 We are going to move to security. This is kind of an update to the committee and I don't know what just happened to John sales, but I think you're going to go first because you're here. It's good to see you. And It looks like just a quick hi and for those who might not have ever seen you the committee before you want to just introduce yourself. Yeah, sure. The sound is a little I mean it must just be the sound in the room. I'm Teresa snow I'm the executive director at salvation farms. It's a pleasure to have been invited. I miss being in that room. I would like that. So I decided to prepare a PowerPoint presentation. And I didn't know if Linda would have that up for me or if that's something on my end that I pull up and navigate through. She made you co host you know how to share your screen. Yeah, so this is going to take me just a minute to get that together so my apologies. It's just a matter of finding the file so I just want to make sure you're seeing what I'm seeing and that you're not. The screen is not. Okay, great. So again I'm Teresa snow, the executive director at salvation farms. And our mission is to build increased resilience in Vermont's food system through agricultural surplus management. And essentially what that means and many of you are already familiar with our work but I thought it'd be good to provide you an update. So the four primary goals. One is to reduce food loss on farms. Another is to increase the use of locally grown foods. The third is to foster greater appreciation of our agricultural heritage and future. And the fourth is to support adjust food system. And what we're really looking at is me making use of an available resource. So that being the available food that and pretty high volumes is is remaining on farms and using this available resource through partnerships to really build shorter supply systems that increase the reliability and resilience in Vermont's food system in and through this really building models that can be replicated and adapted in Vermont through partnerships, or independent of us, or anywhere really in the nation. So, I'm going to try to advance my screen. It's not working. Are you all still hearing me. Oh, there we go. Yes, we can hear you. Okay, I couldn't advance my slide there we go. So, some of you may be aware that in 2016 salvation farms did the first statewide study in the nation to try to gather an estimate for how much edible produce remains on our state's farms. And based on farmers responses, comparing that with census data what we discovered was approximately 14.3 million pounds of vegetables and berries are lost on Vermont farms each year. You'd see vegetables and berries that doesn't include any of our tree fruit, because no orchards answered so this number is likely to be considerably higher. It's particularly interesting about this information. And again this is based on farmer estimates and farmers don't always know what they leave in the field this is a bit from experience from being a cleaner and being in many farm fields. But farmers estimated of that 14.3 million pounds 68% of it is already harvested. Farmers are going to see that because their labor has already gone into it. They're using their capacity and their infrastructure to have this volume of edible food that for some reason is not making it to market. But that shows an incredible opportunity that 68% the reasons that food loss happens. You know it's cosmetic issues market fluctuations there may be labor shortages whether that's affordable or available labor could be capacity on the farm. It could be supply chain capacity. And these are all things that you all are familiar with from hearing about supply chain disruptions and thinking about local food system development. So interesting story about these peppers. The reason these became available and some of you may have heard me tell the story before is that this farmer only had a market for red peppers. And there was an impending frost and and all peppers start out green case you didn't know that and then they eventually turn their color after so many days of maturity. So because of the frost the farmer was like well let's pick all of these peppers even though they're green the market rich the economic return on this will be good. But because of the frost everybody else picked their peppers. And so the market was flooded and hence they're being this volume of surplus, beautiful bell peppers. So, you know the opportunity, the opportunity in Vermont. You know, we are serving approximately 19 million institutional meals a year. That's in our schools, our prisons, our hospitals, veterans homes and hospitals. And we're spending approximately $10 million to source fresh food from out of state. I don't have an estimated john will have better information than I do but the projection from a feeding America in for last year 2021 was around 11%, just above 11% of the population is food insecure. And, you know, of this available food loss or available food from on farms, I think that the state is really capturing about five to 10%. This food doesn't have to be used for charitable purposes it has a lot of potential within the marketplace. So Salvation Farms approach we glean. We've also aggregated surplus product, cleaned it packed it. We've done processing, particularly to make frozen product. We've brokered surplus food so that's buying the surplus and then selling it to a paying market our primary market in recent years has been the Vermont Department of Corrections. We believe that a lot of the impact of our work actually happens through experiential education through engaging people with our mission and with our direct impact programming helps them think about what their role is as an eater within the food system. We've done workforce development. We provide technical assistance that's in state and out of state. Right now we're working with organizations in Rhode Island, Colorado, and we may be working with a network of cleaners in New Hampshire, which is exciting. And the last piece is research. We do have some additional research that you can find on our website. That's at salvation farms.org. I wanted to show you a little bit of impact from our work. We think again with that experiential education piece that engagement of people in the process that creates real change. 