Hi, Tom Stewart here with Clean Business Today. Got my partner, Liz Trotter. Hi, everybody's doing well today. This is Wednesday, 325. Kind of feel like what we need to get into. This is day X of the coronavirus smart business. We need the big calendar. We need to go back and start getting a tally and we'll start keeping up with that. Like we've said before, there's a lot that's happening and it seems like a week's worth of information, if not a month's worth of information kind of comes at us in a 24-hour cycle. A lot of times there's so much information we have a hard time kind of sorting out what's real and what's happened and what we think's happened but maybe hasn't quite happened yet. I've seen a lot of information flying around out there on the presumption that a law has passed and the president has signed. Tell it like it is. Okay, let me tell it like it is, Liz. Let me tell it like it is, Tom. Tell it like it is. There has not been a $2 trillion stimulus package signed into law yet. As of a few minutes ago, the Senate hasn't even signed off on it yet. Even though Mitch McConnell, the- I was waving at Bridget, sorry, Tom. About 1.30 this morning, Mitch McConnell told the president they had a handshake deal in the Senate. Now stop and think about that for a minute. During this time of social distancing and elbow bumps and six feet, they have a handshake deal. This was 1.30 this morning on a bill that they agreed on to the Senate that was supposed to have been approved by now. They're still kind of wrangling with it a little bit and everybody is like, we know it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen today but it hasn't yet. Once the Senate signs off on it, that bill has to go back to the House of Representatives where they have to approve it. But there's Steny Horrier, the majority leader in the House made it clear that there's a 24 hour waiting period that everybody in the House hasn't even seen the text of this bill yet. So they need to get the text and they've got 24 hours to read it before they vote on it. So the earliest that's gonna happen is tomorrow afternoon going into evening and that's presuming that the Senate can get their stuff together today. So is it gonna happen? Wall Street thinks it is because on the stock market, went up again today by a material amount, first two day gains back to back in a long, long time. So investors think it's still solid but the devil's in the details on some of this. So it's hard to speak about a lot of the details because they're still haggling over what those details are. And even after it's signed into law presuming that it is, you still have a rather thin document that it's not until all the people that work in the bureaucracy write all the regulations that take a document that's maybe a dozen pages long and turn it into several thousand pages long while we know what's going on. One interesting piece of information though that the Federal Reserve is talking a little bit more about the money is that they're gonna be making available a small business and bullard the governor out of St. Louis. A lot of details, we don't need the weeds on all that but they're gonna be working through banks basically because they wanna get this money out quickly. And there's a lot of money coming and that's good stuff for us. There's probably a lot of regulation that's gonna be coming at us as employers that we're gonna need to know as well. And some things are changing. And yesterday we were talking about some of the changes in FMLA, Family Medical Leave Act. And next week we're going to be in an era where we have to pay people for that FMLA before we'd have to give people to take time off, unpaid and basically offer, make sure they would get their job back. And that was if you employed 50 or more people if you're below that you didn't even have to participate in that but now because it's our understanding regardless of how big you are, you have to participate in it unless you're able to get some exemption and we don't even really understand what those rules might look like at the moment. And we told you yesterday that it went into effect April 2nd. There's some information that came out today that says actually it's gonna be April 1st. So if you're making some decisions on, you know as an employer do am I gonna be laying people off so I wouldn't have to fall under that and possibly have to pay this FMLA and paid sick time too for that matter. That's another variation of all of that. It looks like you need to do that before April 1st, not April 2nd. And again, it's rapidly moving but I'm telling you like it is that's what we know now. Thanks Tom, I appreciate that. Also, what I heard you say is we do need to make sure that we have decided what we're going to do by the end of March. So by the end of Tuesday, right? Because Wednesday is April 1st. That's the best information we have. But it's changing day to day but I would go with that until we learn something different. Okay, sounds good. We got a few people on live over here without Bridget. As always, hi Bridget. And we've got Ruth, Natasha, let's see. Ruth says FYI, I am in New York where we end ISSA. Not exactly sure what you meant to write there, Ruth but maybe if I read just a little bit more, I'll find out. Natasha says hi from Northern Virginia and hi Natasha. And let's see, Ruth also says, believe residential cleaning is an essential business. Just got a call from Attorney General who is telling us we are in violation of the pause plan. Okay, and so that's interesting. We probably need a little bit more information about that. What that means, how that's impacted you and what it exactly means for you. Yeah, I can share some information on that. Tell me, it's just a second to find it. Hi, Krista. And Natasha, I won't miss your question. Don't worry about the FMLA less than 50. Look that in a sec. Yeah, this doesn't necessarily mean everybody and our government is going to agree with this but this is a document that ISSA put together based on their research and their legal interpretation of what's essential. They go through every state and tell you is there an executive order defining what's essential or not and if it is, what industries they deem to be essential, the way they read the regulation. And if I make it to New York, it's their assessment that it is an essential service. An essential service. I'm gonna take the link to this document that I'm sharing here because it's really on the ISSA's website. I just posted it in the comments. I don't know if that would be helpful or not but you could take that and print it out or send it in an email or whatever to whatever authorities you're having this discussion with and saying you're not making this up.  I don't know if that's helpful or not Ruth but not worth a try for sure. Of course, I'm gonna go back to this for a second. For whatever it's worth for every state that has an executive order, they're saying yes across the board for every state. There's not a no on this. I came to the conclusion the other day that it's really hard for us to be objective, to be unbiased in whatever our opinions are on such matters because we have a vested interest in that answer being yes so it doesn't mean that it's not yes. It very well, it should be or could be but it's kind of like betting against your favorite football team. You might know or have a good reason to believe that they're not the best team but they're still your favorite football team. So our businesses are still our favorite team so to speak and regardless it's gonna be hard to bet against them. You know Tom, I was thinking about that. You said that earlier on another call and I was thinking about that and there are some businesses that were really hoping to be listed as non-essential because they thought that then they would have to close down and that everybody would be closing down and that that would be better for everyone. So I'm not sure that I'm agreeing with your approach there that we kind of have our thumb there. I mean, we might have it there but not necessarily always toward the yes. No, I think it could be either way. When that by me again, why would I want to be non-essential? So a couple of businesses that I know of were waiting for their governors to come on and say, hey, it's locked down and you're not essential because then they would be able to shut their businesses down without having to for a couple of weeks without having as many repercussions or feeling like they were the bad guys that they could look like they were following in order or really they felt like they needed to shut down. So it would be easier for them if the decision were made for them. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure that I'm buying your thumb on the scale thing, right? I mean, I think it kind of goes both ways there. But we do have a bunch of stuff over here and I already missed one. Let me see if I can scroll up. I said I wouldn't miss this one. Natasha said, what was it? I didn't forget your Natasha. All right, here we go. We don't have to pay our employees if we have less than 50, correct? I'm guessing you don't mean that. Yes, you do have to pay them no matter how many you have. I'm guessing that you met FMLA, that it doesn't apply to you. So I believe that what we said yesterday, I'm gonna say it, Tommy, you correct me. I believe that what I heard yesterday was everybody is still, it's including everybody from two to 500, but you can probably get an exemption if you are less than 25 employees. Is that accurate, Tommy? Am I close?  It's unclear, it very clearly states. And again, the regulations that actually define all the fine print hasn't been written yet, hasn't been shared. So we really don't know exactly, but in the law, which is just the general concept, it says that there are provisions for waivers and companies can apply for waivers. But what the criteria is and how you do that and how you get a waiver and therefore you're entitled to one or not, that hasn't even been written yet. So we don't know exactly what it is, but there are people that are speculating that if you're under 25, it shouldn't be that hard to get one. Again, FMLA now, you don't qualify for that. You have to be over 50. So, maybe it'll be 50 when it's over. We just don't know at the moment. This is another one of those areas where there just is not a cut and dried answer. We would all really like to hear yes or no. And this is another one of those where it's just not there yet. We're just not cut and dried. Hey, Lisa. Hey, Natasha. Erin, how do we advise our employees who are scared to work? So that's a pretty big question. You wanna hit it first time? Because I can talk forever on this one. Yeah. I guess the only thing that I would share is you don't have to ask yourself, was this the job that they signed up for? I was on a discussion yesterday and Don Finn, a friend of mine, he's an attorney that does a lot of work with small businesses, made the point that if you're a first responder, if you work in the healthcare field, this is part of your job description.  You have to be there and you have to do it.  