Jake Levin and Ren Constas: Cultivating Support in their Farming Community and Foster Grassroots Meat Processing Initiatives

This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for farmers and food enthusiasts alike, brimming with insights on the multifaceted support available to bolster the local meat industry. From the nitty-gritty of technical assistance, financial support in the form of low-interest loans and microgrants, to the meticulous coordination within the value chain, we delve into the transformative work being orchestrated by Berkshire Agricultural Ventures. The Livestock Working Group emerges as a linchpin in this narrative, highlighting their pivotal role in fostering communication, steering infrastructure advancements, and championing grant-funded projects that offer a lifeline to meat processors.


Thank you Jake and Ren!!
https://www.berkshireagventures.org/
https://berkshiregrown.org/

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Transcript

Chef James: 0:14

Hey everyone, welcome to Chef Sense. I'm your host, chef Massey. Alright, so welcome to the podcast. Super excited here We've got Jake Levin and Ren Constas. Thank you both for being here. How are you both doing? Pretty good, yeah, happy to excited. Here We've got Jake Levin and Wren Constas. Thank you both for being here. How are you both doing?

Ren: 0:27

Pretty good. Yeah, I'm happy to be here Awesome.

Chef James: 0:30

I have to say I read that really nice article that Berkshire Grown put out and you know, berkshire Grown, I mean it's just it's been such an amazing organization to just keep connecting the community. Man, you guys are awesome. Like I've got to get this collaboration. You know that we'll get into that you both are involved with and thank you so much for doing that and leading the way and being an inspiration on that. So can you kind of share your specific positions in your organization with our listeners? Do?

Ren: 1:00

you want to start, sure.

Jake: 1:01

My name is Jake Levin and I grew up here in the Berkshires. I've been working as a whole animal butcher in the Berkshires for 12 years now. I moved back home to work with Jeremy Stan at the meat market and have been working various capacities ever since then in the Berkshires and Hudson Valley. I've also been on the board of Berkshire Grown for 11 years now. When Berkshire Agricultural Ventures, which is the organization I work for, first got started about seven years ago, I was pretty excited because they were filling an important gap that wasn't being filled in terms of supporting farmers and agribusinesses and I thought it was a great complement to the work Berkshire Grown was doing. Then, at the height of COVID, my now colleague, dan Carr, who works for BAV, convinced BAV that there was some serious need to focus more attention on our local meat processing systems, the local meat processing value chain, and by value chain I mean the system that takes the raw product, the live animal, all the way to the consumer and every step of the way, with a particular focus on meat process, on the meat processing bottleneck. You know COVID really drew stark relief to what a critical issue that was. Those problems existed before COVID but COVID really highlighted that and made the general public much more aware of that.

Jake: 2:27

You know the Berkshires and Hudson Valley is livestock farming is a really important part of the agricultural systems here. Dan is a livestock farmer himself. So when BAV started to explore what could be done on that front, I was one of quite a few people they reached out to to sort of form a sort of loose working group to help inform the direction BAV takes, the strategy they take. The result of that was a report that they commissioned from a consultancy group called Kitchen Table Consultants to make recommendations on what BAV could do to further support livestock farmers and meat processors in the region. The sort of findings of the report was there probably isn't a real need for another slaughterhouse, counter to popular opinion. You know slaughterhouses have a lot of capacity. The challenge is it's that small window of time when everyone's sending their animals to a slaughterhouse. That is challenging. But regionally we're quite rich in USDA meat processing facilities when they saw a real opportunity was to working with the existing meat processors to expand capacity, to improve operations, to be able to bring more animals in and serve more livestock farmers.

Jake: 3:35

So based on that recommendation, berkshire Agricultural Ventures applied to a regional food systems partnership grant, which is a USDA grant, and that partnership consisted of working along with BAV is Berkshire Grown One Berkshire, berkshire Regional Planning Commission and Kitchen Table Consultants who originally wrote the report.

Jake: 3:57

So in 2021, berkshire Agricultural Ventures was awarded the RFSP the Regional Food Systems Partnership Grant, and the first thing they did was to post for someone to manage and run that grant and the subsequent program that came out of that grant the Local Meat Processing Support Program and they reached out to me to see if I knew anybody who might be interested in applying or if I might be interested in applying, and I had been a meat cutter for over a decade at that point and I was ready to sort of step out of a cold cement box and try something a little different.

