Farm emergency response planning: How to

Shay: Thank you for the introduction. All the faces that I see out here are people that can affect change in agriculture, and you're here to do that. You're here because you care about people, you care about egg safety and health. And so just thank you all for coming here today. One of the most important messages that I want to get across is, if nothing else, when you leave here today, I want you to do something with this information. We come to these conferences We sit, we enjoy them. You know, as they mentioned on the panel, you know, we think it's a good idea and then sometimes we don't always do something with it. Do something with this information. We have the ability to truly affect change and to help people out there. All right. So jumping into things, this is all my contact information. I'll have it up at the end as well.

I encourage you to reach out and connect with me if you find any value in what I'm providing here today and would love to speak to speak with you. So I'd like to start off with a quick story. My military background, served with 1st Ranger Battalion in Savannah, Georgia for 4 years. I'm just transitioning back into agriculture as of April, and I'm loving it. The story that I want to start off with is to provide a little bit of perspective on why we're here and what we do. So this is Sergeant First Class Christopher Saliz. He was killed July 12th, 2018 on the last deployment that I was a part of. Outstanding guy. He is part of an operation working with foreign, foreign service members. They were doing a clearance of a valley location, came under attack from a large group of al-Qaeda soldiers.

A foreign partner force member was hurt in the attack, and Sergeant First Class Sleaze went above and beyond to get this gentleman what he needed. So he called in the medevac, the helicopters came in, and he personally picked up the foreign partner and carried him to the helicopter. The helicopter came under heavy attack, and Sergeant First Class Sleaze, you can see it on the drone footage, he waved the birds off once he had the foreign partner on. They were going to take him with. He said, "No, go. This is more important. This is the safety of the crew, safety of that foreign partner." And as he started to return fire on the enemy, He was struck through the chest and died as a result of his injuries. That's a good reason to die. Standing up for something that you believe in. Standing up for freedom. Standing up for your country.

I think it particularly hits home as we honor Veterans Day here this week. What I want to follow that with is there's no good reason to die farming. Not one. And so what we can enact, and through ag safety and health programs and through reaching out and emergency response planning that I'm going to talk about today, this should hit home with you personally. There's no good reason to die farming. So how can we affect changes on that? So a little bit about myself. I'm from northeast Iowa, small town, La Porte City. Grew up there with two different sides of farming operations, one that was several hundred acres with cattle another that was several thousand acres with strictly grain, corn and soybean rotation. So I've been exposed to a lot of different sides of the industry.

Went to Iowa State University, received a bachelor's in agronomy, loved that experience, and then transitioned into the military. I'm taking that military experience, as Renee mentioned in the introduction, and hopefully applying it to emergency response planning on the farm. So these are some of the things that I believe and why I want to be here today. I believe that we can make emergency response better through coordination and planning. I believe that we can make farms safer because we lack in several areas. And I believe that we can create better continuity in farm operations as we look from generation to generation, as we look to who's taking over the farm in the future. So how can we work together? That's the question that I pose to you today. So why am I doing this? Why does emergency response planning stand near and dear to my heart?

Because right now we are very reactive when it comes to emergency response. We are reacting to situations that are happening, and I believe that we can be much more proactive. Another reason why I think this is important is because we care about the people that are— who are responding, whether it's in larger communities or in rural departments. Oftentimes we know the first responders that are coming to emergency situations. The emergency responders know who is working on that farm, living on that farm, trying to make their livelihood out there. These are people, real people that we are working with. Also, I believe there's a major lapse in coverage in the community right now. So on farm, in the field, and with farm equipment, we are not geared as much towards emergency response and safety as I think that we possibly can be.

And I'll outline that here in a little bit on why I believe that, especially when you compare this to other industries. So when you look at emergency response planning, You take a step back and look at the LEPC committees or the extension offices or the OSHA as they work with emergency response planning in organizations. Farming is decades behind where they are in that on small scales and on large scales. So how do we change that? How are we going to do this? So I'll go over more of these in depth. We will work with emergency responders to create emergency response meetings. Within farm operations, within the ag community. We will do location walkthroughs on facilities to familiarize emergency responders, volunteer departments, and larger communities alike. And we'll do product development to improve information sharing.

