i want to first introduce ministry of economic affairs officials in the consulate general's office as well as our west michigan business leader hosts university officials and our state county and local government officials and gas it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the city of holland and especially to that is one windmill island gardens and to thank you for visiting west michigan i'm ryan cotton city manager of holland the city we're proud of our dutch heritage and the opportunity to to today as we learn new ways to foster economic possibilities we're also proud for having been recognized by two business publications recently forbes magazine and money magazine as one of the safest most beautiful the most livable places in the united states we hope that new connections made today will enable us to jointly become recognized in the future for increased economic development and international strength especially in our agricultural sectors i want you to know a couple of facts michigan's ag economy is growing a culture contributes ninety one billion annually to michigan's economy nearly a quarter of the jobs in our state a related michigan farms preserve food diversity we grow huge number of varieties to extend their growing season provide i catch in colors great flavor many varieties are heirlooms passed down thr generations because of their excellent qualities all their varieties contain genetic structure of hundreds of thousands of years of human selection and may possess the genetic diversity needed to thrive in a changing climate michigan farms are innovat uses for every dollar in tax revenue raised by residential development government spend their late twenty's percent more than that in services that is the impact of increasing taxes yet for every dollar in tax revenue raised by a farm of forest  open or private open spaces government spend only a third of its revenue on services thereby reducing the need to raise taxes these innovations are all happening here in the greater holland region and it's much about what we will be discussing today so in summary agriculture is vitally important to all of us it is therefore distinct honor and great joy to have you here in to share with you our agricultural fruits we hope that you will also makes strength i think that's very apropos for today so after you leave here we hope you'll enjoy the beauty of lake michigan we hope you will return again and often i know karen and i are looking forward to visiting the netherlands in amsterdam in just three weeks where i hope we can personally learn more about you and enjoy the fruits of your agriculture time nice police car but also nice police because as we met police in the netherlands there is always penalty but here it was very  i see so many proud people your proud and your heritage and i think we can learn from you but also we are dutch people and we also has to be proud on our heads so we can learn from you and this is new for you so it means also that we have to come back in the first week up in february because since voting day for the new mayor i promise we will come back it's not much when you're not dutch and you know in our gene it means matchmaking because you want to do business for that reason i'm so glad that our so many business people from the surrounding of holland michigan are here and you did fake labor because always when you fight people they are closer together but now you outside of the united states of america to children to family to schools for education about the puti of nature and  as we feel today this is already our home in the united states of america thank you very much our work is coming from a viewer not states and canada by building green i was covered with last year thank you for getting started eating we're going to keep this moving on the center of your table or a local selections of beer wine and cider all of which is produced in holland michigan please drink it it is delicious why it is from valley beer from new holland brewing company and the cider was generously donated by virtue cider which is based just south of here in front of all so please enjoy and so that you know what you can sell  i'm looking for growers and investors and technology companies that would like to go operate in this international platform thank you us organic and fresh snow good afternoon my name is i'm from lights and greenhouses we supply and install screen installations that are used for energy saving and reducing the lights and blackouts as well we supply and install in segmenting to keep the box out and we have an office in the kalamazoo thank you don't my name is john clarke and jr i'm which i must shrooms shelter as one of the largest producer of frozen mushrooms on this planet i'm here together with my little brother right over there  i would like to enjoy meeting you all and trying to do some business here about west michigan thank you hi my name is kara and i represent plant lab with my partner brian we represent a new generation of growing climate control chambers and growing recipes to produce better plants in a more efficient more states we help companies going abroad and also into the united states and that's and united states companies going into europe through the netherlands of course thank and outside the u s we have high concentration in europe some parts of asia and what we do is we provide complete solutions to produce high quality vegetables and plants and flowers netherlands focusing on different brands the road or brands for our high tech protected culture crops and seminars for open field growth and looking for sustainable solutions in the ag and horticulture industry i'm looking for partners that can do the production and the distribution in the u oh i'm going to ask to the stage cliff newson the president of the own farm services who is getting his things together dan fisher who is the vice president of ventas technologies charlie parker v p of operation big dutchman and jim byron president of the michigan agribusiness association coming up guys now we have cards on the table if