Sign Banking Presentation Minnesota Later

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good afternoon everyone I'm Daniel Smith I'm president and CEO of cooperative network and I'd like to welcome you to our webinar this afternoon I'm building an industrial hemp industry in the state of Minnesota we are very pleased to have with us today harold stan and mouse key and right Riley gordon from the agricultural utilization research institute in minnesota their firm develops new uses for agricultural products through science and technology and they'll be discussing this exciting new crop well before we start a few things I'd like to tell you a little bit about cooperative network we are an association of cooperatives from 12 different business sectors in the state of Minnesota in the state of Wisconsin we do government affairs education director training and public advocacy for the co-operative system we usually have each year we have a series of conferences throughout the both States and each year we on collaboration with CoBank we have our cooperative business issues conference in Minneapolis this presentation today was to be on that four-hour Seba conference this year but of course because of the kovat pandemic that we're all dealing with that conference had to be canceled so we're very happy to have the opportunity to present this information to our valuable valued members and very appreciative to Harold and Riley for joining us today we're going to start with a few housekeeping things one you will see on your screen that we're asking what sector does your cooperative most of your cooperative most identified with if you could please take a moment to check that and then we'll move forward from there so I'll give you just a moment for that like to thank our sponsors for this webinar coal bank and CHS all participants will be on mute but you can use the Q&A section to ask questions this webinar and all in the series will be posted online afterward for you to view on demand in our second poll question for your consideration we'll leave that on the screen for a minute as well then so thank you for that and now I'm gonna turn it over to our speakers Harold and Riley thank you both for joining us today as I said they are with the agricultural utilization Research Institute based in Minnesota their film their firm helps develop new uses for agricultural products through science and technology and by partnering with businesses and entrepreneurs to make ideas reality the guy talked to us today about the industrial hemp industry this is an exciting new crop that we have all heard quite a bit about in the last couple years and I'm going to turn it over to Harold and Riley and and looking forward to your presentation thank you all right well good afternoon everyone just going to give you just a little bit of more background on myself and let my colleague Riley Gorton do the same again my name is Harold Stanislavski and project development director with the AG utilization Research Institute will tell you a little bit more about what we do in some slides that are coming up we work very very closely with the hemp industry that's developing in the state of Minnesota and we're very excited to share with you some of the work that we've been doing and basically the last two to three years so Riley why don't you introduce yourself yeah good afternoon I'm Riley Gordon originally from Brandon Manitoba Canada where I studied physics up there and then I came down in 2015 here to Minnesota to study civil and environmental engineering at the University of Minnesota and graduated there in 2017 and I've been working with a URI down in Arco products lab ever since coming up on three years now almost within the organization so we work on different bringing different waste streams from the agricultural sector into new products such as feeds fertilizers fuels bringing those those waste products up the values value chain we have a number of pieces of equipment hammer mill pellet nails a number of different things I'll kind of get into that a little bit for a presentation but yeah I kind of get pulled into the other areas as well bio-based products food renewable energy project as well so it's been a pretty good experience and hemp's been a big a big area that that Harold and I have both been kind of taking a lead role here in our organization and some of that work y'all will get to report on today so thank you for having us okay thanks I'm going to turn off my camera now so I don't be a distraction and we're going to get into the presentation building an industrial hemp industry in Minnesota is really key for us to advance this crop in our state all together so what a URI did along with a number of partners is start the process looking at value chains for this crop and we're going to get into it we created a report that's roughly I think it's 60 or 70 pages in length and it will be shown at the end of our presentation where you can get copies of that presentation which includes a good share of the information that Riley and I will share with you today so our hemp initiative objectives were we had a number of focus areas you might say on this we worked closely with producers and processors to identify industry needs in order to move both the fiber the seed forward in the state and we also looked at the analysis of the CBD oil the hemp mail the hem flower hemp fiber for quality control and identification of new uses everything from fuel to feed the fiber and beyond and of course it's very important to identify the hemp based markets and where they might be where they are likely to be in the future so we took a look at that and the identify state of the industry for processing co-product approval for feed because feed is a