Good morning. Welcome everyone to the Capitol. I'm very excited. This is the hearing of the House Tribal Affairs Committee
We will now come to order the time is 8.03 a.m.
Tuesday February 10th
2026 in Capitol room 106
Members present for House tribal affairs are representative schwonke
Good Morning representative kerick and myself chair diver
Let the record reflect
that we are ready to conduct business.
A quick reminder to please silence your cell phones.
I would like to thank Jordan Nicholson
of the Tribal Affairs Secretary from Rutgers
and Doug Bridges from the Juneau LIO
for staffing the committee today.
So this morning we have two items on the agenda.
First we'll be hearing a presentation.
from the Alaska Food Policy Council.
It is Food Week here in the Capitol.
So I'm very excited for this presentation.
We have Executive Director Robbie Mixin and
Advocacy and Policy Director Rachel Lord.
They'll be joining us in person and
governing board vice chair and chair
in indigenous foods working group T'Con Galbraith.
We'll join us virtually.
After the Food Policy Council, the committee
will be hearing a presentation on aviation supply
to Rolaska from Michael Jones, Research Assistant Professor
of Economics at UAA ISER, who will also
be joining us virtually.
So we'll have about an hour for each presentation.
OK.
I would also like the record to reflect that we have been joined by Representative Underwood.
Good morning at 805 and Rep. Story at eight o' five.
Good Morning, good morning.
Okay, Miss Nixon and Miss Lord and Mr. Galbraith, if you can hear me, welcome to Tribal Affairs.
Please join us at the table.
Put yourself on the record and proceed with your beautiful presentation.
I'm looking at Devil's Club.
It looks so good and please begin.
Welcome.
Thank you so much Chair Diber and members of the committee.
My name is Rachel Lord.
I am the Advocacy and Policy Director for
the Alaska Food Policy Council and I live in Homer.
For the record, I'm Robbie Mixon, the Executive Director
of the Alaska Blue Policy Council,
and I also live in Homer.
Welcome, thank you for the great presentation.
It's amazing to see all the work being done statewide
to bring nutritious, cultural, relevant,
and sustainable food to our communities and to all Alaskans.
So as we've mentioned, we're the Alaska Food Policy Council. We are a 501c3 nonprofit started in 2014. The work started a few years before that under an administrative order by Governor Walker. So
This was a initiative to bring together folks from all over the food system to look at collaborative solutions to our unique challenges in Alaska.
So our main mission is to connect, to advocate and inform.
So we bring people together.
to discuss issues, create spaces for solutions and collaboration.
Then we look at policy and investment, um,
create recommendations around that.
and share them with you guys.
And then we also do food systems research
that brings together people working on the ground
from farmers to researchers and then state agencies
and everything in between.
Really anyone who eats?
We envision an Alaska food system that is healthy, secure, culturally relevant and abundant.
We work across food systems, so starting from the ground or the ocean or air all the way
and then how people eat and access that food.
And then at the very end, waste and recycling,
and do it all again.
So we're one of the only organizations in the state
that works on food security issues
across sectors and geographies.
We're a very small staff, under three full-time folks, so Rachel and I, you guys just met.
And then we have a programs manager in Fairbanks and our operations director is in Homer.
We currently have 12 people on our board located throughout the state and again across different
Indigenous food chef to UAF professor.
We have mayor culture represented, people from the food bank.
We try and get a wide swath of geographies
and sector representations.
Given that it's Food Security Week, we wanted to kind of lay the groundwork of this presentation
on some facts and challenges that we are facing.
So I'm sure you guys have all heard the 95% of all purchased food in the state is...
imported, so that's a tremendous amount of money leaving our state when this was created.
It was $2 billion.
Who knows what it is for inflation at this point?
One in seven people in the state may not know where their next meal is coming from and one
in five kids in this state face chronic hunger.
Complicated might be keeping it mellow, but complicated logistics in terms of roads and
ferries.
82% of our communities are not on the road system.
That being said, we have a tremendous wealth in
their value of that annual harvest is around 900 million again that's not
adjusted adjusted for inflation so yeah what do we do this is a little bit of a
chaotic slide but we wanted to give you some examples of the the trainings we
Well, you'll be excited.
We are having our next one in Fairbanks.
So I hope you all are dead.
We've done a number of statewide assessments on food security.
