Namaste, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be across the planet around the world. My name is Greg Prescott from N5B.com and I'm coming to live from Siastiki Beach at the Blue Lifeguard Tower. I did a little walk. As you can see in the distance, there's a drum circle going on down there, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. There's some big events that are going on and I'd like to jump into that if I may, okay? So yeah, the title of this is called On the Edge of Black History and I'll get into that in a minute while people are filing in right now. And it's a wonderful feeling to be where we're at right now, despite all of the energies that are going on that are causing us to purge a lot. A lot is coming up through our lower chakras as what we've seen in our hypers frequencies throughout the last month. The majority of them have been all lower chakras, the root of the sacred world is solar plexus. And as you know, in order to access your higher chakras, you need to get the lower ones right first. So while we have people filing in, I just want to say thank you everyone for joining me here. And if you're watching it on the reported version on YouTube, thank you. There are still ads available, a couple just popped up on N5D, so if you're interested in that, you can just go to the home menu and follow the link. And if you have a product or a service that you'd like to have represented on N5D, do it up. Also, I want to talk about one thing too. Personally, and I wonder if this is all part of the purging process, but I've had this numbing in my feet. And after having a John of God session to basically heal my sciatica and it's gone, I've had numbness in my left foot. Now I have numbness in my right foot. And I was told at the time that it was supposed to be a reminder to put out gratitude for the healing, which I always do anyway. Every day I take my walk of gratitude. But after it went into the right foot, I thought, OK, maybe there's something more into it. And what I end up doing was I got a blood sugar glucose kit, home monitoring kit. And I've been taking my blood sugar tests for about a week. And the numbers go anywhere from like a couple of days ago, I had 92 yesterday. I had 133, which is kind of high. It's almost diabetic. So I might be at the pre-diabetic stage. And that might have been what was causing the numbness in my feet. So what I've been doing is I've been taking CBD oil, not just for that. I also found out I have high blood pressure. My blood pressure, when I initially measured it about a week ago, was 148 over 89. So I've been taking CBD oil. And it's one of the highest ones I can find. It's 500 milligrams. And I'm just taking three drops in the morning, three drops in the evening. And I'm already seeing market improvements. So yeah, today my blood sugar was 102, which is down from 133. That's pretty good. But what you want to do is take at least a month or a week, then a month, history and average everything out, excuse me. So I'm not going to say the brand name of what I'm using just yet, because I want to give it time. But if it's a product that I feel that continues to do what I think it's already been doing, I'll tell you guys about it. But in the meanwhile, I'm just going to keep plugging away and doing what I do. The high blood pressure thing kind of surprised me because I spent a lot of time grounding and at the beach walking and exercising. But apparently, CBD oil is not only good for high blood pressure, but it's also good for diabetics. It's a win-win situation, so I'm looking forward to doing that. Just a reminder that we have a full moon coming up on the 17th. We just had a new moon on the third, a Gemini new moon. Now with the full moon, what happens is the sun is in the opposition to the moon, which illuminates the moon. The moon, the sun is masculine and projected, and the moon is feminine and receptive. So we have two opposing forces going up against each other. So when the moon is waxing, that's a good time. It's growing. It's growing inside, so those are good times to put out intentions for anything to gain. For example, if you want to gain in abundance when the moon is waxing, that's when you put those intentions out. When it's waning after the full moon, as it gets smaller, when it's waning, that's when you want to put out the intentions to remove things such as pain. And that's what we're seeing a lot of here lately with these energies. A lot of people are going through emotional purgings, and it can be quite devastating for many people. But know that it's all in your highest and greatest good that these all occur. Because as I mentioned, you're not going to be able to access fully the higher chakras until you address what's going on in the lower chakras. And that's the key to accessing the heart, the throat, the third eye, the crown chakra. So just a quick shout out to everyone that's joining me here today. Gosh, we have a lot of people. Jody, Vicki, Jean, Yolanda, Amanda, Crystal, Linda, Cindy, Jean, Katrina, gosh, Danny. Namaste, welcome to impromptu, invite the live video here. Ah, it's just a key. Jelena's saying if it's any consolation, I've had low blood pressure on my life, and all of a sudden I have high blood pressure. And about the same time, my heel is killing me with plantar fasciitis. Wow, oops, I don't want to see my foot. Yeah, well, it's interesting, because I know for some strange reason what goes on with me ends up being reflected through many of the people that are watching and listening. And that's why I'm really excited about this CBD oil that I'm taking, 500 milligrams. We'll see where it goes. I mean, there's literally hundreds, if not thousands, of benefits from it. As I mentioned, I'm not going to say the name of it until I get some more verified documentation. I'm taking my blood glucose readings every day, every morning, first thing in the morning. And I'm monitoring my blood pressure. So as these improve, then I'll tell you guys what I'm taking, because I don't want to send you guys on a wild goose chase. But if it's doing something miraculous, heck yeah, I want to tell you about it. So as you guys can all sense and feel, we are on the edge of galactic history right now. Many of you are familiar with Schumann resonance charts. And what I just saw, and I'll be making a video in the middle of the month for my Patreon followers, a mid month Patreon energy update. But I'll release part of that also on YouTube. But what I saw, and I'll put this part out there, is somebody went through and took the Schumann resonance readings for every day of the month, from January all the way through May. And what you can see in physical proof is what's been happening on the Schumann resonance. It's gotten to the point. And I mentioned this a few months ago, that this would become the norm. What we've been seeing on the Schumann resonance charts, this will become the norm. And it has been. What we're seeing are whiteouts basically all the time. There's a lot of things that are going on outside of the Schumann resonance as well. But you have to wonder if these occurrences are also in connection. For example, I just posted an article today on M5D about all these ships that are around the sun. Right now, why are they there? Obviously they are the lovelinks, friendly ships that are there observing us. And there's a lot of people that are waiting for us to join them at the big party. And we can all sense and feel that that's where we're heading, and that's where we're about to be. That's where these high-pitched frequencies of the lower chakras are coming in. Pay attention to them. Make sure you're getting out there and grounding, tuning into them. And when you ground, be sure that you ground yourself fully into the earth.  Because sometimes when you're out in nature, you may tend to exit through the crown chakra, basically. So, this is somebody's trying to contact me here. So that's basically everything I wanted to say about what's going on. There's some huge things that are gonna be happening. If you haven't seen the latest article I just posted, it's from Aluna Hash. And there's some energies that are going on right now that I believe start on the 13th, and then there's more energies that are coming in on the 21st. I believe I don't have the names, dates, and numbers in front of me. But expect more of this stuff coming in right now. It's happening as we speak. And even though we're getting these lower chakra frequencies, those are reminders to stay in, to hang in there, and to continue doing your grounding, doing that work to clear those lower chakras, to prepare you for what's happening coming up. Now, as for me, I'm gonna keep plugging away. I'm gonna be doing my CBD oil every day. I'll let you guys know what's going on with my progress. Lastly, just want to remind people that if you are watching, they are advertising-responsible on N5D. So if you have a product, a service, it's a little windy there. If you have a product or a service or a business that you like advertising, you can advertise for as low as $100 a month. Be sure that you subscribe to N5D as well for either our daily or weekly newsletter. So that way you'll be kept in the loop about what's going on. Gosh, my hair's all over the place. I wish I could have kept track a little bit better. It's hard to read all the comments that are going on when you're on a cell phone. A lot easier when you're on a laptop. But right now, I think I'm gonna go head over to the drum circle. It's over there. Looks like a nice crowd. It's kind of cloudy out right now. A little overcast. I know we're expecting rain later on in the next couple of days. So I figured I'd get out of the house. Get a little exercise in. Let's try to lower that blood pressure a little. So anyway, hang in there. I know what you're going through. I'm going through it too. So there's a lot of purging going on. But we're gonna make it through it. All right. We're gonna end up on top of it all. So until the next time, I'm sending you all infinite love and light. This is Greg from n5d.com. Thanks.