88% of salvation farms volunteers stated having more awareness about how local farms operate and local farms play in our food system. And then we have a quote from Celeste that she really saw the supply chain of food in its entirety from volunteering with us. 100% of farms reported the salvation farms assist them in feeding more people in their communities. We have a black dirt farm in Greensboro where we moved 1500 dozen eggs, plus some other products, you know, send it salvation farms helps them move some of their overstock out into the community with little added costs and unnecessary logistical challenges and that's such a great point and that's one of our goals is we want to be seen as a service provider and a business partner to the farms that we work and work with and serve. 92% of food programs and mainly those are food shows and senior meal programs, programs serving after school youth, you know, WIC programs, etc. 92% of food programs reported that being served by salvation farms increases their understanding and familiarity of locally grown and seasoned foods. So again, this exposure to the food system to what is locally seasonally acclimated helps us become food secure as a population. And the Danville Senior Action Center really liked to this quote about what was the impact of working with us that it enabled their sites to offer more colorful nutritious variety, then they could otherwise afford to do. We had another indicate that it forced them to use recipes that they had previously avoided. So we're really helping people increase their comfort with locally produced foods which creates food security regional food security. I have two slides to talk about our workforce development impact, but I want to acknowledge that this work. We currently are not doing. We do anticipate adding some workforce development again into our programmatic work, but the last two years have definitely been transitional for us. For four years we ran a surplus crop food hub and job training program and when you ski. And after participation, we surveyed, we did pre and post surveys. We surveyed our trainees to see what the impact was. So on the left you can see what types of skills do you feel you developed. And we were really aiming for a workforce development program that didn't just teach one particular skill set for one industry but we wanted folks to have transferable skills whether it's cafe or restaurant or whether it's produce department or maybe they're working in manufacturing or just warehousing. All of all of these skills were delivered and trainees received exposure to through our workforce development training program. And then we provided certificates and trainings as well. So we got to see what the value of that was for these individuals. Additionally, we wanted to find out, did the individuals through participating in this program was a 16 week program. Were there any shifts in their self esteem or their self worth, and I'll give you a few minutes just to kind of process this information but we saw increases in almost every category. And the scale here was a strongly disagree to a strongly agree. So, on a scale of essentially one to five. And, and I did provide a PDF of this PowerPoint so you'll be able to go back in reference any of this information after. So specific to 2021 our accomplishments. I will indicate that we had minimal direct impact programming. So Salvation Farm compared to previous years. Salvation Farms works at two levels at a system level as well as that what we think of that as as a symptom or an event level. Direct impact programming is really on that short term kind of day to day where we're also striving to make higher level system change and impact. So our direct impact programming are those things that we can measure year to year. And last year. You can see the variety of crops that we handled, primarily through our cleaning programs. And just over 65,000 almost 65500 pounds. There's those 1500 dozen eggs. Vegetable starts, and then one bouquet of flowers. I'm not quite sure who the lucky recipient was of those but hopefully it was a senior meal site. So in addition to the grid that's colored of crops, we had 28 additional crops with volumes less than 500 pounds, and then also some smaller donations of meat. And then you can see the total economic value of that 65,500 pounds of food that we moved. Let's see. So, in addition to this, and I'm going to have an, well, maybe I'll tell you after I share this slide with you. This shows you the different types and the amount of sites that we serve, primarily through charitable distribution through cleaning programs and collecting donations from farmers and then facilitating weekly distribution. We served 46 farms last year and distributed to 50 different food programs. We also brokered nearly 3000 servings of locally grown produce to two of Vermont's correctional facility meal programs. And again that brokering is something we're really interested in increasing that that market exchange. And I will indicate again that these since 22. So sorry, since 