tremendously important aspect of the hemp industry and we'll talk about that but later in the slides and then of course release the public report with findings of opportunities and hurdles for the hemp industry in Minnesota next slide so who is a URI it's the AG utilization Research Institute where 30 years old we were created to basically foster long-term economic benefit through the development of new value-added uses for Ag Products and that could be everything perfuse to to new food ingredients to feeds and of course to bio plastics resins and a host of products such as that our locations in Minnesota we have a number of them I live in Fergus Falls Minnesota which is relatively close to Fargo North Dakota we have our headquarters located in Crookston analytical labs Marshall co-product lab in Waseca Minnesota and also a presence of the University of Minnesota campus in st. Paul our services are basically three in nature applied research and development we do not do basic research what we do is Applied Research which is basically taking things that have been discovered and applying them in the field with commercialization and innovation we're unique in the sense that we actually have scientists that work for us from from chemists food scientists co-product scientists engineers and product development specialists can move this industry forward and innovation and networking is key we literally have hundreds of not thousands of contacts across the United States and in Minnesota in order to move product development forward so a your eyes Food Lab is comprised of basically three professionals there on your screen now but we can do everything from food formulation and product development Nutrition Facts label II and such and this is very important for him by the way him as graphs of Google generally recognized as safe so we can develop food products but they of course need labeling and nutritional analysis to be purchased at retail we offer regulatory assistance and how to get that done and how to stay out of trouble sourcing ingredients and packaging is another service so we can determine shelf-life and the food product testing and thermal processes and product stability scale-up troubleshooting and oftentimes working with a co-packer or a commercial kitchen to move the product to product forward in the Waseca co-product lab where reilly works they do a number of things over there and they have a number of pieces of equipment that is so crucial to what we can do with him we've added a piece of equipment there that Riley will talk about later called the core Decatur that can separate the fiber components in the plant so it's useful for the making of products they're also very much interested in everything from animal feed to hempcrete paper bedding absorbance and so forth and of course we can make oil hemp seed hulls spent flower stalks and heard is also analyzed for various uses and purposes next slide so our focus areas again are food and when it comes to hemp that means oils powders and hemp parts that can go into the grocery store and be used in commercial operations that that have a need for them we we have a presence of a rather large Canadian company Manitoba harvest has offices in the twin cities and who's doing a great job moving him forward in our state bio-based products that's where we're working on right now we're going to show you some pretty exciting things that we're working on on fiber and heard applications and Co products there are several byproducts resulting from processing hemp and of course they can be oils and they can be feeds and things like that to move forward and then if we wanted to we could make renewable energy out of hemp biofuels it's really not profitable right now but that is a possibility for us as well next slide so to really get this thing started we need to understand the where we've been and where we're going in 2014 when that farm bill was passed it allowed research plot industrial hemp by state Minnesota jumped on that almost right away in 2015 the legislature created the Miss Minnesota Industrial Development Act it became law and therefore the law of the Minnesota Department of Ag to start issuing grower licenses to grow industrial hemp so our first fields were started in 2016 a where I got involved immediately when that happened and we started looking at this crop for new uses and how it could be commercialized in the state and then shortly after that time flies farm bill passed industrial hemp production nationwide as it has become a an approved crop now by the United States Department of Agriculture to grow so here we are in 2020 and the Minnesota infrastructure continues to emerge at a rapid rate and what do I mean by that we have a number of CBD oil extraction processing and value chain networks in Minnesota already I believe there's got to be at least eight if not ten extractors operating in the state and is willing to take CBD and process that oil into value chains now food-grade industrial hemp oil and protein plants have been established we have one in Waconia right now a small plant that can turn the plant into oil and also protein at that site fibre shed development research and studies are going on right now I'll share with you a little later in the presentation some of the early work that's being done on fiber and what our hopes for that fiber really could become rather significant in the state over time and then feed characterization for future feed approval which is pending we'll talk about that in a minute and then seed production and process and we have of course a large seed industry in the state of Minnesota with corn and soybeans and dry edible beans and potatoes and such the same thing will happen to hemp who will actually do breeding of genetics