Hi there, my name is Haley Sweetland Edwards. I woke up with a cold this morning. So sorry for the sniffles We're gonna follow more or less the same Agenda that we did for the last panel each of our panelists will talk for about five minutes And then we'll have a discussion amongst ourselves, and it'll be opened up to questions from the audience So hold on to them as as people are talking I'd like to introduce everybody we've got Robert Taylor First we speaking first. He's the alpha eminent scholar and professor of agricultural policy at Auburn University Next we'll have Mike Calacrate From the front lines. He's our he's our rancher in Colorado and can talk about what a lot of this consolidation actually looks like for on the on the front lines and and how you can care for animals in The setting next we have Sheila Nichols She's the director of Missouri Food Corps and Ozarks Regional Food Policy Council And she's also been very involved in an effort to build a new locally integrated market system We look forward to hearing about and Last we have Andrew Gunther who is the director of animal welfare approved that stamp a w a that you see on your food Sometimes He's also the former VP of procurement for Whole Foods Clarify was next to VP. Oh, we didn't we had global labels the former Executive global Got it So with that, I guess let's start with Robert Taylor as Patrick Chart showed we've had massive Horizontal concentration at one market level in the global agricultural system, but we've also had massive vertical integration the the dean of the ag law professors now retired Neil Harrell referred to this combination of horizontal concentration and vertical integration as a deadly combination, it's all about power and control controlling the farmer and To some extent the consumer Animals don't matter it's only dollars and To an increasing extent Farmers don't matter that much either. It's really a modern Plantation system. There are numerous social aspects to that. I'm an ag economist not a sociologist we have a couple of sociologists here that know much more about that but This vertical integration system especially in poultry leads to loss in economic freedom for the farmers Loss in consumer choice you walk into a grocery store You know look at the section with bacon and I know in Alabama there may be 15 or 20 brands there and Probably all of them come from Smithfield and probably the same hog from a genetic standpoint feed standpoint same for chickens so a lot of the consumer choice is deceptive in The vertical integration system. There's a lot of contracting. There's extensive contracting between farmers poultry growers and The integrators processors wholesalers. It's very one-sided contract Gross imbalance of economic power and that's where the problem is and then we have Contracting between the processors wholesalers and the retailers the fast food places and the grocery stores and it's evolving to where the retailers are locking in a profit Evolving to where the processors are locking in a profit who's left out of the equation farmers and consumers The Especially in the poultry industry the the captains of industrial farming Really treat growers and farmers as surfs it can be a good relationship and sometimes is and The poultry sector integrated in a matter of two years or so in the 1950s up until the early 90s It was a good deal for growers and growers and the poultry companies known as integrators We're kind of family and they looked out for each other But since then the growers have been squeezed more and more and more and With the squeezing of farmers and ranchers a Law prof at University of Wisconsin by the name of Peter Carstensen says farmers are caught in a vice Because they buy inputs from highly concentrated people with monopoly power and Have to sell or provide products to buyers that have a lot of power. They're squeezed in a vice Telling me doesn't know how to spell. Maybe you should spell it visee and not vi se and at times at times it Can be I've been asked to talk about the tournament Pay system that is widespread use in the poultry industry. It's how growers are paid I Could talk about it at length until your eyes glazed over there are a lot of subtle details but basically in a complex which is a small area surrounding a feed mill and a Processing plant Tyson or pilgrims pride JBS whoever the flocks that are processed in a given week are Put into what is called a tournament and the cost are calculated for each flock and For the growers that have high cost their unit pay Comes down and for those that really have low cost they get a higher unit pay The end result is that the integrator knows exactly what they're paying for all of those chicks the grower pay fluctuates a lot and quite often fluctuation and grower pay is do as much if not more to decisions made by the poultry company Than the growers management So even though economists in the industry call it a tournament to me It's more of a lottery and the problem is it can be a rigged lottery. I'm not saying it always is but but it certainly Certainly can be rigged and settlement sheets growers get they cannot they have absolutely no way of Verifying the numbers used in calculating their pay So there's no transparency Thanks so much Bob a lot of questions there We'll hear from you now Mike. Thanks Thank you my calichrate Colorado Springs, Colorado and st. Francis, Kansas I Mark Dopp being in the room reminds me of those years. I was Many years ago really that I was at the NCBA gatherings and Bruce Bass would go to the microphone and dominate the room He was the head buyer for I B P and and would say absolutely anything I mean and and everyone was so in fear of him that they wouldn't challenge him and and so You know policy at the National Cattleman's Beef Association became very much in favor of the meatpackers over those who produce and and so I just I just That gives me a feeling that I that I don't like to have And it also I think establishes even more in my mind how long the debate has actually been over It is nothing but just empty Crap that comes out of these folks mouths anymore From the from the other side standing up defending the biggest corporations on the planet as if they needed it and And and these are people who are paid to come to this town and do business and of course We pay our own way to come to this town and do business But it was in 1975 that I graduated from Colorado State University with an animal science degree Now that is not to be confused with an animal husbandry degree and of course I got out of there thinking I want to be the biggest cattle feeder in the world and I want to Be efficient and I want to have all the economies of scale and I really thought technology was cool And if Zill max would have been around then I'd been using it But I tell you what I I didn't realize though when I got out of Colorado State University And I built my first feed yard three years later that the big meatpackers had already decided to cooperate rather than compete They'd already got together and said it makes more sense for us to get along than to not get along and They were guided by some some top institutions in this country called the Harvard Law School in that and that in that decision and so Here I am in the fool's game not even realizing it until about 1988 to 1990 when ibp started talking about the formula You know, we were getting out of bed every morning in literally in fear Absolutely in fear many of us in fear for our lives and our livelihoods Under the pressure of these big meatpackers. I went from having 20 meatpackers to sell to in 1978 to having one in 1998 and zero in 1999 when they blackballed me St. Francis of sissy said the way men treat animals is likely the way men will treat other men I Would also say the meant the way men are treated is the way men will treat animals and When I have witnessed the last 30 years the exit of farmers from the land at the rate that we've seen and we've heard those numbers Earlier today the only way that you can get an animal like a sow in a gestation crate Or an egg laying hen in a in a cage less than the size of a notebook piece of paper is To remove the farmer from the land to industrialize agriculture No farmer no real farmer would do that with and especially without the pressure of The price the big packer and their abusive market practices coming down on those farmers in St. Francis, Kansas. We've lost half the kids in our school system Our main street has been decimated by the Walmart in Goodland, Kansas Houses are for sale all up and down the streets of our of our community We've got a handful of a big industrial farms left and They're getting bigger and the farmers are continuing to be driven out of business even today I get up every morning With one thing in mind. How do we increase income at the farm and ranch gate and Produce the very best food possible from our family farms and ranches Thank you Thank You Mike, and I hope everyone's taking notes of questions they have later Sheila you're next. Thanks. Thanks so much for having this I'm from Springfield, Missouri. I'm a small farmer a very small farmer. I work with my neighbors and in cooperation We produce our beef our poultry pork raw milk and produce. I have the land I have the spring we work together. It is a beautiful system, and I know my farmer I know my food I support the people in my community that are doing this and I'm a firm believer as a real food advocate People do want to know people Really want to know where their food is coming from and how it's processed We have seen that in state after state by trying to get bills pushed through labeling Whether it's GMOs or our meat people do want to know they they truly do I came to this as part of the Ag Policy Council in Missouri from HSUS Humane Society of the United States and Missouri right now is really pretty much ground zero for what's happening in big ag versus local ag and family farmer versus factory farming and It has become So apparent to me. I mean almost painful to the point that as I try and promote my local family farmers I am being ostracized by being part of HSUS because everybody needs a boogeyman and When we want to rule from a place of fear That keeps people where they are and from not asking questions You know what I have a nonverbal disabled son that made me the woman I am and I learned to fight for him and I will fight for a fair and just humane Sustainable food system starting at a local level a regional level and a national level The debate is over It's time that we all join forces and that we find our common ground to level the growing field And that's the only way we're gonna do this is to find what we can agree on in Missouri We just last year our Republican legislature overturned the governor's veto Which allowed foreign ownership right now The Chinese company Shanghai that bought out Smithfield owns 50,000 acres in Missouri So basically one out of four pork chops in Missouri is Chinese owned We have a bill right now. That's about to come out of committee that erases Even needing the Department of Agriculture's approval for additional land purchases as long as a company can produce a W9 Which any foreign company as long as they have a US company holding can do We also have when I say ground zero we also have right now coming up in November a Constitutional amendment for the right to farm folks. We already have the right to farm that is protected by a statute this right to farm Constitution will give blanket protection to the gag industry So if this Chinese corporation Moves a huge hog kefo into your little next to your little farm and let's say their lagoon happens to leak Their manure lagoon happens to leak That farmer next to them will have no recourse They will have constitutional protection and I heard it This Missouri is the first state and they are looking to move to other states for Constitutional amendments for the right to farm no other industry would be afforded that protection Maybe we need a right to mine Maybe we need a right to frack It's time that we look out for the health of our bodies our communities our environment The the economic impact and the well-being of our communities our small communities. We're all one We start as little communities and we grow to bigger ones, but the health is in absolute jeopardy and As long as we wait for convenient Not wait as long as we allow for convenience and we don't stand up and do what we need to do Then we will be basically at the mercy of the system.  