Jake: 4:36

And so I applied for the job and luckily, I was hired. So I've been working now with BAV as the local meat processing support program manager for just over two years. There's a lot we are doing in that program, but one of the most important and satisfying parts of the job has been the livestock working group that we've convened to help inform the work we do, and that's a critical part of the partnership. So Berkshire Grown was ran into that grant to help manage and facilitate the livestock working group in the subsequent meetings.

Chef James: 5:09

Wow, so I'll hand it over to Brett oh, there we go, wow Okay.

Ren: 5:13

I come into the story. Almost exactly a year ago actually, I met Jake and Dan and Margaret, who's the executive director of. Berkshire Grown. Who's the executive director of Berkshire Grown? At an interview I saw the job listing on a listserv and it was really up my alley, just what I was looking for. I was coming out of seven years of work in agriculture, kind of moving between production and slightly more bigger picture ag service work, some logistics support, which really tied into the work that I do now with the livestock working group Okay.

Ren: 5:51

So I had just completed two years of farming work at a vegetable farm and at a sheep farm in Pine Plains in Millerton New.

Chef James: 5:59

York, oh, okay.

Ren: 6:00

And was looking to move more, just to give my body a break and move more into computer work and also after having worked in agriculture in this area, I was starting to really notice some patterns and I wanted to work on some of these bigger picture solutions. So I was so excited to see the job posting and then talk with Jake and Dan and Margaret and hear about their approach to bringing farmers together with other people who are working in those value chains and get people in the room together and talk.

Chef James: 6:32

Yeah, wow.

Ren: 6:34

So yeah, so I've been working with Jake and the livestock working group for about a year. Okay, and I coordinate the working group. So I do everything, from sending the emails setting the times for the meetings, I facilitate the meetings and then jake and dan and I work together after those meetings to kind of pull out the important threads of what we're hearing and use that information to keep informing how we're going to the directions that we go to support farmers and to support this food system wow, that's amazing and that's just so much to do.

Chef James: 7:06

I mean both of you, you know, taking that on with this project. When do you see this like I mean you're working on it now like the big rollout is there. Are you underway? Is there kind of like a, a schedule of events, as you're kind of like working through the process? Is that kind of hard to say?

Jake: 7:24

That's a great question. It's an ongoing process. You know, we are really looking at the whole value chain and so that requires lots of different kinds of efforts and different kinds of projects. So you know, sort of break things down, I would say, basically the way that the local meat processing support program has functioned so far. Really it falls into two overarching categories. One of those is everything that happens sort of under the umbrella of the livestock working group and that's really focused more on the value chain coordination and infrastructure development. The other side of the work that I'm really focused on is the technical assistance and financial assistance that we provide meat processing facilities in the middle of the value chain operators.

Jake: 8:20

So to sort of back up a little bit, berkshire Agricultural Ventures is a not-for-profit. So to sort of back up a little bit, berkshire Agricultural Ventures is a not-for-profit. We're based in Great Barrington and we have a service area of four counties in three states. So Berkshire County in Massachusetts, litchfield County in Connecticut and Columbia and Dutchess County in New York. Bab's mission is to help foster and support a more just and equitable and resilient local food economy. And really the way I like to think about it is we have BAV, has Berkshire agricultural ventures has two main tactics for for doing that kind of work. One is we provide technical assistance, so that's sort of a wonky term for basically consulting Okay To farmers and agribusinesses, and that Again, this is broadly speaking for the whole program. That can be anything from grazing planning or irrigation planning all the way to business planning, financial planning, marketing support, feasibility studies etc.

Jake: 9:20

So it's a wide gambit. A lot of the work we do is actually focused on business technical assistance. That's where we see a huge need Writing business plans, writing marketing plans, etc. Wow. The other side of it is we do microfinancing. Oh, and the bulk of what we do is we do low-interest loans to farmers and agribusinesses, and when I say low-interest loans, I mean really low-interest loans. Wow. So the prime rate right now is 9%, I think about around 9%. Okay, we're offering 3% loans.