Now there's several different ways that that looks that I'm going to jump into here, but that's the overview. So the meetings, the walkthroughs, and product development, and this is how you can act change. With the people that you work with. Who's involved with the emergency responders? This is one of the exciting things that I worked personally to develop and enact on our farm operation and why I think this can be an effective model. So working with the Sheriff Department, Emergency Response Management, or EMS, hazmat, dispatch, and fire departments in communication. Working with Extension research and academics such as yourself in order to better develop these programs get data-driven to back up this information that I'm trying to spread out there and for discussion, planning, and coordination. Also people in the industry. So how can we create implementation to current platforms?

So Plant2020 systems or the— drawing a blank right now— FieldView Climate How can we work with those current platforms in order to better improve emergency response planning? And then also financial institutions, so how can we encourage, reward, and incentivize farmers to make these changes? Needs to be easy to implement, needs to be simple to use, make economic sense, and be effective. Needs to make economic sense. It needs to make economic sense. This is how we drive this point home to farmers. In order to make emergency response planning better. Okay, so what does this look like? I already went over that. I'm going to jump right into it. So one of the first things that farm operations can do is to create a blueprint of their operation.

Time in and time out, emergency responders will drive past farm operations and they know what they look like and they know the buildings and they know where they're located, but they physically don't know anything about that operation.. And this is what we saw when we were working with emergency responders on planning a blueprint and layout for emergency response on our operations, as they said, yes, we've driven past that 100 times, but we don't actually know what's here. Now, the word blueprint is very scary, right? I'm not an engineer. I created something simple to outline the operation. So as you can see on the right-hand side, that's a Google Maps image of the operation that we worked with initially. And then this is what you created on that.

So creating labeling, identifying hazards such as electrical hazards, gas hazards, um, overhead storage and bends for possible collapse in the event of a fire, looking at those different situations and laying it out so the emergency responders can have somewhat of an idea of what's going on to paint that picture before they actually respond to an emergency. At that facility. So item, uh, action item number 1, within your operations or within producers that you work with, take the time to draw out what this actually looks like so that you can give it into information feedback systems that I'll talk about a little bit later here. Okay, emergency response meetings. So I mentioned the departments, um, that, that I had reached out to— the fire, EMS, Hazardous Materials and, um, Sheriff's Department, as well as dispatch.

Dispatch was extremely helpful with developing some of these products and information because they are the ones that are receiving the 911 calls. They are the ones that are getting this initial information in the event of an emergency and passing that along to the emergency responders. So for the emergency response meeting, I gathered everybody in the 4 counties that we farm in on this operation. And asked for 1 or 2 representatives from each one of those groups, the Sheriff's Department, Fire Department, et cetera. And they were more than willing and very happy to provide representatives on this because instead of being reactive, we were being proactive in our planning. We were involving them in the planning. So as the gentleman mentioned earlier, you know, how do we get these members involved in planning? Well, you ask them to be there.

You know, the panel mentioned that you ask them to be there, ask them to be involved, and you'll find more often than not that they're actually very interested in being a part of that. So with this meeting, we had about 25 different representatives and were able to have more of a discussion on the farm operation, how we develop this on a larger scale. Okay, so location walkthrough. After you sit down and do an emergency response meeting, There's a lot going on that you can't necessarily envision without going through an operation. Now, when you look at this to scale, as I mentioned, I grew up around operations that were several hundred acres, smaller cattle operation, to several thousand acres where you have the larger facilities as were pictured there. You might be thinking to yourself, how could emergency response departments possibly go to see every farm location?

Well, that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to raise awareness so that when they're responding to these emergencies, they have a better idea of the situations that they're getting into and they're working with the farmers a little bit better. Okay, so doing this location walkthrough, actually going out and physically saying, okay, he had pictured in the blueprint a grain bin here. This is what this grain bin looks like. These are where the emergency shutoffs are that he had outlined there. This is the fire hazard or the chemical hazard that he was pointing out.

