing with the biomass is we want to ensure that we know who's handling the crop so that we can communicate that information the law enforcement if someone has a storage facility you know filled to the ceiling with hemp crops someone's going to know and people can contact us and we can let them know if that individual or that property is registered with our program but your definition of wholesalers was it includes processing transportation and then the sales of cannabis and cannabis products and I believe this is listed in act 164 and then I guess in title seven somewhere yeah which is really encompassing but again so we we don't have that wholesaler we just lump it in with our processors definition who needs to register with us we do not require white labelers to register with us so individuals that are processing products on behalf of other brands they do not need to be registered with us the brand needs to be registered with us because they're ultimately the individual or the company that's responsible for any label guarantees and for the testing and the record keeping so on and so forth stop me if you have any questions as I move through the presentation so that some other elements of the Vermont program is we have a consumer protection angle and again that's the focus of our regulations in addition to registering individuals who are handling the crop we have labeling requirements as well as standards for meeting the label guarantees that are listed on on labels we have record keeping and reporting requirements a record keeping of where you get crops the variety of the crops that you get or the cultivars where it came from how much the weight of that crop was there's there's a lot record keeping a lot of record keeping requirements within the program and then as well reporting to us if you have an exceedence of a potency requirement we require testing by certified laboratories the the Vermont cannabis quality control program began in 2020 November of 2020 we had to develop application materials so on and so forth the certified lab program is to help serve the industry to and for when those labs are doing testing setting a standard for how they will report that information out so that we can have an apples to apples comparison between labs and between the various analyses that are done by by labs these certified labs have to be aware of our regulations they have to have validated methods and I'm going to go into that a little bit more so we do require use of certified labs currently we have two labs that are certified by the agency and we have a list available on our website so and we've been trying to you know since we only had the program in place since November of 2020 we're still standing up that piece of our program we're moving registrants growers and processors to use the certified labs but we also understand that we don't really have a lot of certified labs so it we suspect that we'll have a year another year of of growers and processors being able to use the labs of their choice and those labs that they're currently working with to meet their testing requirements but we will eventually once we have enough certified labs require that individuals use those certified labs this is I mean obviously a function of having a program in place before you have certified labs in place and we as an agency you know we're not going to say nobody can put a product on a shelf until we have certified labs in place because that wasn't going to work for anybody and so we're still we're still working towards getting certified labs in Vermont and elsewhere we would happily allow individuals or labs from outside of the state to also become certified because we do know that hemp producers growers and processors do use labs outside of the state of Vermont and then again we're establishing a common vocabulary which I mentioned a little bit earlier so how do we do this very quick overview of our program we have three full-time employees and there's myself and then we have a hemp inspector and then we have a cannabis quality control program compliance specialist the we have a chief policy enforcement officer that works across the agency that helps us with enforcement does you know drafts many of our enforcement letters and on occasion communicates with registrants we have general counsel and these these these last three bullets here to policy policy enforcement officer general counsel and then care to get the director of public health and ag resource management they're you know they interact with the program but they're not dedicated to our program so those that are primarily dedicated are the three full-time employees what does the inspector do they manage all the the registration process both online and paper we do have an online registration portal but we also accept if needed paper registrations we understand that not everybody has access to the internet and we are willing to accept paper registrations the online portal will accept credit card payments we accept credit card payment up to a thousand dollars if anything is beyond a thousand dollars you have to send in a check to the agency we also accept ACH or electronic transfer of funds for that online registration process the inspector in community the inspector communicates this is Mike De Tommaso he's our inspector he made me on this car but he he manages that process he communicates with registrants so if we are missing information as a part of our online registration process or in a paper application or we need an exchange to a registration Mike spends the time and and and communicates with our registrants he's also really the face of the program because he's out there in the field doing inspections he's the first point of contact he responds to general inquiries about the program manages the complaints that we receive we actually have an online environmental complaint form that is linked to the website that an individual can you know fill out it actually covers multiple aspects of our of our program of the agency's programs but we do have a way for people to communicate to us if they have a complaint out in the field out in the world Mike collects samples random does conducts random inspections he's designed a number of standard operating procedures for the inspections that we can that we conduct here at the agency we're attempting to kind of develop a binder so that you know if we need to hire another inspector it's like here you go this is what you're working on and this is how you're going to do it it also provides consistency within the program and how we interact with our registrants and then as well Mike works with with Dave Huber Dave Huber is our chief policy enforcement officer to implement consistent enforcement practices our goal annually is to touch 20% of the registrants that we have currently with 417 it's approximately 80 that will work with this year and then when I say touch I mean like a random inspection and or response to a complaint during 2020 and into this year we developed or Mike developed a virtual record inspection process because actually records are something you can do at a distance you don't have to be within someone's space so it starts off with filling out a sheet about who you are what you grow how many acres or area square feet of cultivation that you have per cultivar if it's a product-based one you know like what products are you selling and looking at labels so-and-so forth and that's been kind of an effective way to to reach people in the climate that we were working under but we're going to continue to do that again because it's an effective way to get information and oh and looking at test records as well also Mike goes out on random site visits and visits with registrants of the program and then again response to complaints the most common enforcement actions and or complaints actually probably more apt term here is is this person registered are they registered with the program and so we do a fair bit of following up with individuals if if someone has a concern that someone's not registered with us we also through the records inspections you know check to make sure that they filled out their pre-harvest sampling form correctly and that they have all the test testing requirements per that stage of that crop or that product and then as well that they're maintaining those records and have access to them within their their files and then another complaint that we sometimes get is which it relates to whether or not land is registered for cultivation is managing land so some instances they'll be land that has him growing on it it's not registered with us and it's clearly just a reseed from a prior year and if we find that there's hemp growing in a field or cannabis growing in a field it just more broadly because we don't know what's hemp until we have a test done and it's not registered with us we obviously require that individual to register and then we try to provide some guidance and assistance compliance assistance relative to please managing please manage the land we don't want feral hemp crops spreading through the state of Vermont as that I think is probably a fairly big risk to both that floral cultivation of hemp in our state as well as the cannabis cultivation some of the issues that lead to this land management is the infrastructure that's put in so like plastic sometimes prevents somebody from being able to well if they fail to harvest then you can't just you know till or disc the soil up because you have to get the plastic out so there's just a layer of things going on that create problems and so so we are actually interested in creating more guidance relative to managing land so compliance assistance or compliance specialist with the cannabis quality control program that individuals is Robert Chipman and he also spent some time in the Vermont environment ag and environmental lab in Randolph and he has assisted in developing the cannabis quality control program did all the research relative to the contaminants that we wanted to test for in the action limits for when something is considered a potential risk to consumers he has developed the list of materials that we will need in order to review an application for a certified lab he actually reviews those application materials after he receives them and then we'll also this is this program is fairly new we'll conduct random inspections of laboratories either you know looking at their data packages to ensure that the report that is a result of the data package that they match up he's also currently designing an interlaboratory comparison study relative to potency and we're soon to be sending out those samples to all those labs that have expressed interest in participating but this will be an anonymous comparison study but it'll allow like the lab that's participating will be able to we'll know which is their sample amongst all the samples and then we can see the deviation between the results on something that is a known product to begin with I'm not explaining this very well and thankfully Kerry Gagher is in the room he has joined us and and he can contribute if he feels necessary but it'll be it's it's we're really excited about it doing this interlaboratory comparison study and we've received interest by I think at seven labs but up to like 14 analysts and they'll run the same sample like three times and then we'll look at it and we'll compare the results but it'll it'll inform we'll also going to look at the the methods that they're using either they're I guess not they're grinding because we're sending out round samples but you know some of the methods that they use is thank you their extraction methods to compare to see you know like what might be more effective or are certain extraction methods resulting in the same potency anyway moving on I'm getting out of my death clearly but so we also as a part of the cannabis quality control program in the work that Robert Shipman has done and the research he has done established contaminate thresholds for microbiologicals which include yeast and molds and aerobic micro microbial bacteria as well as mycotoxins we have heavy metals action limits pesticide action limits please know that the pesticides that can be used on hemp crops are very limited EPA has approved I'm gonna guess I think around like 62 68 around there to be used on hemp but we test for pesticides beyond that list obviously because that list is a list of things that are okay to be used on them and we are looking at pesticides that are not approved to be used on hemp you can find them potentially on a hemp crop due to spray over drift improper use and these are things that we are testing for within the hemp program however a misuse application or a drift situation that is actually then handled by a separate division we are a separate program within the public health and ag resources management division so the hemp program doesn't do that work we're just requiring the test so again here's an example of where we are relying on somebody else to help us do our jobs better we also test for residual solvents such as ethanol butane hexane propane acetone list goes on and on we currently within the hemp program allow for co2 extraction ethanol extraction mechanical extraction and lipid extraction we within the rules the rules allow for an individual to approach us for another extraction method that can be approved by the secretary just so that we weren't like closing the door on new technology this and what we're talking about is primary botanical extraction not secondary extraction after you've done your primary extraction we do know that some of those secondary processes may use some of these chemicals which is another you know a reason why we test for these residual solvents that can be helpful so this is where I'm truly at my depth certifying laboratories the we require at least we require lamps to be ISO accredited or on their way to obtaining ISO accreditation there's a number of third-party organizations out there that offer this accreditation we look at the facilities that where the testing is being conducted we review their sample storage techniques we review their chain of custody staff qualifications we review their methods and their standard operating procedures for the testing methods that they're going to use make sure that they're validated methods we review their measurements of uncertainty their LOQs and LODs limit of plantation limit of detection and limit of detection thank you Kerry we want to review how they are going to address their complaints that they receive at their lab how they will go about if they you know if they had to revise the certificate of analysis how would they go about doing that and what measures are in place to ensure that both the client knows and you know whatever you know we want to make sure that everything is appropriately managed within the lab and that is part of our review for labs to become certified within the program then I mentioned this a little bit already besides the work that the hemp program does with registration enforcement record-keeping requiring testing and certifying labs and establishing you know an interlaboratory comparison study that will support labs we rely on a lot of other programs within the agency of agriculture the other item is that all of us within the agency of agriculture are out there doing outreach and education the hemp program does it the pesticide program does it fail participates in conferences as well in workshops we in the program develop frequently asked questions worksheets and guidance documents and how do you use our registration processes where our phone call away one of the things that I believe in is is customer service like we serve the customer that's what we're here for you're gonna call me up you have a question I'm gonna call you back and try to get you an answer if I can't get you an answer I'm still gonna call you back and so I can't get you an answer right now but we'll look into it we work with UVM pretty closely on conferences and workshops we participated in meetings with banking and insurance companies we've made presentations before Vermont cannabis solutions afternoon luncheons to talk about our program and these are all opportunities for us that we actually don't have to coordinate but we can go out there and get in touch with the community so they're great great opportunities so relative to regulatory provisions and farming just quickly hemp is farming it's agricultural commodity so within the required agricultural practices there's a definition of farming I've highlighted like three things that I think apply to have specifically hemp is both growing food fiber and is a horticultural crop so it meets the definition when you're cultivating the land you can do it in greenhouse that is considered farming it includes the on-site storage preparation sale of that hemp product that's principally produced on the farm that is all farming and if you're farming then the agricultural practices the required agricultural practices apply to your operation and this is where Ryan was talking about the rules that that fill in the regulatory framework where other environmental regulations don't apply the required agricultural practices apply and that's why we have those regulations in place and so those include these items here including the construction of farm structures and farm structures are you know buildings that are used in the course of your daily agricultural activities and if you're farming and the required agricultural practices apply to your operation then a municipal land use regulation cannot regulate you that includes the construction of farm structures and so that is the current lay of the land how do we achieve this the agency will receive questions from both farmers and for municipalities regarding whether or not the construction of their building or the activity that they're engaged in is regulated by the required agricultural practices this is very high level this is not in the weeds and we can certainly talk about it more but and the agency will respond and write letters in fact this is a letter I wrote this is the concluding paragraph of a letter I wrote a while ago regarding the operation of a greenhouse we make a determination that we believe it's farming and that the required agricultural practices apply this is a letter this is how I did it actually can't be certain how it's done today we would share that information with the municipality the municipality take that under consideration to determine whether or not they wanted to regulate that land use for the construction of that building if they agreed with us then they wouldn't if they disagreed with us then they would go through their regular regulatory process through their development review board or their one of the regulatory boards likewise at 250 uses the same definition generally the same definition is farming and they also have an exception for regulating farming and other working lands types of businesses this is administered by the district coordinators and district commissions in the regions across the state the agency participates relative to the 9B primary agricultural soils criteria I can't think of a time when we were asked maybe one or two times where we're asked to provide our opinion on that their definition of farming and whether or not we believed it was farming and or what aspects of an operation is considered farming but farming is generally not regulated by Act 250 there is a specific exemption for when a permit amendment is happening under certain circumstances that if what is happening is farming it is not reviewed even under a permit amendment and I'm probably not giving this it's due I would encourage you to speak with obviously the Natural Resources Board with respect to that but it is similar to what the agency does an application of required agricultural practices however not asked to comment on this I just wanted to share Vermont's right to farm law this is just the purpose section and there are a lot of words on this page but individuals that are engaged in farming have a you know there's a limitation on bringing a civil suit a private civil suit against an individual that's engaged in farming to the extent that it isn't a significant change in the activities that were occurring before the new activity occurs again not giving it it's due I'm not an attorney but it the purpose does focus on you know like agriculture is important to the state of Vermont we cherish our open lands and our working landscapes so that's what I have that's great honestly I was gonna say just the questions that I have might take up a significant amount of time okay so we have about half an hour I think yeah potentially longer but I would open it up to questions from two board members first I have a question about the labs sure time that you determine you know what sort of fine lab needed to have how long did it take to start certifying labs so once we develop the program and once we launched it we were ready to go we were ready to accept applications once we receive the information that is necessary there's probably a little bit of back and forth but I think two weeks tops you know not