Don Anaklet, m We are not going to get value for even being citizens in this country. All right, those are his sentiments as he begins. And then right next to me we have Gunjiri Kariuki, who is a young man and really vibrant in these things. He's a public policy analyst at Policy Exchange Kenya. Yes, Asante Sanna. And today we are going to unwind everything. All right, let's get this done. The Kibrabi election, it's two days remaining. And we have seen so much that has been happening. IEBC is there, the candidates are there, the 24 of them. And also we have the residents. Are we or rather is the constituency ready for this by election? Let me begin with you, Gunjiri. Yes, of course, it is all system go for Kibrabi election. And as you have seen, just yesterday political parties were capitalizing on the time that is remaining to make sure that they are able to maybe twist the undecided voters. But of course you look at the Kibra campaigns and the rush and the energy that has been invested in that constituency. Then you see the bigger picture of what we call, number one, the agon of political satire to the political reality in the Kenyan politics and the political party politics whereby we say that political parties act as the main sieve that is able to present candidates that the people of Kenya can be able now to choose from. Then we have an opportunity as Kenyans now to be able to gauge what the 2022 elections will be like. And for me, this is an acute angle for the whole of the reflects of 2022. So it's a reflection of what, or rather let's call it a dress rehearsal? Of course it is because as you can see both the jubilee party and the ODM party, which are the main horses in this race have invested so much time resources and you'll even see, even the deputy party leader of jubilee and the party leader of ODM exchanging words in political analysis. So that one takes you. Gujiro, let's make something clear. You said the political leaders of both parties. Who has not been seen on the ground. I said the deputy party leader who of course has naturally inherited the political functions of the party because of course President Uhuru Kenyata is in his final term. So naturally it is open for the deputy party leader of jubilee to inherit that political capital. And so you will expect that anything political because he's the guy who will navigate the party towards 2022 and everything the party does docks at the doorstep. We will be discussing that about Ruto in 2022. We'll be having a look at that later on because still a question of debate whether because jubilee we are not so sure that it's still standing strong. We'll be coming back. But before we even come to Muthura, Don and Aklait, are we ready for this? Are you guys ready? I think we've got enough time to traverse the constituency and going by the timeline left, the truth is there is no one who is ever ready for an election just like in any contest. The time is always short but trust me everything is ready. So from the constitution, from the IEBC they are ready for this? All the stakeholders. You're ready for this. All right Muthura, what do you think? Well first allow me to congratulate my brother here. He's running for Kibra member of parliament and he takes a lot of courage, preparation and even acumen to even believe that you can represent the people especially from a constituency as vibrant as Kibra. So Anaklait, congratulations for the bold move and I wish you all the best. Thank you so much. Now something else I need to say is the ground vituni different. It's not what we have always assumed. You may realize from the eloquence and fluency of my brother here that Kenya is not what it was a couple of years ago. People are aware, people are engaged and they are not ready to be taken for granted. So when people talk about a bedroom and they are addressing a crowd in which most probably nobody has a bedroom, you must ask yourself is that message meant for the crowd or for the constituents? The politics we see being played in Kibra today is not about Kibra. Perhaps the only people who are thinking about Kibra are the contestants but then you look at the four governors who were paraded yesterday or you look at the other 30 politicians from Jubilee who were behind the other candidates. None of them is thinking about Kibra that I can tell you. All right, they have been talking about water especially Dr. Ruto. He mentioned yesterday that there are half several projects like water projects and such kind of stuff. So why then say they are not of interest for the residents? Because if you look at it critically water has been a problem for Kibra since independence. Which now the former premier said that he sold? Now you see, talk is cheap but let's face the reality and the reality is for instance you look at the Jubilee brigade they are talking about things they have done like I said on the ground things are really different. When they talk about sanitation, whose responsibility is it? Who should be delivering on the water that they are mentioning? We have regulators, we have the county government where does an MP come in this whole picture? It's in legislation. Have you had them say how they are going to support the candidate to make sure that such legislation is enacted? That's the conversation that people need to have but they are not throwing goodies which we know will not be delivered because if anything they are not even giving timelines and specific places where this will be delivered. Alright, let me come to you because you are on the ground you have been with the residents and you are really working on it. Raila Odinga comes out and says I was the prime minister and I did this and this and this Dr. Dawkinson says now I am the deputy president but once you elect Mariga this is what we will do. What is all this about? Thank you so much. In fact I am very pleased that you asked that question because that is a very fundamental question on the ground not just on the ground actually. We are narrowing it down maybe to Kikibra but it is the general question in the country. We look at a country in which normally our political godfathers or the big wigs as they are always known have always promised supply of air, oxygen, in real sense, nothing, nothing complete. Don't forget that we are having nine stadiums to be completed in about six months. But trust me, more than 30 months down the line one is half complete. As we talk right now there are the talks of people's bedrooms there is when Mariga comes in this is what he is going to do and the rest but I tend to believe that we have shown a huge lot of disrespect to the people of Kibra, the constituents we have showed lack of concern just like you said because trust me by election in Kibra is supposed to be about Kibra that is what it is supposed to be but right now trust me it is not it's a battle between Dr. Ruto and Moshmarela a battle between jubilevers probably ODM and the other factions like it has become the attention has moved from what it is to what it is not okay, so my take is there will be promises there have always been promises but these things are talks, they are empty talks and that is why when you ask me about the movement for political accountability this just will go beyond Kibra because we are going to hold each and every politician each and every public servant of the people that if you promised ABC within a timeline what have you done and if you have not done much why should we not initiate a process we will be discussing that especially about the coming in of the governors that joined in Team Imra but before then let's ask ourselves let me probably begin with you Gojiri will ODM manage to retain the seat let me first you ask him a very good question but he has been able to meandize way out and has not responded to it effectively you see the deputy president is coming out right now and he is saying that if you elect Mariga we are going to do this and this in my opener I talked about the political reality in Kibra let me unwind it first the people of Kibra have been taught for a long time to resist and stay hard on the government of the day any time that as a government you try or as a leader you try to go to Kibra and especially a very popular one known as Sarangambe which is notorious known for they are even resisting roads and there was a case about there was a case about a certain bypass which was supposed to pass along that route you also look at cases of people being incited to and that is where I am telling you this has been a tradition that has been projected to the people of Kibra and the incitement that has been meted the people of Kibra by their leaders and this is what is coming out now that look we have been all about playing these politics of hatred to other people because we have been incited to do so and here comes the moment when we must be able to talk with the government of the day discuss the issues that affect us as a people if President Uhuru Kenyatta can be able to sit in one table and discuss and agree compromise with the opposition leader who is our leader who are we to reject what the government of the day through the deputy president is telling us and so this is one of the points that will sell very much for McDonnell Mariga because let me tell you the truth it is not the people of Kibra that are responsible for all the vandalization that you have been seeing there all the resistance of government project that you have been seeing there it has come from the incitement and thank God we had Kenokoth who was working with government and he was able to demonstrate that if you as a leader you work with other leaders you work with the national government you work with the president and everybody then it is for the benefit of the people that is what we call leadership but that kind of that kind of fanatic blind resistance towards what the government is proposing will not just work for the people of Kibra that is a reality that come to future and I want to come to it because when it respond to that what he raised as an allegation it has been there it has been all over the media that the Kibra residents they demolished they demolished so much what do you have to comment? I think that most of that is are allegations as you put it I have grown up in Kibra and trust me most of the perception