Creating, whether it's a standardized system for these markings or whether it's individual by farm, you know, if you have a legend there so that if they know that there's a building in Fire 1 and they show up and they see on the legend for that blueprint, oh hey, there might be some chemical hazards in there, it's just allowing them to be prepared for what they might be meeting when they're coming to this emergency. So doing that location walkthrough is crucial, at least with different types of operations. Currently working with, um, Wapello County Farm Bureau on putting together a video series on responding to grain operations, cattle operations, and hog operations so that we can distribute that to Extension, Farm Bureau members, anybody in the community that's interested to pass that on to emergency responders so they can get that visual.

But seeing that walkthrough and having the location walkthrough is still very important. Emergency response sheet. So this is what I worked closely with dispatch and the initial meeting to develop, and all this is, is laying it out in a format so that you can post this at the location of the farm, or that you can post it to the location of each field. I know this is a little blurry, it's a little hard to read. I will have examples afterwards that I can show you either on my phone. I think I have a few physical copies here. But outlining a standardized emergency response to get that information across on what the emergency is in that operation. So saying, okay, first of all, this is my location, this is my emergency, this is my callback number, and then this is the more information that you need to know.

Because I don't know how many of you have called 911, but every time that I have, my brain shuts down, you know. I mean, not only is there an emergency already going on, But you don't know all the information. But if dispatch can get 30% of that information out, they can get to the right place and then hopefully help with whatever situation it is that you have. So developing an emergency response sheet within the operations that can be posted up for employees or visitors or family members to more effectively communicate that information is a huge goal that I think that we can work to improve within farm operations. Now, as I mentioned, I want to make emergency response better, make farms safer, and increase continuity within farm operations.

So by having some of this additional information such as field locations and the closest fuel points or field notes, this gives an idea to new employees, to younger children, or, you know, just any new adults to the operation on, hey, this is what we're actually getting into. Because you might not know specifically where you are, but if you can remember, oh, I'm at the, the Smith Farm or the Moore Farm or wherever it may be, and you can look up this information in a booklet or on a PDF on your phone to communicate that information, you're going to be much better off. Now, as was mentioned, pulling from my military experience, something that may not be familiar to a lot of you, With field locations, not every field location has an address, right? That would be ridiculous. So how do you communicate that information more effectively?

Well, there's a few different trains of thoughts on that, but personally for me, you can use grid coordinates to do that. So if you map out a grid coordinate location to the main field entrances on your farm operations and have that in a standardized sheet, which I'll map out a little bit later, have that on a standardized sheet so that you know the exact location of information, that improves coordination on the farm with your employees. So there's no question about where Jane's North is. That was an issue I ran into this summer. I'm on a new operation. They kept saying, go to Jane's North. I don't know where Jane's North is. Like, this doesn't help me. Give me something better to communicate that. So taking that information, creating an easy-to-use format, and then better being able to communicate that to emergency responders is crucial.

And mind you, when, when creating that information, the beauty about these things right here is you don't even have to leave the comfort of this room. You can zoom in on Google Maps, drop a pin, and know where that field information is. So it's not time-intensive, it's just making sure that you do it and that you know how to do it. Okay, so field location mapping, this is what I was referring to. So these are some actual field locations of operations that we've worked with, and all it is is saying, okay, this is the field name or what it's referred to or what it's also known as. As any of you that have worked in farming know, that sometimes field names don't just have one field name. They've been called different things by grandpa and uncle and cousin Eddie or whoever it is.

So having what else it's known as, the grid coordinate information, because you can easily enter that information into your phone and you can easily easily communicate that information. Now, a story that goes along with this, there's several different entities across the United States that are kind of piecing this together. So there's the Emily Project in the Northeast. There was a farm accident with a child. The emergency responders couldn't get to the field location fast enough. The child ended up perishing as a result of that. Well, by having this information available, you can direct them exactly where you need to go. Because if you think it's a combine fire and you're in the center of an Iowa square mile, how do you know what correct field entrance it is to get there?

