 So I'd like to introduce Jeremy Cowan, who's going to talk about the SAIR project capacity building and urban food systems at KSU. So, what is urban ag? Hopefully this isn't a new concept for anybody, but urban agriculture is basically everything that has to do with growing food, fiber and energy type products within the urban landscape, urban and peri-urban. Most growers, let's rephrase that, most of the agricultural products that are grown for the urban environment are actually grown in the peri-urban region, which is the area around about, let me throw up a definition there. So urban agriculture, the production of agricultural products within the city or densely populated community, whereas peri-urban would be production of those products by farmers specifically for those kind of regions, but not necessarily within those regions. Usually they're within close proximity, but not necessarily always the case. And it's typically a pretty diverse group of participants regardless of which location we're talking about. So what is an urban food system? I've got a couple slides here to talk about that. This first one just shows that we're not just looking at production. We're also looking at distribution, public health, community development. A lot of the different steps along the way as well, and on the way out. So waste streams that would also be part of the urban food system. In preparing for a grant application on another project that we're doing together, we came up with this graphic which is trying to show where the relationships are between the various components of sustainability and or the food system interact. So you'll notice that there's three different economic tags. That's because the economics interact between all of the different phases. So within the urban poor, the peri-urban and the rural, the economics basically you're buying and selling between each of those different locations. So things like urban will help build or support the resilience of the rural education. Some of the peri-urban folks are coming into town for that, or vice versa, depending on what kind of education we're looking for. So things like agricultural education, extension type work may or may not be in the urban environment. And if it is, you'll have farmers coming in from the rural or peri-urban regions to do that. And then I would guess we should probably put social through all of them because there will be social interactions amongst all of the locations as well. One of the things to consider though, and the reason why rural is added on here is because there's a lot of products that you're not going to find producible in the urban region or just wouldn't be practical to produce in the urban region. And so we bring in the rural as well for those products that are not conducive to the urban or peri-urban areas. So there's going to be a lot of economic opportunity in local and urban food systems these days, everywhere from food production to distribution, policy and advocacy, education, urban planning and architecture, municipal jobs. So the consumer demand for local food across the country is currently estimated around 20 billion, which is not a small number, and it's estimated that there could be as much as $177 million in unmet demand in the Kansas City region alone. And that's because about 92% of all the fruits and vegetables that are consumed in the area are imported from not just other places in the country, but around the world. And according to the 2010 census, 80% of the US population is urban, even in Kansas, 2.1 million of the 2.8 million total citizens of Kansas live in towns and cities. I'm not sure what the population cutoff is on that, but it's going to be less than the urban number of 50,000. We have plenty of grassroots food movements here in Kansas. Again, most in Kansas City. In fact, I'm not sure if any are here from outside of Kansas City. So no, we're just focusing on the Kansas City ones here. And while this is obviously not a comprehensive list, even for Kansas City, it does show that there are a number of organizations that are involved in the Kansas City food system and other larger metropolitan areas would have similar groups, though maybe fewer or more depending on how big or well developed that local food system is. So the project that I'm going to be reporting on was designed specifically as training for urban ag educators. So this is a professional development grant program. Professional development program grant. And those grants are specifically to designed for creating projects that are like train the trainer types. So we're not going out to end users with this. Projects so much as to agricultural professionals. And I think I've got a slide that talks about that a little bit more. So we had four objectives. One was to expand on our gaining ground program and build out a webinar series for that. We wanted to also provide support for our ongoing urban food system symposium, which is a semi annual is that every two years or is that buying. I don't forget. So it's the every other year. Urban food system symposium. And in the case of the last two, it was to support a pre symposium workshop and I'll talk about those. And then to support our urban ag study tour. So we have grad students in our urban food systems program. And that's because we have both a graduate degree and masters of science and horticulture with an emphasis in urban food systems. And certificate in urban food systems graduate certificate in urban food systems for those who aren't majoring in our urban food systems program. And those students were recruited not only to help deliver this project, but also to help prepare and write the grant for it. In fact, they did quite a bit of work on a pre proposal survey that helped inform some of that. So, I mentioned that we have both a master's degree and a graduate certificate that masters degrees a pretty typical 30 credits to 36 credits depending on whether it's a thesis option. Report option or or professional track. And the graduate certificate is a 12 credit certificate with, I want to say it's got six or eight, I think it's six required courses and then the rest are elective. And these are our core UFS faculty by core UFS faculty, meaning those who are actively part of the day to day operations in the urban food systems academic program. We have a larger group, the urban food systems initiative, which incorporates a lot more campus based faculty in a much wider range of fields. And we try to prepare our students for a number of different career fields and among those career fields. We've had students land in all of these different areas so project management food production, although. Amanda at the center of the picture there says, if you plan on farming, you don't need a master's. But we'll still take people who want one nonprofit management food aggregation we've had students that have graduated gone on to be organic inspectors state agents and things like that. As far as who are educators are this is our target market for this PGP grant meaning that we're looking at trying to train extension agents in our CS. Staff not nonprofit employees municipalities school teachers community college educators and others who aren't necessarily actively farming but the ones that are educating farmers or at least lending them hand a hand. So I mentioned that our students to the survey, they were able to pull in over 80 responses of those you can see the breakdown small proportion were farmers. 