2020, we've been in a transition period for direct impact programming I'll tell you a little bit about that. I think in two slides from now, but the work we have been doing that is less visible has been that technical assistance work. We've been staffing up our organization which is really exciting. And we've been securing funds that we've shared with other organizations. We secured monies through the Chinden solid waste district, which we pass through to three different partners to secure physical infrastructure, primarily coolers or freezer infrastructure to help with the capture of surplus food in the movement of this food into the communities. And then we also helped secure $100,000 for the Vermont cleaning collective. And some of that has gone out to the Vermont cleaning collective members in one time grants and a chunk is being reserved for some vision building maybe strategic planning. Probably some branding work and a reassessment of metrics and messaging for the collective. And I segue into the collective. The Vermont cleaning collective is an initiative that Salvation Farm started in 2013. And it has six different organizations. Salvation Farm serves as the backbone to the collective. But the collective has a structure in which it has co chairs and tries to really engage the members in its direction. Last year, the members of the Vermont cleaning collective served in total 178 farms. They collected more than 417,000 pounds. I have a table there of local farm raised foods that's more than 1.2 million servings of fresh local foods going out into Vermont. And 186 different food programs. So again as Salvation Farms is a member, we serve 50 of that 186. This also includes a few sites, a few of the organizations in the collective also provided food to the Vermont food bank so then that also reaches their network of agencies. In total the cleaning collective engaged almost 14,000 volunteers, sorry, 1400 volunteers that contributed almost 10,000 volunteer hours and that's significant. And again when we think about impact in the food system. The qualitative information of 181% of volunteers reported cleaning introduced them to new farms where 69 indicated an increased awareness of local farms and the role that they play in our food system. And the 84% shared that cleaning influenced their relationships with farms in their communities. This work doesn't just move food to people that are in need of nutrition or need of nourishment. It really helps build educated eaters and potential supporters of local farms which is very exciting. So, to wrap up, you know what is next for Salvation Farms we're going to continue increasing our staff capacity. We envision growing our team by about five more members this year. We're going to take our models for managing surplus assessing the models that we currently have, and anchoring them in northeast Vermont. So that's the four northeast counties of Orleans, Essex, Caledonia and Lemoyle. However, our work is going to continue to have statewide impact, as well as national impact. We just felt the need to kind of come home to the northeast and really anchor our models somewhere and build the strength of those models. We're going to increase our minimal processing and right now that is starting to happen through a partnership with the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson where we're taking surplus and processing it into a frozen product. We're going to really focus on formalizing and scaling our brokering. That's the buying of surplus and managing all the logistics to get it to a buyer. Most of this food we won't even touch. So it's working with the farmers working with the third party holler and working with a buyer and our target buyer is the Vermont Department of Corrections. We're going to be planning for essentially a relaunch of our surplus crop aggregation hub, where we did do workforce development in the past we don't quite know where this will be so it's really in that exploratory phase at the moment. And we don't know whether it will include workforce development or a second chance hiring model, but that's really important to us that we're providing employment opportunities that really build skill sets. We've started a new gleaning program. This last year, the Northeast Kingdom gleaning program of region that didn't have a gleaning program. And so this will be the first full year of operations. So we're pretty excited about that. And then we're going to continue working with the and supporting the Vermont gleaning collective to use the remaining funds from the Hanna for charitable foundation. And we are, we salvation firms outside of that funding are making some significant investments in the web based platform. We created to support the collective. So, that was a lot of information, pretty fast. Hopefully it provided some food for thought, or some of what you the committee was looking for. When inviting me my contact information feel free to reach out anytime and of course, as always, thank you each for serving Vermont. I love that. That's not part of the farm visit. It is it's one of my favorites. It's been on our Facebook page for a long time it's just the colors the cheerfulness but it's clear they're in the rain. I actually take vegetables right out there. Many, many years ago. Thank you so much. Thanks for your work. And I'm wondering a little bit of time I want to make sure your job is in there too but does the committee have any questions for Teresa at this moment. I just like to comment Teresa Nikki strong. And I don't want to do all this I'm always incredibly impressed with what you've done and are doing when you show us the numbers it's really amazing. The amount of pounds