Because contrary to popular belief, the location, the triangulation— and this was crucial working with dispatch on this— triangulation doesn't actually get you that close. It can be 200 to 300 yards away from, from from your actual location from the cell service. So if you know, hey, this is the main field entrance, they can at least get to your location from the field. So having this mapped out, having additional information here creates that farm continuity and lets your employees know what else is out there. So for instance, if you have a gas line that runs along the farm, you need to know where that is. There was an incident in Illinois 2, maybe 3 years ago now, Father-son operation were piling, they hit a gas line and both of them perished as a result of that. Someone knew that that gas line was there, but that was not communicated. There's no good reason to die farming.

So how do we better communicate this information? And simple things, you know, like as we've seen this year, it's wet out there. Not getting a tractor stuck saves you a lot of time and a lot of money and also a lot of heartache. So information sharing, how does this look additionally, right? So whether it's communicating it to 911 as an emergency response sheet, there's a few different ways you can do this. So the emergency response sheet that I worked with dispatch to help create, you can actually put into a PDF version and send it off to everybody in your phone. You know, most everybody has their phone on them. When you're working in the fields, it's crucial that you maintain your phone when you get in and out of the tractor and in and out of the combines, because then you literally have it at your fingertips. I Am Responding. Has anybody here heard of I Am Responding?

Okay, so this is a program that is specific to departments. They can pay for this service, and what it allows them to do is coordinate and volunteer departments So if a call goes out to dispatch, they can then push it out to whoever the closest responding unit is. So we'll say it's Rally Fire— Rally Volunteer Fire Department. They utilize the system, so blast off a message to all their volunteers, and they can either hit "I am responding" or "No, can't make it." And then you can track how many people are responding to that event, where their locations are, and anticipate a timeline of getting there. The cool thing about "I am responding" is by working with producers, they can actually upload information of hazards and upload the blueprints that you help to create with your farmers. So if you notice, this is the same picture that I had laid out earlier.

It's just facing a different direction, but they took the blueprint from the operation that we were working with and uploaded into their system so that if something does happen there, that's at their fingertips. So I Am Responding is a really cool program. Farm Mapper, okay, so at UMass, some of you may be familiar with this. They're working to do some of the same systems. I think as far as implementation on a larger scale, they're a little ways away yet, but just know that there are other resources out there that this is a free system that you can utilize in order to better implement farm planning and emergency response as well as having I Am Responding in your toolbox. And then the last one, MySmart911. This is one that I'm really fond of. So this is an application, again, completely free on your phone. It has that little green lock symbol on there.

And you can enter information specific to your operation or to your home location, and there's a certain amount that you can upload. For example, this is a screenshot of my profile. So I have my wife and myself's information in there. We have pictures of our house. We have blueprints uploaded, our pets and our vehicles. And the nice part about being able to upload those blueprints and in PDF version is in theory, if you do this with a farm operation, you can have one PDF of all the layout of all these fields. And then if you call and you panic and you don't know the grid location or whatever else, you can say, I'm at the Smith Farm., and then dispatch can view this information. And I know this works. A couple months ago, I had to call 911. There's an accident that I witnessed.

Called 911 as a result of that, and they said, "Are you located at 906 Second Street?" And I said, "That is my address. I am not located. Here's my present location." So they had that information like that. Now what I've taken is you can do multiple locations on this, and I took our farm operation in Illinois put it as a secondary address, uploaded our PDF files into that, and now all of our field information is in there and at their fingertips. So when you think about that, the scale and the application to this is pretty incredible. But how many of you knew about these systems before I mentioned it? Okay. So these are tools that we have at our fingertips that are really easy to use. I promise it took me probably 20 minutes to upload this into my phone. And it's there forever to update. I updated it today because we bought a new vehicle. So just some of those things to keep in mind.