It's in subordination in some ways. But if you're a residential cleaner, putting yourself at risk to do work for people that there's some concern that there might be some infectious disease that could be fatal, that's not part of your job description. And it was his assessment of somebody says, I don't feel that safe that we should accept that and not require them to do the work. For that being said, that doesn't specifically answer the question of what would you tell them, Liz? Okay, so first off, I have a little different situation and I'm talking about specifically for America Made in Olympia. When we hire someone, we do kind of scare them a little bit. We tell them that you're going to be going into homes and people will potentially, you can guarantee that you will be going into some homes where there are germs and pathogens out there. You don't know what they are and some of these things could be dangerous. Just bottom line, we don't know.  So we do tell people upfront that they are going to be encountering things that are dangerous, but that we think we have good processes in place to protect them for that. All right, so how I would advise employees outside of that, how I would advise employees who are scared to work is by listening really, really well to what they're afraid about and making them believe that I'm paying really, really close attention and listening. So I would actually really listen without interrupting, without telling them that any of their fears are wrong or bad, especially if they're saying things that are just not accurate and listening. And then afterwards telling them, asking them if they'd like to hear another side and then another position. And then I would maybe tell them another position of how it's reasonable to have fear, right? This is a scary time. There's scary stuff going on, but they are in a unique position to be in a safer job by far. And they're also in a position to be able to help the masses. That is, if you're cleaning, if you're not cleaning, then I probably wouldn't say that. But if you're going out and cleaning that how they have a unique opportunity to be part of the solution and that sometimes when we're afraid, it's smart to don't get away from whatever we're afraid of. And sometimes when we're afraid, it's smart to push past the fear and that I don't really know which one might be right for them in this situation, but that I'm happy to support them in whatever their decision was. That would be my message. I don't know that that'll work for you, but that's what I would probably say. All right, let's see, moving on here. Ruth says that's the state order to cease operations if not essential, yep. Yeah, Tom, any numbers yet on how many states have a, either a stay at home or, I mean, I guess they have all sorts of terminology for some version of quarantining. Any idea about states, how many? That's a good question. I'll go back to this document here that ISSA has on their website. Again, I put the link here in the comments, but if you look at this first column here, they refer to it as an executive order. And every executive order is a little bit different in terms of essential business and this is non-essential businesses, but wrapped up in that is some form or fashion of just telling people, if you don't need to leave your home, don't leave your home. And I haven't counted it, but the ones with the yeses here are states that have. So, I don't know, I'm sorry. And Oklahoma, this is as of yesterday, that's the date. And I know that Oklahoma now has one in place. I just don't know. Roughly half of them I guess, maybe a little more, just eyeballing it. And I'm guessing more than that because I know that Oklahoma is and didn't they just do something in Texas? I think I heard something about Texas. And I know local municipalities are as well, like the state of South Carolina has not, but the local mayors here in the Charleston area, there's several municipalities, cities all jammed up together here and they have separate mayors. They've all gotten together and they've basically issued their own decree encouraging people to, not essential businesses to curtail operation if we're people to stay at home. So we don't have an answer on that because again, just like who says this, Ruth. Yeah, the wording is ambiguous. There are some states where the wording is more clear. In Washington state, we actually have the term residential cleaning. Doesn't get much clearer than that. So, or actually it might be residential service, but within the cleaning context. And so it doesn't really get a lot clearer than that, but not all of them are like that. They're not clearly on the essential or not essential list. So you're gonna have to make your own call for sure on some of these. You can call people, you can ask. What I've also found is when you call the government to get some answers to these questions, that you're getting mixed answers. I know of two different answers that were given in the state of Colorado. So not really sure exactly how that whole thing is gonna play out either. I think that you are going to have some plausible deniability in some of these areas just because so many people are interpreting cleaning as essential services. So take that as you will or not, not an attorney over here. Just a little cleaning lady, just a little maid, that's all. All right, let's see what we have up here. I know we had a bunch of more questions that came in faster. If I understand correctly, if the state hasn't placed an executive order on us as essential or not, we should refer back to federal critical infrastructure list. That's my understanding. Is it yours, Chutang? Yes, yes. And Natasha, yes, we got that right. Yes, less than 25, she has 12 employees. Okay, you do have to pay them unless you file for an exemption, right? So Denise is giving a little bit more clarity on that, trying to tell it like it is. So you do have to pay them unless, and my guess is until, not just unless, but until you file for that exemption. Robin, from the DOL, small businesses with fewer than 50 employees may qualify, this was what Derek was pointing out yesterday, may qualify for exemption from the requirement to provide leave due to school closings or childcare and availability if the leave requirements would jeopardize the viability of the business of the going concern. So that's also very subjective. And you know, my concern is, or my concern and belief is in some cases, we're not gonna know until we're there and we're filing for it and we're keeping our fingers crossed. And if we file for it and if we initially don't get it, what's the process for appeal? I mean, we just don't know what we don't know yet. Or we do know what we don't know. We know a lot about what we don't know. We know that we don't know, that's what we know. That's about the only thing we know. Stephanie asked a good question. If I'm under 25 after layoffs, does that count? How's that gonna play out? The presumption would be, yeah. I mean, assuming that being under 25 is a magic number to get an exemption because that's where you are at the time that piece of legislation becomes law. When it comes into effect. So it seems like, yes, there's a good answer there. Unless, I mean, I haven't read it. I mean, because a lot of these details are gonna work out.  So, I mean, that's been done. I've seen that. So who, sorry. And they were talking about doing that for something else. I can't remember what it was, but going back to the first. Okay. So Natasha wants to know my business is open and they choose to stay home. So how do I need to pay them? So if your business is open and you've required them to come to work and they don't, it sounds to me like they quit. Is that what you're saying? That's kind of what it sounds like is that they quit unless, do they have a reason to not come to work? Like if it's related to one of, what is it, three things, right, if they don't have daycare, if they're caring for a sick relative or just have to be a relative or just somebody who's sick. I'm not sure how far removed they can be in their household maybe, they're caring for- Something, somebody in their household, yeah. Again, I'm not really sure. We don't have, we're not attorneys. We don't know every single detail of every single thing. We just know the bigger, broader strokes of what we've been reading, except for Tom does have some very specific stuff that he knows really well. I don't have those things. So I would say, what was the third thing? If they're actually sick themselves.  So in those cases, what do they do in those cases, Tom? She says, how do I know? If assuming that this is April 1st or after all things being equal, they're entitled for compensation under the rules of the new sick leave act or paid FMLA, unless you're able to get an exemption and we don't, we kind of noodle that one around already. We don't know what qualifies and doesn't qualify for an exemption. If they don't, if they don't meet any one of those three criteria and they aren't coming to work, do you have to pay them? That gets a little messy too. If they say they aren't coming to work because they are afraid of getting that they're being exposed into a dangerous environment. Based on my understanding, I don't know if they're necessarily entitled to pay, but there probably be a bad idea to take any punitive measures against them. It would be, well, if you don't want to work, that's fine. You change your mind, you know where we are. But, and again, this is kind of stuff that we'll know more a week from now than we know now, but that would be my best guess as to what that would look like. So Robin, I think is asking just a slight tweak on the same question. If they refuse to work when work is available and they don't report, like they don't report to work, I'm assuming is what he means, then they are terminating their position. Agree? So here's my thinking. Yes, they're terminating their position. They're forfeiting it, but the government might say that was perfectly a reasonable thing for them to do. Here's the part that's gonna be sticky. And we're in uncharted waters here. We've used the term unprecedented event in the past and we don't have anything in our lifetime that we can look back on and say, well, the last time this happened, this is the way it was handled. If somebody refused to do work and their justification for doing it is that, you know, hey, I'm a house cleaner and I've got a job description. And if my employer doesn't give me one, I can go to the Department of Labor website and pull a generic one. And there's nothing on there about having to, you know, provide service in an environment where I am at a higher risk of contracting some type of deadly pathogen. And you can argue some of the finer points on that, but there's a concern that the legal system might side with that. And you might not be justified in terminating somebody for that. Maybe you are, I mean, I'm not an attorney for goodness sakes when you really get down to some of these questions, you need to talk to your attorney in your state and say, this is my situation. And a good attorney is gonna walk you through that. A good attorney is gonna say, I don't know either, but let me give you a couple of scenarios, several possible scenarios that can play out. And one of them, I suspect will be the scenario I just played for you. And at that point, you know, you need to be talking about what are the risks and what are the rationale for taking some action and, you know, you're, we're in a time when a lot of times we're picking between bad alternatives. And that could be one of those scenarios. Let's see, Robin, self-terminate. Yeah, again, Tom is speaking to that for sure. Linda says, I thought what was said yesterday, under 25 is automatic exempt, but under 50 you have to file for exemption. Am I confused? I'm not sure where you heard that. I think you might be talking about the town hall call with ISSA. I'm not sure about that. And I don't think Tom is either. I remember hearing someone say that, but I don't remember if it was the expert or if it was somebody asking the question, so much information going around and around and around that the information I'm operating under right now is that under 50 is possibly exempt possibly under 25 almost certainly, but either way you're still going to have to file for it and nobody knows how to file for it. Nobody knows how you're going to get it at this point. Yeah, again, this is rapidly changing and, you know, we're trying to keep up with it the best we can, but it's my understanding that nobody is automatically exempt unless you have more than five or new people. Yeah, yeah, those are the only people.  