Jake: 9:52

So that's basically it's not even enough to really pay for our services, but it's enough to sort of help support our director of lending, and then we also do micro grants, so up to $5,000 in grants to farms and food businesses, and the thing that we do more and more of these days and has all of us at BAV quite busy right now is sort of connecting the two things. We do a lot of grant writing support, so either in-house or we'll hire a grant writer to write a grant on behalf of a farm or food business and we have a really high success rate with that.

Jake: 10:28

So that is basically the other pillar of what I'm doing in the local meat processing support room is I'm working with existing meat processors, providing them with technical assistance. Again, that's like sometimes it's focusing on their bookkeeping and financial management, sometimes it's focused on their HR management, sometimes that's for food safety planning and facility design and operational.

Jake: 10:53

On top of that, we offer loans. So we have an $840,000 revolving loan fund that dedicated to meat processors. So we're issuing loans. So far in the last two years I think, we've issued about almost half a million dollars in low interest loans to meat processors to meat processors and we've secured just over a million dollars in grant funding that's gone directly to meat processors.

Chef James: 11:20

Oh, that's amazing, wow, congratulations.

Jake: 11:21

Thank you. Yeah, it's really rewarding work. Yeah, so that's the one side of what I've been doing, that's to work directly with meat processors to help them improve their operations so that they can work with more farmers in the area.

Jake: 11:34

On the other side of this work, I do really closely with Wren with the Livestock Working Group. So the goal of establishing the Livestock Working Group was really twofold. One was to help facilitate and foster better communication across the regional value chain. Okay, and so Ren can talk more about it in a second, but we have 10 members in the Livestock Working Group representing that whole value chain, oh, wow. The other part is for that group to help identify areas of value chain coordination and infrastructure development that BAV and Berkshire Grown can focus on to further support the resilience and strengthening of those systems.

Jake: 12:16

The Livestock Working Group has identified a few key issues, but some of the things that have developed out of the work that Ren and I have been doing together and we've been doing with Livestock Working Group is Ren manages the listserv and the newsletter that we send out called the Meetup Okay, very cool. Manages the listserv and the newsletter that we send out called the meetup okay, um, very cool. We've developed and are continuing to develop a livestock resource guide, slash directory and we have established a free hotline in partnership with agriforging food safety. So that's a food safety and hasap uh hotline. Hasap standsCP stands for Hazardous Analysis and Critical Control Points. It's again a very wonky term, but it basically is the food safety plan that any USDA-inspected meat processing facility has to work off of and go by, and it's a very confusing and overwhelming topic the food safety and HESA planning and both farmers and meat processors often have questions about it but don't have an outlet for getting those questions easily answered. Oh, okay, so we have developed this hotline that anybody can call into and get the answers from a food safety expert, nicole Day, who's been an incredible partner in all of this.

Jake: 13:29

And then we have coming down the pipeline a whole bunch of tools and workshops that we're currently developing. So we have a marketing workshop that we're going to kick off sometime next year for livestock farmers. We are developing a tool with Kitchen Table Consultants and our friend and colleague, matt LaRue from Cornell Cooperative Extension. Matt developed a meat pricing calculator tool years ago. That's really useful. So we're developing a parallel tool, that's the cost of production tool, because in order to figure out your pricing, you need to know how much you're spending, and that's a question a lot of farmers don't know how to answer. So this will be a calculator tool to help you develop your cost of production, which then you can take those numbers and more accurately use the cop, the meat pricing calculator tool.

Jake: 14:23

Okay, um, wow. I'll let you talk more about the meetup and the directory sure yeah, there's a lot to say about that.

Ren: 14:28

Yeah, amazing okay yeah, so the meetup is the same name for the listserv and the newsletter, and the listserv is hosted on Google groups. We have about a hundred members right now, I think. I think we have 101 exactly.

Chef James: 14:45

Okay, okay.

Ren: 14:46

Yeah, and the idea is to similar to the livestock working group, to have people kind of be able to be in conversation with each other, who work together all the time, whether that's farmers and processors or distributors and service providers who are making up this meat value chain in the region but don't always get a chance to have a forum to talk to each other ask questions or problem solve together.