So we co-authored the governor's task force report
and assisted with the legislative task
Yeah, these are, then we've been a part of Food Security Week for years and years.
Here's some of our conference flyers.
We try to move it around the state.
We just hosted it in Kodiak this year, the first time off the road system.
is done through working groups.
We have monthly working group on different topics.
You'll hear about some of those today,
but they meet virtually and bring together people
from all over the state.
And we often bring in folks from outside the State
to provide a little bit of different perspective as well.
We also have quarterly network gatherings
to bring everybody together.
Conferences, it's a place for people to look for ideas,
look at partnerships on projects, share funding,
share, celebrate all the good things that are going on.
Then each of our working groups as well as
our website as a whole shares different resources
and technical assistance opportunities.
I would love to turn it over to Tika now
to tell you about the indigenous foods working group.
Great, good morning, Tikon, if you can hear me.
Good morning.
Good Morning, please put your name on the record
and begin.
Yes, Good Mornin.
My name is Teacon Galbraith for the record.
I am Vice Chair of the Alaska Food Policy Council Board,
as well as the Chair for
the Indigenous Food Working Group.
I'm honored to be here today virtually,
join you all and to speak to some of
the work that we've been able to accomplish
on the working group, so thank you very much.
So we're going to do a little bit of a deep dive into what Robbie was sharing on some of the specific accomplishments of our working group and why it's so important to the Alaska Food Policy Council and amplifying the voices across the state.
As many of you know, Alaska Native tribes continue to advance the health and well-being of sovereignty of people through stewardship of lands and water and food systems that have sustained us since time and memorial.
In our working group, across nearly every meeting, we have tribal representatives that include dieticians,
harvesters, coordinators, traditional knowledge holders, and policy advocates that consistently
show up. They're always there. And in that space,
we share openly and that helps to shape the direction of the working
group. What we focus on is really determined by the priorities of those that are participating
And that's one of our successes.
The tribal members provide candid considerations,
lived experiences, and policy insights,
which the group receives with respect and action.
And most have expressed appreciation for the welcoming space
with a focus on food policy
that really supports the tribal programming
and the opportunities for tribal producers
that exist within the USDA and state programming.
So through our collaborative work, we've had success in creating a bipartisan and inclusive advocacy rooted in indigenous perspectives.
You know, and that has taken time. It has been through the slow establishment of trust.
In that space, I'd like to highlight some of the challenges that we've identified and
wrestled with as a committee and also share some
of potential solutions that were seeing as an opportunity for the state and for tribes
to engage with.
We consistently arrive back at the threats to wild foods and habitat and subsistence
We, many of us know, all of
us, know the decline in the critical species, such as our salmon, our caribou,
our migratory birds, create direct threats to our continued access to
our rights to subsistence. We also, the challenging of climate conditions,
the increase of extreme weather events,
the change in migrator patterns,
all these creating more difficulty in accessing traditional foods,
proteins that have sustained us for thousands of years. And then regulatory action, it's hard for
they proceed without tribal consultation frequently, and it continues to undermine
tribal stewardship and the rights and co-management opportunities. The pressures do not just disrupt
subsistence harvest way, really. It's impacting our social fabric and intergenerational knowledge
Additionally, we see challenges with food security gaps and systemic barriers.
The high freight costs, as you all know, getting food to rural Alaska.
We'll hear more from my Jones later and do a deep dive on that.
The interruption or unsustainable federal nutrition programs,
the uncertainty around SNAP and other feeding programs such as WIC and FEDIPER.
I would like to commend the state for the adoption of the broad-based categorical evaluation,
which during food week a few years ago was the focus of
the conversation. How do we increase the access to SNAP by really considering the broader
impacts to individuals that are receiving this benefit?
And then school meals constraints, thinking about the access to USDA approved fresh foods
and the distribution and what the feeding programs look like in order to how the knowledge
as well as the local processing capacity.
So when we think about replacing or supplementing
the traditional foods and the
traditional proteins that have supported us
and continue to support our food security in Aralaska,
the lack of USDA certified processing facilities
creates a significant barrier for inspected meats
as Well as, the opportunity for economic
exploitation by those who are producing
those proteins in their regions.
