We thank you for being punctual and Allowing us to stay pretty much on schedule. So an opportunity to now hear from the two rapporteurs on what You said in your particular group so that we get the feedback from each of the two groups So Jill will lead off Dr. Fendais has many years experience in Africa and is now leading agricultural economics, ag education, rural sociology, and agricultural journalism at the University of Missouri. Thank you Ken, and I'm delighted to be here to just summarize some of what we heard today For the groups and we had two great presentations Keith Moore started and then we had Rebecca Nelson And they really got us thinking about a lot of different ideas That made us stretch and so I put together a couple of PowerPoints that were based upon the discussion that happened afterwards And I apologize to anybody right up front whose a specific point I left out So if we have a minute right afterwards for anybody that wants to contribute that point I think it'd be useful, okay This is what I heard and one one in terms of reflecting on it as well as Summarizing what I heard today We have a lot of discussion about the idea of science communication You hear triple a s and other groups talking about Communicating science to the public, but what we have today here is also this two-way Communication going on and it's not only communication. It's also about listening So several of our groups brought up about the listening issue And how we can listen and listen well for these put for what we're talking about in terms of topic Early so listening and translation Early integration of voice came up as one of the important topics and it was reflected from this morning's topic And whose voice and that came up at several tables in terms of power structures and Hearing from others outside of the dominant power structure Questions, okay, so how are we going to broaden that voice? How are we going to get down under dominant power structures that might be the participators in our research and questions came up in presentations and Rebecca's presentations Presentation dealt a little bit with the IT platform How can we utilize the IT platform better than we've done and I put up some topics crowd sourcing knowledge sharing Idea visual is there or data visualization best practice is how what do we know? How can we do that? How can we do it faster? How can we do it in the next in the next couple of years? to really address these kinds of topics We also talked about not only listening to the field but also breaking down barriers among us and And How do we talk his disciplines and how do we listen as disciplines and I think that's a very important topic at this point It did can't come up in our discussions around our tables breaking down barriers between researchers MSU gave us a hint and said Carry big stick, so I bring that big stick, okay to be able to bring that down but I think we're really talking again about listening and Also Translating and in those early stages of that collaboration. There's a lot of translating that goes on But later on it's also that listening that very careful listening that goes on Between people that are trying to solve a problem We also talked across the tables that come came up across a number of the tables about power dynamics and The question of seeing more participation among women came up There was the dominant structure talked about but then women and talking about children that came up in the earlier presentations by Presentation by Regina and how do we go about doing that? I'm still seeing in a lot of pictures that I see mostly men in the pictures and But now we're starting to see more and more inclusion of the voice of women and that came up today as a as a sense of we're making progress a Focus on youth critical and I think most of us agree with that concept. I don't think we've gotten there yet and how do we go about doing that and that came up from one of our tables and It was very much emphasized and I think in our thinking it's emphasized as well then also in terms of power dynamics and this goes to the University and it may not have been intended from the university's perspective But the idea of metrics for measuring impacts. How do we go about measuring impacts? So it's not only at the university level But also as we go farther out into the field and what do we mean by real impact or the impacts of our work as We start listening to each other Then I think there were a number of ideas and these were across the tables To explore and operationalize and these to me are always fun in other words places when you come to a conference or ideas when you come to a conference and you start to hear Different ideas that you go. Oh if we could only do that and one was the provision of choice and the idea of an information market and that came up in the presentation that Rebecca did and How do we do it? How do we do that and that that that question was raised by at least one of the tables as we went around the room Another was just in time research How do we do that if we bring the kinds of ideas that we're talking about up to the front end and Then we have quite a long timeline for some of the science research to take place How are we doing that continually throughout the process and speeding it up, but also making it just in time So we're talking about processes and that was that was I think interesting to all of us Continuous use of indigenous knowledge and in fact I'm surprised that word hadn't come up earlier in the conference because there's such an interest in indigenous knowledge groups across the United States and But it did come up in the group conversations and then appropriate scaling and it was brought up in terms of human capacity building policy etc And there were a number of different bullet points under that particular aspect of it that were important My last slide just a couple of reminders that came out of our discussions after the presentations one was one size doesn't fit all and Obviously if you had there's never a situation where you have only one voice there are multiple voices There's choice that goes into development. That's the way we live today and Also, we need to learn to crawl or walk before we can run in other words We have to be listening on the ground Understand the dynamics of on the ground before we can take it forward now on each of my slides I've included one particular photo that was important to me Okay, and I actually didn't realize that until today This is a picture in Mozambique of orange flesh sweet potato And it was in the field in a place where I had not seen it ever before when I was there in May and I was going to send it to Regina and as I started to put it up there I In these are everywhere everywhere in the villages in in moon Hinga in central Mozambique I Said put it up there the picture as you know came up large and I saw the people You can barely see them on the side I saw those people sitting there and they would have told us a lot. We didn't do that We made a mistake. We went by I took a picture. We moved on it really was a moment We could have utilized and I hope we utilize those moments. Thanks Other before you start any other points that I missed Any points I missed from the group Patty from the world force egg world forestry Center and Angler Forestry Center and Research into action Thanks So we had a great group of people Ruth and Jerry really gave us a lot of food for thought and we had quite a wide ranging conversation So it was a challenge to Summarize it, but I have to say that in trying to think of some organizing principles To give the feedback I'm calling this challenges and opportunities for translational research And I've been leading a research program That involved all 15 of the CGI our centers for the last five years and I've called it linking knowledge with action And it's not knowledge to action because it's a two-way thing And I want to make sure that action is informing the knowledge in both ways and when you do the knowledge to action We're we're falling back into that pipeline route that there's some brilliant people coming up with great ideas And then it's just about translating in and getting out there and In the CG in particular We've been trying to flip it on its edge and really think about how we do research in a fundamentally different way than we have been So that we will have more impact on sustainable poverty alleviation, etc and so that the the topic of this conversation of this Conference is is a big one and and I'm really really happy that this conversation is happening now Across universities and other places where I haven't seen it happening so so much Although there's a new area called sustainability science in many places, which is really trying to do this and Bill Clark a group at Harvard is actually was one of my first exposures to really thinking about this and How we can call it a research area in of itself? Because we don't know how to do this if we knew how to do it would just be about process But we don't know and we it's still a researchable issues So the four things I came up with from the conversations in our group were number one institutions matter They matter a lot and I want to talk about institutions. It's the rules of the game And when the rules of the game don't support Translational research we have a we have a continuing challenge and these are the institutional rules of research organizations of the funding organizations and It's not just the institutions that we work with in the developing world. It's their capacity also If you think we're struggling with it in in the international ag research area, you know How is Akari or or other people? dealing with this so it does matter I Got struck by your sticks and carrots because it's been a debate within my own group Some management types like the stick approach more than the carrot approach But I actually think it's all about the carrots and it's about the incentives Which is the institutions and the rules of the game, right? So you keep coming back to that one of the things that shifted in the CG recently is the shift to open access And I'm not sure if anyone's appreciating how big an incentive shift that is Where you know, we can bring together people from very diverse organizations and say actually what we're developing together is going to be shared with the world and Even if it's just this little thing and you go and write your paper for your university or write a policy brief for your NGO or whatever What we are creating and the data we're collecting and the new knowledge We're generating is we're sharing it with the world and young students all over the place are going to get access to it that never had Access to it before and so I think that's a huge one Translational research takes time And it comes up in very many ways and Creating those spaces for diverse actors to come together and co-create solutions to the local problems These communities of practice that Karen has so eloquently talked about I really like that idea of calling them We've been calling them in the linking knowledge the action field Safe spaces because what you want to do is get people away from their own incentives Bring them together in a space where they have freedom to create They can go back to their you know incentives and rewards But when they're co-creating together you've given them freedom to be creative and do things in a very different way and The M&E frameworks the log frames and all these things that we all have to deal with when we write a proposal or try to fund research Don't create that space. They can hinder it. So again, we're talking about big changes So on