(no audio) (gentle music) So the RFSI program was a result of several years of internal due diligence by Commissioner Pate at the Department.

We actually consulted with USDA leadership even before they rolled out the rules of the RFSI program.

We recognized in Alabama that we did have a disconnect between our growers and also the end point, and we had to do a better job of the middle of the supply chain.

And so we expressed those concerns to USDA leadership, and then they rolled out a program over a year later that was almost similar to what we recommended to USDA at that time.

And it certainly did, it's going to bridge the gap on the shortfalls that we've seen here at Alabama over the last decade.

So the main objective of the RFSI program is to expand infrastructure in that middle of the supply chain space.

Now, USDA calls middle of the supply chain after products are harvested in the field, but before they reach their end market.

So think of all the places that food is stored, aggregated, processed, our distributors throughout the state.

All of that is the middle of the supply chain.

And then there's a second part of the program that's called supply chain coordination.

And this is the actual connection of farms and their products to those end markets.

So it's great if you have a farmer growing squash, but it doesn't do a lot of good if you don't have a market for that squash.

So that supply chain coordination piece is us connecting farms, schools, grocery stores, and other markets so that they can continue to make money and grow more product.

Now, we're taking, and instead of harvesting May through September and trying to sell a whole year's crop May through September, we now have the infrastructure projects where we have aggregation, washing, cleaning, some further processing, dicing, bagging, slicing, chopping, and some storage, cold storage.

So now farmers are going to be able to grow like they've been growing, but now we're going to have product that's been maybe frozen and we can sell it year-round.

The schools are excited about that.

Our restaurants that we have talked to, even our local grocery stores, they're excited about have extending our season with locally grown Alabama products.

So USDA did a really great job of listening to the states and responding to the needs that us as state agencies were seeing with our farms.

We know that throughout the food supply chain, about 40% of food is wasted, and that's a terrible percentage of food to go to waste.

So to have projects like this that can utilize those food stores, food supplies that might have gone to waste beforehand and to see them turn into delicious local products now is really exciting.

The Department of Ag and Industries played a vital role in the RFSI program.

We were already, the Department was already thinking about this type of program before it was rolled out.

We, the Department actually was one of the first two states that submitted their application to USDA AMS and were one of the first states that that was selected.

When you think about a farmer that he plants his crops and he generally hopes that he is going to sell what he grows.

Now, the one thing that most people do not know and understand is that everything that the farmer grows out here on this crop is not a marketable product, but it is certainly edible.

So what I mean by that is the consumer, they only want the number ones, the pretty stuff.

So the farmer has got these, it's got blemishes on it and whatever, and he generally has not had a market for it.

With these processing facilities that we've got now, you can take, say, a peach that's got a bad spot on it, you cut that bad spot off, you chop that peach up and you put it in a fruit cup, and now we can sell that to kids.

Nothing wrong with that peach.

So we got an outlet for not coals, but seconds that the farmers normally didn't have.

Then you take, again, the farmers had consistently hoped to have somewhere to sell their product now, and they had a short window.

So now if they try to retail it and it does it retail, all they've gotta do is contact one of these other facilities, one of these entities that's got a facility say, hey, I've got so many cases, or a pallet or two of this or that, bring it over here.

They process it for him, put it in storage.

He can either take it and sell it, or either the guy that's doing the processing is going to sell it for him at a later point.

So now we're benefiting what I call a community of farmers rather than one or two farmers.

Farmers are going to start working together and we're going to see a cohesiveness in our ag community that we have not seen before.

And I think that we're going to see an increase in acreage, which will afford us to have a larger market share of locally grown Alabama products.

We're hoping it'll change the State of Alabama as far as the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables we have available and really put some money in some farmers' pocket at the same time.

But it was really something when COVID was going on, we were kind of brainstorming and I think the USDA was looking for some things that holes they hadn't filled.

And I really felt like it sort of sprang up out of our office saying, because I knew as a business person, I didn't want us to get out in front of the industry.

I'd seen too many times when the government decided this is what those poor people need, and so we'll build this and they'll follow.

And I had never seen that work.

And so we had actually had meetings about trying to bring some of the stakeholders together and nothing came out of meetings.

Nobody took the ball.

And then this opportunity came along where USDA was sort of asking us what are some other things we hadn't touched?

And we knew in Alabama, it's not true of some other states.

Georgia, Florida had lots of middle infrastructure.

We did not in the State of Alabama.

So I had these people wanted to grow fresh local fruit and vegetables.

I had people wanted to eat and sell fresh fruits and vegetables, but I didn't have anybody in the middle that wanted to aggregate it and help distribute it.