here and that will create more value-added it more interesting as we fine-tune the varieties for our climate next slide so basically this is old already this slide but you might as well say that just about every state in the Union now is pretty much on board with him South Dakota passed that this past year and so pretty much everybody's on board now and the crop was being raised in some way shape or form pretty much in every state but maybe one or two still holding out so these these are just acres that were reported in 2019 and a number of state growers licenses that were issued I was told this year by the Department of Ag that so far about 20,000 acres have been petitioned for by the state to grow this year in Minnesota I don't know if all of them will get planted but that's what's been requested right now and that's what Department of Ag is working with next slide you know for the group here today I find this slide very very important because what are the impediments and top challenges of moving a hemp industry forward kind of nationwide really and first of all you have to have processors to turn the crop into useful materials and you can see on this slide that a large amount of folks believe that that is a major challenge we too have found that to be an issue but it's it's catching up some the lack of banking services there's been progress made there but there are still bottlenecks in banking that that slow the industry down some but it is getting corrected very soon the credit cards and everything else that's needed to successfully run a business will eventually catch up and it'll all get done so that's moving wrong harvesting equipment that too is is well on its way and then all of the other things that you see there are just other things that people are concerned about to move the industry forward so we'll go to the next slide so if we look at hemp as a food product you know that to me right now on the food side is one of the more if there is such a thing as a stable market for him the food product would be the most stable number one is because the products are already in the marketplace and they're on the grocery stores and it's being sold here in the US it's got grass approval generally recognized safe so it's it's moving along now there's a little bit of a glut of hemp in the marketplace so contracts that are given to farmers now are mostly for organic production the non-organic is pretty well filled so there likely isn't any contracts to grow there Riley is showing you here that we get pretty good yields in Minnesota thousand pounds actually more than a thousand pounds in many places in the valley and in throughout Minnesota and the conventional price is about 40 cents a pound now in organic is about two maybe even as high as a dollar of 15 a pound for organic production and drying and cleaning are big concerns and Riley will address that and a little bit later next slide so what does him bring to the table as a food ingredient why would anybody be interested in in Hempfest food well number one is hemp as this Omega content that a lot of folks would like in their diet it's high in omega so that brings something to the table it's non allergenic for many many people so that's positive for a lot of folks out there and then of course it's a relatively high protein and non GMO and you can see that at least on the hemp oil side zero cholesterol zero trans fats so there's lots of good things about him I get excited about a tea URI that we can take him and we can blend it with other proteins and potential oils to develop you know even better products down the road and that's what innovation is all about that's why the food side is pretty good Riley I'm going to turn this slide over to you to talk a little bit about this piece of equipment and what you do in Waseca yeah for sure my can you hear me oh good yeah you're coming across but okay great so yeah so some of the looking into some of the equipment needed for food food processing of those products that Harold was mentioning there for the oils and the powders and different things so first you gotta clean and so we did couple trips off to Canada near where I'm from in Manitoba and some different tours of the cleaning facilities up there and what they're what they're using to get to that Canadian standard of 99.95% purity and usually it just consists of an indent greater lengths order and then an air screen or in a gravity table or the three that are kind of the most common and then if if the crop experiences large skoro shorter get issues than a color shorter would be used but a lot of getting by without those and then to get to the cold pressure oil as you see here this is a cold oil press and that's used to extract the oil from the seed and then the meal comes out the end there and then milling hat down and then sifting on to concentrate the protein into a forty to fifty percent protein product is is how that is how that's done and then the hemp parts is another product mom you've seen those probably in your grocery store and there that's addy hold hemp seed so it's taking the whole off the outside and with an impact D holder and then either just having them plain or flavored for different for different uses either on salads or or just a snack food in general and then hemp milk is using the hemp parts a similar process to creating almond or soy milk where you use a you use just a cheesecloth with with the D hold pen parts and hot water and push it through and then the hemp beer is another opportunity there where you can either use the green or actually just the the carrot the terpenes are the aromatics of the actual flower for use in brewing so number of different opportunities there and kind of a just a kind of a rough overview of the of