Dairy Workforce Focus: Implementation of Training Programs

- To ask questions, we usually save it for the end, and you can either raise your hand or type your questions in the Q&A function, and also you can adjust the view of the screen to change the view for the speaker and have the full presentation, or as you better decide is better for you viewing.

Today we're gonna have Carlos Rodriguez, he works for Country View Family Farms and he's gonna be talking about applied implementation of farm personnel training programs.

So Carlos Rodriguez and then Jay Clements is not gonna be here today, they actually have a really great training program, it's not actually for dairy, but it's really interesting how a lot of the things can actually be applied to dairy management and dairy farming.

Next webinar after this is gonna be our host, Lisa Holden, and it's gonna be talking about training and drift, and that's gonna be December 19 of this year.

And I believe, Lisa, that might be the last one of this series, right?

- That will be, yes, correct.

- So please reach out to us, let us know what other ideas, topics you would like for us to put together for the next series, that probably will start sometime in May or so next year, maybe a little earlier, but please, please, please let us know a topic of interest so we can provide meaningful information for you.

So without further ado or with that being said, I'm gonna turn the screen to our invited speaker, Carlos Rodriguez.

Carlos, thank you so much again and we're really looking forward to hear your presentation.

- Okay, thank you, Adrian, please let me know if you can see my screen.

- We can see it.

- Wonderful, okay, so hello everybody and thanks to Adrian and Lisa for the invitation to be part of this good conversation.

Like Adrian said, we are gonna be talking a lot about what we are doing in regards to training programs in a large swine operation, but as Lisa said, I believe there is some similarities, so a lot of things that we can apply because at the end of the day, we are talking about livestock, we are talking about farming and also we are talking about making our people the best.

So let me start with a quick introduction, my name is Carlos Roudergue, I am a veterinarian, born in Santiago.

I was raised in between Santiago, the capital city of Chile, in between Santiago and the south of Chile, where is the countryside, and probably for that reason I started showing from my early childhood, a lot of interest for animals and that's the reason why I ended up studying veterinary medicine in the Mayor University in Chile, after that, about three years after receiving my veterinary degree, I started doing a master in business administration in a well recognized school of business in Chile, Adolfo Ibanez, and in parallel, at that time I was already working in the Swine Industry, I started working in Swine since I got my veterinary degree actually, but very interesting probably for all of you, during my six years in the vet school, I was pretty much involved in dairy and actually I was looking to be a dairy vet, but I mean, a lot of things happened at the end of my thesis that makes me switch to the swine industry and in reality I love it, but I still have some contact with dairy, my family actually, they own dairy cattle in Chile, so I'm still close to the dairy world.

So at the beginning, coming from the vet school, I started working for a local pharmaceutical company called Centrovet as a swine vet technical service, then I moved to Agrosuper, it was my first experience in a large operation in Chile, 135,000 sows, at that time, I was taking care with another colleague of the coast region of the production with 90,000 sows in inventory.

After a few years working for Agrosuper, I started another challenge, I moved to Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company, taking care of the swine technical services for South America.

And since the last 4 1/2 years, I started servicing here in Country View Family Farms, I started as a sow production manager, overseeing 30,000 sows, spreading eight different farms, eight different locations, and since a year ago actually, I started transitioning to a new role as a training and development manager for Indiana and Pennsylvania operations.

We are gonna talk a little bit more in details about what this department is about, but I'm telling you in advance, this is a brand new department for Country View, and in parallel to my work, I am also a graduate student at the Iowa State University, I'm doing my masters and the long-term is to complete my PhD there, and I am also married to Daniela, and my two daughters, Rosario and Helena, they are pretty much the motivation of all what I do every day.

So this is the agenda for today.

The challenge is to cover the whole agenda in about 50 minutes, so hopefully we are gonna make it, there is a lot of things here, I'm gonna try to be as precise as possible, not going a lot into the details, but let me know if you have any questions.

We're gonna start talking a little bit about Clements Food Group or Country View Family Farms, basically Country View Family Farms is the animal procurement division of Clements Food Group, that's our mothership, we're gonna be talking a little bit about what we do just to bring some context, then I'm gonna do some introduction of our training team, I would like to share with all of you also our goals, just again, to bring a little bit more of context of what we do, and then after doing that, we are gonna be covering pretty much the main plate, training methods, what is our training structure and the career path for our team members, and all this is based on what we call our onboarding process for new hires, we're gonna share a little bit about our Step Plan or level training program, and finally, we're gonna be talking also a little bit about our Manager Trainee programs and development plans, and we're gonna wrap up with some closing remarks.