Another significant and big opportunity that we see is increased in tribal consultation representation and jurisdiction federal agencies frequently cancel or bypass tribal consultations USDA reorganization was a more recent one at the federal level where that was announced and the window for comment was so minimal it was challenging for the voices to come forward and to speak to the impact.
nonetheless understand the impacts to be able to speak to it from an informed way.
Additionally, another recent one by the state, the leasing of aquaculture plots
lacked a tribal consultation within the process of that leasing, and there was no
opportunity for consistent input by local tribes that would be impacted by those leases.
Currently at the federal level there's a lot of comment coming forward on representation at
the Federal Subsistence Board. The three seats that were recently placed on the
Federal subsistence board representing subsistence users has now come under scrutiny
and we see a strong contingent of folks voicing concern about that representation.
We believe that tribes and tribal members should be represented at all levels and within all
committees to have their voice represented and the priorities that are specific to their communities
reflected in the policy decision-making. And finally, in The Jurisdiction, the confusion
around food system jurisdiction, and permitting the traditional food access and community-led
terms. It's a language that is not only second English, but also third, thinking about how
to interpret it from a legal lens for how to effectively and accurately navigate them
to comply with the laws and the regulations associated to it.
So those are some of the challenges and there aren't easy solutions, but I didn't want to stop there just because there's so much shared insight and benefit from this conversation. We have also seen opportunities to strengthen the well being and sovereignty.
So we have seen tribal organizations that are participants successfully implement and adopt co-management agreements with the FEDS.
We see the Otinan or Tribal Resource Commission helping with co management of the federal hunts on the Federal Adjacent Land to the Otonaland.
We see tionic partnering with the state and with
the feds for salmon habitat restoration and covert removal
to increase safe passage for a salmon.
We've seen the adoption by NRCS SEMA 222 which includes
indigenous stewardship methods and recognition of
traditional ecological knowledge which effectively
allows NSCS to pay our traditional knowledge
holders for the knowledge that they're contributing
to these critical projects.
These we see as opportunities to not only amplify, but to further their reach so that
they're being utilized in greater ways to really continue to steward the land and increase
food security for our tribes.
We also see expanded vedipper federal distribution program on Indian reservation. There's the authorization in the farm bill
2018 that allowed for a pilot program for 638
For a 6 38 pilot Program
6.38 contracting is the allowance of self-determination within the federal code that allows the tribes to take on the
administrative costs to
effectively
deploy and leverage the funding to provide the service that is a trust
responsibility of the federal government. In this specific case, we saw the
ability for the distribution sites to purchase and distribute local foods to
replace other foods that would otherwise be in the food box. Alaska and THC was
and then replace Idaho potatoes with Alaska
tribal ego potatoes from a connect tribe.
And so just to see that federal dollars coming
into the state and them being supporting our local economy
and see the economy then be reinvested in our neighbors
through those producers is the type of model
that we see really benefiting Alaska's food system
and increasing our sovereignty and security.
So we also spend as policy arises at the state at federal level, we take time to discuss and to evaluate the potential impacts to our food systems.
As I mentioned before, the short timeline on the reorganization was a flag for us and we ultimately multiple of us in our personal and in professional capacities submitted.
testimony or comments to advocate for the extension, which was successfully,
which ultimately did occur giving more time for
the input of community members.
We've increased familiarity with the USDA and the DOI and state regulatory processes.
In the conversations, what has become apparent to me is that simple language is often
misunderstood or has the wrong personal definition when considering the broader framework.
An example would be as we discussed is the eligibility for many of the programming and
the allocation of funding through the farm bill is determined by the number of producers we have
in the state. If you go to a tribal community and ask who here is a producer, which I have,
And then in the same instance, I had the opportunity to express what my definition of
a, and the USDA's definition over producer truly is, which is if you are on the land
and harvesting minimum or a potential sale of $1,000 worth of goods, you're an eligible
producer.
And in many cases, we see tribal members harvesting from their allotments that amount.
And so there's great opportunity to CD tribal members recognize that they are producers and
potentially explore the opportunity, to have their allotments, registers as farms, that increase
of farm numbers and producers in the state would increase the funding mechanisms at the federal
level coming into our into Alaska, which would further the resources available to us to build
I don't think it's restrictive and only specific to tribal members.
I think there's a gap in understanding of the funding mechanisms and the language that
is determining it across the state and great opportunity to further that education, which
is why I'm passionate about the work of
the Food Policy Council and
the leadership of those, the two joining you in the room.