And that's really how you're gonna do it.

No one little strawberry patch is gonna be able to supply even an independent grocery store.

So we needed them to work together and provide the infrastructure.

But this was just a, you know, a great program that, like I said, I feel like Alabama helped create and sent it.

And it was one of those deals, like, you write your own application, you write your own regulations.

And we were probably the leader in the country in doing that.

So we're proud of it.

We're proud to see.

We hope this has a generational impact on Alabama's agriculture and we think it's got the potential to.

So no good team goes without a good leader.

And that leader's been Commissioner Pate at the end of the day.

He's assembled a team that has been dedicated with the RFSI program, spearheaded by Meredith Casey.

And then from a support standpoint, Don Wambles and myself have kind of been the cheerleaders in the background, you know, rooting Meredith on.

But at the end of the day, Commissioner Pate was one of the first advocates for Sweet Grown Alabama.

And it's amazing to see the transformation since 2019 of how we have started our state branding program.

And then that has evolved to the RFSI program where it goes in, you know, lock and key per se.

And it really has, we think is going to continue to change the dynamic of taking produce that others may not receive.

And further process that and put it into a packaged product for our school system.

He brought Meredith in, which was a godsend.

She took the program, and Hassey and I have worked along beside her.

But she has done a wonderful job getting all the applications submitted, submitted on time, scored and properly projects, properly awarded.

You know, we had $6.4 million that we were eligible for.

We received the whole 6.4.

When we put out our solicitation for applications, we had like $23 million in request.

You know, that shows you that other people, other farmers across the state were thinking, this is something that's needed.

We need this.

The RFSI guidelines let you choose between infrastructure projects or equipment-only projects, or a combination of both.

Here in Alabama, we decided that we only wanted infrastructure because that was something that we felt was sorely needed to help us grow the vegetable, fruit and vegetable industry here in Alabama.

So from the application standpoint, we had 22 to 23 competitive grant applications.

And we went through a robust review process.

And at the end of the day, we did select six projects that we feel is going to bridge that gap.

And not only are they good projects, they're geographical across the State of Alabama where we feel that growers can be connected to those that we've awarded.

Five of those six are produce related type projects.

And the six project is catered to the dairy industry.

And so we feel with that particular project up in northwest Alabama, from a dairy standpoint, that we can get that particular awardee tapped into the school system in the form of getting milk to those students.

So we started out in a subdivision years ago with trying to raise our own food.

We had a third of acre lot.

We had goats and chickens and rabbits and sheep and calves at one point, a little bit of everything.

And our son declared he wanted to be a farmer at seven years old.

And so we worked towards getting a farm.

We finally bought this place in 2020.

We closed January 30th, 2020.

We moved in February and then the world went crazy.

So (chuckles) I was determined though, my first purchase was gonna be a dairy cow.

We brought her home in March.

Her name was Daisy.

And we just fell in love with dairy cows.

It started as just one cow, and as we grew, it got bigger and bigger.

And now it's big, big.

(chuckles) A lot bigger than we ever dreamed it would be, you know, honestly.

It's been a challenge.

You know, we've gone and visited other dairy farms, talked to lots of dairy farmers.

Some of 'em that produce their own milk and some of 'em that sell to the other creameries.

And it's been fun learning.

All the milking portion of it we've learned on our own, you know, basically on our own from milking our own cows, so.

When we started planning, we went to a dairy education event and all the dairy farmers said, "Don't do it.

You've gotta be crazy."

We've been called worse things.

And we're like, "We're just gonna do it."

And so the next week I saw a thing from, I think the Cullman Agriplex shared the grant education thing where they were talking about it.

And I went and I asked 'em a million questions.

And when I asked them did dairy qualify, they both had to stop and like really think on it.

And they're like, "Yeah."

I don't think they had any idea what was coming out of it after I asked that question.

But they've been really helpful.

We worked for months getting together everything that the packet required, researching the markets and everything.

But it was very intensive.

We nearly gave up a couple times.

It was just so much work.

I bet you I worked 40, 60 hours a week for four months just on this.

And we thought for sure, you know, that if we did get it, they would say, no, you can't do something that big.

You have to do this.

And they jumped right in and said, "Yeah, go for it."

And we're like, "Okay, now what?"

(chuckles) So it was a little overwhelming to be chosen with the full plan that we had, 'cause it was just so big, so much bigger than we had envisioned to begin with.

We were just gonna build a new parlor and get a new tank and make things a little easier for us.

And now here we are planning the pasteurize and bottle and everything.

It's way more intensive than we thought to begin with, but we're really excited about where it's headed.

Without the grant, we would not be at this level.