that outsiders have about Kibra is far from right right now he just talked about a perceived road that was supposed to a perceived bypass that is not correct because the road that was supposed to pass through Kibra connects here center and the eastern bypass and its construction is ongoing and passes through DC if you live here just right now just about 30 minutes from where we are pass through there so it means that you didn't also get facts right you understand it's my home world and it's one of the most post modern words in the past 7 years look at the projects that have been running so number one I want to encourage everyone get to Kibra, get to the ground there has always been a lot of wrong perception about Kibra being violent being insecure lax, ABCD and always tied to Raila Odinga and the rest trust me in the past 7 years between 2012 until now the constituency has made huge steps towards development you are a candidate for the legislature of the constituency my question is you say that they have done so much over the past 7 years what are you planning to do? I also want you to have in mind that I was one of the architectures of the 7 years that we are talking about because I worked with the Honore Buken I drafted much of his manifesto and I walked the path with him asking for votes when we got to office because I was still a student I came back to come and let him now move on with what we did so if I am to come in which looks increasingly likely I am not coming into something new for me I am coming to push forward what we have done you tend to say you are copy in terms of education water and sanitation which is an issue in Kibbra I have to acknowledge that and finally in terms of youth and women empowerment thank you very much for what you have said now according to how I am saying it you said that you worked with Ken O'Coff the former the late you worked with him for the first time can we say that now you are copying his manifesto and bringing it on board? I am taking my manifesto that Ken was working on to the next level from where he left it no no no because you know times are changing and the things we put down in 2012 are not exactly what we are going to push forward we just we are just going to to make the manifesto that we put down in 2012 work will be service time alright we will be coming back to you because it's quite a question of concern to the residents of Kibbra like you guys are coming in what new are you ready to offer and we will be coming to that there is a question that we had earlier on posted do you think Mariga will be able to retain or rather not Mariga do you think the ODIM will be able to retain the seat? the Kibbra by elections are too close to call so I can tell you right now with certainty that ODIM is going to retain or lose the Kibbra seats what we can do at this moment is interrogate what the candidates are offering let us forget about the national politics that's been forced on the Kibbra people are we as Kenyans do we really care about manifesto as Kenyans? we don't although we should we are supposed to but there is a big difference today we know it's very easy for any cow or goat with money to get into office as long as you're willing to dish it out to the people it's something that we need to cure if we allow for this malady to continue the quality of representation of the people is going to keep declining and that's how we're going to miss out on opportunities to make Kenya great right, we eat that ODIM loses the seat we say it's the former premier in Nairobi bedroom as we have seen all over actually you shouldn't talk about bedroom I've told you and he's from Kibbra all the people who attend those rallies none of them has a bedroom what they have is a bed space how true is that? how true is that? is the question that you need to address also? yes Kibbra you have to understand that about 65% of the constituency still lag behind in terms of social development and especially when it comes to individual households the larger majority still live below the dollar line that's the truth on a daily basis so while that is one thing we are trying to move forward like he said very few people even have bedrooms you look at Kibbra you can certify the constituency you look at Ayanya state it's about 50% middle class you get to Jamuri middle class again and the upper side that is the Kenyatta and Upper Hain which again unfortunately is not the bigger part of the constituency you look at now the centre of the constituency that is Gatwekera Kihanda Soetu that area still lives way beyond being able to classify the home as a bedroom to anyone so in other words do you have a bedroom personally? personally? because you live with residents of Kibbra I don't have a bedroom too and that's why Kibbra people need to elect one of their own someone who understands what the real problems are for you to have like for instance I'm sure you're an urbanite you live in an apartment it's not the government's role to provide a toilet for you why do Kibbra people need for the government to provide toilets for them because land adjudication in Kibbra has not been addressed since time immemorial which is what they need yes, what Kibbra need is someone who can go to parliament can push institutions in that direction so that we have proper legislation and approach to address the key problems Yes you see we are talking about these issues here as if we don't live in this country of course in our discussions we should have in mind the political reality that has been in Kibbra for a long time some of these issues were supposed to be addressed long time ago we have had independence since 1963 and maybe some of the issues that we are talking about Kibbra today have been there for so many years and that is why sitting here today I can authoritatively say that we need an overhaul of leadership in Kibbra and that is why the people of Kibbra must now be brave and be decisive to work with the government of the day whatever the deputy president is saying is very genuine and of course in Kibbra that look Kibbra cannot continue to be a place of violence a place that has been tagged as a place of poverty this is a time that you elect somebody who has the blood of leadership someone who can be able to work with government unlike some of the past leaders that have been in Kibbra for example the former prime minister who was a prime minister by the way and we are still talking about the same issues today he was the MP of that area so now this is the time for the people of Kibbra to make a bold decision whereby if they elect my friend Don and I wish him all the best I have all the best regards for him whether it is McDonard Mariga let the person who is going to be elected and the deputy president has promised because it is the government agenda to make sure that all the parts of this country are developed that they are going to work very closely with the people of Kibbra unlike some of the leaders that are being incited against the government and being told now look at the other side these guys do not belong to our party that is not the politics that the people of Kibbra would want and so whether or not ODM would retain or lose that seat is something that we are going to wait for but I foresee a very drastic change of course several factors being considered some of which have given you alright which is okay let me come back to Don unlike before the poll has attracted a nationwide interest we have never seen this before a by election of just a constituency attracting a nationwide interest and now we are left with just two big fish so I can call them we have Dr. Ruta who is in Jubilee as we can say and of course we have the opposition leader so I can say opposition leader as it is now even with the hardship where do we stand in terms of Kibbra and the nation thank you so much to begin with Kibbra has attracted a lot of interest not just within the confines of the nation we have seen a lot of stakeholders away from the country that are really looking in this points to one thing to two things I mean this points to the fact that our democracy is now very mature you understand because the perception that Kibbra was an ODM zone has quickly changed and has really it's no longer the whole thing if it were you would be seen the tension we have down there another perspective into which the reasoning being there has always been a perception that Kibbra is a place of violence it's a place of less or no development it's a place where you cannot push any positive agenda as we talk right now and as anything can predict the same over the past seven years until today a lot has moved forward with regards to Kibbra and every other Kenyan really wanna know that the groundwork that has been laid in Kibbra who is taking the mantle to move it next and whoever is coming in okay how best because the shoes that have been left by Honrebuke of course delayed is bigger than the hot air of Dr. Ruto nor the promises of Honrebu Reila Odinga that's the truth we are now left with the mantle but the question of 2022 it's like now we are not focusing on the Kibbra by election we are looking at 2022 in relation to these two big fish what's your take on this well you're right when you say that and it's really wrong for us to take that kind of an approach because at the end of the day we're trying to replace Kenokot the late the former MP for Kibbra that's what's happening in Kibbra right now now there are things we cannot ignore and that is when young people voice their support for some people and I would say in this case the Jubilee government this is a government that gave very lofty promises to Kenyans they went out there and borrowed a lot of money actually more than tripled our national debt and yet most of the promises they made to Kenyans remain unkept to date I cannot fault them for the development that we see in Kibbra they've done that credit why it's due a lot of credit of course goes to the former MP because he was able to work with the government and embrace the government so they would bring development to Kibbra but then the direct promises being made to the Kibbra people by Jubilee we should take those with a pinch of salt because in Kibbra the only official space I know is Woodley stadium where if they really meant well there over one million