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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

 UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 

AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE 

FEDERAL GRAIN INSPECTION SERVICE 

+ + + + + 

 GRAIN INSPECTION ADVISORY COMMITTEE (GIAC) 

MEETING 

+ + + + + 

WEDNESDAY 

DECEMBER 14, 2022 

+ + + + + 

The Advisory Committee met at the AMS 

National Grain Center, 10383 North Ambassador Drive, 

Kansas City, Missouri, at 8:30 a.m., Barbara Grove, 

Chair, presiding. 

PRESENT: 

BARBARA GROVE, Chairperson, Central Valley Ag 

ARTHUR NEAL, Deputy Administrator, Federal Grain 

Inspection Service 

JANICE COOPER, Managing Director, Wheat Marketing 

Center 

CHRISTOPHER FREDERKING, General Manager, Zen-Noh 

Grain Corporation 

PHILIP GARCIA, Grain Inspection Program Manager, 

Washington State Department of Agriculture 

JOHN MORGAN, Supreme Rice, Crowley, Louisiana 

CURTIS ENGEL, Senior Vice President, The Scoular 

Company 

CHARLES BIRD, Senior Director Product Management, 

Neogen Corporation 

ROBERT SINNER, President, North Dakota SB&B Foods, 

Incorporated 

JIMMY WILLIAMS, Secretary, Missouri Department of 

Agriculture 
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ALSO PRESENT: 

BRIAN ADAM, USDA 

ANUJ CHOPRA, ESQPLUS 

NICHOLAS FRIANT, Vice Chair Cargill, Incorporated 

ANTHONY GOODEMAN, USDA 

ED JHEE, USDA 

BYRON REILLY, USDA 

DR. KURT ROSENTRATER, Professor, Iowa State 

University 

DENISE RUGGLES, USDA 
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C-O-N-T-E-N-T-S

Call to Order, Roll Call, Welcome..................4

Greetings..........................................5

Program Updates....................................7

Discuss Industry Issues...........................98

Public Comments..................................164

Wrap-up Discussions on Industry Issues...........176

Adjourn
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P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

(8:30 a.m.)

CHAIR GROVE: Well good morning, 

everybody. It's just a few minutes after 8:30, so 

we will get started as we want to be conscious with 

everybody's time, both here in-person and online.

Welcome, everybody. It's good to see the 

committee back together again even though, you know, 

we had some Zooms and calls in the, in the middle of 

the year to update ourselves, it's certainly nice to 

be in-person here so we can, you know, feel like we're 

getting some good work done.

Welcome to the people in the live 

gallery. Thank you for being here and being a part 

of this as we're working on things for our industry. 

And, also, to you that are joining us virtually. 

Again, appreciate that you are here.

As always, a few of those pre-meeting 

clean-up things. If you have devices with you, make 

sure you have them in a silent mode so that we don't 

interrupt the meeting today. We can continue with 

our business. If you have to take a call, please 
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make sure to step out of the room before you start 

the conversation. Again, we don't want to be 

distracted.

For those of you on virtually, everybody 

is in mute right now. But if, at any point, you have 

a question, a comment, any discussion you'd like to 

say, either raise your hand or pump that up in the 

chat, and somebody here will be watching that.

And when the time allows, or at a good 

break in the live conversation amongst the committee, 

we can call on you and you can be unmuted or, 

possibly, just go ahead and put your question in the 

chat.

I do want to start out here just with 

everybody on the committee to go ahead and introduce 

yourselves so that people in the live gallery and 

those online know who you are.

Dr. Kurt, if you would like to start.

DR. ROSENTRATER: Good morning, 

everyone. I'm Kurt Rosentrater from Iowa State 

University.

MR. FRIANT: Nick Friant with Cargill.
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MR. WILLIAMS: Jimmy Williams, Missouri 

Department of Agriculture.

MR. SINNER: Bob Sinner, North Dakota 

SB&B Foods.

MR. BIRD: Chuck Bird, the Neogen 

Corporation.

MR. ENGEL: Curt Engel, retired, Scoular 

Company.

MR. MORGAN: John Morgan, Supreme Rice 

out of Crowley, Louisiana.

MR. GARCIA: Philip Garcia with the State 

of Washington.

MR. FREDERKING: Chris Frederking with 

Zen-Noh Grain.

MS. COOPER: Janice Cooper recently from 

the Wheat Marketing Center.

MR. NEAL: Arthur Neal, Federal Grain 

Inspection Service.

CHAIR GROVE: And I'm Barb Grove, and I 

will be chairing the meeting today, and I am with 

Central Valley Ag.

With that, I'm going to go ahead and turn 
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it over to you, Arthur.

MR. NEAL: Good morning, again, and thank 

Barb for, thank you for opening up this meeting with, 

you know, just a nice energy. Appreciate that.

I want to say thank you to all of you for 

being here. I guess June was the last time we met, 

and you could be doing a lot of other things right 

now. I know everybody's plates are full, but you've 

taken the time to spend, you know, with us on the 

next couple of days to share your expertise, your 

wisdom and your perspectives.

And we want to say thank you on behalf of 

the Secretary as well as leadership of the marketing 

and regulatory program. It really means a lot to us 

to be able to have you here so that we can discuss 

matters that help us facilitate the inspection of 

grain in a more efficient and effective manner. So, 

we want to say thank you.

As I share today, I'm going to start by 

providing update, and then we'll just kind of hand 

the baton over to various FGIS personnel and we'll 

continue to do the same.
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One of the initial updates I want to 

share with you all is about the GIAC, Grain Inspection 

Advisory Committee nomination process. In June of 

last, June of this year, we solicited nominations for 

the Grain Inspection Advisory Committee, and we only 

got a small handful of nominees.

We had to re-open the nomination process, 

I think, in September. As a result of that, we have 

a total of 11 nominees that are being considered for 

the committee. We have met with the Undersecretary 

concerning nominations and she's meeting with the 

Secretary.

We're hoping that we can get an 

announcement any day now. We were hoping that we'd 

be able to have some folks for this particular 

meeting, but that's not the way things worked out, 

but the process is moving forward.

In the same vein, we're also renewing the 

charter for the Grain Inspection Advisory Committee 

to operate. That process is underway. We had to 

start the nomination process, but we elected to start 

the nomination process first, so that we can ensure 
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that we didn't, we did not delay getting members 

appointed and the charter expire.

So, if the charter had expired first, we 

probably wouldn't have new members until a lot 

further down the road. So, if we can get new members 

appointed before the charter expires, that helps us. 

As soon as we get the charter renewed, we can have 

another meeting when we need to have it, and we'd 

have quorum.

That was the other real concern, about 

making sure that we had quorum. So, that's the 

update there; that charter process, it's moving. We 

have been required to perform a barrier analysis 

around this committee's diversity. And so, we're in 

the process of doing that now.

We've done extensive outreach to various 

organizations and communities to generate interest in 

the committee. Timing, I think, was an issue based 

on the feedback that I have been getting this goround.

Before the next round of nominations, we 

will be doing more outreach to ensure we can diversify 
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the committee. And we're asking industry, also, to 

help us in that vein, as well.

Somewhat along the same lines, there was 

a recommendation; well, we're talking about, we 

mentioned the quorum. One of the things that we said 

we would do was find out how could the Grain 

Inspection Advisory Committee address a change in its 

quorum?

And we found out that the Grain 

Inspection Advisory Committee, at its next meeting, 

can put the quorum issue on its agenda to vote on 

whether or not it wants to change the quorum, and 

then we can update the charter accordingly.

So, that is something that can be done 

through the committee, and we will update the 

charter, okay.

CHAIR GROVE: So, that we'd have to wait 

for the charter to renew because in January the 

charter expires. So, we have to wait for that 

renewal, and then in the next meeting it can go on 

our agenda.

MR. NEAL: Correct. It can go on the 
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next agenda. You could, you know, if you've got 

everything worked out, you can take your vote, and 

then it will be changed.

Any other questions about that one?

MR. SINNER: Arthur, would you remind us 

it's three-fourths, right?

MR. NEAL: Oh, two-thirds; I'm sorry.

MR. SINNER: Two-thirds. You have twothirds mot three-fourths.

MR. NEAL: Yeah, two-thirds. Thanks. 

So, we talked quorum.

Another issue that we're making progress 

on, in the 2020 reauthorization of U.S. Grain 

Standards Act, FGIS was required to perform a review 

of geographic boundaries. We completed the review 

back in June, but it's been going through a number of 

reviews inside the department.

We're glad to say that, you know, it's at 

the last leg. We're, we're really expecting its 

finalization any day now. It's being reviewed for 

approval by the Office of the Secretary. And so, 

we're hoping that that will be an announcement we can 
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make pretty soon. So, that's progress in that space 

in terms of meeting that requirement.

We started, some time ago in 20, I guess, 

'19 the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking for 

exceptions to geographic boundaries. We did a 

proposed rule in 2020, and we've been trying to 

finalize this rule for exceptions to geographic 

boundaries.

And for those who may be unfamiliar with 

it, we're trying to address aspects of U.S. Grain 

Standards Act that would create greater clarity 

around how decisions are made on when a customer can 

receive service outside of the geographic boundary 

assigned to that service provider for that area.

This rule has gone through a number of 

reviews, and it's still going through review. We 

just got feedback from counsel a few weeks ago, and 

we're making changes to it again.

I've heard, and I've got to confirm, that 

this particular rule may now be designated as 

significant by the Office of Management and Budget, 

which adds a whole different layer of review and 
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approval to it, for those who are familiar with 

Federal rulemaking.

We're also working to ensure that we get 

our forms developed because with this rule, you know, 

customers would be able to make requests. And we're 

trying to develop a form that would accompany rule, 

as well as a mock website that the public would engage 

around the regulations.

All of that has to be approved before we 

can finalize this rule. So, there's a lot of work 

going around, going on related to the exceptions for 

geographic boundaries. We're making progress, but 

there's a lot of iterations and a lot of legal review.

So, I just wanted to give you an update 

there. The goal is to put it back into the legal 

review process by the end of this month. And so, 

we're hoping, we're hoping that all things will 

continue to move forward on that.

Along the rulemaking line, soybeans of 

other colors; most of you are familiar we had 

discussed that issue at our last meeting in June. We 

released a notice to trade late October.
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CHAIR GROVE: November.

MR. NEAL: Yeah, November, saying that we 

would undertake Federal rulemaking, public comment 

rulemaking to change the soybean standards by 

removing soybeans of other color as a grade 

determining factor.

We also mentioned that we were going to 

pursue and ask for comment on implementing such 

changes sooner than the one-year time period outlined 

in the U.S. Grain Standards Act. We're making good 

progress on that. We plan on having the first 

proposal submitted in for clearance, legal review, by 

the end of this month.

We're going to try to move that. Our 

goal is to have that rule; I said goal is to have 

everything finalized, hopefully, before harvest. 

The wild card in this is whether or not the Office of 

Management and Budget is going to declare this a 

significant rulemaking.

And what makes that challenging in, 

potentially, being able to do so is because we're 

trying to implement it sooner than the year. So, it 
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could raise a flag for them that this could have 

significant impact.

So, we're trying to do everything in our 

power to keep things as contained as we can, and we 

will continue to give you all updates, accordingly, 

on the progress of that rulemaking.

I think that's all I have. I'm going to 

pause right now, and allow you all to ask me questions 

before we turn it over to Denise Ruggles.

CHAIR GROVE: I do, quick, have one 

question on that last update. So, if you're looking 

at implementing by harvest, it's a crop year; 2023 

crop year would start April/May. This would mean the 

standard could not go into effect until the next year, 

if the crop year has already started?

MR. NEAL: The objective, the objective 

is finalized. That's the objective. Now --

CHAIR GROVE: Move to your mic.

MR. NEAL: Oh, sorry. That's the 

objective, but that all will have to clear a lot of 

legal hurdles.

MR. FRIANT: Arthur, could you help us 
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understand; I think the term you used was significant 

rulemaking. Can you maybe help us understand what 

that bar is to be considered significant?

MR. NEAL: So, the bar for significant, 

and I don't have the dollar amounts in my head right 

now; but for a rule to be determined significant by 

OMB, it has to have a significant economic impact. 

And that threshold right now, Nick, I don't have it 

on the top of my head.

For the non-significant, initially, the 

exceptions rule was designated as non-significant by 

OMB, but based on what I'm hearing as of late here, 

it's not being changed to significant.

And that's primarily, I think, because 

with this rule, when you're talking about the 

exceptions rule, changing someone's geographic 

boundary impacts their business.

So, these things are very fluid, and I 

wish I had the mind of OMB, but I do not. But that 

kind of gives you a perspective. And we can clarify 

the dollar amounts and other criteria for you before 

we leave.
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MR. FRIANT: I think that would be 

helpful just so we have an understanding of what, 

what we've got to look at, both in terms of the 

exceptions. And then I think you said that that was 

also, potentially, a concern for the SBOC standard 

change, as well. That it could be determined 

significant?

MR. NEAL: No one has said anything, but 

it's in the back of my head that it's a possibility.

Any other questions?

Okay, I'll turn it over to Denise to give 

us the budget update.

MS. RUGGLES: All right, can you hear me?

Okay, good morning. I'm going to go over 

our financials as of the end of 2022's fiscal year. 

These are published on the website as of yesterday. 

We did get them up on the website.

There is one more previously requested 

slide that has not been posted yet. I'm working on 

getting that updated next week.

So, at the end of '22, you can see that 

the grain inspection and weighing program had an 
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operating reserve of $3 million, which is about one 

month of operating reserve; a little bit more than 

that, but not by much.

The official agency grain account was at 

11.7 months of reserve. The rice account is at 6.8 

months of reserve, and the commodity program was at 

7.7 months of reserve.

In addition to the user fee funding, we 

also received $16.1 million of appropriated funding 

after the rent portion was removed and overhead was 

taken out of our portion. So, this is, we got $16.1 

to spend as appropriated.

This is how we spent those funds in the 

different programs. Salaries and benefits, travel, 

moving, shipping expenses. Other services includes 

training and services provided by others such as 

maintenance agreements. Our overhead is also in that 

area.

And then, this is how the grain 

inspection program was for the tonnage information; 

how the national tonnage fee, the cost of that program 

and the revenue brought in. And the specific field 
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offices, their tonnage.

And the hourly and inspection fees that 

we have and how those, how those programs ended. 

There's, of course, no tonnage on these.

And then, the non-export hourly and 

inspection fees is related to revenue and operating 

costs for the domestic field office and the scale 

testing program, registration program and the science 

and technologies division. Such as the bar and some 

of their other programs they do pesticide, pesticide 

testing. That's all I have.

Is there any questions about the slides? 

It's really quick and --

MR. FRIANT: I thought, Denise, that 

yesterday that the fees directive came out; is that 

correct?

MS. RUGGLES: Yes, the fees directive 

came out, adding a new rate code for the fecal matter 

assay testing. So, that when customers call in, they 

know what that test is going to run them for those 

services. That's the only change that was made.

Except for, I think there was a couple 
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other slight changes like the pesticide testing; we 

removed the revision on the rate code. We had a 

revision numbering in there.

So, on the fees, though, we are going to 

publish our annual notice so that next year we can 

have a little bit more time to get with the trade and 

industry on the fees for the grain programs.

So, there will be a notice announced for 

the revision account and the grain inspection 

account, a regular annual notice.

MR. FRIANT: And that would be where the 

tonnage fees will be discussed.

MS. RUGGLES: Correct.

MR. FRIANT: Okay.

MS. RUGGLES: So, we will have another 

one in '23 that will give industry a time to, to 

review and provide comment. With the cost of living 

increase that's, potentially, coming in January 1st, 

and then the rice one will happen, again for October 

next year, that's an annual one.

And we will be doing a full regulatory 

review of the commodity program to remove those fees 
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from the regulation. Yes.

MR. SINNER: We made a decision, and help 

me remember, and maybe others do remember, to 

increase the fees sometime during this, this past 

fiscal year; is that correct?

MS. RUGGLES: We did a periodic review 

to, to increase the fees. More than the limited 5 

percent.

MR. SINNER: Okay, so we did not increase 

the fees during the '22 fiscal year?

MS. RUGGLES: Yeah, they increased on 

February 1st the regular 5 percent.

MR. SINNER: Okay, February 1st. And 

so, the deficit is reflective of about five months of 

the previous fees; or maybe four months, right?

MS. RUGGLES: The fee increase went into 

effect February, so it would be February through 

September. So, it would have had, that was all the 

fees that would have; we had four months at the 

previous fees --

MR. SINNER: Sure.

MS. RUGGLES: -- for the grain account. 
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MR. NEAL: And just for clarity, too Bob, 

the 5 percent increase that we've been doing annually 

is a, it's a maximum increase that we can make to 

fees without doing a full fee review and notice to 

Trade.

And it really doesn't cover the true cost 

of the deficit, and true cost of the deficit is based 

on us having reduced fees so that we could lower the 

amount of reserves that were in our account.

And so, we're going to have to adjust 

fees upward beyond the 5 percent at some point soon 

so that we can begin to address the deficits, and 

that's a larger conversation.

MS. COOPER: I had a question about --

can you go back?

Do you have a slide that compares '22 

with '21, for example? Just so we can get an idea 

of what has changed, because every year it's so

different from an export perspective.

MS. RUGGLES: I don't, but they are on 

our website, all of the years, multiple years. This 

detail is on for the different years, as well as the 
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other slides; they're there for all the prior years.

MS. COOPER: In the future, maybe, it 

just might be useful to do a year-on-year comparison 

for us?

MS. RUGGLES: Sure.

MS. COOPER: Just so we can see what 

might have changed. 

MS. RUGGLES: Okay.

MS. COOPER: Thanks.

MR. FRIANT: Also, just for clarity's 

sake, this information is posted on the, it's not 

posted on the Grain Advisory Committee website, 

portion of the AMS website. It's on the FGIS 

financial data portion of the website?

MS. RUGGLES: Correct. Yes, and there's 

two sections on there. The first section talks about 

the user fees, as a whole, which is the first. It 

has this slide and this slide right after it. And 

then the other section on there has this slide.

And then the next slide that will be 

posted there is the one that breaks down the 

inspection weighing program by each of the offices 
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that use those, have those obligations by how they're 

using those with salaries and benefits travel. That 

will be posted next week for '22.

Any other questions? All right, I'm 

going to turn it over to Byron Reilly of International 

Affairs.

MR. REILLY: I've been told not, I've 

been told not to touch the clicker because I'm a jinx. 

I've also been called the walking computer virus. 

So, I'll do my best not to mess up and make the whole 

system crash.