So how can we better link emergency responders with farm information? Utilizing this, utilizing the emergency management meetings and location walkthroughs, and then working closely with those volunteer fire departments. Now, to some extent, you have to think of this on a scale. Some volunteer fire departments are maybe not going to be as invested in this information. Maybe they don't have access to I Am Responding for some reason. Maybe dispatch doesn't work. But when you think about rural communities, if you have progressive operations that are willing to do this operation, that are willing to work with yourselves or myself from a consulting standpoint on this work, you can physically create a handbook and they know, okay, this is Carson and Barron Farms, and give that to the fire department..

And if nothing else, when they're responding to a fire, they can grab your folder, grab your booklet, and again, paint that picture, that 80% information of what's going on before they get there to the emergency. This is no different when you look at it in other industries. So chemical companies, they have to do emergency response planning, they have to do disaster management. How can we prepare this in advance for farm operations that creates that same continuity? Okay, so you can do all of these things. Everybody in this room, people that you know, your family and your friends, the people that you work with directly, whether you work on the ag safety or the health side of things, there are people that you know in your communities that you can work with to do these. Producers and farm workers, so it doesn't necessarily have to be someone who runs the farm operation.

You can identify an ag safety and health person within that operation or or someone that has involvement with the emergency response system and have them spearhead these programs to better help their farm operation and emergency response. And if you don't want to, or if you need help, please reach out to me. I can help you from a personal standpoint of just wanting to help the community, or if it's something that requires a consulting service, I have no problem sharing this information because I believe in it. I believe it's important. I have families that farm. I farm. So this is me wanting to share this information and to get this out to anybody because there are 3 types of people, right? There's people that are never going to do this information. They're never going to have an interest in it and it's too much work.

There are people that want to do this, but they want somebody to do that for them. Whether that's paying them or whether it's through extension, however that looks, or programs or whatever else. And then there's people that want to do it and they're going to do it themselves and they don't need any help doing it. There's maybe a few other gray areas in between there, but in general, I think we can all agree that you have some of those similar people that you work with on a daily basis. So I know this is a lot. It's very new. We're going to take some time here for Q&A. I know lunch is— Right after this, they put me in a sticky spot. But I implore you to think 30 years from now. Technology is not slowing down, right? So the original computers— what I have in my phone here has 25,000 times the storage space. It's a hundredth the size of the computer, and it operates almost 150 times faster.

That didn't exist 30 years ago. So what does this look like 30 years from now? How does our emergency response planning change and how can we be on the forefront of implementing this even at a basic level to provide value to these operations down the road? You know, when things come out, the Starlink network that's coming out, Space Nine Falcon rocket just took off with 60 satellites to add to the Starlink network. That's incredible. You know, current GPS systems are already in place. When 5G gets developed, it's going to be a while until we see it in the rural side of things. But we have access on some of these fringe areas to take advantage of these systems, you know, preprogrammed floor plans. You could have drones responding to fires and then eventually, you know, live streaming accidents or live streaming the capabilities there. I think I can just talk louder. No, it was off.

It shut itself off. Okay. That's right. Can anybody hear me? All right, great. I appreciate you taking a look at that. So, you know, let's talk about it. Um, completely open to any discussion or any development or questions on these ideas. I do have some additional materials that if a question is directed at that, maybe that'll answer it. Um, again, I hope you got some value out of this. Please Reach out to me with any questions that you have. I'll post my information on the screen here at the end. I will be around for the lunch. We have about 3 days of harvest left after that, so I won't be able to stay for the afternoon sessions trying to get that wrapped up. But I appreciate you all taking the time to listen today, and we'll open this for any questions. Thank you. Thank you. Hello.

The first question was, how does slower internet or lack of access to technology affect emergency response planning? And not even specifically to Iowa, but let's talk about rural agriculture in general. The way that I outlined this and looking at grid coordinates and things like that and being able to use your phone, that might be a barrier of access to some people. So great point on that. However, There are other ways. So plat books, does anybody remember those things that you can open up and find, you know, T98 or whatever else? That information is something that producers have access to that you can then share. And like I said, it doesn't have to be a high-tech picture of a blueprint.