a more positive note, we've learned a lot and And and this came out in our group We talk about the the K2A principles and in my world and they are based on the foundations of capacity communication and partnership through thoughtful engagement processes and I call I talk about structured well facilitated Processes are absolutely key because you don't just bring people together and hope to have a good party in the middle You have to really structure it and by structuring it you enable them to be creative Structure actually enables creativity and we've learned a lot about that So this co-development of the metrics of success, which is another topic that kept coming up How do we know that we're succeeding and and by doing this little case study here and this little case study here And even maybe bringing those together We're not creating the the powerful evidence that a lot of people are asking for So we've got in in the climate change Social learning initiative that's just been started by a program called seacuffs that I've been with We've we are crowd sourcing Projects that have been taking Translational research approaches if you will and we're trying to bring together hundreds of them And and crowd sourcing them so we're not cherry picking because we get accused of cherry picking when we do the evaluation in the other way Crowd source a whole bunch of projects what we've created as a framework for evaluating the success of these projects And we're asking people to to apply this same framework You're still gonna have your specifics for your project specific to your whatever the project's about But by trying to create a framework and bring in these hundreds of case studies We're trying to build up the evidence over the next five to ten years And we're trying to use social learning principles and social media and crowd sourcing as the as the Organizing principles, so I think that's the kind of exciting new thing that we've got to start thinking about in the research world Okay Which brings me the last point which I talked to I call sort of the scaling How how is the scaling issue and how do we get leverage? Because we can always have these wonderful projects where you've been working with communities in a particular place for five or ten years And we're telling that story quite eloquently, but of course that's not what we're being asked to do We're being asked to how do you do that much more broadly and widely and and reach so many more people? Well, I think the ICT Approach is something to really think about and by thinking about communication and including communication Specialists from the beginning not later, which we often do as scientists Thinking about this social learning in a really much more structured way than we have How do we use cell phones radios TV social media? To think about right from the beginning in any kind of project or program we go forward with with To to do that inclusive empowering stuff that we want to do stuff So I really want to thank you guys because this has helped me start to to think about This has been a paper in my head for five years. Do you guys have that paper? You never get to writing? And this is helping me to come up with and so if you guys have any other suggestions for me on the Organizing principles of this paper because what we're doing here is just it's really is the cutting edge Someone said to me that once you know patty. This isn't rocket science and they said it's it's the new science and I thought that was pretty cool. So thank you We do have time for one or two clarifying questions if you have them for Jill or Patty Great summary Yes, Bill we talk about extension from and we talk about outreach to But I think your point was its engagement with Changing the preposition can make a big difference another comment or question Yes, Jeff She's coming on the general topic of scaling. I wonder if there's been any thought in terms of putting ourselves out of business in terms of Or altering our role and looking ahead 10 or 20 years. Do we really want to have outside experts guiding the research in you know in the in the countries that we're working in now shouldn't we be Looking at developing institutions and systems that begin to take on these roles and in a sense put ourselves out of business now There still might be a role for example in the CG in terms of germplasm maintenance and addressing regional problems that go Across national borders and so on but it seems to me, you know when we're talking about scaling ultimately a lot of these Efforts have to be done by the nations themselves. And so can we help enable that process and in essence put ourselves out of business in 10 or 20 years? Response I couldn't agree more. I Always actually when I entered the CG over 20 years ago I said that the sign of my success will be that I'm just absolutely not needed Anymore I what is this white blonde woman from Canada coming in you know living in Africa and Just doesn't make sense at some levels does it so I think what what what you're talking about is actually a challenge for everyone in the room In the in the academic community, so how do we do the training and capacity? Programs in a different way also And I think a lot of you were struggling with that and I'm sure looking at the MOOCs and other ways because I just think But you know you don't just put it on the web and it's you know, it's it's learned and taken up It's not that easy So it's a little bit about the open access, but it's a lot about targeting the needs their specific needs And and really thinking again, and it's a communication challenge It's a big one So I think I think we all should be challenged in this room to be thinking about that and absolutely We should be obsolete in another 10 or 20 years. Let's hope Obviously well put I can't agree more It would be fabulous that to me is what capacity building is about it's enabling and if we can be out of business fabulous We don't have time for more questions, but The discussion can continue and thank the two of you for really summarizing very well now moving into our Further into our afternoon schedule Dr. Ambassador Siddiqui is here to be the moderator for this short Session before we go back into some discussions, but we're certainly happy to have you here Islam Thank You Ken Thank you for this exciting and fascinating discussion so far I know we have not allowed questions, but I think the good thing about this session is since we have only one speaker You'll have an opportunity to ask more questions and continue the discussion we had of course this morning Joanna Nestle and as well as doctors Dayton Valdivia and Ellers As well as dr. Cupping up were Instrumental and getting the discussion going and I think I would like to continue as we shift gears Into the discussion, which is how funders researchers NGOs and small holders create mutual opportunities and sustainable outcomes Building partnerships is not new to CSIS every day We at this CIS continue to build partnerships and the importance of collaboration across sectors Institutions and areas of expertise are a common day occurrence and this keeps on happening and that's what we pride as core strength of CSIS During my tenure in the Obama administration and before that in the Clinton administration I have continued to benefit in my role as by in engaging in negotiations Bilaterally regionally and multilaterally on agriculture trade issues I think dr. Moore brought the point which I was going to make and I want to reinforce in order to reach Sustainable outcomes and agreements you have to engage in negotiations You then also face resistance from the stakeholders and the and the partners in my case trading partners And then how do you build the chemistry to reach? Agreements and this is what I found in my work over the past 18 plus years in Washington, DC How do you reach mutual and sustainable? Agreements in terms of reaching outcomes, which will be sustainable for in the long run So sustainable solutions to for food insecurity across the public and private sectors as well as non-government institutions and organizations and small-holder farmers and entrepreneurs can be leveraged to harness Inclusive opportunities and sustainable outcomes across the world and both in Nations which are developing as well as developed Joining us today is dr. Sahara moon chapatin the acting division chief for agriculture research at the US agency for international development She joined the agency in 2006 as biotechnology advisor managing international partnerships to promote the adoption of generically modified Products as well as conservation agriculture practices in South Asia as well as develop by engineered crops for small-holder farmers and strengthen biosafety regulatory capacities throughout Africa in Asia Prior to joining USAID dr. Chapatin work with the biosafety Institute for genetically modified agriculture products or big map for short at the Iowa State University Where her work focused on? Resolving regulatory issues for genetically modified crops, especially those intended for small and niche markets Dr. Chapatin holds a BS degree in biology from Stanford University and PhD degree in physiology From the Harvard University and she's also a triple AS Science and technology policy fellow So she will be speaking this afternoon on achieving meaningful smallholder Participation for meaningful knowledge. So please join me in welcoming dr. Chapatin to the podium Thanks a lot. It's great to be here This is I'm sorry to have missed the morning session. So I was pleased to get the the two little recaps that we just got How do I how do I work the slides? great cool, okay. Well, thanks a lot for that and So I'm from the US agency for international development I'm gonna be actually it sounds like a lot of the what I'll be talking about are some themes you might have already touched on this morning So particularly The point on how we engage women when we're thinking about smallholders how we engage women in particular in the agricultural enterprise is something I'll be talking about But I'm generally gonna be talking about how we work with smallholder farmers how we work for smallholder farmers through a range of different models Through our work at USAID on agriculture and food security My my primary responsibility at USAID is in the research division But I'll be trying to pull in some examples from across the agency as well But I will I think it research is of interest to this audience I'll be drawing on on examples from research quite a bit one of these buttons will do it, right? So I probably don't need to restate the global challenge. I imagine all of you are familiar with this but we are trying to address the fact that You know many people across the world around over 800 million people still suffer from chronic hunger The world's population of course is still growing food food product production will need to increase Throughout all this we're facing the uncertainty of climate change and the fact that resources are Being to our scarce whether it's land water labor. You name it. We're basically having to do more with less The global food price spike of 2008 was really the the genesis of the US government's current response to global To addressing global hunger and food security and what came out of this was the feed the future initiative That's a whole of government initiative It pulls in not just USAID who leads the initiative but of course other agencies throughout the US government in particular the US Department of Agriculture and And basically this is renewing the US government's commitment to reducing hunger and poverty around the world And we're