very long be a has been through the lab certification process you certainly get their perspective on it but that's my experience what I understand and this is the piece that really is plug-and-play it's the the all the same analysts all the same analyze whether it's a board THC everything that a canvas lab needs is is part of this certification yeah these yeah and it's the first place we should partner our program can be your program your program can be our program just looking across the country the foundation of a consumer protection program for cannabis is the laboratory piece and we saw Oregon struggle with that we saw Colorado struggle with that it's just not the piece that was thought of first it was the piece that kind of inserted after this is a very robust lab certification program that includes all the pieces that are necessary yeah I also want to follow up that much of our contaminants that we've got you know that we've got listed where we actually drew from many cannabis programs because the hemp didn't have this outlined for it so and we're one of the few states where this is contained within the agriculture the agency of an agency or Department of Agriculture in some instances it's located within a Department of Health Colorado the pesticide pieces with agriculture the contaminant piece is with the board of health the municipal boards of health because they do it by county in Colorado and the other the heavy metals pieces independent labs so this puts it all in one place no so are there unique features of high THC cannabis versus him or the cultivation practices or even just kind of federal status of marijuana it is where we need to significantly modify some of your thresholds or some of your other consumer protection rules it sounds like you got a lot of them from the kind of high THC cannabis world yeah so I don't see any difference I mean obviously from a povency perspective like that's obviously different but many of but that doesn't mean you know if I think what's at 30% on a plant on a crop it's still the same methods like none of that has changed it's just a different number and in fact under Act 164 the agency of agriculture was required to establish contaminant thresholds for cannabis and cannabis products and I don't know if it's a threshold or a standard for label guarantees and so we did do that that's already contained within our cannabis quality control program despite us not regulating cannabis we really focus on a consumer protection piece that goes above and beyond what USDA was asking for for him and probably because I was sitting in previous conversations about a tax regulate program your question highlighted one piece that I think is a policy decision that we don't need to decide now but what is dry what is dry is dry zero moisture there is dry shell stable 13 to 15% moisture under the farm building to find it as zero percent moisture but it's going to be tricky when you are looking at cannabis that flower for sale that's up in the high 20s if you dry it to zero percent it might go over 30% but if that if it shells stable at 15% moisture you're probably below that 3% number so just some little things to think about as as you move forward what's dry is dry zero moisture or dry shelf stable or at consumption like I said yeah if you get it to 13% or 15% I think 13% is what we have and this is what we call a dryway basis in the emperors it's you know that's when it's consumed someone's not going to go home and try it more maybe they will I don't know and then the other piece on the moisture just as a tangent I'm sorry is that the moisture also also like how you manage your crop for for stability reasons and said reduce the risk of contamination due to micro biological so there's that number too which we believe is around 13% I had a couple questions back to the laboratory context so it's really exciting to hear that my question was going to be similar to Julie's really exciting to hear that there's a potential glide path for for what you've already done from a laboratory context how we can kind of use that with what we're trying to accomplish you said I believe there's two labs in the state that have met your certification standard thus far and seven that are in the process let me be phrase okay okay we have two labs that have gone through the certification process for specific testing areas so it's not the full I should go back it's not the full gamut we have potency yeah is currently certified to conduct potency testing and then and I has been certified to conduct heavy metals and molding yeasts and and no they get the best side piece and another I can't remember which I apologize but so we don't have currently pesticides we don't have solvents as of yet my understanding is that you can add those at any point during the year and I'm certain that labs will move forward we've also received an application from the Vermont agriculture environmental lab from Vale to become a certified lab in potency as well that is currently under review great that's good to know and I guess my follow-up to that is I would imagine that we might not have as much flexibility when our program launches from this laboratory certification perspective like I know that the program has done working with people until they've achieved certification maybe we will I don't know I'm Aaron on the side of caution there but do you explain between now and 18 months from now 12 months from now do you expect where do you expect those other potential labs to be in this process I know there's a lot of business decisions that those labs need to make if they want to actually come into this market and offer these services but just generally speaking I don't have a crystal ball as to how many labs we will have certified in 18 months I can't tell you that we know we have interest from labs to participate and I did highlight initially that we had a program and we were registering processors before we had a certified lab program in place the cannabis control board has an opportunity to put the certified lab program as a to require it first before you have products hitting shelves which would prevent the problem that we're experiencing where we don't have enough certified labs currently in place yeah no totally want to make sure we have a good understanding of the landscape as we try to anticipate as many bottlenecks as we can knowing that we can't anticipate all I had another question on this well two more questions on this specific topic sure I know EPA has dipped their toe into the water for him on he said 60 to 70 ish make care maybe this questions for you how are how are other states handling from a high THC adult use perspective on farm applicators and pesticides when those haven't been technically approved for high THC so they've all done it very differently Nevada is the worst in particular they've looked at a slew of pesticide labels it is an expressly prohibited on the label they allow it so you get a lot of weird chemistry that we don't want to see used on cannabis because that inhalation studies haven't been done Oregon I like what they've done they've allowed them minimum use sort of pesticides but California is currently doing registration packages for specific active and active ingredients doing the inhalation studies doing the other toxicological studies so I think what's coming out of California right now is the best and most applicable science for what's appropriate to be used on canvas I think I can speak for us when we say we're looking for working with you as we figure that you out last but not least I wanted to talk about remediation and destruction I don't know if it might be a prudent time to at least talk with me and my colleagues about how you handle remediation I can't exactly remember where from a remediation perspective USDA is I know I assisted the two of you in writing some comments on what we wanted to see from a remediation perspective but if a product tests over a certain potency what kind of allowable remediation does the program have for folks to kind of work their way back under the yeah so per USDA on the crop side the there is an opportunity to remediate a crop so if you there's specific sampling guidance so if you're within a USDA approved program you're taking one flowering top from an acre and you're that flowering five to eight inches six to something like that that's the cutting the cut that you take in order for the test to be conducted if that flower exceeds the potency requirements you have an opportunity to harvest your entire crop chip it the entire plants and then you're diluting it with stems and leaves and stock and then having it retested for the purposes of compliance at that point and so that's that's what's available from a reformediation standpoint the oh the other opportunity is to cut off flowers and then just use the stock in a fiber market so it's still providing a market opportunity for that crop so those are the two opportunities that exist for hemp the other opportunity or no the other the disposal side is you can do our on-farm disposal so you can compost you can deep burial very deep you can just get back into the soil and I know that the plant or I understand I don't know I understand that the plant has a lot of nutrients kind of like held up within the plant itself and so returning it to the soil is in a bad way if you had a failure in a crop some of the issues or challenges I see with the remediation opportunities is that you can't test until again until you've actually harvest all your entire crop which means you're potentially throwing good money after bad and then you're you know gambling with the test on the other side but I suppose you could probably do some science and figure out whether not you can find me because we're working with potency limits from the flowering concentrate perspective something that we're gonna have to have to think about if somebody's product tests over those and what opportunities are offered to get those products and compliance yes it needs to be destroyed so yeah my product side I would think you know you would it depends on when you're testing like if you're working in at large scales you can probably determine whether or not your products gonna pass you know by sampling that product and we actually have post harvest and product sampling guidelines that we've developed for folks in the hemp industry to try to get a composite sample of you know lots leaders leaders of concentrate extract but you can reformulate potentially if you're not gonna meet that potency requirement on a larger scale like it's not good to sort of suggest that our compliance point is the crop your compliance point is the point of sale yeah so there is more control and if a flower if flower it is over 30% either well introducing more moisture to bring it down or running it through a market that that's making animals or concentrate right and for that matter if you don't meet a contaminant level that too requires remediation like throw potency aside let's talk about contaminants you have something that's rich and full of colony forming units of beasts and molds you can extract that and then you'll eliminate that contaminant so there is another market down the road but obviously best to have good practices in place to avoid that issue in the first place and I think something different where we're running to he's some molds or over 0.3 you're gonna be ready to pesticide contamination issues more than potency pesticide or my artery mildew or any thoughts on the I mean from the lessons you all learned are there any thoughts on the sequencing of the licensing that we doing as far as just like when should we be granting testing licenses cultivator licenses retail licenses just I know you guys don't do the retail side of things but I'm just curious like I think the legislation contemplates cultivators go first and testing you know they have these windows for us yeah I think testing first testing yeah yeah needs to be first by six months yeah yeah because then you're gonna have the labs wanting to get there once it's open to them they're gonna want to get their licenses to test yeah and then they might be sitting a little bit waiting for processors and growers to come on board or wholesalers I don't know wholesalers will have to have testing complete like that's another thing you'll have to think about is at what stage of product development are you it's probably what's end product I Kerry said so is the testing is yeah and that's just within the agency there are you know lots of costs I so certification is by far the most costly piece and we're not for quarrying it right up the bat but you need to be heading in that direction some sort of third-party verification how long did your initial role-making take well it took a while so we started I think is it a year maybe I feel like we had meetings in 2019 in like the Newport area in May we actually had to extend our deadline so whatever the rules are regarding rulemaking we had to extend the deadline they didn't become effective until May of 2020 so I feel like you have like nine months to get to over the finish line and we had to ask for an extension it was the middle of I'm not gonna throw it on COVID but it was the middle of COVID and it just kind of fell off the radar a little bit maybe it didn't fall off the radar that's probably not the right way but priority shift yeah priority shift indeed and that common vocabulary that you talked about is that something we can just adopt is that kind of like now a Vermont standard the vocabulary is is I mean we do we we appropriate many marketing terms within the Vermont emperors so isolate distillate full spectrum broad spectrum biomass like and there are more terms actually we have a fix-it list you always have a pick fix it list somewhere but you know like from Europe you maybe you guys wanted to find what Keith is maybe you wanted to find what bowl hash is you know I don't know but if we all know what they are then we're not all you know people use those terms then it's consistent and the consumer knows you know producer processor knows it's just a consistent marketing labeling plan so that can be our basis but we can kind of expand it further yeah like we define dry weight food you might want to you know food establishments I don't know if you're gonna those are and those you can their terms all over state government that you may want to look to to make sure that you're using the same term yeah yeah you can definitely you can take any of our terms that's what we're here for you built a you built the framework you have three employees on the kind of consumer safety compliance enforcement yeah how do you have the ability to scale that up for high THC cannabis and how long would that take sorry that's probably you maybe haven't thought about it yeah it really depends on where we draw the line yeah yeah you know to conduct a consumer protection program yeah like like we have for him would be very untitled fast because we do have currently five pesticide inspectors doing the pesticide yes we have lab staff doing all in different analysis plus Bob so the infrastructure is there and the legs go deep but in order to what right now you know Mike's step you saw the number 20% of the registrants are randomly inspected you might want a hundred percent we've got we at our top was what almost 900 registrants thirteen hundred thirteen hundred registrants yeah well so it's interesting because I want to admit that the Ham program has you know like we're riding the wave of USDA we're riding the wave of you know changes in Vermont law so I do believe that the 1300 registrants was both growers and processors because we had one registration process at that point in time I think that was 2019 yeah yeah so it probably was both yeah anyway making excuses for what I'm trying to recollect but where you draw the lines definitely had mentioned that Mike Scott had sort of template what his job is what we're looking for and how to do that job and you can apply that in a regionally how whatever it's most appropriate so it is scalable very quickly depending on resource need yeah growing and processing was definitely yeah that's actually very easy to to address the registration of those individuals and if Mike goes in and sees pesticides that he shouldn't see that's an immediate referrals of the pesticides factors and we have others that can do that as well as I look over at fire safety provide those referrals we've been talking a little bit anyone please feel free to jump in we've been talking a little bit about certified labs of course and you mentioned that there's probably not enough certified labs for all of the hemp registrants not today yes right how many would that be for your just for the hemp registrants I don't think I've ever actually done a calculation but I can say that our hemp registrants based on the lab results that I've seen I think it's primarily it's probably under 10 labs where we see you know with their different names across the top of those certificates of analysis so it's probably between 10 and 15 for the hemp program but then also understand that people are choosing a lab that they like to work with so it's easy and they go out of state yeah in our market you're right they will not that's true can I just ask that going back you said that you have labs that are certified for specific things does that mean that folks have to send samples to multiple labs in order to meet that certified requirement quite possibly yes right now right now yes one more to do it all right they wouldn't have time line for someone or cost or see I'm sorry no no please no you saw via diagnostics they can do everything they're only certified in a few pieces but if you were to send a sample to be a you could still order the entire suite we don't accept the result for the piece they're certified and you're gonna hear from them later today I'm sure they'll share what their intentions are are there any consumer protection issues that have come up in the hemp business that are public that are not yeah I mean concerns about concentration of products on the shelf concerns about mold or contaminants we don't have it's not necessarily a shelf life related thing it's just you know whether or not the product is meets our contamination for mold yeah and most of the most of the calls we've received this season per last season were over the mold last year was a really hard year was a white year towards the end of the season and frost three days but luckily it's not the aflatoxin the toxic one that's primarily the butchery this last question so you talked about kind of nurseries it's mean nurseries is one of these issues that spans our jurisdiction in the hemp jurisdiction because it's not flowering it's not high TFC cannabis but it's my understanding I don't know enough about the plan itself but that there's certain genetics that would yield most likely not high CBD cannabis but high THC cannabis but so I'm trying to think we've been hearing that we should be thinking about this is a nursery license we should think about that do you have any thoughts about like who's jurisdiction now a fauna it seems almost silly to have a cannabis quality control program and then a separate you know like if there's just personally if there's a program in the state that registers the business nursery why not take advantage of that same division separate set of inspectors but we do have nursery inspectors yeah and we are currently registered the registering the folks that are producing starts as nurseries yeah you've got something one a few things that we learned in the program that we need to consider is folks are going to be producing starts clones or seeds and selling them to the people who are going to grow them and also we will have industry in the state that will be seed producers right now it's if you it's seven leaf genetics they're a hemp producer but they don't sell any hemp they sell seeds they produce seeds and sell genetics and that infrastructure and industry will end up in the state as well you'll have people producing seeds for a high-tech seed cannabis market that are never taking that to flower and if they are it'll be primarily for research so that nursery component will need to be captured even though we don't have a tax and regulate market you look online the clone market in the state is really strong a lot of people everybody buying their six plants from people producing clones anywhere from 10 to 25 dollars so some of those are registered nurseries and somewhere there's also what's interesting is that as a part of the USDA hemp production program they are providing states the opportunity to establish flexibility on sampling in nurseries so it's a performance based sampling protocol they've asked states to look at that and so we've thought about it a little bit like we don't want to go out to nurseries in sample because there's no reason to but we've kind of put together a list of things that would then qualify them as a nursery like if you're not bringing things to flower and you have to report to us the square footage of your floor you have to let us know when you destroy the crop if you didn't actually