In this episode, Michael Reilly, co-founder of Foodshed Capital talks about his nonprofit loan program which helps clients in farming and beyond. Since making their first loan in January of 2019, Foodshed Capital has contributed over $600,000 in low- or no-interest loans to farms and food enterprises and 85 percent of these loans have gone to businesses owned, at least in part, by women and people of color. Foodshed Capital offers services that go beyond funding with a view to equipping businesses with the education and tools they need to succeed, and Michael gives us a glimpse into what their current portfolio of 45 existing clients looks like. His goal for the future is to continue to build the additional streams of support he offers to farmers, and that extends far beyond financial support, especially to Black and brown farmers. Join us to hear all this and much more today!
Key Points From This Episode:
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How the events around the pandemic vindicated the work that Foodshed Capital does
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How malware attacks have been an additional threat to security.
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The services that Foodshed Capital offers that go beyond funding to equip businesses.
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The work he is doing to help farms to prioritize business as well as produce food.
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Why most of the farms registered are ‘small farms’ and the wide range of other types.
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How passion is important but can lead to burnout if it is the only motivating force.
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What the current portfolio looks like, having made 51 loans, with 45 current clients.
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Their ideal client: farms with a long-term horizon and options to diversify their revenue.
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How some farms are diversifying revenue through consulting and agritourism.
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Why it is preferable to have three channels of income within any kind of business.
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Some examples of outreach that they do, working with farms in Pennsylvania.
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Sustaining the funding requirement as the biggest challenge they face as a business.
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How their average loan size has more than doubled over the past year.
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His hope to make larger loans to support land acquisition in the future.
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Where his funding comes from: philanthropy, investing, and the CDFI.
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His goal for the future: improving the additional services offered that go beyond funding.
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How the organization is seeking out ways to lend differently, especially to Black and brown farmers.
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The growth that he has seen in terms of education and conversation around food services.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
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Click Here for Full Transcript:
[0:00:30.9] GEORGIANA DEARING: Hello, foodie fans. Today, I’m speaking with Michael Reilly, the Founder of Foodshed Capital, an organization committed to funding an equitable and regenerative local food economy. I reached out to Michael after hearing him speak at a regional event. I was captivated by his mission driven lending and how much of his work is aimed at the heart of changing our food supply. The small farmers and food businesses that are committed to changing our food supply.
The small farmers and food businesses that are committed to changing how food arrives at our tables. They focus primarily on biological farming and related businesses who are working to reduce the use of chemicals, balancing the soil to produce healthy, pest and disease resisting crops and when fed to livestock, these same crops lead to healthy and productive animals.
Since their first loan was made in January of 2019. Foodshed Capital has contributed over $600,000 in low or no interest loans to farms and food enterprises and 85 percent of these loans have gone to businesses owned, at least in part by women and people of color.
This is a slow money approach to making change. With these low-cost loans aren’t just handouts, they come with assistance in pointing the way forward for sustainable agriculture. One of roughly a thousand CDFIs in the United States, this Community Development Financial Institution or CDFI not only provides funding but also assist businesses by connecting owners to affordable and often, free resources that they can leverage to help them succeed and profit while working to pay back their loan.
Michael’s work connects to my work and that we’re all trying to make these small businesses smart businesses who are positioned not just to survive but to thrive. I learned a lot during our conversation and I hope you find it as interesting and informative as I have.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:02:52.8] GEORGIANA DEARING: Well, hi, Michael. Thanks for joining me today.
[0:02:55.3] MICHAEL REILLY: You’re welcome, George. Great to be here.
[0:02:57.2] GEORGIANA DEARING: Well, before we get started, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your role and the organization you represent?
[0:03:05.0] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, sure, absolutely. I am the cofounder and executive director of an organization called Foodshed Capital. We are a non-profit loan fund that provides financing to small scale, organic, biological farms that have difficulty accessing capital. We’re a three-year-old organization, we’re based right here in central Virginia, our official office is in Richmond but I work out of my home in Charlottesville.
[0:03:32.3] GEORGIANA DEARING: I saw in your website that you provide financial stewardship to farms and food enterprises. Are you strictly in farming?