really working with partner countries to help them to combat hunger and under nutrition and As I mentioned, it's a it's a whole of government it was it's initiated as a presidential initiative and And it really has at its root a focus on it on it being a long-term effort Not just to get in and out really quick But to really do the long-term work that's required to sustainably transform Agricultural systems and to feed people So I'm going to be talking a little bit about how we focus on small holders and how we focus on women through this initiative Both of these are really at the heart of the initiative And I'm going to pull on different examples from our programs about how we get impact in the field through the impact pathways many of which start with Research but go all throughout the value chain into the field So why do we why do we work with small holders? Really the evidence suggests that the evidence demonstrates that investments in smallholder agriculture can have a huge impact on overall poverty reduction And that those impact those investments in agriculture and the impacts you can get from that It can be quite a bit greater than than in many other sectors in development 75% of the poor the world's poor live in rural areas. So right there you can see why you need to you need to ground your efforts in agricultural and rural areas When you invest in smallholder ag lead development, you're creating rural income growth and employment linkages and And there's evidence that small farms can be even more productive than large farms So really by investing in small holders and their small farms, which can have very efficient use of resources You can really both increase food production But also get those increases in smallholder incomes that are going to lead to the broader rural income growth that we're looking for So this this initiative is not just about I mean, it's at its heart It's a food security initiative But it's about both feeding people and really using the agricultural enterprise to transform economies and developing countries and And in fact just a little data point here smallholder agriculture has been shown to be 3.2 times more effective at reducing extreme poverty than investments in other sectors And then why do we invest in women? I probably don't need to explain that to this crowd It's recognized I think throughout development that that women are particularly important But in agriculture that's that's especially so and gender analysis underlies everything we do within feed the future We recognize that women are a large part of the labor force up to 50% in many parts of Africa They often will have limited land access to land to technologies to inputs Credit and this makes it difficult for them to be productive on their farms And when you can advance the status of women you can increase agricultural productivity overall because you're giving women more access to these things Poverty can be reduced and you can increase nutrition And it's been estimated that if women had the same access to assets as men you could you could increase Farm yields by 20 to 30 percent and that's that's pretty major if you think that Perhaps half of the smallholders are women and then you're increasing that by 20 to 30 percent You could make some some major gains So not just in our field work Do we think about how we can engage women not just when we're out there directly working with smallholders But in everything we do and and from the research side of things that represents a challenge We have to think about if we're funding and we're supporting say a project That's fairly upstream thinking about genomics for a crop How do you think about women and the impacts that's gonna have on women and the relevance of your research to women? When you're working with a bunch of scientists back in a lab somewhere who're doing sequencing That's something we're still working on and we're trying to think through and I'll show you I'll show you some examples about how we do bring that gender analysis into the work We do and and I won't say that we've got it all figured out certainly across feed the future. This is this is sort of a learning and progress We're really trying to understand how we can better engage with and work with and for women in everything we do So I mentioned research. I'm gonna switch just for a moment and say you a little bit about our research strategies I think that will be of interest it it was launched in 2011 the feed the future research strategy and it came out of a year-long consultation process with with many of you I know with the u.s. University community the international research community the NGOs the private sector other stakeholders and and Basically it addresses Global priorities the feed the future initiative is anchored in focused countries 19 focused countries around the world But within the research strategy We've taken a global look to try to see what are the global Challenges that are facing agriculture and how can we bring central? Resources to bear on those challenges what kind of research should be prioritized in order to really advance agriculture around the world and Through our research strategy. We're ensuring a pipeline of innovation of knowledge of technologies of capacity building that really can underlie the entire initiative So to get there we started with a series of analyses We did we started with overlaying some spatial analyses thinking about how the prevalence of poverty Lines up with the number where where the poor people are in the world We overlaid that with analysis of where you have the most stunted children in the world and here I'll just say that Feed the future is not just an agricultural growth program But as I said it's it's a the food security component is extraordinarily important and a very important component of food security is nutrition Security that's that's part of food security And so we would not be effective if we were not taking into account Ensuring nutritional outcomes for the small holders and the populations we're working with so it's this it's this overlay of poverty and under nutrition With where in the world you have the productive agricultural systems that you really could transform Through the right kinds of investments And that's where we came out with with our feed the future research strategy Essentially it was anchored in these key geographies where there are many many small holders There's a high prevalence of poverty of under nutrition of stunting and where there's really the potential to have incredible agricultural growth So the Indiogangetic Plains in South Asia is a major focus for us and three systems in Africa the Sudano-Sahilian Systems in West Africa the May's mixed systems in East and Southern Africa and the Ethiopian Highlands and then on top of that the Prioritization process for our research came out as we have some longer-term research priorities really thinking about advancing the productivity Frontier in both crops and animals looking at at climate resilience and looking at diseases and pests We want to really think about how we can transform these agricultural systems And that requires a research agenda of its own thinking not just how you bring in inputs into a system But how you can transform how that system works and then finally we wanted to really focus on improving nutrition and food safety So now I'm going to shift to going into some examples about how we work with small holders I'm going to pull both from our research programs, but also through some recently launched Scaling activities that are just getting off the ground where we're really bringing the outputs of the research and trying to think About how we can scale those to many many more farmers Then then previously we might have reached But before I do that I just want to kind of highlight the feed the future innovation labs Many of you might have known them by the former name of the crisps of the collaborative research support programs These are now one of the key Partnerships that we have within the feed the future research strategy. They're 24 of these innovation labs Across the country as you can see they engage over 60 u.s. Colleges and universities They are the heart of our research investments and our capacity building investments and each of these works on Both of those as they're doing the research there. They're training students They're working with the institutions in the developing countries and they have real meaningful Partnerships with those developing country partners and they really have a long-standing focus on smallholder farmers If you look throughout the programs of the innovation labs and the former crisps You'll see that that really working with small holders both men and women has been at the heart of what they do So the first example I'm going to tell you about is is Africa rising? It's really our signature sustainable intensification research program Anchored in Africa in those three production systems. I mentioned it's Complimented by a similar program in South Asia that I won't talk about today And in fact we've just added to this portfolio of sustainable intensification a new innovation lab focused on sustainable intensification That was just awarded to Kansas State University So as a side note that program is actually we're putting out its competitive RFAs soon So if you're interested to engage with us in research in this area Look out for announcements from Kansas State on how you might become involved in the research that they're going to be leading Which will really complement the research that I'm going to talk about here under Africa rising So it Africa rising is a huge project. I could I could spend all afternoon telling you about it But I'm just going to highlight a few things in here One is that they work through these innovation platforms and what those essentially are our local stakeholders Brought into groups to really help identify the key research needs So the research that the program is doing on farming systems on sustainable intensification is informed by these innovation platforms This helps ensure that the research is really addressing local priorities But also that the feedback about the technologies in the research is going from those beneficiaries from the smallholder farmers back to the researcher so it's a two-way street and Then these innovation platforms can also be used to help strengthen the market linkages to make sure that the Production side of things is effectively linked to the the markets the aggregators the processors bringing in the extension agents and so forth So it's a real Dynamic platform at the field level to engage the smallholders with all the other actors in the in the value chain What we have a photo here is of the mother-baby trials This is another way that the the program engages smallholders is by bringing in Smallholders into the research process itself many of the research activities are taking place on the farmers fields So it's a very rich relationship there This is one of these guys If I can get to the end without going too far There we go. So this is this is sort of a complex cartoon that that is sort of illustrate the different kinds of interventions and research That can happen at the field level Africa rising really It takes as its unit of research not an individual farmers field But actually the entire farm the entire household enterprise and this helps you get at things There's trade-offs between you might grow maize in your field or you might use an area for livestock or you might want to Use your your leftovers to over as fodder or you might want to integrate it into your into your field So there's