What do you think about that Tom? Well, every situation is different. You know, in each state handles it differently. I mean, we've just gone through that exercise at our branches and castle keepers and we spent a good amount of time here over the last few days reaching out and talking to our team members and finding out how it's going and there's a whole lot of people that are being laid off right now and the states are like backlog processing the information they send you to a website that's down more than it's up. It's not a great and seamless solution that makes everybody feel good at the very least. And in some regards, we're growing more and more concerned that what's supposed to be happening and what you would hope would happen. And I guess what we were led to believe would happen isn't gonna happen nearly as fast as what we wanted it to. And the other piece about that, Karen, is make sure that you're thinking about at the end of the month, some of the stuff is gonna change around the FMLA requirements, et cetera and how that whole thing plays out. So there isn't just one answer. There isn't one quick, this is what everybody that has less than 25 employees should do for everybody that has less than 50. That's not the situation right now, unfortunately. And the bill that we talked about at the beginning of the call, the beginning of this discussion, two-trade dollar bill, which is still a bill, has provisions in it as currently written anyway that has money is going to businesses in the form of loans, but if they can demonstrate they didn't fire anybody for some period of time. Some part of that can be converted into a grant. And a loan is by definition some expectation you're gonna be paying that back at some point in time where a grant is money that's given to you by the government that you never have to give back. Money. But the devil's in the details on all of that in terms of what percentage of those monies could be turned into grants and is it actually washing out everybody's salary 100% and for what period of time and... And what is keeping them fully employed? How many of them? What if people just leave for any other random reason or the number of hours they're working is diminished because number of homes you're cleaning is less, is that gonna be considered not, who knows?  Even if they're only working 12 hours a week to be able to get that, there's a lot of questions there too. For the same thing, it's kind of like, what do we do? What's a smart thing to do? The smart business move during the coronavirus. And without, you know, it's kind of like a card game where half the cards are flipped down and you're having to guess on what to do on only what little few cards you see and we won't really know until more of the cards are flipped over. I love that, Tom, you haven't used that one yet. That's a good one. I like it. I'm using that one. It is, right? Like playing poker. Oh no, until you see all the cards. And the other piece of it is this game might be one of those and I don't know what it's like. Sometimes the people don't have to show all the cards, right? They can just say, yep, and you never get to see them. I have a feeling that there's going to be a lot of that where we're just not going to see all the cards. We're gonna have to be okay with that. Karen says that she has contract or she was just relaying what others are doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, Karen. A lot of people are doing that. It's just one of those situations where I'll make sure it's a good decision for you if that's what you decide to do and know all of the different things that it could potentially be impacting to do that. All right, you see Steph's comment here, Tom. Have you thought about our entrance rate after this? Has there this duty pay? What do you think? Think there will be seeing anything like this? I hadn't thought about it, Steph. There's nothing happening here that's going to make our rates go down. There's absolutely nothing here. It's just a combination of stuff because the insurance market at the end of the day, it's all kind of lumped in together and it's sometimes auto rates. Last couple of years, auto rates have been going up because the losses have been exceeding the premiums, but this is something that I learned the other week as well that private equity is putting money into law firms so they can do class action lawsuits and stuff like this with the expectation that if they win, money goes back to the private equity. So basically the plaintiff's attorneys don't have to, in the past it was kind of like they'll take something on contingency and if they won, they made money and if they didn't win, then they basically lost money but they're being backed by private equity so they win regardless. Not in the 100% cases, but this is something that's just kind of recently been happening. So the expectation is there's going to be a ton of litigation out there, a ton of lawsuits from the cruise ships to just all kinds of people about stuff that we've never really considered before because I was harmed, I suffered damages because of the coronavirus and somebody's gross negligence, fill in the blank. And all of that at the end of the day is gonna add up to the insurance companies that need higher premiums to cover those risks moving forward, unless the government winds up giving them some bail out too, which, you know. Could happen. Very well might be part of that $2 trillion bill, who knows. Well, it started out at $4 trillion, didn't it? And they cut it in half. So maybe that's what they're keeping the other $2 trillion for, I don't know. Let's see, Eluisa says, what about health insurance? Do you know if there is any information about this? I'm not exactly sure what the question is about. Do you know, Tom, do you have an idea what she might be asking? I'm not aware of any thing in terms of, you know, this emergency legislation regarding the coronavirus in terms of changing the requirements as an employer in terms of, you know, what you need to do with healthcare benefits. I mean, the Affordable Care Act is still in place and I don't think there's been any modifications to that. Not that I'm aware of, again, I don't know, but I haven't heard of anything. I haven't heard of anything either around health insurance at all. Unemployment contribution rate will not go up in Pennsylvania due to virus. Yeah, not in Washington either. So I don't know about all the states, but I've heard that, I've heard a lot of people saying a version of that about their state. That's interesting. I guess I've heard a couple of different interpretations of that. One of them is your loss run as a company is not gonna go up relative to the number of unemployed, but the aggregate pool, yeah, the aggregate pool, I think it's big, that's gonna be borne by all companies. Yeah, they're all going up.  So this is another really good example, Tom, for your pitty remark of nothing that's happening here is gonna make it go down, right? There's not much good news in any of this as it pertains to insurance, as it pertains to risk from, you know, litigation. There is good news on the back end of this in terms of how the world perceives cleaning and the value on it and the competitive forces and I see a lot of opportunity once we make it through this initial storm, if you will. We just gotta get there from here. Elulisa is saying also that she's still working and Austin, she believes she fits into the sanitation of residences and buildings. That sounds reasonable to me as well. Of course, nobody's gonna ask me if that meets the standard of essential services, but sounds good to me. I would think that that is about as clear as you can get there. Tom, maybe we should put the link to the letter that you might wanna give to your employees saying that they're essential services if you're self-determining or if you believe the government is telling you that you are essential services just because. Go ahead, Tom. But you've got a great example of that, right, Liz? Yeah, yeah, I have one. I can give it to you and you can put it in the links. Sure. It's just a basic letter saying, hey, this person works for this company that is essential services and that's why they're out driving around. The main thing that this letter does is gives your people a feeling of ease. It's not gonna help them if they don't have a license, of course, right? I had somebody say, oh, well, let's get my employee off the hook then because she doesn't have a license. No, no, no, no, she can't drive. But the letter will help them to feel more confident about driving around if they're nervous about being out and about with the stay-at-home order. And I will send that over to you, Tom. Believing that we fit, yep. So we may be exempt, but we don't have enough info and we could file for exemption, but there's not enough info on how. That's the latest info? Sorry, yes. You should be in here with us because you speak, I don't know, better than almost anybody I've ever seen. Good job. Yeah, you don't know. At least so, we wrote a letter to our employees to have with them, yep, that's great. But if you have an example you wanna send it over, we can use your example, maybe. Somebody I know gave them all letters, but then also printed on those little business cards, card stuff, a little card that said kind of the same thing that you keep in your wallet. It's like, okay, that's a good idea. I saw something, Ben Ferris had one of those. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Ben just doesn't like his name bandied about, so I have to be careful. But talk to her first, I didn't. I might be wrong. Scratch that, sorry. You heard nothing. Richard did hers today and also put it in her online chat channel, awesome. Yeah, send it on over, oh, we said great. We were going to talk today, our plan was to talk about some communication with the customers, whether or not you have stop services for a couple of weeks or you haven't, how are you moving forward and what kind of communications are you doing? We still have about nine minutes here in time. If you wanna dive into that a little bit, I'll keep track of the questions over here. You could probably get a good chunk done in nine minutes. You, let me see if I can come up with something. Anybody have any other questions while Tom digs this out for us or any other comments? Anything that you're doing really well that you're like, okay, this is working. Ah, I'm feeling a little bit better. Anything that's making you feel like the water is below chin level, share that with us, that would be awesome. And a lot of people are feeling like, yeah, I'm not holding on, I'm drowning over here. Y'all hear this dinging on my phone every single time it dings? That's a text message coming in. It's just out of people right there. We can post this as a template in the Clean Business Today resource page, coronavirus-resources. Here's just an email blast that we put together and sent to all our clients late last week, letting them know that- No Tom, no, that's not what this is Tom. It's not? Uh-uh. This is late last week, yep, that's the wrong one. Sorry, I got too many. We'll share that one later. We gotta get first things first, right? Yeah, get them in order. Sorry. What is your opinion about spending on marketing? So I can tell you what I've been hearing about marketing. I don't have the be-all end-all answer, of course. If you are planning on staying in business and you are not planning on a temporary shutdown or anything along those lines, probably is in your best interest to put some money into marketing, but put it into marketing in the ways that are gonna work the best for you. If some things aren't working, don't use them anymore. Of what I've been hearing, a lot of people are putting more of their money into like AdWords, trying to get some better pages up on their website. I've heard that, sorry guys, for sure, people have been doing for sure. I have no idea why those would work. None, but I heard somebody was having some good luck. So, Dana says, one of us should write a book on how to run a cleaning business during a pandemic after this. Start writing, Dana. Start writing today. You're getting lots of good stuff everywhere, right? I don't know how long it'll be until somebody's gonna want that book again, but at least it'll be there. Ah, ding, ding, ding. Okay. All right, Tom, go ahead. Share it with us. Is this the letter? I hope so. This looks like it. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, we've been out late last week. Just letting our clients know that we're doing a temporary, temporary shutdown. Suspend, temporarily suspended field services with the tech was the term that we used. And we said that we're gonna take this two week period to assess the risks. And there's risks on both sides of this. If we continue to clean homes, there's risks that we could be exposing various parties to the spread of infection. Unbeknownst, a lot of asymptomatic people out there, at least the thinking is, there's the body of science, I guess it's kind of changing day to day on that too. Flip side of it is there are a lot of people who depend on us to provide our service. In some cases, they don't really even have other options that if we aren't providing the service, they're gonna have to find another vendor to provide the service. And that vendor might not be somebody that has the training and the expertise and the skills and equipment and so on and so forth to do it in a way that's as good and responsible as we would. So, and you go up and down the spectrum, we made the decision not to include in this things like multi-family housing, common areas, office-based commercial, that's anything that's being highly used by a lot of people. We felt that the risk of those high touch areas not being cleaned and sanitized on a regular basis exceeded the risk of us continuing to work. And even after launching this, we've talked to a lot of our clients and we're getting a lot of stories that even though they're a residential client, they're in a situation where they feel that they need house cleaning services and they understand that we're the most qualified to do that for them and anything less and that they feel that they had more risk than if we didn't provide services for them. So, we're in the process of sorting out here and taking this two-week period to do it in terms of who should we be providing services to and maybe who would be better off and more comfortable if we continued to suspend services for a longer period of time. We just don't know and we're looking for guidance from our government officials as well and that's kind of sparse and kind of mixed. Our president, I guess, made a statement yesterday. He wants everybody back to work by Easter. So, you know... Oh, he just wants us in church. Well, he wants us back to work too. I think he wants us back to work today after Easter, right? On Monday. Yeah, maybe. That's not gonna be a driving factor in any decision we make, but it's just an example of all the things that we need to consider. But we're talking to our staff or team members on a daily or almost daily basis and we're making a concerted effort to reach out to our clients through multiple channels of communication, regular emails as well as making some phone calls as well. And texting too, don't forget texting. Yes. Video is working too. And Tom pointed out something earlier that I wanted to just add a little tweak to. You know, if you're not cleaning for your customers because you wanna help to flatten the curve and slow things down, that makes great sense. Of course, if everybody's doing it, it's gonna go much faster, but if not everybody is doing it, then it kind of puts the cleaning company who is at a disadvantage, especially if there are customers that still want cleaning. And on the one hand, what if they hire somebody who is not as qualified and does not have the training to do the best job? That's not a good option. And on the other hand, what if they hire somebody who is, right? So again, maybe not the best option. On the one hand, bad for the community. On the other hand, bad for your company. So none of these decisions are easy, easy decisions. If they were, we'd all be doing the same thing. But they're tough. Gotta keep saying the same thing I've been saying all along is day by day. Gotta make these decisions day by day. Every day, you need to stop and think, what am I going to do today? With the new information that I learned in the last 24 hours, and there has been some, what am I doing? Did that cough sound dry? I don't know. Allergies, y'all. All right, Tom, we have a couple of things to do. It's great class, housekeeping. So, oh, thanks, Tom. Thanks. I'm gonna take a picture of one of these. Right here. My hand motions were not good for that, but my forehead should have done this. It was better. Is that the way you do it? Yeah. So, Tom, and post for us, if you would, the Clean Business Today link.  And so you might wanna go back and see some of the other ones. Yeah, right now I'm with you. I change my mind day by day, hour by hour. I'm trying to not do that, because it's too stressful for me. So I'll tell you what I'm doing. I don't think I've shared this with anybody yet, except for my mastermind group. When I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I do is I go check a couple of sites that I have, three different sites. And I just, 10 minutes, I just think, what is the smart move for me and my company today? Do I need to make any changes? Do I need to pivot in any way? Now, what am I gonna do to support that decision? Just, what's the decision? That's hard enough. And then, yeah, every day. So every day I'm doing that, not usually making that decision sometime around six o'clock in the morning, with whatever information came in overnight. So I wake it up in the morning, it's like, what? That's what happened today, right? The $2 trillion thing, they signed in right over midnight. Who signed it in the Senate, Tom? Well, they didn't sign, they had a handshake. They had a handshake, okay. And it still has a, after I saw it, they still haven't passed it. Yes, still not. Okay, good, I'm glad you looked. Sarah, so good to see you guys. Thanks for being in support. Good to see you too, Sarah. Dana says, Tom, if I close for 30 days, should I not lay off my office manager? Should I just pay her out of pocket? She's the glue to my business. But I can't float that more than 30 days. Tough question. I can tell you that the decision that we made at Castlekeepers was to keep our managers and leadership team, if you will, in place and on the payroll. Our ability to do that for a long period of time isn't there either.  We've been talking about going to the SBA website and applying for a loan and that's an option.  Now, borrowing money, well, this needs to, we probably need to make this a whole another discussion.  Just because you borrow it, you need to make sure that you got a plan on what you're gonna do with it and how you're gonna get to the other side and how you're gonna be able to pay it back. It can be dangerous if you don't do that. It's kind of like, sometimes it's not too hard to get in trouble with things like credit cards and the next thing you know, you've maxed out your credit cards and you can't pay the interest and the interest on these loans is relatively low but nevertheless, I don't wanna just tell people to borrow a bunch of money and all your problems will go away but that could be a way that you could finance and keep some of these key people going a little bit while you're waiting to go to the other side but while Dana, there's no one answer for that. What do you think, Liz? I agree, Tom, no one answer. I can tell you that I'm of the same campus. Tom, though, if you've got somebody that you really don't wanna take a chance of losing, I'm just going to keep my people working, period. And so maybe they're still gonna stay on the payroll and I'm gonna work them. I have plenty of work for people to do, always. I will find work for you to do because my plan is not to close permanently and if I'm not closing permanently, I've got work for you. So I would not tell anybody else to put yourself into whatever indebted situation you might put yourself into but for me, I'm keeping my core people that I can't, in my mind, I guess I can't afford to lose them so I won't keep them. Hey, we're about to put the kind thoughts there. You guys are welcome. Let me bounce over to Cleaning Business Today, our website's cleaningbusinessday.com. Over here on the right, you can subscribe to our newsletter. I saw that one went out today. If you didn't get it, you're not subscribed. Please do that. That's the best way to stay up to date with all the work that we're doing. And there's a link that we don't really have published on the site because we want this information to be available to the people who are helping us make these Facebook Lives relevant but you guys know what it is. forward slash coronavirus-downloads is what it is and I'm gonna copy that, I'm gonna paste that again. The comments here and I'll take that word document that I shared in terms of the letter that we sent out to our clients at Castlekeepers last week letting them know that we're temporary suspending services that you can use that as a template. It might be helpful. So Tom, maybe tomorrow we should talk about ongoing communication, whether you're in business, whether you're not. We didn't really get a chance to talk too much about that. Maybe you can plan on that for tomorrow. Does that make good sense with what we know right now? Yeah, if something crazy happens in the next 24 hours there might be something else that would deserve some discussion too but let's make that the plan and see what happens over the next 24 hours. Sounds good Tom, for your tell it like it is section segment tomorrow it would be awesome if you could find out the nitty gritty on this Windex rumor that's been going around. I know just the person that can get us the real skinny on that. We'll have that for you tomorrow. Awesome, thanks everybody. Good seeing everybody on the call and see y'all tomorrow. Take care guys, thank you. Bye y'all. Bye bye.