To summarize, you know, food sovereignty is health sovereignty.
We see it from our health, regional health care corporations, educators and harvesters
have all emphasized that traditional foods improve nutritional and improve nutrition
and prevent chronic disease as strengthens mental health and spiritual health
and anchors identity and resilience.
Our traditional food are the foundation of who we are paired with language and we need to protect both.
And we've also seen that local controls better than external fixes when discussing school, food, disaster recovery, agriculture programs, you know, the participants of the group have highlighted that external solutions often don't fit.
So when you have the local fixes, you see things like microgreens being produced,
donated meat programs being distributed to community members and community freezers that
creates reliable and culturally aligned impact. And the tribes ultimately need that authority
to manage their own programs without bureaucratic barriers. Again, the language being a challenge,
the capacity being another, there's a need to streamline the permitting and the requirements.
put on to tribes to increase the local production and think there are great
opportunities to truly invest in our youth, our workforce and our knowledge
continuity where we see different programs specific
to agriculture that have really strengthened
this sector and brought to light for the tribal youth the opportunities that
exist within agriculture.
We also see the integration of traditional foods
into the school curriculum,
the opportunities to increase tribal voices
and marine science policy and ecosystem monitoring.
There's great action and great success
in many of the organizations across the state
and regionally that have implemented
and built these incredible programs
that had created this access
and increased the shared understanding
of how policy impacts our day to day.
our day-to-day lives and access to traditional foods.
So I guess in closing we are the original stewards of the land and the tribal voices should be
respected. The challenges before us are significant but the opportunities are greater and when we
ground those opportunities and our values and relationships and shared responsibility to future
There's need for building of trust between tribes and the state and tribes in the Fed.
And if we can accomplish that trust in key areas, I think we
can see significant joint collective impact through investment in
the needed infrastructure to support the food systems that we are all imagining
and believe is necessary for Alaska's food security.
So, thank you for the time to present and to share about some of the insights gained
from the committee.
I look forward to hearing this through the presentation.
Thank you.
TKAN, Annabasi, Thank You so much for all of your hard work in this Indigenous Foods
Working Group.
There's lots of good work going on helping to keep our communities fed.
And I do love the part of our youth.
That's very important.
And they could easily get their food right here
in their backyards.
We do Ticon have a question.
This was a lot of information that we're taking in.
We have Rep's story who has a questions.
Thank you chair diver to through the chair to mr. Galbraith
Thank You for your presentation. I have a comment and then a two questions if I might share. Yes my first one was I
appreciated
The challenges that you had outlined and it sounded like you have those written down if you could
give that to the committee.
I think that would help me just to see that list.
And from a couple of your comments that you shared,
excuse me, I haven't been talking much this morning.
Sorry about that.
So the first one was you talked about eligibility
through the Farm Bill and that about a,
you needed to be producing 1,000 pounds of food.
to be registered in this bill.
If you could explain about that a little bit more
and how your plans to let more people know about
that in the state, and then the second one you had said,
we need to streamline our permitting process
to increase local food production.
If could also comment on that with a
little more detail.
Thank you.
Thank you, Chair, thank you for the opportunity to clarify those two components speak first. I think I was going quickly how to respect for time. And so producer, there's a definition within the USDA that
For eligibility, a certain programming, you must be a producer, and that definition of a
producer is often misunderstood. It's the sale or potential sale of $1,000 worth of goods.
And so when you're thinking about being a Producer eligible for certain grants or opportunities,
you need to consider that. And I think they've actually adjusted the definition to not even
So it, and then the Farm Bill 2018, as I'm about from legislation there, there is the.
all the programming that gets determined in the funding that is supported. And so in that
matrix of determination they are looking at the number of producers per state or region
and doing the allocation of funding and alignment with the density of
producers and so programming in Alaska we see a small number producers respectively to other
specifically we see a very small number of tribal producers. So I see there being a great need to
increase the education of that definition of producers so that tribal members see themselves
in that definitions through their activities that they're already practicing, the harvesting of
their traditional foods, stewarding of the land, and the continued relationship that
So through those activities, they meet that definition of producer and ultimately it comes down to the agricultural census that would count them that that one would then would inform the farm bill and the deployment of the resources through the Farm Bill.
Yes, please proceed, Mr. Colbreath.
