 So, who we are is small farms made up of four people, there's three locations, 55 acres, and we started it, well let me back up a second, it's evolved through a lot of different enterprises and the current ones are apples, hogs, and sheep. And back in 2008, I was at the Leeds Center at a workshop and they had a presentation on how to add value to your tree fruit. So that was my first experience with adding value to crops without expanding acreage, which I think Vetter talked about that yesterday or last night, that's one way to go and we're not going to, we don't have the skills nor the capital nor the land to scale that way or desire. So we started looking at value added and I would say it was somewhat of a success, the apple thing, but that led us to look at other things and I had some, a waste product from the value added apple product and that led us to hogs and then the hogs led us to a restaurant and then I started thinking about how can we make better money with hogs, although our gross income right now and hogs is averaging about 550 a hog. But how can we increase our income and that was through charcuterie. So what I did was, I wanted to talk about what charcuterie was first because a lot of people apparently don't know what it is, it's preserved meat and we're interested in traditional preservation methods, not non-heat treated shelf stable. Heat kills just about, takes care of everything so that's a pretty safe way to do it. But the non-traditional method where you're going to ferment, get the pH down in a timeframe and then get the water moisture down by drying in another timeframe to make it shelf stable, that's the one we're interested in and it's the hardest because there's not a whole lot of it done here in the U.S. and we've gotten away from that kind of thing. So in a nutshell what this project was it brought together a set of growers, small growers of Heritage Breed hogs and we're all selling at markets and we're growing under 70 head a year. I'm probably the largest producer at 70. And as I was saying we're wanting to expand our increase our income and also deliver some profit margins and not the narrow profit margins we're all dealing with. But through the relationships I had with the restaurant and USDA processors we thought maybe we could bring this all together and explore the idea of charcuterie. So this is kind of where we started. We're all selling small or selling whole half or cuts at the farmers market, a little bit of wholesale, narrow margins if they exist at all. When I figured out my cost of production it was 85 cents a pound live weight and the sale barn was 45 so that's not very rational. And I'm also wanting to make a certain amount of money per head and I'm trying to account for cost of land and equipment as well. Low sale barn prices. I have one friend that raises $5,000 a year and their goal is to make $20 a head on the contract hogs and that's not something we could do. First of all the capital would require that I'm not willing to work like that either. And our USDA processing options just keep getting narrow and narrow. We've got two basically and that really boils down to one because one can't deliver consistently what he's doing. Within an hour and a half of me there's a two. High feed cost because of our small scale numbers for grown grain or anything we're having to buy feed and customers are asking for non-GE feed and I have finally compromised my position on that and we do non-GE feed hogs. Although there's a couple of us now looking to maybe drop in that and doing something a little different but as I said the capital no none of us have a lot of money laying around which also brings to mind that one of the benefits of SARE farmer answer is we don't have R&D dollars but this allows small scale people to do it as well as large scale. But I know we all appreciate the SARE program and it allowing us to explore stuff like this and all of us recognize some demand for pasture based even though hogs don't eat grass, hog production and the environmental impacts customers are asking about those things so it's a selling point for us. So a little bit of research turned up a couple of projects. One of them was the scaling up New England's viaduct meat industry and that identified some trends. This has been a few years now. Something to look for was local value added meat products and in the traditional style. These are the two books too that we used for recipes and we just took those the highlights from that and folded it into this project. Smoked, cured, dry aged. If you can put that on your packaging that's appealing to customers. And the other thing about charcuterie is it's long shelf life premium product and it's high value, perceived high value too. Copa, Lanza, Pursuto style hams are $1.50 an ounce so that was another reason we looked at this as the opportunity but one of the past serra projects was Fair Willow Farm and they were looking at how to just pair with a small processor to do retail cuts just to show that you could produce more income per hog which I think when we sell our hogs that through the city market they gross $900 to $1,000 ahead. So what I did was take I also work for Lincoln University and have kind of a non-threatening relationship with a lot of producers and it was easy to talk to them about other Berkshire growers, other heritage breed growers. What if we pool our resources? I've got a creative person in the form of the restaurant who had trained, experienced, he also teaches at the culinary college owner on board to help us with recipes. I have a USDA processor that's interested in adding this service so that he can increase his income and also create a niche for him, cut out a niche. And then I had Lincoln University or K States Dr. Boyle, the meat lab person, she was going to review our, she did review our hassa plans and provide a lot of input and she eventually did a workshop. And then we also had access to open source hassa plans from I think Underground Meats maybe has one online, a couple for the ground or whole muscle cures. So the idea was we bring all this together, we get through the project and in the end we have a pathway for anybody to go, any hog producer or even beef too to take their animals to the processor and have a high-end traditional style charcuterie product that can sell either hope because it's USDA they could sell a wholesale where they can take it to the city markets or the current customer, some of them are selling a farm. So that was the idea, that was the solution to increase income for all of us. So these were the steps we took. The chef created a couple of recipes at the restaurant, they had a curing cabinet and they were doing some things with our hogs there and we could test the market and get some feedback from people and reproduce the recipes that we could get that down before we handed it off to the USDA processor who then would start making the stuff in his facility and we'd go through enough, I think there should have been three iterations and then we would be submitting samples in to have the steps validate that we did indeed control the five major organisms but so the USDA processor started working on the HACCP plan the same time they started working on recipes and the difference between restaurant and processing plans for HACCP plans is huge apparently and also it's not fully understood or policed I guess for lack of a better word in Missouri. So the restaurant maybe shouldn't even be making this stuff but they can and nobody's prosecuting so we started at the same time trying to get accomplish this HACCP plan and once he got the USDA does not sign off or approve they just review it and sign it once we got that then we could do the batches that we were going to test again for validation determine the cost of production so we could price this stuff and we could price everything for profit and place it in the marketplace as a premium product and then everybody every farm was going to have a labeled product and be able to go take to the farmers markets and their