So about Clements Food Group and Country View Family Farms, just to share with all of you, we are the fifth largest producer in the US, the fifth largest pork producer in the US with multiple production facilities, we're headquartered in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles Northwest from Philadelphia.

Our company is vertically coordinated, industry-leading operations, actually, we made the differentiation in between, particularly integrated as many other producers, and vertically coordinated and we believe we are coordinated rather than integrated because all the links in our production chains are very, very coordinated in real time.

So we are actually able to adapt to all customer needs pretty much in real time, from the plants to our sow firms.

We have 2 billion annual revenue, $2 billion annual revenue, 1.6 billion pounds of pork produced annually, and you can find us under the brand Hatfield in retail supermarkets, mainly in the East Coast.

So Clements Food Group, like I said, is the mothership of what we call Country View Family Farms, the animal procurement division, with 105,000 sows owned and managed, that's our current inventory in the production.

We produce 2.6 million pigs a year and we include over 350 company-owned and independent family-owned farms in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania.

We operate in all those states.

If you go just for the animal procurement side of things, as a pork producer, we are today actually number 11 in the US with the inventory that we have and the production volume that we have, in our farms we're about 400 team members, we have 24/7 veterinary oversight and care and 100% of our farms, sow farms, are group housing.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with basically how flows or how to operate a sow farm, but here in the US and worldwide, you have basically two different scenarios in a sow farm.

Sow farms that are 100% created, meaning the sows stay from breeding to farrowing, in a stall, individual stall, with probably you can imagine, not a lot of room to move.

We commit about two years, 10 years ago, sorry, with a lot of customers, the decision of moving to 100% group housing by the end of this year and actually we already accomplished that goal, so all our sow farms and also all third-party producers that send their hogs to our slaughter plants in Hatfield and also Coldwater, those hogs are coming from sow farms, 100% group housing.

Some of the differences in between group housing as well, you can see sow farms doing group housing, but post-implantation or pre-implantation, what that means basically, you can move these animals into pens from the breeding area, which is created, you can do it before seven days or five days post first service, or you need to wait until the process of implantation is completed, and that happen about 35 to 40 days, 35 to 42 days after the first service.

Our inventory in reproduction is about 50/50, so 50% of our sows, these 105,000 sows are post-implantation and 50% are pre-implantation.

And also 50% of our inventory is running in electronic sow feeding systems like the one in the picture, with pens of 60 sows or up to 240 sows per pen, and the other 50% of our inventory running a system that we call stanchions, basically like you can see here in this section of the picture at the end, we basically feed these sows with feed boxes that drop feed right to the floor one time a day.

And like I said before, our market, our brands are well recognized in the East Coast, but also we have been taking the advantage of some regulatory opportunities in California, I don't know if you're familiar with Prop 12 regulations in California, and also Question 3, Massachusetts, we have been taking the advantage of the regulations and we are reconverting some of our locations to be compliant with those new laws, so we are actually able to sell fresh meat into California under proper standards today.

Team introduction.

So this is the team, the training team, again, this is a pretty new team, we started transitioning, half of the people that you see here actually, between Bethel Ash, Sarah Lazar, Gerardo and myself, we were working in the production, 100% production roles and we started transitioning since November last year to this new role, bringing a lot of production experience to a new department.

This is the organization chart.

My intention is not to show you (mumbles)

or stuff like that, my intention by showing this chart to you is just to show you the fact that I have the privilege to lead this great team, with Gerardo and Sarah, with a lot of knowledge, expertise and also leadership skills, but we report directly to the president of the company.

In my opinion, that tells you a lot how seriously we take training in Country View.

We are not reporting to HR, we are not reporting to a subdivision of the company, we report directly to the president of the operation, that tells you a lot, again, how seriously Country View Family Farms takes training.

What are our goals?

So like I said, we're a brand new department at CVFF, running 100% on our new roles since pretty much nine months, but so far we have been able to accomplish stuff.