you have questions we will have time for q and a fill out on the card if you have a question with regard to any of these organizations or if you have a question for jim who is going to be will speak to the broader  michigan agriculture industry i'm going to have them go down the line and kind of do a really quick introduction of themselves thirty seconds guys ready dan go yeah  michigan agribusiness association where they often referred to as the chamber of commerce of agriculture in michigan we represent the business sectors of those that handle grain specialty grain specialty food products special crop production systems also turkey producers pork producers and potato industrials well pretty diverse organization but very involved in the working to make sure michigan's agriculture continues to grow great thanks guys cliff i want to start with you so for the americans who joined us here at lunch we did a bus tour of the region and our first stop was on armed services so i wanted to talk with start with cliff for just a minute and this is to be some of my own childish ignorance of not growing up here but i drive it every day and my assumption is maybe it is for many others is that you guys are just a grain elevator and you're much more than that could you kind of talk as we evolved we then became a processing plant for soybeans in one thousand nine hundred six and one of the premier strengths of that plant today is its high protein male which goes into the food industry  from just the local feed producing facility into a food producing there's only that markets it's high protein products drought the pacific rim and europe and a little bit in the america we also from that plant come soybean oil and that oil is our own brand name as we also in two thousand put up a refinery that followed right along with the process we found out that if you produce i mean oil better have a refinery because you're if you have to sell your competition you're in trouble as we all know selling your product to your competition doesn't always get to the highest price so we put up our own refinery we got all the way to the end user with our own brand name and we continue to evolve in that sphere as we get our protein into a brand name over the years we've got in the corn process in different states as we are now located in about five states brassica pennsylvania we have a transportation department florida we have a sales office in texas and one in west concent and we also have a facility in japan a sailboat in the plant which sells all our products to the pacific rim we have a as a third generation family and we look to expand on those things that's fantastic just a follow up that we talked about this earlier the netherlands the second largest importer of soybeans in the world after china and the gentleman who is doing the and we ran into some barriers and but we still didn't hear work on that i think in the next couple of years we'll be able to penetrate there mostly america has a hard time getting the netherlands i for big dutchman and distributing product that's on hold anyway out of the back of his car in europe and over time you know as a distributor big dutch was manufacture here but his success was as a distributor more and more  we design we source we sell we manufacture very very little here some parts of the world we do a little more but he's made it a global organization with his family his three children involved in the business and  fifty one hundred here and the others are around the country and the market for big dutchman us is canada north america mexico and south america are our slaves in the world and that's to go back to right everyone made the the business for the farmer more efficient really what were the evolution so where are you finding it more efficiencies in some of these larger farmers who maybe want to have a little bit more if you want to know their chickens better or give them specialized getting it is it possible to wear armor with ten thousand as a poultry to really understand what that need of a specific chicken or turkey in egg production and be a pretty small farm you've got we've got a few farmers right around us here who have million maybe three million birds they're managing and with technology that is available computer technology on line technology they can monitor their flock very closely bird weight production feed consumption and water consumption and right on down the line the newer production which is a product for a farmer was like look nothing goes to waste some prices are a technology integration company and our roots are really in the semiconductor industry more specifically in the advanced touch a touch technology like you might find yourself that and our founder of  some some really new things and how we can develop light spectrum the light delivery systems and to work on what we call solid state volumetric lighting and what that is basically it's provides beautiful ami directional light uniformly like maybe an is that we can custom design our own light spectrums and so if you take our optic like this it's a solid optic but we suspend it all we suspend a variety of fosters in here and  under the influence of highly efficient the light we can change the wavelength of the phosphorus and design specific spectrums that we want to tailor the spectrums to meet specific applications that are out there and so few years ago we're looking at the agricultural industry what you know applications here and we discovered that yeah we could actually produce some really cool light spectrums that provide the needs for plants and to help them with efficient and and strong gro h so anyway with that knowledge we kind of changed our discussion from the discussion of physics like what light spectrum can we produce to a discussion of biology what light spectrum should we be producing so we put our team together of them we have a biologist on our team we have electrical engineer other engineers and we started working and working and we developed we we worked with many universities we read tons of research papers and worked with