If we had to purchase it, we would've started with a very tiny pasteurizer.

And that would've been it.

This equipment's just so expensive.

And basically we built our plan with where we would need to be in five years.

We visited a lot of dairy farms and a lot of own farm processors.

And they all had similar problems.

And it's that when they got to the point where they needed to grow, they weren't built to grow.

And they were boxed in.

And when you build a processing room, it's all stainless welded in.

Nothing's movable.

You can't just pick it up and move something to another place.

And so we wanted to make sure that we were where we needed to be when we hit those milestones, which we hope we'll hit.

But we wanted to make sure that we were there when we got there.

And so we've set everything up with room to grow.

We have space to add extra equipment and everything planned in.

The equipment, people that we worked with, they were amazing and walked us through everything.

They made sure that we had everything in place for where we needed to be.

And we left space where it needed to be left.

And it was, I know a lot about what I wanna do, but the expertise back there, I couldn't have done it without, you know, all the people in their special fields.

So we're gonna be bottling milk, we can make flavored milks.

We can also do creams like your favorite pumpkin spice coffee creamer.

We can do any form of fluid milk.

I know we wanna do chocolate, that's a big demand for that.

We can do, we can separate it out and we can do a 1%, 2% or fat free milk, or we can do a cream line milk, so you have that nice rich cream line on top, which everybody loves to see.

And then we can also do all kinds of cheeses.

There's only like two or three types of cheese that we can't do.

And they are very specialty cheeses of no real interest in doing like the moldy cheeses.

So mostly we'll do cheddar varieties.

We wanna do some Hispanic varieties like Oaxaca and queso fresco.

And then my husband wants to do some Parmesan.

And then butter.

Most dairy farms do not make butter.

They say that it's so much work and the demand's not there.

But we have an incredible demand in our area for butter.

People just love fresh butter.

And I think I could sell butter all day long if I had butter.

With a grant, we were able to set it up to where we can purchase milk from other dairy farms.

And we can help them have good, fair pricing.

We can help someone who wants to be a dairy farmer.

They'll have a place to sell their milk.

Banks won't lend to a dairy farmer because there's nowhere for the milk to go.

And so if you wanna be a dairy farmer all your life, now you have an option to be one because you have another place to sell your milk.

As far as the dairy industry as a whole, there is a huge trend to move towards on-farm processing.

There are so many new processors coming in in every state, not just just Alabama.

So most of the small dairy farms that are left in Alabama are pushing towards on-farm processing just because the market is shifting and people want the local stuff.

You know, 20 years ago, nobody cared where their food come from.

They just wanted to go to the grocery store and get it, and they wanted it cheap.

Now they wanna know what's in it, they wanna know where it comes from.

They wanna know everything about it.

And they want it as local as possible.

If that means it's coming from their backyard, even better.

But they want it easily accessible.

But they really want local foods.

Some of 'em have already reached out saying they'd like to sell their milk to us.

Some of 'em may be a little bit of disbelief, you know, 'cause they think we're crazy for wanting to be dairy farmers.

And that's what we hear a lot of.

"You gotta be crazy to start a dairy farm."

And maybe we are a little bit, so.

We do hope to be able to supply the schools one day.

The school, milk doesn't come locally, it all comes from out of state.

In fact, most of the milk in Alabama, if it is sent off to be processed, it goes out of state and very little comes back.

And that's one of the things we wanna wanna change.

But kids today are so disconnected from their food and being able to get local products in front of them and let them see, oh, that farm's just right down the road, maybe I could go see that farm.

Maybe I could go check it out and go see the cows.

And with that, we also hope to do field trips so that the kids can make that full connection and make that full circle.

Again, it's back to the full transparency where you know everything about where your food comes from.

People just want fresh food, they want local food.

That's their big goal.

And they wanna know what's in it.

And our goal is to have full transparency with everything that we do.

So you can watch the whole process.

We have windows where you can watch everything.

You can go out in the milking parlor, watch the cows be milked.

And then we even have videos where you can just stand in the store and just watch the whole process from beginning to end without, you know, having to leave, so.

Boozer Farms is a family operation.

We began farming full-time in 2012.

I always say that we kind of started in reverse order.

Instead of it being a farm that I inherited from my family and continued work in, it's one that we started from the ground up and then my parents were able to retire from their jobs and begin working the farm.

My siblings have all rotated through at different times with helping at the farm.

So we are in Thorsby in Chilton County and operate on about 25 acres.

Here at Boozer Farms, we raise blueberries, strawberries.

We do a whole gambit of summer vegetables, squash, okra, tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, peppers.