It can be a piece of paper that you drew out what your farm operation looks like, identifying where those field location entrances are, and then going to your local local emergency management and just working with your local communities. Now this goes both ways. So this is where anybody in this room can be involved through programs, directives, extension going to the farmer. But if we can spread this message to the farmers and they're interested in it as well, they can also come to them in that point. So I think you bring up a really good point on the internet and the speed and things like that. Like I mentioned with 5G, We might not see 5G for 30 years or 20 years, especially in the rural communities. The capacity just isn't there. However, as that develops, you know, when we look 30 years from now, things are only going to get faster with better access.

So how can we be on the forefront of that? Did that answer your question? Okay, great. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. How do we communicate emergency response planning for departments that may not have been at the emergency response meeting? That is an awesome point, and I didn't hit on that in the discussion, so I'm glad you brought that up. So the other thing that we did with these field operations is we created— and you might have heard of this on hog confinement operations, where they actually have a separate mailbox or an emergency location information storage area. So what we did— this is really cheesy from a military background— we took a big ammo can and we took this mapping information and emergency contact information, location information, SDS information for chemical hazards.

We put all of that in a central location so that on this planning, if in theory the local emergency responders get there first or someone that you identify in the operation to be your emergency management coordinator, you know, obviously your whole team needs to be trained on that, but someone takes charge of that situation and if they don't have that information come in, you meet them at the drive, You meet them at a location away from the hazard, and you coordinate from that point with physical documents of, hey, these are the blueprints, this is the information, this is what you need to know before you get into that picture. Is it going to be perfect? No. We all know that in emergency response situations, there's chaos, and you need to find structure in an unstructured environment. I think that's one of the best ways that we can address that issue.

If anybody has any other thoughts on that, I don't— You know, I'm more than willing to entertain that because I think that's a great point. So thank you for bringing that up. Yes. And two, two questions that I want to address. Thank you for responding to that. Two questions that I want to address from this. One is the emergency management services on volunteer departments often do monthly trainings. And so to have something like this in rural agriculture to encourage them, even if it's reaching out to someone that's 20 or 30 miles away from where a response would be, They would love to be a part of this, I'm sure of it. So reaching out to them either as a farmer, producer, or with your program director.

One thing that I've also been working with more recently, Princeton, Illinois— excuse me— speaking with a member of the fire department there, I had asked him, you know, how does your egg safety and emergency response look like? And he said, well, we really don't have anything, but they have close connections with all of the rural and surrounding fire departments. So if you can identify a location that is closer to a Marshalltown or an Iowa City, they a lot of times have those connections with those rural departments to better coordinate this. So it doesn't have to be limited just to who you think the, the local emergency responders are. You know, work with the emergency responders or the departments that see an overarching area and see how they can help you with it because they're going to bring in ideas that you probably haven't even thought of.

The second thing too is with the rural response, and you mentioned the rural departments being volunteer, there are going to be farm operations that don't want to share that information. So that's where you look at the access to information on, OK, maybe those people are better off using a MySmart911 or an I Am Responding to to where they can actually directly upload that information and they don't necessarily have to work with those local departments because I think we all know in rural agriculture people kind of butt heads and don't always like sharing information. So that's just two topics that I wanted to address from that series of questions. Who else has questions? Yes. Have you worked at all with including rural health providers in meetings? Great point. We haven't included them in the past with the consulting and the clients that we've worked with.

One group that I failed to mention that we have included, and you gotta remember going back to one of the original slides that said it has to make financial sense, it has to make economic sense, right? So including your insurance providers in that. Now, I will never say this, and I don't think anybody would stick their neck out and say this, in saying, oh, it'll reduce your premiums, or it'll save you money on this end. You can never guarantee that, but working with the insurance providers from that end is where it makes financial and economic sense to producers. Now, if you have rural health workers that are interested in that, I think that would be a great fit to the operation. That's, that's an awesome point. Thank you for bringing that up. Any other questions?