So we build a team, that's actually our first accomplishment, then we remodeled a prior onboarding process that we have here in the company, in our opinion, with a lot of room for opportunity, things that we can improve, I'm gonna tell you more details about it pretty soon, also we relaunched our prior Step Plan and we make something different and I'm gonna share with you in a couple of minutes, this Step Plan has a lot of emphasis or special emphasis in what we call Day 1 Care, basically the first 24 hours of life of a piglet, in swine production, 70 to 75% of the mortality happens the first three days of life of a piglet, and a lot of that mortality is related to Day 1 Care management, Day 1 Care processes, (murmurs) to management and stuff like that.

And also another critical process for us is artificial insemination, so we created a school as a part of this Step Plan as well.

Also as a training team, we basically, it took the leadership and the ownership of our Standard Operating Procedures, so we are actually right now working in a new documentation center, we are organizing new materials, remodeling SOPs, getting our amount of documents leaner, we used to have more than 200 SOPs, today we are ending with no more than 70, 74 the most, we are trying to get rid of waste and making our documents more efficient and leaner and easier to understand.

And also like you can see here, we are working on our Step Plan once again, since we are remodeling SOPs now, probably we need to reevaluate our existing new Step Plan to move it to our next level.

Also the training team has a lot of involvement in continuous improvement programs, we are a part of actually, company initiative related to continuous improvement, but also we develop all our materials and the implementation of those with a CI mindset.

And finally, we are always working on developing the best standard training methodology and that's probably something that never ends.

There is always something to improve on that.

So in regards to training methods, this slide looks pretty busy, so just to give you the core of this slide, here we are talking about training adults and for that, we are using the Adult Learning Model, you can Google Adult Learning Model and you're gonna find a lot of good information, including this chart here, but basically, we base all our actions, knowing that adults learn different than childs.

In a child model actually, you put all the contents in the center of the model and the childs are around their model, the content, sorry.

So those childs, they have empty minds, they are pretty much sponges, and they need to learn pretty much from zero, a whole bunch of new things, a lot of new stuff.

So in the child learning model, you always put the content as a center of your program and then the kids are basically around the content, learning the new things.

When we are training adults, we cannot do that, why?

Because adults actually, they have a previous experience, they have previous knowledge, they have other motivations than kids.

Kids, they have different motivations to learn, adults, they are goal-oriented, they're relevancy-oriented, they are practical, they want to be respected, also adults sometimes need to relearn.

For example, in our company, when we hire somebody from other operation here in the United States, sometimes we need to reset that adult to learn different, to learn something new, that's pretty hard.

So the Adult Learning Model like I said, is a game changer, it is way different than the traditional way we see learning in kids.

And when we are talking how to teach effectively adults, we need to put a lot of emphasis in what we call the STD methods, or showing, telling and doing.

So this is something that actually we put a lot of emphasis in our training team, we put a lot of emphasis in showing, telling and doing with our trainees by showing the process, telling what is in the SOP, and then doing together.

Another thing that I would like to highlight here on top of the other learning model that we use as a core of our training methods, we also use a lot of Lean Six Sigma principles.

We train our people on how to reduce waste, how to make our process leaner.

Actually, I already told you, we have a good amount of documents, SOPs, that are dictating the way that we do things.

But also we don't want to basically neutralize or get rid of our team members' imagination, the way that they see things.

A lot of the improvements that we made in our system actually, are coming from the team members, people that are actually doing the job.

The way that we can be more efficient, we can reduce waste of motion, waste of other production and different kind of wastes that are basically teach in a Lean Six Sigma program.

Also, we use what is called Situational Leadership.

Not sure if you are familiar with Situational Leadership methods, but basically under Situational Leadership methods, we are able to assess the readiness level of a team member, how ready he is or she is to perform an individual task, we're gonna be talking about it.

And finally, like I said before, in between four people, basically the training team is made by four people, we oversee 400 team members.

So as you can imagine, it's pretty hard or almost impossible to think about we four training 400 people every day with our hands, that's, I mean, almost impossible to accomplish.

So that's why we put a lot of emphasis and we receive training on Train-the-Trainer methodologies.

Basically what we do every single day, is spending time in our sows farms training the trainers, training the team leads, training the managers to train their people.

But we are not basically training directly 400 team members every single day, that's impossible.

But through the hands of others, we can be successful by doing that.