I always say, you know, like if you can grow it here, chances are we are growing it or have grown it before.

We do a lot of cool seasoned crops.

So right now in the ground.

We've got cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, kale, collards.

We'll have some other things joining them soon.

Baby carrots coming along.

So a lot going on here.

We were so excited to be a recipient of the RFSI grant.

And that was for kind of middle of the supply chain to help strengthen our food security as a nation.

And so at Boozer Farms we submitted an application and our goal was to expand our packaging shed to be able to have larger conditioned space that we could pack and prepare product to go out.

We also expanded our cooler capacity so that we could aggregate more produce from other farms to be able to help those farms get more of their product to market.

It's also allowed us to install almost double the size square footage of walk-in cooler space so that we can really maintain product at an ideal temperature to help keep the quality exactly where we want it to be.

It's allowed us to get a wash line to help streamline and improve our washing process as produce comes in from the field.

It's allowed us to add a processing kitchen for the value-added products that we are gonna be working to produce.

And a huge thing too is just the loading dock space used to everything that pulled up to the farm or left the farm had to be loaded and unloaded by hand.

And now we've got a dock that allows for a lot more mechanized loading and unloading.

And then we are also able to put in a commercial processing kitchen where our goal is to make popsicles that we'll use number two fruits from our farm and other surrounding farms to be able to create these popsicles that will be able to go into the school systems.

So the markets that we currently serve are our grocery stores, are farmer's markets that we attend, and then also the Farm to School.

And we hope to just continue to grow each of those markets to increase the number of schools that we're able to work with because now we can increase our capacity to aggregate from more farms.

So when our cooler space was limited, when our grading and packing house was limited, that restricted how many farms we could partner with.

Now we'll have the square footage, the cooler space to be able to bring in more product to make that available to more consumers.

This property right here has been, I think my mom and dad bought this in 1975.

However, the farm, we've been in this same area since 1903.

My grandfather received 176 acres up under the Farm Homestead Act in 1903 from Theodore Roosevelt on November 24th, 1903.

And that property still remains in our family to this day.

One year we went to the market and we had all this produce, we only had three days to sell it, a week at the most.

And I rolled through the fields and I saw the fields and they was full.

You know, we only sell a small percentage of what's in the fields.

And I said, it's gotta be a better way than to let all this food go to waste.

It makes no sense.

And believe it or not, I prayed one night, I said, "God, what can we do?"

For we can... And I never told nobody this.

I said, "What can we do for this food won't be going to waste?"

And I got a phone call one day and it seems unreal, and it, I mean, it seems unreal.

I got a phone call from a guy from the Department of Ag and Industries, and he asked me, he said, "What can you grow?"

He said, if I ask you, they said, "I got your number and your name because you part of the voucher program for the seniors."

And he asked me, he said, "If I were to ask you what products you was good at growing, what would you do?"

And I said, "Well, I can grow watermelons, I can grow squash, I can grow whatever."

He said, "Well, I'll tell you what?

I'm gonna give you a call back.

Just keep that thought in mind, and when you see my number, answer and I'll give you a call back."

And so with that being said, all of a sudden one day he said, "Hey, I wanna meet you at your farm."

And I said, "Okay."

He said, "Somebody gonna meet you at the farm."

And so I met a guy at the farm, which was Mr.

Don Wambles.

And I knew his name from being on the paper, but I never seen him before.

And he showed up and he met me on the highway and we was picking peanuts at the time.

And he said, he said, "Hey, I'm Don Wambles."

I said, "Whoa!

Mr.

Don Wambles?"

He said, "Yep, that's me."

And so that's what got us in this program and started us building towards that right there and making that dream come true.

So that prayer was answered when they showed up at my door.

After working with Mr.

Don now for about five years upon different various programs, something came up, the Resilient Food Program come up.

It was a grant, and we applied for that grant and we put together what, from what I learned about what we needed in this area, what we can produce, what we was lacking in.

And I put together a plan and said, hey, we need a processing building, we need trucks, we need refrigeration, and we need cutting equipment.

And so we sat down and we thought and I went back and forth with different farms and stuff, and we thought about what would benefit us as a whole, what would benefit the customers and what would benefit us.

And so with that, this ideal of this processing facility came to tuition.

We able to sell to local schools throughout this county and Montgomery County, Elmore County, and Houston County schools and all the way up to Oxford up in the middle of Alabama.

So yeah, through this program, we able to move product to different schools.

And the feedback we got on those products is that the schools love them.

They, I mean, because they fresh out the field, the kids eat 'em, they ask for those products.