sell it off your floor like things like that and it could easily translate to a nursery inspection and or license issued by the agency if you wanted to use our program inspections could be done here to your standards to ensure that crops are managed appropriately in those are pieces that we all by statute if somebody's selling seeds we have to register as a seed dealer if somebody's selling nursery stock we standardarily have to register so we'll decide where that you'll be a close coordination with us you know yeah yeah in this area many others I do I wonder if you could tell me if you if your goal was to touch 100% of your registrants how many Mike's do you think you would need so well let's just say five 20% okay straight up yeah and is that true like today or at the outside of the program that's today with 1,300 registrants actually I bet you still could because Mike does Mike does a lot more than just right inspections so you probably could still do it with five yeah how many inspectors do we have in the well it's still fewer yeah I don't know never think about the water quality program it's a comparison I think that I don't think temporary maybe attempt maybe you can do it but their responsibilities would be pretty limited like I feel like the nuances of your program would be such that you would want employees who are you know regimented in their following and let's just say that's five but hemp is primarily grown outdoors so we're hitting everybody during one growing season if you've got indoor growing operations that are going year-round the burden for that month before harvest goes away yeah but that fives a good number we have five inspectors cover in this day doing the pesticide feed seed fertilizer hemp and they do housing inspections for food and retail inspections products in the five conference days regional and they hit all the sort of class B pesticide dealers in class A pesticide dealers the class A's are your big ag shops they hit them multiple times a year the other ones are on a two-year cycle so we're hitting every house shown how it was going to go home pop hardware storage and pesticide inspection every other year and we could do it every year but we like to throw in golf courses and nurseries and renovate inspections too so I got one more question and I recognize this question might be better suited for Mike I'm not gonna put it on the spot he's listening so that last week we talked about greenhouses with the Department of Energy or the Public Service Department I think the two of you may have weighed in on some of my questions I have in your experience with folks that have cultivated hemp from a greenhouse perspective I just wanted to touch on how efficient I know I'm sure they run the gamut of age and efficiency right now but I'm wondering and it's a question in my head how ready with folks that might want to grow high THC cannabis in a greenhouse well they need to depart for the PSD's requirements so she had mentioned two layers two layers of poly and that's what the air between every greenhouse that I've seen is running two layers of that's how you buy a greenhouse cover I just didn't want those folks to feel like they're getting another additional cost depending on their cultivation model so that's the that's the greenhouses when you're talking about the high tunnels high tunnels run one layer of poly the high tunnels will never meet that but high tunnel you're not using your right you're just they're not gonna hit that 180 day threshold yeah yeah that's what I think defining what you mean by greenhouse and they use that the two layers of poly for rigidity so you've got air between the layers of poly or more out to survive the winter just got you to trade off this has been fascinating anyone else yeah thank you and I said that the entire advisor community has been named I actually don't know who on the team is going to be there I know that you guys might both be there or maybe one or the other but we're looking forward to if you have one you give us both right but we look forward to collaborating with you and even a conversation going excellent thank you so next on our agenda is public comment we we have several public comment periods throughout the day I would like to try and keep us on track a little bit so please if you've joined us via the link please raise your virtual hand if you'd like to make a comment hey folks this is Grant with an autopolicy director Earl Hamont nice to see everybody again thanks Kerry and Stephanie for that great presentation of the M program I think it's really critical to look at these programs in parallel and I'm heartened to hear you all discussing like ways that there could be overlap both for efficiency's sake but also just for for all kinds of reasons two things I just wanted to highlight in that conversation one was about breeding and I think one thing that we've been hearing from a lot of folks is that you know this is actually a really primary of people are interested in we live in a really unique climate and breeding for these conditions is a thing that a lot of people may be looking forward to it could be a really unique place for Vermont to have a market and a niche going forward so thinking about that critically makes a lot of sense and I think the differentiation between high tunnels and greenhouses the other thing I just wanted to hit on and I think as you're moving across the agricultural landscape that difference you know is very stark in terms of what crops are being grown in terms of costs in terms of what types of farms have them and don't but that's it thank you all very much great thank you Graham Nick on the list is Jeffrey actually good morning so can everybody still hear me yeah excellent I've got headphones on so thank you well I just want to echo my colleague Graham sentiments about the previous speakers thank you to Kerry and Stephanie that was excellent and Mike and everyone else that participated thank you to the board for making this space I do want to just pick up on some of the points that Graham had mentioned by the way for the record my name is Jeff Zatella co-founder and executive director of Vermont Growers Association the trade association for Vermont's cannabis professions think of us as the Vermont Growers Association very similar a lot of our members are breeders cannabis breeders and those interested in entering the market to sell teens or starts so I wanted to highlight that one of the things that will be incumbent on Vermont when it comes to establishing its brand with regards to the inevitable federal legalization of high THC cannabis will be establishing a uniquely Vermont brand and directly tied to that is breeding and the development of unique and regional genetics specific to Vermont specific to this region this gets into what we talk about in the cannabis industry as IP intellectual property and genetics these are more advanced sophisticated conversations that I look forward to but this is the foundation for that so I urge you guys to keep that in mind as you think about regulations in ways for these Vermonters to access the marketplace that is important for federal legalization and preparing Vermont for exporting our craft products so thank you for your time thank you anyone else that's joining via the link that wants to make a public comment please raise your virtual hand and if anyone's joins by the phone hold on one second Loretta would you like to make a comment please okay yeah I got it thank you very much I'm I'm really enjoying this conversation as a medical cannabis patient and it it's just mind blowing to me that hemp has all of these restrictions for heavy metals and testing when the medical cannabis industry does currently thank you very much for your work guys thank you Loretta um yes Stephanie in the room with the agency I just wanted to highlight I didn't mention this previously but within the hemp authority to regulate in chapter 34 of title six it includes hemp seed labeling standards and so we do have a provision within our hemp program that outlines some standards for labeling of hemp seeds specifically including requirements for potency so on and so forth and based on some of the comments that were given just now there's potentially another opportunity and I just wanted to highlight it I'm not prepared to talk about it at any more length than that thanks for flagging that so anyone else from the link would like to make a public comment please just raise your raise your hands virtual hands okay um anyone do you want to make a comment I hadn't planned you but uh recently I've gone through the program and I've been involved in the uvm and some of the conferences I also recently applied for around license and I just want to comment that it's been the customer service aspect that you referred to has been outstanding you guys have been helpful you've been very supportive in the outreach and it's uh it's been a pleasant experience so thank you guys very great job um anyone else who joined maybe by the phone I'm not seeing anyone joined by phone but if there is anyone you hit star six to unmute yourself and you can make a public comment okay um we are very slowly ahead of schedule but our next witnesses are here you guys are ready to go we can did you make that presenter today yeah I'm not sure our point well so the chairperson what I would suggest is we take just a very quick break get them on the table and set up and come back in the bottom of the hour is that work yeah absolutely and 11 30 yeah okay so we're going to take a six minute break here and come back at 11 30 all right we're going to back up a second because we realized that we were on mute sorry to the folks listening in so we've got Ben Moffitt here with us assistant state fire marshal also the barrier regional manager we've got Landon Wheeler with us and assistant state fire marshal springfield regional manager and in my conversations with Stephanie in preparation for today I think we were all in agreement that it was really important that the board hears from the two of you it's my understanding that the two of you have kind of ran point from a educational perspective to state partners but also to the public when it comes to understanding fire safety building code requirements from a fire safety context understanding what other guidance is out there what other controlling principles are out there to make sure that what we're doing is is safe from a perspective of those that are handling a certain process but also making sure that that trickles down to you know how consumers use certain products so with that introduction take it away all right thank you very much so I guess I go first my name is Landon Wheeler I'm an assistant state fire marshal thank you for the lovely introduction I've been with the division of fire safety for about 15 years I have 25 years in the fire service in total and I'm a lead contact for the hemp permitting process for the division of fire safety because the process was so new and there's so many specific hazards that are addressed with it Ben and I received in research specific training and education so that we could assist the rest of the division of fire safety in that process and we've continued that throughout and I am the regional manager for the spring field office and I'll turn it over to Ben for his introduction thank you Landon yes so again my name is Ben Moffitt thank you guys for the introduction today thank you for having us so I haven't been with the division quite as long as Landon I have four years of service here prior to that I'm a born and raised from honor and I was doing engineering work in the mechanical electrical plumbing field for seven years prior to coming here again like Landon said you know hemp and the processing of it and the growing of it and how that interfaces with public buildings in the state is very complicated and somewhat convoluted at times and so having a couple experts subject matter experts is pretty important for the division as a whole recently I became the regional manager for the Bay Area office so DFS and Landon's going to touch a little bit on this but we have basically four districts in the state one up in the northwest corner one in the northeast corner in the central Vermont area which is what I cover and then two in the southern portion one in Rutland and one in the spring field awesome so the division of fire safety I just want to give you a brief overview of who we are we do fall under DPS public safety we encompass quite a bit in our small division the state fire academy the state use our team the state hazmat team the arson and explosives investigation team and we also sit as branch representatives and partners for the state emergency operations center on a very regular basis so those are some of our additional duties along with new construction existing building inspections follow-up on life safety hazards and all of the hazardous materials storage for federal tier two reporting also come through the division of fire safety so we are small but we have a lot of jobs in titles thanks so this is also going to be me what we regulate so 20 vsa 2730 defines what a public building is and that gives us our guidance in regards to what we have jurisdiction over and allows us to enforce our rules that through our rulemaking process if you'll click on the next couple that'd be great some things that are typically not in our purview and we do not have jurisdiction over our buildings that are single-family owner-occupied dwellings certain agricultural buildings and mercantile occupancies on farms that sell products that are principally produced on the farms themselves those would be examples of things we don't have jurisdiction over i mean it's easier to present it this way than it is to say what we do have jurisdiction over it the definition if you'll go to the the remainder of the slide the our state statute was actually modified with working with the department of ag when the hemp bills were hemp bill was introduced and what that did was gave us jurisdiction over some hazardous processes that happened during the processing of hemp so you'll see that there was a change there was an addition that if two or more people are conducting this hazardous operation of extraction we would have jurisdiction no matter where that operation happened whether it happened on a farm or in somebody's shed or in a garage but what it did do was leave the ability for a single individual to be able to do that on their own property and not trigger our oversight so very much staying with the Vermont way changes have been made like i said during the the introduction of the hemp law hemp bill and thank you Stephanie for your help and writing that section because it was uh it actually was the first time that our statute had specifically been changed i think in over 20 years then you're up so the division of fire safety we have the authority under our rules to promulgate or under our statutes rather promulgate rules and in the state we adopt some i might be off of my number 292 reference standards that we adopt through reference or either direct adoption so i'm just going to name a few of them here for you again here's our rules so we adopt standards in entirety and then you modify certain sections that we want to change again this is done through a legislative rulemaking process similar to what ag does so NFPA one is our fire code that's kind of our all-encompassing fire safety code that kind of regulates anything that you might be doing in a public building in the state 101 is more specific to life safety whereas one is more specific to fire safety if that delineation makes sense to you the international building code so we also regulate building construction in addition to fire codes here in vermont the plumbing code so one thing you'll know and i think we talk about it potentially later on is we not only enforce building and fire codes we also house the electrical and the plumbing inspection for the state so we house all the electrical inspectors and all the plumbing inspectors for public buildings under the division the big thing that we also are tasked with is accessibility so we deal with all of the accessible standards that are promulgated by the department of justice in this case they're a little behind the times with the 2010 ADA standards and we also promulgate rules pursuant to accessible design and public buildings so your bathrooms your handrails your ramps all that kind of stuff is covered again 292 standards these are some of the big ones that come into play when we're talking about hemp NFPA 30 flammable liquids regulate storage use and handling of all flammable liquids 70 again i touched on we enforce electrical codes through our state electrical inspectors so NFPA 70 is the national electrical code or the NEC and 36 solvent extraction and 90a 90b talks about building mechanical ventilation and 90b specifically once we start talking about ventilating hazardous type favors which can be found in the hemp extraction world can you leave those up for a minute sure so how do we get here as a division of fire safety so i mentioned a few of our secondary tasks or jobs that we do and even prior to a hemp build coming about and starting to become a business in vermont we had been involved in the extraction process and growing process more on the illicit side of the world you know with items such as butane honey ash or people making and extracting products in their home and having accidents so we saw a need to better educate ourselves so that we could educate the public in regards to the hazards associated with those processes so our education in regards to the big picture of this started a long time ago and it definitely helped facilitate us working into the hemp industry where it was more of a regulated and legal market it definitely gave us a background and a better understanding of all the processes that come along with commercial sales and processing of botanicals and you'll see we don't call and differentiate very often in any of our codes hemp and marijuana we they're synonymous in our laws and we typically cover them when we talk in broad spectrums as botanicals so that it's a more wide reaching item you know not not only does it cover marijuana and hemp but it also covers lavender and you know other things that can be extracted from plant matter thanks Ben so fire safety permitting process for hemp so we want to give you guys a brief overview of how the permitting process works and why we have a permitting process obviously we have a permitting process because there can be some hazards that are associated with some of the hazardous materials and processes that are utilized during the extraction but believe it or not it's actually a lot wider ranging than that it's not just extraction it's the secondary processing of the product it's the large occupancy loads that it takes to process material such as flour you know it's the sales and mercantile environments we typically are involved in almost every aspect in some way of the sale the production the growing the extraction the secondary cooking or processing of the product but the processes the process for us is typically always the same so we're going to go through that so you'll have a better understanding we have four regional offices Springfield Barry Rutland and Williston at this time and contact is made typically from a customer that's interested in this process or starting a business next so we'll have a we'll schedule a preliminary meeting depending on the scope or the process that they want to do and I'm going to use extraction for this method because it seems like one of the the ones that is the most time consuming for us not for our customers but for us we ask that they get an engineer record because there's a lot of processes that they have that take a lot of specific engineering and review and a lot of the equipment that they utilize is not UL listed and it wasn't designed for the product or the process that they're using it for so we'll have a meeting DFS personnel which is us will provide them what information we're going to need to review based off of what they tell us their processes will be the engineering documents are developed and submitted for processing by the assistant state fire marshal and plan reviewer and that's where Ben and I typically will get involved and assist one of the plan review staff from the division of fire safety and the reviewer of the process because it can be very complex and as you'll see it can be very time consuming on our end go ahead once the review is complete a permit is issued and the applicant may begin construction or fit up of the proposed facility the reason we we put this slide or this terminology up there specifically is there's a drastic difference in value and processing that's associated between hemp and marijuana production and as as this industry does move forward for you you're going to see the drastic differences in the way that the plant is taken care of where it's grown how it's treated in its processing how it's packaged for sale it's all going to be drastically different than what the hemp or cvd industry is and for us it's the it's the