Ren: 15:14

Share resources. So we're seeing it getting used more and more. People are putting questions out there and getting their questions answered. We send out a digest about once a week, every 10 days, sharing events and resources and information that we're gathering from all over the place just to put that information out there okay um, and, and then the newsletter has about 250 subscribers and we send that out every other month and it summarizes the work that the local meat processing support program has been doing recently.

Ren: 15:51

We usually send out the report of the most recent working group meetings so that people can see what we're talking about and how things are developing.

Ren: 16:00

We also share updates in the region, whether that's a butcher shop that's opening up or a processing facility that's gotten USDA certification. We share events, webinars from all over the country that people can tune into to learn about meat related information, marketing trainings and distribution trainings, and you got all kinds of conversations that are happening online that people can tune into and then, we spotlight somebody who's doing work in this world that we think is interesting, that we're learning and getting inspiration from that.

Ren: 16:35

We think other people could also learn from. Last month we spotlighted Foodworks Group, which is the consulting group that we're working with. That's heading the and I'm going to butcher it they're heading the study on local. Oh no, I'm just going to give it to you to say Okay, yeah, I realized I left that out.

Jake: 16:55

That's a big project we have going on right now, is so the livestock working group, I would say like, has really identified like four or five major issues right. So further value added production opportunities, and value added production I mean in terms of meat, I mean things like sausage, jerky, meat sticks, but also things like bone broth, rendered lard, pet trees.

Chef James: 17:18

There we go. Okay, I was going to ask that you know pâtés, meatballs, meat pies, et cetera.

Jake: 17:26

So that's something that Livestock Working Group has identified. So we need more value-added production opportunities. That was also identified in the original Kitchen Table Studies consultant report. Logistics and transportation, which is a tricky wicket but one Ren and I spent a lot of time talking about and thinking about Cold storage capacity Workforce, which is always challenging and an idea that was also in the original report by KTC and continues to be something discussed with Livestock Working Group, which is a more organized sort of effort towards aggregation and or co-branding of meat products.

Chef James: 18:10

Okay, like a cooperative sort of umbrella.

Jake: 18:12

Could be a cooperative Could be there's a lot of different ways it could go but essentially a way of creating a sort of new market stream for livestock producers entering new markets, or a new sales channel Like e-commerce. It could be e-commerce, it could be, you know. So back to the value-added production part of the. The origin of that conversation was like we were talking about cold storage, right, and like, okay, so we everybody feels like they need cold storage. What is it? And then we'd ask people what is in your cold storage right now, whether it's something cold storage you have on your farm or you're making space somewhere else, or you just are storing it at your meat processor, which unfortunately happens. What came out of the conversation and Matt LaRue calls this the cold storage fallacy, which is about 10% of that for most farmers were products that just are really hard to sell.

Jake: 19:09

So feet, bones, fat, organ meat and me being a butcher with a focus on value-added production, I was like well, there's a real opportunity there. And a lot of the farmers reported that they just tell their processors to throw everything out at this point, that they've reached their limit of what they can keep in their cold storage, so throw the rest out and that's painful for me because that's essentially money being thrown out. If there was the opportunity to turn those bones into bone broth, take those chicken livers and turn them into liver pate or a dog treat. But when you start to talk about that, there becomes a capacity issue, which is, like you know, if off the shelf farm one of my favorite poultry farms here in Marlborough they may only have 10, 50 pounds of chicken liver and you know that 50 pounds of chicken liver sounds like a lot to some people, but as a meat processor that's not that- much and so it's hard for a meat processor to justify making chicken liver pate just for 50 pounds of chicken liver for one client.

Jake: 20:08

But what if we took 10 farms in the region?

Jake: 20:10

and they all pulled their chicken liver together and it was labeled whatever Berkshire County Chicken Liver Right, it could also have the farm's name, so then it would be co-branded. It could be one aggregated system. But there are other questions like who's going to manage or operate that? Who's the facility that's going to do that? How do farmers decide who is part of this pool or not? So those are some of the questions we're working on right now.

Jake: 20:38

But FoodWorks Group is to help us answer some of those questions. We got some funding Bav got some funding from the state of Massachusetts to look specifically at value-added production and cold storage needs with them to conduct a market analysis and feasibility study on ways in which we can expand or create new value-added production opportunities and more shared use cold storage opportunities. So we're at the halfway point. It's been a really exciting process, a lot of really cool stuff that's come out of this so far and we're really excited to see sort of the final report and we have some funds set aside to help with implementation of whatever the recommendations that come out of that report are.