84% of those that responded were from a metropolitan urban region and 77 and a half percent were working within the north central region. So if you're not, is everybody familiar with Sarah and how the regions work. So effectively the north central region, I believe starts at Kansas and heads north and captures the Dakotas Minnesota Wisconsin. Illinois. I don't know does it catch Indiana as well. Ohio as well. Okay. Is it 13 states 12. Anyways, so when applying for Sarah funding and support you would apply for it within the region that you are in and here, like I said, we're in north central. And so the topics that were identified as being needed by the respondents included business management access to capital marketing. Processing post harvest handling integrated pest management soil health value added products value added products has popped up quite a bit lately. And so this is what we decided we would focus our webinars on where these topics that were listed by our survey respondents. But 2020 turns things on its head. We submitted this proposal in April of 2019 with all sorts of plans in mind that were related to that and COVID had its impact on the world. The death of George Floyd had its impact on the world and the subsequent movements that came out of that further that impact and so we had to. We had to do a big pivot. And that was because in 2020 we were set to give our next urban food system symposium. Everything went virtual from conferences to classes and so we weren't able to do a lot of things the way that we anticipated. We did get a bit of an extension to get things going and permission as it were to change things up a bit. And so what we did was we pivoted our. Well, let me start with the gaining ground. So gaining ground was going to be easy because it was a webinar series right and people know how to show up to webinars in masks or socially distanced and so we were able to put those on. And all of those were both delivered online as well as archived. And we recruited the students to run the whole show. So not only did they identify the speakers as part of classwork, but then they coordinated the entire webinar series from start to finish with a little bit of help for the tutorials and getting things connected, but they also then and see each of those webinars. And so not only did they integrate themselves in the delivery, but they were almost solely responsible for its success and it was a success. So with the webinar series, we were able to produce 10 quarterly webinars featuring all of these topics. And we were able to do that for urban agriculture, as though we all needed help with zooming after 2020. And so, like I said, they chose and coordinated all the speakers organized and delivered the webinars, and with over 1200 registrants we actually had over 800 participants among those 10 webinars, and that I think it's a pretty good number from where I'm sitting. So this is the urban food system symposium so this was a program that we started back in 2016 in 2018 we offloaded the hosting to Minnesota. 2020 was coming back to us and 2020 was when everything shut down. And so we had to make a hard pivot on that. And where we were supposed to be doing in person I believe in June, and we ended up opting for a virtual conference that we pushed back to October just for all of the rigmarole of shifting things around. So this PGP grant provided funding for scholarships for people to attend the conference. And as a result of switching to virtual our costs went way down. And so we were able to provide more scholarships to participants. And that went over fairly well. We did have early on in our planning process some feedback on our topics. And so we were able to be responsive to that with the extra time that we had specifically looking at some of the demographics for who would be featured during the conference. And so we ended up. Yeah, we ended up with a slate of both keynote and invited speakers that ended up being fairly compelling. These are our folks so just holiday. Charles right Chuck Rice from Kansas State Elizabeth Mitchum Karen Washington Jill Clark Jennifer King and Mark Winnie and I'll talk about some of them a little bit more. In 2020 urban food system symposium we were able to provide 47 scholarships to our urban ag educators. We had 112 abstracts from 70 different organizations, we gave an additional 11 scholarships to students, and it wound up with a total of 324 attendees that came from as far as New Zealand, South Africa Switzerland. More international conference as a result of going virtual. I mentioned we did a pre symposium workshop. And this was another one that was mostly organized by the grad students. Our panelists included Mark Winnie, Bethelos Smith, Misty Jimmerson and why not a binom and the focus was especially on food policy councils and mobilizing the community food system, especially in the era of COVID and the racial struggles that erupted with that were bought brought to the fore with George Floyd staff. So the workshop we had over 120 participants including our speakers and 72% of them said that they would recommend that workshop to a colleague. 65% had previously worked to advance food policy councils in their communities, and 20% more said that they plan to do something with food policy councils after the workshop. 80% said they strongly agreed that the workshop improved their knowledge and understanding of food policy councils so good results there in 2022 we were able to have an in person symposium. This one we brought because we couldn't do 2020 in Kansas City we did 2022 in Kansas City and provided scholarships for our urban ag educators up to $500 to cover both travel and registration. And we were able to augment the regional grant that we had with additional state PDP dollars. So we had some great speakers that talked to us about the topic of the conference I'm going to go back there is building coalitions for a changing world is that showing up over here it's not come on mouse. There goes building coalitions for changing world. And so we were not just talking about some of the social changes but also climate change we had a fairly broad set of workshops and not workshops are the sessions, building on those different topics. And so we had Pandora Thomas is a permaculture educator out of California that did our keynote. We had other invited speakers on a wrong garage and from Cornell Samina Raja and Cameron Smith. We're all talking to us about different ways that we could collaborate in building our food systems. We had that symposium at the hotel Kansas City which is an old boutique hotel in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. It had quite the decor made for the elegant symposium. It was really kind of posh. Although the rooms that we had had really creepy paintings and Yeah, so we also had another pre symposium workshop this time for now and Dr. Rangarajan were the ones that put that on looking at developing curricula to advance planning policy.