the equipment that needed to get there all right go to the next slide yeah I'm having there you go so to kind of wrap up the food side a little bit what does the landscape really look like and this data was 2017 the 2019 data will be should be all really soon but you know the fact of the matter is there's real white markets here approaching a billion dollars it is over a billion dollars now in the US on hemp-based products sales and so this this is what pretty good it's bound to grow the beverage industry is very much interested in in hemp for beverages for both athletes and just general purposes so that's moving along pretty good and the breads and grains and all the rest of it is also looking forward so that's that and I want to get into the the feed side of things and I wanted to show this slide first because before we can move him feed into the value chain we do have to have approval from the FDA to do so and they work with a group called the Association of American food feed control officers or officials and this is a group that is sanctioned by the FDA to give these kinds of feeds control numbers so then it can be sold commercially across channels and there's quite a process to get a feed approved cost about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars per species per ingredients to get Pascal approval or FDA approval generally speaking and we'll talk to you a little bit about what's happening out there and what we expect in the future so we'll go to the next slide but first off if we look at him as an animal feed does it work does it bring something to the table and what's been done in other parts of the country well a lot of these are Canadian at work a little bit out of Manitoba and Nova Scotia but they have done quite a bit of work on laying hens and laying hen performance and egg yolk fatty acid content with with him go back up there Riley please I want to finish that one and then so that's turned out really well and then the feeding hemp seed meal to laying hens and hemp seed cake feed for growing cattle all been done next slide and there's been studies done on industrial hemp for silage and also with the nutritive the nutritive value of hemp meal for ruminants so lots of works been done so we feel pretty confident that as FDA looks at this there's a a lot of evidence out there that says this is a really good good feed for livestock and that we could move forward so here in the United States North Carolina State University researchers have wrapped up already this him an animal feed trial with the poultry sector and I if I was a betting person I would say the poultry sector will be the first one to get after approval to use this as an animal feed in that sector next slide and the Colorado Department of Ag has a heme feed coalition a lot of states are involved in this because as we get approval by species per ingredient if one person does it or one entity does it then it's applicable to everyone so that's the good news you don't have to keep repeating it for every single company it's just it's universal across the board on these animal control numbers and that's why working together is a good thing next slide so I'm going to turn this one over to Riley again and to talk about the opportunity for hemp and feeding pet food which is pretty good yeah so going off of that so here's some of the numbers that we've started to uncover in our lab when we started to look into hemp as a feed product so we looked into the cake the holes after taking getting a hard product out and you have the holes left over and then the hemp flour and the spent hemp flour after Stevie Dee extraction so looking at that material after the oil has been taken off and looking at it from a total Edessa for nutrient and crude protein perspective all of those products would make for an excellent animal feed in theory and really the hurdle that it's facing right now is that the feeding trials and that Affco number and once it once it has that under its belt I think this is uh you know there's gonna be a big step for the viability of the hemp industry as a whole to be able to utilize these byproducts and that value um so just this is just a slide showing we get all our testing actually done in with Johnson Dairyland laboratories for our feet analysis and then we do the we do a market analysis here in a URI we have an animal nutrition expert down working with us in Waseca al Deering and so he puts together these charts and so it's using the total digestible nutrient and the crude protein levels to identify a theoretical market value for what these byproducts would be at different fluctuations in common commodities such as corn soybean meal and alfalfa hay so kind of where the market is right now the hemp cake would go for about two hundred twenty two dollars a ton um just in theory and so that's a pretty good value there for for these oil producers right now that what well they have an outlet for a majority of their oil the protein markets not necessarily there to to support the development or to support all that material so getting having an outlet for that as a feed would be a huge opportunity and so just a number some numbers here for example so just say I know this is kind of on the low end but a thousand pound per acre yield the green 30 percent oil content is generally what a hemp seed is and so if he had ninety percent extraction efficiency which is close to what we saw in Waseca lab that's like seven hundred and thirty pounds of hemp seed cake um so it's a majority cake out of there and II do so I'd be a an estimated income of eighty one dollars per acre um at that first kind of fluctuation market price there's one corns 350 a bushel so I just kind of kind of puts it into perspective a little bit and I think