Can I ask a question?
Thank you.
Oh, yeah, before you...
Sorry about that.
One quick follow-up on that last thought.
Thank You, Chair Diber.
Through the Chair, I'm Mr Gilbirth.
When is that window?
When do they take the agricultural census?
Is that at any time you can adapt that number or is there just a time frame?
similar to the census is the set period of time and off the top of my head I'm
forgetting the last time it was conducted I'll defer to my colleagues I
think they might have that number on their head yeah Robbie Rachel through
the chair this is for the record this says Robbie Nixon it's every five years
follow-up follow up on what year are we in when are
Through the chair, the last census was 2022, so coming up in a couple of years or one year.
Thank you. Okay.
Okay, Mr. Galbraith, we have one more question from Rep. Kirk.
Oh, sorry. I'm going to rewind and Rep story had another question.
I think you were about to answer.
Yep, and so I think the follow-up to that was what is the action that has been taken
Through my work. I partnered with the previous FSA
administrator
Amy Petit
Just and we hosted a series of roundtable discussions across the state to increase access and
De-mystify the farm service agency and the process that it would take to register and allotment as a farm
And I think there's just a lot more of that need opportunity for information sharing dialogue and just helping to deepen the understanding of the programming available and the definitions of a language being used.
With the FEDIPRA program in 638 contracting,
we've seen 6 38 contracting successfully deployed through IHS
and through education across the state.
We have the regional healthcare corporations
as a result of the compacting that occurred for IHIS
in the 90s to create our regional tribal,
regional health care corporations.
Exciting in an exciting development and progress
in that 2018 farm bill.
There was the authorization of two pilot 638 programming, one through the Fidipper federal
distribution program on Indian Road observation, which I spoke to and another through forest
management through forestry division and through The Department of Forestry. And so the forestry
one also allowed for federally the management to be assumed into a co-management agreement
federal forestry land and so both are pilots and we would like to see the expansion of those
opportunities to be made available to tribes across the nation, tribes, across
the state and to seek increased allocation of funding to those. Unfortunately, there fortunately
The unfortunate part is that a lot of it is unaccessed because of lack of capacity,
lack understanding, lack awareness of those resources and the availability of
that designated funding. Fortunately, both of
those programs were leveraged and engaged with by
follow-up rep story. Thank you, Chair Dibert. Through the chair, thank you for
that information. I still need more clarification about the streamlining and
the permitting. Wasn't quite getting that. And I also, it seems like it's a federal
program and I am assuming you're talking with
our federal delegation about things that need to be more clear in this program.
Yes, absolutely we are.
And the streamlining, I think it's similar,
the for producers who are trying to operate,
say our reindeer herders in the Northwest
both tribally owned state land and federal land
for the permitting, the challenges of working
through that permitting with the state
and also on federal and for
the effective use of the land would be one example
of where there is significant regulatory.
paperwork to complete to effectively operate in those spaces. So I think where we see big
opportunity is for the further for increased communication between the state management practices
for subsistence as well as the DOI, VIA, and USDA matrix of permitting and allowance for
Thank you. Okay, thank you, mr. Galbraith. We have a question from rep karek and then rep schwankie
Thank You through the chair. Thank to all of our presenters this morning. I was just curious how people
Get on to the working group 55 members and the indigenous foods working Group is an amazing number of people and
Just wanted to know if people just
volunteer to be a part of it and participate in meetings and then also just generally for the food policy council how somebody can sign up to
be involved. Mr. God.
Thank you for that question. We have a link on our website. So all of our
All of our board is a working board, a volunteer board on our website. We have an opportunity to join any of
our working groups or committees open to the public. And we welcome that inquiry, the working group,
the Indigenous foods working, group has grown over the years as we continue to just consistently meet.
Yeah, we basically turned nobody away because all voices are needed, all perspectives are
needed and we've consistently continued to benefit from the expanded perspectives.
That's a simple form, quick questionnaire, who are you, where are coming from, why are
you interested in this working group, and through that we generally get a pretty good
understanding of why somebody might be passionate about improving their food system.
Just a quick follow-up. Thank you through the chair. Mr. Galbraith, can you give me a sense of
where the 55 working group members are located statewide and
You don't have to tell me exact numbers, but just generally how well are we doing in the indigenous foods working
Group of capturing we're all subsistence users
Yep, thank you truly
Is I would say there are more members that are in urban areas as a result of access and current work priorities. So we have representation from API and THC.