same way plants being grown outside won't be grown outside anymore they'll be brought inside of buildings because they're that much more valuable typically and it also helps protect the plant from some of those funguses so they don't have to use so many fungicides herbicides and pesticides and the last but not least we do inspect these processes throughout the construction of new buildings and the fit ups of existing buildings as they are being renovated something that we learned during for over the last two and a half years roughly is a lot of the old stock buildings that had been available for hemp production in vermont may not have been the perfect fit for the industry and sometimes that can add barriers to the customer because those buildings just weren't built or designed for what they needed them for something that we are preparing for and we hope to see is that we see more new construction that is specifically designed for the industry and we have seen some for the hemp industry to the at this point thank you you're up Ben oh this is the last this is me the final inspection is completed we do grant occupancy certificates and operations certificates operating permits once we get through the permitting and review process and our inspections are completed the reason this is important is some of the processes are hazardous and what we've learned over the last few years even with the hemp industry is the industry changes pretty drastically and pretty quickly and vermonters are ingenious absolutely ingenious and they will find lots of ways to make things easier or more practical for themselves but sometimes inadvertently that creates risk i'll give you an example if you take a machine that is designed to heat up an extractive product that may have a hydrocarbon in it but you put that next to an open flame obviously you're going to introduce a combustible material to that environment and it can create a lot of risk and hazard and we've we've learned that we really need to make it clear to our customers and then users that once we grant this condition to operate it has to stay that way until we reevaluate what you want to change because the scenario i just gave is a real life scenario you know working throughout our processes you know we've learned a lot and we've learned that we have to actually ask a lot more questions than people typically want to give answers to us for and i'll give you another example is you know the breakdown of the medium to be able to extract it you know we actually found we whackers being used inside of buildings we found milling machines that were designed for corn being used inside of buildings and we found a lot of specific hazards and you know once we explained what the risk was and educated our customer and so in regards to those risks we were able to mitigate most of those issues pick your up man yes i just wanted to take a step back perhaps it wasn't clear um you jumped into this slide um the permitting process typically anytime you are doing construction addition modification in what is defined as a public building under 20 bsa 2730 you will trigger requirements for permit so i just wanted to back up this is the process but those are the triggers thank you man can you repeat that sorry can you just repeat that last point yep yeah so so anytime you are doing construction modification fit up in an existing or a new building if you're building a brand new building from the ground up you would be required to obtain a construction permit if it is considered a public building under 20 bsa 2730 um so that kind of hopefully gives you the background because to me it's really important the sequencing of this right when people talk to you versus talk to us right it should be part of our application with our cities and and that is a very important part to us also because if you grant on conditions to operate we would love to be a component of that conditioner to operate so you've received your permit from the division of fire safety here is your permit to operate or you know some sequence of events where we fit into that in regards to your development obviously that's probably a conversation for another day but we definitely would love to be part of that we're actually part of almost every association or agencies group that you've met with so far that that I could read on your agendas and your previous meeting notes we actually have a clause in almost every one of their rules that say fire safety takes precedence over existing statute or existing rules or when there is a conflict the division of fire safety's life safety requirements would take precedence and so i also want to clarify to go even further on that addition modification anytime you install new fixed equipment would also trigger a permit so fixed equipment would be something that's slaved off the building's power system or attached to its plumbing or any other type so basically anything that doesn't plug into a wall would be considered fixed equipment and that would trigger and we have different permitting processes in place to to address smaller scale projects versus a full new build project so i just want to talk about time frame real quick so the division of fire safety has a goal of turning around every one of our permits within 30 days and we have greater than 94 percent i believe of reaching that goal and typically that last few percentage of our projects are very complex in nature or have outstanding design issues that have to be provided to us but we're very very effective in regards to meeting reasonable time frames of turning permits around to our customers yeah and i think you know when we conclude this presentation we'll certainly make that that point but you know like Stephanie touched on customer service to us is everything and outreach is everything and education is everything and the more we can provide that to the design community and all of our players it makes that process so much easier i know when we started this you know we were getting hand drawn sketches on paper of water heaters that were being you know it it runs them it runs the mill but by the end of it as we got into year two of this process these people were coming to us with full design submissions they knew exactly what was needed and we were able to just process the permits through so but we'll talk more about that later um some of the types of the processes that we've seen and how they interface with public buildings throughout the hemp program you know indoor growing we certainly have seen that and and we have not only dealt with the hemp side of things we also deal with the medical marijuana side of things as well and so we've been in some of those facilities but the big things for the indoor side ventilation irrigation so obviously that involves plumbing backfill prevention all that kind of stuff and also the application of pesticides fungicides and fumicide herbicides herbicides if they're being done in the building can pose different hazards to the occupants so that's something that we have to look at ventilation and and signage and all those sorts of things as well as storage requirements we've seen drying a lot of it we've seen some large industrial drying operations inside of buildings this also includes the trimming processing of the stalks flower right on down the line even the extraction of terpenes through the drying process using condensation and collection like Landon said you know vermoners are ingenious and they will figure out how to get every part of that plant that they can legally obtain out of that plant again extraction this is a big one the mechanical processing of it we've seen any number of various operations and processes obviously the big thing on that is there is a tremendous amount of hazard you know everyone's seen the stories of these plants failing and blowing up hurting both fire safety personnel as well as the occupants distillation so you know i know Stephanie touched on the the slaying if you will across the industry but the raw crude that typically comes out of the extraction process is then distilled further on down the line to you know to extract or refine certain cannabinoids analytics so we also touch on the analytics because obviously as we've discussed already we would we would exert jurisdiction over a laboratory space and NFPA does have a standard that regulates labs specifically and then just the the aspect of hazardous materials as Landon touched on we do here under fire safety have the state hazmat team and we do regulate the storage and we administer the federal tier two EPRC community right to no act which requires people housing or storing over certain quantities of chemicals to register with with us in the EPA so lessons learned so years a few years ago when this process all started you know we we wanted to try and figure out where we were having breakdowns and how we could make things not only easier for us but especially for our customers and one of the big things was insufficient supply of adequately adequately qualified design professionals across the entire state not obviously the process on the legal side of things was new to this entire environment and actually to the whole northeast at that time so having design professionals that had awareness and knowledge of this process and the hazards associated with it was non-existent so out of state design professionals not licensed to perform design services in brahman a separate separate statue 26 vsa governors governs professional licenses in the state of brahman and it says if you're doing design work in the state of brahman you have to be licensed in the state of brahman so we actually we're going to get into the how we help people at the next slide then gets to say the nice stuff but we didn't we didn't leave it this way go ahead then yeah so one thing I just reflect in the library down there real quickly and we were seeing a lot of design professionals come out of the colorado world if you will so a lot of midwest or western states that had moved into the marijuana legal aspect of tax and regulate were coming here and these people were like well what do you mean you have a stamp you know they're good to go it's like well they have to be licensed in brahman so that's a little bit more on that lack of u l listed equipment intended for specific usage in the industry much of the equipment is modified lab equipment so the best way for me to explain this especially dealing with a customer is you're taking a piece of lab equipment and you're using it for industrial use and i'll use hemp as an example because that's what we have the most experience in but they wanted to process equipment as quick and as efficiently as they possibly could because that made that meant more money and they were using a lot of equipment that just wasn't designed for that and I believe even right this second there's only two pieces of extraction equipment that are actually well listed and approved but there are literally tens of thousands of homemade designed and engineered pieces of equipment that are used in the extraction process and we've seen it all we have germinated that stuff we overseas yeah we've had cd listings and the way that we've worked with that is to get design professionals involved but i'll let Ben talk on that in a few new technology processes constantly evolving in the word proprietary so in this world you are going to learn to hear that word you're going to hear that word a lot we have a proprietary process and we don't want to share that or we do not want that information to become public record as a state a jay or authority having jurisdiction we had to learn to work with all of our customers to provide a level of support and to get enough information to be able to accomplish our jobs but provide them with enough security for them to know that what they think is proprietary or what they want to keep their own is going to stay their own and that was hard in some cases a lot of the industry did not want to share with us the way that they were going to do their processes and we really need to know because if we don't know we're not going to be able to identify the risks associated with it existing buildings being converted into industrial usage containing hazardous processes so i've touched on this we do have one of the oldest stocks of buildings in the entire country being in vermont i think it's the third oldest statewide state by state that does not help when we typically reuse buildings or when buildings have multiple uses and i believe the next line will be quick talks about multiple uses and mixed use buildings you know in our industry there's a lot of processes that can't happen in the same buildings that are high-risk buildings and i'll explain that is we're not going to want to put a daycare in the same building as a building that's going to have an extraction process happening within that building and unfortunately a lot of our old buildings are cut up in ways to have multiple uses and multiple occupancies so that does bring another level of difficulty to the customer when they're picking out their buildings to utilize but a good thing is is we're typically involved early enough in their process that we can discuss these risks and hazards and help guide them into a building that's going to work best for them with the least amount of restrictions go ahead scale of operation varies tremendously and what i mean by this is a lot of our customers working through this the extraction side of hemp or even the storage of dry product or that they wanted to store long term there was a great need to expand very very quickly for some and a lot of the industry wasn't prepared for that growth of scale and it was something that definitely caught us off guard and it worked for some and it didn't work for others but the the scale of of increasing the scale of their operations was something that we didn't realize would happen so quickly especially you know we would issue a permit and then get a phone call very soon after that saying we'd like to amend that permit because we want to do this now and that builds into the new technology we figured out a different way that we our customers reach out to us and say we figured out a different way that we'd like to you to extract this product and that would definitely add some complications in some cases complaints specifically odors so believe it or not the odor of processing was our number one complaint that we received and really all we can do at that point is make referrals to air quality or to another state agency but overall i really did expect to have some of the more common things that we had noticed such as disposal of biomass material in dumpsters or something along those lines but the reality was our number one complaint was the odor from the buildings that were processing it i think that's one more yeah so this the disposal of biomass the reason that this is risky or something that is on our radar is almost all of the processes that are utilized in the initial extraction leave some form of hydrocarbon or solvent in the plant-based material and unless that small amount is removed that material is highly flammable so if this ends up in a dumpster and a kid goes by that dumpster or an individual goes by that dumpster and thinks they hit the jackpot of all jackpots you know so we we absolutely have had to address it and you know i we're educators way before we're an enforcement agency so we utilize that opportunity to educate and talk about scenarios just like i just did and i call it land and labs i actually took a sample out of that dumpster and i was at the facility with the fire department we went to a safe location with the fire extinguisher and i showed them how combustible that material was so it definitely is one of the things that we want to make sure we address in your end of the process a complicated review process based on project complexities the typical review for ben and i was about 40 to 60 man hours of our time to review a process and that's got with information going back and forth between us and the design professionals that represent the owners of these facilities so it's very very time consuming and labor intensive on our end you're up so some of the ways we you know obviously we saw the problems and you know we had to to some extent adapt on the fly so this slide specifically will talk about some of the stuff we've done because there are only two of us and it was coming at us especially the first year when when it became legal and people were just i mean every field was was covered if you will in hemp and and you know people were like well we got to get this out of the field what do we do we need to process it and it was just coming in so you know landon and i seized the opportunity to really you know work with Stephanie over at agriculture the the relationship with with our two departments has been phenomenal and you know that that was a good first step to kind of bridge that that regulatory guys you know do you guys cover this do we cover this and there was a lot of unknowns initially and i and i hope that through this process we can alleviate some of that moving forward you know we've provided a lot of training to our fire marshals you know both our field-based staff and our plan review staff so we we actually have fire marshals that are assigned to reviewing permits and and plans specifically so you know getting them up to speed was huge we've done interagency training on the law enforcement side we've actually trained with the state police both the fire and explosion investigation unit and the clandestine lab team over there just for first responder safety in some of these operations we have so landon and i both sit on Build Safe Vermont which is the international code councils Vermont chapter and through them we worked to get Steve Thomas I'm sure you guys have heard that name if you haven't he's an excellent resource he's out of Colorado and he was big in the development of their industry on the code fire safety building safety side of things so we set up through the Vermont chapter to to bring him here and provide a presentation for engineers architects and anyone else who wanted to sign on again you know more outreach on the national level as a state and as a division we've actually NFPA which is the national fire protection association is actually looking at cannabis hemp and the extraction processes and we as a division recently they were looking for feedback starting a actual hemp or cannabis should I say standard specific to the industry and we've we offered a letter of support for that from the state level we also work with the ICC which I said before is the international code council landon and I both sit on the northeast regional coalition for the ICC so we are voting members at the national level for code adoption and code changes which has been a great opportunity for us as a state of Vermont to really formulate and to drive the model codes in a way that is predictable for us and we've also I know landon's work to do the extension to provide outreach more specific to the growers and the processors and we've attended a number of the agency's outreach programs as well to answer questions for folks so you know this is again the biggest thing for us is educating people so that they can be aware of the requirements the processes and and get through the the regulatory hurdles so again this has been high level I'll let landon to get here and yeah no again I want to thank everybody for the opportunity to come here today and speak to you all you know our like I mentioned our goal is to educate way before we ever have to use enforcement tools and we use that opportunity to the best of our ability but we that something that goes along with our us being educators is this industry is so new and changes so quickly that we become permanent students and what we've done for the division of fire safety is embrace that and and get as much education as we possibly can and then pass it on to the other members of the division of fire safety so that when this does ramp up and it does increase in regards to the needs and our involvement we should be ready and something that's helped us along that way is there will be very few changes for us between the hemp industry world and the legal sales of recreational marijuana world other than the increase and the types of facilities that would sell process grow the end product that's great any questions for Ben and Leenan I have a quick question you open this up by saying some statutory changes need to be made as related to hemp and agricultural buildings I mean this is a commercial product and statute not an agricultural product and statute I would imagine that means there would need to be any further statutory changes for you to if it specifically mentions hemp and we're not doing hemp yep I was curious but I guess as I'm thinking for my question that was that was going to be our question to you no if you're not going to allow the product to be called agricultural that's what it's called in our authorizing legislation at this at this time is commercial product and we read that and it was brought to our attention through another agency