Riley there it's just important to say that you know you still have the oil to sell and potentially the fiber to sell there so I don't want to leave you with the impression that all you're gonna make is eighty one dollars an acre right no yeah that's uh that's after the fact that's just from the byproduct so yeah good point yep okay so moving on to hemp fiber so this is another value chain that we've looked at pretty extensively here under our under our initiative and one that we continue to be kind of probably the most excited about other than feet and just the amount of product opportunities that are out there with the hemp fiber is just uh it's it becomes pretty amazing once you start looking into it and so but it's one of the it's probably the industry that has the kind of the least amount of traction or yeah least amount of traction right now just with uh it used to be a big industry here in Minnesota with lots of fiber plants and and rope twisting plants and different things like this utilizing that hemp fiber but since the prohibition of the plant it's really a lot of that equipment is kind of gone kind of disappeared gone away and we're really kind of left to to figure this figure this thing out kind of scratch again so that's kind of where we're at but this is the modified graphic here we're looking at from North Dakota State University paper and we kind of added a few things at the top to kind of showcase where we're at right now and that's kind of we're seeing some investor interest here in the state and there there's a couple groups that are investing in feasibility studies of what it takes to bring hemp to grow hemp fiber to bring it to a marketable product what level of processing is needed for different end markets how far does different fields need to do fields need to be away from a processing facility in order to remain profitable answering these types of questions and really it's pulling in existing fiber fiber experts either in this country or in other countries to kind of help us out with these feasibility studies and Indian insights into the the processing equipment that's needed to do decortication for example properly which is a kind of a a method of separating the stock from in the outer fibers from the inner herd of the stock and and that's kind of the the first processing step but then cleaning and sketching and hackling and all these kind of these these common techniques and textiles and natural fiber industries that need to be done in order to to bring these fibers to their different states for the end market so answering those questions and then and then once you have grower participation and you can put together processing facilities and it can move forward and flow into the diagram of all these exciting products and this is the diagram that showcases the dual purpose crop so you would extract the seeds and the green first and go through the either the holding or the pressing for oil and all that and then you take the stocks after wrap them and then put them through processing to be able to produce fibers and herds and then here's just a picture of kind of what that looks like so this is a hemp stock you know on the outer portion that's about 30 percent by weight bast fiber and then 70 percent by weight herd or an inner woody core I mean it's pectins and lignans that hold those together very strongly so doing a process called reading where it allows the natural enzymes to eat away at those pectins and lignans and make the decortication process less energy intensive and time consuming is is a very important process there and so yeah and so just quickly on some of the markets that it can reach so textile market the construction market bio composites market and then and then kitty litter or or animal litters animal beddings is uh is kind of an opportunity that exists today with just just the herd itself which is a really closely resembles kind of an absorbent wood chip I would say you could picture Harel did you want to say anything else on this one well I'm just going to say that what's good to know about this is is that from an a URI perspective and the clans we deal with we're likely going to be dealing with some of these areas here to innovate and develop a products in Minnesota and many of these products will be developed with existing industries that we already have here and that's the exciting part so you know we network a lot next slide Riley and I we we came across a company called fiber achi and in Kentucky they make him wood beautiful beautiful wood out of out of hemp and this is one here that Minnesota also has the potential to innovate in this area blending and hemp alone and all kinds of things to make this this happens to be flooring and there is the process and Riley could say just very briefly about the process but this is relatively straightforward fairly simple type of work yeah why this is really neat is that decortication step that I just discussed it's not actually needed for a product like this they're actually just taking the stalks and introducing a bio-based binder or adhesive onto them and then putting it under in a hydraulic press putting it under 1700 ton of pressure and just squeezing just through brute force into into this wood with the binder in there and so you wouldn't need that that decortication and that cleaning those those time-consuming and capital intensive really processes that that you need to to get those fibers for other applications this is a low-hanging fruit opportunity where you can really take advantage of of the natural properties of this the stalks there's just another picture of the input plant so yeah I just wanted to kind of go through a few of the different processing facilities that we know of here um here in the US