CHAIR GROVE: So, are you taking over 

Tony's comedic relief section of the program today? 

MR. REILLY: Well, he has certain buttons 

that are taped, so we can't press those. So, yeah, 

he's my second in command.

The topic I'm going to talk about today 

is going to cover the latest international trade 

issues, our outreach that we've been doing, and 

update you on the quality complaints.

The whole Decree 177 from China is still 

our number one topic. We've had issues with GACC 
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since they split up. The food safety exporters under 

Decree 248, the ones that handle grain such as foodgrade sorghum and pulses, they have been kicked back 

to Decree 177.

So, I have been in consultation with FAS, 

who's been talking with GACC, trying to get more 

details explaining why. And particularly like the 

pulse guys who are registered under 248, which 

requires a lot of, I think, confidential business 

information they have to disclose. Does this mean, 

now, that they have to be registered, additionally, 

under 177?

And there doesn't seem to be less 

communication between the two divisions and GACC, the 

food safety and the quarantine inspection service.

GACC had been silent with USDA. We've 

had, in June, was the last published list of 

exporters, and we've been handing them, sending them 

monthly updates. Okay, we've added this, we've added 

that.

And we just, through pressure from FAS 

and a letter that was sent over there, they have 
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updated through our September list. We've updated 

and sent a November list, which they have also 

updated.

Lately, we just got an e-mail back from 

GACC saying that hey, I've seen four exporters that 

need to be on the list. So, we're preparing to send 

another update. So, at least we shook the tree and 

got them to listen and provide updates.

Usually, it took about, you know, three 

to four weeks. So, we're glad that they're finally 

listening to us. I think they're still trying to get 

structured, reorganized.

MR. NEAL: I want to comment, too, and I 

forgot to mention this update, and it's connected to 

Byron's update on China Decree 177.

The last meeting, the Grain Inspection 

Advisory Committee also made a recommendation that 

MRP marketing and regulatory programs in Foreign 

Agriculture Service undersecretary create a task 

force to look at issues around kind of grain exporter 

registration issues so that we can have a coordinated 

approach.
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And so, Foreign Ag Service Animal and 

Plant Health Inspection Service and FGIS will have a 

minimum of two individuals that will serve on our 

kind of tiger team to address issues around grain 

exporter registration.

We have been, we had been meeting, 

anyway, before that. But just to ensure that with 

more communication around the topic, we're going to 

make sure that it's a standing agenda item at the 

Grain Inspection Advisory Committee meeting, and 

provide updates on activities that have surrounded or 

occurred around those issues.

It also allows the committee to, then, 

come prepared to discuss any matters related to it 

and make recommendations through the committee that 

could be taken back to FAS, APHIS and FGIS.

Before this occurred, you know, we had to 

do some homework around the whole 248/249 decrees. 

And FAS had already been engaged with the Food and 

Drug Administration around all of the issues. They 

were representing USDA across the entire scope of 

commodities.
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And I think what, and I could be wrong, 

I think one of the challenges that presented to the 

grain industry is that we had some food-grade grains 

covered under 248/249 that could, potentially, be 

addressed one way.

And we had Decree 177 that we were 

addressing another way. That reconciliation 

probably was not going to take place, I don't think, 

because that process is moving a lot slower and 

communication with GACC is becoming increasingly kind 

of void.

I mentioned this in another setting, and 

this is feedback from FAS; they were getting, FAS was 

getting more response from GACC around the grain 

issues than any other issues because they've been 

very quiet.

So, we've been making, I think, the most 

progress in terms of, and that's on the China side of 

the house. We know that there other countries that 

are developing exporter registration requirements, 

and so we'll collaboratively through those issues. 

So, that's how we're addressing that particular 
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recommendation.

CHAIR GROVE: Okay, because I do think 

in the last meeting the discussion around that was 

with different forms of registration or different 

registrations that needed to be done for exporters. 

And me not being an exporter, somebody else in the 

room may have had a more clear definition of that.

But some of the paperwork being held up 

because of improper numbers, or not consistent 

numbers, so then containers were being held. And I 

think that was the biggest concern, is just 

efficiency of those processes maybe.

Because multiple registrations meant -

- not always having the right number on the right 

form, and I think it was China's shipments, 

especially.

MR. NEAL: Yeah, it wasn't really clear. 

I don't think we've been asked for any numbers yet. 

Most of it is company names. Company names and 

addresses may not be pairing up. And as a result, 

somebody may be declared as not being included on the 

China exporter list.
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And us trying to work to get them 

included in rapid form, and it's a challenge, 

especially as we're going through a re-organization, 

but we work collaboratively with APHIS and FAS on all 

of these issues.

But for the purposes of, you know, other 

countries, including the one that, you know, imports 

a lot of our grain, China, you know, we'll be working 

more collaboratively with this committee around 

strategies and approaches.

MR. ENGEL: How do names and addresses 

get on the Chinese list?

MR. NEAL: Barbara, you can correct me 

if I'm wrong. So, we use our, the FGIS exporter 

registration list to populate the China list, as well 

as the, the exports locations that FGIS is providing 

direct service, okay?

And so, that's how that's been happening. 

But we don't control every, we don't, we don't know; 

let me say this differently. The U.S. Grain 

Standards Act requires anybody who is exporting grain 

to be registered with us if they're exporting over 
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15,000 metric tons, okay?

But there could be pop-ups, you know, 

container yards, or container businesses that are 

starting to export grain. They should be registering 

with us, but may not be, and they try to export grain 

to China and they're not on the list.

And so, all of these, there could be 

various ways that this could cause a problem. But 

it's based on information we have in our system as to 

who has registered to export grain, and that's the 

list that we provide to China.

MR. ENGEL: Thank you.

MR. REILLY: Also, just checking; I see 

his light's still on.

We changed our registration requirements 

for China in that every year, starting in December, 

when you register again with FGIS as an exporter and 

under the exemption, our list that China has is wiped 

clean.

And the past we used to just keep adding 

all the new ones and not taking off the ones who no 

longer export or are out of business. So, every year 
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they get a new one, and they're put in alphabetically 

on this list.

China requires that we have an Excel 

spreadsheet and a Word document which only highlights 

the changes, whether it be an address or company name 

and/or new registrants. So this, I think, has helped 

as far as China's requirements. 

I heard, you know, in the past they would 

have loved to have had a number associated with each 

exporter but, as Mr. Neal mentioned, the only 

requirements are the company name, contact 

information and address, so we've been doing that.

Now, on outreach --

MR. FRIANT: Byron?

MR. REILLY: Yes.

MR. FRIANT: If you could back up one 

slide because I have a couple of questions. So, I 

note on your third bullet point that GACC moved pulses 

and food grains back under 177. Is it a correct 

assumption that the food grains include sorghum?

MR. REILLY: Yes.

MR. FRIANT: Intended for food use?
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MR. REILLY: Yes. Sorghum, rice and 

other pulses, including potatoes or tubers.

MR. FRIANT: But if I look at your subbullet, it appears that maybe GACC hasn't really made 

either formal notification or confirmed that that's 

the case?

MR. REILLY: They've confirmed, through 

FAS, that that was what they were doing. But FAS 

went back with a formal letter hey, asking for 

clarification exactly. Particularly with the 

registration part.

You know, these guys went through a lot 

of detailed information on the GACC CIFER system to 

registration food-grade products. So, do we also, 

you know, if we place them back on the 177, or whether 

or not that would be done internally in GACC?

That they'll just know that those people 

are now under the jurisdiction of the inspection and 

quarantine. So, we have yet to receive a 

clarification why this was being done, et cetera.

MR. FRIANT: Okay, and then, sorry I'm 

going in reverse order. On your second bullet you've 
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got an updated, that GACC posted an updated list in 

September. Does FAS filter back to FGIS the actual 

list from GACC?

So, in other words, my observation is 

every time GACC updates the list, it's a new website. 

And so, trying to find the list is difficult.

Does FAS communicate that website link 

back to FGIS?

MR. REILLY: No. We go back in on the 

Chinese GACC website and then try and locate it as to 

what number. You know, particularly since it's all 

in Chinese, and then find what section of the website 

do we hit for English, so --

MR. FRIANT: So, do you have the 

September list available that you can share?

MR. REILLY: Yes, we do, and I will --

go ahead.

MR. NEAL: So, moving forward we're going 

to attempt something. How long we do this, I'm not 

sure; it depends on how well we're able to keep it 

up. So, when we send updates to GACC, what we're 

going to try to do moving forward is to update our 
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website with the most current GACC list.

Now, that's, that could, potentially, be 

a challenge depending on how, timing. We have to see 

how well all that works. So, we're going to attempt 

to do, put that out in our instructions for exporter 

registration; the places where folks will be able to 

find the updated GACC exporter registration list.

Is that right, Byron?

MR. REILLY: Yes. 

MR. NEAL: Okay.

MR. FRIANT: So, I would say that's a 

positive change, and I commend the agency for trying 

to do that, because trying to find the list, as you 

alluded, Byron, is a nightmare. So, I appreciate 

that. Thank you.

MR. REILLY: Now, I'll talk about our 

outreach and training that we've done. FGIS 

initiated an educational training series with Foreign 

Ag Service. During COVID, they've hired a lot of new 

people, junior and mid-level employees, some without 

much grain experience, if any at all.

And thanks to Mr. Sinner, last Advisory 
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Committee he suggested that why don't we plan a field 

trip and take these new employees at the mid-career 

level and take them to various aspects; show them the 

grain industry, snack products.

We took them to Mr. Sinner's facility. 

So, it was a rounding, very good success. In fact, 

FAS is now going to make that a yearly trip, visiting 

different aspects of agriculture and, particularly, 

focusing on exports.

FAS, several years ago we had a trip 

arranged for the junior members of staffing, and FAS 

has implemented that as a yearly trip, also.

We also just conducted a lab training 

series with the U.S. Wheat Associates in Santiago, 

Chile. We had to work with them to help calibrate 

their instruments virtually, which is a challenge, 

not to mention the language barrier.

But we were able to get their Dockage 

tester working properly and check tested. We sent 

one of our Spanish speakers down to Chile to conduct 

a one-week training seminar in the lab equipment and 

wheat grading for three major millers in Chile.
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U.S. Wheat would like to plan sometime 

next year to conduct a much larger training series in 

Panama, bringing together many flour mills from three 

different countries.

We had a recent call, well, Monday, with 

all USDA co-operator groups, U.S. Wheat, Grains 

Council and Soybean Export Council to talk about what 

are their plans for outreach for the coming year. 

So, they came up with suggestions.

They all requested that we have a 

Southeast Asia TDY for a month in September getting 

back on track. They already had listed several 

countries that they would particularly like to go to. 

So, that was a very positive step.

We have asked that the co-operators have 

individual trips, short ones that they could provide 

funding for FGIS travel costs, which the Chile trip 

was paid for by U.S. Wheat Associates.

Also with our outreach, we updated our 

older translated presentations. I circulated a list 

of different ones we have in different languages, 

including all those in English, to the USDA co-
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operator groups so they have an idea what's 

available, and that we can send them to them.

 They're located internally on the FGIS 

website. We also have a list on our shared drive for 

any trade teams that will be coming to the field 

offices, which they can access. 

They've asked us to develop videos 

explaining the grain processes. Although we have 

PowerPoints, but they would like an actual video 

close-up of grading. And also an explanation of the 

different divisions.

We've developed a PowerPoint, 

particularly for our new employees who are, you know, 

their first assignment is in the field office, 

grading grain or sampling or whatever.

And they don't really have a full 

understanding about all of FGIS and the different 

opportunities that may be available for their career 

progression. So, we've developed a very good 

PowerPoint explaining our overall roles of each 

division.

We also plan, we've developed a foreign 
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travel training program in our SharePoint site. 

There are five training modules that we're going out 

with an announcement very soon to the field offices 

where anybody interested in doing foreign travel can 

take these training modules.

And then, upon completion of those, they 

will take a, you know, PowerPoint presentation to us 

virtually to see how well they are at public speaking, 

and knowing the subject matter.

And we're looking at, we developed a 

training module for containers inspections. We 

currently have it in French; that was the first one 

requested. So, we're looking at having that 

translated into other languages.

Now, on foreign complaints. This shows 

you from 2017 the volume, tonnage-wise at least, has 

been going down. Although we had, in 2019, we had 

nine complaints. So far this year we only have two, 

and both of them are from China. Surprise. And 

that's it.

Any questions?

MS. COOPER: Can you give us any 
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information about the complaints for our last fiscal 

year?

MR. REILLY: No, I don't have that. I 

mean, that was at the previous --

MS. COOPER: That was --

MR. REILLY: That was all of last year. 

MS. COOPER: Okay.

MR. REILLY: It stayed the same at, we 

had six.

MS. COOPER: Okay.

MR. REILLY: One rate and five quality, 

but they were kind of diversified. Of course, China 

also made the list. Of course.

MS. COOPER: Thank you.

MR. REILLY: All right, next up, I 

believe is Mr. Jhee.

MR. NEAL: While Ed is coming up, I will 

add this to Janice's question. We are starting to 

see more concerns about official weights on vessels. 

And so, I think that's something that we're going to 

probably be looking at a lot closer.

Because that can start a whole other 
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issue with respect to trade if folks feel like they're 

getting short-changed on weights for FY.

MS. COOPER: So, more concerns on the 

weight versus quality?

MR. NEAL: It's a new thing that we're 

starting to see but, yeah.

MR. ENGEL: Arthur, are the number of 

weight complaints increasing, or is the amount of 

weight that's, the variance increasing?

MR. NEAL: If I'm not mistaken, there's 

only two that we've gotten, but those two generate 

concern so that we know that we've got to make sure 

that we've got proper monitoring in place.

And also, that we're educating buyers 

that if they've got concerns prior to the vessels 

leaving, they need to let us know, too, versus just 

letting the exporter know. So, that information is 

flowing in a timely fashion. So, that's kind of 

what's happening.

MR. ENGEL: Thanks.

CHAIR GROVE: Byron's got an additional 

--
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MR. REILLY: Prior to the most recent 

that Mr. Neal has mentioned, the previous rate 

complaint was in 2019. And the ones prior to that 

were about one every 10 years. So, there were very 

few in the past.

MR. MORGAN: Arthur, are these 

complaints regarding weight, is that land to ship, 

like railcar to ship, or is that barge to ship? 

Because I know transloading barges, draft weights and 

stuff sometimes is an issue. I was just wondering.

MR. NEAL: Still going to research on the 

full flow. Some of it, we don't have the full details 

on how the ships were loaded. Some of it may not 

have been official.

Some of it could have been rice, and 

we're not mandatorily required to be inspected by 

FGIS. And so, we're still doing research on some of 

these things.

DR. JHEE: My turn?

CHAIR GROVE: Yes, I think you can go 

ahead.

DR. JHEE: All right, good morning, 
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everybody. I appreciate the opportunity to kind of 

bring you guys up to speed on activities within the 

Technology and Science Division.

I think one of the key updates was, that 

was a key interest of this committee was the status 

of the soybeans of other colors study that was 

conducted towards the end of the summer and through 

this fall.

One of the, what we found out was that 

there was no difference in protein and oil. The 

approach that we took was we collected 100 market 

samples that were representative across the entire 

United States.

We utilized our master NIR 

instrumentation within the inspection 

instrumentation branch as representative of the 

actual instruments that are used at all of the field 

locations. These are the master instruments by which 

the calibrations of all instruments in the official 

system are calibrated against.

One of the key aspects of the study was 

that we had all of the SBOC picked out of the market 
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samples. That way, we were able to kind of run pure 

soybean samples against those that had the SBOC 

included.

The actual ranges of SBOC that were used 

were between 2 to 7 percent. But, again, we were 

happy to find out that there was no difference in 

protein and oil.

One of the things I did want to mention 

was an expression of gratitude to our Chief 

Scientist, Dr. Tim Norton, Jeffrey Infosten in the 

Inspection Instrumentation Branch, and Brian Adam 

with the Board of Appeals and Review. It was their 

effort that was able to conclude this study.

In 2021, FGIS proposed changes to the 

mycotoxin test kit criteria to improve accuracy and 

align with FDA and codec standards. We reviewed and 

analyzed comments that were received, and the FR 

notice, which are response to comments, was published 

on November 10th.

Moving forward, we're only going to make 

two changes to the mycotoxin test kit criteria. We 

are increasing the number of readers to three, as 
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well as the number of analysts to two to ensure that 

performance verification is met to the standards. 

For this effort, I wanted to thank Mr. Tom Wether, 

analytical chemistry branch, as well as the policy 

group within FGIS.

Now, this is a victory. The technology 

evaluation process. We issued a Federal Register 

notice for public comment. We did receive some 

comments on this process, and they focused primarily 

on the clarification of terminology as well as 

implementation process.

The minor edits were made to the user 

guide. We were able to get the document cleared by 

our office of general counsel, and it went live last 

week. So, it is actually within the FGIS website 

under approved equipment.

You will see a hyperlink to this user 

guide version 1.0 in terms of how the agency will 

review and evaluate equipment used for official 

inspection. For this project, I can't thank my team 

enough. It was 100 percent effort in terms of every 

unit within TSD that contributed to this effort.
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Energy and technology; where are we now? 

As I mentioned in the last meeting, we issued an FR 

notice published on February 15th. We are still in 

the process of partnering with manufacturers. We 

have signed what's called a CRADA, or cooperative 

research and development agreement with one 

manufacturer.

Currently, our focus is going to be a 

narrow scope on medium grain rice. Particularly, we 

want to be able to provide some options or 

alternatives for the California rice industry should 

this particular instrument become fit for purpose.

We'll continue to engage the rice 

industry to see if there's other solutions that are 

feasible, as well.

Other current events; I briefly mentioned 

last meeting that we're working with USAID, or U.S. 

Agents for International Development on the 

development of a full suite of analytical services to 

provide their humanitarian food aid program. We are 

well into this process.

I can't thank Dr. Candy Bell and the 
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Buyer Technology and Analytical Services Branch, as 

well as Mr. Tom Wether of the Analytical Chemistry 

Branch, on their efforts to stand up over 40 

additional analytical methods associated to this. 

So, that we knew, with confidence, that food aid 

coming from the United States is safe for the world. 

Other current events that we are going to 

be taking on this year; we have some data that 

indicates there may be an impact of foreign material 

on the levels of paraquat, particularly in soybeans.

So, our scientists in the chemistry 

branch are going to take a deeper dive into this over 

the next year. We're also considering expansion of 

our ISO 17025 scope for buyer technology to add 

genetically engineered corn and soybean varieties.