This is a little bit more about the Lean Six Sigma methods that I shared with you already, basically here, I just want to highlight the fact that today all our trainers within the team are certified Lean Six Sigma with Purdue University.

We consider this actually mandatory, not just for trainers, also for certain levels of the production team, directors, production managers.

We are looking for some level of training in Lean Six Sigma methods and also we are working on some training initiatives to train in the basics, very basics of Lean Six Sigma, even our technicians, but we consider this pretty important.

About Situational Leadership, for us, this is the foundation of our training, why?

Because there is no way to improve something if you cannot measure it now.

So by using Lean Six Sigma methods, we are able to measure the readiness level, like I said before, of every single team member for all the things that we need to do in a sow farm.

And we measure this in a scale of one to four, this is coming from the Situational Leadership Institute actually, this screenshot, we score a team member, for example, let's say in breeding sows, artificial insemination, we can score a team member as R1 if that team member is enable and insecure or unwilling to do it.

Then if that team member is unable but confident or willing, it's an R2.

In between R1s and R2s, we have team members that they need a lot of direction.

So the manager and the team lead, by scoring that team member as an R1 or R2, they know that they need to spend a lot of time at a select level doing the things, bringing direction, giving instructions, those team members they are very green.

Then from R2, the next level of readiness is R3, is somebody able but insecure or unwilling.

So basically, it's a team member that he or she has a lot of experience, good execution of processes, good knowledge, but is just missing confidence, it's a matter of confidence.

So sometimes here we need to delegate, we need to push that team member to start doing things by him or herself.

And finally R4, are our team members able and confident and willing.

In between R4s and R3, we have team members pretty much self-direct.

So here we just need even make them participate of decisions or right away start delegating but we are here in this area at the left of the graph, compared to R2s and R1s, we need to do a lot of selling of new processes, for example, or a lot of telling, but at the end of the day, it's a lot of direction.

Internally here in Country View, since words like unconfident, unable, unwilling, can be very hard to swallow for team members, let's say, we are adapting the language of the Situational Leadership language basically, to our internal language.

So we are not calling our team members unwilling, unsecure, and stuff like that, we score the same way our team members, but we call them beginners, intermediate, advanced or experts but basically the meaning of each of these expertise levels is the same.

So now since we know our goals, what are the training methods, how we measure success, how we measure basically the readiness and execution, now let's talk a little bit about the structure and the career path of our team members.

So this is pretty much what we have here in Country View, this is the career path of what we call an animal care specialist, no more than a year ago, we used to call actually our team members, technicians, techs or barn techs, we changed the job titles about a year ago on all our team members because we are convinced that we are setting new expectations and a different mindset just by the fact that we are calling a team member a specialist.

That team member is not a tech anymore, is not a barn tech, is an animal care specialist.

So you are rising the varying expectations but also you are building some sense of pride on that team member with a different name on this position.

All new hires start as an animal care specialist without any level of certification when they are hired.

And they go through an onboarding process that lasts two weeks, after completion of that onboarding process, that team member is eligible to start a certification level one, in one department first, so let's say, we're gonna start with the basics in farrowing, once that process is completed in two months, that team member is animal care specialist 1 certified in farrowing and ready to start getting the same certification process now in breeding and gestation and the Gilt Development Unit.

Once this process is completed, that team member is changing the job title from animal care specialist to animal care specialist 1, and for us, that's the minimum expectation, the basic knowledge that we expect from an animal care specialist, a team member, and that's the reason why actually you can see here, there is no any salary increase here.

This is just basic knowledge.

But then hopefully all team members, but I will say the majority of team members, they are looking to keep learning, growing and basically developing their careers, so the next level of certification is an animal care specialist 2.

And that's basically a higher level of knowledge and certification in one of the departments.

Once that team member complete that level of certification in one department, breeding or B&G, sorry, B&G or farrowing, that team member is actually receiving an incentive in the hourly rate of 25 cents.

So we are linking knowledge, execution of processes, readiness levels, with an increase in the salary.

Then if that team member is showing interest on learning the same level at the other department, so that team member start the same process, the same journey of being an animal care specialist 2, but now in the other departments.

So that team member is cross trained, certified now in both departments and those team members, we call, when you have a double certification level two, we call those team members level three, animal care specialist level three.