All right, my intrepid learners, today we're going to talk about this question. Is good health a human right? And we've talked about sort of what good health means. We've talked about that in our first lesson a little bit. We haven't really talked yet about human rights. What is a human right? This is a really big question that kind of has busied the world for many years and many decades and lots of people are still talking about what it means. But really if you kind of dive into sort of the modern definition it's something that is inalienable and universal. So that means that everyone has them and that there are no buts about it. So that means you don't say well they're you know they're a person but and no buts. It's inalienable, it's universal, everyone has a human right. And there are 30 of them set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And we'll talk a little bit about that here in just a second. And just before we get started we're also going to talk about this a little bit later when we talk about this capabilities perspective coming up. But we're going to talk about how health doesn't necessarily equal health care. So how I'm going to make the sign here in math that means not equal to. Doesn't always mean health care. So we'll discuss the sort of nuance of that in a second. Alright so we're going to break it up into these three perspectives. We've got a legal perspective, sort of a international legal perspective, capabilities perspective right here, and then our economic perspective on this question. We'll start with the human rights one because kind of one of the older ones in terms of at least in terms of these three here. The first sort of big argument, the big international argument about this came in 1948. Or the world had just finished with World War II and they really weren't, they were needing sort of some sort of unifying documents and lots of them were written at this time. And one of them is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In it they said in 1948, so this is a long time ago mind you, everyone has the right to be to a standard of living adequate for the health of him and his family. So obviously it's a little bit antiquated in this language here. We've got his and his. We probably wouldn't want to word it that way because women are just as important in this discussion. So we've got this document that sort of gives us the our rights sort of from a legal perspective. Now let's take a look at something that was sort of, it's a little bit newer. It's I think from the 70s if I remember right, but that's not very important actually. It's sort of developed by a famous economist and philosopher. He's from India. His name is Martya Sen. Talks a lot about development and written a lot about it as well over the years. And he talks about human rights and the right part of this thing as being not as much a legal right but of a social right or of a social sort of, I need to learn how to spell, I'm so bad when I'm doing these videos all of a sudden I can't spell anymore. It's a social ethic. So sort of like a human right in a way, but it's something that we as a society say people should have these rights because we're good people, we have resources, we should share them essentially. Something like that. And he also says that feasibility, again not spelling correctly, feasibility does not determine your rights. And this is a really important sort of thing. It's basically saying that just because you can't, you can't at this moment offer that in completely say okay you have the right to good health but it's not exactly deliverable at that moment doesn't necessarily mean you don't have that right. So many countries have something kind of like this about violence. So they say you know you have a right to live in a society where you're not being attacked all the time. But that doesn't mean that you might not get mugged on the street someday or that something bad will happen to you. So feasibility doesn't determine your rights. And Sen just sort of tries to draw a connection between healthcare and legislation. So he's thinking of this sort of in a big picture kind of way like what kind of policies and what kind of laws can we make that will create the sort of systems that we need to fix health. And there he's also sort of making a wall between those two things. He's saying healthcare is one way in which you can achieve this good health. But there are other ways and you can use legislation to get those in other ways other than healthcare. Or you can use legislation to strengthen healthcare. There's lots of different ways that you can do it. It doesn't necessarily mean that universal healthcare provided by the state is maybe the requirement. But the right of having good health is nonetheless a socially ethical right that everyone deserves. And that although it's not feasible, you still have that right. So that's kind of an interesting agreement or sort of a between. You'll see actually that it's kind of a bridge between these two in a lot of ways. That's why I put it in the middle. So we move over here to the economic perspective, which most economic institutions and pretty much anybody who is worth their salt in economics these days agrees on this right here. Organizations I'm gonna have to go fight my pen a little bit here when we get done with this video. So economic organizations and that means things like banks and big health organizations, big development organizations and small ones as well are sort of saying something that actually makes perfectly logical sense. And honestly, we could have come to this a lot earlier. And that is that health is a necessity. And what they mean by this is that in order to have a successful life, in order to do the things that you want to do, you need to be healthy. It's absolutely vital. And health is therefore in many ways a motor for economic growth and for positive development in a society. So if you don't have healthy people, they can't go to work. They can't take care of their families. They can't do the things they need to do to build a stronger society and get the better health that comes with having more resources. So it's kind of like this motor. And I'm just gonna write motor down here as sort of a so you guys can remember, it is a motor for development. It is a motor for sort of getting a country to a better place. And this is really a purely economic view. It's not necessarily saying like, oh, people have the right to it. Saying people need it. It's required. And that's actually, I think, probably one of the most interesting sort of ways of thinking about it. So why is this important? Well, there is something that people talk a lot about in development. And they talk about a gap. So we've got here health on one axis. I'm gonna make a little chart here in a second. Got health on one axis. We've got time on another axis. And let's make the poorest people in society. We're gonna give them the color green. And their health in general starts sort of here. And maybe it's slowly improving. And in general, it's actually getting better around the world. So it's kind of maybe slowly curving up towards the top here at the end. And in the meantime, the people who are attaining sort of a middle class or upper lower class status, their health is getting better like this. And then at some point, it kind of starts to plateau. And it's actually been doing this now for a few decades. And then you have the very richest people in any societies, anywhere around the world, where as soon as medical advancements became sort of a part of what happened in society, their health shot up and sort of has plateaued and kind of slowly steadily gotten a little better and a little worse throughout history. And the question is, is this gap right here, so the space between the poor and the rich, or the richer, is this ethical? And does it make sense when you're talking about money? And I'm gonna put dollar signs, but you can replace that with whatever currency you would like. Does it make sense in terms of money? Because you've got these people down here who are often sort of the lower sort of the motor of a society's for forward motion economically. And they're not doing so well. They're putting a lot of money into their health, a lot of money that they don't have. And they're not doing very well. And does that make sense then? Does that maybe in some ways also hold other people back, not just with their health, but economically? So that is one way of looking at it from sort of an economic and also brought back the ethical sort of into this graph as well. Alright, so that is a look at health as a human right. I mean, I think just to be completely honest, I obviously feel that it is. But you everyone's entitled to their sort of opinion, though, I guess I would maybe take a look at each one of these perspectives and give it a second thought if you're unsure.