And then, furthermore, within our 

inspection instrumentation branch, we plan to 

implement the national type evaluation program 

protein and oil calibration to reduce variability 

across the inspection system.

With that, I'll be open to any questions. 

You guys are taking notes.
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MR. MORGAN: Thank you, Doctor. Can you 

back, so on the food aid can you go into a little 

more detail on what type of analytics or analytes 

you're working on? Is this going to be a major change 

to what we're currently doing?

DR. JHEE: Not a major change to what we 

currently do. This is primarily going to reside 

within both our analytical chemistry branch as well 

as our commodities units.

For the past 40 years we've been 

supporting USAID on a number of their cereal-based 

products that we provide anything from 

microbiological SAs, E. coli; those types of 

analytes, to heavy metals, as well.

Where we're expanding is to rice 

products, fortified rice products, additional 

mycotoxin testing for the cereals and pulses and 

grains, as well, that's used for the humanitarian 

program.

MR. MORGAN: I think they've, haven't 

they released some new limits or something?

DR. JHEE: They're working on, I think, 
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some new CLA; I think that's the acronym, 

requirements --

MR. MORGAN: Right.

DR. JHEE: -- for their products. We're 

working closely with USAID to make sure that the 

timing of implementation of those new CLAs aligns 

with the method development here within FGIS. Our 

goal is to have this whole full suite of tests ready 

for all of the U.S. producers by the start of the 

third quarter of this fiscal year.

MR. MORGAN: So, CLA new limits and 

testing, okay.

DR. JHEE: Correct.

MR. MORGAN: We'll be waiting for that. 

DR. JHEE: Yeah, I figured you'd be with 

us on that.

MS. COOPER: I have a question on the 

technology evaluation. Can you kind of give us an 

idea of how you see, you know, what's next? How do 

you see this rolling out? What are you expecting in 

response to publishing that, that process?

DR. JHEE: Well, we hope that the 
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guidance in this user guide is clear enough so that 

manufacturers that would like to seek evaluation and 

approval of an instrument to be used in an official 

system is clear.

We believe that the criteria laid out in 

the user guide emphasizes, not only the purpose and 

need of the instrument by, you know, the use and the 

practicality and pragmatism that could be applied to 

the official system. But also, it outlines a lot of 

the technical specifications.

And I think one of the key things that we 

wanted to focus on was the industry's need to ensure 

that there was no variability or reduced variability. 

I think the industry looks at instrumentation with 

open arms, but also cautiously because of the 

concerns they may have about variability in data.

So that's, I think, one of the things 

that we hope manufacturers do take a close at; close 

look at in terms of the user guide. Off the top of 

my head, I can think of two particular instruments 

that may come through this system.

I'm not obliged to be able to actually 
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publicly state that now, but I do know that we 

anticipate two manufacturers approaching us in the 

upcoming year.

MR. NEAL: And just to also comment on 

what Ed shared, are we expecting an increase? You 

know, I don't know. I'm hoping not because we need 

some bodies in our instrumentation branch.

So, if you all are aware of some good 

engineers and some scientists that are looking for an 

opportunity to help with this type of work, we'd like 

to have them onboard so we can facilitate more of 

these type of reviews before we get inundated with 

requests. That's one of the things we're hoping to 

happen, is we get more bodies to serve, but I think 

clarity was the number one goal here and that if 

someone wanted to engage the process, they knew how 

to.

DR. JHEE: And I think one of the key 

things I may have mentioned this summer was the 

importance of adding an appendix to protect 

confidential business information. That's one of the 

more robust aspects of this process, so that we're 
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fully aware that any type of trade secret or 

proprietary information is kept confidential as it's 

reviewed by FGIS.

Anything else?

I appreciate it. I will turn this over 

now to the Field Management Division and Tony 

Goodeman.

CHAIR GROVE: Actually, we are scheduled 

for a break here at 9:30, a 30-minute break. I think 

we can still keep on schedule, just to shorten that 

break just a few minutes and come back at 10:00 

o'clock and be prepared to move on with Tony.

All right, thank you.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

went off the record at 9:30 for a brief recess.)

CHAIR GROVE: All right, thank you, 

everybody. We're going to go ahead and have Tony go 

ahead and come up and give your update, and then, 

after Tony is done and any questions we may have for 

him, we are going to circle back through the top.

I think we have more questions in some 

different sections. And so, we may be bringing 
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different people back up to ask a few questions on 

your sections again.

Kind of -- it went really quick this 

morning, and maybe our brains weren't thinking as 

quickly as we were talking, so we want to give 

ourselves time to digest a few of those things. So, 

again, we'll probably start and, Denise, after Tony, 

have you come back up to start. Okay, thank you.

MR. GOODEMAN: Good morning, everybody. 

Please, please keep your seats. Keep your seats. I 

thought this was a DJ booth set-up. I was going to 

get some walk-up music, finally. No fog machine, no 

nothing. Going backwards already.

I also thought when they told me to sit 

down before the break that Byron went wrong and I got 

bumped. So, speaking about it, what do you call 

somebody like Byron that promotes wheat and other 

grains around the world? A bran ambassador. Janice 

sits in that category, too. Yes, sir.

MR. REILLY: What if it's only protein 

concentrates? 

MR. GOODEMAN: Arthur always gets 
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nervous when I tell these jokes and so, last week, 

you know, when I was preparing for this meeting, he 

says hey, Tony. He sends me an e-mail that said send 

me your jokes in advance. I said, Arthur, I said, 

I'm real busy working right now. You know, I can't 

think about jokes. He said that's a good one. You 

should use it. 

Arthur pretends not to like the jokes 

but, you know, sometimes when I tell a joke in the 

office, half the time he rushes down the hall to retell it to HR. Sometimes if it's really good, HR 

calls me and wants to hear me repeat it myself, and 

if he really likes it, I get a time-off award. The 

letter doesn't say it that way.

No, but I appreciate being here today. 

Always good to show the updates. A lot of this 

information is pretty new and impacted greatly by the 

low water levels on the Mississippi River.

So, this is only going by a market year 

or fiscal year, depending on the slide. This goes 

by fiscal year here, so we've only got October and 

November worth of data.
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And so, with the low river levels, as 

you've heard about, a lot of the barges coming down 

the river, even if we have a decent number of barges, 

they might not be fully loaded. It's really hard to 

move the barges around and to source the grain. It's 

been a major challenge for us. Because of that, just 

in these first couple months, the fiscal year is 

tracking almost 21 percent lower than last year.

There's not much sophisticated analysis 

that goes into the projection. It basically says that 

if we keep the same track, where we'd end up. Not 

to say that that's likely, given the river level, 

hopefully, will return at some point and we'll be 

able to move some more grain out.

Here, our corn. This goes by market 

year. Corn exports are down 30 percent compared to 

last year and 36 percent compared to the five-year 

average. We do hear that given the tight river 

operations, in areas where people are forced to make 

a choice between exporting corn and soybean, right 

now it seems like the priority is on the soybeans. 

Mexico remains our number one destination for corn, 
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43 percent of all exports. China, 32 percent. 

Soybeans are pretty well on track. Down 

8 percent compared to last year, but just down 2 

percent compared to the five-year average, and we've 

had some record years baked into that five-year 

average as well. China remains our number one 

destination, almost 70 percent of all soybean 

exports. Mexico in second, Egypt in third.

Sorghum's off to a slower start, 65 

percent lower compared to last year and down 58 

percent compared to the five-year average. Mexico 

this year is number one. Now, this has been China, 

so this is a bit of a change. China's at 18 percent. 

Sudan, 17 percent. We've had slides, I think, in the 

last couple years where China would be like 95 

percent, something like that.

Wheat is up 16 percent compared to last

year, but just off of the five-year average. Mexico 

is also our number one destination for wheat, 18 

percent of all wheat exports, and Philippines and 

Japan, second and third.

A quick update of the prior 
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recommendations. The consolidation of instructions 

is pretty well a part, ingrained in our philosophy 

for all instructions. We want to consolidate 

whenever we can. It's an ongoing project for us.

We've got, we'll probably be 

consolidating in the neighborhood of 15 instructions 

this year into smaller -- or not smaller, but into 

centralized documents. One of them, for example, is 

we do a lot of commodities under the Agriculture 

Marketing Act. And we're going to -- and they have 

stand-alone directives. There's a lot of 

similarities there, so we're going to combine those 

into one instruction.

You might remember a couple years ago 

when APHIS took on the systems approach, and part of 

that was a study of foreign material in soybeans. We 

were, basically, the contractors -- I wouldn't call 

it that exactly, but basically did that sampling and 

the initial FM separation work for them. 

Before, we sent it to a different part of 

AMS, the science and technology group, the Gastonia 

seed lab, and they would do the seed analysis. And 
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the committee recommended that no FGIS funds be used, 

and we can report that that did not happen. That was 

funded by APHIS through an interagency agreement with 

us, and so we were -- we didn't use any FGIS funds 

there.

On the MOU, the subcommittee had a number 

of recommendations. We have provided those to FDA, 

and we have made a little bit of progress. FDA has, 

initially, agreed both the CFSAN, the Center for Food 

Safety and Applied Nutrition, and the Center for 

Veterinary Medicine, CVM, were looking to set up a 

meeting. We initially targeted January, but some of 

the leadership is out on detail until the end of 

January. We're looking at February. And we also 

asked if we could include industry, like -- perhaps 

like you all in a meeting like that.

And we've made some traction there, and 

so they've agreed, tentatively, to do a listening 

session in February, and hopefully, we can get you 

all to participate and try to get some traction moving 

forward with the findings from the -- from the 

committee. Also from any other industry groups that 
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might be interested in having some changes that are 

not grain, for example.

I talked about the Mississippi River 

levels. This is still a major impact to operations 

in the Gulf. Glad that the rail strike was averted. 

That would have been a pretty big disaster for the 

grain industry.

River levels still a big story down in 

New Orleans, and the inefficiency is a pinch. It's 

just -- it's no good for anybody because we still 

need a lot of the staff onsite. We're still working 

24/7, in general. We're still unloading barges, but 

not be unloading full barges, might not be unloading 

them as quickly. It's really frustrating just to see 

that kind of inefficiency in the industry as a result 

of that low water, but we are still working. We are 

still working at places it does seem to be, hopefully, 

returning a bit.

Hiring activities. We are proud to 

announce a new manager in our New Orleans field 

office. That's the largest field office in FGIS. 

Her name is Sherry Williams. She comes to us from 
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APHIS dog training facility in Georgia, and so, she 

came onboard in November. For anybody in the Gulf, 

please, hopefully she's been out to see you already. 

If not, she'll be out and around soon.

I'd like to thank Mr. Andy Ping who was 

down detailing as our acting manager for the better 

part of a year after the hurricane. So, thank you, 

Andy.

We continue to hire graders, technicians, 

supervisors and quality assurance specialists. We 

are in the process of hiring a quality assurance in 

our Pacific Northwest field office in Portland, and 

then also in our League City field office in Texas.

Our former quality assurance specialist 

in League City, Tim Hall, is now here in Kansas City. 

You might have seen him around the building. He's 

our assistant manager at our DIO, our domestic 

inspection operations office here just down the hall.

And we have an announcement out now, 

please tell your friends, for a technician. This is 

more of an entry level-type job to come onboard with 

us in New Orleans, Arkansas, I think Portland, and 
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one other one that escapes me right now.

Soybeans of other colors. Arthur 

touched on the pending proposed rule that will be 

coming out. All of the slides I'm going to go to 

next are public information that are on our website 

now. We have a separate site set up for soybeans of 

other colors with a lot of this information.

A credit to our DJs in the back, these 

are our media group, and Kendra for setting that up. 

And it's got a lot of the frequent questions. And 

then, also, Lee runs reports, I think it's about every 

month or so, and updates the data online.

So, this is published on our website. 

This is as of November 28th. Some reminders to you 

before we dive into the numbers: these are total 

certificates, so it's not a perfect representation of 

quantity. One ship might get one certificate. One 

ship might get five certificates. A train might get 

110 certificates. It might get one certificate. So, 

there is a little bit of -- if you have a submitted 

sample, it would be one certificate. If you do one 

railcar, it could be one certificate. So, it's 
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imperfect.

And then, the percentage of No. 1 

SBOC. This is the certificates where SBOC result 

only, not considering any other factors like FM or 

damage or anything like that, only looking at if SBOC 

would have been the grade determining factor, how 

would it play out?

So, we go back -- we looked at this, we 

presented this data back in June. And you can see 

in prior year, this was basically a non-issue. This 

goes back 10, 11 calendar years.

In 2011, for example, the amount of 

certificates that would make No. 1, just on SBOC, not 

on any other factor, was 99.7 percent, 99.8, 99.8, 

99.9, pretty much a non-issue. There was a year in 

'17 where 99.2 only would have made it. And then we 

had a big change starting in the fall of 2021, where 

92 percent would have made No. 1 based on SBOC alone. 

And then we saw that continue in the calendar year 

'22. Only 81 percent would have made No. 1 on SBOC.

And, perhaps even a bigger deal, only 12 

percent, only an additional 12 percent would have 
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made No. 2, and 5.7 percent would have gone No. 3, 

just on SBOC, with a total of 18.5 exceeding the No. 

1 criteria.

Here's a visualization of the average 

SBOC over time. You can see it's almost nothing, and 

it's -- you know, we went with the proposed rule back 

in 2017 or '18, opening the corn and soybean 

standards, asking if there was anything that needed 

to be change or updated, and we got very few comments 

of some folks asked us to just pull back the -- the 

announcement. We took that as the standards are 

working as intended, and we made no changes. And so, 

you can say, well, we just opened them. Nobody said 

anything about SBOC. Well, it was obviously, you 

know, not an issue back then.

Then, all of a sudden, we get to the 

harvest of 2021, big spikes. The big story for 

today, and we'll probably be highlighting, is this 

big drop. Since our -- since our harvest this year, 

we saw it approach almost 1 percent nationally. And 

then, all of a sudden, now it's tapering off 

significantly. 
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Now, this is, again, only certificates, 

only things that are officially inspected. If there 

was a whole bunch of SBOC out there, and somebody 

wasn't presenting it for official inspection for some 

reason, it wouldn't be reflected here. This could 

be weighted a little bit for the types of inspections 

that we do, but definitely going down.

This is kind of inverse of that. Soybean 

certificates where SBOC was certified and met No. 1, 

almost everything. We had a dip to below 70 percent 

earlier in 2022 and now creeping back up to above 90 

percent for everything meeting No. 1 on SBOC.

So, the timeline by month. This goes 

from July, 2021 until the end of November. You can 

see the exceeding No. 1 SBOC, and, again, we saw it 

at the beginning of the harvest of the fall of 2021 

and continue to increase to peak in the spring of '21 

with almost -- or over 30 percent exceeding the No. 

1 criteria, with only 6, 7 percent meeting. And then 

a big drop-off. Once we got into the harvest of --

we saw a lot of it, initially, in harvest, and that's 

what prompted a lot of concern, but it appears to 
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have tapered off significantly. 

And -- but not quite -- not close to prior 

years yet, but only 6.5 percent in November of this 

last -- this last month here exceeding the criteria 

for No. 1. And we have a lot of issues if it doesn't 

meet No. 3, because if it contracts at No. 2, it can 

usually get traded pretty well. But even -- this is 

really tough in these windows here, but now even less 

than 1 percent is exceeding the No. 3 criteria.

We were asked to break this out by 

reporting regions. We divided them up into the 

Northeast, Southeast, North Central, South Central 

and West. The colors are -- we do have the new highdefinition projectors, so we'll see how that turns 

out. You know, we had the old-fashioned one. Colors 

come through great now. Actually, they are pretty 

nice. 

And so, we see we had a good spike, a 

good spike in the Southeast. All of these numbers, 

though, have tapered off. The gray line is submitted 

samples, and so we saw some peaks there. This is a 

breakdown by Region, so --
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CHAIR GROVE: Can you go back to the 

previous slide?

MR. GOODEMAN: Sure.

CHAIR GROVE: I was just trying to 

correlate the coverage.

MR. GOODEMAN: This is the inverse of 

that. The number of certificates by region that 

would have made No. 1, and you see almost everything. 

And then we've got this, this period of noise in late 

2021, early 2022, and even -- even in the Southeast, 

where we had this big spike, almost everything's down 

here now, much lower.

I'd be happy to field any questions, or 

-- how do we want to organize it for question on the 

transportation?

CHAIR GROVE: No. I think as you look 

at, I think, three slides back, just before your map, 

and looking at the change, once November when it 

seemed like it dropped away, I would say just an 

observation of operations and storage.

In the Midwest, as we looked at some of 

those states that had them, had been recording 
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higher, so your Southeast and your South Central? 

Very dry. It was a drought, very dry crops coming 

in. And just movements of very dry beans, the hulls 

drop-off.

So, once they've been in storage and 

you're moving them, you don't see as high a percentage 

shipping outbound because the hull is broken, usually 

cracked off. So, you see it more in piles in your -

- within your conveyance system.

And so, that makes sense because, again, 

I will say, very dry crop for soybeans -- well, for 

all crops this year in those areas and higher drought. 

So, to me, that number makes sense. I do want to --

I think this would be the appropriate place, yeah. 

Right. Because of the SBOC update.

Okay, any other questions anybody has 

right now?

MR. SINNER: Yes, Barb. I'm interested 

in your comments, and I was going to come back to 

Tony and ask him if he had any explanation of why the 

drop-off compared to previous year.

And I was interested in what you said, 
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that because the crop is so dry, the hulls were coming 

off and, therefore, it's not detected and not seeing 

it through the inspection.

Are you seeing the same thing, Tony?

MR. GOODEMAN: We'd have to go back and 

look at splits because if the hulls were coming off 

to that degree, then the splits would be pretty high. 

We'll have to go back and look and see if that's had 

an impact.

You know, I think that people are more -

- anything I say is going to be speculation because 

I don't know. So, I really shouldn't --

MR. SINNER: I understand.

MR. GOODEMAN: So, I'll just stop there, 

really. I mean, you all know better than I do. We 

just aren't seeing it as much. It seems like people 

are getting more used to handling it when they do see 

it or segregating if they do see it.

You know, we did quite a bit of travel 

this fall, and I would try and look hard for it. And 

sometimes you'd see some beans with, you know, 

indication, but it's not like it was everywhere. It 
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seemed like there's some pockets, still, that were 

really tough. Yeah.

CHAIR GROVE: I was just going to say --

so, it was, I'll say, through -- through our trade 

territory, just direct center Midwest, early harvest 

was higher. We were seeing it at a higher rate. 