people who live in Kibbra deserve a stadium the Jubilee government should have promised to deliver a stadium there Muthira because for the interest of time there's a question that like us to tackle and probably can begin with Ngojiri we have seen several governors among them Charityngilu and we have seen them join the ODIM the ODIM league is it are we really not now caring about the handshake or we are rather focusing on 2022 yes first of all it is delusional to think that somebody like Anwe Guru would move all the way from Kerenyaga to Kibbra and even transform more than 5 votes that is not in this world why would you think so of course we and we also question the integrity of some of these leaders like the right honrabu Raylo Odinga somebody who would be the first to accuse Anwe Guru of massive corruption and yet right now is asking for help from her I am not able to get that consistency from Raylo Odinga of course there are questions and the deputy president was in a komiko way trying to drive that point that look somebody is getting assistance in a bedroom where else we know matters of the bedroom are more private things of course that is a political satire which a statement that is meant to ridicule their opponents and maybe sometimes for the sake of the gallery and the talks it works but then let us talk about politics of alignment and how the people of Kibra are supposed to be assessing the candidates is not about the number of people that are going to the tourists that are going to come to Kibra and try to promise the people of Kibra this and this and this because they don't understand the issues that the people of Kibra face of course in a mean of the deputy president he is the deputy president of the Republic of Kenya and he has taken Kibra and so he is justified to go to Kibra and as a government give such promises it will be correct for the president also to go to Kibra but when we see but when we see somebody like Raylo Odinga getting Kifuda Kibwana from Makweni so how does Makweni and Kibra relate so this is just a way of trying to capitalize on the tribal politics and make sure that they are able to get that bonga but then remember if we are consistent as a country and looking at the 2017 general elections the reality in Kibra was that look it is Raylo Odinga who controls this space but now after the handshake and you correctly put it whether it's jeopardizing the handshake or not that has nothing to do with the handshake because what is the role of the handshake the handshake was supposed to bring peaceful coexistence of the people and in fact to bring a fantastic atmosphere for the people of Kenya to be able to converse it was never meant to shelve competitive politics so that was never a point of the handshake as we wind up is the absence of Kalonzo Musioka giving a leeway to anyone in this particular sphere I don't think so because Kalonzo Musioka was second in command and we know Nasa collapsed the center stopped holding a long time ago we've seen the emergence of the Kamba leaders and surprisingly all the three of them the three governors were in Kibra they have neutralized the effect of Kalonzo Musioka and one thing we know about him is sometimes he doesn't like to reveal his cards because he seems unsure sometimes and when that's the case he pulls back now the question we should be asking ourselves is what value does he add in the national picture and to me at the moment I don't think he has a lot of clout times have changed and if he doesn't change tact then Kenyans should put him where he belongs and that is in oblivion let the new generation take charge and with that I also just want to outline one thing the young people should look at the lineouts in Kibra we've seen the people behind Kenokot they are a little seasoned a little aged look at those behind Mariga yes we have a problem with him having never participated in a political process but then they are youthful which means the young people in Kenya should believe in themselves let's believe in the power of our fort it can make all the change if we choose to stand behind a candidate like Don a knaklet here we have the power to make the change that Kenyans needs in 30 seconds for them because of the interest of time is Rayla Odinga in fear of losing the bi-lecture first thank you so much for that question but allow me brush over the two other things that you talked about first the appearance of the governors in Kibra both good and bad one of them is that we are showing up a united front and that we think the nation and Kibra as a constituency is going to move forward beyond this bi-election but on the other hand it shows that ODM and Honre Boraila's search is very fearful and looks increasingly likely that they are going to lose the constituency in terms of ODM and number two on Kalonzo not showing up on the political fear the other day I think it looks increasingly likely that he is losing his mantle in Ukambani time will prove me wrong or right but beyond the next week I think we'll still be seated on this we'll be looking even at Ukambani politics because it's a question right now of concern you'll agree with me that as things goes a lot is really happening beyond the scenes in terms of political alignment and as I see things unless Kalonzo steps forward and decides to stand with the one Dr. Ruto he has got no political future in this country Israel and leaving it here yes or no I think yes that's it ladies and gentlemen we get to call it a day for that time unfortunately we may not be giving you the partnership because of time but don't forget Val is coming up in just a few don't go anywhere my name is Karanja Alex thanks so much it's always a pleasure to have you join us thank you so much thanks so much gentlemen for coming


We continue today with chapter 31. The self-accused. Only the self-accused condemn. As you prepare to make a choice that will result in different outcomes, there is first one thing that must be over-learned. It must become a habit of response so typical of everything you do that it becomes your first response to all temptation and to every situation that occurs. Learn this and learn it well, for it is here delay of happiness is shortened by a span of time you cannot realize. You never hate your brother for his sins, but only for your own. But ever form his sins appear to take, it but obscures the fact that you believe them to be yours and therefore meriting a, quote, just attack. Why should his sins be sins? If you did not believe they could not be forgiven in you, why are they real in him if you did not believe that they are your reality?  Are you a sin? You answer yes whenever you attack, for by attack you assert that you are guilty and must give as you deserve. And what can you deserve but what you are? If you did not believe that you deserved attack, it never would occur to you to give attack to anyone at all. Why should you? What would be the gain to you? What could the outcome be that you would want? And how could murder bring you benefit? Sins are in bodies, they are not perceived in minds, they are not seen as purposes but actions. Bodies act and minds do not, and therefore must the body be at fault for what it does. It is not seen to be a passive thing obeying your commands and doing nothing of itself at all. If you are a sin, you are a body, but the mind acts not, and purpose must be in the body, not in the mind. The body must act on its own and motivate itself. If you are a sin, you lock the mind within the body and you give its purpose to its prison house, which acts instead of it. A jailer does not follow orders but enforces orders on the prisoner. Yet is the body prisoner and not the mind. The body thinks no thoughts, it has no power to learn, to pardon nor enslave. It gives no orders that the mind needs serve, nor sets conditions that it must obey. It holds in prison but the willing mind that would abide in it, it sickens at the bidding of the mind that would become its prisoner, and it grows old and dies because that mind is sick within itself. Learning is all that causes change, and so the body, where no learning can occur, would never change unless the mind preferred the body change in its appearances to suit the purpose given by the mind. For the mind can learn and there is all change made. The mind that thinks it is a sin has but one purpose. That the body be the source of sin to keep it in the prison house it chose and guards and holds itself at bay. A sleeping prisoner to the snarling dogs of hate and evil, sickness and attack, of pain and age, of grief and suffering. Here are the thoughts of sacrifice preserved, for here guilt rules and orders that the world be like itself, a place where nothing can find mercy nor survive the ravages of fear except in murder and in death. For here are you made sin and sin cannot abide, the joyous and the free, for they are enemies which sin must kill.  Let us be glad that you will see what you believe and that it has been given you to change what you believe. The body will but follow. It can never lead you where you would not be. It does not guard your sleep nor interfere with your awakening. Release your body from imprisonment and you will see no one as prisoner to what you have escaped. You will not want to hold in guilt your chosen enemies nor keep in chains to the illusion of a changing love the ones you think are friends. The innocent release in gratitude for their release and what they see upholds their freedom from imprisonment and death. Open your mind to change and there will be no ancient penalty exacted from your brother or yourself. For God has said there is no sacrifice that can be asked. There is no sacrifice that can be made. And from the workbook, lesson 244 I am in danger nowhere in the world. Your son is safe wherever he may be for you are there with him. He need but call upon your name and he will recollect his safety and your love. For they are one. How can he fear or doubt or fail to know he cannot suffer, be endangered or experience unhappiness when he belongs to you, beloved and loving in the safety of your fatherly embrace. And there we are in truth. No storms can come into the hallowed haven of our home. In God we are secure. For what can come to threaten God himself or make afraid what will forever be a part of him? Amen.