Well good morning. Good morning. Can I encourage you to sit down and we'll get this session started. And do come forward if you can. My name is Camilla Tullman. I'm the director of IID. And I'm just going to give a short introduction to this session because it's about agriculture and land, which is very close to the heart of IID's work and my heart as well. It's focused on making agricultural investment work for small scale farmers. We're very lucky to have a great chair and panel for discussing these issues. Before I introduce our chair, I wanted to just give a brief introduction to IID's work on land and agricultural investment because as I said, it's been very much at the heart of my work and now to IID over the last 20 years. We've been looking at three main areas. One is monitoring large scale land acquisitions, what's known as the land grab, or the rush to acquire soils, water, forests in other countries, in other parts of the world. To try and find out what's actually happening in particular places, to try and get behind the headlines, and to try and understand the principal drivers of this rush to acquire resources elsewhere. The second main area has been working with lawyers and communities and governments to develop effective, low cost, accessible forms of land rights registration that can secure farmland, that can secure common property resources in terms of access, investment, ensuring returns for the long term. And the third main area of work has been examining and communicating alternative investment models and contracts that keep land in small holder farmers hands and get a better balance in market value chains between investors, between and producers. We're really keen to try and address the huge asymmetry in power between big companies, host governments, and local farmers. And I know we're going to hear a lot from the panel this morning on how that can work out in practice, what some of the positive examples are, what some of the pitfalls are. I'd now like to introduce our chair, Lindy Weissabander, who's a very well known and respected figure on the global agricultural stage. She's the CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, FANERPAN, based in South Africa. She's been a member of the Montpellier panel and is also on two of the boards of the CG IAR. Somehow, she also finds time to have a cattle farm of her own and she's extremely well qualified to run this panel. So, Lindy Weissabander, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kamila, for that warm introduction and the overview on the work you do with a lot of passion. It's a pleasure to be a chair and to be accompanied by eminent, eloquent panelists who are going to be engaging with us for the next one and a half hours. I'm excited because in this panel we have three women and one man. He's a lucky man indeed. But more interesting is that we've got a representative from Brazil, our host country, who is a great advocate on farming issues, particularly the family farms. We also have a representative from Africa who is a researcher in her own right and is passionate about forests and ecosystem services. And then big business is also here because the topic that we are on is making agricultural investments work for family farms and for small scale farmers. Without taking much time, I would like each of the panelists to just give us an overview of who they are, where they come from, what they do, and what it is that made them say yes to be a panelist for this exciting session. I'm going to start with the farmers because there's a farmer I'm passionate about, the people who feed us. Over to you, Alexandra. This is called CONTAG, which is the National Confederation of Workers in Agriculture. And also today we have the responsibility to organize the confederations of farmers, peasants and indigenous people in seven countries of the South America, and today I'm one of the farmers of the Amazon. And we accept this challenge of being here with you to discuss, mainly the main challenges that today are put into Brazilian family agriculture, which is mainly to look at how the dispute is in the field and mainly this model of development that is being worked on in the Brazilian field and which today greatly discriminates on the small Brazilian farmers. I'm called Sara Namirembe. I come from the World Agroforestry Center. I'm coordinating the program for proper rewards for environmental services in ICRAF. And my major interest here is to look at achieving environmental integrity in the whole quest for enhancing food production. So looking at ways that we can design land use in a way that can achieve both and also achieve fairness for small holder farmers. So I look forward to a very engaging discussion with fellow panelists and with you too. Thanks. Thank you, Sara. And over to you, Ruth. Yes, my name is Ruth Van Neck. I'm a producer of biofuels. We started seven years ago to produce biofuels based on the Jatrofa, a crop that grows in Africa. And we decided to grow Jatrofa, to buy the Jatrofa from small holders and not to set up a large-scale plantation. Making that decision helped us to have more possibilities to grow, but we will come back on that later on. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have a field of who is up here. But there are three pillars to this conversation. There is sustainable intensification of agriculture, of course. There is investments, agricultural investments. But most important, there is the small-scale farmer, the family farms, as they will call them here in Brazil. I am keen to understand the typology. What do these family farms look like? Can we bring them to this room? Alexandra, can you take us to the places where you are farming, lift them up and bring them to this room and just describe what does it mean to be a family farmer? What is it that is in a family farm? We, farmers, don't like the term small-scale farming, as it is used in many parts of the world. Today we say that we advance to the recognition of the term family farming, because we understand when we say small-scale farming as if it were a pejorative term, because it depends on the size of the property, because sometimes I can have a hectare of property and, depending on the activity I develop, I can't be a small farmer. So, today in Brazil we identify by the size of the property. It is an important question to recognize who is a family farmer. But above all, it is a term that is used to recognize the family, who develops this activity with the family, and, above all, who works on the land, who takes away its sustenance, specifically from the management of the land. So, this is the differential when we say family farming. And today in Brazil there are more than 4.5 million properties that represent these Brazilian family farmers. Although we still have a great difficulty in identifying properties, one of the great problems is the lack of background regularization. We don't have the document of the land, so we estimate this number that I am saying of 4.5 million, these are the official data that we have, but they are far beyond that, but we know that today family farming represents and occupies less than 20% of the exploration of the Brazilian territory. So, it is a very important investment, and our main struggle is the identification of these two farmers that exist in Brazil, their role, and, above all, the fundamental role, which is this family farming, even if it is only 20% of the territory, it guarantees 70% of the food that goes to the table of all Brazilians, that is, the guarantee of national food security. Alessandro, tell us more. You say one, you don't like the name small, you want to be identified through the family, because the core business is to grow food to support the family. You own less than one hectare. What other assets, other than land, provide for the livelihoods in that family farm? Well, when we say that we don't like the term small agriculture and I said that we have already advanced a lot in this term, today, at the summit of the countries of the South America, we have advanced and today we recognize this term family farming, beyond Brazil. This term is used a lot, even from the creation of the special meeting of family farming in the South America, where we have advanced in these terms and in these debates the needs for family farming. So, beyond the question of land, of the identification of access, first of all, to produce is the access to land, we have discussed mainly the need for investment of public policies that make investment that is able to strengthen the production of family farming. One of the biggest challenges today of family farming, besides access to land, is the commercialization, the generation of income, and so that we can have quality of life for these families who survive in their properties, have the condition to manage their properties and also be able to, from start to finish, produce and also commercialize, dominate all the chain spaces of their production. So, for this investment in technologies and in several others, especially other public policies that come together, we call this concept of integral agricultural reform, because it is the access to land, but also with a package, we usually call it public policies that can guarantee both production and commercialization, all the needs of this family. Thank you very much for that overview on family farms. Over to you, Sarah. Dr.  We can now visualize what a family farm looks like. What does an African small-scale farm household look like in terms of assets, the number of people who depend on that household, the physical structures, and anything else that can help us understand what happens in Africa? Okay, in Africa, what we call a small-scale farm, and we hopefully, after today, will adopt this family farm term, because it sounds much better. But what we call a small-scale farm is usually between one quarter of a hectare, or even less than one quarter of a hectare, up to about two hectares. And this is supporting a family of, on average, six persons. We have these small-scale farms occurring adjacent to urban centers and others occurring in rural areas. Those adjacent to urban centers have good access to market and can also supplement their income from land with off-farm employment. Whereas those ones from the rural areas are less endowed in terms of infrastructure, and they produce for family consumption mainly. And in general, they are poorer than the small-scale farms in nearer to the urban centers. The farms usually produce food for the family from cultivation. They have some livestock farming. This is usually in the more humid areas we have a mixture of cultivation and livestock. And then in the more dry land areas, the farms are more oriented towards livestock. These farms produce the family needs in terms of food. They can also invest in some form of cash crop production. The environmental services that they may need, things from nature including water or firewood, are usually accessed from the commonly owned patches of land. And so usually these kinds of resources are not generated from the small-scale farm, but those resources are generated off-farm from some kind of commonly accessed or commonly owned public natural resource system. The land tenure is usually not documented or titled. So a lot of these farms are traditionally or locally known that they are owned by a certain person. But in the more formal system, this land tenure is not documented. So it's quite unclear from an outsider coming in how the land tenure works. But that's the whole setup of what a small-scale farm looks like in Africa. Thank you very much, Sarah, for that overview. One thing we are getting is that Africa likes the term family farms. So very soon we are going to replace small-scale to family farm. Thank you to Brazil. But one thing that's clear is that tenure rights between Africa and Brazil are still a challenge. But for Africa, I think the other thing is that women are the backbone in terms of the food production cycle from these small farms. Now, over to you, Ruth. We've heard from the farmers. We've heard from Africa. We've heard from Brazil. You are big business. What is your interest in Africa? What is your interest in Brazil? What is your interest in those developing, emerging economies? When I started to invest in Africa, it was in biofuels. And the biofuels business is very new. And for that reason, with an upcoming market, you always have to be very careful how to do that. Setting up large-scale plantations for something which is very unknown, there's not much information about it, it's very riskful. Because you are taking a lot of land away from the people, from the local population, and you're not sure what the outcome will be. So that was the reason for me to decide to work with small farmers. And you can do that in Africa. You can do that in Brazil, in Southern America. You cannot do that in Europe. Because Europe, there's no space for production like this, for biofuels, and also for large-scale food production. Because just the content is too small. So your attraction to Africa was the small-scale farms and your interest in improving the livelihoods of these farmers. If I can interrupt you, the initial step to go to Africa was to produce biofuels and that we needed the land. My first focus was not to focus on poverty reduction. That is something that came later on. Because we found out that the combination was very possible. Excellent. I think we get it out of the