It's up. Thank you. Good morning Before I start I'm not even going to get into the the ins and outs of the trade agreements and whatever What all I can say is that our agricultural system is broken and My life is somewhat privileged I wake up every morning and I work with about 1700 farmers across 48 states and Canada Who are farming on pasture and range and we ordered those farms from birth to death? But I've met some great people and I was in Aspen because it's a terrible place to be and the scenery is awful And the food is terrible With a guy called Barton Siever who's a guy on fish and what does a fish guy know about agriculture? And the answer is an awful lot, but his phrase and I steal it is farming is the way we interact with our planet And we're not doing a very good job. Are we? Everything we do with food animals is related to our bodies because we eat them and To the land that they survive on or don't as that may be Animal welfare approved has a very specific position in this conversation We are not going to attack farmers. We think that's the wrong thing to do farmers are the custodians of the countryside What we'd like to do is to divorce farming and farmers from the large corporations that pretend to be farmers or farming But we all have to take responsibility for the position. We're in right now We are a free market society We allow the snake oil salesman to continue We listen to what they have to say and when somebody says put a label on it We have a big pushback that says no no no you should start your own farm and make your own label Well, I want to be really clear that things like feedlots and confinement feeding are not sustainable either for the animal or For the environment or for the community or for human health They cause E. Coli. They cause salmonella the abuse of antibiotics is causing antibiotic resistant and yesterday We had a big conversation about the new FDA regulation and the interest groups were out in full force Because there are groups that say that we should not use Antibiotics without a vet and there are farmers that don't have vets and I use this analogy because it's hot to trot There are a lot of groups that said you have to have a vet AWA stood up and said hey, we've got farmers who are brilliant farmers They're outdoors on pasture and range their animals very rarely get sick their experts and they need access to antibiotics But the interest groups got involved So the issue actually got confused So there's the potential to hurt good farmers in order to change the way big ag Once their animals to be produced So I think our interest today is to say there is another way within the free market And that's to bring audited third-party labeling honest open transparent labeling and a question I ask often I'm sure you all know the answer What does natural mean in the terms of the USDA FSIS definition? Do we think it means animals are outdoors on pasture and range anybody think that natural would mean that wave your hand in there If you think that's a good definition Natural so no yeah, let me give you the definition of natural as it applies from FSIS Minimally processed to words when you see natural on a meat product. It means minimally processed That's all it means no more no less And if we're allowing those labels to appear on our meat and we get into cool And one of the reasons with cool that it's difficult particularly if you've got grind and We've got a global meat industry and we do this is our drive for cheap food And I call it so-called cheap food Okay, we export Whole muscle to another country to have it converted into nuggets and sent back because in a dollar value in a nickel-and-dime society That's profitable But if we add in the real cost of carbon the real cost of human abuse in Packing plants the real cost of farmer abuse in terms of some of the contracts that are incredibly abusive That food is amazingly expensive and until we the people in this room get up as consumers and Pay the real price of food to real farmers the system will not change no matter how broken we think it is Thank you Thank you so much all of our panelists here I have I think many more questions then Then we can fit into the next five or ten minutes, but I Had the pleasure of sitting next to Andrew last night at dinner and we talked a lot about The solutions to this problem because those of us who are interested in this field that can just feel Just so overwhelming so much of it is is broken from You know sustainability and nutrition and obesity and the welfare of animals and all of these things and and This panel is specifically addressing the welfare of the animal so I wanted to Sort of jump off what Andrew said at the end there about we can still have a free market model, but use Effective labeling to Correct the marketplace. I wanted to know what the other panelists thought especially Robert Who can talk a little bit more about the tournament system and how that is how that puts the farmer in advice but also Forces farmers to treat their animals in a certain way Thank you. Oh, okay In contract poultry production the grower this so-called contract farmer Makes very few decisions they have to go through the house daily Make sure there's feed water Environmental conditions correct pick up dead birds and so forth, but they make essentially no critical decisions About what's going on the integrator poultry company owns the bird They own the feed They decide How many chicks we'd be delivered when they will be delivered? They own the feed They make the feed deliveries they make the decisions when the type of feed will be changed as the bird matures They decide when the bird will be picked up and processed so that the grower has a very Not not many Options available on how the birds are treated treated it is the integrator that decides how many birds about 1.25 per square foot so one bird has about this much space in a house So You know the animal welfare issue is controlled largely by the poultry company and not by the farmer grower And Sheila in your home state of Missouri, there's Your attorney general is going after some of the changes that California is attempting to make in that Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, um Chris coster our attorney general has filed suit against California because of their egg laws Because California has decided that they want their eggs to come from chickens that have a more chickenly way of being You know We feel that like I said earlier you are what you eat and you are what you eat eats and How they live and the people of California have decided that they want their chickens to have a more humane environment They feel it's going to be healthier Less salmonella less E. Coli less back to less antibiotic use and Chris coster along with five other states have now joined suit in suing California stating that it's Pardon me it goes against the competitive clause for the states to be able to sell and So it's going to be very interesting to see Just to be really clear that there isn't an antibiotic usage in laying hands. They don't use antibiotics in production laying hands And and just also to be completely clear the Californian prop 2 is to increase the size of a cage minusculely and add a perch So for those of us that get chickens, we're not convinced. That's a humane way forward, but it's really interesting to see Industry fighting back using trade laws To block what is potentially a move forward But if we put labels on that product and said that this is from a caged hand There is some European research that states people eat less eggs if it says caged hand on it You know, I wonder what they do if there was a picture of a sow and a farrowing crepe on their pork chop You know, I mean can we drive the market by some honesty and transparency and understand I keep saying this I'm not railing on farmers real farmers try to do the best they can in the business They're in they're trying to pay their college fees for their kids. We had a farmer in Washington state And I don't want to to rail on this too much Who made the choice between buying health care for their family and buying farm insurance? So if we have a benefactor in the room, they need $35,000 to rebuild their bond It's sadly burnt down because they chose health insurance over, you know So there's some real issues at that farmer level that we've got to address and we can address it with transparency You know, if we get the journalists in this room to talk about how an animal is in produce without it being inflammatory You know, we mustn't be inflammatory. We mustn't want to stop farming. We mustn't have an anti meat agenda We must allow farmers to make a living But if we can show how animals are being produced and the net result on the planet if you're interested if you're green by that sort of meat if you're Into your own health By that sort of meat or if you're into the animal welfare, maybe you don't eat meat at all But as long as we're transparent our market should work And Mike I'd like to hear from you on this as well. Do you you said something interesting about 1975 you had 20 meat packers to choose from and by 1988 I think it was you had one and by 99 there were zero But how has that affected your business and and the welfare of your animals? Well, it was 98 I had one okay, and in 99 I had zero And it affected my treatment of animals severely because I didn't have any I emptied out my feedlot it was Done it was a big empty place 15 people lost their jobs and went to town and And it had a big impact on our community but We found a solution we found a way around it and and it's called a company wrench foods direct that I got angry I guess at the big meat