And that actually give another incentive of an additional 50 cents on the hourly rate.

And at the end of the day, you have a subset of team members, hopefully it's a lot now, ideally all of them, but we have another level of certification, which is the animal care specialist 4,, and that one is the highest.

We call that level of certification actually the range of the leadership of the farm because we are going through advanced concepts in both departments, administrative and people management.

This is a certification that takes four months to get done and is a dollar extra per hour.

Like I said, this is the range of future leadership.

So let's talk a little bit about the onboarding and in our onboarding process, together with of course, the basics that that person needs to know about stockmanship, animal handling, stuff like that, we consider those two weeks of onboarding, a golden opportunity to start making basically, the best experience ever for that new hire.

We really want to make that new hire falling in love of swine production.

So this is also about a lot of relationship building, a lot of time well spent with the manager, with also what we call the onboarding buddy, the manager designate a team member in between training that usually we have in a sow farm, he selects basically an onboarding buddy for that new hire to make their journey together, to be a resource for questions or help with, I don't know, different things, payroll, stuff like that, domestic stuff, but at the end of the day, the onboarding buddy is somebody that is pretty much together with that new hire for the first two weeks.

And we saw actually, since we started rolling this part of the program, we improved our 90-day retention rate and we reduced turnover pretty significantly.

So like I said, the onboarding buddy has a fundamental role in the adaptational learning process of a new hire, but at the same time, that person has a big responsibility in transferring our company culture as well, the way that we do things, our core values which are ethics, integrity and stewardship, those are things that we pretty much live every single day and the onboarding buddy has the responsibility to make that contagious.

Finally, within the onboarding process, we have some ground rules and those are, first of all, there is a list, detailed list in our SOP for onboarding, of things that a new hire can do and cannot do, will not be able to do, for example, power washing, working overtime during the first two hours, two weeks, sorry, more than like I'm saying here, no more than eight hours a day and no more than 40 hours a week during the first two weeks of employment.

I mean, there is some things that we are setting as ground rules and those cannot be basically avoided and actually our trainers and service people, supervisors, are always controlling that to happen.

And so far, since we started rolling this over about nine months ago, we started in March this year, we have a measurable impact in 90-day retention rate.

So at the beginning as any new process, we were selling this new process now to all our managers, team leads, and unfortunately, some of them were not pretty much engaged at the beginning, they felt like this is something else to do, something, I mean, added to my plate, so unfortunately we have some specific farms, not a lot, I mean, I don't have a a handful of those, but in those locations where onboarding was not completed to the tee, we had about 52% retention rate within the first 90 days of employment.

Different reality for the farms, the broad majority of farms where this process was completed religiously, they basically moved the needle over a 90% retention rate within the first 90 days of employment.

So for us this was a game changer because we used to have issues, reality retaining people for 90 days here in Country View about a year and more ago, but now reality, it is not a problem anymore, just by onboarding people, not throwing people to the fire basically, not asking people just to power wash or do heavy stuff because they don't know the technical things, people get scared and a lot of our new hires actually, it's their first contact with agriculture, we want them really falling in love of what they will be doing rather than scare them.

So after onboarding is completed, then we have the Step Plan, like I said, so it is this plan of four steps.

And in the Step Plan, again, we have a standardized process.

We really want to make processes in training here in Country View, measurable and with not a lot of gray, actually we don't like the gray, things need to be white or black.

You are basically meeting expectations or not meeting expectations based on key questions.

So this is just an example, as you can see here, this is the training tracker of a team member, I just created this for this presentation, so the trainer in this case is myself, Carlos, the team member being trained by me is Tom Thomas, the sow farm is Great Pigs Sow Farm, and we are starting actually today.

So in this spreadsheet actually, when you enter the information and the starting date, the spreadsheet calculates immediately for you the due dates with dates and days left of all this activities listed here into this level of certification, which is level four.

If you are in green, you are good.

This task in green are due in more than 12 weeks actually, so you don't need to break your head trying to get this done as soon as possible because it's not a high priority right now, when things start turning yellow in our trackers, that means that the due date is getting closer, four to 12 weeks, and finally the activities or tasks in red are the ones that they're gonna be doing in this case in less than four weeks.

So actually we receive very good feedback from managers with this kind of tools because they're very visual and also are organizing all the tasks and trainings in a way that makes sense.