[0:03:40.1] MICHAEL REILLY: No, we work mostly with farms but yeah, as our website says, we work with other food-related businesses that are non-farm businesses. Over the last three years that we’ve been making loans, we’ve worked with the restaurant and some value ad and businesses, bakery, a couple of food hubs. We definitely embrace other types of businesses.
Our main requirement while working with a non-farm business is that the business does support the local food system in some way. Whether that’s sourcing ingredients or a restaurant, sourcing a lot of their ingredients and then of course, a food hub would sort of be self-explanatory in terms of helping to support the local food system.
[0:04:23.1] GEORGIANA DEARING: That’s really cool because I have often thought of you as just being like farm support but it’s nice that you do those value-added businesses in the local agriculture so that’s pretty cool.
[0:04:33.6] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, again, we’re here to support local food systems and of course, producers are important but if they don’t have somebody to sell to, it makes it very difficult. We can now really try and support those businesses along the value chain are really important.
[0:04:48.0] GEORGIANA DEARING: Well, I’ve been asking people this same question because the pandemic really had a big impact on all food industries, particularly, restaurants but all of them and I’m just curious, what happened for your group, your organization last year and this is going to be airing in the fall so we’re probably going to be facing some of those same challenges.
[0:05:07.4] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, let’s hope not but you’re right, it’s getting a little bit concerning for sure. Well, you know, going back to late March, early April of 2020, there was a lot of concern. I mean, a lot of farms were really worried, farmers markets were closed down, everything was closed down and there was some serious concern about the work that we were doing. We had a portfolio of farms and businesses that we had supported and we didn’t know if they were going to be able to stay in business.
Fortunately, since then, COVID really has almost had, in a way, sort of a positive impact I think on our work because what we saw was an unfolding of events that really sort of vindicated the work that we do. Everybody knows by now the story of the grocery store shelves being raided and laid bare, with no products on them for several weeks in the spring of 2020 and a lot of people returning to local food and realizing that for a lot of new customers who never bought from local farms that this was wow, this is like something that was there for them when they really needed it.
Once the farmers market got going, it worked through all the regulatory issues and restrictions and things like that, they got back up and running and that was very helpful and so, farms really got back on their feet in many ways. We have found that COVID, again, just underscored the real ethos behind our work, which is that we need to really seriously look at supporting local food as a means of resilience and we’ve been sort of spouting this line since we started and most of it was around climate change and the weather and how local food systems can be more resilient in the face of changing climate and more erratic weather.
Now, we have the pandemic and so it’s an added storyline that we talk about and that we now know that this pandemic is not going away anytime soon and it could be something that’s with us for a long time to come and new strains that come along and that sort of thing. It just helps us to really tell our story about the needs for resilient local food system and communities being able to feed themselves.
Then on top of that, we had sort of a third element that came into play this summer with these malware attacks and so, we now know that that’s another threat to our security to sort of this way of life that we’re so used to, being able to get food whenever we want, we’re all impacted by the gasoline shortage and that it’s not necessarily connected to food but it certainly synthesizes how much of a risk there is, there was a malware attack on a meat processing plant, which did interrupt some of the supply chain there.
[0:07:50.9] GEORGIANA DEARING: Yeah, it was definitely a story of supply chain in the last year and yeah, you’re like many of the businesses that I have talked to that there have been some sheepishly admitted silver linings to the pandemic because you can’t disallow all the sad and tragic things that happened but a lot of local food has found places to flourish in that space and so, yeah, it’s a little yin and yang I guess.
[0:08:18.2] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, sheepish is definitely a good way to put it. I always feel a little bit self-conscious about sort of feeling a little bit giddy about what the pandemic has done but obviously there has been a lot of suffering, not just physical suffering but economic suffering for a lot of folks. Don’t ever want to really imply anything other than it’s been very much a challenge but yeah, there are silver linings and I think everyone would agree, we all have our stories and silver linings.
There’s millions of us who are introverted and have just kind of like, you know, not having to go out in public as much as usual. I think we all can relate to that in some way shape or form.
[0:08:58.4] GEORGIANA DEARING: Yeah. I’m going to ask you, beyond funding, can you tell me some other things that your organization does to help local food?
[0:09:06.5] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, we started with this idea that farms had difficult and small businesses, these businesses have difficulty to access of capital so that’s a fundamental program we have, how can we get capital into the hands of those businesses that have difficulty accessing it.