of food that volunteers, a point out together in number of parts that participate. It's really truly outstanding. And one little question I haven't, but maybe I've had it in the past but I'm trying to visualize these farms with the food that they have that you can lean. Do they feel like I'm sure they know they're contributing but how do they have this much produce just for you to come clean a lot. The whole concept of leaning is very spiritual actually. But how, how does it they have this much food to clean. That's a great question. I like to say that seeds are relatively cheap. And, you know, farmers will plant enough food so that they're always meeting the market demand, which means at times over planting to as as essentially an insurance. So that if there is a weather event or there's pests. They have a buffer. But, you know, we have all grown zucchini. We know how productive it is. And I think sometimes the available food isn't just because it's extra or it's a buffer planting, or it's a prolific crop like zucchini or even some tomatoes. Farmers grow enough so that they don't have to tell a market that they don't have product, and they want to make sure they have the right quality of products so sometimes it's not an issue of the, the, the edible nature of the crop, or the keeping quality it just might not need some other specifications so therefore becomes surplus so in order again to meet that market. They grow enough so that they have the right quality volume consistency. Additionally, you know, think about your green beans in your garden. You know when the first flush comes they're fast and easy to pick the second one they're still pretty fast and easy to pick, but the third the fourth pick they're just not as thick and they're not as perfect so farmers plant multiple planting so that they can do a fast and efficient, high quality pick their first second run through and then they're going to move on to the next planting. You know that food that's being left is, is fine it's, it's actually saving them time not to deal with it. And then that becomes essentially fertility for their or organic matter for their soil if they just tell it in the same goes with salad greens, a lot of farmers plant a lot of salad greens and you know they do one cut and they'll start to grow back and so that second cut may be available to cleaners there's it. Yeah, there's just a lot of food out there, and I would say a lot with the, the storage crops is so so a lot of it's just condition, you know think of butternut, you know if it has a small spot on it. If it can't go to market, it might spoil the rest but it's something that can be used if we have the right abilities within the supply chain to capture it and use it. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you and thank you for all the work you've done as well, especially during this pandemic when food security was such an issue for families. Good to see you again, John go ahead and introduce yourself and, and please say a few words. Hi, thank you for having me hi everyone for the record I'm john sales I'm CEO of the Vermont food bank, and also for the record I love following Teresa. She gave me a PowerPoint and she provided all the beautiful pictures of Vermont produce, and really gave a great, a great recitation of what's happening on Vermont farms, and how vibrant Vermont agriculture is, you know, particularly the, organizations deal a lot with the, you know the small very small to very large vegetable mixed vegetable farms and produce other kinds of produce and folks who are creating meat and eggs and dairy. And there's just so much opportunity in Vermont agriculture I think still for us. You know, there are, like in any market there are things that are doing well and have a future and there are parts of our agricultural economy that are are suffering or in crisis. And we just we need to be aware of what's happening in the market and make sure where we're supporting those places that have the opportunity to grow. I am going to zoom out a little bit from where Teresa was and talk more about food security in the larger sense in state and then what's the food bank up to what's the situation right now. And then a little bit about what we're looking at doing as the food bank in the next year. So, first, just the, you know when COVID first hit, because that's the beginning of time right now, March 2020. You know, kind of my prediction was, all right, it's going to take a little bit for government to respond to this and we're going to need a philanthropic response quickly, really robust. And actually that happened it was the first kind of the first six months should the state did step up with the National Guard and you may remember back in the airport food distributions and the FEMA MRE is. And then, you know, the federal government did respond, and through the state of Vermont and with cooperation, really the past year and a half has been a pretty robust response to everything that's happened. So great research we've been really fortunate a team at the University of Vermont, working with some other regional folks have been doing consistent research on food insecurity. And during the that first year of the pandemic our food insecurity rate went from about 9.1% in Vermont to 33%. And literally a third of the people in Vermont needed some assistance in getting enough food for themselves and their families and keep in mind that about 50% of the households in Vermont had some kind of job disruption because of the pandemic. It seems like a long time ago, but it really wasn't. And, and, and we're, we're now in a position where those, those federal programs, the kind of the, the pipeline of money and