it's pretty limited I would say right now there's nothing in Minnesota right now in terms of a processing facility this one is son strand out of Kentucky and as far as we know they're actually in a transitional period right now where they're not actually running their equipment or the business isn't currently running but they were for a long time the kind of the leader in the US for for producing fiber and herds they they had a number of products they had a natural fiber in that insulation product and then they had this natural cord board that was good for like interior decorating type applications and then they also produced just mass quantities of I've heard and fiber for different for different applications and they are one of the only groups in the u.s. that provided that so other than that there is North Carolina has a has a group called hemp incorporated they have the coal industrial hemp manufacturing they we don't know a ton about this group we do know they had this decortication setup going on there and haven't heard a whole lot from them in the past at least year now but they're on the map and then Basque or in Nebraska we've talked with this group several times this is a picture of their step cleaner that they use to further clean the fiber after the first decortication stuff and you can see on the ground there's a bunch of clean fiber there and we've networked with the individual quite a bit that's that dealt this piece of equipment he's been out to a couple events of ours here in Minnesota he's on to actually a new company called hemp fast forward if you want to follow along with him he's got probably they worked 20 years of decortication natural fiber research under his belt and he's one of the kind of one of the best experts we know right now when it when it comes to looking into these decortication pieces of equipment and and vetting them out because there's a lot of equipment out there that's you just got to be really careful and do your due diligence when you're looking into these types of things as there's equipment out there that doesn't always do what it says especially in the in this industry right now um so another ones is a ste 8 out of New Zealand there's a couple groups in Minnesota that have been looking into bringing this piece of equipment here I know there's a couple in Pennsylvania right now but we've kind of we vetted it out of it with our contact there at hemp fast forward and kind of keeping it at arm's length right now just kind of seeing how others experiences go with this and really just really recommending to groups that they they do a lot of due diligence because this might not it might not produce the quality of her in fiber that you need for different applications it's really depend all depends on what your end application is for picking your processing equipment and then this group is the Harold and I discussed with them about a month ago they use this creats decortication technology out of kind of I think it sort of Belgium and but they're using it in Canada and they've put a bunch of a I technology in with this where it can read moisture real time as the Fiber goes through and adjust the processing parameters accordingly at in real time as the stocks go through so really innovative group out of Canada that's working on this right now they're currently looking for funding to get their first large-scale 10-ton an hour plant going and O'Reilly by if I might I just want to say to the group that this particular group is looking at the possibility potentially having five operations in the United States that's what they discussed with us here a week or so ago and so we'll be we'll be in contact with them and and see how we can bring maybe that kind of thing forward but it was good to know that we hav a company that potentially can do things on them on a pretty big commercial scale so then this is one will we'll watch a little closer absolutely another group powers Oneg and they're called formation and narrative out of Colorado Corbett Hefner and his group and they build mobile D corrugating equipment there you can see on the left and then they also do custom custom harvesting headers for CBD grain and fiber that you see on the right there and they're currently working on a larger version of the mobile decore Decatur that can take on bales this one that they have here that's actually not the most up-to-date version I think they actually just released a more updated looking version but it's it's hand fed stocks um so they're actually working on one that would be able to take bales and actually streamline the process out in the field which is a an interesting concept as well in the alternative of having a central processing facility and then just a low-cost Chinese decor Decatur this is there's a group from Minnesota that has one of these common in it's um very low cost and just a really rough first pass decortication you need a significant amount of cleaning and and multiple passes to be able to bring this material so market but I think for cause I think it's a good first step and just to get to get playing with the fiber and understanding kind of how it how it works and how it reacts through decortication and I think this is a great first step and we got some of the fiber from this machine and did some initial rope twisting and different things with it it seemed to work pretty good then Canadian greenfield technology they have this piece of equipment called the hemp train and this it's made primarily for CBD plants and so it takes the the plant and it separates the leaf and the flower into a green microfiber which would go to an extractable product and then separates the bast fiber in the herd as well um for a ton an hour through put this machine is and that's on