I think it IDA TCC. And so we, those who have this within their professional scope are joining and gaining access to the resources.
of folks who join and leverage the information for their own advocacy.
I would be guessing if I were to put a number on it, but there is a significant portion of our
users, including myself, who are actively practicing subsistence nature.
Thank you through the chair. Thank You mr. Galbra for presenting. I have kind of two questions.
I guess I'll ask them together. So so I'm from the eastern interior and I am a rural non-tribal
hunter-fisher and eye trap as well as my family has a pretty long history as gardeners. We have
on our backyards. So, I have two questions for you. What kind of interest have you had
in bringing back knowledge and interest in home-based gardens and greenhouses to help
with traditional healthy food growing in your own backyard?
And then my second question is something that I was kind of hoping you would touch on a little bit here, but it's missing from this slide and your discussion, and that is, what's your thought on intensive management that's run by the state of Alaska, very specifically to provide for more abundant wild game,
and the fact that it is not allowed on federal lands at all.
Mr. Galbraith.
Thank you for both of those questions.
Home gardening and local access is critical while the abundance of the ecosystem and intact
ecosystem provides for many. It would not sustain continual harvest from all.
And so looking at local production models is
critical to the continued access from my perspective.
So whether that's the community garden, personal garden or educational gardens, integrating our traditional plants into the planning and production of those gardens is absolutely necessary to sustain the amount of yield that will be needed as interest continues to increase.
food security in our rural communities, comparing the urban and rural divide, and what we found
was that in many cases, there are super users. Those who are practicing at a high level for
subsistence or providing for their family and their community are often frequently also practicing
home gardening and production on their land.
of that correlation with something that we're curious about. We've actually engaged
with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game about the potential of including a gardening question
on the subsistence survey that they conduct to increase our understanding and the data set
Um, in terms of the state management of and the versus the federal, I think it's a challenge, um, to have the dual management system, but it is the best that we got and title eight isn't the subsistence rights of tribes and
The challenge that I see that with the state management practices is it is focused on high sustained yield.
And there is a limit.
Resources going to the fishing game to effectively determine and evaluate the carrying capacity of the land.
And without that information, it's best informed, but opportunity.
to further inform how to manage it.
And so we've seen significant declines in critical species and populations.
The Melchina herd, the collapse of the salmon run on the Yukon and Cuspequim.
We see that this management practice,
the loss of our herring in the southeast.
So with these as data representatives of representations
of how the management practices are effective.
I have concerns and I think that the tribal perspective is one of harvesting from abundance
and we need to think about the health and wellness of our ecosystems and our animal populations
and get them to a place where we can harvest from that abundance not from the critical limit
high yield opportunities as the state is.
It's a flipping of the model of decision-making that I think we would see the increase of
the population increased access for both our subsistence and sport hunters.
Follow-up.
Go ahead.
Thank you, Mr. Galbraith, and I'm going to just do a time check here.
It is 8.45 and we have about 15 minutes left with both of
We have a roughly it looks like about 18 more slides 50 more sites, but we'll do a follow-up quick follow up
And then we will move move one. Okay
All right, follow up quick follow-up.
Thank you through the chair.
I thank you for that, Mr. Galworth.
And I think thinking broadly is really critically important
in this arena.
I happened to actually be the past wildlife manager
for the Nelchina Caribou herd.
So I have extensive experience there.
I just want to ask that you consider the concept that.
Pushing management towards the federal government is not in the best interest of
Hunters and Trappers fishermen around the state in some cases
They do not support active management and when you
take a look at some of these wildlife populations,
Caribou and Moose.
You'll see we have low density dynamic equilibrium
across large percentages of land in rural Alaska,
creating situations where you cannot harvest much more
than 5% of the population.
So I think that there's a little bit more work
to do on this subject.
Thank you, Mr. Galbraith.
And maybe we can have a further discussion on these.
moving forward with that with 15 minutes left.
Mr. Galbraith, as I look at the slides,
I see that there is, if we move forward one,
there's indigenous foods working group
with advocacy, networking, and food system assessment,
and then food security and sovereignty.
Is there any wrap up on these, or you tell me
slides.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to it.