Shipping, I would say, we were probably shipping 

greater than No. 2, definitely. But as harvest went 

on, I would say we weren't still seeing it in those 

areas that our ability to ship with, and actually 

most of our contracts are No. 1. So, it was a matter 

of having enough volume to be able to blend to a No. 

1 in some areas.

But again, I will say with the excessive 

dryness, we were -- we see that a lot, depending on 

the structures. Flat building structures, we see the 

evidence of the hulls. It's a lot easier to see that 

they're breaking off, especially in longer-term 

storage, but with the dry storage this year, it was 

a dry crop.

MR. FRIANT: I know in several 

conversations that we've had, whether it be the 
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industry workshops or with the last budget committee 

meeting, there's also a lot of discussion around 

training and education of the official agencies and 

staff.

Do you -- is it possible that any of that 

change could also be clarification during inspection 

on what truly is an SBOC versus what just had some 

slight discoloration to that?

MR. GOODEMAN: You know, if anything --

MR. FRIANT: I guess my question is, was 

there a lot -- as we talked about, having much more 

education outreach. Did that occur, and do you think 

that's how folks were inspecting the beans got just 

clarified?

MR. GOODEMAN: I think, if anything, you 

know, we talked about this before. If anything, and 

Brian is our Chair --

MR. ADAM: And maybe let me take a crack 

at a little bit of that, but yeah. It's on. Okay. 

So, I think -- yeah. I'll bend down a little bit. 

I think most of it, when we see the 

training, we actually see the opposite. So, people 
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would actually be, in a general sense throughout the 

program, actually missing a little bit. So, I don't 

really think that's the issue. It could have been a 

few things where we do see less -- more awareness by 

the elevators, better blending.

It seems like as we go up north we see a 

little bit less of it, as well. I know that for the 

board, we've seen a dramatic drop in board appeals. 

So, we went from about 20 to 30 a month to about two 

or three since September.

So, it could be weather having an impact 

on the crop as well, a little bit less. But if 

there's a genetic component, there's also a weather 

component that may agitate -- may create more SBOC. 

So, I just feel, from what I'm hearing, it just 

doesn't seem to be quite as bad.

So, I can't pinpoint one thing or the 

other, but I think in terms of just more awareness, 

I think with everyone, has helped. And if you're 

getting soybeans in from one part of the state and 

there's no SBOC, and another part of the state there's 

a little bit, and you blend it. So, we may see some 
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advantage to that, as well. Where the previous years 

elevators really weren't aware of it and, and maybe 

they're doing a better job segregating the 

differences in the soybean content.

So, I think from my perspective, that's 

about all I know of possible reasons for the recent 

dip. 

CHAIR GROVE: I would agree with you, 

Brian, that -- that the training made people more 

aware. And I think, again, recommending, you know, 

in June as you discussed, the training and having the 

quality control people from all the offices to come 

down and do training. I think that was vital.

Because -- and we've also utilized our, 

to say -- to be able to go to the inspectors and say 

hey, can you help us with our people? And 

identification was very key, also. But I agree with 

that statement that the awareness probably made the 

findings higher.

Because we knew what truly constituted -

- I will say, in -- in our -- in the Midwestern areas 

that I saw at higher, they also had severe weather 
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patterns, a lot of hail damage, wide-spread hail 

damage that affected a lot of different things, and 

it actually was higher in the SBOC. Is it just the 

weather pattern that correlated with it? I don't 

know.

MR. NEAL: And Tony, correct me if I'm 

wrong, too, some states where -- in 2021 where it was 

really high, I think it was -- I think it's the 

Northeastern region. I can't remember exactly. But 

we didn't, we didn't see a lot -- no, Southeastern 

region, yes. Yeah, Southeast, where we had a few 

states that had some high SBOC content. We didn't 

see that at the back end of harvest.

MR. GOODEMAN: Yeah, maybe not as high.

MR. NEAL: Right, not as high.

MR. GOODEMAN: Right, right.

MR. NEAL: So, it makes the whole 

environmental impact, whatever that is on that decoat 

color, maybe it's just evolving. I don't know for 

sure.

But I do know that, through the 

collaboration we also paid for, not for these 
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numbers, but some of the grain that may be moving and 

being inspected unofficially, I think the material 

put out to help people understand what SBOC is has 

not made a difference.

Because some people didn't understand 

that, you know, that range that typically is 

associated with this particular variety was not SBOC. 

And I think that also made a difference for the 

unofficially inspected stuff, because I think that 

was also causing some consternation as well. 

CHAIR GROVE: Yeah, I think the updated 

visual reference card was a big help and it gave some 

great examples. Again, it wasn't just here's what 

it is, but numerous pictures showing different 

variances. That was helpful. I know we utilized 

that in our training.

Any questions for Tony, again, about the 

inspections?

Okay, thank you.

MR. GOODEMAN: All right. Thanks, 

everybody.

CHAIR GROVE: No -- no closing? No 
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official closing for us?

MR. GOODEMAN: Do you want one? I've 

been told before not to ask a question you don't want 

to hear the answer to, you know. I'd be careful. 

Since there was a request to have a grain 

inspection joke, by special request: how much grain 

does it take to fill a railcar or a ship? A lot. 

For the grain inspectors in the room, you go by lot, 

sublot.

CHAIR GROVE: Okay, I'm going to have 

Denise come back up. I think there might have been 

a question that you can help us -- and if you

would --

MS. RUGGLES: Do you want me to --

CHAIR GROVE: Yeah, go back.

MS. RUGGLES: Don't get dizzy.

MR. FRIANT: So, Denise, I have a 

question.

MS. RUGGLES: Did you want this slide 

or --

MR. FRIANT: Yeah, this will be all 

right. I was having a little bit of trouble keeping 
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up on my notes. So, if I see correctly, the 

inspection and weighing column basically only has a 

one-month operating reserve.

MS. RUGGLES: That's correct.

MR. FRIANT: So, does that give us a 

concern with the start of a new fiscal year and any 

front-loaded expenses we have in the fiscal year? Is 

there concern about the agency, particularly the 

inspection and weighing account, starting this new 

fiscal year with only one-month operating reserve?

MS. RUGGLES: So, for front-loading of 

cost, because we're under a CR, we're only applying 

the CR level across all of our accounts. That 

includes the appropriated accounts, so we're on a 

21.1 percent of appropriated funding during this 

continuing resolution. So, we're applying that same 

amount to the other agreements.

CHAIR GROVE: Can you, just for everybody 

both online and in the audience, explain you're on 

the CR? Explain that.

MS. RUGGLES: Continuing Resolution. 

So, Congress has not passed a budget for the Federal 
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Government. You probably see it in the news, talking 

about a shutdown. During that period, as we're 

waiting for our full-year funding, we're on a limited 

amount of prior year funding.

So, we are applying that percentage 

across the user fee accounts as well. You really 

can't load a contract and say oh, just this line only 

can be this amount and the other lines are the full 

year. It just doesn't work that way.

MR. NEAL: And to also add to what Denise 

has shared, Nick, I think we're less concerned about 

the front-loading that has to take place just because 

of a full year of operation. You know, we'll catch 

up. Now, the big concern is just that we've got onemonth of reserve left. That's the big concern.

MR. FRIANT: Just the overall concern 

about not having big enough reserves.

CHAIR GROVE: Any other questions on the 

financial for Denise? I think John?

MR. MORGAN: Just a quick question. The 

fiscal year is October 1 through September 30th?

MS. RUGGLES: Correct.
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MR. MORGAN: So it's as of September 

30th?

MS. RUGGLES: Correct. It may have a 

little bit of two weeks into October. Where we have 

payroll, we have estimates put in at the end of this 

fiscal year, and then they actually come through, so 

we hold off on reporting until those have cleared.

MR. MORGAN: All right.

MS. RUGGLES: So, this is the true full 

year.

MR. MORGAN: All right, thank you.

MS. RUGGLES: Is there any other 

questions?

DR. ROSENTRATER: I'm just curious, 

being new to looking at these types of budgets, if a 

5 percent increase were added like we were talking 

about earlier, have you done any projections in terms 

of what the financial -- assuming that the volume is 

the same next year, what is the potential for net 

revenue or net loss?

MS. RUGGLES: I do have those, but I 

can't speak about it right now. We're reviewing them 
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again tomorrow, but --

DR. ROSENTRATER: Okay.

MS. RUGGLES: -- I have done them, yes.

DR. ROSENTRATER: Okay. Okay, and the 

reason I ask is because do we need to start thinking 

about the bigger increase?

MS. RUGGLES: Correct, and that's --

DR. ROSENTRATER: Sooner rather than 

later.

MS. RUGGLES: Correct. So, we're going 

to have to get out the initial notification of our 

annual, and then we will have to do a follow-up. 

What we're doing in that is right-sizing the fees, is 

what we call it, where we look at the actual specific 

test and confirm that we are recouping the cost to 

perform those tests. So, it's not just a straight 

line. 

So, some fees might go down a little bit 

because maybe they've been increased unnecessarily, 

and other ones will go up more because they're, you 

know, their costs are more. And we're also going to 

look at removing some that we haven't used in 10 years 
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to reduce the fee schedule from being so large.

MR. FRIANT: So that -- the first stage, 

if I can use that term, the first stage will be the 

annual review for how to include all service fees and 

tonnage fees?

MS. RUGGLES: Correct.

MR. FRIANT: And then, once -- so that 

will be published around the same time it normally 

is, the first part of the calendar year?

MS. RUGGLES: Yeah, it's --

MR. FRIANT: And then there will be a 

secondary review after the start of the new calendar 

year that will be a more comprehensive review. And 

that will also include all fees plus tonnage fees?

MS. RUGGLES: Correct.

MR. FRIANT: Okay. Thank you.

MS. RUGGLES: Yep. And then also, next 

year, we will also have the commodity program because 

those fees haven't been done since the early 2000's. 

And then, of course, the rice fees will be published 

around April or May, the normal annual one that we do 

along with all the AMS programs. And the -- the 
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annual review we'll be doing with the grain 

inspection, the inspection and weighing, will also 

include the official agency review.

CHAIR GROVE: Any other questions for 

Denise on finances?

Okay, thank you. I appreciate you coming 

back up.

MS. RUGGLES: Yep.

CHAIR GROVE: Yeah. Any other questions 

now?

We're just going to open it back up, and 

if we need somebody to go back up to their slides, 

you can come forward. Otherwise, you can probably 

answer from the microphone there in the back.

You know, Arthur, this one may be for 

you. So, we talked a little bit about, earlier, SBOC 

and the public notification that it will go to public 

comment. Can you just go back and give us, really, 

what -- what is that scope? What's the scope of the 

request for comment on the U.S. soybean standard? Is 

it just SBOC? Can you give us a little more detail 

on that process there?
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MR. NEAL: I can't go into too much 

detail, but it's really what we said in that notice 

to Trade. That's what we're focusing on in this 

rule. 

We're focusing on the soybean standard as 

it pertains to soybeans of other colors as a grading 

criteria, and we'll have to adjust whatever 

components of our regulation attached to that so that 

we can propose removing it as a grading criteria, as 

a mandatory grading criteria, and making it more of 

an optional criteria for those who still want it. 

And they're also commenting on the timeframe for 

implementing such changes. That's really the scope 

of it. The root of it is, anytime you open up the 

standard, people can comment on anything.

Let me also make this comment because 

Kendra did get -- we mentioned about the office of 

management and budget and their criteria for deeming 

something significant or non-significant. And so, 

this is the criteria that they use. And we're 

speaking to this in reference to the exceptions rule 

and, potentially, soybeans of other color.
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So, they deem something that's a 

significant regulatory action that is likely to 

result if -- that may have an annual effect on the 

economy of $100 million or more, or adversely affect, 

in a material way, the economy, a sector of the 

economy, productivity, competition, jobs, the 

environment, public health or safety or state, local 

or tribal governments or communities.

It also includes an action that may 

create a serious inconsistency or otherwise interfere 

with an action taken or planned by another agency. 

It also includes an action that may materially alter 

the budgetary impact of entitlements, grants, user 

fees or loan programs, or the rights and obligations 

of recipients thereof, or an action that may raise 

novel legal or policy issues arising out of legal 

mandates, the President's priorities, or the 

principles set forth in an Executive Order.

So, it's broad. And because our action, 

I would presume, affects competition, it could get 

captured. I'm hoping it doesn't, but without a few 

clarities, we have not, I have not had any 
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conversations with OMB about it yet.

Like I said, this was a recent 

conversation that I had in which that terminology was 

used. I've not gotten anything in writing that it 

is deemed significant, but we've got a few clarities 

if it is that it just introduces come complexities to 

our process.

Any questions there? Jimmy, you look 

like you got a question. While you all think about 

that -- oh, go ahead.

MS. COOPER: I'm just curious about 

process. So, those criteria are so broad that OMB 

could decide virtually anything was significant. So, 

how often is it applied, and how much time does that 

typically add to the process?

MR. NEAL: Great question. I can't 

answer how often it is applied. In my previous years 

where I've done a lot of rulemaking, everything was 

significant, just about, with the exception of one 

point of some materials that we used to add onto a 

list that the organic industry used for, you know, 

for processing, production handling purposes. They 
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had deemed that that would be non-significant.

I'm not sure if that still stands, but 

they deemed most of the regulatory actions that I've 

been associated with as significant. There was an 

article -- not article, but a report written by GAO 

mentioning how it's not very clear when they make 

that determination and working with agencies to try 

to make it clear.

So, you've captured the essence is that, 

you know, it's very broad, and what they deem 

significant versus non-significant, you know, we 

don't fully understand the logic, but the process 

gets more lengthy. OMB will probably, a minimum, you 

can probably attach three months, minimum, to their 

review process.

CHAIR GROVE: So, that review process 

starts before or after public comment?

MR. NEAL: Well, review process is before 

public comment.

CHAIR GROVE: Okay, and that is why I 

know I had reached out to AMS to ask has it been 

deemed when the public comment period will be open, 
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and the response was just that no.

MR. NEAL: That process -- the public 

comment period is not really established until that 

rule is about to get published, so we don't have that 

answer. We may have in mind when we want it to be, 

but through the various numbers of reviews, that time 

can change based on anybody's input.

When I say anybody, the Secretary may 

have a desire to have it a certain time period, the 

Undersecretary could have a desire. It just depends 

on what the goals are, who's controlling, you know, 

what issue is trying to be addressed, the level of 

significant impact it has on achieving the end goal. 

It also could be affected by OMB's comments because 

they're typically the last to review in the process 

before we can publish, if they get involved.

MR. SINNER: Arthur, aside from the 

process in the U.S., is there anything being done on 

the customer side in FAS to educate or discuss this, 

the issues, with customers?

MR. NEAL: We have not, based on my 

understanding. FAS has not raised this as an 
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alarming situation to other countries because as we 

see the numbers, it's evolving. What they have done 

is assess whether or not countries have made -- have 

been alarmed internally regarding SBOC to bring the 

information back to us, and based on what we've 

gathered from their intel, no one has raised this as 

an alarming issue in my trading partners.

MR. SINNER: All right, good.

MR. NEAL: Any other questions about 

SBOC?

I do want to provide a separate update. 

The grain inspection budget committee at the last 

meeting did make a recommendation regarding shuttle 

trains and steps that could be taken to attempt to 

bring more accountability to that process and improve 

service. That recommendation was provided to the 

agriculture marketing services, transportation 

services division that developed a USDA position that 

is shared with the service transportation board 

regarding the perspective that STE should consider 

when addressing these rail service issues, these 

competition issues, and the like.
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So, that was provided just as an update 

to them as they develop speaking, talking points for 

the administration on these, on these matters. So, 

I just want to pass that along to you all, that we 

did give that to them.

CHAIR GROVE: Any other thoughts here 

from the committee for the updates that you heard 

this morning? 

MR. FRIANT: I want to go back to -

- it's, I think, for you. In your recap, you talked 

about the work that was being done on the rulemaking 

around exceptions and the boundary studies and 

whatnot, and I thought what I heard you say was it's 

been going through the legal review process, but --

and what I didn't quite understand was, what issues 

were holding the process up of moving it forward? 

And if you said it and I missed it, I apologize.

MR. NEAL: I didn't say. I can't really 

-- I can't share the contents of it because it could 

all change, and it's pre-deliberative, and most of it 

is to ensure that what we are proposing does not 

contradict the U.S. Grain Standards Act and that our 
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implementation of what we are -- when I say proposing 

-- are finalizing can meet the OMB requirements for 

information collection and the paperwork, the 

Paperwork Reduction Act.

So it's just, there's more -- it's making 

sure we're held accountable for all of the other --

in addition to USGSA, making sure we're held 

accountable to implementing this with respect to the 

other acts the govern Federal rulemaking.

Now, ideally, you know, we want to make 

the changes and get it implemented, but there are a 

lot of things that go with the rulemaking that could 

cause other analyses to have to occur.

You know, like I said, if something like 

OMB gets involved, they could potentially ask for 

greater economic impact analysis where we've got to 

do more research now on a potential burden this is 

going to cause to industry. If someone wanted to --

if we didn't make a good enough case about the 

potential impact on a tribes, we could potentially 

have to do an analysis on the impact it's going to 

have on tribes. It just varies, the process.
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But in this particular case, it's right 

now more about USGSA, us being within -- us not, you 

know, finalizing anything that goes beyond the USGSA. 

Competition is probably being assessed as well, and 

then, us conforming to the requirements for 

information collection and paperwork reduction.

MR. FRIANT: Thank you. Maybe the 

follow-up question to that -- that really -- and 

anything that we've asked in the follow-up questions 

here, is there anything that this advisory committee 

can be doing to help support the agency in some of 

those efforts?

Any -- and maybe you can't tell us what 

recommendations, but anything you would suggest us to 

deliberate on as a committee that we could bring back 

to the agency?

MR. NEAL: I'll be honest with you. 

Right now, I think, I think we're in good shape. I 

think things will be well on -- we're talking about 

exceptions, geographic boundaries. Right now, in my 

head, there's nothing I think that needs to be done. 

We just have to address the concerns that have been 
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brought to us. And if all things go well and we get 

through the, you know, following up with those 

clarities, and once we submit it, it will be about 

implementation at that point. 

And next time we'll hopefully have a 

conversation. When we're back together, we're 

talking about, you know, questions and answers. How 

do we -- you know, how does this work? And, you 

know, what else? That type of thing. Hoping we 

don't get lost in what-ifs, but it's more about 

implementation.