My co-presenter, George Castor, unfortunately, could not be here today, but wanted to go through some of the things that have happened since we last presented on the State of the Project and our roadmap in Detroit at KubeCon in October, and also present some of our roadmap for 2023, do a little bit of a demo around some of our new capabilities around doing infrastructure as code governance directly against source assets, and then walk you through the contribution process for those that might be interested in that. So, out of curiosity, a quick show of hands. Who here has not used Cloud Studio? Okay. Well, this is to provide a quick overview of it. It is an open source rules engine for cloud management. It's simple YAML policy DSLs. It allows you to find interesting resources by doing arbitrary filtering on them. So, take an EC2, a set of EC2 instances in AWS, find those that are on the, available to the public internet, that have IAM roles attached, that allow them to create IAM users that don't have encrypted disks, and you can throw a chain of these filters together in arbitrary ways, and then you can take a set of actions on them. And actions could be something like stop an instance, or take a snapshot of it, or change its role, or security groups, and you can combine those filters and actions sort of to create arbitrary policies. So, you might target it towards doing security, you might target it towards doing better operations, taking on Mac backups, you might target it towards cost optimization, underutilize things. And so, it's designed to be a service with Army Knife around your cloud management. And additionally, it also binds into event-based execution. So, now you're able to, as API calls are happening in your cloud provider, actually introspect what's happening with those API calls and if the resulting resources are compliant to your policies. So, that said, what's happened since last October? We've had about 70 authors contribute about 280 different commits across different resources and providers. We've added two new core maintainers, Darren Dow from Intuit and Petruc Mishra from Capital One. And we've added a few new providers. Providers in custodian are sort of like what you express your policies against. We've added a Terraform provider for being able to evaluate Terraform source code inside of your pipeline and additional capabilities around that. And I'll actually do a deep dive demo on that. And then we've had the contribution of the Tencent cloud provider. This is for those that are using Tencent cloud. And this is currently almost, does not support our event-based execution, but also supports multiple resources, filters and actions, the same as our other providers. So, looking forward to our roadmap in 2023, we've been looking at how do we improve the policy authoring experience. So, we've added policy testing for our shift left policies and we want to continue to add that back to our regular cloud providers on all the public clouds, as well as policy tracing. So we have some built-in tracing support that target the cloud provider's native experiences around tracing. But we wanted to actually add that in as just a command line capability that's independent of the cloud provider so that it's a better baseline experience. And as part of that, also doing some policy debugging so that you can step through your policy execution and understand sort of what it's doing, how it's filtering things. On the release engineering stuff, we've been doing a bunch more work to sort of simplify our release process and make it more automated. And the goal here is to get humans out of the loop. We generally release once a month, but that's currently, you know, a typically it's a maintainer that's going in and actually generating the release, testing the release, et cetera. And we're trying to get that completely automated such that it just happens on a clock and it's all system driven out of GitHub Actions. And then additionally, more functional tests than CI. We just recently, this year, got access to some additional cloud provider resources from CNCF and we've been running our functional tests there. And we're hopeful to add additional providers as we get additional resources with the CNCF. And as far as the core, we currently have the core sort of, the currency system and package is sort of hardwired into AWS. And for other providers, we don't want to carry those dependencies into those other clouds. So we're trying to look at, we're looking at trying to extract the core code from that so that the other providers have a minimal dependency set. And then additionally, clock studying as part of being like a, having a native cloud experience for each of the providers has direct integration with the cloud provider's logging metrics tools. We're looking as well as tracing and we're looking at, how do we simplify that and potentially use open telemetry support to abstract that out so that we don't have to carry forward on individual implementations for every provider which becomes more relevant as we've been adding new providers. Looking at some of the providers. So we have Kubernetes admission controller support but I think there's been questions. We currently label it beta and it's currently fairly synchronous. So looking at doing a new implementation of that admission controller to support and this is both validating and mutating to support better concurrency for production execution. And then additionally, we have a separate AWS provider and the main one called, it's based on the CloudFormations CloudControl API which is sort of gives us fairly generic uniform resource coverage across all the AWS resources. One additional capability that we'd like to add to that provider is being able to do preventative support. So in the same way that we're doing ChefLeft earlier in the pipeline pre-deployment we also want to add that same capability for AWS CloudControl. And then on the ChefLeft side we've currently started with Terraform and we feel like it's got great, fairly good universal coverage and significant usage, let's say, across the different providers as well as being available across all the providers. But we want to go ahead and add additional languages based on what community feedback is and what people are interested in. And we've heard clear interest in both CloudFormation and Kubernetes Manifest. And then one delta to sort of our standard policy sets. So normally in CloudStudio for the different providers we provide lots of examples and documentation around types of policies you can do but we don't provide sort of an out-of-the-box supported set of policies. With ChefLeft we're going to actually change that and focus on giving folks an out-of-the-box experience with a set of policies that they can use. And then looking at potentially new providers there were some community interest in Oracle Cloud as well as an HCP sort of web service provider generically that can be bound to doing policies against any SaaS service. Looking directly at some of the cloud providers, we have a few contributors, larger organizations that have a backlog of contributions for Azure and GCP. So I think when we went through them they had about probably about 200 pull requests in pipeline. So we expect to see additional Azure and resources and GCP resources. And then looking at trying to get the Azure SDK slim down we've been tracking upstream with Microsoft on this because the current Azure SDK sort of blows up our Docker image and it's typically about a gigabyte. They're currently in progress on slimming out in the individual SDKs. It's effectively just a lot of generated code and it's trying to make it smaller and more lightweight. On the AWS side we're trying to value from is how you support sort of exception management. We currently support S3 and arbitrary URLs. We're looking at supporting DynamoDB and being able to add a query using CQL syntax directly into your policy to be able to source exceptions or valid values, vocabularies directly from DynamoDB. As well as being able to do better fuzzy IAM statement matching across the different resources and that having embedded IAM policies as well as IAM principles. Okay, so I wanted to talk about shift left. So super excited about this. This is sort of how do we mostly just doing is applying things at runtime. So even the event based real-time remediation capabilities are based on something's actually been provisioned in your cloud and you're now going to inspect what's happened and apply changes. In certain contexts you need to be in the runtime like certain cost optimization policies. You need to look at the metrics for utilization and that requires sort of a time basis for it to live to be able to evaluate that. But being able to apply policies and governance directly within the developer pipeline generally leads to increased productivity and in the general sense all problems are easier to fix the closer you are to their source. So in the same way that static typing helps us write better code. Being able to apply policies, sort of pre-commit allows us to do the same. So the three different contexts here are, let's see, is that readable? Are going to be sort of pre-commit where I'm just on my developer workstation and then pre-merge, which we'll go into in a second, but effectively I am, just to let me first show you what these policies actually look like as well as the Terraform. So I've got a simple module here that's just creating a VPC, a security group and an EC2 instance and this EC2 instance is attached to a security group that allows for sort of wide open ingress. So if I switch out to the policy, the exciting policy and what does that look like? I basically have here a exciting policy that is looking for a particular resource, EC2 instances and is applying a set of filters to find sort of if it's attached to a security group that also has an ingress permission that allows for wide open access. So when I go to run it, it tells me that I've run a few policies and that this particular resource has failed and it's sort of giving me the exact source line so I know where I can go fix it. The experiences intend to be developer centric and hence sort of operating directly on Terraform source and this is inclusive of all the Terraform interpolation, variables, conditions, includes and they only be respectful of all that so that we can track back to the originating source. So we also, so for this provider, we've also added a dedicated CLI and that's really just to try to help create, since we're no, typical custodians sort of in the operator mode on the CLI and targeted towards administrators whereas C7 and left in this context is targeted towards developers and providing a developer oriented experience and workflow as well as being directly integrated into CI pipelines. So if we wanted to look at a CI pipeline, I've got a CI pipeline here that's got, that's had C7 and left integrated in and it's failing in CI and I can look at that and see the actual change. So this is sort of the pre-merge workflow when you go to submit a pull request and it's really about informing the rest of the code reviewers on what's actually happening but most of all don't want to dig through CI logs so directly we also support doing code annotations on the code hosting. So here I've got the C7 and left output when it was in CI directly annotates the code on the pull request to show what's part is failing and that's generally to help the reviewer so I added a comment here after seeing this that it should use a different security group.  You can pass those in directly to C7 and left when you run it to provide that additional context. Now C7 and left here doesn't require any cloud credentials. The intent is that the developer doesn't necessarily have access to that production environment. They may just have access to a local development environment and that you can provide those different environment credentials via the variables. Sorry, different content values that might be an enforce in those different environments. All right, so switching back. Okay. And so that sort of covers off on sort of pre-commit and then on the authoring experience. So we added a few things to this. One is that you can write policies that sort of wild card through typically in custodian because we're operating against the cloud providers. We have to query resources. We have to do additional fetching. So typically I provide policies against a single resource. With valuing infrastructure as code assets and source on disk we're able to do a couple different things. Effectively because we have the entire graph sort of in memory we're able to do policies that target multiple resources. So you can do like a glob and do like a single tag check policy or label check policy against all resources. And then you can also do arbitrary graph traversals. So we support effectively going from any node to any node in the graph. So we have an example we had before we were going from an EC2 instance to a security group to a permission on security group. And you can do that across any set of resources that are connected. And that's an inclusive of respecting all the terraform variability and references. And then additionally we've added in built in policy testing. And this is currently only for C7 and left but we're looking at how do we target this towards runtime providers. And this is basically providing a terraform that the policy will evaluate against and then a expectation assertion language that is effectively validates that the different checks have succeeded or that and fails if there's any findings that were not asserted as well as if any assertions were not met. So I think that George also wanted to have this go through what does it look like to contribute to custodian? So typically on custodian we run everything out of our make file. And that helps us sort of drive across all the different resources and providers that we have make test is sort of the basic. We've also had make format, make lint. The source tree itself is sort of laid out with the most providers being in the tools section. And you've got Azure, VCP, Kubernetes, C7 and left as well as various other sort of operational tools that are helpful. Mailer for notifications, C7 and org for running across many accounts. And from a making a core quest perspective we typically run this all against CI matrix of different providers, inclusive of building docs and Docker images. Our docs are all built with Sphinx. We support both restructured texts in Marktown and welcome contributions on that record. But, oh, I've got a failing test. I didn't have a module installed. Well, that's sort of an update on where we're looking at going and what we've been up to lately. If there's any questions, I'm happy to take them. Any questions? Go for it. Today it works, the question is, does the C7 and the left work with CloudFormation or just Terraform? And the answer is today it works just with Terraform. It is designed to be multi IX source format. We're charting CloudFormation next. Hopefully we'll get there by the end of May and then also charting Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a little bit easier just because the runtime is the same as the source definition. With CloudFormation, it will be parallel, it will be based on the AWS Cloud Control. So we're also trying to see if we can mirror the IX source format to some of the runtime format. And for CloudFormation, the runtime provider for AWS Cloud Control that we have effectively is the same syntax as CloudFormation actually uses the CloudFormation schema registry. So looking at doing CloudFormation supports it. Any other questions? All right. Well, thank you all. Hope you have a good KubeCon.