what that would mean for us is I don't believe there would be a statutory change requirement what it would mean for us is that any building whether it's a grow a gross structure let's call them because there could be lots of different types has natural light or non-natural light it would mean that in some way we would be able to retain jurisdiction in that building if that's not the intent of this the statute then I would say a regulatory change should happen but if that is the intent then that's what the conclusion would be is we would have jurisdiction over anywhere it's grown sold processed extracted distilled cooked baked turned disposed of but if that was our major question honestly was it does create some confusion between 20 bsa in the current statute that the act at hand in regards to we define agricultural buildings as places that grow with less than six full-time employees or 12 or the equivalent of 12 part-time employees I believe 20 no more than 26 weeks per year no more than 26 weeks per year so our statute and our definition in regards to what is agricultural is very very specific but from what we understand this bill would not allow that that product to be called agricultural so just on this point though if an agricultural structure that is outside of your jurisdiction brings sold an extraction into it it's outside of your jurisdiction so no okay that would be a change of use and it would definitely be within our jurisdiction I'm more talking along the lines somewhere where the plant is grown through all phases of its life and I'll you know an example of that is we had an old Napa building that was converted into a nursery you know it's we've seen lots of reuse of structures but and that became a public building once that happened so not to confuse the matter but a statute sometimes do if there was only one person doing said extraction in that agricultural building they would be excluded yeah okay and then it can get even a little bit more complicated if we argue what was the definition of employment yeah so you get a lot of these family operations well we trade a place to stay we're not he's not employed so it you know again education goes along the way you know in a lot of times once you educate people or what the hazards are they're like oh okay yeah we we don't want to have something unsafe or present an unsafe situation sure and most stuff is it safe to say that because you guys are involved in them based on the current designation of not being farming this would be a lot of them it's just it's similar you would treat the building similarly correct correct yeah but I don't I don't think we want to see happen to have a sprinkler system yeah so believe it or not the international building code is going to be addressing this I believe in the 2021 code it's going to define that plants that are grown in non-natural light buildings should be classified a little differently than than plants that are grown in natural light buildings so I think that we're well in place to not have that scenario ever come up unless it's like really really really really big or they introduce something a little different that creates a hazard you know I want to give you I do want to give you an example of that hazard that is created in an in most row facilities now is they produce carbon dioxide for the plants to grow and they usually use a hydrocarbon that's burnt in that environment to breathe that carbon dioxide so they use pot burners they hang them in the environment and they burn propane or natural gas and that that can create a hazard for us and that's something that we have identified and worked with some farms with reducing the risk associated with that I guess we're one of them and sort of conceptually to this why when Stephanie started talking to me I was saying to you I didn't understand but the hemp program was designed first as a consumer protection program sort of secondly to create a culture of compliance among the growers in the process and the third component there was to protect them from the rain and all that effort and all that work could be undone by one headline or two headlines of the facility burning power blowing up or impacting the neighborhood adversely in that way so when these conversations were occurring we were like oh yeah we need to change the statute to make sure that fire safety is involved in these process facilities yes and we have been headline free and I'm going to go there you go that's the success and that's how we gauge our success is when we are not in the paper and that's people are dinner and people people and then property are our goals for the division of fire safety the preservation of life is our ultimate goal we are a prevention organization so we're supposed to look to see what the risks can be and reduce those risks through our codes and standards and through our educational practices and processes so that's all I have thank you for listening to me ran I have a question yeah I assume that your fee supported um and I'm just curious for these complex projects that take 40 to 60 hours of review yep what is it kind of just an example so I can give you our our fee base is very easy it's point it's eight dollars per one thousand dollars evaluation of construction so it's very affordable it's yeah it's eight dollars per one thousand dollars of valuation of the project so total construction value eight dollars yeah a thousand and flat it's a flat fee and then we also there's a there's a maximum fee if you will which most of our smaller hemp operations don't ever reach that threshold but there is a maximum amount yes we have a very very affordable fee bill in fee scale and it's kept simple on purpose something that we didn't touch on but we should is both of us do have other trades that fall under the division of fire safety we encompass the electrical inspectors and plumbing inspectors of vermont and they do have a separate fee scale but again it's it's itemized and it's pretty nominal to stay into this kind of sequencing of when you all should be involved versus our approval process because we are required to kind of try to limit barriers entry for small builders particularly and so we don't want them to pay unnecessary fees for projects that aren't going to receive because they can't meet the code so i'm just trying to think what you would like to see from us as far as we what we should require prior to someone seeking an application this is probably a much longer conversation than we should have i think it's not appropriate to do it right now we're running a little short of time but maybe just a high level thought on then so yeah no i uh i agree that is going to be a difficult conversation and we don't want that to happen either i mean that the intent is for us for somebody that submits information and documentation to us to get their permit from us i'm not sure how your layout is going to look in regards to people's approach to your different licenses and and i can say that it would be very easily streamlined and probably non-confrontational for either one of us for almost all of the practices and licenses you'll have except for extraction or distillates and probably some storage depending on how it's what's required and i say that only because of this the other occupancies are less complex most buildings can meet the requirements very very easily with small changes the ones that i did mention are they could not be approved for us or they could not want to have to take the steps to be approved from us and that's where i see that breakdown and and i want to use the hemp industry as an example we we had so many processors that came to us hired engineers bought specific pieces of equipment and then there was changes in the market or environment or availability of product and they didn't move forward with their process and i wouldn't want to see a barrier from either one of us as part of their choice to not move forward so i'll i'd be more than happy to have that discussion i think some education even in our application process right and that's and historically that's kind of how we've handled it with with Stephanie you know because they're they're the first contact typically you know when they're coming to get registered as a grower or processor and i think that worked pretty well i mean we and and to touch on this point personally i don't think i've ever denied a permit application for a building i think we've we found a way to meet the intent of the code through prevention and other measures in that building to make it work so there are situations sure but for the most part it's it's doable great and you're not being paid by the hour for these yeah i see you get paid by the valuation so it might need to work with these folks and it's not going to cost them just real quick we've used that to our advantage it takes us 40 to 60 hours but we incorporate other employees and division staff members so that it's not just a permitting process it's an educational process and something that we can use to our benefit also we're we have to use our time very very wisely it's limited any other questions yeah i got one question it's been a while since i've been in the NFPA code world um to solve it i can't remember which which code it was for solving what the number was so NFPA one chapter 65 is going to be the hazardous materials code and NFPA 400 will cover all hazardous materials NFPA 30 will be combustible and flammable liquids okay and i think we're talking gaseous there's a separate standard under NFPA 55 but it's also under NFPA one okay i was i was just gonna say i know you had mentioned that NFPA is potentially considering doing something that's a little bit more streamlined for this industry moving forward but i'd imagine all the traditional solvent extraction methods that are employed in this industry and other at a larger scale in the agricultural manufacturing industry yeah um are kind of have some language built into what they're doing in those portions of the NFPA codes we actually have specific language today yeah um and it's phenomenal it's NFPA one chapter 38 yeah that's what i saw and that's in the 2018 edition of one so you know again the codes they're they're more reactionary you know and again the industry is so new and that's why NFPA is trying to you know develop the formal put together a technical committee because anytime a national standards develop as a technical committee that is industry reps and all sorts of people involved um right to put an actual to take 38 and give it its own standard if you will so yeah and that's really great here i think i told you i have experience in the solvent perspective NFPA and the combustible dust respect for that yeah it's for prior prior work so thank you absolutely thank you well thanks for being here um obviously we have you know more work to do with you all um and so you know we'll just continue the conversation but thank you for this kind of introduction today so you can make sure that we and everyone who's watching kind of knows what the expectations sure anytime thank you great i know you kind of juggled some stuff to be here but in person today so thank you no problem it's very important to us both we spent a considerable amount of time working with the industry with our partner agencies and with each other so it it's uh it is important to us all yeah um so next on our agenda we have another public comment period we'll handle it the exact same way as we have been if you if you join through the link um if you'd like to make a public comment please raise your virtual hands uh we'll then move to the folks on the fall and after the people with the link had an opportunity um i see is that Karen Karen Connelly you can i think you can unmute yourself yes hi um Karen Connelly i do have one question um it was mentioned that you handle lab analysis so is that coordinated with the Vermont hemp program because they are working to certify the labs so what is the coordination there so we have clearly identified barriers of what our responsibilities are and they're very different our the division of fire safety's responsibilities are for the equipment how it's installed in the hazardous materials that are utilized and the and that's where our process would stop and the certification process would pick up in regards to how those tests are conducted and i don't want to speak for anybody else but um how the tests are conducted the standards they're conducted to in the parameters they're conducted within i believe would summarize it all right thank you did i miss anything so do you mean that you handle the the um the testing or they do that wasn't clear i the the fire this is Stephanie from the agency of agriculture the fire safety division will will evaluate the envelope whereas the agency's hemp certification program handles the processes and the standards to which those processes are conducted so does that make sense so it's a it's a we both have jurisdiction over this but just for different things okay that is flour okay thank you thank you Karen um anyone else who joined through the link uh you'd like to just raise your virtual hand if you'd like to make a public comment all right it looks like we have maybe one uh loretta i am then i'm very interested in something that i just purchased at my uh dispensary that's called nanoemulsion and i was wondering if you have anything that you could uh tell me about it is what it does is it increases the processing of how the cannabinoids and everything affects you instead of digest and it's supposed to take 15 minutes instead of 90 minutes so the thing is nanoemulsion that i'm interested in finding more about uh loretta um maybe if you could send an email to someone at the agency of agriculture or someone this really isn't meant to be a question and answer session with our witnesses it's really just kind of a open comment public comment for the board to hear the concerns of members of the public okay so okay i understand thank you mr pepper it's just that this process is going on in vermont and i just wanted to um find out if there was any you know chemical processing but i'll i'll go ahead and send an email thank you all right thank you loretta um anyone else who's joined by the link um it looks like we maybe have one or two people that are joined by the phone if you if you would like to make a public comment please hit star six to unmute yourself and we have one person who's joined us live would you like to make a public comment no okay all right well that uh can conclude our public comment next on our agenda is a lunch break um so we're going to take a lunch break we'll be back at one o'clock to hear from via diagnostics um and uh korea botanicals so we can take a break how would you like to pause in the recording so we are back it's one o'clock our next witness today is tom grace and carlo farmer farmer um and they're here from uh via diagnostics uh the board went and visited the lab incredibly impressive operation um in a great kind of vermont story too so i won't waste any more time but we would like to just hear um just a little bit about your background and some of the challenges and potential opportunities that we have in the realm of testing um when we come to uh kind of a tax and regulated adult use market sure uh first i would introduce uh uh luc mason here's he's the uh lab director um harley as you were uh last week or the week before and then adam bouchard here um he's our sales uh marketing director so all of us are here and um just to give you some background about via diagnostics via is the irish word for food it's also happens to be the via bureau in ireland is the fda of ireland we have no association with them but we thought via would be a good name for our company since i was born in ireland and uh an immigrant to the u.s but grew up here and uh just to acknowledge um you know uh also so it can be can be also an acronym for bio interactive analysis which is pretty much what we're doing with most of our methods here at the laboratory so uh in 2006 my daughter myself and my wife decided that um well i decided that uh we could open up a laboratory and because it was a need for allergen testing in foods um back then there was only one laboratory in the united states that was doing this testing and i was familiar with the market because i'd worked with biotech and several other companies in europe on the food testing market in north america and i saw that there was a need for rapid turnaround time testing and also a need for validation of methods uh companies uh food companies did not want to spend a lot of energy and time and then mark their margins are very small to validate methods so in order for um these methods to be accepted by these uh different manufacturers uh they should be vetted and validated with these food manufacturers matrices and i thought would be a good match for that so uh we put our pennies together in 2007 we opened up the laboratory um that we literally built with our own hands we bar got stuff from the university vermont st michael's college ebay etc and um opened up the laboratory and almost from the very beginning we were profitable which was great i uh i happened to know a lot of the people in the food industry and they utilized our services but it was also one aspect of that uh which i thought was important was the fact that some of the methods that were available commercially for detecting food allergens weren't really designed for processed foods and since we only saw processed foods i decided that i would figure out a way to make my own method for detecting these these specific allergens so i found a company in oregon who was willing to work with me and we developed antibodies specific for egg peanut milk soy etc that could detect these highly processed proteins um and very quickly we developed that into a company called elution technologies and developed test kits that we use in house today but also uh we distributed to companies around the world and uh we developed a rapid five minute actually about a 10 minute method like a pregnancy test that people could use that companies could use in their own manufacturing facilities for detecting these allergens part of their quality control program uh and about six years ago we ended up selling that part of our company elution technologies to 3m and now they distribute that product around the world and we still manufacture these test kits but 3m owns the technology and about the same time about five six years ago uh we noticed that there was a need in vermont to do hemp testing hemp cbd was becoming a new thing in the market and vermont looked like it was going to be producing uh farmers were going to start making crops of hemp and we saw that there were really no good laboratories in vermont there were a few in Massachusetts and main but none in vermont that really could um do that type of testing the quality control testing necessary for that market so with some of the money that we had gained from the elution technology sales we decided to invest it in a brand new hemp testing laboratory chemistry lab and we fitted up with extra space that we had here in our laboratory area and today we have the state-of-the-art probably technology of and the envy probably about other laboratories around for the quality that we have for hemp and hemp testing so that's where we are now uh one of the things that we try to do for our employees is we also offer great benefits and not only livable salaries plus um health care benefits where nothing is out of pocket for them additional benefits for them as well and uh to start off they get a five week vacation um yearly uh we're also off for um for christmas the christmas holiday from uh christmas eve to january 1st second and uh and also the state holidays as well so um our employees are usually uh pretty happy with what we provide them i hope anyway and um and i try to give them uh an environment because we're only as good as they are i mean we all know that that that uh if we treat them right they will take care of the business that that makes us survive so uh i think that's very very important uh so not only their financial needs but their uh social needs as well for their family and for uh and also our environment um you know social environment our our collective um environment of um um kitton county but for mont as a whole um so carly do you want to talk a little bit about the importance of testing any questions if i continue um do we we we can hit you with questions as they come up i mean uh yeah well why don't we just wait a little bit and uh i mean i've got a number of questions for you but uh why don't why don't you continue on what was and ask some questions toward the end sure um so basically our goal in the canada's laboratory uh is surrounded uh around safety of product right so whether it's hemp whether it's uh high thc products we're looking for um contaminants we're looking for potency we're looking for microbials um and all of this right now is currently required by the state of vermont already for hemp um and i know that you're looking at that moving forward with cana with other cannabis products high thc um and what we want to do is really