Chef James: 21:22

That's amazing. Is it in a sense, an opportunity to like those that are a part of this programming? Everybody has a percentage in on cold storage as a specific location and that's part of everybody divvying equipment in a joint situation.

Jake: 21:39

Yeah, so you're dividing cost. Yeah, yeah.

Chef James: 21:42

I was curious about that because it's like it's just so hard in farming and in what you get for what you're doing and trying to get to, that you know zero waste is so hard. Wow, that's amazing to know that, though. Yeah.

Jake: 21:55

Okay, wow. And's amazing to know that though. Yeah, okay, wow. And then you haven't even talked about the directory yet, which is one of my favorite things.

Ren: 21:59

Yes, the directory is ever-growing.

Jake: 22:03

It's in an.

Chef James: 22:04

Excel. It's in a Google Sheets document right now. That's awesome.

Ren: 22:07

And we have 12 tabs, so each tab is for a different kind of like. I think of it as a yellow pages. It helps me wrap my mind around what it is, so each tab would be like a different section of the yellow pages, so there's um livestock equipment sources. There are distributors um possible outlets for wholesale veterinarians. I think we just added a tab for like general farm repairs and fix it people.

Chef James: 22:36

Okay.

Ren: 22:36

Really it's. It covers a lot of different areas and then in there we have different entries for you know whether it's a store or a person and their contact information and their location, and then the services they provide. The geographic area that they that they work in, if that's relevant and it's growing. The geographic area that they work in, if that's relevant and it's growing. So we're continuing to get input from the working group and other farmers and other people that Jake works with through TA and expanding it, and we also just recently got a grant from the Extension Risk Management.

Ren: 23:10

Education that will allow us to move it from Google Sheets onto a more user-friendly online platform.

Chef James: 23:19

Wow Okay.

Ren: 23:21

Maybe with more like filtering tools and yeah.

Chef James: 23:25

Wow. And so like right now, hurdle-wise, I mean all this, all the amazing work, and I don't think people really understand you know there's so much into farming, there's so much into you know meat fabrication and your passion, and you're building this and being a part of this amazing process and like putting that together. Do you see? I mean, are there certain hurdles that kind of come to the forefront on some of this that you're like how do we chisel away at this one?

Chef James: 23:49

Yeah, I don't even know where to begin, I mean with the with the resource, the resource guide, with the directory.

Jake: 23:56

So one hurdle is just like you know I'm gonna use, I'm gonna pick up my neighbor, a fellow new melboro person, matt ferrara. He's a hoof trimmer. He's out on the road every day trimming hoofs for dairy farms and stuff. He has a truck. His number is on the truck. If you you know, if you're a farmer and you know him, you know him. But if you're a new farmer it's very hard to find Matt. He doesn't have a website, he doesn't have a Facebook page, and so that's just been challenging for Ren and I just like how do we track down this information?

Chef James: 24:29

And make it open to everybody as a centralized area to go to.

Jake: 24:32

Yeah, so there's logistics to that. But then when we talk about part of the reason we created this directory, it started out as just a processor directory, because people would email us or call us and say, hey, who else is out there, who's smoking bacon or where can I get my lamb slaughtered? And we decided just to compile a list of all of the processors in the region, including their inspection status and where they are, etc. So we created that and made that public. And then when Ren and I were working on the transportation and logistics issue and people were emailing us and saying, hey, I need to get my.

Jake: 25:09

You know, I have three whole pegs a week that need to go into New York City because I have three butcher shops or you, you know one butcher shop and two restaurants who buy those for me every week. Yeah, but I don't want to drive down there every every week. Who should I call? So we started to put together a list of different logistics operators and then it was a pretty short list and we're like, oh, this, there's a real need here wow, so you circle that.

Chef James: 25:32

What could what? What do we do that?