Before running you need to learn how to walk now, so that's pretty much the thought process here, we are organizing different activities, trying to build the foundation for the next floor and then the next floor, to make basically a very robust building.

Here once trainings are getting done, the training in farm, the team member together with the team lead, they need to start putting their initials and the date of completion, so the spreadsheet is basically calculating if the team member is in compliance or not, based on the date of completion.

And finally, who is certifying the quality of the training and the knowledge of that team member, is the farm manager.

So the farm manager go and start basically measuring that team member if he's passing or failing, based on this question, the one that you can see here in the upper right corner.

Is the team member showing consistent execution according to SOPs and delivering expected results?

If the answer is yes, this spreadsheet starts getting populated with green, if the answer is no, it's gonna...

these cells they're gonna be red with nos.

Something that we of course expect since we have four checkpoints here, this is a four-month program, so 16 weeks, in the first checkpoint, we are not expecting to have a lot of green here of course.

Actually, if we see a lot of green, probably something is wrong.

But through the time, like on a scorecard, these columns, they're gonna start turning greener and greener until the point that in the final checkpoint, week 16, we are expecting to have everything green.

That team member is basically showing consistent execution according SOPs and delivering expected results for all those tasks.

So as you can see here, this is a highly standardized process, this is something that I already mentioned, we have a strict order and dates are automatically generated, the distribution, ideal distribution, as you can see here, this is the training life of a team member at the end of the day, we have one file per team member, and we are expecting to have in a sow farm, about 10% of our team members animal care specialist 1, with the basics.

There is nothing wrong if somebody doesn't want to move forward to upper levels of certification, but for us it's a problem if we have 60%, for example, of animal care specialist 1s.

80% of animal care specialists 2 and three together, they need to make 80% and 10% of the range of future leadership.

And we put a lot of emphasis, like I said before, in artificial insemination and Day 1, because when we are doing artificial insemination, pretty much we are sewing animals, it's the narrow, we're putting a seed that we are taking care of for 16 weeks of gestation, to then harvest that product now.

So it doesn't make sense to start sewing seeds, to then, I don't know, just left the fruit getting rather into the floor.

We need to harvest, that's Day 1 Care.

So in that way we gonna have a final product with high quality.

So that's pretty much the mindset that we have in between artificial insemination and Day 1 Care farrowing attendance, so far, very successful.

And like I said before, I'm gonna start moving faster here, but 70% of the pre-wean mortality, not just in Country View, industry wide in the swine industry, happens the first three days of life of a piglet.

And this is basically, this school, the Day 1 Care school, is an effort basically on that way, to reduce pre-wean mortality.

Same with AI, in between all of our processes, probably artificial insemination, regular artificial insemination or post-cervical artificial insemination, are the most sensitive processes in our operation, highly dependent on people's hands.

So we really want to have basically those team members certified on those processes, to execute to a higher standard.

By doing that, actually we improve our farrowing rate in 3% and in some locations even more, even higher.

But that's why our regional trainers actually are certifying and training team members in these two things, all the rest of tasks and procedures, are being trained by team leads and managers.

And this is just a picture of what is our Day 1 Care school, I don't want to go through the details here, but let me tell you something that we believe is important here, if you see here, in a school of four modules, Day 1 Care is the last one and probably it's taking about 30% of the time, let's say, in terms of time distribution of this school, and the whole certification process takes about 30%.

For us it's pretty important the whys of things.

We really want to train our people not just in the execution of something, we need to train our people also in why it's so important?

What happen, what is the...

what are the physiological events that are triggering, I don't know, the execution of an injection of neutralized or oxytocin or different things now, and we don't want our people being experts in anatomy and physiology or physiopathology by any means, that's not the idea, but the idea is to bring them the minimal knowledge and understanding of things, in order that at the end of the day, to have decision makers rather than just process executors that they are just following the letter.

And this is...

I just want to link what we are talking about now with some production data, this graph is telling us basically stillborns or piglets that they die during the farrowing process, and for Indiana operations and Pennsylvania operations, you can see here if you are familiar with SPC charts, we see here that in Indiana and Pennsylvania, we were moving our system in the upper side of this mean now.