allow um you know trust in products so that's you know taking our results to the customer or whoever's selling this product or making something out of it um and allowing them to trust in this product that's safe to to give out to people and sell and use themselves so the four pillars that we were looking at is safety trust quality and value because um you know without having a safe product there's no trust and with the quality that that we can add vermont can add to these products gives uh the customer um the extra value that uh they would be looking for and willing to pay for as long as it's safe and uh and is labeled properly so that's our goal is to create a safe trusted quality value products for the consumer and for the grower manufacturer of course do you want to you mentioned certification yeah i was gonna i was gonna say you know it seems to me like what we heard earlier is that certification is one of the most costly ongoing costs that you have could you talk a little bit about the iso certification and maybe the vermont certification from the agency of agriculture that you did what that means what's entailed and whether that um you know why that's important yeah i can speak a little bit to that um you know it's a third party certification so it's an important step i think for any laboratory to have so people can have confidence in your results basically it requires you to perform a you know a high amount of validation testing for your methods to satisfy these third party auditors that you're performing the analysis correctly and reporting results accurately so it is a very important system and we are iso 17 025 accredited currently for cannabinoids and we're accredited by the state of vermont cannabinoids and moisture testing our iso certification yeah we are for iso accreditation we are covered for both low and high thc cannabis products so it covers handband marijuana and we are moving along shortly with all the other methods so heavy metals residual solvents pesticides mycotoxins terpenes and microbials hopefully within the next couple months for iso and for the state but it is a big expense you know these validation materials are similar to calibrators they're extremely expensive you have to continuously run quality control checks but it is in the name of you know consistent quality results so they do think it's an important thing to have so it's all about traceability so that and culpability so that we have a way to trace back to some original source certified reference material that shows that the rossels that we're putting out are accurate to uh specifications so that's the thrust the basics of iso but all the paperwork all the traceability that we have to put into that and the time for our own validation showing that we are capable or culpable and culpable for our results and that's the again the idea behind iso showing that whatever we're doing is repeatable and accurate and also we're very involved with a oac which is an organization that certifies methods for the food pharmaceutical industry and um infant formula industry etc and we're involved with their committees on uh hemp testing and cannabis testing and also their certification process for methods so we have inputs on that and we're on their committees and we will be attending that conference in end of august in boston which is the a oac conference annual conference there and the last year we presented a paper that carlene put together i think two years ago two years ago yeah on uh hemp testing which got an award from their organization and uh what we continue to do our research and put our stuff together for uh these presentations and for the organization um yeah so um oh go ahead no please go ahead i i think we're probably leading reading from the same list i gave you a list of topics that i thought you might want to cover and i i have them up as well you can ask the budget so what do you test for and i've heard uh luke mention a few things but also what is the cost of this kind of full panel versus you know potency i mean i know you probably have this up on your website but i think it's probably helpful for us to hear just kind of full panel test how long it takes and what you test for can you take that breakdown sure so like you said um a lot of this information is it's found on our website we are actually updating our website uh as things continue evolve and we offer uh new tests but um the the testing really ranges our our microbial package which includes total aerobic plate counts knees to mold uh we do those combined for as little as that's 40 and uh you know more most common tests the cannabinoids 75 but we do offer full panels so let's say for for flour which would include cannabinoids, terrapins, heavy metals, pesticides, microtoxins, and microbials a total at a discount for 430 just to give you some examples but we also offer 430 dollars yes we also offer both discounts to customers so if they're submitting 10 samples or more simultaneously they also receive a 10% discount at that time uh just to give you kind of a quick overview of how our pricing structure and again you can find some of this material on our website and we are continuing updating it as well so the cannabinoids would be 75 dollars per test um terpene 75 dollars etc uh at time you're finished with everything else i guess the um we also do metal tonin uh which did you mention that i think i got it and uh we do microtoxins which again takes it's a little bit more expensive as well as pesticides which is a little bit more expensive than 95 but um the cost of the instruments are very very high you know we invested over a million dollars in the instruments and set up the lab um the cost of materials are very expensive also for um calibration and create the standards that are used for these assays also the time involved and personnel involved who do a prep takes about 24 hours to run a single uh cannabinoid sample from prep to finish um and the margin to be honest are very very low so we really need to batch these samples together run anywhere between 10 20 30 samples at a time in order to um uh defray the cost of um running these methods uh if we run one method we would we would lose money on a single sample uh on a method so we have to batch it in order to make it worthwhile for us to do the analysis and defray the cost of equipment and all the other uh auxiliary costs that we deal with on a daily basis even getting rid of our waste material costs us a lot of money you know because we use uh certain reagents that are semi-toxic and uh to do the extraction process we have to get rid of it through the solid waste district of Vermont of Chittenden County and again there's a fee for that so it all adds up uh so that's why we have to batch it together um we could probably right now do today do yesterday we did 30 uh cannabis testing 10 uh cannabinoid testing samples right 30 yesterday so I think we talked about this earlier that we could probably do 60 per day uh and our current rate if we got higher than that we'd probably have to look at uh employ another instrument and maybe expanding their lab a little bit which we have extra space for well I guess that was going to be one of one of my questions was capacity recognizing that your potential um you know entry into this high thc market you know is a business decision and what you're you know I know that we've got a lot of things to do before you can make an informed business decision but wanted you to discuss potentially your interest in expanding capacity to you know to help folks that need to get their product tested from this emerging market perspective yeah I mean we have the capacity uh to build into a um the space that we have currently there's another uh probably I don't know how to say square feet but right next door uh actually attached to the space we have now we could probably move into and utilize that space as well um it would take us probably two months to set up that space but it wouldn't be that difficult to do that and especially for determining THC CVD levels using HPLC would be pretty quick process to expand out and and do extra testing you know 60, 80, 100 samples per day we have to we also have to train up our personnel which takes about probably four to six weeks we are rotating currently everybody through the hemp lab the cannabis lab currently so everybody will be familiar and be able to run the equipment if necessary and the assays so that's happening currently Luke and Ryan currently are have been through the process and are now certified to run these assays besides carnally and Sydney so uh and then probably the next three or four months we'll have two or three more people go through training and certification to run uh these assays so I see no problem expanding as long as the market is there and again it's a cost-benefit analysis that we have to go through but you know as long as we have a value then we can justify the cost um you said that you could or but yesterday you processed 30 um cannabinoid tests yes how long does it take from the time that the sample sort of enters your door to the time that the testing is complete what's that timeline look like um so it depends on what is being required for testing um if we're talking about just cannabinoids themselves it takes us um and as well as thinking more about batching right so if we have a batch of 30 it's going to take a lot longer to process those than just one um so there's a lot of variables there but we're just talking about one sample um you probably get it running that same day processed uh run that overnight and then we could analyze the results the next day but for 30 for 30 that takes a bit longer um we could probably depending on if we have more manpower or womanpower in the in the laboratory person power person power uh in the laboratory is that we could um easily do a similar timeline let's say it's just you just have to ramp up the amount of labor that's being put into it so for two people and we've done this before where we we would process with two people to get the samples into a format that the machine can handle so what involves is is homogenizing the sample weighing it out and then uh extracting it with a solvent put it into a specific file and then put it on the instrument get the instrument calibrated all set up and then running it so you're talking uh from start to finish probably 48 hours uh if you are would you say that yeah if you were uh with with two people uh doing the uh prep work yeah there's so that's just for cannabinoids if we're talking about our longest assay which would be uh micro that has to incubate over a five day period so that's a much different story um it's going to take a similar amount of time to prep that sample but the assay and testing itself is going to take much longer more like a week yeah but they have heavy metals and terpenes and residual solvents pesticides micro toxins uh they also take their own individual prep times as well so if you want to do a full panel of analysis you're talking probably you know four days excluding micro say that thank you uh Tom and Carly and Luke one thing that we are of course struggling with as a board is that we need to make accommodations for small cultivators to break down the barriers to entry and like forgive my ignorance but uh you know how do you have suggestions for us from a testing um you know from the testing aspect about how we can help our small cultivators not be overburdened by the testing aspect which is a cornerstone of our of our mission is to have consumer safety you know the four pillars that you listed are what we need but we need to balance that against the fact that uh you know it's not for cultivators especially this is not a terribly profitable business potentially for the thousand by small cultivators we we're using the thousand square foot um kind of marker um and one thing that comes to mind just bear with me uh is you know if you tested the soil um you know do you need to continuously test the products that are grown in that soil for instance if there's no other if there's there's no turnaround and that's just one thought but uh but please if you have any thoughts on that you know this is kind of our the question that we grapple with with every decision that we're going to have to make I think we've tested soil before. We've tested soil before um I'm not sure you know I'm not I'm not a farmer I'm not a agricultureist uh you know my background is is is cancer research cell biology pharmacology um so a little bit different um but uh I would think that as long as they're not spraying stuff on the on the plant uh you should be fine as far as testing the soil for um you know contaminants heavy metals and uh let's say you know pesticides that might be in the soil uh I think that would be fine as long as the the company the farmers not spraying his his product with roundup or something like that but you would never do it anyway um but yeah um another head I was gonna say I think what the state has developed for the hemp program is they've done a pretty good job of accommodating for these things whereas if you haven't been at you know an apple orchard you don't have to test for heavy metals if you're organic you don't have to test for pesticides I know one of the big burdens there became each different strain you grow you have to do the complete test on each so I don't think people really took that into consideration you know when they were planting perhaps if they had four different varieties of hemp cultivars they would have to do all these tests four different times um you know someone's growing indoors it could be a little different certainly different varieties can you know uptake pesticides and heavy metals differently but those are things you have to worry about so much in a controlled loop you know you might be able to minimize the amount of testing they do on a you know a grow depending on how many different varieties they have for strains we know that it has to be amenable to the farmer the processor and the consumer and you know also from regulatory's respect so it has to be has to work for everybody otherwise it's not going to work for anybody so it has to work for us as well but we want to we want to you know help the market anywhere we can because you know that's that's our our goal is to help the farmer and the producer processor as much as possible and you know whatever we can do to help with that we'll we'll do we're trying to figure out more efficient ways to do the processing here and you know we've been looking at it and have some ideas that maybe could speed things up and maybe make it a little bit more efficient are we've done that with our our gen testing lab we have become very very efficient at processing up to 200 samples in a day and you know it just works like clockwork currently and we're hoping to be able to apply and apply those those techniques those ideas that we use for that into the hemp lab the cannabis lab that's our goal we can you know sort of streamline the extraction process make it more efficient that would definitely reduce our cost but also can pass that on to the our customers i gotta i gotta follow well i gotta follow up to peppers to chairman peppers question and it's i guess it's a different way to ask the same question first of all i know i know that you guys are very conscious of your your prices and you know those are oriented to make sure that all folks that are interested in pursuing different types of testing can afford it and are not immediately mooted out of the conversation because they can't afford it and i know i'm thankful for that so you know bouncing off of what chairman pepper said about balancing the small cultivator interest making breaking down barriers and looking at testing and looking at the cost associated with testing i would imagine that there's some kind of baseline or litmus test where there's certain there's certain elements of testing from an environmental contaminant perspective from a consumer protection perspective are absolutely necessary to conduct for any product that comes in to your lab but i'm sure that there's also additional testing that might be done now might not be done now might be required now might not be required now that could be considered you know additional marketing material for folks that can afford it and then want to figure out ways to differentiate their product and i guess you know terpenes other cannabinoid percentages that might be present in a certain strain or a certain product immediately come to mind but from your perspective where is that bright line where's it if there is one i guess where's a good place for us to kind of set a solid regulatory testing foundation and allow you know folks that have the capital to come in and differentiate their product well i think the terpenes are a good good example that i don't think have any negative impact on the consumer per se so you know as far as heavy metals go pesticides go you know microtoxins go i think those are important things that that the consumer needs to be aware of or be right be protected from but terpenes are an added value added thing and i can see that in the future is being something that vermont would have a pretty good market for as far as specialized you know have products or cannabis products with the entourage effect with terpenes so that wouldn't be necessary wouldn't necessarily have to do that but as far as running the cannabinoids we have a panel and they all come out so we differentiating THC from alpha THC to delta THC to CBD CBD wouldn't be productive because it all it requires the same amount of time and comes out at the same time with the instrument you get that all as an added effect of running that assay so differentiating them wouldn't help as far as if i just want to see THC and delta nine and CBD that we couldn't separate out say oh that's that's what you get we could but it wouldn't make any difference because we have the other derivatives in there as well in your report yeah i appreciate that and i remember you as we had discussed this previously but you know as we're thinking as pepper alluded to we're thinking of ways to get creative here always cost mine yeah i i don't know exactly but i'm probably the amount the number of times tested could be worthwhile finished product would be most important because that's what the consumer will see you know upstream testing screening maybe there's a cheaper way of doing that but the finished product i think would always have to be tested for these specific analytes at least that's my thinking but you wouldn't have to test everything your whole crop because then you would have any to sell of course so you have to get proper examples the other thing that could be done is send a consultant uh let's say say we could hire a consultant from via to go out to the farmers and give them you know ideas on how to sample a crop how to uh you know what would be necessary to fulfill the requirements for the state and that would be something that they possibly do or actually do the sampling for the farmer and bring it back to be a that's a possibility i you know just just thinking of top of my head um i don't mean to no go ahead the only other thought i have here um is that what we've done for some people that don't want to spend um the large amount of money on a full panel initially is they submit their sample enough to run a full panel but we'll just run cannabinoids for them first that way they can see if they're compliant or they can see where their levels are falling where they want them to or not and then they'll we'll be able to be contacted by them and continue on with any further testing that they want so it kind of it doesn't strap them into a full panel initially but it allows we're allowing them the the opportunity to eventually test that sample the other thing that can be done is we do in the lab here for the allergens is we can composite samples so let's say a farmer has you know several things that he wants to test but we could probably because the sensitivity of our methods are so high so so sensitive that we could probably test several composites together homogenize it and run it as a single sample and that would give us a good overview as long as nothing popped up too high of the contaminants that would save the farmer a considerable amount of money compositing there'll be an added cost to composite you know an extra 20, 30, 40 dollars or whatever but it would defray the total cost of let's say testing four samples at $195 you know that's $800 this way they would only charge you know $210 or something like that so that'd be one way to defray their cost thank you I think that's a possibility, yeah Tom, Bia is you know pretty well established you've got your ISO but for someone someone else that wants to get into the testing wants to seek a testing license you know we have to think about when to issue these licenses how we sequence that in relation to cultivator issue in cultivator licenses product manufacturer licenses and retail licenses for someone else other than you because you already have your ISO certification and you already have your building and you know when should we license