Jake: 25:34

and that was confirmed by further conversations with livestock working group of like yeah, this is, this is challenging like. Another example for why we're focused on logistics and transportation is, uh, just to use one example, eagle bridge, a really great solder house up in eagle bridge, new york, about an hour and 40 minutes away from here. They're one of the main processors for our region. You know, any given week there might be 10, 20, 30 farmers from berkshire county driving up there and back once or twice a week separately, bringing their livestock down and then getting the cut and wrapped, finished frozen product and bringing it back to the farm. It's that, you know, that's painful. I'd much rather see um christian stovall from hidden mountain farm out in the field with his sheep than on the road driving up the eagle bridge twice a week okay passing three of his other farmer friends, you know.

Jake: 26:24

Yeah, so is there a way we can create more efficiencies around that? But but wow there's a lot that goes into figuring that out it really.

Chef James: 26:30

It's unbelievable. So, literally, it's like getting the cold storage big enough and maybe putting together a transportation unit that our producers and farmers they're kind of like. You're a part of this ordinance, you know the group. That's hands-off. This is what we're here to help you orchestrate and you can focus on what. You're where you want to see them, which is their passion.

Jake: 26:53

Yeah, yes and no. I mean part of the challenge is like Berkshire Grown or Berkshire Agricultural Ventures. They don't necessarily want to be in the business of running a logistics company, and so that's the other part of what Ren and I are doing is like, who is out there who might want to be in that business?

Chef James: 27:08

Oh, I see Like a partnership.

Jake: 27:09

Yeah, what can we do to support them? Can we give them alone? Can we write a grant so that they can get grant funding to start this business? Okay, can we help them network. A lot of what Ren and I do is simply just networking right.

Chef James: 27:21

Okay, okay.

Jake: 27:22

Oh, climbing tree farms, going to New York City once a week to drop off pigs, and so is Kinderhook Farm. Have you guys talked to each other yet? Yeah, and you, sometimes they have, sometimes they haven't, and that's been some of the really wonderful outcomes of the work we're doing and it's not that sexy you can't say. Well, this week we connected these three farms and they're now coordinating, they're getting their product down to New York City. People want to see a big new truck or a new building, but a lot of it is that smaller stuff and then, maybe we'll get to that bigger thing eventually.

Jake: 27:57

Maybe there will be that big truck one day that's going down Route 22 and down to New York City. But right now we're not quite there yet. No one's quite there yet. So just slowly putting that stuff together.

Chef James: 28:09

Okay, wow, that's amazing. Okay, well, I mean it sounds like, I mean it's. You guys are just off to an amazing start with all of it. Are there any like other topics in it that you'd like to talk?

Jake: 28:20

about.

Ren: 28:20

Sure, yeah. So last month we gathered fiber and hide farmers, processors, other people in in the fiber and hide world in the Berkshire Taconics, for the most part, um, and that grew out of something that Jake noticed, which was that where did that come from?

Jake: 28:37

Yeah, it's a good question. Some of it's just personal interest, like I happen to love local fiber, but we have in this region we have a larger than typical number of small ruminant farmers. So by small ruminants I mean goats and sheep. So it's a larger slice of the livestock farming pie than in most other places. Small ruminant farmers are having a really challenging time in general with processing there. There are fewer and fewer meat processors in the region who are willing to process small ruminants for a whole number of different reasons. So that was something I was starting to talk to. We were starting to talk to small ruminant farmers and then in talking to them they would mention when you say like, hey, what's going on, what's working, what's not, what's challenging? They'd say, well, you know, I used to selling hides selling my sheep hide for $250 at a farmer's market. That was like people were happy to spend that much money and that was a really important revenue stream for me, wow Okay.

Jake: 29:41

But it's getting harder and harder for me to find someone who will tan my hides.

Jake: 29:46

Or, you know, we share a sheep, you know, twice a year for their health, and we have all this wool but we don't really know what to do with it, or we have a hard time getting it turned into yarn, et cetera.

Jake: 29:58

Wow, but we see that as an important revenue stream for us and so we started to hear that more and more and you know, ren and I and the team at BAV we started to talk about that and I was like you know, I think there's something here and it's not obvious that it's related to me.

Jake: 30:17

And I and the team at BAV we started to talk about that and I was like you know, I think there's something here and it's not obvious that it's related to meat, but it is in that most of these farmers are also raising their animals for meat Right, and if we're talking about creating a stronger, more resilient livestock farming system, this is well a smaller part of it, an important and crucial part of it, which is like how to? So far, we're taking the similar approaches and, like we had already like started to address it with the directory, like we there you know the person who needs animal health services, whether they're raising a fiber sheep or a meat sheep or a dual purpose sheep, like they need the same vet and they're like this. This really complements the work we're doing and wow we see and hear a need for it.