supports are is starting to to finish finish up you know they're there we have the COVID support payments direct payments that went to families we had the support for unemployment the extra unemployment support we have the support for for rental assistance some of that money is still out there we had a lot of support for businesses to make sure that when through periods that they were closed they were able to to not not go out of business and be able to bring back people back to work. And now we're, we're dealing with the ARPA funds and I know you all have been doing a lot of work in in allocating those ARPA funds. And I just want to thank the legislature and, and the governor for the Budget Adjustment Act which included $6 million that's coming through the Vermont food bank. So we'll actually be able to buy and distribute food throughout Vermont for this fiscal year. So we'll actually be able to go back to, to July 1 and then through through the rest of this fiscal year and apply those funds. So we did request both to the administration and through the legislature, an additional $6 billion for FY 23, so that we can plan for how we're going to continue to address this and that did not make it into the, the house version of the corporations bill. And so we'll, we'll see what happens in the Senate but it would be great to have the ability to really plan for how we're going to work with our Vermont growers and and farmers and and utilize these local resources to make sure that people in Vermont have enough to eat and have access to that great local food and that we're supporting our, our local ag economy. During this crisis. So, John. Yeah, I have a constituent, I have a constituent contact me about the budget issue. Could you just elaborate what happens in the house budget with the food bank or where you're at to try to get in the budget. If you'd like that a little more. Sure. Yeah, you know there were a lot of discussions in the appropriations committee, the food banks request did make it from the human services committees, budget memo to the appropriations committee so it was on the table in the appropriations committee. And really, you know as as those things go lots of conversations and it always kind of comes down to the end, the end conversation. And the best, my best information is that the committee just felt as if the, the food bank had just gotten the million in budget adjustment, and that there were, you know we have gotten the McKinsey Scott gift and that there were other funds available. And, and that there were other priorities, because it's always a balancing act. Our position is still that. And I talk about this a little bit that the this, this crisis is not behind us, particularly with food insecurity, which is really economic insecurity it's about families not having enough money to buy the food that they, they need to live that active and healthy We're going to continue to talk to the Senate, as the budget bill goes to the Senate and and see if we can get some movement there. And, you know, that's kind of where we are right now. I'm actually I can, I can pivot and talk about, about that a little bit. Because we're transitioning it feels like from that, that kind of surge of government support back to the philanthropic support. And what we know, you know, from the last recession and from any crisis is that food insecurity has a much longer The, you know, if you read the Wall Street Journal the economy will come back and then we'll be talking about growth. Well before people are, you know, have aren't seeing the impacts of food insecurity. It's both a leading and lagging indicator of a poor economy. And so we see this, the extended need continuing for the next couple of years. The food bank wants, you know, we will insist on being there. And we want the state as a partner, because we don't think that this is just the responsibility of our philanthropic donors to make sure that everyone in Vermont has that food that they need to eat. I, you know, the economic unpredictability, particularly for people who have lower incomes is going to continue. And I was talking to a donor yesterday actually, who's kind of a prominent person in Vermont, and we were talking. The donor was saying, and this is something I've heard, well there were all kinds of you know people got pandemic payments they got extra unemployment they got housing assistance. Why are people still struggling, what's going on I can drive down Shelburne Road and I can see, you know, people looking to hire on both sides of the road. Why can't people just go out and, and, you know, get a job. And this donor actually ended up answering their own question by talking about something let's grow kids has been talking about to to purchase high quality childcare for your child. That's about $12 an hour. It's about $24,000 a year for high quality childcare. If you buy a gold or platinum plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield and pay for that out of your pocket. That's about $24,000 a year so that's another $12 an hour. So childcare and healthcare. That's $24 an hour. That doesn't include rent that doesn't include transportation that doesn't include food and making $15 an hour working at Wendy's frankly doesn't cut it for those families. And so we're still in this period of rebalancing. And there still is still our families out there who don't know how they're going to be putting those that tying those ends together. I'll just share a quick another quick story I just heard this today, one of our staff members was talking to the person that runs Fairhaven concerned which is a food shelf in Fairhaven. And what they're saying is in the last couple of weeks they've