a lot of local growers and in farmers and and we tooled and tested that argued a lot and finally came up with what we call are told will grow a broad growth light spectrum and i think i'm like a lot of companies who do design there and develop their products around the limitations of the technology we really want to start with the plants and  know in a commercial greenhouse what it what's the most popular light use right now and it's well you know you're in a big commercial greenhouse where you've got the sun for supplemental lighting high pressure sodium is really bad out there for a long time and been very very popular some metal technic greenhouse growing is huge in the net and into the second largest producer by hectare in in the world in terms of house growing where do you see a potential market for this where do you see this going well i mean  indoor growing is is the exploding all over the world actually and we're seeing a lot you can see a lot more you know vertical farming urban urban gardens into home growing and small operations for example we just you know today sold six hundred of business for agriculture industry in michigan there's twelve thousand farms that surround this west michigan area they make up this west michigan area i got so many questions i will have to like time for one  twenty fourteen was a huge year in terms of corn and wheat and soy bean how his how is michigan's agriculture industry changing as effectively kind of the world changes in terms of what who needs what produce where we shipping stuff where we importing where things going we ship everywhere give you a little flavor of some statistics and information about michigan where the most diverse diverse day in terms of what we grow in the nation except for the thing on the west coast california we grow a lot here and the irony is what we grow here tends to be more accessible and easier to get to markets in europe and elsewhere we are very diverse especially on the west side of michigan you know i i love the going to holland many many times and i love my friends point out that they looked at the north sea and said hey we can farm that and built the dikes and did everything they could do while that same kind of an entrepreneurial spirit exists in this part of the world in the west michigan you know it's not by accident you started your trip in detroit it was raining and you get over here in the bright sunshine and a clear sky it's also important to note that the ad spirit here in west michigan agricultural is also joined with with a whole lot of resources that are pretty unique to the area the number one resource that's the unique to the area very unique to the area is water water we believe firmly in our industry and our association is the oil there's absolutely no question about i was in new york last week at the bank of montral investor conference and the big conversation was monetizing the value of water it's a key issue especially if you look at what's produced in california that goes around the world what we produce here that goes around the world the other piece that's interesting in michigan is that a lot of folks that are familiar with the midwest in the united states are familiar with corn soy beans and wheat here we talk about things like beans black beans navy beans kidney beans we talk about blueberries and apples and cherries we talk about livestock production of rapidly growing dairy industry we talk about an expanding a production industry and by the way as an aside  just this morning the u s d a united states department of agriculture and the federal government the u s authorized the import of eggs from holland because we have some issues here with avian influenza we also have this other major resource in the west side of the state of michigan called microclimates you may be familiar with those and how and as well but that's why you see the production up and down the west coast that's why you see specialty crop production here and that's why you see a real  entrepreneurial spirit in those microclimates is why you see a whole industry developing around what i refer to as specialty production that may be nine g m o soybeans right left it may be organic black beans it may be organic beans for example in michigan we talk a lot about driving production navy beans kidney beans those kind of things we actually grow more acres of non g m o soybeans in michigan than we do driving it's rapidly growing industry the whole point is that in michigan we tend to focus on what the market wants not what we want to grow let's let's go back to water real quick because we talked about i touch on that on the bus as we drove past that lake mack issues in terms of what we're experiencing today and that's water that's going to silt in it and drainage what we're trying to do now is keep it locally with project clarity keep water on the property or the store there the water somewhere what is michigan in general doing to really protect that freshwater resource that we hold that is so important as you said movie to issues we see coming at us one is water access water use and water quality water quality specifically we have several programs in place we in our organization ever regional conservation partnership program where we're looking at installation of conservation practices just like project clarity is doing on late we're also launching a new a project to talk about managing drain tile water that comes off the field and drain tile because that tends to be the biggest source of some of the nutrient loading that the that exists and some of the water bodies we're launching that project are right now third the professionalism of the industry and the ability of the industrial look at the variable rate fertilizer application high tech verbalise or application only putting it where it's needed when it's needed applying it several times during the year rather than just all at once in the spring that's a key component but also raising the level as i say of professionalism of those that do what they do what they do with farmers in terms of nutrient their