all these different trade-offs that you can really only get a good sense of if you're working at the entire farm level But what I wanted to show here was this little basket You I don't know if you can read this on the right, but this this research is essentially about Creating options and and giving smallholder farmers options to choose from so it's not coming in and saying here Are the package of technologies that you need to use in order to be effective? It's saying these are technologies that we have tested that we have tried in collaboration with the smallholder farmers And we know they work and let's work with you to help figure out what might be best in your farm because it's gonna be different If you're a single parent a single mother perhaps With a small piece of land you're gonna be trying out a different range of options than a large family operation with much more labor On the farm for example So this is just an example of a farmer that Africa rising works with Elizabeth Mindy a smallholder in Tanzania. She has five children working on a relatively small farm Through working with the project She was able to pilot test a number of new technologies ranging from new varieties different fertilizer or manure approaches and different intercropping and spacing opportunities and so she actually tried the maze and the pigeon pea intercropping trials on Her farm and then surrounding farmers were able to come and meet with her and see what she's doing on her farm Learn what her experience is which was actually quite positive She did a trial essentially on her farm where she left a small part of her farm in her conventional practice and On the larger part of her farm she tried out these various new technologies and was really encouraged by the yield Increases that that she got so but but by working with a farmer like like Elizabeth who's quite engaged with her community That that learning can be transferred and shared with other small holders in her in her region So I mentioned earlier that we're challenged in thinking about how you involve communities and smallholders and women Even in what might appear to be a more upstream science genomics project that they might be hard to make that connection Through a collaboration with the US Department of Agriculture the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya We're working on a goat genomics project This is about trying to select better genetics to deal with climate change and to be more productive in in smallholder systems in Africa And so there's quite a bit of work going on in the lab on putting together a high-quality goat genome assembly Trying to identify genetic variation and signatures of selection But at the same time the project is now taking this learning and Developing it into community-based breeding programs And this is working directly with the farmers in a community to give them the tools and the knowledge that they need in order to Do selection at their herd level? If you think about a herd of goats You might be incentivized as a farmer to take the ones that grow most quickly and to sell those off when they're young to Increase your income, but that might have a sort of perverse selection On your herd and you would essentially be be weeding out the most productive goats if you did that so this is about Sort of bringing a different approach and you're giving smallholders farmers the tools that they might themselves need in order To to advance their herd selection at the herd level at the community level So that's that's kind of a neat example of how you can bring that genomics learning all the way down To make it useful in the field at the farmer level Here's another one of so this is one of our innovation labs the soybean value chain research innovation lab and They work in Africa Thinking about what there's one of their studies here is on whether and how small older farmers can really engage in the soybean value Chain, I think we think of soy value chains in many places as quite commercial Perhaps not where you'd expect a smallholder farmer to be engaging, but there's evidence in Africa that there's some real opportunities there So the socioeconomics Portion of the study is really focused on a few questions trying to understand is soy being appropriate for smallholder farmers If not, why and if yes, how can you best introduce it? And what are the gender implications in terms of the decision-making and who are the beneficiaries in a family? Another I'll get to this last point on the women's empowerment and agriculture index But this is a tool that I'll describe later that we're actually using within this project So here you have a photo of The the researchers engaging with the smallholder farmers during the socioeconomic work and then you have seed packets here ready for dissemination This is one part of a much larger project looking across the soy value chain another part of this project is looking at at soy milk production something they're calling Vita goat and and trying to think about how smallholder farmers can engage in soy milk production how they can get linked to a broader market through this What's the economic sustainability of the of the soy milk enterprise and how can they train and engage? Community-based advisors to really help the women and the smallholders who are producing soy milk to make it into a profitable enterprise So it's not just a household level enterprise, but it's actually something with with real potential So you'll notice here. I'm going through some legume examples. There's no It's not really a coincidence I think we've we have a really strong focus on legumes across our feed the future research programs We're recognizing that legumes are often a very important income source for women in particular They often tend to grow the legumes and legumes of course are also quite nutritious And so this helps us get at both our income and our nutrition Generating goals and finally of course legumes are an important important part of sustainable agricultural systems So as we saw with the with the farmer in Tanzania if she's integrating legumes into her maize system She has the potential to really make it quite a bit more sustainable and productive So this is an example from our legume innovation lab, which is run by Michigan State University This particular project is is run by the University of Illinois and researchers in Niger And it's focused on integrated pest management in Calpe And it's this partnership between the university researchers the the local partners in in Niger and NGOs who are working at the household level in Niger and they've come up with a number of different strategies to address pests of Calpe and it involves a nemoil mixture and Then a particular virus that that combat the pests but what's really important here is they've been able to work with youth in particular and training youth how to use and how to produce these these products and And of those youth they've had 50% girls in a country like Niger, which is impressive And they're working in multiple villages throughout Niger through these local NGOs So again an example of really taking an approach and a technology trying it out at the field level with smallholder farmers and giving Them the opportunity to test it in their fields and even to be engaged in the production and the sale of the technology Another legume example This is from from Latin America another program run by the legume innovation lab out of Michigan State and It's built on this is sort of I think a nice example to show how the impact pathway goes from research all the way to impacts in the field This is building on many years of research to develop new bean varieties. They're drought tolerant pest resistant really suited to the agroecologies and in Latin America Bean is a is a heavy seed. It's it's not easy to transport it's self-pollinated It's very common for farmers to save their own seed There's not a lot of private sector investment in this market And the markets themselves are fragmented and poor and so in addition to the research effort around developing new bean varieties There was a research effort around actually trying to test out the different models of seed production Should you do it through community-based production? Is there a way to do it through government system? whoever it is they tried a number of different approaches and They came up with using these community seed banks and the community level seed production as a really viable option for these Ecologies for this type of seed and by the end of the project They had reached over a hundred thousand small orders across several countries in Latin America And at the same time they were producing and disseminating through these community Strategies the packages of the rhizobia inoculant to go with the seed So what's really been nice to see come out of this is that our Guatemala mission has now made another investment To really ramp up this effort I'm going to do there is to integrate not just the seed dissemination through the community seed production But really to integrate that with nutrition messaging around how you might improve the quality of your diet at the household level So this kind of gets to something else that we're really focused on within feed the future in particular our research strategy is How can you get those nutrition outcomes at the household level through agriculture investments? It's not simply enough to help people produce more beans Maybe they sell them instead of eating them or maybe they don't have the full range of nutrition information They need a level so we actually have a fair amount of operational research that is focused on specifically that question of how can you Align and how can you design your agriculture investments to get those specific nutrition outcomes that are really one of the top-line goals of feed the future? So now I'm going to shift away from the research into a series of new projects that were just launched many of them with CGI our partners around scaling technologies and these are technologies that are ready to go that have been developed already Perhaps aren't reaching enough farmers for a variety of reasons or we often say they're sort of just sitting on a shelf sometimes And so this influx of resources and attention is aimed at really trying to think about the best ways To get these technologies out the door and Julie Howard's here She was during her time at USA it really involved in in mobilizing folks in our office behind this and getting this entire initiative off the ground This is an example in Ethiopia mark Malt Barley production a lot of these samples I'm going to walk you through our seed based, but in fact the seeds dissemination is happening at the same time with information on Admin practices best practices how you can link to market So it's not just a seed effort as it is really thinking about how you empower smallholders to to adopt a full range of Technologies and to themselves figure out what they want to use To ensure that that that the research outputs are not just sitting on a shelf for in a lab somewhere, but really getting out to scale so that's just an example of of Working with with farmers to grow a new kind of barley that's particularly suitable for Also in Ethiopia another example of community based seed production I think legumes lend themselves really well to community based seed production Primarily because there's so little in many places so little private sector investment that that you can't just say well The private sector will handle seed multiplication dissemination because that's not happening for a lot of these really critical crops that are