probably on the high end this is a 1.5 million dollar capital investment so I just kind of goes to show the no huge investment that these machineries demand right now and the races really aren't for folks to kind of develop like high quality decortication equipment at an affordable price to be able to be scaled up and be able to do because one ton an hour and the grand scheme is not that's not a huge a huge quantity for any sort of production you're gonna need seven to ten ton an hour to support an industry so to be able to bring the cost of that of that processing equipment down or it will be important and I think something that a lot of a lot of different groups are looking at innovating towards then this is the decor Decatur that a URI has purchased from the composites Innovation Center up in Winnipeg they ran this piece of equipment for about ten years and it's originally from Czech Republic I mean it's easy tech is the group and we are just proud to say that we just got this all set up and it's looking very similar to this picture now in our own lab we just got our electrician that's doing the kind of the finishing touches on it we're getting it hooked up and it hopefully will be operational here in the next month and so we're just really excited to have this will be kind of the first of its kind here in the Midwest on the research scale that can do pretty good decortication it's a series of Pickers and rollers that it that is the theory behind it and it may require multiple passes but it really depends on again on the reading and the variety of fiber going through and we're just ready to to learn all about it and be able to produce small amounts of fiber and heard four groups that are here in Minnesota to either implement into new products or implement into existing products to improve the performance and the in the bio and the bio-based content of products so we got a number of groups already contacting us interested in and getting some fiber for their for their uses so um lots of project interest already and I think it's gonna be a big deal here and we're excited to to get that in operation shortly and this is dr. DeNiro out of the National Research Center in Quebec and he's been running this piece of equipment for probably fifteen plus years and he's just provided a lot of really good insight and helping us get this set up and kind of hit the ground running so we don't you know so we don't have to play around with things too much and can kind of have a really good set up going into it he's invited us out to see the modifications he's made to this equipment and he's been able to support a product development for fiber in a number of different industries with this equipment and he's got a cleaning device that he uses on the back end for example that we're actually gonna be looking at a purchasing as well so we can kind of support some even some textile like woven type material markets as well and then this is just an example of kind of a an operation in Calgary in Oberto that actually these guys are just west of Edmonton in attack Alberta and they have a one ton and our processing facility for fiber so they do all the decortication there I think it was about a five three to five million dollar investment that they made for for a one ton in our facility and all of their fiber goes to a group Composites group and they make different things like hemp girl mats and as well as erosion control blankets and then the heard all the herd goes to just bio fiber and they're a group that makes hemp treat blocks and so I'll talk a little bit about em Creek in a little bit and what that all is but it's just kind of a cool snapshot of how a fiber industry would work and looking at what what - what industries can kind of take those end materials is there's a number of different products coming of the back of the decortication facility there so this is a project I mentioned erosion control blankets we've actually been approached by MnDOT and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture to uh to pursue an lccmr grant surrounding looking into replacing plastics in erosion control and sediment control products with hemp fiber so the project's gonna look at de coordinating fiber down in Waseca and then we're gonna work with some some partners on that that can twist the fibers into a yarn to create some this the the skins are the the skins of the sediment control log and then also the netting of the erosion control blanket and then we can use de coordinated fight over as well for the fill for those products and this is part of a project that MnDOT is really chomping at the bit to start replacing all that they're all of their plastic products as soon as possible in all these types of products so they think hemp fiber grown domestically would be a really exciting opportunity and if we can prove out the the viability and the technical performance of those products with hemp in them they're all over replacing you know 100% of those products right away so this is a really exciting project that we're really looking forward to getting started we're just kind of tying together the the application for the grant right now and getting that in for the deadline on the 30th but that work would start in about a year's time and it would be a three year project own so just an example of something that that's real right now that we could can start developing on this hem fiber in the States take Riley here we'll just move on there there are a lot more products that are out there they can be made from from from ant biomass want to move a little quickly because I know we want to ask some questions so you know I guess you can continue here yeah so carpets automobile composite so fiber blended with a like a PLA or another type