Yes, this question was, how do you convince family and farm operators to be proactive and convince them that emergency response planning is important? So who are the influencers in the operation? The older generation. They're the influencers? Okay, so UMass or the RF Dash program that many of you might have heard from actually looks at how do we utilize the emergency responders to have that discussion. So since they are people that are in the community that are volunteer fire department or volunteer EMS, A lot of times they value their opinion and that they work better with some of these planning initiatives than an insurance or a consulting agent or even family, particularly family members. You know, I think we all know that you're not an expert unless you're 5 hours away from home, right? So working with those people that they care about and encouraging them, it's a battle.

It truly is. I came from that side of the operation as as well, where I know within my family that if I'm not the one doing it, it's not going to get done. So I think it's identifying who the influencers are, who they trust, and who can most effectively communicate that information. Those are the ways that I, I see to overcome that barrier. It is tough though. I mean, I think we all know whether you work with family or just care about the people in your family, a lot of times it seems that you know what's best for them And it's hard to implement that. So I definitely have sympathy for that. Thank you for asking. Yes. The question was, have you worked with insurance companies or others to incentivize this to farmers? Financial support? Financial support. Not directly.

And what I mean by that is the insurance companies that we've worked with in these operations are almost similar in their attitude in the proactive approach as the emergency responders are, and that they want to be part of the proactive approach. So when you look at it from an incentive or an award or, uh, you know, just encouragement to do the right thing and have that working relationship with the insurance providers, I think that's where the value feeds back into it. But to answer your question more specifically, no, we have not had any direct financial. Now, I have been approached from two different insurance companies that serve large areas in the Midwest on potentially looking at taking this model and incorporating it into their system and how they can sponsor it and provide it.

So I think we're— and I'll say this in full transparency— is where the ag community and the safety community is right now is we've done a lot of outstanding programs. You folks have done a lot of outstanding programs to bring awareness and safety. So whether it's the rollover prevention systems or rollover protection systems or the grain chute recovery and rescue systems, you have done an extraordinary job on effectively implementing that and communicating that, and more importantly, creating the preventive training associated with that that actually saves lives before an incident happens. But where a lot of people, and in particular the insurance companies that I've talked with on this are coming from is, okay, what's next?

You know, because we've infiltrated a lot— not infiltrated, that's a bad term— but yeah, we, we have provided value and provided response to these areas that has had huge impact. We know Grainshoot Recovery Systems have saved lives. That's a good feeling regardless of where that comes from, whether it's you all or an insurance company or a private investor being involved in that. So what's next? What's next in agriculture? Is it moving into the emergency response planning? Is it something that we— that hasn't been brought to light yet? So maybe 5 years from now, that'll be completely changed. But that's where we stand today. So thank you for asking that question. Yes. This question was, what barriers have you seen and what has been consistent in your success stories? So you have to make it easy. It has to be easy to use.

And I think Farm Mapper is a great program and it has awesome potential. So I've met with that team, great people working on it, and I think they have a spectacular vision for it being implemented. Some of the things that come in in particular, and again, I'm not knocking on their system at all because I think it has tremendous value and tremendous growth potential. Some of the mapping systems that they use are outdated mapping. So when you think of how agriculture has changed from 2007 to 2012, when there was a lot of cash flow coming into those operations as a result of high market prices, they were able to make a lot of improvements improvements, shops, buildings, tractors, equipment, homes. So a lot of that thing, those things have changed. And when you look at rural mapping in certain areas, they're not updating that like they are a Chicago or an Iowa City.

So one, specifically looking at that mapping. Two, and, uh, one of the things that I spoke with the team on is they are very focused on animal systems. So for me personally whether it's as a farmer or an emergency responder, I don't need to know where the chickens are. I need to know where the hazard is, right? And I say that wholeheartedly and in good nature because there are just some areas that we need to improve. Now, like I mentioned with the symbols, the symbols don't have to be a standard universal thing of, you know, I'm not looking for this to be an SDS layout that OSHA creates or NIOSH, working together with those groups. However, just being able to clearly identify those hazards, so that was one of the holdups. And then the third thing that I'll add to that comment that I hope this kind of answers the question is you have those different groups of people, right?