Believe it or not, we started rolling over our Day 1 Care school in week 10 of this fiscal year, in Country View right now we are in week 29, so 19 weeks ago, let's say.

This is fresh data, up to last week actually.

And you can see here clearly now, the trend started going down at the point that we make a system change here, all our points in stillborns are running below the mean now and we are actually looking to improve our processes and our school as well, to keep pushing that trend lower and lower.

But so far in Indiana and Pennsylvania, two large operations with hundreds of team members, we're doing something here.

And I am not trying to say our schools are perfect, but looks like when you tell people, not just what they need to do, also you are telling them the why of things and they are training people on decision-making processes as well, and some of the Lean Six Sigma things that I shared with you, et cetera, you can make an impact in productivity.

And finally, once we have these team members going through this career path now, and we have some of these stars, highly talented team members, ideally level three or even level four certified, we have mainly two programs to develop them, to make them...

why not if they succeed on this and we help them to succeed as well, to make them the future leadership of our farms.

So when we are developing future leaders, we are talking about Manager Trainee Program and also Individual Development Plans.

The Manager Trainee Program in Country View Family Farms is focused on new hires coming from college, fresh from college or internal candidates, animal care specialist 3 or up, that they need deeper training to be able to take the next step.

There is some people that for some reasons, for example, they are very talented, but they joined us a year ago or so, so they are still green, but they are very talented, promising team members, so we put them into the MT program together with team members coming from college and that is a one-year duration program.

In the other end, we have some team members that have been with us for several years, they have experience, they know about pigs, also they are very...

they are highly talented and they have basically all the Step Plan done, for those, we think on a program that is more like going straight to the main points related to high level production stuff and mainly people management, and we provide this Individual Development Plan, which is customized but also standardized for all our team members, and the duration is three to six months.

For the Manager Trainee Program, these are our pillars, and like I said, everything is under the umbrella of the telling, showing and doing, we have monthly training sessions, they need to develop a project for the company to get graduated, a lot of activities at the field, training at the slot level, Alchemy and Absorb are our web platforms, so we have some web training as well going on here, and finally, as any other team member, our MTs, they need to complete the Step Plan for team members coming from college, because of course, internal candidates, one of the requirements, is to have this process already done.

The monthly training sessions for our MTs, we are covering these items, we consider this pretty much the core of the program, people management as a first thing, essentials of swine production, sow production in particular, finance, swine health, nursery and finishing production, basically what's going on after weaning, marketing, and in marketing is included also some meat science class at the plant and understanding the physical facility, basic trouble shooting, but training our team members also in how to fix basic stuff.

And of course, every month in some point, we are covering several points over this eight, not all of them, but sometimes half of them, and through the time, the complexity increases.

So we start from very basic training, but in the second half of the program actually, things start getting very hard.

This is actually a picture of our last group, they got graduated and actually we are happy to say that from this group today, we have one assistant manager and three team leads working right now, getting promotions, and the rest of the group actually, they are still in the bench, I mean, it's just a matter of time.

And when we are talking about IDPs, on top of what I already explained, I would like to say that there is some ways to get into this programs and the ways to get into these programs are, first of all, the desire to grow and become a leader, here we need to have a team member that is consistently exceeding expectations, also having the sponsorship of the supervisor, the regional trainer and the service person, so everybody is putting the signature on this team member as a high talent, and also a minimal level of certification now, ideally level four, but if this team member is a level three, but this team member can complete the level four certification in parallel to the IDP.

But also there is some ways to get out of this program.

So by the voluntary decision of course, to stepping out or inconsistent performance, lack of active participation during training sessions or lack of ownership on this program because we make clear expectations about the owner of this program is the trainee, not leading by the example of having any disciplinary situations.

But also this is not just about the team member, no, we are not just putting on team members' shoulders all the pressure, we need to do our thing as well, we need to do our part.

And sow farm manager, service people, regional trainers, and also we are assigning a mentor to this team member, everybody has some level of accountability on the success of this program as well.

We need to make people succeed.

So here you can see also some expectations for us.

And like I said, this program, the IDP is strongly based on the job description, so we really want to have somebody ending this program, fulfilling the position on 100% without any gaps, and the contents are related to administration and planning, production management, people management, communication skills and a lot about our core values and the way that we do things in the team of Clements Food Group.