important to smallholder farmers Faba bean is another one. We're working through Crops to date. I think 10% of the national seed supply in Ethiopia actually is is through community based seed production Another one vegetable seed kits with the World Vegetable Center This is recognizing that vegetables play an important role in in nutritional and dietary diversity and Often are an important source of income for farmers as well So this is an effort to try to increase that year-round access to to nutritious foods Different kinds of vegetables and to give them the Access to the entire packet of tools they might need which could include include seed but but many other things as well And then finally one more legume example in West Africa Scaling both groundnut and cowpea again two crops that are extraordinarily important to smallholder farmers a number of new varieties are coming out of the Pipeline in groundnut. That's varieties with aflatoxin resistance shorter duration Drought tolerance in cowpea. It's striker resistance higher grain fodder yield Resistance to nematodes or aphids so it's it's really again This is an effort working with community based seed production to try to get these varieties To farmers and to help them be engaged and really disseminating and even profiting from the dissemination of these varieties along with The associated tools and and and best best practices that you would need So now I'm going to shift again. I mentioned I would come back to gender When we started Feed the Future it was clear that we really wanted to be working on gender It was extraordinarily important for us to wreck you know We recognize that we were only going to succeed in as much as we could Reach smallholder farmers we could change their access their decision-making powers on the household within the household But we didn't really have a good way of measuring that. How do you know if you're having an impact? All our projects count the number of beneficiaries that are men and women and that's great And it's great that we require you to do so if you're one of our grantees But that doesn't necessarily tell us are we really changing the status for women? Are we changing dynamics? Are we giving them a level playing field within the agricultural system so along with with several other partners? We led the development of something called the women's empowerment and agriculture index and this tool tracks Women's roles and engagement in agriculture essentially relative to men and it's it's a very quantitative tool That you can use to to gauge your progress at right now It's it's being used at the national level or across large areas and it looks over who make it looks at who makes the decisions Who has access to assets and resources who controls the use of the income? What are the leadership roles within the community and how do women and men spend their time and this is a survey-based tool? That we found quite effective, but it's actually now being diversified and we're using it in different ways We're Streamlining a new version of it that can be used in large national surveys But we're also coming up with versions that can be used at the project level and I mentioned that the soya bean valued Chain innovation lab is actually working with that tool at the project level and and we're trying to take the the learning that's come out of Wea and gender analysis and really thinking about it from the project design stage Thinking about it as you're building your impact pathways for a new commodity or new project that you're working with How can you ensure that it's gender sensitive and that you're going to get those gender income or sorry gender outcomes? This is just an example the sorghum mill at innovation lab using gender analysis In the in the development of their value chain work.  It's a nice schematic But it's really thinking about what are the roles of men and women in their value chain and they're doing this before They've even initiated really any research. It's not after the fact how we're going to get this out to women But it's as we get started. How do we really build this in from the get-go and Then just a last slide to show how we use gender assessment in the program cycle Really through design through implementation through the monitoring and evaluation phase and then the assessment and the redesign and at every step In this process thinking about what are the impacts? How can we how can we really ensure that we're getting those impacts that that we that we're trying for for both small-holder farmers and for women And that's all I got. Thanks a lot So it's time for question and comments. So please Anyone before you start? Let me just ask the first question using my prerogative here Sarap I see all the work which is being done and you gave a very good Menu of what's being done under feed the future and other programs my question to you is when you talk to People in sub-Saharan African countries. Do you see any lessening of their concern or quote-unquote opposition to GMOs or is that still there? I didn't even mention GMOs. How come I'm getting a question on them? You hear both I mean there are farmers who wish they could be growing The existing gently engineer crops and they're not able to because their government hasn't yet advanced them through a regulatory system Or there's no one to make them available in a country. You could imagine Something like like a drought tolerant maze or an insect resistant maze or a BT cotton And then you also you hear from farmers that have heard that these crops are gonna be toxic and and have all sorts of problems And they're usually hearing them from sources that are not particularly credible But I think when it really comes down to it the farmers are looking for tools to increase their productivity and profitability and You know, they'd be likely to adopt them if they could Thanks. I was very interested in your technology scaling and your examples of the community based seed production how do you Sort of Work with the the private sector to the extent that there is some private sector I mean particularly vegetable seeds and things like that. I suspect and and how do you? Sort of build in sort of the Evolution of the seed industry I mean in the sense you'd hope that that that some of the community-based stuff would eventually lead to to some women's groups or whatever Building on the current role that they play in in multiplying and selling seeds to to maybe develop their own companies or any how to to figure out a way to work with the The private seed industry as it evolves. Yeah, that's absolutely. That's a great question I think there's a real spectrum There's gonna be some crops in some places where there simply isn't yet a seed industry of any sort and that's where you're working through Communities, there's gonna be other places where perhaps it's a mix different kinds of farmers are either gonna reach out to their Neighbors or to the private sector some crops lend themselves really well like maize for example to really helping to strengthen the local private sector And and doing it that way I think an example of what you described is in Nepal where there's been an effort around community seed production for many years And we're seeing some of those small community groups turn into private enterprises So that's an evolution that I think is can certainly play out in some areas and in some crops that lend themselves better to that You we'd like to see more of it. So certainly something we're working with I'm talking about community seed production in these projects, but there's a range of different investments we make into that seed sector Our work with with Agra in Africa for example is working with with small private seed companies Thank you very much Edma by My question is in the old model Extension services served as a go between between research and farmers where information was flowing one way In this new model where we bring researchers closer to the farmers and we're saying that there's a two-way street of Information flow what do you envision as a role of extension if any at all? And are you funding any extension support work anymore? Is that an old model? Thank you Well, I don't see why the interaction has to be directly always between the researchers and the farmers I think the extension agents themselves can can play a role in there certainly In a lot of places there are more extension agents to go around than there are farmers or sorry than than researchers Certainly not than farmers that would be So I think I think an extension service model that is really Receptive to and working with farmers as opposed to just conveying information to farmers would play an important role in Conveying that information back and forth. I think where we've seen Some really good examples of that and I didn't really talk about South Asia too much But I mentioned we have a program the serial systems initiative for South Asia and it's a bit like Africa rising But it's sort of further along and it's working a lot on models of technology transfer and community-based sort of innovation Platforms and I think one of the things that project has done is Really strengthen and build a new role for those extension systems in the region such that the extension System representatives are actually out there doing joint trials with farmers and themselves being engaged in the research process Once again, thank you for an excellent overview of feed the future And I was particularly pleased to see your emphasis on women in agriculture on the partnership in the innovation labs with the Universities particularly the land-growing universities and your emphasis on nutrition the consumption side of our work but earlier today Jeff Ellers shared some data on consumption or on price prices and projected prices and Over a period of what 15 years to 2025 which showed declining commodity prices and your data or your first slide Suggested an increase in commodity prices and that seems to cut to the heart of Sustainability for our producers are particularly the small holders I wonder if you could comment on the discrepancies between your data Jeff and your your slide on Commodity prices, maybe Jeff might want to comment since I didn't get to see his slide I'm guessing yours was a projection and mine was to date or my I think mine even stopped maybe a year or so ago So I'm not an economist. I probably will just not try to really take a stab at that question, but I think Commodity prices have risen today over where they were where they're going in the future is something we we look to our economists to give Us better information on Thank you. Thank you, sir I just showed a slide from a World Bank report that was looking out to 2025 and it had probably 30 different Basic agricultural commodities and we're showing for most of them slight declines in prices so that by 2025 You know soybeans had fallen from $550 a ton to $510 a ton and so we were trying to You know match that picture with this big food production issue that was on your first slide And and I basically offered it up as a question that I didn't understand the the apparent Lack of linkage between those two numbers, you know, we're facing this huge need to fill You know a lot of hungry mouths, but at the same time there must be the World Bank is figuring there's productive capacity Actually greater than today and that's why food prices are going to be lower They're projecting at least and now you know how accurate I mean I can't say the World Bank's always had a perfect record So, you know, who knows if that's ever gonna come out, but I mean the World Bank has got confidence that everything