So when looking at the success stories, it's progressive operations, and that's the key, is progressive operations, because it doesn't matter if you're 500 acres and it's a grandpa and an uncle farming and, you know, you have someone that cares about them and wants to make sure that they are safe. Implementing that, they realize a need for it. Or the second thing where you've seen success is they understand the value in saving money. Third, that specifically one operation that I have in mind is just that farm continuity and planning. So working with an operation in Wisconsin, they have 240 field locations, they milk several thousand cows, and they have 30 full-time employees. How do you coordinate and communicate that information to create better continuity within the farm. So those are some of the success stories.

Again, to bring it back to that, I think Farm Mapper has huge potential and I think it would serve as a great addition to the programs that are already out there. Hope that answers that question. Thank you. Yes. This question was, do you communicate chemical hazards to farmers and emergency responders And do you know of any programs pairing youth with the older generation for technology and safety implementation? Answer the second question first. No, I do not know. I think it's a great idea and someone should spearhead that. My siblings— I have a bunch of younger siblings, and to watch them multitask and to enable this information, it's incredible. Even at my age, I like to think that I'm up on things and that I'm very technology savvy. They blow me out of the water. So I think there is tremendous growth there.

And then where you look at where that's going with, you know, you mentioned the aging rural community and those involved in agriculture, at some point that will change. You know, it might be 20 years, but let's look at where this is going for implementation. What I'm presenting here today is not something that I think is going to happen overnight or in 5 years. It might be 10 or 15 years down the road. But I think there's something that we can be done with that now. So maybe from a planning standpoint, someone with a flip phone or someone that it would take more time to do, those are the people that we need to be reaching out to. But also they need to be receptive and need to be progressive in their outlook on that. So hopefully that answers that question in a roundabout way. I don't have a good answer for that.

The second one, uh, with the chemicals that you mentioned, so I'll bring this back to the training. So when I first started reaching out to this community, a lot of people were grilling me on questions, and rightfully so, on, okay, this is great looking at emergency response, but how do we, how do we do planning for this? Let's talk about prevention. You know, let's talk about not having to use Green Shoot Recovery System because they used a harness and they had a buddy system and there's communications and it didn't happen. Safety is so hard to measure because you don't know what you prevented from happening. So when it comes to the chemical side of things, absolutely we have, um, and what I try to focus on when doing the consulting with these clients is looking at a pervasive culture of safety and prevention up front.

And so when it comes to the chemical plannings, whether that's having the SDS information available or better communicating that when you're doing the walkthrough in the locations, Absolutely, we put a focus and emphasis on that. So if we can prevent it before it happens, if I know that— and again, this is where it comes hard with safety— if I know that I helped to prevent one injury or prevent one death by planning and coordination, I can die a happy man. You know, that's the goal of this operation. So absolutely, we put an emphasis on that. Thank you for asking. We're almost to lunch. Take one more question if anybody has it. If not, like I said, I'll be around for lunch. Thank you so much for your involvement, engagement. Please, I'll put this up on the screen.

Well, and I'll just mention quick, so eventually whether it's working with MAPR or someone else, I would like to have this in an application. I don't have the funding or the time really right now to do that, but in theory if you could have this at your fingertips to better coordinate that information or to be implemented in systems, whether that's Climate or 2020 systems, to where you're in a tractor and you can just hit a button that says, "Hey, I have an emergency here," and it automatically shares your data and information and field location. So if it recognizes what field you're in, no different than it knows what hybrid or whatever else that you're in, and can communicate that main entrance information, that takes me out of the picture. That makes it way easier. And I hope someday we can have that adoption of that technology.

So thank you for your time, your dedication to agriculture and shaping the future. Please connect with me in some way. And thank you all so much.