like when in the process should we be licensing the testing facilities well yeah I mean I think it would be helpful to have the requirement for licensing earlier you know definitely give people a heads up because it'll take labs a while obviously to get the data together you know to obtain the license so I don't know if that kind of depends on what you consider starting the licensing process but certainly we'd hope for the you know the requirements and the parameters you were looking for and that would help out the smaller labs like with the M program they don't necessarily require the ISO certification but they essentially have the same you know the same requirements for method validation and documentation so that can certainly save smaller labs money because they don't have to go through ISO and spend the whatever twenty thousand dollars you know initially getting set up there like that yeah but they uh they have to do you know the same amount of analysis and documentation ultimately which takes time so that that aspect at least I would get out knowing the requirements knowing the requirements you know I want to see as soon as possible not just for us but especially for someone that is starting from ground zero or but yeah I'm not sure you know it makes that much difference to the process the whole process from a high level looking down you know what you know of course the lab has to be there the lab for the farmer to know that his crop is safe and the processor also has to know so I would think that maybe yeah that licensing and understanding what the requirements are would be a prerequisite for this process. Is that $1500 fee is that as you pay for the hemp testing facility I mean did that seem reasonable to you as a business owner maybe that's for your business person oh yeah $1500 yeah compared to what yeah ISO charges yes that's very reasonable what was the decision to go with ISO is that just the gold standard the decision to go with ISO versus another third party certification well so I should I should I differentiate here we're certified to the ISO 17.025 standard which is the standard for all analytical labs but we're accredited through A2LA which is a certification body so you can choose Harry Johnson or ALAC or A2LA we went with A2LA because they have a really good reputation yeah and they they they attend the same AOAC meetings we attend the same conferences meetings present at those conferences so we have a very good knowledge of them and know that they're they're a well respected organization yeah and they're they're very heavily involved in the cannabis industry I don't know so much about the other accreditation bodies but A2LA is very involved in cannabis regulations and testing yeah so but ISO we are ISO certified for the allergen lab and you know in order for to compete in the market in the larger market the food market you really should have to be you should be ISO certified for that market so that's why we went with ISO and plus we have all the nuts and bolts in place for ISO and we have a person dedicated for quality control here and that's all he does oh not all he does but a lot of what he does is looking at our ISO certification and making sure our quality control is where it's supposed to be so for him to step in and help with the hemp and cannabis certification was paramount and really made things happen very quickly for us any other questions for the VA team good moment also thank you well it's been a real pleasure getting to know you and your team and thank you for the services that you provide for Vermont in the hemp program and congratulations on the acquisition of the IP for the the testing that we came up with that's pretty exciting at a Vermont company did that you know when we were visiting the lab you also had a great COVID story I feel like you guys adapted very quickly and were able to accommodate a lot of your employees' needs and it's just another great success story again but thank you for being here thank you and yeah we were very lucky with the last year with the uh when the pandemic struck that we were able to take half our employees offline for a week and keep the other half here for working it was probably a strain on on our employees for that one week but they were off the next week so that helped a lot and nobody lost salary nobody lost any benefits and that was really helpful to them and to us as well of course and to our our clients our our customers so yeah it was a win-win for everybody and we definitely want to keep everybody safe Luke and Adam just came back from a conference in Phoenix and since they just came back they're having to wear a mask here so we want to keep everybody safe Carly has an underlying condition that she has to wear a mask and but we're all fully vaccinated at least all three of us and so we're just doing what we have to do to to make sure that everybody's safe and we can still do what we have to do thank you oh great yeah well thank you very much and I'm sure we'll be in touch as we kind of move through some of these regulations around testing for your advice and your help if there's anything else we can do please don't hesitate to ask we're glad to help and you know whatever it is thank you yeah great thank you very much thank you so we're a little bit ahead of schedule I don't think our next witness can join before two so I'd like to do just a 15 minute break if everyone's okay with that Dan are you with us? Dan you need a star six to unmute yourself sorry are you there? Can you hear me? Yeah now we can hear you um so we're back from the cameras sorry what was that? I just said there's a bit of an echo sorry okay we'll let us know if it's you know you're unable to proceed but Dan Chang you're the co-founder of kriya botanicals you know you're a product manufacturer in the hemp world we just would love to hear from you about kind of what's involved with kriya what what you guys do and you know maybe just some of the challenges that you see as as we transition as a state into an adult use recreational market and maybe some of the opportunities that there might be for product manufacturers and I don't know if there's anything specific about the law that you want to talk about or or any kind of just pitfalls that we might be headed towards as a regulatory agency that you want us to be that you want on our radar as kind of a product manufacturer in the hemp world. Sure I'm happy to and I'll apologize in advance if I have any poor reception or cutouts I'm calling you from the beautiful Vermont State Park so a bit of a tough one but so yeah pepper's right I am one of the co-founders of kriya botanicals we are in South Burlington we're about four years old now and started out in the hemp economy right when legalization failed last time in the legislature so we decided to pivot and learn what we could about CBD because it would seem to us to be the perfect analog if we someday wanted to get into a recreational marijuana markets to learn about the extraction the growing the analytics of the plant and CBD seemed like a logical place to do that so to that end about four years ago we started growing hemp I grew for two years we learned was I didn't need to keep growing there would be plenty of farmers getting into hemp and boy was that correct and the other thing was that what Vermont really needed was not more growers at the time but they needed analytics to legitimize the industry and they also needed extraction capacity in the state because all of that hemp needed to have the value add somehow to get to a finished product and extraction is where that happens so we spent the next couple years learning about analytics and extraction and we finally opened up fighting certified organic really high-end boutique oils to the CBD market and providing analytics as well limited analytics so we opened up a small lab kind of a proof-of-concept lab and we were doing an extraction with supercritical carbon dioxide which produces a very very pure extract a very very high quality what's called a crude oil in the business and that crude oil can then be further it can be formulated with but it can also be further refined into more potent concentrates like distillate and isolate and all sorts of consumer concentrates but y'all starts with the plant and the crude oil and then the analytics to make sure that you've got a clean product so the full panel of analytics of course would include potency the percentage of the cannabinoids you're looking for your target cannabinoids whether they're CBD or THC or now CBG or then you move on to look at the purity of your oil in terms of do you have heavy metals from the soil do you have residual solvents from your extraction if you use things like ethanol to extract rather than carbon dioxide are there pesticides residual pesticides from your farming or from your neighbor's farm so all of these things go into the analytical suite that tells you if your your crude oil is clean and so that's what we did to start and it was a very very niche market providing this high-end oil and our throughput was very small with the co2 extraction because we were only able to do about 10 pounds in extraction so maybe 30 40 pounds a day at max so we decided to add on another extraction methodology which is ethanol the ethanol also makes a high quality crude oil but not quite as high quality as co2 there is residual solvent that needs to be taken care of and it can be further purified into all sorts of things as well but the benefit of the ethanol extraction is that you have a much much much higher throughput so i'm doing hundreds of pounds a day instead of 20 30 40 pounds a day all of a sudden so our lab now we built a new lab in 2020 unfortunately in south burlington and we added ethanol extraction so it's not unique but it is very rare for our cbd extraction lab to have two methodologies usually you build a lab around one whether it's co2 or ethanol and we do both and we do analytics and we were the states in the northeast first new england's first certified usda organic lab we're also certified kosher so we're going after all of these audits and third-party certifications to try to seem legitimate in the lack in the lack of ratified state or federal cbd laws so that's the world that i've been existing in up until now working with the fire marshals in south burlington to build our new lab was quite a process that was a new thing to them so we jump through every hoop with third-party audits and engineering audits and i think they were very grateful to have the experience and i was very grateful to be audited by the state and kind of be in the good graces with the fire department so that's that's kind of where we stand now and i think i'll shift to talk about a little bit about the upcoming rec market and where extractors like myself might find themselves and some of the pros and cons of how i see it um one of the main things that's important to realize for us is that extraction labs and analytical labs have an extremely high barrier to entry um because of the instrumentation that's involved the machines are very expensive um hundreds of thousands of dollars usually um now that i've gone through all of the fire audits i know that that part of it getting all of the engineering audits and the correct machinery adds tens of thousands of dollars many extraction labs run clandestinely outside of the purview of of anybody because the laws are so lax right now but when you want to run completely approved by the state and by engineers it's a lot more expensive so having a visible legitimate lab is quite expensive to do and it's all the same on the analytics side the instrumentation is hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars also the people that you hire the personnel these are trained chemists that we work with these are not fifteen seventeen dollar an hour jobs although i do have some of those employees on my bottling line and in packaging i really have to hire employees that understand chemistry and botany and things like that so i've got salaried employees and they're all paid very well so that's another barrier to entry now when i'm considering joining the vermont rec marijuana market there's a number of things the issues that i have to consider number one is it was allowed to happen somehow that the current permit holders are out of state sometimes multinational public companies with more money is increases right so here i am a small vermont entrepreneur and i have to decide whether or not i can compete with these kind of competitors now not only are they large they've got a lot of money they may have up to 10 years operating in the space and other states or other countries they're going to have vertical licenses which means that their margins are going to be astronomically better than mine and that their market share will be much bigger than i will ever be also if they get a head start of an indeterminate amount of time months six months a year three months i don't i don't know what that time is going to be but i would then come into the market facing these giants with all of this money and experience and they have 100 of the market share already so that's a very daunting market for a company of vermont entrepreneur like myself to face i've been in the market now for four years working towards this moment when i might be able to apply for an extraction permit but i really i'm an established business in the cbd market now and that's got its own ups and downs and i've really got to take a hard look at whether this market is even accessible to a company like mine and and i'm actually head and shoulders above most entrepreneurs because i've already got the equipment and i've got four years of experience and i've got people trained on using it and so please i've i've already got a lot that most people don't have and yet i'm on still way way way way behind the people that will already be there so that's a major consideration of mine um another one would be probably growing um you know i'm sure you've heard of other states have had nightmares of opening up their rec and having too little supply of flour and then maybe too over supply of flour that happened out west a lot um they didn't establish their growth correctly so that was an issue um so you know as a hemp supplier i like to get as much quality product as i can from one farmer which would speak to having very large growth having small lots of little farmers um that's difficult for me records wise it's difficult for me in terms of quality and it's expensive analytics wise but if i have the same hemp that's consistent from one farmer that knows how to grow it and try it i much prefer that as a cbd extractor now in the rec marijuana market i think it's a little bit different there is a variety that people want so i think that having large growth that can fill the pipeline are essential but also having local smaller growth that can um provide the quality um would be it's also necessary sorry i'm being asked to move my car by the park rager um so there are there are a number of considerations uh in growing the hemp as well um the as an extractor i am really interested in i want to make sure you everybody can still hear me am i still coming through yeah you're coming in yeah we hear you again okay i'm just going to move my car so this ranger gets off my back that's okay i'm not making any friends so which park are you in i am in little river i'm only in waterbury i'm up at the reservoir okay yeah it's gorgeous beautiful day um so you know i was i was kind of talking yeah great fishing i've been eating rainbow trout for breakfast this morning that we just caught so i've been speaking a little bit about some of the concerns that are on top of mind i know for me and my partners number one being is the market accessible even um i know that it's it's already a done deal with who holds the licenses but i do believe there's probably still some wiggle room and how the the market is created and how those how they're allowed to operate in terms of i don't know if it's verticality or in terms of lead time that they're allowed to have but i would urge the people or the board to consider Vermont businesses and smaller Vermont businesses when you're looking at this because it's going to be a major uphill climb for us to enter this market and i'm speaking just as an extractor i assume for analytics for growing and for retail it'll it'll all be similar stories um beyond that the big picture growing making sure that there is enough in the marketplace to get the market going but also enough so that small Vermont growers can have a place as well um and can contribute their knowledge expertise and quality to this as well in the hemp market there's a in the hemp regulation market there's this Vermont products that have to be grown in Vermont by Vermont farmers and certified in Vermont and i don't know if something like that would work in the rec market as well um but it's something to think about i'm happy to field any questions that anybody there has for me as well yeah i have a question this is kyle harris it's a it's a pleasure to me to be a via phone with a beach and person sometime in the near future i look forward to it yeah i look forward to it authorizing legislation there's a there's a 60 cap on concentrates and i was hoping you might be able to speak to your perspectives on that and how that potentially could also be a barrier for you and your business to enter this market we've we've heard from others that it could potentially be but would what would love to get your thoughts yeah thanks for bringing that up kyle let's flip my mind and it's actually huge um so i mentioned earlier how we extract the raw biomass plant material into a crude oil and that crude oil then gets refined into any number of concentrates that can go into products or can be consumed as is in the marijuana world or sorry in the rec world you see things like shatter and hash and all these crazy things that are made um they're all all of the concentrates which are a massive massive part of the market i don't i don't have a number of the market share of concentrates in my mind but they're all about 60 percent as far as i know the crude oil that comes out of my extractors is usually 60 to low 80s percent now that's the crude oil when i refine it further it's 80s percent in 80 purity into the 90s percent purity that's and and there are myriad concentrates that are used in the rec market and all of those would pretty much be taken off of the shelf so you'd be looking at things like flour gummy bears and edibles and things like that but a lot of the concentrates that people really enjoy would not be a part of the market so that is that you know if that's a rule that they should just get dropped in my opinion um that's that's something that's going to put a major hamper on um the extraction and the well the extraction as long as we as long as we dilute the product down to whatever legal amount like you said if it was 60 percent then we could still participate but we would never be able to participate nationally we would be watering down the quality and diluting the quality of the product to make it Vermont legal and then nobody else would want it in New York or Boston or anywhere really so we'd be kneecapping ourselves as a state by doing that in my opinion so uh 30 questions further questions about that i can speak to it oh good i have a further question about that i just you know because we talk about concentrates being in like you were saying 80 90 percent purest form what can you talk about what it would be diluted with to get it 60 percent uh yeah that's a good question um i think that people would be making a lot of edibles maybe putting it into a lot of adjustable foods but if you're talking about and i don't even know like in the cbd world we have to do this and we use things like mct oil coconut oil to make tinctures and things like that we dilute it to a legal limit which that allows us to ship it federally it allows people to formulate with it um but the cbd stuff is not it's a different market because those are all smaller dosages in the marijuana market granted there are smaller dosage edibles but a lot of the concentrate market is on purity and it's on high potency so all of those products like i said would be kneecapped by something like this um i can't answer directly what you would mix it with maybe lower maybe a lower potency oil so you know it knocks it down but again you're really just compromising the quality um by doing it and you know some people might say well why do you need something to be 80 90 pure of course you don't you just don't um but that's the market i mean that there is a concentrate market it's a diverse market it's a sizable market it's based on quality um so you know the market exists and again if we were wanted to compete nationally this would be a pretty major issue yeah well i guess you know your your response to not necessarily knowing how you would approach the dilution part of that gives me pause because as we heard from prior testimony you know vermont folks are they have that that's what ingenuity and they'll figure out how to do it but from a consumer protection perspective