that we all are doing is gonna be so successful their prices are gonna come back down There you go. They've got a lot of that's a good way to look at it. Thank you. I'll turn it over I feel I have to say something about this. I just went to the if pre Foresight conference last Friday and they have real prices rising in the future So I think, you know, there are lots of different analyses out there For us, we know that if technology grows faster prices won't go up as much. So it's good to keep investing That's the I think the important message that we need I think, you know, smallholders are both consumers and and producers and so This dynamic is always played out in this debate if you're trying to primarily sell things You want prices to be high But if you're also purchasing things which many smallholders are then you want them low, so The big issue for smallholders Yeah So hard in your after rising technology packages, you know You said they're you were gonna have an offer or they're having they have an offering for maybe different levels of farmers or or different individual Situations, is there any financial packages that go with those and because what I worry about is that you know Someone who wants to increase their production simply lacks the you know The little bit of pre-finant production financing to get into that next level of technology package So then they opt for maybe one that's not quite as good but is cheaper and it doesn't really allow them to take that next Step up the economic ladder. Yeah. No, that's a good question And it's certainly something that is part of the mix when you're thinking about transforming and Sustainable intensification. It's it's not just about the biophysical inputs. It's about the financial packages as well I can't say up the top of my head which of the after-rising projects have really integrated that fully or to what extent they're thinking about it It's certainly something that's come up in our South Asia programs as well and and through the different partners in the region Working with with other development partners that may be offering finance Packages or resources that's certainly something that they're trying to integrate Well again, you should have plenty of questions for the discussion sessions We're doing something a little bit different now at 2 o'clock We're going to have those who are funders like gates and USAID and other foundations and If you're an innovation lab person like Michigan State or Virginia Tech or Kansas State Stay in this room and Be a part of the funders discussion If you are a researcher or an outreacher or Some NGO working on the ground with small holders We would like for you to go not next door this time but down to the first level in room 110 for presentations related to working with small holder farmers and so We're gonna Have a chance to get a refreshment There's probably some cookies and some sodas and coffee out there get it on your way down And we will continue in the matter of minutes So that we can continue to get your input Into this dialogue


Hey, Alicia. This is Megan with Oxmoor Toyota. I just wanted to send this video greeting just to personally introduce myself I do see that you were interested in one of our 2016 Toyota Sienna. I want to let you know that this vehicle is still available in the E price that you asked for is in the Body of this email. If you do have any questions or like to schedule a time to come out Please either reply to this email or contact me at<PHONE_NUMBER> And I look forward to hearing from you soon Bye


When we arrived to the catering company's restaurant, we were directed to a back room that was set up for us to do the tasting. It was nice to have a private space that we could go back to and be able to talk amongst ourselves. We spent a lot of time debating the food, and so it was a nice area that we could go to. First, we tried the house salad, which was very light, and the Caesar salad was a little bit heavier but still good, but we really, really liked the house salad. It had a very nice dressing and just tasted really good. Unfortunately, I didn't start filming until after we tried the walleye, the garlic mashed potatoes, and the green bean almondine, but I do show a little bit at the end, and they were all pretty good. We were pretty happy and satisfied with that meal. The next meal that came out was chicken, and it has your meat sauce with mustard. I told myself you should put that on almost anything, especially the chicken, it tastes so good. The last entree, which is your cheese merrioli, and then it got our homemade Italian, they call it gravy, the red sauce they call gravy. This does have some meat in it, if you are wanting to look for a vegetarian option at all, we can make it where it's a meatless gravy. So that is definitely an option that we can eat too. To finish off the tasting, we coordinated about all of our decisions regarding the food and other things like napkins, all of those specific things that would relate to the catering company. So again, we were pretty disappointed that we only had two or three options, but it actually became clear at the end why that was. So it's pretty typical that at most weddings, you only get to have two options.  And then usually you get some kind of starch, vegetable, and a salad. I didn't realize that the starch, vegetable, and salad were actually going to be the same for every single plate. It just wasn't very clear to me. I guess I was thinking we would maybe do like the fish with one starch, one vegetable, and then the chicken with one starch, one vegetable, that would be different. But it was the same. So I guess it makes sense for why they did that, but it was just kind of disappointing that you only got to choose a couple options to try, especially because we could have liked something more, but we didn't get to try it, so we'll never know. So let's talk about each of the different items that we tried. First off, the thing we did not like the most was the mixed vegetables. Weston actually says in the video that they looked like they had just come out of a steamer bag, which I agreed. They didn't seem very elegant and nice, which is kind of what you're going for in a wedding. And yeah, we were just not very happy with that option. And then we really loved the idea of having walleye just again as something kind of more Minnesotan to try. And unfortunately, which is sad because they only cooked one, it wasn't super flavorful. It was still good, but it could have been more flavorful, and so that makes us worried because obviously when they have to cook over 100, what is that going to taste like if the one that they cooked especially for our tasting was not very flavorful? So we're a little bit worried about that, but we have to stick to our guns and we're just going to go with the walleye because we liked it and we want to have that kind of more Minnesotan dish to go with our up north bit of soda wedding theme. And this was actually the same for the champagne chicken as well. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't something that blew us out of the water either. But again, to me, the food doesn't really matter, as I've said in past videos. So I mean, I guess it's not that big of a deal, but it is just kind of disappointing that the one that they had to cook wasn't, again, wasn't just very flavorful and exciting. So when they cook 100, we'll see how that tastes. But oh well, it's not a big deal. It's one meal and we'll get over it. And then for the other entree, I personally did not like the ravioli. It was this weird, like peppery, spicy flavor. And I was very unhappy that it seemed like that was the only vegetarian option and they actually make their sauce out of meat. And so I was just kind of disappointed. They said they could use that to accommodate different dietary needs, but we actually ended up going with something else. So you only get to choose two entrees. You don't get to choose like a third to be the vegetarian, but you can let them know if you need a vegetarian or other option like a vegan or like gluten-free or something like that. So they do offer that as an option, but that would only be for a small number of people. So the ravioli, I guess, didn't really matter because we didn't understand that you couldn't have that. Anyways, we chose a different dish that Weston's mom had actually tried the previous time that we had visited there. So I guess it worked out that we didn't like the ravioli, but we got to try it and figure out if we wanted that to be our vegetarian side dish. But our most favorite food that we tried was the garlic mashed potatoes. And honestly, they were amazing. They were so delicious, so creamy, and they were just really, really good. I'm very, very happy with those. So the food that we went with just to reiterate was the walleye, the champagne chicken, the house salad, and then the two entrees are going to come with garlic mashed potatoes and green bean almondine. And we are pretty excited. Overall, the experience was fun. It was a nice time to get everybody together. My mom and sister went and then Weston's mom and dad went. And it was just a really nice time, especially for having Weston's mom and dad there. They are paying for the food and the drinks. And so it was a nice time for them to kind of get a better idea of what that cost will look like. And just kind of talk through some of those logistic things. So that was really nice and just getting together, trying some good food. And yeah, it was a nice experience for everybody. Again, I'm not too sure what their food's going to taste like when they have to make over 100, which is disappointing because you do pay a lot. But I think it will all be good and I'm really happy. I got to check that off of my to-do list and can now focus on other things. I can get my invitations out and yeah, all that stuff will be good and I'm done with the tasting. So I'm super happy about that. So that is all for this video. I hope you guys enjoyed and I'll catch you next time. Bye guys!


Please don't miss this important statement that's made by Paul and Romans eight. He's already told us in the beginning that there is no condemnation for anyone that is in Christ Jesus. So if you're in him, there can be no condemnation. And look what he does to those that are in him. In verse 28, he says, and we know that God causes all things. He causes though. He is the one that's doing, he's the active agent. He'll take those things, all the things and cause those things to work together for the good. Well, for who's good? Well, to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. So those of us, as he said, who are in Christ Jesus, whatever is happening, he's gonna cause it to work for our good. Many have taken in the past that that is taking a bad situation and turn into a good situation. It's not about a situation or circumstance. It's about salvation. He will cause whatever's happening in the believer. He will cause that to work for his good. Is it possible then for that person to ever become unsaved? Well, not according to this passage. He'll cause it to work for his good. If he becomes unsaved, that didn't work for his good.


Damage associated molecular patterns, damps, molecules released by damaged cells or the ECM which can trigger an immune response when detected by toll-like receptors, TLRs. This process is important for tissue repair but can also lead to chronic inflammation if the body fails to recognize the damps as harmless. Targeting specific damps could be used to treat diseases such as eye, cancer, and atherosclerosis. This article was authored by A. M. Pixonini and K. S. Midwood.


