2016-02-22 Game Managemetn Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes—February 22, 2016 doing the skinned and split hog —those are about 15. If we're doing a whole pig and skin, um, when we have the scalding and de-hairing equipment— our capacity goes up to about 30, and then our chilling and refrigeration compartment has the capacity—the storage capacity for two full days of processing. TL: You're selling the shares to folks, you know, $100 a year, whatever it is — that entitles them to what? MA: Well the actual membership fee is $100. The investment in the coop, ah, which is a separate fee is basically a $500 buy-in. It entitles them to a single share of stock and that's actually the maximum anyone can own — is on share, one person — and it represents their voting power in the cooperative, um, and what that entitles them to is priority scheduling — so they in advance let us know what their processing needs —when they're gonna have animals ready to harvest and then they get built into the schedule before anyone else who would be a non-member. They also get to work on committees that determine the type of meat products that we're ultimately going to be marketing — so we have genetic improvement programs that we're working on with the producers of the various species as well as looking at marketing segments— like if we have a customer that is looking for kosher [unclear], um, part of the function of the coop is to pull together the required parties to actually design the entire vertically integrated process or raising that animal through processing it and having it packaged and ready for sale, um, and because some of the standards associated with this are pretty strict it's actually a kind of a challenging thing to do but, so it gets some entry into this participative process that enables us to serve markets that otherwise would be virtually impossible for a small producer to get involved in and then the other thing that the ownership of that share of stock does is, it entitles them to a --what's called a patronage dividend — so the — our charter for the coop is that we don't—we offer our services to members at cost— non-members who want to use the service — this unit or any of our services — are going to pay the standard schedule rate plus a 25% up charge. And then, from the patronage dividend perspective — what they're entitled to is any profits that are generated from the operation of the coop itself are then redistributed back to the, um, member owners of the stock in the coop and, um, we - our business case projections are that by year 2 and half, three — somewhere in that time frame—will be at full capacity spinning off about an excess of$300,000 a year in excess cash that would be going back to the coop members. JE: Petty good, eh, for this little thing. TL: Yeah, it is. 10