 You know how when I was looking over the annual report this year one of the things that struck me was the incredible impact that they needed to have. And then to have that quantified by the ACR studies where they were able to calculate it every year in 1985 to 2009 Erie rice varieties added 1.46 billion dollars per year of value to Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia. I mean that kind of impact is just staggering. You know it's more than, one year of that impact is more than the total that's been invested in Erie. And so when we think of the nature of the impact that we have I think sometimes it's just mind-boggling. Yeah, I think so too. I mean the returns on investment from jump-up improvement research are great and certainly we've demonstrated in the past that kind of level of impact. I guess what interests me nowadays is how we're going to continue that. Can we just continue breeding in the same way? We'll have the same impact. Now what needs to be changed? You know I think in 2011 we started thinking a lot in a different direction. How can we go out of the more market-oriented breeding where we can have more precisely defined different environments, the market segments, the consumers that will eat the different kind of rice. And what does that mean also to the rice quality requirements and how we reorganize our breeding programs? I think that's been one of the new developments that even a public sector breeding institution like Erie visits partners in the national program now needs to start thinking about it all. Yeah and I think it's no coincidence that we're here in the rice grain quality and nutrition laboratory at Erie. You know recognizing that rice trade is going to be more and more international, recognizing that quality requirements are at the same time diverse as well as demanding forces any breeding program that wants to remain relevant into understanding what actually makes up acceptable and desirable rice grain quality, what the market demands, what consumers want, what they're willing to pay for, all of which translates into making a much more robust rice economy. And one from which rice farmers instead of being trapped in poverty can begin to extract some real value. And I think this creation of value is a very important part of the modern breeding program. Yeah I'm really excited about this because we've sought at the past always about rice as something that needs to be cheap. Of course people who depend on rice at their state would want affordable rice, but we also see in recent years that increasingly people in the also the Asian countries want a much more diverse range of rice if I go outside of Erie and do the local supermarket here. I can buy nowadays 10, 15 different kinds of rice, packaged in different ways and 10 years ago that wouldn't be only a few. The quirky things about rice grain quality that's always struck me is how incredibly picky rice eaters can be about the way the grain looks. Unlike wheat which grind up into a powder then mix it up with water and cook throw it in the oven and cook it, rice is eaten as a whole grain and so the way it appears even before it's cooked can be extremely important to a consumer. And so our breeders not only have to worry about all the things like yield and disease resistance etc. They got to worry about what the grain looks like and what is a beautiful grain to one person might be absolutely atrocious moving to another. So we spent quite a bit of effort trying to sort out how to figure out what makes rice look like. I'm actually quite excited because when we look at how Erie has developed in recent years and just a simple statistic of the kind like we had last year in 2011. Every month we've fired 15 new pieces and more and there's more and more. It's been really a sign of growing but also of rejuvenating new people with new ideas and new skills. We've also had an increasing number of women on the scientific career track. So I'm very optimistic that there's I think a new generation also of young people out there hopefully who will now have an increasing interest in agricultural science and come to places like Erie and work with us and our partners in the future. Yeah we had almost maybe a record number of retirements from the institute. The overwhelming number of them actually reaching retirement age. And on the one hand one my level and your level one worries a little bit about you know we're losing a lot of institutional memory, critical mass, etc. On the other hand we're bringing in a whole new cohort of new or early and mid-career scientists that will really energize the institution. We see that already in terms of the number of post-docs we have, the number of graduate students we have. Not forgetting that Erie was founded as an education and research institution. And I think that now keeping a good balance between that educational component and the research component demands that we have a young and dynamic staff along with a few grey beards if I would but keep the balance right so that we've got enough young and hungry scientists who challenge us and some of the older scientists who have the memory of who can come back and say well actually we tried that 15 years ago and this is what we found and this is why it did or didn't work. Show me where we were wrong and getting into that kind of dynamic is it particularly important for maintaining the health of an institution like yours? Yeah, I have a nice, late last year started thinking about what would 2012 be like and I concluded at the end that he's been through a process of quite a few years now of planning and changing, prioritizing and starting new things For me, 2003 is going to be the year of going back to work Now it's time to really do the things, give people enough freedom and hopefully other resources to do it and now I'm 100% convinced that they will come up with many, many interesting new things and not to our benefit but to the benefit of the farmers and many other stakeholders. I think as you mentioned earlier, what we have been achieving over the last couple of years and are so brilliantly highlighted in this year's annual report and last year's annual report as well are achievements that when you and I were around the rice world 10, 15 years ago people said either were impossible or would not happen within our lifetimes and now we're seeing them, not only coming out as experimental results we're seeing them in the farmer's fields 1.2 million farmers in India alone growing flood tolerant rice and we have flood tolerance now combining with drought tolerance When I joined URI in 1992, I was laughed out of the room when we suggested we could combine drought tolerance and flood tolerance He said we don't even have drought and flood tolerance How can you think of combining them with anything? So it's an exciting time And it's going to be another good year