packers, and I said I'll tell you what I'm going to do I'm going to produce my own meat and it's not going to be based on this industrial model and When you eat my meat, I'm going to be responsible for it, and I'm going to do the very best job I can of producing it and Absolutely, I'm going to treat these animals With dignity and respect and in a very humane way because the fact is when you do that It makes more money. Yeah, it works better and and in fact industrial agriculture does not work It simply doesn't work without a whole bunch of subsidies, and I and I'm with Andrew I'm saying why do we call these guys farmers at all? They aren't farmers. They're they're corporations with a lot of refugee workers. I mean How many languages do you have to speak in a typical big meat-packing plan to communicate or? A hog farm and why in the world that our kids want to come back to a factory hog farm? To work and and and to resume the life that that the parents had had led in such desperation And so I'm all about rebuilding a food system around sustainable restorative practices Around humane treatment of animals and nothing but really the very best food that's possible to produce But it's really really hard and we hear Bob Taylor talk about the predators in the marketplace And if we don't control the predators in this marketplace the monopolies that mark Dopp and Janet Riley stand up for every day We cannot build the alternative food system. They will snuff it out They will crush it and when I go up against every day in Colorado Springs with Cisco Coming in and in predatory pricing paying Kickbacks to chefs and to kitchen managers and the lies that come out from these big Food companies like Cisco who's now buying US Foods Justice Department. What are you gonna do about that one? We don't have a hope because family because Farmers markets are great, but what farmers really need is a market Thank you. I think in my last question and then I'll open up to the audience and one thing we all of us keep touching on here is a theory of change and Andrews talked a lot about transparency and labeling things like that But I think that what a lot of you have alluded to is a collective action problem so when it comes to labeling and people making choices about their meat and It that will inevitably skew towards maybe wealthier consumers those who can afford to Go to Whole Foods those to afford to read the back of of their boxes and I wonder what all of you think and I'll open up to the whole panel about what needs to happen Maybe politically what needs to happen? Besides journalists here talking about some of the issues that you're addressing We have the conversation last night. Let's get home economics back in schools Let's teach people to cook and part of home economics is knowing the nutritional value of your food How to make best value of it and we don't need four pounds of chicken to feed a family of two in one night You know, we can go back to that system And I'm a guy trying to get back from pre-diabetic and all sorts of other health issues because I've eaten too much garbage food And I'm really good at it. I've run through an airport and grab this and grab that but you know We've got to do that So I think bringing home back into schools would be a really good idea and for all the big-ag companies Why don't you go ahead and fund it and sponsor it be a really good idea show your credentials? amongst other things like I think I think we're doing a lot that Food Inc. I think in my view was a turning point for people's understanding How broken our food system is and and you know, I suggested at a gathering once that Wall Street ran off with the loaf of bread and we're all fighting over the crumbs and and but we were also talking about You know farmers markets and people, you know trying to build this new food system stuff And one of the women in the in the audience says well I'd suggested we've got to get much more active in politics and we got to get good policy And she says that heck with Washington corporations control it Let's just bake our own bread and I said, you know what if you bake your own bread though, and you're not engaged Bacon bread will be illegal. And so you do have to get engaged We do have to have better policy and we all have to become citizens again Barry Lynn's message Transition yourself from that aggressive price shopping consumer to being a citizen Does that feel good to hear and do perhaps The country's run by those who show up I firmly believe it and Once you know you can't unknow about your food. I'll never forget the first time I saw The pictures and now that the ag-gag bills are coming out. It is trying to limit that view for people Once people know once they see it. I truly think I can't I can't buy meat That's a story any longer. I probably buy 40% of all my food locally. I know where everything comes from not everything but of what I buy locally I know how it's raised but truly we have got to quit being so lazy and Convenient as the nation the health of our bodies our communities our economy our environment depend upon it and when we show up Stand up Then then we have control and we feel much more in control of ourselves in our environment And we don't have to live in that place of fear. You can either choose a place of love or a place of fear and I choose love Robert do you want to say anything on that or should I open it up? Okay, I'll say one thing in general It's ironic that many of the ag business corporations When they were much smaller they owed their success to offering what consumers wanted and they made a big deal about that We're successful because we're offering what consumers won't and they did Now they're spending billions to tell you what you should want you want GMOs You want this chicken you want this hog and so forth Well, we have about a little over 15 minutes here So I'm going to open it up to the audience. Please say your name and your affiliation my name is Roberta Stanley and I've worked for the state of Michigan and I worked on the house head and labor committee on child nutrition programs And they're a great beneficiary of commodities and so forth. We tried to change a little bit at one point, but Since they're a great consumer and they can kind of drive policy Given that the school systems are some of the great users of the food Would you address some of the issues that might enter into that discourse that you've been having and also? It's it's human ecology now and you're right if we direct children on how to eat better as young people that ties into my earlier question They do that throughout life Michael take this one. Yeah, I really like that question In Colorado Springs at district 11 Rick Hughes is the food manager on in the school system It's the largest in southern Colorado. They serve 25,000 meals a day or so and Rick used to work for Sodexo years ago And and the board of district 11 came to Rick Hughes one day about six or seven years ago And they said hey Rick, you know, we really like you, but we don't like your company Sodexo Would you consider coming to work for us and doing the in-house food management program in Rick Hughes said yes? Well, one of the first people who came to it was myself with French food direct and said can you supply beef to our school? And I said wow absolutely I would love I would love to do that and and over a period of time Rick is Eliminate the processed foods in that school and and eliminated all the chemicals and and buys as much as Possibly can I mean we got the Arkansas Valley 38 miles south that a lot of fruits and a lot of vegetables mostly the fruits are over the mountain But but we've got a The school is the center of an education piece not only not only for the kids But but how about all those people he taught to cook in the school kitchens? I mean we've got some great support with live well Colorado now Getting behind this effort, but I don't know of anywhere in the country That's further ahead in this issue than Rick Hughes with district 11 in Colorado Springs And so he's a very very key component in in building that food system and and Rick is Teaching others as well now and so the folks that Rick that used to work with Rick initially have left and been Given better jobs in Greeley, Colorado, which now is doing what Rick is doing We've got the Boulder School District and Cooper you many of you know and Cooper She's doing it. We've got some really cool things happening And so the school lunches is a big big opportunity But the problem is is infrastructure available Within these places to be able to provide that local food And so we've got to rebuild a lot of infrastructure that the big meatpackers have eliminated over the years through their through their Predatory practices and and it's going to be very very hard and we have to come together as communities to build these things as communities Please just jump in well I mean we've we've been working with school districts and hospital districts across the US and the issue Fundament is the price given to buy the meal If you're looking at a buck 60 or buck 50 and that's you'll you'll you'll price to buy a meal That's what you're done Mike sort of put the point that it's the big meatpackers that have moved the kitchens out of schools It isn't it's budgets It's a group of folks like ourselves on the school board that try and balance our budget and we can get a meal For a buck 40 in a box rather than two and a half dollars But there are some innovative ways to do and if you guys want to have a go at it will come and work with you and try and find Farmers it'll do it, but it means Decreasing portion size because if you're going to pay more for a different quality You're going to have to have a slightly smaller portion size We fed 1500 people in the food bank in New York at less than a buck 29 ahead using heritage turkey and local grown potatoes But we had to have a chef To take that raw commodity and turn it into an edible dish We don't have enough chefs in schools anymore. They're gone, but we again We're responsible for going back to this bottom dollar if we want our school districts to function as a sort of Low-hanger on our on our state our city budget Well, you're gonna have cheap food if we say to that our kids are our future Let's give our school more food food budget. We'll get better food It's math the whole thing is based on dollars, but we'd come and work with you in a heartbeat We got farmers that love to supply you. I just like to Bring it to the point that in the child nutrition program reauthorizations There's a farm-to-school link and program and one of the most Forthright and upbeat programs actually was in New York City the largest Server of food but throughout the country where we do produce food those