seen a new surge in people coming in, and they're concerned now is keeping enough food on the shelves, and it's mostly older Vermonters. They just have more need, and prices are going up around them. And there's a lot of fear again. And so it's a matter of how do we get these people are neighbors, how do we get our neighbors through this kind of lingering transition period to a new normal we don't really know what it's going to look like. So I wanted to also other event answer your question first of all, and are there any other on that topic. Thank you. Since this is the ag committee I did want to talk about. I was talking about the food banks link to our local agriculture. First of all, a pre pandemic, about, I would say probably about 30% of the food the food bank distributed was fresh food, and about 70% was shelf stable food. Well, in 2021, last year, 60% of the food we distributed was fresh food. And that's for a lot of reasons. One of them is really resources that we had pandemic funding coming through. We had huge disruptions in our local food economy. And so farmers were really looking for markets. I mean, I remember early on in, in, you know, April May, after everything shut down. The food bank was hearing from farmers saying, you know, I got this huge crop. The schools aren't buying anymore the restaurants aren't buying anymore. I need an outlet for this. And we were able to, to, to come in and purchase that and have it distributed very very quickly. And that continued. So, I'll just in. You may have heard because we've been talking for a few years about our remoders feeding for monitors efforts, which I will say back when I started the food bank in 2009 and Teresa was there. And actually, the one that started what is now for monitors feeding for monitors and the food banks cleaning efforts. And so, so thank you Teresa for getting us to this point. And in 2021, the food bank made $1.5 million in local food purchases from local farmers and that's, that's produce from about 150 farms across the state. That's eggs, and that's meat and dairy buying local dairy also. That includes direct purchases and also what we call our VFV mini grant program, where there are some farms that are basically too small to deal directly with the Vermont food bank so if we're contracting with a farm as the food bank statewide organization. Last year it was 17 million pounds of food were distributed. So we need a farm that can deliver, you know, in the by the gay Lord, by the case to our loading docs, so that that food can be sorted and redistributed. A lot of small farms can't do that. And so the mini grant program makes grants of, you know, anywhere from 500 to maybe $5,000 to local food shelves, who then contract directly with the local farm. In fact, I've got a quote right here. Heidi Chote small axe farm in Barnett said it was a great opportunity to get connected to a great organization, which is hope, which is the local nonprofit. And to learn that we were there to help one more CSA sale made a big difference to our small business. So sometimes those local food shelves will buy, you know, one, two, three, five CSA shares that then get delivered and and split up and distributed through the local food bank. That allows our smaller farms to have a kind of a guaranteed market. And to know that I'm going to have these five CSA shares because hope is getting a mini grant through the Vermont food bank. Next year we're actually increasing the amount that we're spending in local farms and through VFV. I'll give you some just just a few quick numbers. So, next year worth the 21. Next year our plan is to spend $151,000 just on eggs. And by the way, eggs, the cost of eggs from Maple Meadow farm has gone up. Oh, I wrote it down. I think it was. I think it was like 60%. But we're continuing to purchase, because we need that protein to distribute. So, $151,000 in eggs $83,000 next year to purchase chicken pork 32,000 ground beef 105,000 ground turkey 21,000 milk $8,000 that's already been pre purchased. All of this is Vermont food from Vermont growers and Vermont processors. And it's all going to our neighbors are Vermont neighbors in every community across the state. It's, I think it's essential not just to to feeding our neighbors, but to supporting our local ag economy and growing it. One of the things that the food bank can do is be a flexible customer. I got another another quote here from Silas Doyle Burr at the last resort farm in Monkton. And he's talking about thank you so much for your role in making our produce available to the local community, especially those in need. The experience working with you this season really saved our operation as we lost so many accounts to the pandemic. The flexibility provided also helped us out a great deal. As the simplicity allowed us to ease the complexity of pivoting strategies and what that means is, you know, if they get someone who says hey I want to buy all your carrots. And then there's, and we had said we want carrots but then there's onions or or butternut squash. We're fine to buy that because we don't, we don't need any one certain product at any one certain time. Any kind of local fresh food, we can distribute quickly and efficiently in a Vermont community. We, at least right now, particularly during these these transition and very challenging times. The food bank sees ourselves as a partner to organizations like Salvation Farms, and we're really proud to partner with Teresa and Salvation Farms, and so many others all across the state. And we, it takes a lot of resources to do this in fact the amount of federal food will be getting this year will decrease, and the amount of donated food has been pretty