Jake: 30:57

Um, you know, like, uh, mary burley, uh, who took over her mom's farm lila's mountain lamb like she's really interested in fiber as a as a part of her farm business, like she's so passionate about it and we want to be able to to help her. Just yeah, you know we were helping her with getting slaughter dates. Now we're trying to help her figure out how to improve the fiber part of her business.

Chef James: 31:18

Well, I think it makes sense because, again, you're talking about trying to fight and work on the zero waste, and if you're including them, it's like, yeah, I mean hearing all of this, it's like pulling on a couple strings on a sweater, Exactly, and you're like okay, and you're like, oh, red whoa, you know. And then you guys are just going right after it. I mean, you know, I don't know it's very inspiring, but it's got to be very daunting and it couldn't be in better hands. I mean very lucky to have both of you.

Jake: 31:50

Wow, yeah, okay, it does feel like we're pushing a boulder up a hill, but it's a really enjoyable experience.

Ren: 31:57

But there are moments I think, where it feels like we're pulling on a thread and then all of a sudden a whole bunch comes.

Ren: 32:03

Having the fiber and hide farmers all together in the room was one of those moments where I was like, oh, the boulder just walked itself up the hill for a minute walked itself up the hill for a minute, because what came out of that meeting was his list of priorities for what would need to happen to strengthen strengthen the regional fiber shed and they basically were the exact same priorities that came out of the working group meeting of meat processors, farmers and other people in that value chain. So we were. We saw all of a sudden this venn diagram coming together, like that we can work on these things at the same time with different people and kind of like, get more bang for our buck. Yeah, you know, have a bigger impact on more farmers.

Chef James: 32:45

That's amazing, okay.

Chef James: 32:47

Well, I mean I guess for me, you know, looking at all of it, you know hearing kind of the journey of what you all, what we're doing here in the Berkshires, to you know, again, between the big four and the companies and things there.

Chef James: 33:01

You know, because some of our other areas across the US and some of the people that I've talked to, they are dealing with the slaughterhouse issue that you know they're kind of closer to those farms and they were kind of getting steamrolled, unfortunately, and they continue to drop off and that's very sad to see, I think, to hear you know, hey, we do have the capability with the slaughterhouses here, but it can bottleneck but we're looking at cold storage and transportation.

Chef James: 33:26

You know, I think that's just the power of a very amazing community to you know, keep pushing forward and I think, again, being an example to what we're doing, I mean there's another person I was talking to, aj Richards, which he does from the farm and he's working on e-commerce, which is literally kind of like that national map of like here's New England, and build a system that can network all these farmers in these regions so that if somebody goes on that website you can order specifically from that farm and it ships direct from that farm. So you know, I think, hearing all of this amazing work that everyone's doing, you know it's very powerful and you're doing what you love to do and what you've been destined to do, and I think that I'm excited to see the future.

Jake: 34:12

Yeah, I think we both are. No, I mean, if you're interested in the work we're doing, we encourage you to sign up for the Meetup newsletter, and that's a great way of staying up to date, as well as signing up for the Berkshire Ag Ventures newsletter and the Berkshire Grown newsletter. Okay, anything else you want to add?

Ren: 34:31

Check out the resource guide.

Jake: 34:33

Okay.

Ren: 34:34

And there's contact information on there to add listings or send us ideas well and also donation wise.

Chef James: 34:41

Is there any support like that you can use that?

Jake: 34:43

they find that on the website yeah, we're both, you know, small not-for-profits working here in the brick shoes. We're mainly small donor funded, so yeah so both organizations could always use power up more, more yeah.

Chef James: 34:56

Amen to that one. Okay, all right, well, jake. Thank you, ren. Thank you so much, and your travel to get here. This has been outstanding Thank you.

Jake: 35:05

Thank you, James.

Chef James: 35:06

Yeah, all right, everyone, that is a wrap. You can check us out if you like that. Subscribe Also the Instagram Chef Mas massey. Let's keep it simple, chefmasseycom. Have a good one. Bye for now.