recommendations fertilizer i commend ations we run the certified crop advisor program in the state of michigan which requires folks to be educated about what they do with crop nutrients we also run a certified fertilizer applicator program we're doing a lot of things to help raise the level and raise the bar if you will to maintain water quality and help them grow but the irony is it's important to future we we support the attitude of all of the above the commercial producers want to produce variety and use the g m o an answer i've just written but if you look at markets and we look at trends in food demand in the u and around the world there are different demands and if it's not g m o that's why there's not g m o soybean oil soybean meal all sorts of things like that we work with a company called pulp day which many in agriculture don't necessarily like very well because they to get rid of all g m o those and they want to pursue organic production the irony is we also in michigan not very far from here have the largest organic bean mill in the world we have the largest organic egg producer in north america so we represent all sectors we are all of the above that's what the market demands and whatever that market demand is our producers and our industrial me in terms of the future by can predict the future  challenge is that all of us after realize the science basically says everything is safe but the market and marketing objectives are driving some of those decisions and it's our challenge as an industry to meet those market demands about g m o your food right if you say we have to listen to a tickle sooner because the consumer yes decide what to eat it's not the government is not the producer no it's a cool sooner because he has to pay for it this week he also feels that it was in detroit the whole foods the first whole foods in detroit it was the pilot tryout and they said we didn't know what happens within six months they made already the benefits where that would which was calculated over three years and for you soon they will open the second to whole foods and hope which means organic because they have a market for marketing story but not to you at all if you first of all i told you we were for you excited to come here to come with a delegation such a beautiful lunch nice lunch it's organic it and i like tradition because i'm an old guy but also i feel i see something that we can learn from each other west michigan they have to and to put new hours and here we are we are together with and also i have to compliment to make compliments to you because the late night show is over now so maybe you can take it over you look also like l about a relation but we did today this is strength i will asian partnership and this also for the future because again is now my second time and i promised my wife to come back because i saw already united speech yeah yeah really but again it's not only for today but also for the future i hope that you will find nice place in your office in the major robert and i will just say that i did give time on one more thing actually two more things because when i found out that there are no voters and they're coming back in november i gave him two more of those lapel pins with instructions to present those to kingvale i'm alexander and queen maxima to make sure that they too come in november book about amsterdam this nice gift it's on your desk it's a two you may open it because i was here the first time it just just before the event and with five hundred thousand troops in the small street we we need to there's a reason we're here and and you are the reason but there is a real reason that this luncheon happened and because of the generosity of war norcross and one of the largest law firms and in the state of michigan and  is going to toast you on your journey to your next location so i'm going to give this to curt rubric thank you brian we're with coffee and actually while you're while you're all getting your favorite beverage from the center of the table all of a toast in a second but thank you to the delegation the thirty four companies that made it out to the to the event made the trip thank you to the speakers you guys if anybody needs to have a weekly fix of ag agribusiness fax sign up for gems for jim's e mail it comes out and it's all of all of the things that are fit to print agribusiness in the state of michigan so with that what's another and some that aren't fit ok we won't talk about those anyway had a great had a great day today started out in grand rapids those of you who were there got to see the great downtown market a fantastic opportunity to showcase the food in the state of michigan for those of you that didn't you missed out on a great event i was by the way the one who whispered wow it was expensive that wasn't because the food was expensive it's because i didn't plan on when i walked out the door this morning i did not plan on spending as much as i did at the market so but it's all it's all very good a great a great trip and thanks to those who hosted us along the way on the bus trip boar's head zealand farm services copper craft brewery and johnson certainly the folks on the bus our visitors learned a lot about the area about the hard work and the ingenuity that goes on in west michigan and east michigan's not so bad so i hope you enjoyed your trip with the dan carmody all right so the toast this is the two to the first step on a long and prosperous journey to our new partnership that one where they told me and now who's in charge brian's in charge i am not in charge no one should ever give me a microphone thank you all for joining us today really appreciate it obviously as we discuss these guys got to go to chicago to hang out with royalty  i want everyone to know that this was a much cooler party than what they were doing in my or gardens because we had again the the the wind in and cider and beer of our local fair which they had lemonade so good for them commerce in the city of hallinan everyone else was part of this thank you so much for being here today and enjoyed a beautiful day