Ultimately though, we really want to create successful businesses. Not create but we want to help perpetuate it and assist with viable businesses as much as we can so we’re starting to focus more and more on what we can do to support those businesses, whether it’s helping them with their bookkeeping, they don’t have a website, pointing them in the right direction, helping them with social media, probably a lot of things you’re used to doing.
There’s just so many elements to running a business and a lot of farmers are, they’re really good at like getting stuff to come out of the ground like producing food but most of them are not so good at running a business, which is a lot different from many small businesses a lot of small businesses start up with like the business mindset like, “How can I run a business” and then, whatever it is they’re doing, sort of, that’s just part of the process. With farms, it’s about growing food or producing food and the business part sort of is just kind of an afterthought.
We’re trying to sort of change that narrative, not ourselves, I mean there are certainly a lot of other folks doing this work but we’re just trying to play our role in terms of changing the narrative around small farms and not only getting them to act more like small businesses but getting others to respect them as small businesses because they’re often not. We saw that in the early days of the pandemic when they came out with a lot of the early COVID funding relief that was distributed through SPA, the EIDL program and the PPP programs.
They excluded farms because farms were not considered small businesses under the SPA definitions. That was really challenging and very frustrating and it got some quick action on behalf of advocates for farms that got changed but it was a bottleneck in the beginning.
[0:11:11.6] GEORGIANA DEARING: This is me not understanding all the statistics here but percentage wise, the number of farms in the US, isn’t it like crazily skewed to small family enterprises where someone probably has another job to keep food on their tables?
[0:11:29.6] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, you're right, it’s really hard to pinpoint just how many there are out there. I don’t have the numbers exactly off the top of my head but yeah, there are certainly, most of the food that is produced that flows through the supply chain to the grocery stores and chain restaurants comes from big, mega farms but most of the farms, if we look into numbers, most of the farms out there that are registered as farms are “small farms.”
Now, within that definition, you have a wide variety of flavors, you have hobby farms, you have homestead farms. The ones that we work with are the true small farms that are doing direct market into the local food system through farmers market sales and wholesale to whether through restaurants or local grocery stores or whatever it might be. Really trying to put a number on those, it’s kind of tough, it’s really kind of hard to say, how many of them are out there but you’re right, there are a lot of small farms throughout the US.
[0:12:35.0] GEORGIANA DEARING: Well, I wanted to go back to a couple of things you said because one of them, you said that farmers don’t think of themselves as being a business first or business minded first or about growing things and I thought, you know, you’d be surprised at how many people who are in the craft food industry or people who have a passion about a local food recipe or a local food product that they’re trying to bring to market, the get so wrapped up in the passion of it that they kind of undervalue the business side of it and I suspect that some of what happens in farming is that, “Well, it’s just what I do” you know?
[0:13:09.1] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, I think there’s quite a bit of that, I think it’s changing but I think many farmers do get into farming because they’re just so passionate about it and it’s critical that farmers feel that way because it’s so difficult to do and you know, you’ve got to have that that passion, people certainly don’t get into farming to make a lot of money like they might do in a lot of other industries.
That passion needs to be there but I think what does happen is that passion becomes the one motivating force and farmers will say, “I just love doing this and I don’t really care about the money” and that works for some but I think there’s a limit to that and eventually, what happens is they get burned out or they just struggle so badly with the finances.
Usually, it’s a combination of not making enough money and working such long hours that physically and mentally, it just takes a toll.
[0:14:05.8] GEORGIANA DEARING: It’s hard to see the payoff if you’re not really making a wage that supports the effort.
[0:14:13.6] MICHAEL REILLY: it’s just only so far that somebody can humanly endure that before they finally give out the give out.
[0:14:21.0] GEORGIANA DEARING: Do you provide some sort of access to resources for coaching or support or business structure or things like that beyond just the capital?
[0:14:32.2] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, that’s what we are constantly developing, these new organization, we don’t claim to have all the answers in place already, we’re continuing to build out those systems and to this point, we’ve been doing much of it through collaboration with other organizations, one we work with very closely is a company called Kitchen Table Consultants, they are based up in Philadelphia area, they’ve been around since 2009 providing business consultation and trainings to farms and food businesses throughout a good part of the east coast.