We got refrigerated trucks and to transport those products and we got equipment to value-add those products, which is a blessing for the cafeteria workers and for us because when they get the food, they have limited time to prepare the food.

So through this project, we are able to dice, chop, bag, wash our ready-to-eat meal, which is awesome.

This grant right here has changed the area forever, I would say.

Talking to a lot of the farmers that know my dad and things around here, they always wish to have something where they can focus on vegetable production.

And with this grant, this has allowed us to stay in business, to move away from peanuts and cotton and corn and to the vegetable growing business, which like in the southeast.

Extreme Green Farms is a hydroponic farm located in Auburn, Alabama.

We grow lettuce year-round, 365 days a year.

We pretty much produce lettuce and sell it to the entire State of Alabama.

Some of our lettuce goes up to Huntsville area, some of it goes down to Baldwin County area.

All schools in between that.

Restaurants, primarily in our immediate area.

Hydroponic growing allows you to limit a few of the things that are big strains on our resources.

Number one, that would be water.

So it takes a lot of water to grow anything.

And with hydroponic growing, we're able to use about five to 10% of the water that you would use in a traditional agricultural setup.

In addition to that, is the space that it requires.

So we are able to take, you know, what would be about 10 acres or so of growing space in traditional agriculture and we're able to cut that down to a little less than an acre and grow the same amount of product.

So the RFSI grant has obviously allowed us to provide greater accessibility to our locally grown produce.

For us, that means, first of all, having expanded cold storage.

Because if we're gonna grow more product and we have to have a place to store that.

In addition to that, it's also improved our transportation needs with the van that you can see here behind me, the van is refrigerated, so that allows us to transport our product a longer amount of distances.

In addition to that, we've also been able to increase our traceability through different technology additions that we've made here.

The RFSI program has been a lifesaver for us.

I think it helped us out with the summer feeding programs, the collaborations that we have there.

You know, there's a lot that was taken away from farmers last year and this gave us the ability to fill those gaps.

A long term in the next five years, we just hope to continue to increase that market reach across the State of Alabama.

A big part of that is schools.

We continue to increase our school impact.

And with our greater transportation and our greater cold storage, we're able to grow more and then obviously add more customers as we're able to grow more on our farm.

So when product is produced locally and we can harvest it same day as delivery, you extend the shelf life of the product.

The fact that we have the product and deliver it to the schools ourself, less people are handling that product.

It's a healthier, cleaner product.

I think the biggest challenge that schools face getting local product is the fact that they produce mostly in the summertime and the schools are open mostly during the wintertime.

So getting that product to hold over until the wintertime or be available for them to be transported to them is the challenge that the schools face.

And then second to that is different schools want different product that's not available everywhere across the state.

The RFSI program gives us the ability to store that product and also distribute it when the schools are available to access that product.

Selling to schools helps us tremendously because it gives the kids the opportunity to taste this healthy, fresh food and know that it came from a local grower.

It's a win-win for everybody.

So the kids get the experience of having the healthy food and the farmer gets the opportunity to produce that food for the local kids.

The RFSI program really helps to grow that across the state.

It gives us the ability to store the product, to give us the ability to transport the product and track the product across the state to different kids.

The Deep South Food Alliance is an aggregation center for small farmers where we buy that product, process it, put it back out on the open market.

And we also provide outreach and technical assistance to help them to be able to produce those products.

When we first started looking at the infrastructure grant, it was quite a undertaking, and it was really too big for Deep South and its capacity alone.

So we kind of brought in the troops.

Other ages and institution across the Black Belt that had the similar needs, and we joined forces together to make it happen.

When we first got started, we had ladies and men from the community that was hand cutting greens and hand doing everything and all that.

This equipment going to help us to be able to use the machine to do some of that work.

And what may happen is it help us with efficiency.

When you got a lot of labor, you spending a lot of money, and 'cause we don't wanna put anybody out out of a job, we'll just have some rotating the shift.

They learn to use the equipment and what have you, and then they won't be so tired when they finish.

And then we can increase the capacity and be able to serve greater market.

Before this, we couldn't expand the center here, we couldn't especially couldn't buy the equipment.

This grant enabled us to buy a brand new refrigerated van.

And so it helped us to be able to move to the next level.

And what we're gonna be working on is profitability and so we can kind of grow on own.

So this is was a great start.

And the other thing is too is that having an aggregation center here, we can work with other aggregation centers across the state and we can cross-pollinate product.

You know, we may not need to process something here.

We can get it from somewhere else and vice versa.

So until we got this infrastructure grant in to buy these equipment, we couldn't do that because we didn't have the capacity.

So I see us now being able to pursue those kind of avenues.

Before the grant then it was just pretty much every person was for his or herself.