of resin certain car companies in Europe have been doing this for quite some time with hemp fiber I'm starting to gain interest here in the United States there's just a an example of a car door panel made with a hemp biocomposite there's a group in Fargo called C to renew and they've made a bio comp is a 3d printer filament where they can with PLA and hemp fibers and they can 3d print sunglasses and coffee mugs guitar picks golf tees and you name it they can they can make a molding of it or a 3d printing of it with with hemp fiber um so that's a really interesting group that we continue to work with on other products as well textiles again a lot of these are made in in China today but there's a number of you know American companies Duluth trading coat entry Nike that that that uses hemp fiber and it's usually a 55/45 cotton and hemp blend that are in a lot of these shirts and they're all made in in mostly China but some other European countries as well but bringing textiles to to the US soil someday would be really interesting and probably the highest value market there is for for hemp fiber then just quickly this is that just bio fiber group I had mentioned and this is a picture of the hempcrete block so hempcrete is the herd or the any inner woody core they'll mix with a lime binder in water it's a super breathable material in terms of moisture and then also it has a high thermal mass where it can hold on to a large amount of heat no it's of to its size and so it creates a really healthy cost-efficient environment for homes I mean it's in it generally just an insulative material but it's this group has made likely reinforced Lego blocks with it where it's actually structural as well um contributes to lead credits there's just a number of advantages to this product and there's a there's a plant that's producing these right now in Alberta that Harold and I hope to go visit someday soon when the co vid thing all blows over and then a hemp nano material so looking just just quickly that another application for this is a research group that the University of Alberta figured out how to make graphene with hemp that can store a large amount of energy per its per its surface area and so looking at applications such as hemp power batteries and and phones and different things like that is another possibility there's groups that are actually looking at that we've seen business plans on to do a graphene plant with the fiber and it's would be a really interesting application as you cut you can use kind of the lower end fibers for this for this process and then you can keep your higher end fibers for either bio composites or textiles um a couple groups out of Manitoba that we've had the opportunity to to learn with but I'll skip over that I just wanted to mention here Riley uh we are working with Minnesota companies this happens to be a company in central part of the state of Minnesota already looking at a hemp fiber facility this one would take fiber from the hemp plant and would make a number of the things that Riley mentioned from from the hemp the heard the insulation and so forth so just wanted to show you this because it's becoming real in Minnesota that are already starting to you know put brick and mortar on the ground at some of these facilities so yeah overall point on the fibers that really none there's no processing facilities right now in Minnesota there's groups doing feasibility studies that we are participating in pretty closely we really got to kind of develop markets and processing kind of almost alongside each other so we think that a URI getting the small core Decatur is really gonna play into that development of end markets you're in Minnesota and then we can kind of work with these investors that have interest and and hopefully there'll be a an investment made in the processing facility in the near future CBD Harold you know talk CBD well I'm not we won't spend a lot of time on CBD but this has been the hot thing the last couple of years in Minnesota there were a lot of fields from that was processed and extractors here in Minnesota I think there'll be a number of acres again this year the markets gotta find its way through there was very high profits to be made early it's been mitigated some so we have to just discover it all in a URI has been working with growers on how to dry it handle it and get it into a stage where it can be handled in the processing side of it and Riley let's not talk about the economics right now they're changing we have a lot of projects at a URI from from hem Creek research all the way to the fiber to cleaning in the feed and there's more and more coming into the pipeline every day and across the nation there's lots of a URI has discovered a lot of places in the United States that are getting infrastructure we didn't look at them all exhaustedly but I just wanted to show this that there indeed is investment being made in this industry a URI has ability to test him we are an approved lab with the Minnesota Department of Ag for research development and testing so we can test for THC CBD proteins fats and a whole host of other things so there you go and we like to say that it ain't what you know no it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble it's what you know for sure that ain't so there's a lot of things in the hemp industry we need to discover and find out so Riley you can go to the last slide we are very excited to you know to to be working in this space be very happy to take some questions from the from the group and certainly you can get a hold of us those contacts that are on the screen thank you thank you to our speakers Harold and Riley from the agricultural utilization research instace Institute and thank you also our sponsors coal bank and CHS