We began collaborating with them to provide training to our borrowers and that relationship has worked really well, we also will collaborate when we can with local SPDC offices, there’s one right here at Charlottesville that’s housed in the same office with the community investment collaborative CIC which is a CDFI here in Charlottesville and so we have collaborated with them a little bit on technical assistance as well and we’re in the process of hopefully expanding our staff internally to be able to provide those resources a little bit more efficiently because as our portfolio grows, now, we’re up to – we’ve made 51 loans to date and some of those have already paid down.
Our portfolio currently has about 45 businesses in it. As it grows, it gets harder to keep track of all of them but we’re determined to do that and so we’re just continuing to look at systems that can allow us to provide each farm the individual needs, address each individual’s needs that they have.
[0:16:06.8] GEORGIANA DEARING: Can you tell me, what does your best client look like? What kind of farm or food organization are you looking for?
[0:16:15.0] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, you know I think as far as farms go, we are looking for farms that really do have a long-term horizon and we want to see farms that are going to be around for 10, 20 years and so this kind of gets back to the burnout issue and so we look at what has the farm done already to really establish good systems, what are their financial systems, the marketing that they’re doing, their sales channel.
That’s pretty important, it helps if they have a track record. We do work with some newer farms and in those cases we want to see the farm operators, if they work somewhere else before, what kind of trading do they have. Ideally, we like to see farms that have the capacity and the openness to sort of diversify their revenue, so if the only revenue is just going to the farmer’s market every weekend that might work for a while but again I think there’s a risk to that.
Again, there is burnout involved because that is really, really hard to do. There is also the lack of control over the market. You know, who knows? Like the market itself may fall apart, they may lose the land that they are using and so there is a lot of risk in that so we want to see farms that maybe are developing value added products that are diversifying in some way.
Maybe it’s through agro-tourism. We know now a lot of farms might have like an Airbnb property that they are using to make money and they tie that into agro-tourism where they have Airbnb renters come in and maybe learn through staying on the farm, what sustainable farming is like. Getting involved in consulting, we have one farm that we work with, there is a lot of consulting for other farms to help farms learn how to farm better and new ways that protect the soil and biodiversity and that sort of thing. Again, like any business it is sort of just adaptability, being able to adjust the changing conditions.
[0:18:13.5] GEORGIANA DEARING: That’s kind of where there’s some overlap, like my primary clients are packaged goods, right? Specifically, I want to work with craft brands who are doing local sourcing, who can trace their ingredients back to a farm but they need more than one sales channel to have a healthy business. You know I wouldn’t – I just interview a woman who went into the pandemic and her only channel was food service and selling to restaurants, which meant all of her sales are gone overnight.
She had to quickly adapt and develop a retail channel and was quite successful at it but I hear you saying if a farm is only going to the farmer’s market that’s just one channel of income. You are looking for people who have a little bit of diversity of where their revenue stream is coming.
[0:19:01.5] MICHAEL REILLY: Absolutely, yeah. Three solid channels would be really good and hopefully restaurants is not necessarily one of them. It is good to have restaurant business but farms really – but there are some that do it but there are very few that have a lot of success on just focusing on restaurant business and then of course, as we saw the pandemic back and just disappear overnight.
[0:19:23.7] GEORGIANA DEARING: Yeah, so how do you find your customer base? Do they come to you or how do you find them?
[0:19:29.5] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, mostly yeah and they kind of come to us. We really haven’t had to do much aggressive marketing. I think from the very beginning, we have developed I think organically and spread by word of mouth so early on when I cofounded the organization, my cofounder was also involved in local food and knew a lot of farms, had a lot of connections.
When we planted our stake in the ground and said, “Okay, we’re going to start making loans” we had personal networks that we could reach out to, to say this is now available and so the first ones we made were to farms that I had known for years, which I have been a customer of for many years in the Charlottesville area and then from there, it’s just word of mouth.
I’m very involved, it’s not saying we sit back and just kind of let them come to us. We do a lot of outreach through other organizations that we are involved in, so for me personally like I am on the board of directors of the Virginia Association for Biological Farming, which is a network of hundreds of farms around Virginia. I am on the board of the Virginia Farmers Market Association.
