2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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that came into the pens and as soon as they come in – they don’t attack the calves – the calves know – they get out of the way and they go stand along the fence – and they let the pigs eat all of their food. And so the bigger discussion is not necessarily that they’re damaging the cattle – they’re really not – but the cattle are easy to manipulate and we see decreased rates of weight gain – the feed’s just not getting to the cattle – we see decreased health of those cattle – most of it due to pigs. We’ve really seen an uptick in livestock diseases from pigs in the last several years and it’s a variety of things, pseudo rabies, ah, foot rot, ah, swine brucellosis and a number of different things. Anthrax is native in our part of the world so I want to emphasize that it’s an issue that we face, ah, and it’s a seasonal thing and it’s always been here but, pigs are interesting in that they evolved with Anthrax so they, they can get Anthrax but they don’t die from it, it’s a, again, strange thing. But the economics of it, you know, it’s startling, we don’t understand everything that’s going on in terms of losses to livestock operations – in Texas we know it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 95 million dollars a year that they’re doing in damages to livestock. The damages to agriculture are total in Texas every year is like 500 million a year and it’s, it’s just a staggering number. The point is it’s very real and it’s hard to find someone that hasn’t experienced that. When we talk about crops – Hawaii’s crops are very different – your crop production systems are different in many ways – one thing that I always like to talk about is when you have a crop that’s an annual versus a perennial – if I’ve got a perineal crop that increases its value or productivity every year – that damage that we see from pigs to those crops is startling and the one I talk about here all the time is hay. We’ve seen a significant decrease in folks producing hay even out of long, well established pastures – just because the damage to the land and they get sick or remediating it – they get sick of the damage to emblements trying to produce it. So it’s not always with pigs the direct damage that you see – sometimes it’s the kind of creeping loss over time where folks just don’t engage in those enterprises anymore – they can’t stay in business with a crop that they used to farm – so they have to switch to something less valuable, less desirable, but it’s the only thing that the pigs won’t eat. And so it’s something that I like to talk about also when you’re in a, a produce producing region – all right, that’s kind of a strange said – produce producing – we, we grow a fair amount of produce in Texas as well – not like you guys do – it’s, it’s incredible what you can produce. But for us we have green production so artichokes, lettuce, spinach, you name it we have citrus production, we have melon production and one of the problems we’ve run into in recent years is pigs getting into those areas or into the water that’s used to irrigate them and we see e-coli contamination. So, you have a single farmer that has e-coli make it out of there and make it into the food chain, hopefully, it gets caught before anybody gets sick but it’s the, the death sentence for the farmer’s farm. There’s no way that anybody’s gonna want to do business or buy from them again because their produce is contaminated and it’s – when you do the chemistry back it’s pig e-coli. So, one thing on the property side I’m just gonna hit quickly, I always tell people, if I knew how much turf grass was worth I might have gone into a different industry and not wildlife because I never knew how much golf course were worth, but the damage to property is one that creeps up and I’ll say it’s funny for us many years ago, our legislature didn’t want to do anything in terms 11