With respect to SBOC, I think the 

industry has done what it needed to do. Raised the 

alarm. Expressed those concerns to the Secretary and 

Undersecretary. Collaborated well in information 

sharing, so everybody's got an understanding, 

including us.

We know what the desire is from a good, 

you know, section of the industry. And it's being 

ready to comment to facilitate just the rulemaking 

process. Hopefully, what we will submit for review 

will be clean enough, simple enough that it doesn't 
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get overly complicated. That's the goal: to keep it 

simple. The more complicated we make it, the more 

difficult it becomes. So, that's our goal right now. 

Am I wrong? Just try and keep it simple, right, with 

SBOC? Yeah, just keeping it simple. We're not 

trying to complicate it.

And so, to be honest with you, if -- I 

can't say that. So, yeah, keeping it simple is the 

best thing I can say, and so that may be something to 

-- to discuss when that comes out.

CHAIR GROVE: Yeah, I do appreciate that 

when we think about the implementation side 

afterward. There's a whole lot of records out there 

and documentation that needs to -- needs to be updated 

after that to make sure everybody is on the -- when 

you think of -- when you look at that standard and, 

like you said, the regulations, all of the 

explanations within everybody's handbook, and making 

sure that that has been put out to the public. That's 

an important piece. So, understand that. Thank you 

for some of the clarification.

DR. ROSENTRATER: Just a quick question. 
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I'm not sure, Arthur, if you're the right person or, 

Tony, if you're the right person for this. 

Looking at the study that's on the SBOC 

web page in terms of the protein and oil as end-use 

functionality, I'm curious, is there any desire to 

dig deeper and understand root cause for this? I 

know we've got a lot of observations of, you know, 

whether it's flat storage or conveyance or drought 

conditions. Is there any desire or need, or should we 

consider digging deeper and trying to use more data 

and analytics? Or even a secondary study, to try to 

-- because even though the trend is positive at the 

moment, that could change.

MR. NEAL: That's a great question. 

Great question. Based on demand, we do not think, 

from FGIS perspective -- I'm not speaking on behalf 

of anybody else other than FGIS. We don't think that 

that would be the biggest return on investment in 

terms of common resources because our trading 

partners have not raised the alarm bell regarding the 

issue. 

And the study that we performed was 
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really to affirm other peer review research that was 

conducted on this topic because we don't have the 

capacity to do the end-use research. And I think I 

was speaking with James earlier this morning, and he 

was sharing how, in Canada, they have capacity in 

their lab to do more end-use research versus what we 

do here in FGIS at our grain center. We focus a lot 

more on ensuring that inspection results are -- have 

less variability and are more accurate versus how 

end-user uses the product.

So, I think, short answer, no. We don't 

think that that's something we'd want to take on.

CHAIR GROVE: Good question, Kurt, 

because isn't that what we're all wondering? If, 

like, how can we keep it from happening? 

And again, the research, actually, on the 

production side is an important piece. I think the 

Grain Inspection Committee last year, I think, went 

-- in June, went with the proper route of the research 

on functionality because until you can show it isn't 

going to change those things in the process, we were 

never going to be able to go forward. Well, we could 
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have, but it would have been a lengthy process to go 

forward with changing a standard. 

And so that research helped, at least, in 

what is already a complicated process. So, I -- I 

think that was a great call from this committee 

because our original discussions maybe were a little 

more broad on that, and we brought ourselves back to 

what needs to happen first.

MR. NEAL: Well, it was fast. It was 

neat. It was quick work on behalf of the committee 

as well, and that did -- that did come up, the process 

by which we have to engage to get to that level of 

results. We'd still be in the process. And so, 

yeah, a great question. I agree.

CHAIR GROVE: I don't see any questions 

have come through on our virtual meeting attendees. 

How are our in-person gallery back there? Any 

questions?

Go ahead. If you would like to come to 

the microphone and state your name, please, because 

we all --

MR. CHOPRA: Sure, thank you. Good 
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morning, everyone. Just a quick one on the SBOC. 

What do you think would be the color impact, if any, 

on CSB or CSB-plus? Would there be an impact or 

would there be no impact? Just an open question to 

all of you.

CHAIR GROVE: Just again, I do want --

can you please state your name?

MR. CHOPRA: Anuj Chopra from ESQPLUS.

MR. FRIANT: And maybe -- Anuj, for the 

group -- what CSB and CSB-plus is?

MR. CHOPRA: Oh, I'm sorry. Corn-soy 

blend and corn-soy blend-plus. These are two 

products which are exported as aid to USAID. I'm a 

subcontractor to USAID and assist them on the supply 

chain and quality of the supply chain.

And these products have been sent by 

USAID as aid through different PVOs and directly to 

various -- various aid countries, so I wanted to know 

if there was an impact.

So, that the receiving folks at the other 

end suddenly see a color change, and they start 

different shading it. So, I'm not sure if there was 
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an impact on that color of the corn-soy blend, CSB, 

or CSB-plus in this space. Thank you.

CHAIR GROVE: Any exporters in the room 

or processors that have experience with that that can 

help answer that question?

MR. FRIANT: I think maybe to back up a 

step. I'm not sure -- Brian, what are the inspection 

processes, or Tony, for CSB and CSB-plus?

DR. JHEE: I can probably make a comment, 

but I do need to probably seek clarification on this. 

So, my understanding would be the two 

cereal products that were just mentioned would be 

processed with the hulls removed, so if the hulls are 

removed, there wouldn't be any discoloration. So, I 

think -- but that's, again, probably confirming with 

colleagues within USAID.

MR. FRIANT: And I think, Tony, a 

question for you. Does FGIS inspect corn-soybean 

blend? And, if so, how compared to the normal just 

straight corn or straight soybeans?

MR. GOODEMAN: Yeah, this is Tony at 

FGIS. So, the corn-soy blend, it's a process. It's 
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basically ground up cornmeal, soybean meal blended 

together. I think there's some other additives may 

be in there, too, but they're emergency food aid-type 

products mixed with, I think, water, and it's like a 

cereal. It depends on the contract. Previously, 

FGIS or one or our cooperators was required to take 

that sample and then send it in here to the technology 

and science division.

They do a number of tests on it, 

including bacteria and other quality factors. That's 

changed recently. I think now it's a, they can use 

other sampling entities, or self-sample and send that 

sample in to TSD for the analysis.

So, it's not, it's not graded like other 

product, other commodities under the Grain Standards 

Act or the Ag Marketing Act, but there's a number of 

tests that TSD performs on the product. Yeah, we 

consider it a processed commodity; it's ground up.

CHAIR GROVE: All right, I'm going to ask 

one last call for any other questions. I think we've 

kind of slowed down with those, but good circling 

back on some of those; getting some clarification.
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If we have no more questions, we are 

going to break early for lunch. Yeah, so we would, 

it is 11:04. We're going to call our break for lunch 

at this time. Come back and be ready to start GIAC 

business after lunch. All right, thank you.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

went off the record at 11:04 a.m. and resumed at 1:00 

p.m.)

CHAIR GROVE: All right, good afternoon. 

Welcome back everybody.

So, in this portion of the program, we 

are going to talk about some industry issues that 

were turned in prior to the meeting. And what we 

would first like to do for each of them is let the 

presenter or the group, the subcommittee kind of go 

through their whole process first and then ask 

questions after it. That way you kind of hear the 

full amount, especially with the subcommittee groups 

as there's three different members of that 

subcommittee. Let's them get through kind of their 

background of what they did before we start this.

So, the first issue that was presented 
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was on destination origin versus destination grades. 

And this was, then you should all be able to read it 

there, but the background is officially certified 

origin weights and grades on the, so again, on the 

origin end there's some inconsistency then at 

destination with a regrading of them. And of course, 

everybody wants inbound grades. It is now in your 

inventory, you want to know what you have so you know 

what to do with it.

But some inconsistency at times, again, 

with an original certification. It has seemed more 

prevalent in the recent past than it has in the past 

five to 10 years. And some markets maybe have a 

higher rate of what we see as inconsistency. And, 

you know, a couple of things to touch on, time of 

transit, certainly, can affect that.

So, what can this committee do? What can 

we help work on to look at that consistency? And as 

put in here, actually with the other topic, there 

could be some things in the other topic. So, what 

we see is those things that may seem subjective, 

color, odor, and again, time of transit does affect 
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the odor more than it would the color. Color is what 

it is.

But those seem to be from the industry 

standpoint of, I guess, the companies that reached 

out, seemed to be their biggest issue. Again, does 

that change the official certification? No. But 

that also doesn't mean that the export facility needs 

to accept it or accept it without renegotiation of a 

contract because of the appearance of a change in 

grade or a misgrade.

So, I'm going to open this up for some 

first thoughts or even maybe further questions 

because what I have thought to is have the inland 

market has reached out and this seems to be something 

that we are seeing more regularly inland.

So, I am going to give a little bit of, 

I don't know if it's a caveat, but some thoughts as 

the industry about this is something we had in our 

last meeting, in transportation issues, time of 

transit certainly affects this.

Now, is that something that is in the 

works by numerous different associations, numerous 
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different government groups? Yes, that is a 

conversation, not one that we're going to fix here, 

but it does affect issues like this. Grain in a 

steel box depending on its destination, time in that 

steel sealed box weather, heat certainly can affect 

it. That can change your grade factors.

So, I don't think it is necessarily felt 

that it is mis-grading. That could be. Again, we 

don't, this is the conversation for us to have in 

thoughts.

MR. NEAL: Thanks, Barb, for that 

background. And just for consideration as you all 

discuss this, because we've heard anecdotally some of 

these types of different grades at origin to 

destination, some of the things to also consider: 

who's doing the grading at origin? Is it being 

performed by, you know, an official service provider? 

Are the issues subjective or are they quantitative? 

Are the processes being employed the same? Are they 

official processes? Do we even have a real sense of 

the problem, how widespread is this? Is it 

concentrated?
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And the various things you just noted, 

too, Barb has isolated, too, more the inland arena 

and you talked about transit issues and how are they 

contributing to the potential change in the product. 

So, I think those are some of the things that you can 

consider when you all discuss this.

MR. MORGAN: Is this primarily rail, or 

is it rail and barge?

CHAIR GROVE: Primarily rail.

MR. FRIANT: I would say that we also see 

the issue on barge traffic, you know, and would 

welcome your comments on that.

MR. FREDERKING: Yes, we certainly see I 

would say moisture variance probably more than a lot 

of other factors, sort of like when it comes to barge 

origin destination, but there can be times when 

there's degradation of the commodity in the barge 

that usually is explainable with transit times and/or 

loading conditions or conditions at the time of 

loading.

Maybe it's harvest and it's pretty hot 

out, higher moisture when corn or soybeans were 
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loaded, but typically, it's easily identified by 

origin and addressed with that origin. But there are 

specific areas, I would say, that do have official 

grades that we see significant moisture variance.

CHAIR GROVE: Thank you.

MR. ENGEL: Chris, have you spent any 

time trying to identify or understand the sampling 

techniques as opposed to the grading techniques that 

you start out with?

MR. FREDERKING: Yes, we've found that 

they're following proper procedures using diverter 

type samples and have even followed it down to the 

sample bags that are being used to transport the 

sample from the facility to the State Agency.

MR. MORGAN: I mean, Barb, outside of, I 

mean, the way we deal with it is we deal with the 

shipper and the buyer deals with us. I mean, outside 

of that you're looking for ways that, I mean, because 

it happens. Weights are another issue, especially 

draft weights on barges. There can be quite a bit 

of variance. But once you unload it, I think some 

of that is related to the negotiation of the purchase 
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and sale too, so how are you going to handle it?

CHAIR GROVE: I think one of the reasons 

this has come up in some of the direct conversations 

I've had with different marketing groups with 

different companies has been around competence. And 

you definitely want to have competence in certifying 

agencies. They are grading your grain, you know, 

again an official origin certification you have that 

assumption that this is a cert. It was officially 

graded. If it was done in the proper process, this 

is what it is. But we all know, again, storage time, 

time in a different container changes that.

I will say I do feel, again, this isn't 

about that, but with SBOC there is an immediate 

response to an official inspection on training 

people. And I think that happens. I think that 

happens, again, a stepped-up focus on it. You know, 

Tony went through that. No, not Tony. Yes, Byron 

talked about, again, training people, Byron did. So, 

I think that focus is very important and that helps 

with the confidence knowing that.

MR. NEAL: Let's use moisture as an 
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example. There's a difference between moisture taken 

at origin by an official agency and moisture 

destination, let's say, taken by us. I think this 

is for staff. Are examples retained in such a sense 

that we could compare if there's a, you know, a desire 

to want to make sure to confirm that the results are 

accurate?

So, that may be one thing to take into 

consideration is that if you are receiving different 

results around the quantitative, or I guess, even 

subjective factors, you know, making sure we can 

compare if there's something done at origin the 

official agencies will still have a sample that was 

taken on hand so that we can do a comparison.

CHAIR GROVE: So, did you want to clarify 

then against sample retention to make sure I

accurately have a 10-day on domestic, 30day on 

export, or does it depend? A few of the, you know, 

when I have asked that question, and again, it's 

individual agencies, that's kind of been the 

response.

Tony?
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MR. GOODEMAN: Yes. Is this on?

It depends on the carrier and the 

movement type. I'm going to look towards the back 

of the room to confirm, but we've got 10-days on 

outbound rail and for barges 30-days. Yeah, so we've 

got an instruction. I think I ought to know. Our 

group publishes this, the measuring division, but 

there are about 10 different categories.

So, yeah, outbound barges, 25 days, 

excuse me, and outbound rail, which I mentioned, is 

10-days. Those are the two big categories there. I 

would say we have several tools if there's ever a 

concern. So, keeping those retention periods in 

mind, if you experience an issue there are several 

things we can do in the existing tool box, so to 

speak, I think.

We do have random monitoring. That 

doesn't always catch everything. We monitor less 

than, our systems monitor less than 1 percent of all 

the samples, some random, some more targeted. And 

so, we're not going to, we might not always see 

everything in the same way that you do.
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So, if you experience an issue and want 

us to look into something, you can do that very 

candidly to our field office. So, we've got the 

manager of our domestic office here and also the bar, 

great resources to reach out to if there ever is a 

concern. We can pull more samples and look into that 

kind of thing and see if there's some fire where that 

smoke might be. You could also request an appeal, 

even at origin if you're an interested party. Any 

interested party can request an inspection or an 

appeal.

There are retention, I'm sorry, there are 

time limits around that that can be waived between 

buyer and seller. There's options, too, for 

beneficial inspection at origin at your spot, which 

it sounds like you're doing a lot of that already. 

But there's so many variables, it's best to, when we 

have situations like this, it's good to have a 

conversation. And we can talk about different 

options and whether you want to do that formally, 

like through an appeal or an appeal on future 

shipments or something we can look at, you know, with 
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file samples or training or sending out samples after 

the fact. We have a lot of options there.

As far as the committee is concerned, 

like some of those restrictions I talked about are 

regulatory. So, those are, you know, public and for 

public review, as well. So, if at that point, like, 

we have a restriction once the carrier's left that 

you can't get an appeal on it unless the parties agree 

to get an appeal because, Mr. Moore, we talked about 

risk and risk management, you don't want to send 

something off.

Okay, I've fulfilled my part. I have a 

grade. It's official. It's good. And then, the 

customer or someone else two days later when the train 

or the barge is halfway gone and you don't have 

control over it anymore all want a re-inspection on 

that boat and it went from a 1.9 to a 2.1, it doesn't 

meet contract anymore and now what do I do? So, 

those things are all, you know, regulations now for 

those reasons. But, you know, if there was a big 

interest, I'm sure you all could look at something 

like that. It really just depends.
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Like you said, when you put, when you put 

the grain, and then, I know all the grain that we 

handle here comes straight out of the Garden of Eden, 

goes into these carriers. It, like a fine wine, only 

gets better, right? That may be not always the case, 

but you're right, it doesn't usually, it doesn't 

usually get better with time. The color, though, 

like that shouldn't be changing a whole lot. That's 

something that shouldn't degrade, but I don't want 

to, I don't want to minimize that. 

MR. GOODEMAN: Yeah, that's a great 

point. So, Ron mentioned, thanks, Ron mentioned, Ron 

mentioned the retention points in our instructions 

are minimums. So, the applicant for service could 

ask for a longer retention period if they want. We 

do see that sometimes in the container market. We 

talked a lot about, too, extending the retention time 

for containers. We haven't gone through that process 

formally. But you could ask for, say, on your barge 

shipments or your rail shipments, say instead of a 

10-day retention, we want a 15 or 20-day retention 

period. That's a possibility there.
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Thanks, Ron.

CHAIR GROVE: That's a very good comment. 

Thank you for that, because when we looked at, again, 

issues outside of our control, transportation, if you 

have rail delays, that 10-days that samples could be 

gone, like before we said, hey, let's compare samples 

or audit samples. I would say especially when we 

look at the food grade cars, 10-days is enough. So, 

thank you for that. That's very good.

MR. GOODEMAN: I just want to clarify, 

just to throw it out there. We do offer a service, 

sure, we do offer a service called Official 

Commercial Inspection Service. We developed this in 

conjunction with the industry and the official 

agencies 20-something years ago. It's a modified 

inspection that the applicant agrees to.

It's most common on inbound trucks. We 

have a lot of truck labs where we do that. But it 

is possible, conceivable that you could do that 

outbound at an official commercial inspection that 

might have a different inspection procedure or 

retention timeframe, but just for awareness on that.
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MR. MORGAN: We've used Official 

Commercial and taken official delivery-of-shipment 

receipts off the boards, so it was helpful. The 

other thing, I don't know if these grading specs are, 

one thing I've always looked at is are they in 

tolerance or not? Because the same people grading 

the same sample and you get two different results.

So, are they in tolerance or not in 

tolerance? I think it's a key thing when you're 

looking at comparing sample-to-sample, as well. And 

also keep in mind from a moisture standpoint the 

storage of the samples could affect moisture, as 

well.

These, in going through, I think there's 

a lot of tolerance, a lot of tolerance data that they 

did when they approved the grading of the lab 

equipment.

CHAIR GROVE: Any other thoughts on this 

particular discussion? Because some of it, I feel, 

may roll into the next. And we can always come back 

to it in thoughts that go with this. But I do think 

there may be some things on the technology group that 
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might be relevant to this same discussion.

Again, any thoughts or comments from the 

group or committee on this particular one?

MR. FRIANT: Well, I just have a question 

and it made me think of it when Tony was talking about 

the available process. In any of the conversations 

that you've had with folks, was there ever a case 

where there was a discrepancy at the destination and 

then the origin went back and requested a review 

inspection or an appeal inspection by FGIS to see 

what the results were on that origin grade?