I am involved with the local food hub here in Charlottesville, we do a lot of collaborations with them. Just by word of mouth and then partnering again with other organizations, we’ve grown outside of Virginia and so word gets out to organizations that we partner with. I mentioned this kitchen table because came from Pennsylvania that is how we wind up doing 10, 11 loans now.
Pennsylvania, we are actually talking, we’re in discussions with a non-profit in upstate New York that works with a lot of farms in the Adirondack region, so another example of how we do outreach through other organizations that we partner up with and to this point, yeah, we have not had a problem farms finding us. Usually our biggest problem is this is kind of the slow time of the year.
Understandably, most farms are focused on farming, they are very busy but usually our problem is we have too much of a need and not enough funding to always meet it right away. We’re fortunate enough that we’ve generally been able to keep up with the demand but it gets a little crazy at sometimes just particularly in the off season where we find that demand really speaks. Just keeping up on the funding side is really where the stressor is more than anything.
[0:21:49.4] GEORGIANA DEARING: I am going to ask you about that because when I think of capital, I think of big, big buckets of money but you’ve also said that you’re a three-year-old organization and it sounded like you said you have had about six notes paid down, so to have paid those off in three years that doesn’t sound like hundreds of thousands of dollars. That sounds like buying a piece of equipment that you need or something like that.
[0:22:16.1] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah.
[0:22:17.7] GEORGIANA DEARING: Is there a range in the needs you fulfill like small to big or I am just curious?
[0:22:24.1] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, so we started out making mini microloans we all them, so our cap was $10,000. For the first year and a half or so, well, you know really up through the end of 2020, we capped our loans at 10,000 and that was primarily just to address the fact that we weren’t a large organization and we needed to monitor the supply and the demand and we wanted to make enough loans that we could manage it based on the funding that we had available.
Beginning in 2021, we increased the cap in our loans to 50,000 so our average loan size has grown from it was a little over $9,000 in 2020. In 2021, our average loan size has increased to about $20,000 so we now are finding that the need there is generally like in the $25,000 range and that is really mostly for – you know most of the requests are for equipment, infrastructure, working capital so we made a few loans of $50,000.
We’ve made quite a few of 25 and most of them are kind of falling within that range. It’s our goal over the long-term to be able to loan much more than that. We eventually want to help with land acquisition that is a big need for farmers to be able to buy land and finding the capital to buy land so that obviously requires more money. We’re hoping within the next maybe two, three, four years to be able to make 100 to $200,000 loans and support land acquisition.
[0:23:54.8] GEORGIANA DEARING: Okay. Well I mean, I am going to ask, where does your funding come from? Do you have individual investors or how does that work? How do you get the pool of money you steward?
[0:24:07.4] MICHAEL REILLY: Yeah, it’s a really good question. You know, as a loan fund, a non-profit loan fund, we’re sort of different than many non-profits where most non-profits are used to raising full-on property capital to support their payroll and other administrative costs and then their programming. We have all those needs but we also have to lend money, whereas many non-profits would be really excited maybe like by a $50,000 grant could go a long way.
It could pay a salary, whatever that’s great for us too, the only problem is we could get a $50,000 grant and if we have a loan request for $50,000, it could go right out the door really quickly. We started out strictly through stolen property capital, private donations through individuals as well as grants from several community foundations around state and then from some foundations nationwide. As we’ve grown in order to accommodate growth at some point, it is really difficult to lend money unless you are also borrowing money.
It would be really nice if and maybe some of your listeners would be willing to talk to us about writing a six or seven, even a seven figure check that’s straight philanthropy that would be wonderful. It would give us certainly a lot of flexibility to do our work but until that time, you know we do borrow money. We primarily been looking to borrow money from individual investors, so we have just a simple promissory note that we use.
It is an unsecured promissory note that we use for people who are interested in, you know, it is kind of a blend of philanthropy and investing. It means the return of capital so they promise that they will get their money back and there’s a small interest rate that they could earn but they also realize that the work we’re doing is high risk and there is always that potential that it could be written off as philanthropy. That is the ideal way that we hope to grow.
We know other organizations like ours can grow in that way. We are certified as a community development and financial institution, which is CDFI for short. Not many people know what that is, it’s okay but it’s a designation that is awarded through the US Treasury Department for organizations like ours that these community lending to underserved populations throughout the country, there is about a thousand of them. There is about 20 or so in Virginia.