It's just a normal day for the first sergeant at the rain you're gonna need to pull your medic back Yeah, everybody's gonna come back to the line over this and then you guys are good for first sergeant Tehan Nicholson It may be just another day at the office But today the office is at the M240 Bravo machine gun range at the Vaziani training area in Georgia Gunner we're up mentoring and training soldiers only part of the job for Nicholson So what we've done is we've partnered first platoon from Alpha Company third ID first platoon from The Georgian soldiers and also first platoon of Comanche troop together to make one company the creation of this type of ad hoc unit sets up some very basic issues communication because a lot of its hands on so You're able to guide the soldier where you want them if you don't understand the language But once they started realizing that oh, you know, we're out here at the range and the same thing that we're doing The Georgian soldiers are doing that there was no problem for the Georgian Army NATO response force company That is participating in an old partner. It makes us me and my soldiers happiest to work with our Partners and our brothers from overseas that pleasure Training and working together is evident when the soldiers and even the first sergeants get to fire the M240 Bravo machine gun going Sweeney Army Europe public affairs


Well, thank you all Nancy and I appreciate you coming out here to welcome us home Before I bring you up to date on the economic summit. I'd like to turn a minute to my goodwill ambassador Nancy used the opportunity of this Pacific trip to take her fight against drug abuse to Thailand and Malaysia and I'm very proud of the award that was presented to Nancy, but the people in Thailand in Recognition of her dedication. She's really special to me, too. I Understand that she has a presentation I Understand that Nancy has a presentation of her own to make so here's my special ambassador of goodwill Thank you all the young people that you see over there are from the Martin Luther King school and before we left for Tokyo I They gave to me Some letters to be delivered to their sister school in Tokyo and a mural Which I did and they were very very happy to receive them and they sent back a lot of letters to you and This mural which I wanted you to see and everybody else to see and They hope that this will be the beginning of a long friendship and relationship between the two schools and You and them and and a lasting friendship So I was very happy to do it and they were very happy to receive your your letters and your mural. Thank you well Prior to leaving I talked about the winds of freedom About the resurgence of democracy throughout the world and the solidarity among free people We return from Asia more confident than ever that the future is on the side of the free Today the leading powers of the free world are united in purpose and steadfast in their resolve in Tokyo we looked each other in the eye discussed the challenges we face and Reached understandings that will serve the cause of our mutual security freedom and prosperity The seven major democracies represented in Tokyo set out a unified course on a number of vital issues Terrorism as expected was high on the agenda Our unarmed citizens have been murdered Victimized by cowardly attacks that have permitted to continue Threaten not only the flow of trade and travel but the very fabric of our free societies. I Am more than pleased by the commitments made in Tokyo by our summit partners in this regard Our nations acting together have enormous diplomatic economic and military power We agreed the time has come to move beyond words and rhetoric Terrorists and those who support them especially governments have been put on notice It's going to be tougher from now on The decent people of the world as is clear from our statement in Tokyo are not just standing together in this war against terrorism We're committed to winning the war and wiping this scourge from the face of the earth The late Ludwig von Mises a free or a preeminent I should free market economists once said people must fight for something that they want to achieve Not simply reject an evil Well our meetings in Tokyo reflected both struggle and triumph We sought and reached a consensus as to the best path towards sustaining non-inflationary economic growth High taxes redistribution and central planning are not the way to a better life For the last five years ours has been a program of low tax rates high growth and free enterprise and it's worked There are those in less than free societies who would like to think that self-interest makes it impossible for democratic peoples to cooperate The triumph in Tokyo refutes that cynicism Summit members in an extraordinary display of unity agreed to a number of significant economic initiatives We for example agreed to improve the international monetary system through greater interaction between our governments We reached an understanding that trade imbalance questions and exchange rates stability Very tangible issues would not be dealt with as isolated occurrences, but as manifestations of fundamental economic goals and policies We established a new framework for strengthening effective coordination of international economic policy subsidized agricultural production a primary cause of the world's surpluses of food and fiber and A politically sensitive area was seen as an emerging issue of great importance and we discussed it with candor We spent more time on this than any other economic issue In the end we agreed to further analysis and discussion It was a modest step, but perhaps the historic first step Toward the day when our farmers can sell their products at a competitive price Anywhere in the world A high degree of unity was evident in a number of crucial economic questions The u.s program to deal with the large foreign debt in the developing world By encouraging high private sector growth received strong support And the need for a new round of trade talks with an early launch following the september ministerial received a strong endorsement World trade keeping it free and fair Is a major challenge not only of the western democracies, but also to the developing world Prior to the tokyo summit i met with representatives of the six member nations of asian The association of southeast asian nations They agreed with me on the necessity of keeping markets open and getting world frayed flowing The asian countries are Supportive of a new round of trade talks and of a program of growth oriented policies to solve the debt problem in the third world My feet meetings with the representatives of asian gave me a chance to bring their concerns to tokyo It also permitted me the opportunity to confirm our ties with the industrious people of the pacific rim The united states is a pacific rim country And will most certainly continue to play an important role in events in the pacific That the economic summit was held in tokyo was fortuitous There in japan East truly does meet west a land of beauty culture energy and enterprise Today the interests of free people are no longer east or west North or south, but instead are global and universal Free people everywhere of every culture share a bond of the spirit and of the soul We all have an interest in peace the rights of man And in the well-being of everyone who lives on this planet We reconfirm that in tokyo Well again, we both thank you for coming out to welcome us home. It means a lot to us And it certainly is good to be back in the good old usa Thank you again. God bless you all


First up, Matthew, subunit to SQL. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. So I'm here to talk about subunit to SQL, which is a little project I started to solve a problem we had given the scale of OpenStack's CI system. So I'll start with just some raw numbers to give an estimate on how big things are. So when anyone pushes a change to OpenStack, the CI system kicks off 5 to 25 DevStacks, which is a self-contained bash script that brings up and running OpenStack's cloud and starts, we interact with it with second level virtualization. As part of that, we run about 10,000 integration tests, which is using that environment. We basically just run tests against it. There's about 1,000 and 1,500 tests for each DevStack we spin up. And as part of running those tests in a single, we bring up about 1,000 guests using second level virtualization. What this means in aggregate, for the month of December, I used the database, which I'll get to. We ran 12,000 gating jobs. The CI system has two tiers of jobs, check jobs, which are for proposed commits. And once they're approved, they go through a final gate check, which specatively executes them. And we ran 12,000 test jobs just during December, which is a light month, because everyone goes on vacation for the second half. As part of that, we ran 15 million tests, which is a big number. So because of the size, we've come up with some interesting solutions to do some analysis on what we're running. We have an Elk stack elastic search to analyze the logs. But because of the nature of elastic search and the fact that we have some resource limitations by running in clouds, we can only have about 10 days worth of history, which isn't very good for doing long-term trend analysis, because 10 days isn't very long. And we also have things like graphite and other tools, which give us a longer term view, but they didn't give us the granular test level. And since I work primarily on some of the test suites, knowing how the tests run over time is very important, so we can make informed decisions. So the primary motivation was having the ability to look at an individual test and see how many times it fails, for example, or is it getting slower. And one of the big things we've seen with elastic search in the community is that since it's a queryable API, we can write programs that automate finding things in it. We use it, for example, to find known race conditions. We fingerprint them and search through the logs for 10 days and automatically identify known race conditions in test runs. So having a queryable API was key if we wanted to do this. So that's when I started writing subunit to SQL, which is very simply. It takes in a subunit stream and stores it in a SQL database. For those who don't know, subunit is basically a machine parsable output from a test run. It does a lot of fancy things, like multiplexing, and it supports running in parallel and a lot of cool things. And it's got a lot of broad support for most programming languages, and it's very easy to run, and it's got a lot of filters. So subunit to SQL takes in one of those streams and then converts it to some SQL queries or updates and stuff to put it in a database and has three utilities. One is subunit to SQL, which just takes it in, stores it in the database. Then there's SQL to subunit, which just gets a subunit stream out from the database. And then there's also a command to manage the database schema. Since I use Python to write all of this, it's SQL alchemy with Olympic migrations. So we can update the schema over time as needs change. It also provides a Python database API. So you can write Python programs very easily to interact with the data store that you have set up. And I've been using that to play around a lot. It's kind of cool. So for the data model, that didn't, no, it's kind of illegible, I apologize. But there are three basic tables. There's a runs table. And each row in the runs table matches basically one stream. It's basically this is a test job. If you're familiar with the test repository project, it's one, I forget what Robert calls it in that. But if you're using the file