Thank you very much. We spray our pastures. I'm going to say quite a bit and let you decide how much that is. I don't want to live on a tractor spraying anything. I'd much rather get by without it because it takes time and it takes diesel fuel and it takes money to spray. The best way to get good grass, I think, is to move your cattle in an appropriate manner. And the grass will come on. But what we found a few years ago is that by spraying raw milk, you can really get a tremendous boost in your grass production. And what we learned from this raw milk is that it helped our grazing in that it gave us more grass. And so we're able to graze better in that we can knock the grass to the ground, cover our soil, give the microbes more to eat, and so on. I think our grass is considerably better since we started spraying. And the first time we sprayed was in May of 2010. Having said that, we didn't spray at all this year until September. We probably wouldn't have sprayed any had we not had a terrible drought. The drought, as I'm sure most of you experienced it also, it devastated our grass. And we thought, well, we'd try to give our grass a little bit of a boost. And I'll show you a picture. We've never had better-looking grass than we've got right now. Now, we don't have as much of it as I'd like. And it's not as good in the sense of the bricks level, the sugar content. But it sure looks good. It looks good. You'd want to cut it and put it on your salad. But we'll show you a picture of that later. The young man here operating the PowerPoint is Brandon Meabroor. He's a young man from our county. He gets his master's degree in less than 30 days from Lincoln University. He's helped us for a year and a half, does a great job. Brandon does a lot of the spraying. And he does all of the work on the PowerPoint. Believe it or not, I can barely turn on a television. I am technologically challenged from the word go. But anyway, we've got some slides to show you today that I think you'll find interesting. The first thing we're going to show you is the sprayer that we use to spray raw milk and the other products that we put on our field. Do we need to cut down the lights or is this be okay? All right. This is Brandon. And this is a mist sprayer. They're sold in Nebraska Blades where they're manufactured. You'll get a better... Okay. This will actually cover an 80 to 100 foot swath on a good day without much wind. One reason we did not do much spraying earlier in the year is we had so much wind. It was unbelievable. You just couldn't control the material you were spraying. But 80 to 100 feet, you can get over a field pretty fast. And you're moving at about five and a half to six miles an hour. Everything's calibrated for that. This sprayer only puts on four gallons per acre of liquid. So you don't have a lot of liquid to put on. Most boom sprayers have what they call 20 gallon nozzles. You're putting 20 gallons of liquid on your field. If you're putting on two gallons of milk and that's all, then you've got 18 gallons of water hitting your field as well. If you want to add some molasses, put a half a gallon molasses per acre and you're going to cover 10 acres, then you've got five gallons of molasses in your tank and so on. But anyway, this sprayer is great for getting over fields in a hurry. The drawback to it is, if you've got much wind, it's really not nearly as good as the boom sprayer and you don't put quite as much liquid on your soil, which I think is probably a plus. I will show you the first thing we did when we sprayed, and this would have been about two and a half years ago, in May of 2010. Let's hit that second slide. This is a field that we call the apple archer. You can see in the bottom left-hand corner a water hydrant. There's another one down at the end of the red line and that pretty well divides the field in half. What we did, we drove to the right of the hydrants and hit everything on the left side of that with raw milk. Two gallons of raw milk per acre, nothing else. No sea salt, no molasses, no nothing. Just raw milk. 28 days later, we hosted a field day and a gentleman by the name of Terry Gompert, who's a very, very, I should say, who was a very, very well-known extension agent from Nebraska, came and he could see what was going on. He could look at that field and say, oh my goodness, you got a lot of results. You can see it. But he actually then went out and measured and where we had sprayed the milk, we had an extra 700 pounds of grass on a dry matter basis in 28 days. Why don't you hit that third slide, Brandon? Okay. In less than 30 days, we had 700 pounds of grass and the most amazing thing of all is the reduction in compaction. Where we sprayed the milk, it took 100 pounds of pressure per square inch to put a penetrometer in the ground. For those of you that don't know what a penetrometer is, it's a 28, I'm sorry, a 26, I was right the first time, 28 inch steel rod and the modern ones have dials on them so you know exactly how much pressure you're applying to get it into the ground. Well, the one we had from University of Nebraska showed pounds per square inch and where we'd sprayed the milk, it took 100 pounds. To the right of the line that you saw a moment ago, it took 300 pounds of pressure to put that penetrometer into the ground. As I told you, I'm technologically challenged. I couldn't operate the thing and look at all the bells and whistles that told me the pounds per square inch but all you had to do was take it and stick it in the ground and where you had sprayed the milk, it just went right in. Where you didn't, you had to really put a lot of weight on it so there's no comparison between the soil that was sprayed with the milk and that that did not get sprayed with milk. In Nebraska, they ran a test similar to the one that I conducted two and a half years ago but they did theirs in 2004. They sprayed two, five, ten and 20 gallons of raw milk per acre. What they learned was two gallons per acre does just as much good as 20 gallons an acre. You're just wasting 18 gallons of milk per acre if you choose to put 20 on. In Nebraska, they waited 45 days before they measured their grass and in those 45 days they got 1200 pounds of growth per acre. I think that's probably consistent with what we had. I told you at 28 days we had the 700 pounds but I went back to that same field about two and a half weeks later and you could see where we sprayed the milk was at least six or eight inches taller than where we didn't spray the milk and I'm thinking we clearly had more growth than we did 30 days, 15 days before that. As the summer wore on, you could clearly see where we had sprayed the milk. Tremendous weed control. I told this to one guy and he said, are you comparing milk to a herbicide? I said no, it's not that at all. What we think is happening is that everybody really knows you're feeding the microbes and the grass is growing thicker and better and it's just choking out the weeds. The weeds can't compete with the grass that's growing in the soil that you sprayed with milk. We also learned that your bricks level, that's the sugar content of the grass, went up. Where we sprayed milk, this was the summer of 2010, June, July and August, we were measuring where we sprayed the milk and normally the bricks level or the sugar content of the grass was about three points higher. Whatever it was, it didn't matter. Whether you're talking Johnson grass, Fescue, Archer grass, Clover, the comparable grass where you sprayed the milk was about three points higher. Let's go to the next one. I got pretty excited about the spraying of raw milk and so I started checking around with other people and they said, oh, you need to be spraying this and that and so on and one thing that a lot of people recommended was molasses. Half a gallon and acre is what most people recommend. A lot of people will say if you use more than a half a gallon, you'll give your microbes in the soil such as surge that their numbers will increase and then they won't have enough food to maintain that growth and they'll die back. Well, I always thought, well, that's not good to do that but I had a microbiologist tell me that's not really all that bad so if you get this surge in growth and they do die back, the microbes are there for the other microbes to eat so if you get a book on microbes or go on the internet, you'll find out that this is really a very interesting thing. There's no way I could even hope to explain it to you today in a few minutes. There's a book out called Teaming with Microbes. I read it two or three times. It's very interesting. I would suggest that you try to get a hold of that book but anyway, it's something that you just keep working at and hopefully you pick up enough that you can feel comfortable trying to do some things around your farm. Liquid fish, I think it definitely helps. It's a little bit pricey. Four and a half to six dollars a gallon. A lot of people put on two or three gallons. I'm tight. I try to limit it to one. Sea salt is another thing that I have thought that is a real benefit. This is especially true for those in a 40 to 60 inch rainfall environment, annual rainfall environment. Your soils have been leached and a lot of the minerals are gone. The sea salt, I'll put it back in there. Coral calcium. That's pretty pricey too. That's ten dollars an acre. Compost tea, that's free if you know how to make compost and you've got good compost. If you run it through a brewer, you can spray that on your soil and get a pretty good bang for the buck, I think. Those are just some of the things that we do and have done in the last three years. I told you that the bricks levels are higher where we sprayed the raw milk. Let me show you something that we did last fall. Starting October 26th of last year, I went out to a field and took some brick, tested the bricks, and the fescue tested 25 to 30. I can't explain that. I don't know why it was that high. Napa Valley premium red grapes will only test 25. After a while we'll go outside and test some grass that we brought up here. Coca-Cola will test 10 or 11. Mountain Dew about 13, maybe 14. So here's fescue last fall that tested one time only, 30. 26 to 29 every time we tested it. We came up with fescue that tested 26 to 30. We also learned that you can look at the plant and determine whether it's going to test well or not.  