What that does is it allows us to apply for some capital through our funds that is administered through the US Treasury Departments every year and then it also opens the door to some other funding sources mostly through commercial banks that have requirements to lend into underserved areas that they don’t typically do through their normal operation. You know, we’re looking at that. We have a loan through the USDA, we try to piece things together.
Really what we’re learning as we go along and again, I think the key for us is to find impact investments from individuals who are really very aligned with the work that we do and then who understand the work that we do. You’re not really going to get that much through a commercial bank loan or even through the US government, so that is kind of our strategy going forward.
[0:27:16.7] GEORGIANA DEARING: Yeah, so I was going to ask about going forward. You talked about the money side of it. What do you hope to be doing for your client base in the coming years? What’s next, I guess on the list?
[0:27:28.9] MICHAEL REILLY: What’s next? Oh wow, yeah. I think we really want to continue to perfect, if that’s the word we can use because nothing is ever perfect but we want to improve upon this sort of the additional resources that we can provide so that when somebody comes to us for a loan, we want to be able to make a loan so that we could help their business but we realized that that’s not the only thing that is going to help.
We want to continue to develop these additional services around helping the farm become a successful business, whether we do that on our own, more likely again in partnership with other organizations, they can bring these skills and to help farms and help our food system grow. We want to continue to – I really am talking about it yet but we do a lot of work to really support equity in the food system when we reach out very aggressively to Black and Brown farmers because we know historically they have been disenfranchised in the agriculture community and in the lending community.
We feel that it’s really part of our mission to do whatever we can to help change that, to help address those past in equities and disparities that have existed but we know we can’t change the system but we can do things that can help elevate the conversation and hopefully one day, we will really change the way that we lend money. I mean, not just in the agriculture community but just overall. I mean the lending systems it’s very beneficial in many ways but it is also fought with a lot of peril in terms of just good position that it puts people in.
In terms of the leverage and the risk, loss of real assets that can occur when you’re overleveraged and can’t make payments, so we’re really trying to be a force for change in that regard and speaking out in terms of ways that we can lend differently but particularly to Black and Brown farmers.
[0:29:27.7] GEORGIANA DEARING: That’s a really good piece of your mission there. Thank you for bringing that up, I should put that in my speaking notes but thank you. Well, if any of my listeners, if the magic works and someone wants to write you a check or if someone wants to ask you for funding, how would someone find you?
[0:29:48.4] MICHAEL REILLY: The best thing to do is just go to our website, it’s foodcap.org and just about everything is on there in terms of things that we’ve talked about here today in regard to our mission, there is contact information, my contact information there. You can find me quick on my email, we explain how people can donate if they want so all of that is there but I always welcome conversations with people. If anybody wants to reach out and talk to me more about the work we do or just about food in general, I am always happy to do that.
I think one of the great things about working in this as I am sure you know working in the food business, I mean who doesn’t want to talk about food, right? It’s an easy sell like even though it is tough getting funding, I always find that or at least people want to have the conversation because it is always interesting, people can relate to food. Everybody wants to know about it. I think we’re turning the corner here I think in this country to the point where people are more interested in farming.
I think growing up I know as a kid like you know, we never talked about farming and I grow up in suburbia. You know, there’s the running joke that they’ve done these studies in our country that showed that kids think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, things like that but you just don’t know where that food comes from. I think that’s changing like I really do. I think we see that more and you just see it in advertisement.
You know, so much more talk that you know some of it might be some pretty brutal green washing but nonetheless, as frustrating as green washing is it’s still like the conversations, it is still getting the conversation going. I think that is important and it does underscore the fact that more people are aware of the need to understand more about food, where it’s coming from and there’s no doubt in my mind that’s changing. Anyway, I am always happy to engage in discussions if anybody ever wants to reach out and have that conversation. I love to talk about it.
[0:31:49.7] GEORGIANA DEARING: Well, thank you for talking with me about it today. It was really interesting and I am always happy to learn more about what you are doing. We get asked questions so many times by farms and farmers and I don’t feel like that’s my wheelhouse, so I am always happy to bring resources and information in so that I can point people in the right direction, so thanks for joining me. I really enjoyed it.
[0:32:12.1] MICHAEL REILLY: Thank you for having me, George. I enjoyed it as well. I really enjoyed the conversation.