CHAIR GROVE: The ones I've discussed it 

with it was, I'll say State Agency to Federal Agency 

in a sense. I don't think a re-appeal was or a reinspection was then asked for.

MR. ENGEL: Nick, was your question in 

the form of how many of the grades held as opposed to 

how many of the grades failed?

MR. FRIANT: No, it was more about when 

there's a discrepancy of destination and the 

destination challenged it at the origin, did either 

the buyer at destination or the seller at origin say, 
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hey, we're going to go back to that original 

inspection and ask for an appeal or a review 

inspection on that original to see how that compared 

to what they got at destination on that same rail 

car?

CHAIR GROVE: Yes, in some cases, yes, 

it was, they went back to their file samples, which 

would be what they have, but they still varied from 

what the destination felt that they were. And I 

would say especially in the odor category. No, it 

doesn't have odor at origin, has odor at destination, 

now what?

I'm going to go ahead and pull up the 

next discussion point and then I think that will help 

this.

MS. COOPER: While Barb is doing that, 

I'm going to go ahead and give you a little bit of 

background on how we approached this topic. As you 

all know, many personally involved, but also looking 

at the list of resolutions from the last 10 years or 

so, the GF has long expressed support for 

incorporating new or improved technology into the 
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official system to help address a variety of 

challenges.

The need for improved consistency and 

accuracy of results, to streamline the grading 

process, to produce results more quickly as customers 

are demanding results ever, ever more quickly. And 

grain shortages, either current or anticipated, if we 

can find a technological solution to part of the grain 

system that speeds things along and doesn't require 

humans, than perhaps that's a benefit.

So, with the development and now recent 

approval of the User Guide, by which FGIS will 

identify and approve new technology, we thought it 

made sense for this meeting to bring forward some 

ideas from industry on priorities or specific needs 

where technology could help. And so, asked for 

volunteers and Nick Friant and Curt Engel said that 

they would participate. And the three of us sort of 

chatted, decided on a plan and you can kind of see 

there what our objectives and discussion topics were.

We started from a position that anything 

we wanted to propose needed to maintain the 
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integrity, transparency of the official system. So, 

kind of based on that, we went out to a wide spectrum 

of industry and agency participants and just talked 

to them about the general topic of how technology 

could help improve the official system.

So, what we wanted to do today, I'm sure 

you've all had a chance to read this report, but what 

we want to do is just the three of us present then a 

few highlights in what we heard from the people we 

talked to and then really open it up to discussion on 

what your ideas are and then with the objective, if 

appropriate, to come up with a recommendation for the 

committee to consider.

So, with that, I'll turn it over to Nick 

to summarize the comments that he heard.

MR. FRIANT: And I think before I get 

into summarizing my comments, and Janice, I apologize 

if you mentioned this already. I was pulling it up 

from my screen. But one of the, part of the 

conversation that we had was that we were focusing on 

the technology piece, the grading equipment 

technology piece, and not so much around the IT 
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systems technology, which I think over the years, 

Tony, has been part of your project, right? So, we 

were focusing on the grading technology equipment.

But we do need to recognize that the 

systems, the software, the IT systems are an 

important part of that as we were talking about 

earlier today. If you have vision technology that 

can grade damage based off of someone that's got a 

pencil and paper and has got to write it down and 

then type it into the computer, we haven't gained 

anything with the technology. So, that is a key part 

of this discussion, as well.

And the other piece is that, you know, we 

were focusing on the technology, not so much changes 

to the standards, but that could also be a part of 

the discussion down the road. So, I was tasked to 

have some conversations with two of the primary 

industry associations for the graining business, the 

National Grain and Feed Association and the North 

American Export Grain Association. And I think 

that the key point to share with that is overall, 

both groups are supportive and see the need for 
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technology in grading equipment. Very supportive of 

it and recognize that if we don't find ways to be 

better, quicker, especially as we look at staffing, 

you know, today, we have to look at the automated 

processes and what equipment can be brought in. So, 

very supportive of that.

A little bit more into some of the 

details of those discussions, and you can see the 

bullet points on the screen, as well, but first of 

all, you know, what some research around what 

technologies are available, what technologies should 

be focused on, is it existing technology that could 

be adapted or adopted? Is there a new technology out 

there?

It's almost a, almost an inventory, if 

you will, of what is available or what may be needed 

which kind of fits with that second bullet around are 

there specific equipment manufacturers that are doing 

stuff today that, you know, would fit into new 

technology to bring into the system? Or are there, 

are there new players out there in this space that 

could bring new technology? So what, who all is even
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out there? And some of them I think we know because 

already equipment providers in the system, but what's 

out there? What's available?

Also, I think there was a strong, strong 

comments around use the opportunity to partner 

between the government and industry. In this case, 

we're referring to the grain handling industry, 

right? So, be talking to grain elevators about what 

they see, where the opportunities are and what 

improvements, as far as technology goes, would they 

like to see at their facilities, so that could be 

something that would help?

And then, I think maybe the last two 

pieces that I'll mention for my part, and I think 

it's a very important one, especially as we looked at 

the finances early this morning whereas any financing 

that will come from this if we need to be doing 

research, of there's, whether it's research on what 

equipment is available or research on is the 

equipment acceptable for use in the official system, 

the funding, where does the funding come for that and 

what's the mechanism for that?
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And then the last piece I think I would 

like to point out is, you know, is there kind of in 

that same vein, an opportunity for partnering with 

the Land Grant universities and where they might have 

some of that additional technical knowledge or one of 

the ideas that came up in conversation is could this 

be some sort of graduate school project for, like a 

master's degree level student that they could spend 

some time working on, as well?

So, I think maybe that's where I'll leave 

it for my part and pass it to Curt.

MR. ENGEL: Thanks. My part in this 

endeavor was to reach out to industry contacts, 

agencies, excuse me, and primary focus when I started 

this was everyone's out of people. And the 

opportunity to think about changing the way this 

process is accomplished involves thinking about 

changing the standards, not necessarily the absolute 

value but the manner in which this grain gets graded. 

And I can, and I can, you know, it's coupled with 

examples of that.

Tom Meyer, many years ago, suggested to 
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me that someone should design a machine that you could 

drop a sample in and it would give you what's your 

test grade and protein before it fell out of the 

bottom of the machine. The standard needs to be 

changed relative to how moisture's taken, relative to 

weight, whether it --- or not. I mean, that would 

be one example of that.

From an industry standpoint, there's a 

real move afoot to eliminate as much human contact 

and interaction as possible in this scaling and 

binning of grain facilities because of the 

consistency of having the personnel available to get 

the same repetitive answer where we're grading this 

grain as it comes through the seal. It takes, it 

takes training, and it's a process.

If the mechanization of this, where 

technology can be applied in manners in which it takes 

as much of the subjectivity out of it as possible, it 

improves everyone's situation in life. The agencies, 

you know, I've been at this for 40 years. The 

agencies struggle to keep up with us. They're 

working for the railroad. So, the timing of all of 
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this is so incredibly subjective that it's difficult 

for everyone to try and communicate with the 

workforce that is available to train right, period.

Thinking about that and all through the 

process and then thinking about some of the great 

factors that are subjected, if you will, to other 

technologies, and one thing that comes to mind very 

quickly is optical, you know, scanners during corn 

damage. Now, you know, I don't have a lot of 

experience with that but I've seen a lot of optical 

scanning equipment that can do things, you know, that 

I would have thought of as magic, you know, when I 

was a young man in this industry.

Now, is that technology available to 

identify germ damage in wheat? Likely not. That's 

probably still the hand grade, but those technologies 

exist today. I know one of my favorites is a Carter 

Data Dockage tester. What a great piece of 

equipment, but is it the right piece of equipment? 

And that's a form of a question.

And I've got a couple of examples of the 

grading factors today. And the SBOC would be one. 
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Test weight in soybeans is one that is no longer a 

grading factor because the industry didn't see it as 

necessary. And, you know, I grew up in the universe 

of DHV and wheat and it disappeared. It was not an 

important factor anymore. So, are there, is this an 

opportunity not only to embrace some technological 

applications but, you know, examine some of the 

standards, some of the factors for their usefulness 

and meld the two together?

I think that the message I heard across 

the board was consistency. Just give me something 

to work against so that I can work with every day 

that's not, you know, that's not a moving target. 

Combining some of these functions is humanly possible 

so that, you know, not only speed the market but it 

produces more consistent results.

I talked about the optical scanning. 

People issues are the huge driver in this regard. As 

this process could and likely would occur, there'll 

be other things that other people find that will turn 

out to be opportunities rather than impediments. I 

think I'll just stop there and pass it to Janice and 
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we can revisit any of this as anybody needs to have 

a conversation.

MS. COOPER: I focused on delegated 

states and designated agencies in my outreach and 

heard, of course, a lot of support for the official 

system and also concerns about availability of the 

needed labor. So, they're open to new technology. 

Didn't hear a lot of specific recommendations or 

priorities because they're sort of waiting for the 

official system to tell them what they can use.

Meanwhile, they are doing as much as they can 

to improve their delivery and their customer service. 

So, they're trying to automate their back office 

systems, improve their training programs for their 

personnel and, you know, just trying to do everything 

they can do within their power to improve how they 

provide service. There was one device called the MCI 

auto-picker that was mentioned in a couple of phone 

calls. I'm not personally familiar with it, but of 

course, I went and Googled it right away.

And so, just an indication that there is 

equipment out there being developed that will be able 
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to combine tests or functions, but it needs to go 

through a more formal process to make sure that it 

meets the need and the specs as defined by FGIS. And 

then perhaps it can be considered for inclusion. 

And, of course, there Nick said we didn't focus on 

the IT side of things, but there were a lot of 

comments for the need for improving the handling of 

information, not having to enter it more than once, 

get rid of paper and pencil, get rid of paper hand 

tickets, that sort of thing that might be adopted to 

improve just the data collection and sharing.

I think we've seen the success of the 

concept of adopting multiple technologies for single 

tests through the micro-toxin test kits and the 

moisture meters so that the idea of bringing 

competition to the system, I think has been validated 

through that experience. And it think that it can 

only help if you have multiple vendors for, like a 

filing number or other kind of test because then you 

get both competition for both providing a better 

piece of equipment and also maybe cost savings.

So, there were comments in favor of that 
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approach. So, and of course from the agencies who 

provide this service, there were also some concerns 

about not going too far and replacing all humans with 

technology, both from not wanting to lose their 

business but also feeling that humans were still 

important to the integrity of the system. So, those 

were kind of the overall comments that were received, 

but I think I agree that general support for the idea 

of streamlining and automated with pieces of the 

grading system.

So, we'd love to hear your comments and 

questions.

MR. FRIANT: I think I would just like 

to add on, Janice, if you look through the bullets, 

you know, one of the things that came out of the trade 

associations was engaging the industry. And then 

some of the comments that Curt heard from the folks 

he talked to was kind of that same thing, right? 

Engaging processors and exporters, engaging the 

operators, so I think that's an important point for 

us to consider, recognize it. And we've heard this, 

you know, we've definitely heard it from Arthur and 
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others on the team, ways we can continue to better 

partner between FGIS and industry.

So, I think that's a good point to call 

out that we saw that in different conversations that 

our group had with folks.

MR. NEAL: So, as I listen, and thank you 

all for the work. Thank you for the background paper 

there. As I'm sitting thinking about approach, there 

are a couple of things that I've thought about we've 

discussed with all of you in different settings and 

we've discussed inside the USDA, but I think we're 

going to have to strategize on the approach to learn 

in an organized manner what is out there.

AMS has this cotton and tobacco program 

which is probably one of the most mechanized grading 

programs I think we have in the agency and they use 

super highly engineered technology to grade cut, to 

cut down on manual labor. They did it through a lot 

of research, a lot of specialty design, but it cuts 

down on their time significantly and insures 

consistency. And they can monitor all of the results 

on screens.
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Darrell, who's the Deputy Administrator 

for that program, at the start of the year around 

March, has started to visit a few other equipment 

manufacturers in other industries just to see what 

type of technology that they're using. And he got 

more ideas. He also talked to, you know, TSA, the 

type of technology that they use for scanning, you 

know, people's luggage because you can see everything 

in there. He says, well why can't that technology 

be used in cotton grading? So, he's thinking outside 

of the box.

And I'm thinking, we're going to have to 

develop a strategy to assess what else is being out 

there in Ag industries, you know, be a benefit to us 

if we garner enough interest or if it already exists

what you already have outlined there, but we've got 

to do it in a structured way. One thing we talked 

about in October with Melissa, the Associate 

Administrator for AMS, was potentially piggy-backing 

on a conference to see if we can entice equipment 

manufacturers for all of the commodity programs in 

AMS, maybe come together and have a discussion around 
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what is being used. We learn from each other.

That's something that possibly could be 

explored because we're all so busy. We've got 

limited visibility into some of these areas that we 

want to see progress being made in. We've got to 

pull people together so we can learn. That also 

gives us an opportunity to engage industry 

stakeholders, get feedback. They're here. They ask 

questions, too. And so, just, you know, I'm not 

throwing this out as a recommendation. I'm throwing 

this out for consideration.

Maybe we need to work towards some type 

of convening like that and be organized and designed 

in such a way that is not necessarily making pitches, 

but for us to learn how are certain industries, you 

know, currently leveraging technology to insure 

consistent, repetitive, accurate quality results. 

You know, if you look at wheat, small grain, you look 

at raisins, small fruit, technology being used in 

that space. Can some of that technology be used? 

And we don't know. Is it picking up color? Don't 

know.
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You look at what, all of them are pretty 

small sorters, pretty small, not quite sure what 

resembles that in another commodity, but I think they 

are conversations we should have with industry. I'm 

going to make some contacts especially with crops 

industry just to touch base with them and get some 

kind of introductory understanding in some similar 

type of commodities, what they've got going on.

But maybe that's a starting place for us 

is more learning to see if we can focus our attention 

because some of the things I'm hearing, one of the 

things I've heard repeatedly is, you know, HVAC THV, 

you know, in wheat. That's something that's a factor 

that can be subjective, that can create challenges 

when it comes down to loading a ship, a vessel in a 

timely manner. It would be great to have some 

technology of some type of solution around that.

Odor, different ball game, but it is a 

challenge, subjective at times. So, that's an issue 

I'm hearing that, you know, I don't know if there's 

a technology that really addresses odor. We didn't 

mention this today, but animal dropping, animal filth 
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is something that we work in collaboration in 

industry, particularly Cargill and TSD and they 

finalize a chemical process by which we can, you know, 

get animal filth is detected in a lot and it's caught, 

it can be tested using a chemical test to confirm it 

rather than just being a subjective, you now, visual 

assessment. So, that's progress there.

And there could be other areas where it 

presents a regular challenge. We try to load vessels 

in a timely manner or load railcars in a timely 

manner. If we could find the right type of 

technology that takes some of the subjectivity out as 

you mentioned it before. Not necessarily replace 

humans, because you probably always want a human 

there to validate something that may be out of whack 

with a piece of equipment. But we may want to think 

about orchestrating some type of environment for us 

to learn what else is being used out there.

CHAIR GROVE: I kind of like some of your 

assessments there, some of the same similar notes as 

I was writing down. It, you know, there's always a 

concern if you use technology you're trying to get 
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rid of the people, and that isn't what it's about. 

The biggest thing is right now we're all struggling 

with having the people. So, we're not replacing 

people. Right now, we can't find what we don't have 

in the first place.

And then also, again, the validation; 

that is always needed. Machines have errors. 

Machines get backed up. We still need people, but 

as the industry goes, we're getting incentivized or 

pressurized to load faster. Both of them. So, to 

load faster, somebody's got to grade faster. You can 

only do so many steps in a certain amount of time.

So, I think technology is that way to 

help being efficient in that, in a sense, in the 

loader and agencies be able to work together and not 

have the frustration. Because there is frustration, 

you know, on the loading side. There's frustrations 

if something is not happening fast enough, you know? 

And that is, again, pressure from others. So, I 

think this is a great call for this.

And again, I do feel it relates back, the 

work that you guys have done and again, the input 
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that you guys got really can go back to the other 

problem, also, some of that. In some of those, some 

of the issues, whether it's moisture and moisture 

wasn't one that I had thought of, but again, that is 

an equipment process, so in validation of equipment.

In your thoughts or comments on what this 

subcommittee has put together, I think you guys 

reached out to such a wide variety of people. And 

that was great, to get the input already from so many 

others.

MR. FREDERKING: I'll just add, I 

understand the overall intent. And certainly, Nick 

was talking about as far as, you know, looking at 

ways to automate the grading process. But still to 

use some of the other comments in here, it seems like 

there are still some low-hanging fruit in regards to 

data that can be exchanged between systems and 

between customers and FGIS, specifically as an 

exporter who's using AWMS and dealing with weights 

logs and that weight log, you know, being stuck within 

that AWMS. Is there a better way to export that out 

and get that information to the customer without 
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having to follow a very manual process, which is to 

print it out and scan it?

You know, we talked about getting more 

efficient and doing more with less people. Those 

little kind of improvements, we've had some traction 

not that long ago as we ran into some roadblocks and 

between the weight log, probably some barge 

certificates, getting that data automated and sent 

out to customers would be some real benefit there. 

Certainly, the grade log and how that is given to the 

customer as well, there's probably some improvements 

that can be made there.

So, I just don't want to lose sight, 

certainly, of some other areas that we can look to 

improve technology, increase our efficiencies, cut 

down on the amount of time it takes to get grades and 

information to the customer.

MR. FRIANT: And I think if I could just 

add, it's almost, like parallel projects that are 

combined, right, because we need the technology. We 

need the IT systems. And then, we also need the 

technology to talk to the IT system. So, I mean, I 
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think they're both very important aspects and we 

don't want to lose sight of them.

MR. NEAL: Let me comment on that. Very 

tricky situation. I'm going to acknowledge I think 

they have to be looked at in tandem but at the same 

time there could be a point where there's technology 

that exists that could be deployed but because of 

internal processes to get things onto our systems and 

get it, you know, approved, there's some things we 

don't control.

So, I'm not saying we can't do them at 

the same time, but I think there's also going to be 

a decision point in that process that is do we wait 

fully until USDA approves something that can be put 

on our network and use? Or do we employ technology 

that can still produce an accurate result 

comparatively and continue to work to get it approved 

for our network? I think that's a decision point in 

a process.

So, I'm not negating either but it's not 

always simple when you pull our networks into it. 