If it just looks like something that looks healthy, like you just kind of sense what a healthy plant looks like, you test that plant and it's going to test better than the old plant that looks kind of yellowish and not a good color to it. So every time we picked a good plant last fall between October 26 and January 4, we got the 25 to 30. I was flat on my back following back surgery on January 3rd and 4th. Brandon, the young man here, went out on the 4th of January and took that BRICS test. And the morning before it had gotten down, I don't remember exactly what I got a record of it, so it was very, very cold, zero or thereabouts. And that grass still tested above 25 in the afternoon of January 4th. So Fescue will hang in there with you. I don't know why or how.  Now, that's the one time they're thrifty, but we ought to be running tests on this stuff to find out why Fescue will do this, why will milk help, what does molasses do, what will liquid fish do. I don't know, but I can tell you, last fall and winter we had incredible BRICS levels. This year, following a drought that we all know about, our BRICS levels were down considerably. Oh, on that second bullet there, October 26th, what I didn't say here was that the worst Fescue we saw last fall and winter was 21 and a half. We had nothing that would test below 21 and a half. This year, November 1st, just yesterday, we barely got to that 21 and a half level. We had some 23s and some 17s and I'll show you those results in a minute. Archer grass and white clover last year was roughly five points below the Fescue.  I think we all think that, oh, clover is a whole lot better than Fescue. Well, when you're looking at protein, you might be right, but when you're looking at energy, at least in the fall and the winter, that Fescue is hard to beat. I think that shows you why Fescue can be a great grass if you stockpile it and take your cows through the winter on it. Okay, the next one. Brandon pulled these samples October 28th, just three days ago, four days ago. On the left-hand side, he got the four different fields. If you'll come down three, you'll see the apple archer. That's the field that we sprayed the milk on back in 2010. The ridge field, the fourth one down, that's the one that last year had the bricks of 26 to 30 throughout the fall and winter. This year, we had three samples from that field, 1920 and 22. So this is the best we could do this year. I don't know why, you know. I just don't know. Let's go to the next slide. If you will talk to this gentleman up here in the front row, Greg Judy, there's a guy back there with a white hat on, Mark Bader. They'll tell you that you'll want to graze the top of the plant if you want the most energy. So we went out and measured our plants. The top two inches in the field that we call the pony field, the bricks there was 20 and the top two inches. We measured the middle part, 17. The bottom, 12, the bricks of 12.  She's not getting the energy to keep that stool solid. But if you're in a position to let them graze just the tops, you're going to solve a lot of that looseness problem. This time of year, I don't know if you can do it. What we're doing is they're going to eat it out of the ground. What our cows are doing, they don't like fescue. They're going to eat the clover and the archery grass out of the ground. So what we are doing is we feed them a bale of dry hay a day and that seems to help. And I don't think it's a waste because all we're doing is extending our grass. So I think it's money well spent. I think our cows are getting a lot better diet that way. But you can just see. 23, 17, 13, 20, 16, 10, it's consistent. Every time you work your way down that plant, you're losing energy. So if you need any more than that, if that doesn't convince you, I can't help you. Let's go to the next one. Why was our bricks so much higher last fall than this fall? I don't know. Could it be something to do with the drought that we had? Maybe. Last fall, we were very, very dry. We got no rain in September and October. That grass, it was hard to get moisture out of the grass. This year we got quite a bit of rain in September and October. We had about a three week dry spell after Isaac hit I sure would have liked to have had a little bit more, but at least, you know, it was much more moisture this year than last year. The grass last year that we measured was mature. It was grass that we were saving for stockpile. Much of the grass that we measured this year is absolutely brand new. I mean, it has all come out of the ground in the last 60 days. We were so dry that when I turned the cows into fields that had grass, what they didn't eat, they broke off. I mean, it was bare, you know, pretty much bare soil and sure there was nothing standing. So when we first got our, when we got that rain from Isaac on August 31, a zillion little seedlings started popping up and that's much of what we measured here.  Do I know that? No, that's just a guess. Let's go to the next one. Can you see the upper middle in particular, how the grass kind of, it just sparkles. Folks, I've never seen anything like this and I don't know what the answer is. We sprayed, did we spray anything this year early in the spring? We didn't, okay, we didn't spray a single thing until September. But after September, we got after it pretty hard. I have not used much liquid fish in the past, but I bought a tote of liquid fish. That's 275 gallons. I bought it from Schaefer Fisheries over in Illinois and I'm not pushing those guys. If you ordered it from Neptune's Harvest, which I've used in the past and is a good product, they don't have any. They ran out. Schaefer had it. They preserved it in phosphoric acid. We all need phosphorus. I don't know whether phosphoric acid is a good thing to put on your soil or not, it's probably as good or better than sulfuric acid, those are your two choices. But the one thing that they do offer for 50 cents a gallon, they will put liquid kelp in there. So we sprayed liquid kelp and oh, sea salt and molasses and help me, Brandon, what did I miss something, I'm sure. But anyway, the grass absolutely looks phenomenal. The nature as well as last year, as I don't know why, we probably wouldn't have sprayed anything this fall had we not had an extremely bad drought. But spraying helps. And once again, I don't tell you that you ought to do it twice a year or every year or anything like that. I'm just telling you it'll help. If it makes sense economically, try it. But what it did for us, it got our grass up there to the point where when we ran our cattle into a paddock, they knocked a lot of it to the ground and I think that gave us the ground cover we needed and also provided our microbes with the food that they needed. Talking about microbes, let's go to this. This is information from Texas A&M University. If you will look at the middle column in an acre of, they describe it as fertile soil. In one acre of fertile soil, there are between 300 and 3,000 pounds of bacteria per acre. Actinomycetes, and I may mispronounce that because I don't even know what they are. 300 to 3,000. Fungi, 500 to 5,000 pounds. By the way, that's a picture of a, oh, that's bacteria. Okay, we got another picture later. Protizoa, 50 to 200. Algae, 10 to 1,500. Total, 1160 pounds to 12,700 pounds of microbes per acre. Now think about it, that's an enormous, you know, that's got to be more than, that's about like your cow herd. But anyway, there's a lot of life under that soil. It's hard for me to believe that Texas A&M is totally off base. However, having said that, most people will tell you that you got between 1,000 and 3,000 pounds of microbes per acre. So, whatever it is, there are a lot of them under there. They can do a lot of good. They loosen your soil. They store the nutrients in the soil. Fungi in particular go down into the soil and grab the nutrients and bring them back to the plants. This is an amazing thing and I simply don't have the ability nor the time to try to even come close to explaining that today. But the fungi probably might be the most important of all the microbes, especially the mycorrhizal fungi. Let's go on the next one. This is a picture of it. Imagine a plant has 100 feet of roots. The mycorrhizal fungi will attach to that plant and have 1,000 feet of filaments out there. And I'm just throwing these numbers out. It varies from plant to plant and from type of fungi and so on. But the mycorrhizal fungi will enormously expand the root system of the plant. It will make it much easier for the plant to get nutrients and also make it much easier for the plant to get moisture. The mycorrhizal will store the moisture. The mycorrhizal fungi will store the moisture and the nutrients and feed the plant as the plant calls for it. What's really interesting is that fescue is a plant that works well with fungi. The fescue gives off a sugar that the fungi needs and in return the fungi gives the fescue plant the nutrients and the moisture it needs. And I read something about that just within the last 30 days. A lady from South Dakota wrote a very interesting article in Acres, USA. She said these two, the fescue plant or just the plant. A plant and the fungi have a system of checks and balances. The plant will give sugar to the fungi only if the fungi is bringing back to the plant what it wants. And she went on to say that these two have a metering system where they meter what it is that they want and that it's very difficult for the one to cheat on the other. I just thought that was a wonderful way to explain that. Okay, what do we got next? A young man from Georgia sent me the three photos actually. Let's go down real quick and then back up. Alright, let's go back to the high density. Something that I've been interested in is making some savannas and I got a whole lot more interested in it this year than I've been in the past. Because we've got 500 acres of woods and 300 acres of pasture so I saw all those 500 acres sitting out there not doing me much good this drought season. And if I could get in there and thin some of those sprouts out and feed a little hay in there and let my cows get in there, hopefully I could come up with something that looked like that. I wouldn't graze it year-round by any means. I might only graze it once or twice a year. But I think those of you that have some wooded ground that's not too steep or some halfway decent soil if it's not terribly rocky, I think this could offer some real potential. We've got 100 acres at least, maybe 200 that would just be ideal. I'm 71 years old and I'm not going to get out there with my chains so unclear that I guarantee you, but maybe if I could just do 10 acres that'd be a lot and I'm just curious as to how it would turn out. Okay, let's go down to the last. Our ultimate goal is to have good grass for our cattle. We raise south poles. This is a picture of the cows as you can see with the polywire. The next one is a young bull calf. What