farm-to-school programs are being Very very successful, and I know like the chair of the Senate Ag Committee Debbie Stavnau throughout her career She grew up on a farm. She's been promoting them as has spread up to the chairman of the energy and commerce committee in the house Thank you Like what's jumping here, you know Andrew brings up a good point about the cost of this food But I thought what was really interesting about district 11 Andrew was in the very first year and their very first attempt at going local and Getting rid of Sodexo. They saved $250,000 and that's buying the good food Today that number is a half a million dollars in savings over what Sodexo would have cost And so there that that is not always true But in the other cool thing that's happening now in Colorado Springs is University of Colorado Colorado Springs is combined with the University of Colorado Medical Medical School and They've decided to kick out Sodexo and go local and employ 75 students Learning how to cook and work in that those kitchens And so now we've got another major university that has gone local as well as CC made the switch to bone Appetite and away from Sodexo. So this is really Exciting stuff that you can actually save money by kicking out the the big food service companies And if the big food companies didn't have all those subsidies to begin with to produce that and all the tax benefits that they get To do that and then when those Products don't sell on the shelves and get put back into the food banks that get put back serving the poor people and communities Then there's another tax break there. So I think that we really need to look at the cost of These meals from the very beginning of the subsidies and Just briefly Sodexo. They're a full service. They're not a distributor I think my concern as we get the two confused We do need distribution and large companies are really efficient at it And if we're going to feed some of our rural schools We might want to think really careful about what support structures we get rid of because we still have to get Food to to smaller communities But I think getting rid of something like Sodexo who profit from making it in every part It's a really good idea, but I think US foods are now very much moving into moving Sustainable product. They're in this market right now looking for farmers. The issue is volume You know and my previous employment, you know farmers would come to me with one cow a week and say hey we want to supply you Understand most meat cases move five or six whole cattle a day You know so there is a volume issue and an insurance issue and a repeatability issue We can't just fix this with a little small farm bolting on so I mean I'm not in favor of Sodexo at all But I don't want us to kick out the distributors. They're really efficient at it all the more reason for food hubs and Developing things like that to do the distribution and aggregation of local food. Great. Let's have another question Yeah, Bruce Friedrich from Farm Sanctuary and just to clarify the situation with Sheila's Attorney General Chris Coster and the dispute between Missouri and California the Proposition to is not the law. That's that's under dispute and proposition to says that Animals should be able to stand up spread their wings and turn around without coming in contact with another animal and The industry is trying to frame that as saying that it still allows cages But it very clearly doesn't allow cages So we probably don't want to find ourselves in a situation in which we're seeding something fairly important Proposition to past with more votes than any other proposition in California history and the people who voted for it thought that they were voting for cage-free and The law that Chris Coster is suing over under the Commerce Clause should have the same effect as proposition to it's AB 1437 and it says that eggs cannot be sold in the state of California Unless they're compliant with the same standards as Prop 2, but it's the big agribusiness industry That's trying to say this still allows cages And it really very clearly doesn't Thanks for that clarification. Thank you Let's have another question in the back there Thank you, I'm Dave level I'm one of those pathetic serfs who is entrapped by the big major corporations on the poultry business 22 years ago. I was Struggling to make a living and my mother suggested I take a look at the poultry business I did eventually got into it now 22 years later. I probably I'd earn most of the people in the room. I I Also am an environmentalist. I work with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation I yesterday in the day before hosted a tour from three poultry growers from the Shenandoah Valley All three of them told me and they all three raised poultry for different companies that poultry is what keeps their operations profitable so You know that this this complaint about the tournament system I'm incredibly happy about the tournament system I work harder and I do a better job than most of the other growers in my area And I make more money as a result of it do to eliminate the tournament system would bring in basically pure Socialism to pay us all equally because if I'm gonna make the same amount of money as the guy down the road Who's not getting up in the middle of the night to take care of the alarm call when something goes wrong The chicken eyes why should I get up in the middle of night and take care of the alarm call? There goes your animal welfare welfare right at the window. I work harder. I do a better job. I make more money I'm damn glad of the tournament system. I Would I'd like to have actually Robert or Mike respond to that one maybe Robert first I'm sure you can find growers like you that are happy, but all available Objective information on cost and returns to contract poultry production done with proper Managerial accounting not tax accounting Show that most years the average contract grower loses money after you take out a very modest Fee for unpaid labor Basically minimum wage Are you including the fact that depreciation on the farm falsely lowers the income of the farm? It's a phantom Expense specifically the best set of information available Comes out of the Alabama Farm Business Analysis Association, which I have absolutely nothing to do with It was recently terminated by extension, which is a sore point with many of us but it's where an Ag economist with a graduate degree sits down with the growers And goes through all of their records for Managerial accounting they also do the tax accounting, which is much different and Over the ten years or so that they have summarized that they do this very carefully you know most poultry operations have cattle and maybe a few crops and they Properly apportion this but it shows that I Don't remember the exact number but three out of four years. They have actually lost money Yes, I'm saying they do the complete managerial accounting all of that is available on exactly how it's done Let me make one more point USDA has morning and afternoon cattle and hog reports USDA has absolutely nothing on the average pay even the gross pay the contract pay of poultry producers they have a few little snapshots, but there's not even an annual series on that so there's A lot of information that is not available in public But the integrators through a common reporting service share this with each other But it's not available to the public So I know that we're going to get back to the tournament system later in a different panel today So I want to Sort of loop back to the welfare of the animal and how consolidation is affecting that one thing that we talked a lot about last night was the alliance between organizations like the Humane Society of the United States and independent ranchers cattlemen and farmers and that is a Odd bedfellows sort of relationship Sometimes and I'd like to have our panelists talk a little bit about that and and sort of maybe the the positives that could come out of that for animal welfare Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War said that More than the war itself He was in fear of corporate concentration in the consolidated wealth into the hands of a few and he said that Corporations will work upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is in their hands We've been divided for a long time on our prejudices Especially in agriculture American Meat Institute the National Cattleman's beef Association Wants to put people like me out in front as a shield sort of as a human shield So they can look like a farmer or a rancher. I should have wore my hat perhaps So you get the picture better But but the fact is that if we don't work together We all have a common interest and that is Healthy soil Animals that are treated humanely. I mean we have an environment that we should care about. I mean rural Prosperity farmers that earn living and the living incomes and we have all this in common and so We need in fact to work together corporate power today is is far beyond President Lincoln's wildest Imagination he would have never have guessed that we would have made a full return to the robber baron era He would have never have guessed that and the only way we can address this power is with power And that's people working together with common interest of course We may not all agree on everything of course We don't but when there are things we do agree on as citizens we should be cooperating Thanks Mike. I think I want to make one thing really clear that the myth that keeps being thrown at me is that HS us wants to end all animal agriculture. They want everybody to be vegans and vegetarians Not the case I'm wearing leather. I eat meat. I eat all kinds of meat So do a good portion of the members of HS us There are hundreds of thousands of members across this country that care about humane treatment of animals that care about their environment and health and It is a perfect Alignment with HS us like we were saying you might not agree on everything. Let's find our common ground and our common ground is Bringing back our farms bringing back healthy soil. We don't have a planet be So they're they're great bedfellows. Thanks to you. All right. Well, that's it for our panel here I'm sorry Andrew and Robert. You didn't get a last word Thanks so much for for your time and here's Barry again