markets and sell it and get feedback they could do sampling or whatever that was the idea so there are lessons to be learned even from failures and in this upside down current upside down world maybe I could say it was a success but we did end up with a product shelf stable one batch. The USDA finally signed off on the ground muscle product which was the hardest of the two you had either whole muscle or a ground product you could pursue and all three batches passed so that validated that the steps that we have outlined to make in this case it was picante salami uh they controlled E. Coli's staff Listeria Salmonella and Clostridium and we ended up with a farm labeled product one farm so you you can hear already I'm saying I'm using words like it was supposed to happen this way and we ended up with less than we were starting out for shooting for but some of the lessons I learned from this and I'll explain further how this ended. I'm the project investigator on this and went out had many conversations with the participants then put together a proposal sent it back out to them asked for comments and I must be really smart because no comments came back but now in hindsight I know that was because I had maybe hadn't read it or they didn't fully understand a part or they maybe didn't even read at all there should have been some input so in hindsight I don't feel like I had to buy in I needed from everybody it was easy to sit and talk to me and say yeah that sounds like a good idea I'll do that um I did then when we got the award of the proposal gave everybody a commitment letter and then a condensed version of what I expected their part to be and what they were going to have to do and everybody signed it and I also gave them a copy of the grant proposal so that they could review that again um I don't know that there's a stronger way to because I'm not going to get involved in lawsuits or anything but a commitment letter I think is a strong thing is I can ask for I didn't expect to learn so much about hassle plans or the charcuterie process I made a few batches at home I expected that the service provider was going to build on his base knowledge and I could pay him for those services and I thought that's what we talked about but it didn't quite work out that way and the USDA because there's hardly any a non-heat treated shelf stable product out there and depending on your region and your inspectors not a lot of it has gone through the review process and they are resistant to considerate and very slow to make any forward movement I mean you're providing white papers to justify what you're doing but it's it was that was the biggest struggle the hurdle was I know they have a full table and have other things to do but we had to ask for an extension and it was just trying to get them to finish the review but it finally got done towards the end so they have a lack of knowledge and they have lack of exposure so the more this happens I think the more the easier it's going to be the first one was tough something else that I did not understand was the lack of or the turnover rates in restaurant industry so my partner there the guy that had the experience when I went in to have him sign the agreement he asked if his other partner could sign it and I didn't think to ask why it's because they were splitting up so he was gone and there went the main skills and I didn't have a backup at that point after we signed it and then I find that out and then every six months you're dealing with a different restaurant manager so it'd be like this education process and then the people under them would be turning over and then there sometimes there was nobody that had the skill to do it you couldn't you couldn't risk it same problem with the processor I knew him for about a year had been taking hogs in there I overestimated his abilities and skills and human resource skills in particular so there's a lot of turnover there and I offered to work part-time I offered to rent the space I offered to pay wages for the a dedicated person to learn the skills and be in charge of the project but they don't stay long enough so that didn't none of those options worked out but I guess I'm hardheaded because I kept at it and we finally did get that last product through but no sales were made I'm not confident in what I saw even though past the validation test came back positive I noticed there's spots that the the curing salt does not appear to have gotten to and they are backpacked so that's a anaerobic environment so potentially what is it staff I think creating botulism so so that's how our project ended and we have out of that there's a couple of paths we could go and right now there's I now have a person that has a meat distribution company spent five years in Italy learning the skills and that's what he wants to do but he's not can't finance it we still have the producers in interested and now we have I have a curing cabinet and the innovation it's a commercial kitchen innovation center has warehouse space we can house the curing cabinet a drying cabinet there and they've had meat products come through they've written hasps for meat products although they were heat treated so there's still a group out of this and this what we're looking at now is a little different arrangement not the coalition but a little more other a brand where people have ownership in it and we have control of what's happening so that's where we're at and I say the hat I have the happiest talks because our first value-added product was apple brandy and all the mash spent mash goes out to those hogs and there's residual alcohol though it's really little we also have do a rye whisking put that out there too so I'm a concise speaker so that's probably pretty quick questions you have to be somewhat self-critical why what else could have happened well I was motivated and wanted to see it happen so maybe I wasn't assessing the processor skills as harshly as I should have or as critical as I should because I really want to work and my options are this and maybe I should just slow down so I mean there were some other things like personal introspection that I benefited from so my hope is that this that method was going to leave a pathway for anybody that wanted to have charcuterie made to do it anybody that's selling direct small scale which this is a hurdle for all of us could go into this premium market and our first value-added product I positioned that premium and I wanted a meat product because many of the same people that are buying that will express interest in this premium meat product to consume while they're drinking and in wineries already have our snack sticks and some cooked some heat-treated shelf-stable food like Italian sausage and pepperoni and things like that it's just that's not high end the the margins are lower there's no producer in Kansas City area yet but over in St. Louis there is that's another option was a saloon Badoo started I heard that they'd they scaled up into a facility that's with excess capacity and I've been talking to them too about what if I bring you 10 hogs and we you do copac they're considering it to use that up to create more cash but yeah but there's and that's something we can ship I had a friend went to Washington D.C. and it pulled up the they went to a restaurant to eat and open the menu and appetizers she snapped that and said well where's of the earth but in there was La Quersha from Iowa that does the prosciutto so people it's something we can ship to the coast where there's denser populations and that what we've been talking about in this new the next step is how to try and understand people on the coast the mindset and how they see the central part of the United States and especially in the the stillers guild right now there's a conversation about this too because we have some control on how we market this stuff but that's probably a little over my head in comparison well yeah in Europe yeah yeah it's coming here it's what we're a little behind but I think I think it is the original deli meats