And through the co-op, we get to pool the resources and purchases.

And the biggest thing is having a outlet to market your product and move it on as fast.

You may be able to sell it on the corner, but you definitely know you could sell it through the processing plants.

We are living in a food desert.

We don't have a lot of farmers, you know?

But by the farmers co-oping together like we are here, that kind of guarantees that those communities would have a source of fresh grown produce.

That's one of the things about the co-op is you have to learn to cooperate with each other.

And so when one person is having the issue and then they'll get on the phone call or text and we'll make ourselves available.

Because the farmers are of different age and experience, then the younger farmers are able to tap into a lot of that wisdom that is not in the textbook.

I think the answer is building that system and we going to have to look at clustering in some production systems and aggregation points across the Black Belt.

A lot of the small farmers can't produce the capacity that are needed to build the system.

So I think moving forward we need to look at some production/aggregation system across the Black Belt.

We need to be looking at West Alabama, Central Alabama, and East Alabama.

And we need to be located close to the transportation corridors to be able to make all this work.

And I think that's the next step we need to work on.

And I think there's some interest in that.

And the reason why we don't have a food system in the Black Belt now is probably because nobody had built one.

I think that we have to come together, create the vision, do the research, and then find out and figure out how to implement a strategic plan of some kind.

Right now, we have a vision but we don't have a roadmap.

So I think all of the partners need to come together and let's build a strategic plan around what we're looking at, and let's bring landowners to the table, to the planning table and farmers to the planning table as we do this.

So what I do from day to day can be highly variable.

I work with farmers a lot.

I work here at the Black Belt Marketing and Innovation Center quite a bit, in processing.

I work with other processors quite a bit.

And markets, we help develop markets.

And literally everything in between, trying to develop the Black Belt Food Corridor, which is a regional food system to meet the needs of the Black Belt residents here.

The Black Belt Marketing and Innovation Center is unique as an extension facility because it was a group of farmers in this Dallas County area came together and requested such a facility.

They wanted a place to aggregate and process their products, and Tuskegee University answered the call.

We tried another facility down the road, it didn't work out.

And then we finally got this facility, which used to be an arcade.

It's about 18,000 square feet here that we have to work with.

We renovated it to add the loading dock out front, the cooler and the freezer and the processing area here.

And we've been processing fruits and vegetables here for about a decade or more and a lot in the last few years.

And so it's been wonderful to get to work with the ASAC on the RFSI project to do some renovations here, which really helps us to meet food safety requirements and meet some of the market requirements that we're up against.

Once that producer is looking to harvest that product, once they get it out of the field, then they say what happens next, you know, that's what we have to talk about we wanna reduce field heat, we wanna try to make sure that product is gonna be the best quality possible.

So at that point, that's where we gotta look at starting, is this going directly to sorting?

Is it going directly to packing?

Do we need to chill it, you know, from the field?

Do we need to chill it once it gets packed?

All different, you know, variety of what happens next with that product.

But before that product gets to the retail stores or the grocery stores or wherever they're going, food school systems or whatnot.

And the BMIC has been kind of instrumental in developing not only just some of the marketing opportunities that they're used to with, you know, fresh and whole produce, but being able to offer a value-added piece of it as well.

So being able to cut, bag, chop different products has given them an opportunity to get into different markets and local stores and local schools.

So we were really happy to be a part of the RFSI project because our floor here in the processing area was not up to stuff.

We had some peeling pains and we had some water issues, and so we were able to put in a drain here and put in this really nice commercial food grade floor here, and we love it.

We're able to clean it more easily and keep it more sanitary that way and do more because of it.

And we were also able to put in a freezer that it will hold 22 pallets or one truckload of product and it's now available for farmers to use to store product.

So it's been tremendous in moving this facility forward in service to farmers in the area.

Outside of just being able to grow what they normally do, call it squash, kale, things like that, this gives 'em the opportunity to have somewhere to process, maybe again, extend some of their product opportunities as well as store it on a large scale.

So as we are able to use this as a collection point for some of our smaller farmers, it definitely works as a great place for transportation and distribution from here.

Since it's a university facility, our mission is education, research, and extension.

So we do applied research here, usually at the request of industry.

We have interns here and other groups of students that come, and they're able to use the commercial processing equipment and get hands-on experience doing that.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to add to a resume when you go to look for a job that you have applied experience with commercial processing equipment.

And then on the extension side, we allow farmers to come in and aggregate and process product here.

So we have a cooler space that sometimes a farmer will just need a cooler space for a couple of days so they can get to another market with something, or they can process product and they can put it in the freezer, which really extends the shelf life of it.