Okay, so welcome everyone. I guess we'll get started, we're at 20 past and we've got about 40 minutes here, so we wanted to kick off this session. My name is Jennifer Lin and I lead product management and I'm joined here with Don Keeler, who's Senior Vice President at Hitachi and we're gonna talk to you today a little bit about a partnership that we've been engaging in. I'll kick it off with just a little bit on the Juniper Contrail side. The majority of the session will be led by Don and he'll talk more specifically about aspects of the solution. So we're gonna talk a little bit about, there's been a lot of discussion here at the conference already in terms of the differences between broader cloud platforms and infrastructure and platform as a service versus the specific needs of carriers with NFV. We really conceived a lot of the stuff that we've been doing with Contrail around that dichotomy, so we'll talk a little bit more about that. There are some very specific needs in the 4G packet core and we're gonna talk a little bit about what problem are we solving and what have we done to date and then why does this partnership make the sum of the parts greater? We're really here to kind of talk a lot about what we've already done and not so much, wouldn't it be great if NFV could be addressed in the context of OpenStack? We already made that decision probably two years ago and when we kicked off this partnership I think we were both convinced that the equal momentum around cladification and the specific challenges of the mobile packet core could kind of come together in a nice way. So we'd like to share a lot of the fruits of the efforts really over the last couple of years and then if we have time at the end we'll open it up for Q&A. So some of you may be familiar, OpenContrail, we kicked off this open source project obviously driven a lot by the acquisition that Juniper Networks had made of a small startup called Contrail Systems and Contrail was really looking at how do we do cloud network service automation? A lot of the discussion that we've had with our large carrier customers is how do we take a lot of these best practices in building out an elastic architecture that scale out standards-based interoperable in a way that doesn't cause us to displace a lot of the goodness that we already have in a pervasive IP network. And as many of you know, a lot of the standards work around Contrail and the architecture with L3VPNN systems co-authored by AT&T and Verizon some years ago to address how do we define for cloud data centers, virtualized data centers a standards-based interoperable environment so that we can have all of the benefits of a highly distributed elastic architecture but still solve the issues around resiliency, availability, multi-tenancy and security. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. Really just this balance between what were some of the drivers? From a technology perspective, everybody understood that this need for a scale out horizontally scalable architecture was not necessarily the way that networks were built in the past where you kind of built for the peak capacity and you filled it up as things came on. The move to cloud, which really empowers the end user, means that you can't build for an upper bound. So what a lot of the cloud providers have done is to build obviously a very horizontally scale out infrastructure that essentially builds on as usage grows and then billing back the user. And in mobility, obviously, we as mobile users already see that paradigm that the backend infrastructure was not really built with that driver in place. For the last few years, a lot of the focus in IT environments has been on cost reduction but increasingly that's balanced with agility. So a lot of what we're talking about here with NFE and as we work with our carrier customers around service creation is of course you have to bring the cost down. That's sort of the minimum pay to play but really what people are measuring increasingly is business agility and this notion of fail fast which hasn't been sort of comfortable within the carrier markets but is really a key tenet of how the cloud providers think. There are mistakes that are gonna come along the way. The resiliency of the application and the resiliency of the infrastructure, the sort of cattle versus pets discussion is something that I think as this market matures we're seeing more sort of examples of how do you balance that elastic scale out with the resiliency in HA that carriers expect. At the same time, you know, organizationally and a different lexicon for cloud, a lot of those sort of layer eight issues have prevented folks from embracing this as quickly as the technology was available and there obviously were some gaps to address. So technical maturity and some of the retraining that grew up with the networking industry where proprietary operating systems were based on specific CLI commands per device. A lot of what we're doing with system level SDN and cloud network automation is simplifying the network configuration in a way that automates the delivery of services. So we'll basically show one very specific example. We've had incredible success with OpenContrail and the folks that initially have moved into deployment haven't necessarily been the large scale carriers. We're sharing a lot of the actual deployments in a user group session tomorrow morning. We're six of our customers who are cloud builders are gonna share essentially their evaluation, the benchmark testing that they did, their operational best practices and we are really growing this community. You know, at the beginning, a lot of the, pretty much all of the developers were Juniper employees coming from the contrail team. Some of the customers that were starting to showcase have already contributed back into the open source community, a lot of the enhancements they've made and this sort of effort, I think, which is fairly new in the networking industry, especially for carriers. You know, Juniper is a founding member and platinum sponsor of efforts like OPNFE and a lot of those open platform for network functions virtualization type discussions. People are looking not to agree that this is a good idea but looking for data driven solutions, data driven decision making around actual solutions. You know, the loose coupling from a software architecture, things need to be API driven and this notion that started in the SDN discussion of programmatic control for network systems has really evolved now. A lot of the APIs that are presented either as neutron APIs or services APIs be they load balancing as a service or other specific service from a network perspective are really maturing. A lot of the things when we started this journey as gold members in OpenStack were not yet defined as clean and well-behaved APIs. When we talked about the V router capability in contrail, which essentially is distributed virtual routing in the Linux kernel, that was a little bit of a different type of discussion in the convergence of computes that storage and networking but obviously there's a lot of sessions at this summit around that. So I think we are converging as an industry on why that makes sense and how we can achieve a loose coupling between the different planes of the network, the data plane, the control plane, the service plane, the management plane and how we can do it as an open ecosystem. So as I mentioned, you can play this one out. As I mentioned, the work around contrail started before even the founding of contrail as a company was driven through the IETF. We're now in the seventh iteration fully fledged IETF working group but the key tenant was a vendor agnostic architecture for essentially an overlay-based network that would interoperate day one with existing network infrastructure and that's not a single vendor network infrastructure. So I think we've proven with the ability to scale into actual production deployments. We've been deployed on obviously not only Juniper MXes and Juniper switching infrastructure but in many cases a mixed vendor environment of switching and routing. As long as we can retain this notion at the layer three gateway of an IP VPN and that's a key tenant of how the contrail architecture was conceived, we didn't want to make compromises in terms of the ability to achieve secure multi-tenancy in a virtualized environment. At the same time, the reason that these large carriers got behind this approach was because it interoperates with existing WAN gateways day one. So the notion of a hybrid cloud is not some future roadmap item. We are already interconnecting overlays within a specific data center to the wide area network, MPLS VPNs, IP VPNs, Ethernet VPNs in a standards-based way and proving the interoperability of every layer of the network. Increasingly too, this notion of a Linux kernel module that natively does routing, not just for scalability, latency reduction but also for service delivery is making a lot of sense to folks. And the area that we see the most mature thinking about this, are folks like the real-time applications guys. We do a lot of work with real-time analytics, gaming providers, entertainment folks who increasingly are moving away from a hypervisor environment, maybe to a Linux container environment, but they're very latency sensitive. And in many cases, they're using layer three routing protocols like BGP, not just to scale, but to essentially do service insertion and policy enforcement right at the host level. That's proven to be a key differentiator for us and the fact that we have an open-source code base that we're starting to see a lot of co-creation with our broader community is something that I think has helped the adoption. The way that we do network virtualization and attach policies to abstracted virtual networks is really enabled also by the way we do service chaining. It's a similar approach where we have a unified control plane which is good old next-hop routing and whether it's a physical appliance or a virtualized appliance, we can essentially route to that service. We can present that service as a service, whether it's a firewall or a load balancer or a caching service or a mobility service. And when the group-based policy is created, it's created at a vendor agnostic level. We use then service templates to push down the low-level configurations and make sure that it's enforced in the architecture. So a lot of that sort of service automation and dynamic service delivery that the lessons learned from a lot of the cloud builders does become very relevant in the way that we do distributed service delivery in a cloud. Lots of data, as I mentioned, around each of the tenants here, we have a couple of customers that are doing sessions here at the summit to share their benchmark testing and the scaling tests that they did. Since a year ago, I think we are getting a lot of best practices both on the operational side as well as how these tests are being conducted to evaluate SDN-type solutions. And the term SDN, as many of you know, has probably been evolved quite a bit since it first started a couple of years ago. We look at it more as network virtualization, which is policy-based