we're trying to do is a breed has come up with 1,000-pound cows that'll produce, 1,000 or less that'll produce a 500-pound calf. I had a picture on here of probably a 900-pound cow with her 350-400-pound calf from two or three months ago. He's going to make the grade. He'll weigh over half his mom's weight. Okay, yeah, there he is. This little guy, I'm convinced, will weigh well over 50% of his mother's weight come the end of this month when we wean. And we've got maybe six like that. We've got some great big old cows that we're trying to reduce the size of, but we're slowly but surely getting there. What we're going to do now is go outside. If you want to take the bricks of grass, you need to do it between three and four. And in the winter, you probably know later than three. In the summertime, you probably might want to wait until four with daylight savings time. But anyway, we picked some of that really pretty grass, and we'll take it outside and show you how we squeeze it. I will say this. In 2010, Greg Judy is a very good friend. We've known him ever since he dumped a bunch of red Angus cows on us a few years back. What happened? Greg ran out of grass and we came up and bought some cows from him and saw the south poles and ended up with south poles. But a few years later, we ran out of grass and Greg was kind enough to come down and take those cows back. So he ended up with the same cows back, but they were good cows. I just like to tease Greg. But anyway, Greg has always said it makes sense to graze grass that's a little bit more mature. If you get around your farm over 21 days, that grass doesn't have much maturity. In 2010, and another theory of Greg's, and it undoubtedly works, if you let the grass go without grazing it well into the growing season, mid-May, late-May, June 15, whatever, you're going to control your weeds with that grass. Well, back in 2010, we set aside about 30 acres. And on the 7th of July, you know, that's right, we opened up the first of those 30 acres to our cows, and we had some very mature ryegrass in there, annual ryegrass. It was pretty. And the cows just loved it. And so I thought, wow, I'm going to sample this and see what the bricks level is.  This is one way to squeeze juice out of grass. Well, I squeezed that ryegrass, and I measured the moisture that we got out of it, and the bricks level was five. Then I took a sample and using a modified vise grip. You can see this after a while, if we go outside. You can squeeze grass in here. And actually, it'll do an even better job the second and third time if you'll just keep squeezing it. It'll do almost as good as this thing. But with one squeeze, that ryegrass measured 10. I had just gotten this wheatgrass juicer. Those of you who are health food folks, you know what wheatgrass is, and you know what wheatgrass juice is. I've never had any. But people that do consume it think it's wonderful. And this is one way to make it. A lot of people grow their own wheatgrass and then stick it through something like this. Some of them have electric versions. This is perfect for what we do. When we ran that ryegrass through this wheatgrass juicer, it tested, the moisture tested 14. Now, that tells you that just a straight squeeze, you're not getting all the nutrients out of the grass. And the thought that immediately came to mind is that old broken mouth cow. That's why she looks so bad at the end of the winter. She can't get anything out of that grass. She just simply doesn't have enough teeth left to break it up and get the nutrients out. But if her teeth were as good as this juicer, she'd look a whole lot better come March or April. But I just, there was no doubt in my mind that this is the equivalent of the old broken mouth cow, the garlic presses. Before we go outside, I'd be glad to try to answer any questions. One thing I do want to say. Mark Bader has always recommended long, narrow paddocks is the way to get your grass to the ground and provide feed for your microbes. We've tried to install that into our program as much as possible. But I came across some guys down in southern Missouri at the Beyond Organic Farm. Some of you guys may have heard about it. They're eight or 9,000 acres down there. They have the longest skinniest paddocks I've ever heard of. They've got paddocks that are a half a mile long and 90 to 145 feet wide. Now that's a long, narrow paddock. But they've also got some good grass down there and they went through this past summer without feeding any hay. I wish I could say the same thing. But anyway, that's it for my presentation today other than going outside and showing you a little bit about bricks. Any questions? Yes, ma'am? Yes. The question, the ladies noticed, she got in late, she noticed that we were spraying and she thought we were spraying on an apple orchard. That was where an apple orchard was. That's what we call the apple orchard field. There are all kinds of people that spray citrus and apples and everything else. Now I don't know if they use raw milk but they use all kinds of different sprays. And I'm not talking about chemicals. I'm talking about natural things like compost tea. Would that work in a high tunnel? I would see no reason why it wouldn't. And I don't think there's any doubt that raw milk will help you. And something as labor intensive as what you're going to do with produce, you could do that a lot. Two, three, four times a year, I think would be beneficial to you. Yes. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. What you want to keep in mind is two gallons an acre. So if you're talking about one tomato plant, a teaspoon, you know, half a teaspoon, that's all in the world you'd need with a half a gallon of water or whatever. Yeah. You know, yeah. Yeah, well, there is no racial man. What you need to think is, think in terms of how much milk you need to solve the problem that you're addressing. If you were to put, I would think a tablespoon of raw milk in a gallon of water, you could, you know, three, four, five tomato plants real easy, or even more. You'd want to spray the whole thing. Well, you know, milk's pretty cheap. You can go to a local dairy. The milk I use is conventional. If you go to a Mennonite farmer, or an Amish farmer, and he'll sell you organic milk, I think it'd just be that much better. And if you wanted to put a half a gallon or a quart would be more than enough, I think. But if you wanted to put a half a gallon on your 30 by 70, that'd be, you know, I think I'd do a great job. Yes, John. The question is, what were the South Poles developed from? Basically Red Angus, Herford, Centipole, and Barzona. The Centipole and the Barzona add heat tolerance. You guys know about the Red Angus and Herford. That's right. And a few shorthorns. There's another gentleman here. Yes, sir. There are very few government studies. But 70 years ago, a guy conducted a study on humans. TB 70 years ago was a huge problem. And this guy was out in California, and he used cats in his experiments. And he noticed after a while that the health of the cats went down. So he decided to see why the health of those cats went down so bad. And he fed them four different things. He fed them condensed milk, pasteurized milk, raw milk, and one other farm, something like condensed. I can't remember what it was. And the cats that were fed the raw milk their health improved. The cats that were not fed the raw milk were fed the other varieties, the pasteurized and so on. Their health continued to deteriorate to the point where they became invalids, couldn't move. But the really interesting thing about that study is the guy had, you know, hundreds probably of cats in cages. And underneath the cat cages, he had sand. And they saw that the manure and the urine that fell into the sand had a big impact on weeds later when they moved those cages outside. But the really dramatic growth came from the cages of the cats that were fed the raw milk. The cats that were fed the condensed milk and his evaporated milk, I'm not sure what that other one is, but the pasteurized milk, very little weed growth. And then the guy went one step further. He planted beans. He planted regular green beans in the sand and where the sand from the cats that were fed the condensed milk and the pasteurized milk, those beans did poorly, very, very poorly. But where he planted the beans in the sand from the cats that have been fed the raw milk, the beans not only just exploded, they actually converted from the standard green bean that we know it back into the pole bean, which is where they came from to begin with. Now, if that doesn't convince you there's something special about raw milk, then I'm wasting my time. I could have tried it. That's the best example I could come up with. Yes, ma'am. This lady said you can soak your beans in a water and milk mix when you plant them. Do you do that? I thought I was smart. I came across this one article and I wrote a big story about raw milk and I thought, woo, I was the first one, Terri Gompert, the extension agent, and I thought, man, we've really got something here. There have been people that have been growing pumpkins with raw milk and it's a pretty common thing around the country. I don't doubt that it will control a lot of diseases. Okay, here's another gentleman who says he's been spraying watermelon with... Is that right? In Florida, when the golf courses down there water their... not their greens, but their fairways, they put molasses and instead of a half a gallon, like I've been told you should be your maximum, they use two gallons of molasses and that's the only fertilizer they use. I would be interested in knowing if they get much weed control with that. We certainly get weed control but I don't know that it's the molasses. Question is, I guess a question, would yogurt work better than raw milk? I have no idea. Yeah, yeah. I know a man out in the Panhandle of Texas that gets milk, colostrum milk. He gets it for 50 cents a gallon and he sprays it through his... what do you call the... the center pivot and he just gets some enormous... His bricks just go through the roof, his cattle gain five and ten pounds a day but the interesting thing is that old soil of theirs has had everything leached out of it from being irrigated all these years. The minute he stops putting milk into the irrigation system, the bricks tumbles the rate of gain of the cattle just goes all to hell. So he's got to keep pumping that milk to feed the microbes, I would assume, what few microbes are left in that sandy soil. That's a guess, nobody knows because the government won't spend any money to find out the good stuff. Yes, I'm not sure I could handle goats.