from a quality perspective what does that mean and um you know how what the board go about ensuring acceptable practices for that would be back down to that 60 percent and dan can i pick up on something that you said which was i think you said that a lot of this extraction is happening in people's garages in the kind of clandestine market already so does this just leave a bit of does that leave that kind of clandestine market vibrant as well i mean is that oh of course of course i mean the black market will will always be there uh you know you you want to not get as small as you can or get rid of it but the fact is the quality is is there in the black market the growers in the black market are better than any medicinal grower than any medicinal lab that exists and these you can make these in your garage so people will they they have been for decades and they they will continue so yeah again it will exist it's just a better review on a regulated or or that um i would think you do another one that you kind of a sidebar to this um that you should think about is in the hemp world and i don't know about the proposed rec laws i haven't read them enough detail but we're not allowed to use in the hemp world we're not allowed to use hydrocarbons here in Vermont meaning propane hexane pentane these are all hydrocarbons that are very very commonly used to extract cannabis and they they produce extremely high quality extracts um but they are very toxic plastic chemicals and if not used that are regulated in safe manner extremely dangerous and also if they're if their extracts are not properly tested um you don't know if there is residual solvents in it which is dangerous and that's the problem with these clandestine labs that you brought up is that many many many labs in the cbd world um are clandestine because there there weren't certifying bodies when i when we started there were no fire marshals going out um department of health and ag wasn't going out to look at any labs so that's why we started doing things like organic and kosher just so we would start to get audited um so you know a lot of people are doing this stuff in their basements and they're not purging their oils of these solvents um so that's why i think that it's smart to give it space in the rec market but regulate it but make sure that the rules are there and the specs are there and the analytics are in place to ensure safe products because people will be making them either way um yeah and as an extractor i've never touched this stuff because i haven't been allowed to and that's why i don't i don't really know how to dilute this or i really don't know um how we would manage a 60 purity thing just yet i've got a question on a different topic anyone want to talk about concentrates anymore good um dan uh we uh by statute are supposed to um prioritize uh in breakdown barriers for small cultivators but i want to pick up on something that you mentioned um you need a consistent product uh the raw materials to be consistent of consistent quality so how do we thread that needle are you just not gonna i mean should we just rely on the small cultivators for um for flour and not the kind of processed products or the extracted products or i mean do you have any thoughts on that like how we can build out our craft cultivation using small farmers but also create these kind of products these extractions yeah it's a tough one you know there has to be some kind of pure system i would imagine where you've got you know your Vermont small cultivators um and this is tricky because i think that's where your best quality is going to come from but that's also where probably most of your not i won't say worst quality but potential glitches will come from too um you're going to have really conscientious excellent growers but then there's going to be a couple people who are smaller and they're just they just don't have the technology and the place set up to grow quality safe flour which is it's not easy to do it over and over it's easy to do it once but it's not easy to do it over and over and over again at scale and maintain spec um so it has to be kind of the balance where you let people in that know what they're doing and are competent at it while making sure that you weed out the yahoos that just want to grow marijuana and think that it's a fun thing to do there will always be those people that know weed themselves out to a certain extent but you do you do need to have the size the more sizable grows just to keep the pipeline full as well i don't know how many dispensaries you envision are going to be open or how much flour you envision is going to be sold over your quarter over quarter annually year over year but the small growers probably aren't going to be able to keep up with that any consistent fashion so there needs to be a pipeline a base that fills the pipeline as well and i i see that coming from these big let these big guys do what they do best these big operations they've got the money they've already got big grows in canada and all over the country they know exactly how to do it and they've got the growers to come do it um and let the smaller growers shoot for quality um and i you know beyond that i i don't have a heck of a lot of advice there obviously has to be some middle of the ground as well but um in terms of how many permits uh that that i'll leave up to you i don't know but it is important like i said to make sure you've got consistent quality product but you know also i should mention i don't know how this is all going to get timed out if these um if uh you know analytics and growing and retail are going to be phased in you know in quarters or if they all get released at once but um you know obviously extractors as an extractor we can't extract without the hemp flower and the retail can't open without the flower and the extracts and we all need analytics so everything has to be layered and kind of going at the same time so we could all open at the same time as well um timing of these permit releases is also really really critical yeah and i was actually just gonna ask you about that i mean you i think korea unfortunately was kind of the guinea pig on a lot of the hemp program and the fire safety that you mentioned um but now that we're a little bit more established in this day uh how long would it take a you know korea if you're starting today from scratch to get up to where you are um at this moment oh man uh you know that's a great question and it depends on if you're actually starting from scratch where you've got to buy machines and train people how to use them because the learning curve on that on getting your machines running the way you want them and producing what you want to is is month i mean it took us probably better part of the year um to get everything running smoothly the way we wanted it to now if you're a huge multinational company with a lot of money you can bring in experts and machinery and have it running within a couple weeks if you've already got the people but if you're starting from scratch as a Vermont entrepreneur it could take it would take a minimum of three or six months to get your machines and your staff up and running um so yeah you would need to have not only a hemp at that time you need to have analytics because i mentioned briefly but analytics brings the legitimacy to everything the growers need it to know how if their plants are are legal and on spec and the lab and or the extraction labs need it to know um if what they're producing is on spec most extraction labs do not have analytics in house we do just for a matter of qa qc and it keeps us moving really well and it may be the reason why we're still around while some people aren't but um to run a lab on analytics lab on top of an extraction lab is a lot of learning and a lot of work so and it all has to happen together all growing labs analytics and extractions all have to happen simultaneously um i mean a retail can come in after all that to sell everything that we make um but it can't come in before any of us um obviously make the stuff i got another question but i want to open it up all right uh dam when do you like to when do you like to have your product tested when you have the raw material or you know tested for heavy metals pesticides adult trans etc or when you have your it's a great question it's a great question so i'll give you the rundown on the hemp side how we do it um the farmer is obligated to to do a full panel of tests on his hemp so her hemp so that lets us know about the potency of the biomass make sure that it's legal because in the hemp world that's important that they can't have too much thc in it well as it's marijuana and everybody's in trouble but so there's potency there is residual i mean sorry there's heavy metal um there's pesticides things like that moisture then it gets into our lab if all those check out it comes into our lab we'll test it again for potency to make sure it matches and is legal to make sure that we can run it we'll then extract it and as soon as we have the crude oil we'll test the crude oil to see the potency then we also have to test it mandated by sorry mandated by the state we have to test it to make sure that it doesn't have any more residual solvent or pesticides or anything like that in it quite um so we have to do a whole other full panel and then after that we formulate a product out of it so we'll make it into a tincture or into a salve or a bulb or a stick something like that and we have to test it again to make sure that it's on back for the customer doesn't have what the customer wanted in it and then after that it goes to a third party lab to be tested again so you know this stuff is tested five six times as it goes through our lab and out the other end by a third party for the customer so you can see why analytics is such an important part of this because from the farmer to the customer all through our lab they'll test the same lot of stuff many many times and is that testing has this thing concentrated down become more expensive to you like you know when you start with a bunch of raw material and then you extract all the kind of CBD THC out of that I mean does that testing become you know the product itself is more expensive and so no the testing is all the testing is all the same it's the same tasks we run through and they all cost the same no matter what's what you put into the machine one thing that's different I mentioned you briefly earlier though if we have a ton of growers like right now my lab uses three or four growers so it's all the same hemp that they're vetted we know what they're growing and how they're drying and that's all happy but if I'm all of a sudden using 20 different growers of small batches of biomass that I have to be testing exponentially more I have to be testing everything everything you know that's that's daunting for me because to do one full panel it's you know three four hundred dollars and I have to do that a couple times on the product as it goes through so the the testing is I mean it's a very very large bill for my lab even though we have the potency testing in house we outsource everything else so it's not to be it's not to be just brushed aside it's a big big thing to consider when you know when the testing will be opened up and how many labs I mean you really have to have labs available and there aren't well there's be a diagnostic trying to think who else is in Vermont and you would know more than me they're the only state certified ish lab I can think of in Vermont is be a diagnostic yeah so we need more you know and these labs these labs cost millions of dollars to open up and run like I said so this is a that's a critical thing is in the hemp world we're supposed to have everything tested by a state certified lab and there are no state certified labs so we use labs in Colorado and in Philadelphia and in Boston for all of our third-party stuff it's because there aren't any Vermont state certified labs in existence so that's another thing that you're going to have to find is I'm sure there will be growers I'm sure somebody will there'll be plenty of retail applications extraction will be tough because it's so expensive in the same of labs it's so expensive to get into those are the two that are going to be hard to get a lot of entrepreneurs into well this has been incredibly helpful I actually have one more question but it can't open up they can't work so I'm not going to ask it but um thank you Dan I mean it's just I'm so grateful that you're in Vermont it's a little distressing to hear that you know you're doing this good work and you have had to see to get into this market because of the barriers to injury so it's something that we're going to be thinking about a lot and you know hopefully we can be back in touch with you and create it as we start yeah well I really appreciate all of you giving me the opportunity to speak today I'm sorry I'm a little bit distracted by my dog and park rangers and campers but I don't know how many people are in the room there but I obviously would love to show you our lab in person and show you the machines and the extracts and the analytical equipment to explain it to you and have you meet our employees the wonderful Vermont employees um because it's the kind of lab honestly it's the kind of lab you want in Vermont uh we are Vermonters employing good jobs we're we're hiring people from out of state to come move here and live here and they're having kids here this is the kind of thing that's good for Vermont so it's important that that we are allowed to have a place in this economy because it's a big one and we've been waiting for it and working towards it and like I said I would love to show you our facility so so please reach back out to to Bill and to me and and come into our lab and and see it for yourself sometimes soon that's great thank you so much we will do that thank you and thanks for taking the time while you're out you know on vacation in the state parks yeah I'm happy to do it anytime it's important thank you so that's our last witness for the day we have some time set aside for public comment we'll follow the same procedure we'll start with the folks that have joined through the link if you have a public comment please raise your virtual hands and we'll start with you tell you both you both good afternoon you guys uh just want to say thanks a lot for the work you're doing and um it was great hearing Dan you know talk about concentrates and whatnot I just wanted to kind of echo what he was saying about these 60 percent THC caps um it's going to be really hard to make quality concentrates that can compete on a national level you know limiting to 60 percent and to go to the things like what we might cut them with are probably things that I don't want to consume and put in my body I mean you can use like extra terpenes like he said the MCT oil but it's just you know a lot of people want to smoke those things because they're not inhaling any plant material so it's actually a bit healthier for your body um myself included and you know I just really want Vermont to be able to compete in that category like we do in every other craft category you know being like kind of the best in show and then I know that you had a question that he couldn't answer and concentrates take up about 13 percent of the market you know is what in sales and that's from like the bds analytics from california so i'm assuming it's going to be fairly similar thanks thanks for that yeah thank you yeah thank you um eric reef if you want to unmute yourself uh we can barely hear you uh we can hear you yeah yeah we can hear you just a second I'm going to shut my bluetooth off that might be the culprit because I do have um any better now for oh yeah there you are yeah go ahead okay all right all right so on the 60 percent I've been making some notes here so I may um I may say some things that have been said on the 60 percent um what you're doing is you're making everybody uh have to add a cut or have to add carrier oils uh we just mentioned we don't want to inhale that we don't want to consume that so you're going to take all the the the dabbing and all the vape completely out of the market and uh the the difference from the 60 uh up to um you're gonna have to cut because at the base I can go up to 75 6 percent myself a lab can take that up to 82 3 with better filtration and then you can run that through a short path to get that into the 90s then this is what I don't like medically is then they take that into a reactor and and take everything out so there's um there's no more regulators uh medically um so uh what you're the difference between the 60 and the 90 is is how the fats the lipids what would be called in the vaping and dabbing world the undesirables so we don't want to combust any more fats any more waxes than we have to and by making us go to 60 you're going to make us artificially add some and nobody wants to vape uh or dab any of that and they won't and so you're going to uh you're going to increase some illegal activity plus you're gonna make it dangerous because butane which it's illegal it's in the bill and it should not be used because of the flash points so low um it leaves all those undesirables behind it only picks up terpenes and cannabinoids so if you're making crap in the market and I can take butane and make real high quality terpene rich uh you know dabble the material now the problem is the solvents um I would personally I would look at uh the solvents that are left in the product like test test test on solvents um and then personally I would say no hundred percent uh I want a regulator I don't want that thing to be uh just THC because we don't know and there could be long-term use there could be problems with just THC only um that's my personal view so uh that's that's what I had for you on that sixty percent and um I think the way that you you go about that is you test on the solvents and then you test on on on any of the on anything else that's left behind that somebody would know more than me about so thank you very much. Thanks Eric uh next on the list is uh Sherman Sherman if you're there uh feel free to unmute yourself and um join my video if you'd like. Let's see here I am uh thanks for letting me share um I would like to make a comment on required microbe open ten minute testing if that's okay. We're having a little trouble hearing you um I might be having a um I actually found better for us. Okay um so is it okay if I make a comment about required microbial contaminant testing? Yeah we do. Okay um yeah I'm presently the director of regulatory affairs at medicinal genomics but previously at the New Jersey public health lab uh I was the project manager that started the cannabis testing lab for the Department of Health and I was a subject matter expert specifically for required microbial testing um and that I wanted to share the medicinal genomics as an industry leader in cannabis and pathogenomics and I was going through the internet this morning before this meeting and I noted that presently Vermont requires the microbial tests as was mentioned by the laboratory representatives earlier this afternoon uh total aerobic microbial count and total yeast and mold. On the other hand and I'll be you know sending in a written comment on this you know we recommend the microbial testing specifications that were originally recommended by the Fido Science Institute um submitted in 2016 to the Vermont Medical Cannabis Program because we want to ensure safe product for both patients as well as consumers and the the tests that Fido Science Institute recommended were the species specific human pathogens which are the shigatoxin produced in E. coli the salmonella species and the three pathogenic strains of asrogelus and and the most important fact I want to just share with you the two tests that you require right now in the medical cannabis program when you get a result for total aerobic and total yeast and mold you don't get any information whether the cannabis sample is contaminated with any dangerous microbes to human health so I'm just going to say why do these tests and so I just wanted to share that um but I'll be sending him a formal comment in the near future thank you very much can you also just include your contact information when you do that oh yeah I'll definitely do that um okay anyone else uh that would like to make a public comment um that join through the link please just raise your virtual hand um and uh it looks like we have one person who's joined via the phone if you would like to make a public comment please hit star six to unmute yourself and we have one person in the audience I would just echo the voice of uh that's already been said about the opposition to potency caps for a number of reasons already mentioned just another the opposition okay I don't see anyone else um for public comment so uh that's the last thing on our agenda I again we'll probably be meeting again next Thursday hopefully we can meet at 116 State Street in Montpelier and we'll probably be most likely talking about public safety issues and safe banking issues so um with that I would entertain a motion to adjourn second all in favor