and automated, as well as the ability to dynamically insert services. And the ability to do that with a way that natively interoperates with a mixed-vendor physical infrastructure so that we can start to converge physical, virtual, emerging, legacy, cloud, verticalized, et cetera, is really the key to this. At the solutions level, too, a lot of our partners are really building their own best practices, and we're capturing that with a reference architecture approach, sharing not only the hardware and software bill of materials, but also the configurations. As an example, many of our customers are using a non-Juniper Layer 3 gateway. We've done some interoperability testing and shared those configurations back just to show that if it's an RFC 4364 IPVPN compliant router, we can interoperate with it day one, which eliminates the need for extra gateways, which is extra troubleshooting, extra complexity, extra cost, and really puts a bottleneck in the system that for many of these real-time video and mobility type applications adds extra complexity. So, you know, there's a few key design principles and a lot of the discussions and the buffs around NFV are really, you know, constantly coming back to these key tenants to make sure that as we deliver NFV services, we don't compromise, number one, on what IP networks can already do in a secure and resilient way, but also address the new problem. So some of these are really a little bit of motherhood and apple pie, but when you go back and you evaluate each of the alternatives against these directives, there is sort of a numbering system that we've seen some of our, you know, more mature carriers kind of start to put together. And lastly, you know, we've had a lot of success, I think partially because we use sort of native IP principles and how we do this in growing the ecosystem. Obviously, we're highlighting one of our very strategic partners here today in terms of the services that we deliver and we wanted to share that goodness a lot because, you know, in the keynote session this morning, there was a lot of discussion about, you know, what are the differences between NFV and broader cloud services? And I think as an ecosystem, we're learning that iteratively and trying to share that with the broader OpenStack community, OPNFE, I'm on the board of Open Daylight, lots of discussions in those types of open forums. And OpenContrail being, you know, its own sub-community on some of this, we can kind of get deeper into a lot of the data and the comparisons. So with that, I'll turn it over to Don and we'll get into the meat of it. Right, thank you. My name is Don Keeler and as Jennifer had mentioned, what we're gonna do is I'll share with you some of our experiences that we've had in working with Juniper in a trial that we've been conducting for a number of months now in a mobile operator. And one of the things that we're focusing on is a mobile packet core. And for those who are not familiar with the various components that make up a mobile packet core, the one specifically we'll be talking about today will be the MME SGSN, which facilitates the mobility, tracking the mobiles, paging of the devices, authenticating through the HSS or HLR, the various devices, and then you have the gateways, which effectively do the bear. And so one of the things that we, as we're looking at moving into NFV, in the virtual capacity of these nodes, the things that we really have to, we wanted to look at how do we make it obviously cheaper for the operator, because they're worried about the total cost of ownership, as well as making it less complex in terms of building out, especially when it comes to scale, because each time you add one of these nodes or have to increment a node, you have to touch a number of nodes around it. And so as well as it has to be carrier grade, we have to maintain the five-ninth reliability that the operators are expecting these nodes to provide, even though they're now being offered in a virtual environment. So as you go through, some of the things that we were seeing that operators were concerned about was the fact that the call models were always changing. It was very unpredictable. We found with some of our operators that they found that the active vital and the various different transitions that a mobile makes were four times what they had anticipated. So you had a call model that was always constantly varying, especially with the introduction of new devices with the relatively flat money that these guys are getting in terms of ARPU that they need to find how do they continue to grow their services. AT&T was actually at a SDN NFE conference in Dallas just a couple of weeks ago in which they said that they anticipate the network in terms of its data capacity that they will grow in excess of four times in the next four years, but they were keeping their capital outlay consistent over that time. So how do you manage to continue to deliver the service that are expected of an operator when they see these growth and yet the revenues are relatively flat? So obviously looking to NFE, the things that we're having to say is, okay, we wanna be able to run on COTS hardware, but it still has to maintain the reliability that we're expecting these network elements to maintain. Obviously it's gotta support all the various G, 2G, 3G, 4G costs effectively and being able to scale out as needed when you see what's happening. Now one of the things as we were going through and looking at all these, the thing that we were looking at was we found out, we just can't port our app that we had that was running on ATCA, we just couldn't port it onto a VM and say, you know what, there it is, it's virtual. But what we found is that the bottleneck that it had when it was sitting in an ATCA purpose built hardware platform was the same bottleneck it was experiencing when we just ported over to a virtual environment. So what we really had to do was figure out how we best could deconstruct our application and actually make it so it really could be, if you will, cloudified where we could actually scale in multiple different directions depending on what was happening in the call model. I just want to give just a quick background of who Hitachi, I'm actually based in Dallas, but who we are, Hitachi has been in the communication business for over 70 years. We actually provide, mainly in Japan, CDMA, YMAX, and LTE network components. And Hitachi CTA is part of the network and telecommunication group that's out of Hitachi Limited. We actually are in North America where the entity that would bring various networking equipment from Hitachi, Japan into the US market.  And now in 2008, Hitachi and Nortel actually got together and won the KDDI LTE network. KDDI is the second largest mobile operator in Japan. And when Nortel went bankrupt, that was problematic for Hitachi and KDDI. And so Hitachi actually purchased the Nortel EPC asset at the end of 2009. So I was part of that acquisition. So we brought over the whole team that was building the Nortel LTE components. And so that's how Hitachi actually became building the, in our case, the MME SGSN as well as the gateways in Japan. So we actually delivered our first prototype of a MME SGSN actually utilizing some Adjuniper's technology at the end of 2012 and actually showed it at Mobile World Congress 2013. And now we're ready to actually deploy our MME SGSN as a VNF right now in 2014. So what do we do? So as I mentioned, we had to decompose our MME SGSN into various different VMs. So it allows us to scale in the various dimensions. Typically, if you look at a control device, we have to scale based on subs, we have to scale based on throughput, and we also have to scale based on signaling. So when you wanna add a bunch of EnoBs, it takes up capacity as well as memory space. The throughput would only be for 2G, 3G, SGSNs as well as the ability to add subscribers from a call P perspective. And so what we found is that in our ATCA offering, we would always hit the bottleneck in just one of the dimensions. But what being able to deconstruct our app, what it allowed us really to do was begin to scale, not only when you hit the max subs, well, you can also, you continue to scale your data throughput as well as your signaling events. And so what we found we could do is that we could not only scale out to the maximums, but we could continue scaling out. If you were looking at a radar diagram, we could actually scale quite significantly, independently of each one of the various domains. The other thing that we really had to make sure of is that we could still maintain the five nines reliability.  In terms of reliability, it has to be able to be deployed, you gotta be able to upgrade it. One of the challenges is, you know, how do you do system upgrades? And in the app, we can certainly upgrade each component in an in-service environment, but then we have to continue to be able to do that, including the NFVI. So in pulling this all together, we've been able to demonstrate this in an environment, in a lab environment with the operators right now. We find that it ultimately really does reduce the OPEX complexity that an operator has because of the fact that we can scale, and we actually really focus on having a single IP point of presence, so that even though you scale all these VMs to an EnoB, it doesn't look like it anything changed or to the HSS, HLR, so you're able to scale, and yet nothing, you don't have to touch any of the nodes around you. All you have to do is be able to have the hardware that's available to be able to build it out. So in our labs, we're on all sorts of different hardware, so we really don't care what it's on, whereas almost everyone, most everybody else's version of an MME, SGSN, or P-Gateway are all on purpose-built hardware, so you see as moving to really a virtual infrastructure, it really enables you to see the value of the COTS hardware. And finally, we really see, because of this isolation and being able to add, we really can deploy these things much faster, and have seen that as we've moved it. The other thing that we noticed is that we could actually scale down. We never could scale down very well, because when you had it on an ATCA chassis, you had to put so much hardware just to put on the very first subscriber, whereas now you can on a single server, you can actually have an MME, SGSN, P-Gateway all running and being able to be fully redundant with, so you're able to scale both down and obviously continue to scale up in quite a significant way. So some of the things that, you know, what's really been nice in our partnership with Juniper is that we've really been able to take this VNF that we've been showing and really show the operator that it is carrier grade, that it is really ready to be stood up as an application that can be put into the network. It is highly available. We are seeing the five-nines reliability as we beat it up both in our labs, as well as in the operator's lab. We see that it can scale out so that we have both a small configuration, which is just two servers, up to one that has 20 servers in it and just being able to see the various degrees in which we can scale the application.  