much flat since the pandemic began. So the, the access to, to state funds and to federal funds to the state is critical to keep this really expanded level of effort going for this next year or maybe to. I'll leave it at that and love to hear if the committee has any questions. Thanks John and I really appreciate the work of both of you. And I'll take this moment to do a little advertisement and say that both of your, both of your organizations rely on donations. Anybody out there in TV plans, YouTube plans, who wants to donate, I'm sure that you can Google either the food bank or Salvation Farms and find a way to donate. Because we really appreciate your work. We're going to have to go on the floor of the house in about 15 minutes but maybe do a question or two if anyone has one. Hi, for both of you. I'm curious about the issue of grains that we may be seeing shortages, you know, depending on transportation or political situations in the world. Oh, we just things like corn. Is there anything on your radar about that are you hearing about any charges and availability or anything at all. I'll go first quickly. We're very concerned. Everyone knows that food prices have been rising significantly. Even even prior to the war in Ukraine, Ukraine is one of the top wheat producers and the number one producer of sunflower oil in the world. This is definitely going to have a an impact on food prices. At the national level we're engaged with our national organization feeding America and we're all really concerned about the fact first of all that food banks across the country have been purchasing a lot more food. We've been doing COVID. And, and that now that the food that we're purchasing as well as the food, the people that we're serving are purchasing is much more expensive. And what what is going to happen I don't know what we're what one of the strategies that we're working on is to work with the USDA. And to make sure that USDA through its, there's several programs, which they provide food to communities, TFAP and CSFP and some other acronyms to make sure that they're maximizing their purchases so that food banks have access to that food. And, you know, like everyone else were, it's kind of waiting to see what the impact is. Do you want to comment on that. I think, I think john, I think john did a great job. Speaking to, you know, kind of the, the issue at the moment, but I, you know, supply chain disruption is not pretty, although it does allow us to peek under the hood, and think about how we could be investing and doing things differently. And, you know, I think, we love our dairies, and we want dairies in our state. We have a lot of land base that grows cow corn that could be growing food, food items grains, dry beans that could support our diet here. We can't flip a switch and make this change but I think, you know, as we look at disruption. What is the opportunity that's held within it. So, again, I think john you did a great job it's a little scary. What we're looking towards but we have a lot of resources here that we can think creatively about. Now we've been hearing from Alan Taylor about doing the feeding to England. And that's, you know, that's a really exciting development as well. You know, as we think about climate change, other academics wars, you know, what things it would potentially have an impact on our situation here. I think we have a quick question because of that. I was just thinking of, we're in the era of the story now off adoption of a way to have it will put up pictures of farmers on their tractor trailers. And you must have examples or certainly thoughts about if you can connect a donor to a specific farm to, you know, pay say for, for milk, you know, above the market. Because that helps the farmer connects the donor to the farm in a personal way, and then you can distribute it and it's a good story all around I just wondered if in those harder. And as I'm coaching like me, very nice. If you've done that, and I'd love to hear some stories about that. Yeah, you know, not so much trying to, to fundraise around a certain farmer but certainly, you know, farmers as partners, and, and telling the farmer stories. You know, the food bank runs gleaming programs in a couple of communities also in in Browder borough and in the Rutland area and some in Chittenden County, you know, and works with the gleaming collective partnering. And there are, there are some farms that are doing things like CSA shares where you can, you pay a little extra and then they'll produce extra food and that will go to the local food shelf. So if there are efforts like that that are sort of focused on one farm, we like to try and connect keep that in the community and connect it right to the local food shelf and so we basically using the storytelling are telling the story of of our farmers writ large across the state. And I know when, you know, as we've been talking to the legislature about about financial support for Vermonters feeding Vermonters we've been having some of our farmers coming in and testifying. And certainly they're very eloquent about the, the impact that this kind of forward contracting that the Vermont food banks doing has on, you know, not just their, their operations but their ability to to expand and to know, okay, I can, I can plan another acre next year because I know I'm going to have this guaranteed contract from the Vermont food bank. All right, I think we have to wrap it up here. I want to thank you both, John and Teresa for joining us today it's always a pleasure to hear from you. And we certainly appreciate you and your time. So, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you all. Thank you. Good to see you Teresa.