And I understand the weight logs and so forth and we 
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can definitely look at the low-hanging fruit and see 

how those types of things can be prioritized.

MR. FREDERKING: I certainly understand 

the need for network security as well as plant control 

security and all the intricacies that go into 

maintaining that balance. But certainly, we think 

there's opportunity there to revisit and try to get 

some of that stuff pulled out.

DR. ROSENTRATER: There's something I 

think I'd like to throw out to the group. I think I 

mentioned this at our meeting last time. The work 

that the group is doing is really great. I'm also 

thinking about this as a teacher of students and 

engineering students in particular. And students are 

really excited by sensors and instrumentation and 

control systems and computer programming and all this 

fantastic stuff that you can do all of these tools 

and integrating the data collection and management 

and analysis.

And something we shouldn't forget is the 

cyber-security aspect because we've had increasing 

incidents of different co-ops that have been hacked 
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and shut down. I think that's something we should 

consider building into the discussion from the 

beginning as opposed to a post-hoc approach.

CHAIR GROVE: Very good observation. 

Again, we do know. I mean, organizations have been 

taken down and still a year to two years later have 

not regained. So, that's a very important thing to 

keep in consideration.

Thank you for that, Kurt. 

I like, Chris, your comments because we 

think about, I guess, about observation, I guess, in 

watching the official process happen that there are 

still a lot of manual pieces of paper processes and 

if there's that ability to streamline that, it makes 

it visual to both sides. I do feel in that process, 

at least from experience with different state 

agencies that there's at least a good verbal flow of 

information when it's happening or at least a hey, I 

hope you know this is what we're seeing. You may 

need to adjust things.

So, at least there's good communication 

there, at least from the loading side inland, but 
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that doesn't necessarily, again, go to efficiency of 

the visibility. Some of the things you guys talked 

about, going again back to the destination and origin 

grades issues, I think very much tie together. And 

I think that we're looking at possibilities in some 

ways of some of the things we'd like to propose going 

forward I think will connect to both of them.

I know thoughts from others in the group 

where your personal experience you see a technology 

piece that we should be working on because I like 

what Janice said on the MCI auto-picker, you see that 

put in a lot of places, again, where people, don't 

have the extra people or just adding the efficiency 

of the product. But I also look at that in the 

process of test weight is not currently a machine 

function, correct, in the official process? It's a 

manual process.

What does the Agency need to be 

comfortable with the machines in an official process? 

You know, something that's manual now could be, there 

are machines out there now doing it and a lot of 

people rely on those machines already. That's 
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devil's advocate.

So, it's a very quiet group for really a 

big thing here. Technology's very important. 

Arthur, I like the approach of, as you talked about, 

strategy with manufacturers again, not again for 

their --- but what is already there. Can some of 

these processes probably work, again in the 

processing side, maybe more so in rice color sorting 

as used a lot, can that be added to the grading 

process?

I think, again, reaching out to see what 

people are using. What people are using from the 

processing or the production side, I think that's a 

very good aspect. You know, we'll talk about later 

in adding, because if we don't know what all equipment 

is out there, we aren't all communicating daily, 

weekly, monthly, about hey, this is what we're using, 

and I think is where this starts.

People that are doing the grading, the 

agency side, what are some thoughts?

MR. WILLIAMS: Arthur, I have a question. 

If I'm a manufacturer of new technology, what's, can 
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you walk us through the process of what I'd have to 

do to get FGIS to pay attention to me and what I would 

have to do to get my process evaluated?

MR. NEAL: Interesting question. So, 

I'm going to start up here. I'm not quite sure if 

FGIS would typically be the one to pay attention 

first. On the new equipment evaluation process would 

be something, that's how they would engage us around 

a piece of equipment. However, just because someone 

has developed a piece of equipment doesn't mean that 

the industry's ready for it. Doesn't mean that that 

piece of equipment is going to be in demand, 

repeatable, is it going to introduce variability into 

a system that's just not desired.

And so, that's why that, that evaluation 

process is in place. Because what we do once they 

come to us with their quote unquote, request for 

evaluation. We check to see whether or not they meet 

standard check boxes. There's a process where we 

then also engage industry to find out their 

perspective on this piece of equipment that's been 

brought to us.
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And we've got to take that into 

consideration regarding factoring prioritization. 

But it also has to meet the USDA standards and 

regulations for, you know, the standards that we have 

in place for that particular commodity that piece of 

equipment is attempting to provide results for.

And so, we're not in the business of 

trying to say, hey, everybody, bring us everything 

you got. We don't have the capacity to look at it 

all. You also need to be able to demonstrate that 

there's demand, already developed demand, for what we 

have. And FGIS want you to evaluate this because we 

have limited resources to prioritize equipment.

MR. JHEE: Well said, Arthur. And Jim, 

I think you raise a good question. It's who asks 

who? Should the agency be asking the industry or 

should the industry be asking the agency? Meaning, 

I think what we're getting at is in certain instances, 

like we could probably go back into history where the 

agency has identified a need.

I think what we heard about two years 

ago, two-and-a-half years ago when I first came on 
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board was an example in California with the rice 

industry, the medium grain rice industry, a very 

specialized one. It's a niche, but the 

instrumentation that's being used there, it's been 

obsolete for over 10 years. Meaning the company will 

not replace parts. Whatever's left is what's there.

And if these machines start to fail, you 

have an increased time of inspection, because it has 

to go to line graders, right? And so, in this 

particular instance, the agency went out and 

solicited manufacturers of emerging technology. And 

that's what I spoke to this summer and one of the 

slides was about, in terms of exploring, a technology 

that uses a scanning technology or something like 

artificial neural network, ANN. And so, we're 

working on an effort like that. Where we identify 

on behalf of the industry, a situation where 

technology can hopefully add value.

Now, if another manufacturer were to come 

out where there's already an existing instrument or 

plural, already existing instruments, that you guys 

are using and they come to us for evaluation, if they 
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pass all of the criteria, and we evaluate the 

instrument and deem it to be fit for purpose, I think 

the choice is now on the industry because we don't 

exactly know if there's going to be a bias from one 

instrument to the next. I think what you guys 

probably see out there, in terms of moisture meters 

or grain analyzers, there's a bias, but it's your 

choice on what you're using.

And I think in going back to the origin 

and destination question, that's what I hear is an 

industry concern. So, long-winded answer, Jimmy, 

it's not an easy question to answer. I mean, sure 

we can say the door's open in terms of evaluating new 

instrumentation. But I think it is also a shared 

responsibility to see what's out there and what would 

be pragmatic for you guys.

MR. NEAL: And just to add to what Ed 

shared -- there you go. To add to what Ed shared, 

it has to be responsible to the integrity of the 

official system, because for us to be responsible for 

the integrity of the official system because let's 

say we do have a host of instruments out there that 
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do the same thing. Somebody's got to be responsible 

for insuring that we're monitoring the performance of 

those instruments and such that the variability is 

not all over the place because that grain is going 

from one hand to the next. And the, the less you can 

control that variability, the more difficult it 

becomes to insure integrity of the official system.

MR. MORGAN: Arthur it's John, I'm 

thinking back to, you're talking it's like the 

chicken and the egg, right? I mean, moisture meters 

are kind of a top down push down from FGIS over the 

years as part of most of the work I've seen done, as 

far as for equipment from this facility. And it's 

improved moisture testing, I would think in rice. 

I'm not sure in other grains, but definitely in rice.

The other issue was several years ago 

when I first came on this committee, there was an 

effort by a manufacturer and a small group to change 

the rice milling tester unbeknownst to the industry, 

So, and that particular piece of equipment we felt 

introduced too much variability into the results. 

So, that's something that's also, some methods are 
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simple stupid proven and it gives you a consistent 

result.

Some of the more sophisticated technology 

has a lot of variables that go into it, specifically, 

some of the milling, this milling equipment in the 

lab basically calculates how much head rush you have 

in rough rice and stuff. We also use the fall screen 

analyzer. Extremely accurate, but it needs a recipe. 

It needs a program for it. FGIS has been, has not 

been able really to provide one. But industry 

participants have provided one, and I think one 

particularly large buyer of rice is kind of standard 

for the fall recipe, as well.

So, we've also spent a lot of time 

looking at optical grain analyzers, of which we're 

surprised that when you guys were working on 

California, that Sitaki, they didn't submit their 

equipment. I guess that's on me for not following 

up because we have some Sitaki equipment in our labs 

that we've used. But, then again, it all depends on 

some of this equipment and technology is like a 

computer, garbage-in-garbage-out. You've got to 
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have the right recipe. You've got to have the right 

people running it. And you've got to put the right 

variables in to get a consistent result. And that 

takes time and effort.

On the optical stuff, there's a lot of 

really interesting technology out there as getting 

firms incentivized to provide it. But there's a lot 

of ways you can do that. I would think with some of 

the grains that we talk about in this room, it might 

be easier to use optical technology. We've had 

varying results in the southern market because we 

have so many varieties we use for rice and a lot of 

variability and just what's considered a long-grained 

versus a medium-grained. In California, it's very 

consistent.

So, I would think they should be, it 

should have been easier to get that optical 

technology done, and we've seen that. The official 

system had to move from one manufacturer to another 

in rice in the last 15 years and it was a challenging 

move over.

But once FGIS got involved the 
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manufacturer of the equipment, everything fell way, 

got extremely better. But the specs, the equipment, 

the reliability, everything went up once you guys got 

involved with CIBRO on the Grainman equipment. So, 

all those things are, it's like the chicken and the 

egg, like I said. Some things, some things probably 

can be top down for existing equipment. But for new 

equipment, I think the industry is the one that has 

to take the lead on it because people have to buy 

into it.

DR. JHEE: Not only the user has to buy 

into it or the industry, but the manufacturer. I 

think one of the challenges we faced when we solicited 

manufacturers for the rice imaging was the southern 

production and the variability that's there and that 

you have more of a harmonized or a more uniform 

production in medium-grain California, but it's a 

niche market. And so, from a corporate standpoint, 

I would be personally thinking, well, is it really, 

where is the return on investment? And so, there's 

that other balance that needs to be struck, as well, 

in terms of raising the awareness of what kind of 
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instrumentation is out there, who the manufacturers 

are, but what would be the utility at the end of the 

day?

MR. GARCIA: It might be that would be 

the capital investment. So, we bring this equipment 

in and then we ask the official agencies, well, you're 

going to have to use this wonderful equipment that 

will replace a human, but you need to invest $2 

million to buy that equipment. And that's a, you 

know, that's something that needs to be considered at 

the time of implementation, and that would be my 

concern. I think it's all fine and dandy and 

wonderful, just money talks.

MR. NEAL: One of the key words that Ed 

used was return on investment. And for us that 

becomes even more critical when you look at our 

budget. I'm just being honest with you. So, 

whatever it is we take on, you know, we are held 

accountable to the industry. We have to spend our 

resources wisely and if we invest, then we expect a 

return. So, whatever we take on, whether it's lowhanging fruit, big fruit that's still high up on the 
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tree, we need to be in agreement on the approach, the 

strategy for getting to where we want to be.

MR. ENGEL: Arthur, would it make sense 

to you that FGIS can be the clearing house on the 

front-end of being the industry contact to kind of 

determine the value proposition?

MR. NEAL: Repeat the question?

MR. ENGEL: Which things are important? 

What's important and what's not important? And be 

the group that's, that sets the specifications to 

industry for the equipment and then if that, in fact, 

is viable and is economically accessible, FGIS also 

is the qualifier of the equipment?

MR. NEAL: So, some of that I think 

exists, but maybe not exactly as stated. The value 

proposition for that piece of equipment is joint, you 

know, I think it's us in addition to industry. 

Because, you know, yes, we may purchase it if it

passes, it may not because especially if there's 

another piece of equipment that we're already using. 

I mean, I think --- yes, we didn't just go out and 

just buy them. They were approved, but we still had 
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some that we were using. So, just because it's 

approved doesn't mean that FGIS is going to buy it.

And that kind of goes to what Ed was 

saying also is that some manufacturers when they 

realize, you know what? There's not enough buyers 

in this space for me to actually introduce this piece 

of equipment. That becomes a real thing. I think 

the standards, we set the standards. The standards 

are in the regulations and the performance of the 

equipment. We have to develop methodology forward. 

I'm using the wrong word. Yes, criteria, for it. 

And so, we set that. We assess and evaluate that 

equipment according to that. We share the results, 

what we can share so that, you know, industry will 

have the opportunity to then engage in our review 

process. This committee will likely then comment on 

the piece of equipment, as well, so that we've got 

some perspective as you all represent various sectors 

of the industry.

And we can take that into consideration 

through the approval process, but it also at the end 

of the day, the ultimate decision is going to be about 
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whether or not that piece of equipment is meeting the 

standards in the USDA.

MR. FRIANT: I think I've asked the same 

questions, Jim, but maybe just a little reversed. 

Have any technology providers reached out to you and 

said, hey, we've got a new piece of equipment that we 

think FGIS would like to evaluate? And the number 

one example that comes to my mind that James mentioned 

was the MCI auto-picker. So, has anybody come to you 

from technology and said, here's the auto-picker? 

We'd like you to evaluate this to see if it could be 

used in the official system.

DR. JHEE: Can you hold on one second 

while I grab my notes?

MR. NEAL: While Ed is grabbing his 

notes, in the past, that's how it's been done. You 

know, manufacturers come to us and ask us, hey, we've 

got this piece of equipment. We want you to take a 

look at it. A lot of it has been something that's 

probably already been in play, and just been 

upgraded. Some of it's new.

DR. JHEE: Okay, so Janet, thank you for 
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putting that document together earlier because I was 

able to kind of explore what new world is the MCI 

auto-picker. Phenomenal device, phenomenal. It's 

about the size of maybe this room. But, it's not 

that big, but it's really a conveyance system of one 

instrument to another instrument to another 

instrument. Our understanding right now it's 

actually going through NTEP approval for the National 

Type Evaluation Program. And the difficulty, I 

think, that our engineers are having is that they 

have to go on site.

We can't just have an instrument or this 

auto-picker come here. The auto-picker name is the 

entire system. The components within the MCI are, 

like the moisture meter, the grain analyzer, the test 

weight apparatus, et cetera. Let's see. So, here's 

what our engineers had mentioned. If it passes NTEP 

evaluation, it doesn't necessarily indicate that the 

MCI auto-picker will not be an NTEP approved device.

Excuse me, the auto-picker will not be an 

NTEP approved device even if it passes NTEP 

evaluation. Basically, what the engineer is saying 
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is that the MCI auto-picker is compatible with an 

existing NTEP approved grain analyzer such as an 

existing NTEP moisture meter can be installed on an 

auto-picker and still give accurate results. So, I 

think what Jason, what my colleague is trying to say 

is that the auto-picker is the overall system. And 

that you could have an NTEP approved moisture meter 

that is within that system. 

It's not actually the MCI auto-picker 

that's going to achieve full approval. That's 

because you could have more than one grain analyzer. 

You could have more than one moisture meter that's 

already achieved NTEP approval that becomes part of 

that conveyance system. So, it's a little bit 

complex.

CHAIR GROVE: So, to that with the pieces 

of equipment that are part of it, since it is a 

conveyance system, what that is is a person moving it 

from the moisture machine, you know, it's maybe 

replacing the compartmentalized diverter it's got 

within it. So, instead of, you know, a divider 

putting it into multiple dishes that different people 
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take that.

So, I think going to what Janice said is 

that type of a process, if the pieces of equipment 

that you attach to the conveyance system make a few 

of the processes, again, the MCI picker does not 

assess damage, but it is moisture and because it is 

moving it back through the system, it will assess the 

moisture, drop it back through to re-assess to take 

then out the FM and to re-assess it back through for 

those who are doing test weight with the machine 

versus the cup. So, I think the test weight piece 

would be the part that is not part of the current 

process.

So, you would wait for, to see if the 

NTEP approval happens before you might consider it, 

review it in your process?

DR. JHEE: I don't know if there's an 

easy answer to that because the auto-picker is a 

system. It is a conveyance system. And I believe 

that the manufacturer has indicated that you could 

make an option, the user could have an option of 

gravity-fed or pneumatic-fed. And there are 
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differences in terms of how the actual 

instrumentation would be able to receive the grain 

and thus, analyze it and then it would proceed the 

conveyance to the next instrument. So, that's pretty 

complex, I think.

But I think the concept is for it to be, 

to allow for streamlining, and I get that. And I 

appreciate the fact that there is thought behind the 

streamlining of the process and trying to avoid handoffs, because hand-offs is where, you know, from a 

SIG-SIGMA perspective is really what you want to 

eliminate.

Barb, I don't know. I think only time 

will tell to see if this corporation would want to 

knock on our door and say what would it take?

PUBLIC: Hello, yeah, recap. So, one of 

the things to consider is I mention a system and as 

we check test equipment, we also test systems. And 

so, the individual outputs of each of the component 

of that system would also have to be regularly tested 

to insure that piece of equipment results mirror the 

results near the results that the equipment is 
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actually producing.

And there's a whole component of --- and 

our records management and our team management 

processes that has to be gone through as well with 

these various systems. In this space, we often 

consider information system our computer. But from 

the Federal records point of view, an information 

system actually is a filing cabinet of paper. So, 

it all fits together to deliver those results 

appropriately.

CHAIR GROVE: You know, I like something 

you said earlier I felt it was interesting, Arthur. 

You said, you know, will a piece of equipment add 

value that the industry is not ready for? That is 

also a very interesting, I will say the new technology 

in moisture machines. Very much needed, but there 

are still, there are still so many gap 2000s out 

there. It is, you go back to the financial piece of 

the equipment even though the new technology, when 

people understand what it will do for them, what will 

help in an operation.

It isn't just a sale, but your whole 
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grain preservation process over drying, shrink, 

aeration, all of those, but again, it's do you still 

have the funds to buy the equipment? And there again 

are a whole lot of old pieces of equipment still out 

there. So, again, in what you talked about in kind 

of a joint, or finding just an industry collaboration 

to see what's out there, I think that's very important 

because as technology comes about, if we aren't 

communicating well, what are its benefits? You don't 

get good buy-in.

I will say I think with, again that with 

the new technology and the moisture meters, I think 

it was put out there before people understood it. 

And so, it's a long tale for people understanding the 

value. And I think that's very important, even for 

manufacturers as they're trying to submit something. 

If they can't explain well its value and what it will 

give to somebody in the industry, give to the user, 

of course and the financial benefit. And there's a 

lot. It's not just the purchase of the equipment. 

It's is it going to help you?