One, as I mentioned, because of our single IP point of presence, that as you build this out before, as you, if you had to scale with ATCA, as soon as you put that next box down, you had to get everybody else involved in terms of being able to put it into the network, add it to, and make sure that everybody else could see it. So you really see that we are able to scale it in a much more cost-effective way. And because we have multiple VMs that can scale independently of one another, it wasn't like when we deployed the single node that we were leaving resources unused, whereas now you are able to highly, more efficiently utilize the resources of the servers by building, adding only the VMs that you need to as you go through it. Just want to talk a little bit of some of the things that we had to do. One of the challenges that we have is that from an MME perspective, it has to be very deterministic about what the capacity is. The operator's expecting that you quote a capacity and he's expecting that you meet it, otherwise you provide more hardware. And so one of the challenges that we have is that typically we'd like to see on your left where it's, where there's multiple VMs, it doesn't matter what CPU they're on, that everything works fine, but we know that from our experience that the scheduler isn't where it needs to be. And we were starving all of our VMs because they're very integral with one another, you can't have one starving the other. And what we're finding is that we're starving the VMs. And so what we've done is actually right now we're pinning cores so that we can actually get the deterministic behavior that we're expecting of the application. The other thing as Jennifer actually talked about OpenVS doesn't do what it needs to be. And so with Juniper obviously, with their vRouter solution provides us a robust networking capability that is required of the application. We're in the business, I'm in the business of building an app and so we really need a partner that has the infrastructure that is needed. And we see that this is true for what Contral has brought to us whereas we couldn't get that when we were looking at just OpenVSwitch. So what we've been looking at is where, how do we now deliver something that's simple to deploy? That's really what our goal has been. We wanted to make sure that as operators scaled, it scales in a meaningful way. And but in not a operationally complex way. And we think that we've been able to do that. We've been able to, because of the way that we've re-architected the application, we can actually scale it in a way that would meet the needs of the changing call models that we see, whether it be from subscribers, whether it be introducing of small cells where they wanna have hundreds of thousands of cells attached to the network, that that is not a problem that we're able to begin to look at mechanisms to auto-scale it as it needs with by utilizing more analytics, et cetera, where you're able to look and plan for these unplanned events. We are utilizing, with Contrail, we're using the APIs that are provided to us and we actually see that that's something that we can continue to move forward with where it is that we're able to, as a VNF write on any NFVI that is provided by the operator or is requested. And most importantly, it has to be carrier grade. And this is the thing, it'll never get stood up if you can't meet the five nines. That the operators want. Anyways, that's all we have. If you have any questions, we'd be willing to take them. Not all at once, please. I had a question. So you talked about the five nines and you said you were doing things at the HA level and potentially other ways as well. Could you give more technical details on what techniques you're using to get to the five nines? Well, I'll let Jennifer talk what they've done in Contrail. I mean, we do typical things from a VNF perspective where the app is fully redundant. Depending on the type of VM, it's either one to one or load sharing or N plus one. And so we've done that in the app and then we've looked to Contrail to be able to actually provide the more, make the NFVI robust. Yeah, I mean, from a network perspective, obviously Juniper's broader routing, switching infrastructure, we've been through this quite a bit in terms of maintaining the SLA with five nines availability. A lot of the lessons learned out of that were carried forward. We did a grounds up BGP implementation. That's where we get the unified control plane. So we don't have to reinvent how you basically ensure no single point of failure for every aspect of our software architecture. We have sort of resiliency built in, whether it's the control nodes in terms of the control plane function, the configuration management nodes, which are also completely scale out, the analytics nodes, and at the same time, for any given host, if you lose any one of those nodes, you never interrupt the service. And that's obviously a lesson that we've learned in routing. When you essentially lose a router, traffic doesn't stop. And that was actually one of the key issues with some of the generation one SDN controllers that we heard a near full back from a lot of the carriers. It was unacceptable to essentially take a step back on the expectations of resiliency. The other aspect of it that is, once again, a lesson carried forward from large carrier grade networks is the ability to do in-service software upgrades. So we can have two different versions of the code running, have a salt and pepper type configuration while you do that upgrade. So we've documented a lot of the best practices in terms of large scale upgrades across the physical and virtual infrastructure. The other aspect of it that Don kind of alluded to is we've given a lot of diagnostic and troubleshooting information. So the instrumentation that goes all the way down to the Linux kernel for the network administrator is unprecedented in terms of overlay type technologies. So we can look at five tuple flow statistics for every virtual machine. We can do pings and trace routes and we can look at latency between either virtual machines or aggregated across virtual networks. So there's a huge amount of visibility and diagnostic and feedback loop there to ensure that the resiliency of the system is there. Automation is also one key aspect because as you know, there is sort of in traditionally in device level CLI commands, the ability to fat finger and make a mistake that brings down your sort of availability of the entire system. So as we've learned in mobility controllers over the years, the ability to kind of have a system topology view but automate a lot of those best practices cuts down on the human error thing quite a bit. So any other questions? Okay, well, thanks. Oh, yes. Well, I'm not the right guy to tell you, give you technical information, but we can certainly provide some information on it. Yeah, we can share as a follow up. I mean, in the Juno release, there is quite a good discussion more broadly in OpenStack Juno around CPU pinning and some of the best practices. And then specifically for the Hitachi example, I think the main thing is back to sort of balancing the system because the idea of pooling those resources kind of runs counter to the idea of pinning a CPU core. But I think there are some best practices that essentially are being baked into the templates that maybe address some of that. But yeah, we can do a follow up there. Yes, yes. So we use the OpenStack right now running in a Havana environment with the neutron plugin based on Contrail as well as the VNF from Hitachi. Yeah, I mean, a lot of our, so right now, Contrail is upstream as of the Juno release. A lot of the testing and deployment that we've done has been based on the neutron APIs. There are some things obviously that we've done specific to help this mobility solution. Over time, we expect more of those to be upstream. Okay, I have a question. For the, I'm from China actually in China community here. Okay. And we talk about those OpenStack for NFV with a couple of friends from Huawei and Zhongxin, right? And the key challenge for them is how to ensure the availability when we implement OpenStack because there are different level of availability like VM level, right? L2, L3, or even the gateway or other sort of virtualized network components. So when we look at into this PBT, I think you enable the hardware plugin in OpenStack, right? So this is the key to shift the availability work to hardware. And my question is, how long has this plugin has been developed and how the maturity level of those plugins, yeah. Well, I think said another way, one of the key tenants from a Contrail perspective is don't reinvent the wheel if something works well. So I think part of the long pole in delivering NFV solutions is there are new protocols that are trying to address problems that are already actually addressed. We just came out of a three week bake-off in Asia, one of the largest carriers and they did a very detailed, very thorough benchmark test specifically around availability for OpenStack-enabled systems. And that stressed both the physical network infrastructure which was multi-vendor as well as the virtual overlay as well as the capabilities of certain services which were a mix of mobility solution type services as well as broader cloud services, firewall load balancer, et cetera. That was probably one of the best data-driven bake-offs that we've seen specifically around HA for both the network component, but more broadly, where are the gaps? And there's some very known gaps in other aspects of OpenStack that came out of that study. I believe some of that will be shared in future OpenStack sessions because the intent was to share that with the community more broadly. As we're starting to see some of the non-carrier but some of the deployed cloud builders starting to really share their benchmark tests and contributing that backup stream into the OpenStack community as well as the OpenContrail community, we've had sort of an open discussion there about what gaps are very well known and which ones are already served by a physical network infrastructure and don't need to be duplicated in the virtualized overlay. Okay, I guess with that we're probably out of time. Thanks a lot for joining us and enjoy the rest of the week. Thank you.