It can stay there for months or even years, right?

And then they can market the product that way.

So being an intern here, I've really worked with all aspects of the agriculture field.

So I started out just learning about agriculture and, you know, going on farm tours and meeting farmers.

And I ended up, you know, working on my own research and working on other projects like a cost of production analysis.

I worked on import substitution in the Black Belt, you know, kind of over overall leading to more profitability in the Black Belt region.

So it is a great benefit to the farmers and it helps them put more of that food dollar back into their pockets.

And because we are marketing locally, that money can recirculate in our economies.

So, you know, when we buy locally from a farmer, that farmer's then able to take their family out to eat, they're able to pay for dance lessons for their children.

And so it's circulating in the Dallas County economy, which is huge for everyone, including the farmers that are making more money because of it.

But we're hoping that it's also a workforce development project and an economic development boom for Dallas County.

So this place is a big help in the community because farmers are able to come here and process their produce in this facility.

And, you know, a lot of times farmers come here with an idea and then they get to talking to people like Dr.

Woods and Dr.

Woods can really give them insight on, you know, value-added, you know, maybe don't do this but do it this way.

So, you know, it's really a learning opportunity for a lot of people.

It's been an opportunity for producers to learn, to expand, and again, to market some of their, some of their newly, or also been opportunities for them to do research on which products work best for them, which, you know, commodities are gonna be best for their markets.

And in with the work of, with the help of Tuskegee, Department of Ag and Industries, Federation of Southern Cooperatives, it's been a collection of different organizations that have kind of brought that corridor together.

In Alabama, everybody that we work with, they're our friend.

We build relationships with all of these farmers across the state, which is extremely important.

Whenever they see us coming, we want them to have a smile on their face, not say, oh no here, can they come again.

And we work real hard at building those relationships.

The most rewarding part of working with this RFSI program is the relationships that I've built with these farms, with these communities.

Because the great thing about these projects is that they're not just benefiting one farm.

They really are reaching across regional lines, state lines.

They're tapping into all kinds of different markets, and so many people are benefiting from these programs.

When I came to the Department of Agriculture, I had no idea that I would get to be a part of something so cool.

But our farmers are really great and it's a blessing to be able to work with them.

I really and truly down in my heart believe that when they start hearing the results, our reports of what these projects, our RFSI projects are doing, they will come with another round of funding.

I believe it's going to be that earth-shattering in the agriculture world.

I anticipate that the RFSI investment will allow us to greatly increase the number of farmers that we are helping to find markets for their product.

I think that it will greatly increase the number of consumers that we're able to help find product that they're searching for.

I think that it will allow us to work in a way that meets a demand on both ends.

A need that a farmer has and a want that the consumer or the marketplace has.

We look at the RFSI program as a collaboration between farmers, between people that have and don't have.

So if we have a vehicle and Taylor, at Boozer Farms has storage, let's get the product there, get it redistributed from there.

If we can assist with getting product out to other schools and other distribution locations, that that's what we look at from our RSFI perspective.

It is very, very important.

This is something that I never had had the experience to experience it before the last couple years or so here.

We're find out now that it is great opportunities out there for the farmer, and it has been very helpful to us.

So we need to try to keep on reaching out to continue on help the farmer and then that way we might be able to bring in beginner farmers to learn how or want to farm 'cause it's very important.

One of the struggles is you have farms that start and then we see 'em fail, and I almost never see 'em fail because they don't know how to farm or how to grow something.

It's the marketing aspect that so often is the struggle.

So they know how to produce an amazing crop, but you can't stay in business if you've produced amazing crop and can't sell it.

And so that's really where I guess I see Boozer Farms and the role that I really want to serve in the industry is helping those farms be able to market that product.

I think if we figure out how to build these clusters that we talked about probably, and I'm talking about finding, you know, two or 300 acre sites that where you can have the cold storage, the processing, everything from these sites.

And I think that we can bring our young folks in and be a participant of these sites farming 50 acres or whatever.

But what we gotta figure out is how can our young folks make a living wage doing this?

And if we could figure that part out, a lot of 'em will stay home, would stay at the Black Belt and do some things, but we gotta figure that part out.

The other piece is, is that we gotta be able to figure out a safety, financial safety net of some kind to encourage them to take a look at food production and what have you.

And we gotta make it enticing enough, and we also gotta gotta figure out how we can relate technology into the process.

And we gotta do those kind of things to attract our younger folks.

And we need to start at an early age doing high school interns and that kind of thing and get some buy in from that end.

I really do think that RFSI has the potential to attract new farmers, young farmers, to the program simply because of some of the technology that we have already built-in in these facilities that we're building.