I think we need to help manufacturers 
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understand that piece of it, too. If somebody wants 

to see the need. I like what you said, John. Hey, 

there's something old out there that just works. Why 

change it? Unless somebody can give us a good value 

on why, it's hard to show the need for it.

I think at 2:30, I'm going to go ahead 

and call a short break because I'll let you come here 

and talk. And then we'll have a break because it 

seemed last time it helped us give time to think of 

a few things we may want to add. So, we'll take a 

short 10 minute break after your comments. And then 

come back and kind of finalize any other thoughts or 

discussion that we might have for these topics.

MR. GORDON: So, I think ---

CHAIR GROVE: First, can you state your 

name.

MR. GORDON: Tim Gordon with FGIS. All 

right, Jim, I think you asked a question and like, 

how would we approach something? And I was 

specifically thinking about new technology. And so, 

part of our process is identifying the reference 

method. And so, the reference method's always going 
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to be what we currently do.

So, visually, when we think about the 

imaging technology, it's probably the greatest, you 

know, possible implementation is imaging. And so, 

but when you look at what the reference method is, 

it's very well optimized for what the instrument 

might want to see.

I mean, one example is vitreous kernels. 

So, right now, where's the bar do? Well, if there's 

any soft spot in that kernel at all, anything, even 

a little spot, it's soft. And also they slice the 

kernel some times. So, there's like really 

challenges. So, a reference method is really clear. 

It has to be because it's already in the standards. 

So, we can't change that easily. And yet, it's 

optimized for visual, human vision.

So, you know, when these imaging 

manufacturers come to us, and we know who they are, 

I mean, it's a pretty small set of manufacturers. We 

know who they are. We reached out to them even with 

the rice thing. So, they all knew that our thing was 

going to get announced. So, even that, you know, the 
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idea that a broken kernel is three-fourths or twothirds, Ryan? Three-fourths. So, if it's threefourths, you know, if it's more than three-fourths of 

a whole kernel, then it's a whole kernel, but if it's 

less than that, it's broken. Even that is 

subjective.

So, but the machine is going to do a 

better job of consistency once it's done, but it may 

not line up perfectly with the inspector. But 

anyway, there's a lot of challenges, but if I'm the 

guy, if I'm a person that wants to sell an instrument 

that's doing imaging, I don't want to sell something 

for one factor. I want it to do a bunch of stuff. 

And that becomes just a huge challenge because now 

we're talking factor by factor, you know, heat damage 

in corn, you know, whatever it might be, vitreousness 

in wheat.

And so, they want to come to us and 

probably sell all those factors, but each one we want 

to demonstrate that it does line up with our reference 

method which then becomes tied to the standards. So, 

that's just an additional kind of challenge for the 
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committee to kind of think about.

CHAIR GROVE: Okay, let's break here for 

10 minutes and then come back and see if there are 

any additional thoughts or comments on these topics. 

Thank you.

(Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

went off the record for a brief recess.)

CHAIR GROVE: All right, thank you 

everybody for coming back in. I am just going to 

then open it up to the committee if you have any 

further thoughts again, and comments on the two that 

were represented today that you can help add to 

possible resolution writing this evening. Again, 

your input, your varied experience, is very important 

to what we'll be working on for our resolutions.

MR. FREDERKING: Yes, I would add on the 

technology piece. So, certainly understand the 

comment from John and the desire for industry to give 

feedback to FGIS on different technology initiatives. 

But I also wonder as we are not grading near to the 

extent, nor handling samples near to the extent that 

HEIS personnel are, has there been any process to 
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formally poll workers that are within HEIS to see 

where the greatest benefit or where they would 

benefit most greatly from any sort of new technology.

And could that, should that be everything 

from, of course, the grading aspect to even sample 

preparation, sample handling and export housing. 

There's hundreds of pounds of sample handled for each 

sub-line. So, is that another area that could be, 

could be ripe for improvement?

MR. NEAL: Great question and some of my 

historians in the room, FGIS historians, I think back 

in the day, FGIS actually developed a sample handler. 

Anecdotally, I heard that it worked well, but somehow 

it was put in, some heads are shaking, some are not. 

But it never really made it to prime time or 

manifested itself where it would be implemented. So, 

I think everything is up for consideration. I don't 

know that we polled our employees. I'm sure that 

some discussion has been had, but not since I've been 

here.

And so, we'll take it into consideration 

from our end on what we can find, what we can do, 
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what we can implement, utilize, to become more 

efficient on our end. And like I said earlier, it's 

kind of like a two-edged sword with us because of the 

data, the data housing, data security, also 

networking capabilities, all of those are aspects to 

the factor, we have to factor in, to certainly 

consider that.

CHAIR GROVE: And to add to what Chris 

said, again, that was very good, but to do the jobs 

what are their thoughts on it not just Federal 

inspection, Federal, State and contract, if those are 

some of the people that we are relying on for our 

grades, I think that's, including that entire 

grouping as a possibility.

MR. NEAL: And we have talked to a lot 

of the inspection agencies about it before, same type 

of topic, the wheels turning, trying to get the juices 

flowing to get their input, their thoughts. And I 

think it's a mixed bag. Also someone has stated that 

because of the USDA threat, you know, am I going to 

be displacing people? Is that going to also impact 

our ability to provide service to certain areas? 
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It's variable. So, we did have some vibrant dialogue 

around it but nothing conclusive came out of it.

I think personally FY23/24 we're going to 

be really -- have to start making some, some steps 

toward identifying possible direction in this space. 

I just do because other industries are utilizing and 

leveraging technology. I don't know why we can't. 

And I do know our grading standards are complex. And 

so, programmability, I think, is a big challenge for 

us, too.

We've got so many different grains that 

may come in, like in loading ships, you're switching 

out the next day or so and, you know, you're running 

trains. Same thing, running different grains and 

you're trying to use the same piece of equipment. 

You know, how well is that same piece of equipment 

able to be programmed between commodities or do you 

have to have different pieces of equipment?

Trying not to make sure that there's a 

competitive disadvantage for, over commodities, too. 

You know, we want to be able to be efficient in the 

majority of the commodities that we are handling. 
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And so, we're keeping all of these type of things in 

perspective.

DR. ROSENTRATER: To follow on that 

thought, I think the committee has done a really nice 

job on summarizing ideas and input especially from 

different industry stakeholders. I would challenge 

our overall committee to say, you know, in 20 years, 

30 years, 40 years, where do we want to be? What's 

our future state?

And then maybe then you can ask the 

questions, how do we get there? Whether it's human, 

machine or combination thereof, where do we want to 

be in 20 years? It's going to take a long time to, 

not just develop the technologies further than what 

we have now but also implement those.

MR. NEAL: Great comment; great 

statement. That also requires taking a look at the 

U.S. Grain Standards Act, because even when we talk 

about technology, you want to make sure that whatever 

that future state looks like, if you see that people 

are involved in it, how does it impact what's 

currently authorized in terms of who's doing the work 
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and how the work is being done? So, just keep that 

in mind, too.

CHAIR GROVE: So, any other thoughts or 

comments from the committee at this time that you 

feel may help in our work for resolutions?

Again, I know that this is at this time 

it's stated a little later in the day for public 

comment, but I think that the committee has given all 

their statements and thoughts at this time. Is there 

any public comment, then, in our gallery that you'd 

like to add to give us a little help in what we're 

going to be working on for tomorrow?

PARTICIPANT: I would encourage the 

committee to consider what data standards you need. 

I heard, you know, Christopher talk about ZENO. 

Right now, we give a lot of certificates. We give 

pictures of results via screens. The data standards, 

I believe, are going to be the railroad tracks, the 

drive, the cars, the equipment, the communications to 

go forward. So, think about how you want to use the 

information and what you might want to do, given the 

thought about 20 years from now. How do you drive 
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towards, you know, new innovations onto the 

standards? What are the standards that are missing? 

What would you like either the industry or us to take 

a look at? Thank you.

MR. NEAL: So, on that same note, let's 

go to Chris's comment. Even on things like lowhanging fruit, you know, stuff that we do 

repetitively all the time that, you know, we believe 

we, it would be beneficial if we could, like transfer 

or share that information more easily in an 

electronic manner. If that's, if those are things 

that, you know, we can prioritize, it would be our 

responsibility to share how that can potentially be 

done with you all in a way that makes sense 

economically and also practically so that we've got 

agreement on how we move forward. So, those types 

of things, I think that the dialogue can be had around 

those.

MR. CHOPRA: Thank you. Good afternoon. 

Great discussion. And, again, I'm Anuj Chopra from 

ESQPLUS. I'm a contractor to USAID. We are looking 

at the full supply chain and the quality of grading 
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as it's going through the USAID process to see how 

can we maintain grain quality and the other 

challenges we are seeing. When we're just talking 

about bin preparation or even railcar preparation and 

the level of cleanliness and prep which is happening, 

we can tell you that we are finding foreign grains in 

cargos.

So, that means there's not, if you're 

carrying yellow split peas, we are finding corn in 

yellow split peas which becomes a failing point for 

that cargo at the receiver end. So, that is a big 

challenge.

Second challenge which we're seeing is -

-- bugs coming in beans. There's a migration of bugs 

which are coming in which are not associated with the 

grain you are carrying. As an example, as recent as 

Monday, we saw rice weevils in hard red wheat. How 

could a rice weevil survive in hard red wheat? You 

know, so there's some, so maybe there's something for 

you to consider in that space, what would be the best 

practices which could be developed so that this sort 

of cross migration or that the cleaning of the bins 
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is done a little bit better so that at the receiver's 

end the commodity point goes that we don't have 

challenges. Thank you.

CHAIR GROVE: I do appreciate those 

comments because while outside, maybe the two very 

specific things that were brought up this afternoon, 

they are still a very important process in our grade 

standard. We talked about mixed grains. And also a 

very important process in our trades. So, thank you 

for that and things for us to talk about, at least 

add to future agendas or work on in our own practices. 

So, thank you.

And Jess?

MR. MCCLURE: Jess McClure with the 

National Grain Aid Association. One of the issues I 

know that was discussed in the beginning and before 

I get into that, I just want to thank the leadership 

for FGIS and USDA for their attention to the SBOC 

matter. I know that's been an ongoing issue over the 

last several months. And I think the input you've 

received from the stakeholders on this and 

prioritizing, I really want to appreciate that and 
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the leadership within the USDA.

I think one of the most important issues 

really is where the advisory committee could come in 

here, is a resolution to help expedite and prioritize 

the approval process for the SBOC notice. I know 

that that is currently going through the internal 

review process at USDA and I know that it could take 

some time once it is finally approved and going to 

the Office of the Federal Register for publication. 

I think, obviously, we would like to get this printed 

and commented on so that will give you enough time to 

then analyze the comments and hopefully have this go 

into effect before the upcoming harvest.

So, I think from the advisory committee's 

standpoint, I think having a resolution to address 

those issues would be very important.

MR. NEAL: Just to comment on that in 

reply to you, Jess, it's a priority. I'm taking the 

phone calls and e-mails on it. So, I'm not quite 

sure if we need too much more pressure.

CHAIR GROVE: You know, for stated public 

comment how they were two specific comments that were 
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posted for public review before this which remain the 

only two topics that we will be working on for 

possible resolution suggestions. The input from the 

public to what are some possible future agenda items, 

what issues do you see within your trade or your area, 

are very important to this committee.

So, even if you're not prepared to do so 

today, there is still public comment period tomorrow, 

and there's also the ability to contact the group as 

we look for the future. It is constantly, it isn't 

just us that needs to determine those topics, but we 

need a full public to help us with that. How can we 

make, whether it's just the State, or how do we make 

trade better for the entire industry. So, again, 

welcome those possible topics for the future.

MR. FRIANT: Barb, I have something to 

bring up to the group, recognizing that we can't 

necessarily make a recommendation this time but 

perhaps for the next meeting. It might just be some 

comments from FGIS staff. The immigration of the 

former FGIS website into the AMS website and trying 

to find FGIS-specific information is a nightmare, 
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just to be blunt. So, I don't know if that's a 

conversation to have outside that or something for us 

to discuss, but it is not easy for the public to find 

information since the website has been integrated.

I think there would be some great 

opportunity. I don't know what that looks like. I 

don't know what's possible in the new structure, 

whether it's an FGIS-specific section or there used 

to be a quick links that was available that's now 

been taken down, but some way so folks that need to 

find the information can find it a bit more easily. 

Because it has been a struggle.

CHAIR GROVE: I do really feel this may 

go back to something Byron talked about earlier in a 

sense in, you know, looking at the GACC. You're 

saying, how do we find it? He also said it's buried. 

So, I think this is really a continuum maybe of that 

because we're talking about websites.

And the information and the learning, 

sharing, so if we're talking about training, 

learning, I think without another agenda item, it may 

be part of their, a good part of their continuation 
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of learning, Byron, in the training industry alert. 

Does that make sense?

So, again, I am also someone who likes to 

use the FGIS website and there are some pieces that 

I may have used for our own people for training that, 

like Nick said, are hard to find now. So, I think 

it's really more of a public education type of piece 

of where to go.

MR. NEAL: It's gotten, it's gotten bad. 

Just being honest with you. It's easier to find 

items on our website by Googling what you want to 

find than going to website and seeing a natural link 

and tree to the information that you want. We've 

taken at least two stabs at trying to clean it up 

from what it was. It was worse than what it is today, 

and trying to figure out how to say this the right 

way.

The USDA website goes through iterations 

every time somebody new comes in, and USDA is huge. 

And this is a one, what is it, one kind of format for 

everybody to just it in and the challenge with FGIS 

was, there was a reorganization that took place after 
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that had occurred.

And so, FGIS was not part of a AMS 

organizational planning because FGIS was not part of 

the organization at the time. And so, everything 

FGIS, everything in FGIS just got migrated into AMS, 

budget, IT, website, you know, processes, everything 

changed and catching up to that. In addition to, you 

know, transitional leadership data, then we try to 

bring people on board, it's, we're trying to catch 

up. I'm not making an excuse. I'm trying to give 

you insight.

MR. MORGAN: To your defense, Arthur, 

MAS, FAS, all a disaster, as well, since they were 

integrated. It's hard to find export sales reports 

and just, yeah, so you're not, you are not alone.

MR. NEAL: So, what I think we should 

commit to do with you, maybe not necessarily in this 

setting but in the off kind of GIAC calls that we 

have, they just gave us the time for discussion about 

the areas that you all used to use, that you used the 

most and us kind of getting that input and then trying 

to figure out how to prioritize, organizing that a 
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little bit better and we can make progress over time. 

I think that's, that's a helpful approach at us 

helping, at you helping us help you because we've 

done a couple of clean ups, at least two, I think.

And we're still working on it like the 

stuff Byron talked about when we were putting the 

instructions out for export administration for '23, 

coming up for '23, initially we had a link to the 

GIAC website and I clicked on the GIAC website and 

all I saw was language that I couldn't interpret. 

So, that's not going to help nobody. And I clicked 

on the English version and the English version 

totally transformed that website to where wherever we 

were trying to direct somebody to find the GIAC for 

registration, it was no longer there. It was a 

totally different website.

So, I figured it was best for us to just 

let us do work, try to update the list, put it on our 

website and we just have to be responsible and careful 

to do it frequently. And we'll put in, I think, two 

locations on our website which is basically mirrored 

so that it helps you all find who's on that current 
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list for the exporter registration.

So, things like that we try to do. It's 

an iterative process, but I appreciate you bringing 

that up. I don't take it personal. I don't try to 

not, you know, USDA AMS is just a process that 

happened and it's unfortunate that it happened with 

a lot of stuff. And we're going to do our best to 

serve you all better. Thank you.

CHAIR GROVE: I guess what that says to 

us is that we valued the material that FGIS had for 

us to utilize and so when something's no longer there, 

we miss it. So, it tells you, again, the value of 

the product that was there was very beneficial to us. 

So, thank you and thank you for that suggestion. I 

think that is very good. Again, those things that 

we use we'll schedule that another time. Thank you.

Okay?

MR. NEAL: Nobody got anything to talk 

about trains? I'm just teasing, Jimmy. 

CHAIR GROVE: So, then you did say again 

for a quick little update you snuck in there about a 

previous resolution. I think that factors into other 
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things that we talked about today. So, still very, 

very important piece of whether the exact resolution 

we presented earlier in the year, that was maybe to

put a little bit of focus on the government side of 

how it's affecting people. Yes, it's affecting 

people. It's affecting service. And as we come to 

the use of technology, issues with grades, some of it 

rolls back into that.

So, that is a very important piece that 

is outside our individual or even a collaborative 

group. It's very outside our control. But to be 

able to again add our voice, I still think is very 

important because the effect on all trade really 

relies on not just service, but I think as we were 

talking about, talk about websites. We were just 

talking about this, the traceability, even just 

having better traceability so we have that 

communication is very important.

MR. NEAL: So, on that same note, from 

our conversations with transportation services and 

with AMS, you know, I can't remember everything 

verbatim, a couple of components you all recommended 
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was about GPS, global positioning and penalties for 

those railroads that aren't delivering on time. They 

used that in their comments to the Transportation 

Safety Board. So, what you all have shared and the 

impact, as well, on the official service providers' 

ability to have staff available when those trains 

arrive, the impact that it has on those 

organizations, so, that has been conveyed.

So, I just don't, I don't want you to 

think that what you all have shared has disappeared. 

It's being used. It's being discussed in 

conversations. So, you know, congratulations on 

adding value.

CHAIR GROVE: All right, we've had kind 

of a final call there. Everybody is quiet for the 

day and I think we have some good feedback for us to 

work with. Again, with no final comments, no more 

public comments, I think that wraps up our industry 

issues discussion for today. And I think I will 

adjourn early and look to convene again tomorrow 

morning at 8:30 with the preparation to be able to 

bring resolutions for discussion in these comments.
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MR. FRIANT: And, Barb, just a point of 

process. We can only bring recommendations relative 

to these two discussion topics.

CHAIR GROVE: These two discussion 

topics for resolution for tomorrow, yes. All right, 

thank you for reminding me. Yes, so as we had some 

public comment today, we can take those into account 

for conversation tomorrow for future agenda items. 

So, as we feel we have hammered out some resolutions 

tomorrow, we can talk about further items. Okay?

All right, thank you, everybody for 

coming to day and the participation. Again, we have 

public comments section open for tomorrow. Closing 

of discussion today doesn't mean closing of 

discussion. So, if you think of anything tonight, 

we will welcome those tomorrow. The same with the 

committee.

See you all tomorrow morning at 8:30. 

Thank you.

(Whereupon, the above-mentioned matter 

went off the record at 3:25 p.m.)
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