Welcome to the first technical lecture of the political economy of the environment. Today, I'm going to describe a simple model that illustrates the problem posed by environmental externalities. I will explain what economists view as the efficient level of environmental degradation, how we can arrive at that level of degradation, and why economic inequality can be bad for the environment.  It would cost your neighbor something to pollute less. Specifically, the cost of pollution reduction is given by the following equation. mc equals 2x, where x is the amount of pollution reduction in pounds per year, and mc is the marginal cost to him in dollars. The marginal cost of pollution reduction is increasing. It costs your neighbor just $2 to reduce pollution by one pound. The cost is low because he can keep his home just slightly cooler and wear a sweater. It costs your neighbor $4 to reduce pollution by another pound, or $6 in total. The marginal cost keeps increasing as your neighbor is forced to adopt more and more extreme measures to reduce pollution, like installing solar panels or wearing a hat indoors. We can graph the marginal cost as a function of the number of pounds that your neighbor reduces his pollution. The marginal cost curve has an intercept of zero and a slope of two. It looks like this. The pollution next door bothers you. The benefit of pollution reduction is given by the following equation. mb equals 60 minus x, where x is the amount of pollution reduction in pounds per year, and mb is the marginal benefit to you in dollars. The marginal benefit of pollution reduction is decreasing. The first pound of pollution reduction is worth more to you, $59 to be exact, than the 60th pound of pollution reduction, which is worth $0 to you. The marginal benefit curve has an intercept of 60 and a slope of minus one. It looks like this. Now we have a graph that illustrates both the marginal cost to your neighbor and the marginal benefit to you of pollution reduction. Note that in this example, the benefits and the costs are given in terms of pollution reduction, which we call x. However, we could analyze the costs and benefits of pollution rather than pollution reduction. Let's say that the level of pollution is equal to 60 minus any pollution reduction. So p equals 60 minus x. We can rearrange terms to see that x equals 60 minus p. The marginal benefit of pollution reduction is the same as the marginal cost of pollution. By substituting 60 minus p for x, we see that the marginal cost of pollution equals 60 minus 60 minus p, which equals p. We can graph the marginal cost of pollution like this. Similarly, by substituting 60 minus p for x, we can see that the marginal benefit of pollution equals 2 times 60 minus p, or 120 minus 2p, which we can graph like this. Analyzing this problem in terms of pollution instead of pollution reduction would give us the same answers. However, today we will analyze this problem in terms of pollution reduction to better follow the examples in your readings. The cost and benefit of pollution reduction illustrates the problem posed by environmental externalities. How much will your neighbor voluntarily reduce his pollution? The answer is not at all. Reducing pollution by even one pound costs him $2, so he won't do it if he doesn't have to do it.  After all, reducing pollution by one pound is worth $59 to you. Your neighbor will not voluntarily reduce his pollution, but this outcome is inefficient or suboptimal. What is the efficient or optimal level of pollution? The first pound of pollution reduction is worth $59 to you and costs your neighbor $2. So reducing pollution by one pound increases social welfare by $57, as illustrated by this green line. The second pound of pollution reduction is worth $58 to you and costs your neighbor $4 more. So reducing pollution by another pound increases welfare by an additional $54, as illustrated by the second green line. Your neighbor would maximize social welfare, but not his individual welfare, by continuing to reduce his pollution until the marginal benefit to you no longer exceeded the marginal cost to him. So what is the efficient level of pollution reduction? We can find out by simple calculating when the marginal cost of pollution reduction equals marginal benefit of pollution reduction, or where 2x equals 60 minus x. By solving for x, we find that the efficient level of pollution reduction is 20 pounds per year. How much would social welfare increase if your neighbor reduces pollution by 20 pounds per year? We can simply calculate the difference between the benefit and the cost of reducing pollution. This is equal to the area of the green triangle, or one half, times $60, times 20. Reducing pollution to its efficient level would increase social welfare by $600. So how do we get your neighbor to reduce his pollution by 20 pounds? There are multiple solutions to the problems posed by environmental externalities. Perhaps the most obvious solution is government intervention. The government could simply mandate that your neighbor reduces pollution by 20 pounds. To do this though, the government would need to know both the marginal cost and marginal benefit of pollution reduction. Calculating the marginal cost and marginal benefits of pollution reduction is difficult, but not impossible. We'll discuss this later when we learn about benefit cost analysis. Another clever solution was offered 50 years ago by an economist named Ronald Koss. Koss showed that bargaining between individuals can lead to efficient levels of pollution reduction, if property rights are well enforced, and if transaction costs are absent. In our example, assume that your neighbor has the right to pollute all he wants, but that you can pay him to reduce how much he pollutes. Could you two make a deal? Yes, you could, because reducing pollution by 20 pounds benefits you more than it costs your neighbor. Your neighbor would be willing to reduce pollution if you pay him more than it costs him to do so. The cost of him is illustrated by this green triangle, which is equal to $400. You would be willing to pay much more than $400 to reduce pollution by 20 pounds. After all, the benefit to you is illustrated by this large green trapezoid, which is equal to $1,000.  Ronald Coase went on to show that, as long as property rights are well enforced and transaction costs are zero, individual bargaining will lead to the efficient level of pollution reduction, regardless of how pollution rights are initially distributed. This theoretical result is known as the Coase theorem. To understand it, assume that your neighbor does not have the right to heat his home with a wood-burning stove, but that he can purchase pollution rights from you. Again, your two would be able to strike a deal, because allowing him to pollute some would decrease his costs by much more than it decreases your benefits. You can calculate how much you would be able to charge your neighbor to increase his pollution on your own. In the real world, bargaining between polluters and people will not lead to efficient levels of pollution, because transaction costs are not zero. Imagine how time consuming it would be for all the people who live near a coal power plant to sit down with the owner and strike an agreement on how much the plant will reduce its pollution. But that isn't the only problem with the Coase theorem. Even our example, in which there are just two people so bargaining is nearly costless, illustrates important aspects of the political economy of the environment. First, the Coase theorem suggests that your neighbor will end up polluting at the efficient level, regardless of whether he initially has the right to pollute. But whether or not he has the right to pollute will affect you. After all, if he has the right to pollute, he could charge you up to $1,000 to reduce pollution by 20 pounds. Is that fair? Second, it is crucial to recognize that within this framework, both the benefits to you and the costs to your neighbor are measured in dollars. However, it isn't necessarily true that a dollar is worth the same to you as it is to your neighbor, especially if your incomes are quite different. To drive this point home, imagine that you lose your job and become poor. What will this do to the marginal benefit of pollution reduction? Since those benefits depend on how much you be willing to pay to reduce your neighbor's pollution, your poverty will almost certainly reduce the marginal benefit of pollution reduction. You are now not willing or able to pay as much in exchange for less pollution. Assume that your marginal benefits of pollution reduction are now given by the equation mb equals 30 minus x. Graphically, it would look like this. On your own, consider how the impact of your job loss and the associated increase in incoming equality affects the efficient level of pollution. What is the efficient level of pollution now? And is that level of pollution fair? Given your answer, where would you expect polluters to site toxic plants? And again, given your answer, what would you expect to happen if income inequality increases? Thanks for listening to your first technical lecture on the political economy of the environment.