repository, it's one number. Then there's tests, which is an aggregate view of all the tests that have ever been run during any of those runs. So each time a new test is run, it gets added to that test table. And if it's already been run, it increments the counters for things like success, failures. And it also doesn't running mean for runtime. And then there's a test runs table, which is basically the product of those two tables where it's every unique instance of a test being run. So let's say you've run three runs with the same test suite. There will be three entries for each time a test is executed. And that table is used to store basically the status code of the test and the start and stop times for the test. And then each of these tables also has a key value store metadata table because why not? And we needed it for runs because we have a lot of metadata associated with our test runs in OpenStack CI. So we wanted to ensure that we could store that information with the data. And since I was adding key value metadata tables anyway, they were there. We actually used the test run metadata table right now, but that's going to be deprecated for what it's used for. So how we set this up in OpenStack's infrastructure is a little convoluted, but cool, I think. So we have our test slaves, which go off and run. And we have our Jenkins masters, which communicate to them via SSH and trigger the jobs, and then pull the artifacts off of them, which then get stored on a log archive server, which is just a big file system, basically. And it's got a web front end on it, so you can pull the logs. That triggers is EMQ event, which a Gearman log client sits there and listens for the events, and pushes a job on a Gearman queue, which then we have a worker that sits there and listens on the Gearman queue for a subunit event, and pulls the job off the queue, processes it using subunit to SQL, and dumps it in a MySQL database we have running on a Trove instance in Raxbases public cloud. And there's also public access to that database so people can interact with it, which is probably a terrible idea because we're going to get DDoSed, but anyone can connect to it. We don't publish the credentials, but we don't keep them private, either. So if you want them, you can ask me. And that's how it works. And we have to do that because of the distributed nature of the infrastructure and some security assumptions with the slaves. The advantage of it is also we can horizontally spread out workers. Right now we only need one, and it seems to be able to keep up with the load from the tests. But if we ever needed more workers to process the subunit streams that were coming in, the Gearman worker section over there can scale out horizontally because they'll just work in conjunction and process them in parallel. But with one service running on one worker, it seems to keep up with the load of OpenStacks CI very well. So now I'm going to talk about some of the cool things I've been able to do with having this data. One of them is catching performance regressions. So this is actually the first graph I generated using Pandas as a time series, and it's incredibly ugly. But it shows you some interesting things, like what's going on on the bottom? Why is it jumping up and down? And that clearly shows that something is running faster most of the time, and a lot of the times it's a lot slower. And the green line is just a running mean because that's what I wrote the script to do. So when I was looking at that, I said, well, what happens if I split those by just group them and look at the graphs? And you can see that the middle line where it's about 150 seconds to execute the test, there's still a significant variance. But that's about expected. When I was looking at other tests, we have about a variance of 40 for runtime. And that just has to do with the nature of running second level virtualization on a public cloud with shared hosts. We get noisy neighbors and a lot of other variables that affect performance. But that bottom group was very consistent. The top group, I believe, is a race condition that I haven't been able to track down yet. But when I was looking at those groups before, the fast runs, which is the green line, they all had consistent metadata. They were all running the stable ice house branch, which is older code, and they were all running on precise instead of trusty, which we run on master. The slow runs were all master and a newer branch of code and all ran on trusty, which is interesting because we had no idea this performance regression was there because looking at test runs one off, you can't really tell. And then there was that slowest group at the top, and there was nothing in the metadata that was different between those runs and the regular slow runs. And my belief is that's a race condition in the test or an open stack that is affecting performance that we can't isolate yet. And it's theoretically possible we could track down what tests were running at the same time and try to isolate the race condition with the database, but that involves more sequel foo than I'm comfortable with. The other thing we can do, which was something that was important to me in the primary motivation, is figure out how often a test fails. So if we run 20 million tests in a month, knowing how many times test X failed isn't very easy to figure out. But using the database, you can write a query.  So this one will look for all the test hot plug nick tests. There are two, which is why I used the like instead of an exact test ID match. And you can figure out how many times it runs. I'm going to bake this into the Python API so you don't have to look at a very long query with an inner join like this. Yeah, and it's pretty quick, at least on the second time, given the size of the database. Because last time I looked, we have about 37 million rows in the test runs table. Yeah, so it solves that problem, which I wanted to use as the maintainer for the test suite to be able to know when it's safe to remove a test. Because if it's constantly failing, or failing 1% of the time, we probably don't want to remove the test because it's catching something. But if it's not failing, then it might be safe to remove it. And the other thing we're starting to use it for, as of this morning, is optimizing the test runner. We use the test repository, test R, which is test runner, runner, which can take previous timing data to make scheduling choices. It groups the tests into multiple workers using the previous timing data. And since we have this giant repository of all the test runs over time, we can use that to extract timing data and populate the scheduler with this information so it can make more informed decisions and hopefully improve test performance a little bit. And the long-term goal is to integrate this in the test repository project so that it's baked in. And we don't have to, yeah, Robert's smiling, so that everyone can use it without having to run commands manually outside of it. Won't work in the CI in the open second because of some permissions issues with the slaves. We don't want to put the credentials on the slaves, but it should work for everyone else. And we're to get some more information. There's the repository. Oh, I shouldn't have put hyperlinks because then it doesn't show up on the slides. But if these slides are posted somewhere, you can click on those links, and that'll take you to the repository, the documentation. And I hang out on those two channels on free note all the time if you want more questions. And I'm always looking for more contributors because it's mostly just me at this point. And that's a shame because I think this is a pretty cool project. So are there any questions? That's all I had for prepared material. And it looks like Robert has his hand raised. I could tell that without even turning around. Cool. So I must apologize for missing the very start of your talk. And as such, are my questions redundant? I'm sorry. What do you do with the attachments, the standard out, standard error, et cetera? Right now they're dropped because I didn't have a good way to store that in the SQL database. I figured some of them get quite lengthy. And I didn't want to store a 100 kilobyte text file in the database along with each because they would be associated with the test runs table, which already has 30 million plus rows for running for two months. So I didn't want to store those in there. What the runs table does have is a link to a artifacts URL. So we use it in the CI system so it can point to where the artifacts could be found. I can answer to that. Oh, yes. So if you do actually whack them in the database and using remotely in my SQL and you don't select that column, it will never be read off disk. And so if you giz at them as well when you're throwing them in there, they're probably going to take up not much space. So it may actually be OK and just use disk until you. Well, it sounds like. Separate table actually will probably use more space. That might avoid any degradation. Yeah, with the row format for NADB, we'll just have a pointer at the end of the site. So when you have a blob, it says it has a pointer off the end to go look at that page. So if you don't actually select that, all you are doing is a little extra eight bytes per row. Well, if you did it in another table, in that table, you'd use a lot more space because you'd have to have the primary key to the lookup as well. That's the other thing. I taught myself SQL to work on this project. So I am by no means an expert on anything. Yeah, something like this has been my to-do for about how many years? Well. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So there's multiple attachments. So since we're designing, there's multiple attachments per test. So my expectation for that would be to be a separate table of attachments. Would it work OK? Yeah. OK. Cool. Question. You said you wouldn't be able to use an integrated version of this where testR itself could do this. Hopefully there's a CI system because we don't want to put the credentials on the... But what about the RESTful API? You said the slaves were considered dirty and we shouldn't put things that have real credentials on them. On the right? Yeah. So what, hypothetically speaking, there was a RESTful API to talk to test repository. Just like it's an alternative back-end, right? If at the local, you'll have SQL, you'll have a web. Yeah. You could have dedicated low-trust credentials for your slaves. Yeah, probably. I mean, I'd have to talk to Jim since it's his CI system. We can figure this out when we're not in this... Yeah, I have some use cases where I want to be able to have random developers throw it up as well so we get data from when you're running Make Check. So the idea is then you could order Make Check for any software project to execute the ones that are most likely to fail for you as a developer first. Yeah. So my general mode of thought on this is that I think we can do something with single-use credentials. So if we have a system that creates a database user and gives those rights to a slave, we could potentially do that. There's a lot of details to work out with that, but we can talk about it. Any other questions? I think it's all in the back. Should we just have the global conspiracy over here in the not corner? So you mentioned that some of the queries get kind of slow. Some of the ones on the test runs table do because there are millions of rows and I'm not very good at writing schemas and there are three indexes on it. We should sit down. Yes, I know. I need people with SQL expertise. That's the... Yeah, a gear. Occasionally, someone discovers I have some knowledge. Well, thank you very much. Thanks.