bag. Big business is in Africa to make business. And business is about profits. It's about win-win. It can be in Africa. It can be in Brazil. I want to ask the farmer, big business is going into the family farms, is going into the small-holder farms to make business. From your experience, are these fair deals? Are they win-win for the farmer and for the investor? I would like to bring, maybe before you answer, when you were talking about family farming, we have a lot in common. I think it's mainly family farming from Latin America, Brazilian family farming and African family farming. We have been discussing a lot about these common challenges. Exactly, because in Brazil, more than 50% of the poor are in the field. Poverty in Brazil has an address, as we usually say, and it locates more than 50% among family farmers in the field due to the absence of high investment. These are some of the points. It also unifies a lot our action. When we look at Africa and Brazil and Latin America, they are the two continents today that suffer a greater search for investment in land, for the fertility of our soil, for the availability of rain, for space, and also for the lack of a stronger regulation of our own legislation in our countries. So today, we would say that droughts are very common between the two continents and the needs, especially of the identification of the role of family farming and the role of business farming. How to reconcile these two interests is a great challenge. And today, we would say that in our experience, we are not very easy to meet. I think that, especially because of the difference of interests between the two sectors. So when you ask, sometimes this identification, the work has been fair? Generally, no. I think that for us, when we meet companies that are so concerned with this differential, they are not very easy to meet because while one has the interest of the market and of mainly earning profits on this market, there is a relationship with the market. The relationship of family farming with this different land of social inclusion is that our struggle is for the empowerment of these families so that they can also not only with the vision of great profits, but above all, the differential. That's why the numbers show that family farming generates four times more jobs in the same equity, depending on the production, sometimes explored by a mainly of the monoculture. So this is perhaps the great differential and not always this relationship is very fair for the difference of vision and objectives of exploration of this land. Thank you very much, Alexandra. For this sustainable development we're looking at the economic benefits, the social benefits and feeding the environment. And we've got a private sector investor who is working with his family farms, who is working particularly in Africa. His interest is to make a profit because it's business. But, Rude, what is the formula for making this sustainable development? Can the rural farmers really stand up and say yes to private sector investment, yes to big business, yes to jatropha production? Are they winning? There is always a kind of pressure if you're talking about large-scale agricultural activities. Very often you see the large-scale plantations and they can be very efficient. And that is always in competition with the smallholders because smallholders, small farmers are not that efficient right now. And that is the big competition between the smallholders who are trying to produce their food production or trying to produce feedstock for other things could be biofields, for example. If you have a large-scale production very often it's more efficient in logistics, in fertility, for the soil. It's more in control. And it is indeed a very difficult step to get those small farmers on the same level as the large-scale plantations. For me as an investor it should be not really an issue. Of course it is an issue because they are my suppliers but my price is based on what they provide on me. And if they are less effective their income is lower. And that is the reason for me that I want them to be very effective. We love your passion for these family farms for the small-scale farmers. But we are still trying to understand you have articulated the challenges of making them your supplier. They have diverse interests. They are not well-skilled and the infrastructure support around the family farms is minimum. But you have still chosen to go and do business with them. Can you tell us why not with big business? Why should you go through this pain? What we produce is biofuels. And biofuels is a different kind of business because it is very new. And that means there are a lot of things unknown about biofuels and what you see with large-scale plantations on biofuels you see that they all get bankrupt right now. The reason is they are unknown about Jatrofa. They started to grow Jatrofa. The productivity is negative and they have to stop. With Jatrofa as a side business if you are just growing Jatrofa as hatches around your land it protects your land and then you can harvest the seeds and sell them to a company like Delegate. It is a different approach. It is an additional income and additional effort. So that is a win for Jatrofa. But it only works for now. It only works with Jatrofa. I would like that it also would work with food production. So the Jatrofa you have introduced to the African small-scale farmers is providing you with oil with seeds. And seeds which you then process. But more important you are allowing the small-scale which they would not use for anything else. Before you answer I want to go to an expert. We have gotten the panel an African researcher who is an interest in forests who is interested in ecosystem services Sarah. Does this make sense? Are we able to reduce poverty in Africa by encouraging our farmers to partner with people like Ruth? I should also maybe put a provisor that in certain instances yes and the research is still not yet complete on these issues. So we also don't know much more than the private sector on how Jatrofa might work if we are going to focus on Jatrofa alone. But the little research that we have for regarding Jatrofa is the hypothesis was that it would go on marginal land. But it grows faster and quicker if it goes on less marginal land. And so it's beginning because of the income that's coming into the farmers. It's beginning to move from what they call marginal land into the land that should have been producing food. So as far as we know about Jatrofa but if I could use another example where Sugarcane did that for example in western Uganda where with more income, with more farm inputs coming in from the private sector onto the small farm, farmers actually completely replaced their food with Sugarcane production and when that factory could not buy their sugar anymore they actually became food deficient. So there can be a risk with that. The assumption that farmers will only use marginal land I think would be taken with a pinch of salt. I think what's interesting for me is that we admit that research is still working in progress in terms of particularly the Jatrofa but the beauty with private sector is that they are risk takers. They have gone in they are partnering with the disadvantaged and they are also learning by doing and they are hoping that the policy environment will meet them halfway. Can you just unpack for us the policy challenges that you are facing in your efforts to make sustainable investments through private sector partnering with small scale farmers? Just a minute, Sarah wants to unpack something. I'll come back to you. I think also the other issue that we need to understand from the private sector is this transfer of risk because there is the issue that that the farmers are taking on this I mean as much as the private sector is a risk taker there is also the risk of the farmer and the insurance systems of the farmers are usually vested in the social networks that they have and these social networks tend to get kind of disintegrated when they get into partnerships with private sector businesses so I think maybe something else we would like to hear is if the private sector could then compensate that kind of risk that is now exposing the exposing farmers too or can they share in the insurance process? Over to you there is the risk there are policy challenges what is private sector to cushion the small farmers from the risks that they face from the policy environment that is not creating a level ground for you to work. Let me start on the risk side what we do and that is indeed we are sharing the risk a little bit we invest in the factory we invest in infrastructure we are not investing in land that is the part which the farmers are doing and that also means that if Jatrofa is less effective and the farmer is investing in Jatrofa that means it could be in disinvestment that is why we always promote Jatrofa just to do it additionally don't reduce the amount of production of food because that is your first part of income you need it for your own living but you also need it as your income Jatrofa only should be an additional income so we always say don't use more than let's say 50% of your land that also makes that it is not possible for us to give a kind of insurance if Jatrofa is not successful because if we are suffering, the farmer is suffering if the farmer is suffering we are suffering also we have a common risk and a common profit if it is successful then we get the side of policy and that is something which is very difficult in Africa because we are depending on policies but there is not much policy development in Africa what we prefer to do is sell the oil just on the local market in Africa what happens right now is diesel is produced in Rotterdam is transported to Africa is sold there also the oil we are producing is first sent to Europe to the United States to produce and to transfer it into biofuels and of course that is ridiculous I would prefer to sell it on the local market the reason we are not doing it is because there is no policy we are not allowed to sell biofuels in Africa there is no policy about it so we don't know what happens if we start selling it right now we will be later on over 5 years do we have to pay whatever fees I don't know so that is the reason why we don't sell on the local market right now interesting you generate the products in Africa but you are not allowed to even create the market where the product is produced you are making more money outside the continent interesting we could make a better profit if you could sell it in the continent itself so policy challenge number one we hope you could make both better money but more important we hope you could make more money in the pockets of the farmers who are producing before I go over to Brazil roughly show us how much money are we talking about because we heard from Brazil that the biggest challenge is poverty we know that is for sure in Africa another challenge now we have got an investor coming into Africa growing introducing a crop for biofuel to make big money my interest is how much of that big money remains in the pocket of the producer the small farmer because food security is about one, producing the food two, accessing the food which means you have money to buy and making sure you have a decent livelihood how much money are we talking about on average pay yeah I can give you some insight about what the income for the farmers is we always said this is additional we cannot replace their income and farmer can make about 300 dollars a year on just over which makes that they can in rural environment they will double their income 300 dollars a year in my old life when I was 13 we worked on a maize farm and the maximum we got from our 1 hectare was 2 tons of maize and the current price is about 120 US dollars so they would normally make about 200 dollars a year so an additional 300 dollars would really make a difference to a small holder farmer it sounds small but my little mathematics says yes it would make a difference in Brazil since root is saying that in addition to 50 percent of the land being used for crops to feed the family they are asking for a small portion that they use for biofuels and they leave the farmer with 300 dollars more than they would have without roots investments right do you have similar cases in Brazil where you've got a big business coming to work with the family farm and making a difference by leaving more money in the pockets of the farmers do you have similar cases in Brazil where you've got a big business coming to work with the family farm even with the difficulties we still have technical assistance we take important steps in the last few years we still have a big farm when we see that more than 50 percent are still poor but I would say that it is very efficient to feed more than 70 percent of the food that goes to the table of the Brazilians now the difficulty is exactly that these politicians in the countries can look at this sector as a strategic sector and I think in this debate mainly regarding the diversification of production the relationship including agriculture we identify with this I think one of the big challenges has been how to diversify how the property can also have several sources of income now the big difficulty in this relationship when before this debate how this business relationship with the small farmers it is difficult because this relationship usually when it is the income of a property for production sometimes