And similar than the Step Plan, here is the standard tracker now with all the list of activities that this team member needs to go through by month with the trainers assigned resources if needed, and also dates for review.

Every other week this team member is getting together with the manager and reviewing the progress and making minutes about it actually.

So just to start closing, we are a few minutes actually late, but these are the closing remarks, so to summarize, we adopt the Adult Learning Model as one of the main principles for the training of our team members because like I said, we cannot train our team members as we do with childs now.

Adults learn different and we talked about it.

We also adopt the Situational Leadership as a method to measure how ready our team members are because as Lord Kelvin said, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

But you also need a very objective way to measure readiness, and we believe this method is very helpful at the moment of doing that.

Our new step plan has been a useful tool actually for managers, the last three weeks actually, we held meetings with all our managers in Indiana, Northern Pennsylvania and Southern Pennsylvania, collecting feedback after six months of implementation of this step plan, and to our surprise, they didn't see a lot of room for improvement, actually they asked for more, I mean, they didn't see nothing wrong but they want to include more things, more details, more knowledge, more stuff and that actually for us, was very exciting to hear.

And we have a measurable and positive impact in our retention rates and production performance, like I showed you in our numbers and graphs, since the execution of our training programs and methods here in Country View Family Farms.

So with that being said, I don't know if there is any questions.

- Thank you so much, Carlos, for the incredible presentation, great, great information.

If anybody has any question, please raise your hand or tag your question in the Q&A box.

You have a few minutes for question, I have one question, Carlos.

It was interesting to see the decrease on the incidents of stillborn after the training was implemented in those large farms, and that's exactly what we have seen in dairy farms as well when we think about the maternity management training programs.

The question I have on those, do you guys have statistics done on those?

I know it's quite complex 'cause it's a multifactorial component, affected by season and different management practices, but 'cause we, at least in my lab, we have tried to put statistics on this and it's quite challenging, but I wonder if you guys have been able to put some statistical numbers on that.

- Yeah, so far the only one statistical tool that we have been using are these statistical process control charts, probably different than in dairy, we are less sensitive to seasonality since our farms are like the one is behind me here, we're basically 100% controlled environment and basically it's an enclosed system, but there is...

I mean, in regards to stillborns, actually the main challenge, and let me go back, usually is during the summer season.

But curiously, summer is right when we start going down in our stillborns here.

So usually actually you see an increase of stillborns during the summer season because sows start getting...

they're running a marathon farrowing 20 pigs alive or 16 pigs alive, our average born alive right now is about 15 piglets.

They're running a marathon, and during the summer season actually we were able to decrease the number to levels that we never saw before.

But you are right, I mean, probably we can run some additional statistic and basically detecting confounders and stuff like that.

- Thank you, Carlos.

We actually have one question and we are on top of the hour, but we're gonna do this question then we can direct the other ones to your email, but the question is from Omar and he says, "How do you word the language?

Are you using translation for your training?" - Yeah, and actually that's a very good question because that's one of our biggest challenges here in Country View, right now in our operation we have about 50/50% Hispanics and Americans working in our farms.

Four years ago actually we used to have zero, actually I am the first team member coming from out of the US here in the company and that happened 4 1/2 years ago.

So during the last 4 1/2 years, we have been doing a lot of things trying to cover that language barrier, something that in my experience address part of that, is what I showed at the very beginning here, but basically, is the learning method.

When you put emphasis in showing, telling and doing, if you have some gaps in communication based on language barriers, you're gonna be lagging in the telling, but you cannot lag in the showing and doing.

And for our trainers and our managers, those two has been the biggest tools to spend quality time at the slot level with the people, showing them how to do things, doing with them and then trying to figure different ways to tell something.

We are using actually some devices, actually right now in my desk I have something that I am trying, a translator, a simultaneous translator, we're testing different things and also making available some English and Spanish classes as well because this is not just about teaching Spanish to speak English, it's also some of our managers, American managers, they really want to learn Spanish.

So we feel like we have a gap and an opportunity area in both ways there and we want to work on that actually.

- Thank you so much, Carlos.

All right, I think that's the question that we have for today, so if anybody has any other questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to either Lisa, myself or Carlos, but Lisa or I can direct the questions to Carlos.

So thanks again, Carlos for your presentation and thanks everybody for being here today.

- No, thanks for the invitation, have a great day.