But you think about what else could be put there.

And our young kids today, they're fascinated with technology and the, you know, a lot of our produce is hand harvested.

There's some crops out there that already today can be mechanically harvested.

So you bring another level of technology from the field all the way through the processing plant, and I think that's going to be intriguing to young folks.

From a production standpoint, we hope that we gain more producers from RFSI.

Commissioner Pate's always been an advocate of the specialty crop industry is one of the best industries to enter on a small scale.

It it's different than going out and buying 500 acres of land and getting in the row crop business and having a lot of equipment infrastructure to initially purchase.

So we can take several young beginning farmers, get them to grow produce on a small scale.

In particular, I'm just gonna point out the project in Southeast Alabama and how there is going to be a processing facility in Southeast Alabama where ultimately we hope that five to 10 years from now that there is 30, 40, 50 small producers that are growing the products that they would like to further process there to strengthen more local products and more regional products.

In order to get more youth involved in farming, we need to show them that this is actually a viable career pathway, that they can make a living this way.

And it is not certain at this time that they can.

So we need some policy changes at the national level to be able to sustain family farms and allow them to go into farming as a career.

Many, many of our students and our farmers in the region have to work full-time jobs and then their farming on the side, which means that we can't grow the volume of food that we consume in the region.

This facility is designed for those one to five acres, to those 10 to 40 acre farmers.

You know, it is the support that comes from this facility has been tailored and key to keep some of those small farms in operation.

You know, without being able to come here, have opportunities to process some of their products, store some of it, they probably still wouldn't be in, you know, in operation.

So this facility has given them a great, you know, step forward in that aspect.

I think because of this grant that our farms are gonna grow at least 25 to 30% over the next five years.

The reason is commodity prices are low and the only other option that we have, we love the land, is vegetables.

And through this grant we was able to, we able now to process vegetables, store vegetables and distribute 'em throughout the year, which in entails, lets the farms be able to last longer and have a steady cash flow.

Five years from now, we would like to have a bigger organization and with a bigger market and farmers, young and old working together and bettering the community as well as feeding the nation.

(insect chirping) You know, I love where we're at and kind of the footprint that we are making.

My goal is to continue to be able to support other farms and help to move fruit and vegetable farming as a whole forward by really helping those small to medium-sized niched farms find the best outlets and ways to partner with the consumers that have the demand for their product.

I would like to see this place in the next five years probably replicated across the state, across the Black Belt region specifically, to be able to offer producers even more opportunity on their particular farms or within their close area.

So like I say, again, I think this will be something great that's replicated by some of the cooperatives that we've been working with to be able to, you know, again, create some of that business infrastructure within their own facilities.

I didn't want to get, I didn't intend to get this deep, but when you start the work and you build the relationships, then you have a tendency to wanna move it to the next level and do as much good as you can.

What I would like to see in five years with the Deep South Food Alliance is to be a part of a bigger system.

Maybe looking at a food system corridor for the Black Belt, and let's bring in partners from across the Black Belt and let's build a system.

I don't think the Deep South being a solo organization can get where we need to go, but, you know, where is unity there's strength.

So I think I'd like to see us build that corridor, build those relationship and put the Black Belt on the market for producing some of the food that we not only use in the Black Belt, but also using other parts of the country.

By local.

You know, as Alabamians it is buying local produce from our farmers to show them that their community still supports them first off.

Being able to kind of, again, always work with the producer, work with that are gonna have some of the best practices or some of the best sustainable practice for that product as well as their land.

So conservation is one thing that's gonna always be key with them.

So just being able to support those farmers within the local market to say, hey, we see what you're doing, we see what you're growing.

We want you to grow more and make sure that Alabamians gonna always be our first customers.

My goal for RFSI is to afford our farmers the ability to increase their production, not lose any sales with that increased production.

As a matter of fact, it increases their sales as well.

And if we're increasing production and we're increasing sales, our farmers are going to be making more money.

And as they start doing that, we're going to see this farmer over here and this farmer over here look and see what's happening, especially our row crop farmers.

The world we are in today, our row crop farmers are struggling.

I can see the potential for some row crop farmers to start growing produce and sending it through some of our RFSI projects, which they're going to need.

The money that's invested, we got a facility, that facility needs to run 10 or 12 months out of the year.

So we we're gonna need more growers.

You know, I hope the legacy's gonna be to be more people to be able to stay in rural Alabama.

I'm convinced there's people that want that lifestyle.

They wanna raise their children there.

We just have to give 'em a way to do it.

And this is one part of infrastructure to help, allow them to be able to stay in those communities and prosper.

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