it can be fuel cellulose for cellulose plants like in Brazil we have a lot or several others in many cases sometimes a contract of 50 years our big concern that the day this land is returned to this farmer it will no longer have the condition to survive on it if it is returned this is also a doubt after 50 years it will not have the condition to continue because the way of working with so many insumes with so many technologies is not the same as the other farmer so this relationship often ends up being exploration now it can be a more sustainable relationship I think when we are in this debate one of the challenges we have especially discussing why? the same companies today why 7 companies dominate the market of the world meat for example why many the same company acts in several countries as the partner here is saying acts in Africa and commercializes in other places sometimes there is the absence of public policy also to strengthen local markets we also identify this we think that the exit of strengthening local markets for any production to have focus with the local market and today it is not what potentializes so we understand that this relationship needs to happen it needs the guarantee of sustainability we call it traceability of the production of family agriculture because if we look today for example Brazilian family agriculture is responsible for a significant example of milk Brazil is highly sustainable in milk production but the production of family agriculture disappears when it leaves the property and arrives in the dairy that it buys it disappears the contribution of family agriculture so we are today a challenge traceability of this production I think how family agriculture is contributing in the big chains even in the world market it is very significant in that sense but we already identify that 28% of what produces family agriculture is also part of Brazilian export so I think this relationship it will have sustainability mainly from the moment that this identification relationship happens in Brazil when you ask if we have similar experiences there is a challenge being built for example of biodiesel biodiesel in relation to family agriculture where we are also looking to try that the property of family agriculture also has biodiesel as an alternative to income but to empower the families themselves in a cooperative way so that they can dominate all the processes too and this is a great challenge so I think it is possible but not looking for local markets making the real contribution of the families so that they can empower themselves of these generated profits but what I liked is the issue of risk where you say you can diversify by different crops but by bringing in big business you are seeing that as a way of diversification because you are bringing in a cash crop that you wouldn't otherwise have a market for but now with the partnership you are seeing an opportunity but it has got to be a fair deal there is a component of research that you brought in we go into these deals for 50, 99 years and this is a family farm when you get it back after 50 years can we still call it a family farm has research looked into that have you done any modelling to project what would be the damage or benefit like your land to grow cash crops then three generations down the line your grandchildren want to grow cassava can they do it I think what I know about this is not the research coming from ICRAF but it's research that we did within Uganda when the president of Uganda was proposing to give away a portion of the forest to a large scale sugar cane producer and what we found that actually the long term impacts of using technological agriculture inputs on land causes land to be nonproductive in the longer term so some research has been done but I only have the data for Uganda I'm sure there is data out there for other places looking at the Uganda side and also looking at this sugar cane relationship between large scale producers and small scale farmers is that actually that land if the farmers become out growers then that land becomes non-useable at a later stage I think something else I also wanted to add to this discussion is the 300 dollars sounds very good if you just look at it as 300 dollars but we have to ask ourselves from whose perspective are we looking at this and at the farmers we rarely calculate their investment versus return so that is something that needs to be a kind of unpacked and then also there is the issue that we've been looking at this not necessarily for small scale farmers versus large scale farmers but also for environmental services where this kind of a similar relationship comes in where we have the larger players from the international market coming in to pay for environmental services at the small scale and again the question comes in like how do we set the price which then results into this 300 dollars or whatever it is and usually the setting of the price from our research is an issue really when you get what the buyer is willing to pay versus what the seller is willing to accept we found that actually many of the sellers don't get the time to think through their opportunity costs when they're naming their price and a lot of the times they tend to undersell themselves so the framing of the contracts should actually allow for review to allow the farmers to come up with these kinds of agreements such that they can renegotiate the 300 dollars or whatever the profit would be Thank you very much Sarah I think one thing that's coming out clear is the issue of trust when you are dealing with family farms small scale farms and you are bringing a big player to partner with them there is an element of mistrust in terms of information the fine print in these contracts because when I get the 300 dollars I jump and celebrate and say this is double but is it the fair deal is it really what I got into or that's what I was made to understand is the best value for my output how do you ensure transparency and flexibility to make sure you can go back to the drawing board should you have a windfall of money what we it took several years before we had settled our price actually when we started our business our price was much lower and the farmers didn't accept it or they only produced small amounts and we had to raise the price in time and at a certain moment we found out that farmers get more to produce the tropha first and that's also something that we always see farmers start growing the trophas mostly it's only a small amount they only have one row of hatches and at a certain moment you reach a level and the trust that they say okay this is interesting we sold the tropha seeds to you for two years and we have trust in the company and the organization and then they start to increase the production and that's also why we it took so many years before we became successful to build up a trust with the farmers takes a long time and now we are active for seven years you see that now at once we see a very steep grow of supply from the farmers and the reason for it is that we are getting more and more well known under the farmers so we have received, reached that trust and the reason why we didn't have the trust in the beginning is that a lot of things happened before we arrived at the farm place a lot of farmers lost a lot of money to better crops and couldn't sell sell it finally Ladies and gentlemen I'm sure you can see from this panel small scale farmers family farms need big business they are saying it's not a dirty word but it's got to be a fair deal there are challenges in the policy front there are challenges in the governance process issues of transparency and trust but this is something that the farmers are welcoming with open arms I would like to turn over to you and find out from this debate are there any burning burning questions and issues that you would want to contribute so that we can bring your views to this debate we are midway there is plenty of time but I just thought I should pause now and open up for your engagement whilst you are thinking through your questions you can see a couple of hands Alessandra is dying to say something just to top you up with more information we are not yet finalizing I just want the audience to be part of this dialogue and will still continue I would like to ask you is this really necessary this relationship and I would like to even provoke the debate what we have talked through our organizations both here in Brazil through the contact of other organizations that work in the field in Latin America with the other networks that we have worked also partnership in Africa to make a conclusion that we need to ask ourselves if we really need these investments to bring a production that I don't know how to deal with that I don't know how to plant that I am dependent on technical assistance that I am dependent on the insumes that I am dependent on the whole mechanism of this market chain where the price of this product was discussed in several places in the world depending on the product what is the need that I have to do this in my own as a farmer as a director we have reflected this and our conclusion in Brazil we have invested much more in the discussion with our farmers in experiences that strengthen the local market strengthen what I already have what I produce what I know how to deal with what I know how to work and what can in fact make a big difference one of his examples for example why not explore the first market that I have closer to my home that is the school that is where the national food program in Brazil came from and has made a big difference because it already produces make the school consume healthy food and that comes from the property close to your home this relationship so I think we need this question I think that as alternatives they can be sought but for us is mainly to strengthen alternatives production, consumption that can be there and growing for other alternatives but above all I think this is the way for us safer it's all to do with transparency the closer the markets the more eyes we can have in understanding what the market forces are what the returns on our investment are and how we can benefit and reduce poverty another issue is the relationship to have some dignity we need to respect that I'm bringing the land don't make me dependent by making me depend on you for the inputs depend on you for the information depend on you for the market there's got to be an element of empowerment so that in this partnership between family farms and big business you leave the family farm better of capacitated to do things better rather than be dependent I saw a couple of questions out there so please can we have the mics say hello I'll go row by row


In this video, we demonstrate how to pour and spread your art resin. Once you've mixed both the resin and hardener together, you'll have about 45 minutes of working time to spread it before it starts to cure. If your mixture is warmer than room temperature, your working time and cure time will be decreased. Pour and spread the art resin as you see fit. If you intend to coat the entire piece, start by pouring in the center. Use a spreader to guide it exactly where you want it to go. Or you can use a disposable brush to embellish only certain areas of your piece. You can resin the sides with a disposable brush or your gloved hand. Or just let it dome neatly on top. Now, you're ready for step 5.


It's time to know your foe and it's the Denver Broncos under first year coach Nathaniel Hackett. They are three and five on the season. Of course, kickoff is noon on Sunday at Nissan Stadium. Broncos coming off of a bye. Second week in a row. Yeah, somebody coming off a bye. Oddly enough. Their offense, 329 yards per game. Not what they want it to be because their new quarterback whose name everybody knows. Russell Wilson off to a little bit of a slow start, but they're getting better. Yep, and they want to run the football. They want to be physical and they want to get these backs involved and, you know, then create things for for the quarterback and some windows and end use. You know, Cortland Sutton and Jerry Judy here. Dolchich is a guy we talked about. Chase Edmonds earlier in the week is what his availability is going to look like out there. And there's Dolchich, who's got a lot of great range, can run. And again, Russell Wilson's, you know, back there pulling the trigger. So, you know, it's going to be a huge challenge. You can see the play action here taking a shot against the Texans. Defensively, they're excellent. And we'll get to that here in a second, but they're excellent. And they just, they don't, it's hard to throw the football on them. Front is very good. Safeties are Simmons and Jackson and Surtain is a new next star in this league at cornerback. All right. Let's take a look at the defense giving up just 288 yards per game. Just 166 passing. Draymond Jones, outstanding start to the year. Yeah. Athletic can play inside, can play outside, takes on blocks, can make a miss. He's got very good length. He's a, you know, relatively young player, I think just in his fourth year, but has gotten better every single year. You know, you could see him out here playing in space. He's a long player that's athletic and he's gotten better. So that'll be a huge challenge. And again, we've talked about this, Mike, they feel good enough about their young guys on the edge to move on from Bradley Chubb and trade him and work with these young guys that they have.