I think in my initial presentation,
I covered the components that I wanted to see to on those slides, thank you.
Wonderful. Thank
you so much.
Tecan Galbraith for your words.
We'll go ahead and please proceed with Ms.
Mixon or with Miss Lord.
Yeah.
Chair Diber and members of the committee.
Again, for the record, Rachel Lord, Advocacy and Policy Director for
the Alaska Food Policy Council, and I will go quickly.
I'm delighted for
the opportunity for you all to hear and engage with,
hear from our indigenous students working group chair and
engage them on questions and we certainly have a list of follow ups that will provide you.
We, as Robby mentioned earlier, we work collaboratively with stakeholders around the state.
on a variety of food systems topics and so as part of that we have two of the ones that I
chair and co-chair are the advocacy working group and the school nutrition working
group. We again similar to what was shared by TCON we meet monthly we
have stakeholders from around the state they are open invitations for participation we
Participants that are actively working in, for example,
for the school nutrition that we're working
in school districts, that our school
nutrition directors, we have community health organizations,
we had community advocates,
we've state and federal agency representation as well.
So it's a really nice place for batting around ideas,
learning, asking questions, and getting stakeholder input
and collaborative input on different things
I wanted to share with you as members of the legislature that we have, at the Alaska Food Policy Council, we've been working on developing a new,
we developed a food policy framework for Alaska. As Robbie noted,
we had been part of a lot of different reports over the last five, six years.
So there's Food Security Action Plan that was over 300 people from 13 different communities across the state,
opportunities in their communities. We worked with the governor, it's an office on the
Food Security and Defense Task Force Report. They're both the legislative task
force, so many reports. And so with our efforts to try to look at all of these
and pull out what are the consistent pieces that are coming up across sector
time and time again from people from across the state, from the legislature to
individual community members and kind of everyone in between.
And how can we kind of capture that?
So we do have this new food policy framework
that is on our website.
This is just a screenshot from,
it's in these different categories, sectors, if you will.
And so this is from the very first one
is wild and traditional foods.
Again, this just the screenshot.
But these are, these
are
ideas, these are opportunities that have been identified as ways to move forward food systems
and food security, independence, and sovereignty for Alaska through all of these different reports.
We also included a couple of pages at the very end of this to help us and to hopefully help you
try to ask some questions as you're considering, as we are considering different policies,
of how do these things, do this policies,
do the budget investments, where are they moving the needle
and where they may be not.
And we do contend as a cross-sector organization,
as systems, very much interested in systems change
for the better that is sustainable and lasting
and meaningful, that really good food security is going
to touch multiple themes and not just a single sector.
Again, these are just some more questions that are at the end in terms of kind of what are the some of the big questions to ask and how are we, when we're looking at different opportunities in front of us, how we are looking
at questions, to kind understand the context that we were working within.
Part of what we do for the advocacy work that AFPC does and what
we work with our stakeholders around the state and our working group.
We have a weekly legislative.
Tracker, I watch a lot of gavel.
I see you all on TV all the time.
And so we have a weekly newsletter that comes out
called on the menu and on a bill tracker.
So we are tracking actively the legislation
that's before you and the movement of that legislation.
We are a nonpartisan organization
and really with such a wide range of viewpoints,
both on our governing board and amongst our stakeholders
that participate, we don't tend to take
a lotta strong positions.
We really believe very strongly in educating and empowering Alaskans and our fellow organizations and community stakeholders to be able to engage in the process with you, bring their knowledge to the table and ask the hard questions that need to
be asked when you're considering different public investments and policy decisions.
We do travel to DC.
We come here every year for the Food Security Week.
along those lines.
This is just some screenshots of our bill tracker.
We also do policy briefs and whatnot.
And I would invite you all, and Chair Diberd,
I've invited your office, if there
are things that you want to.
Ask and get maybe some feedback on you're always welcome to reach out to the chairs of our working groups
And we do have presentations typically every month and it is a really great opportunity to get some stakeholder input
around food systems
So
We're just really quick. Can I just been through this? Okay, so we have a USDA regional food system partnership project
that started two years ago or a year ago.
You're gonna hear next from Dr. Mike Jones at ISER.
He is one of our partners on this project
and on some other projects.
We are drawing on cross sector expertise
to try to knock off some, not knockoff.
These are long term, right?
This is a long game.
We're all in this longgame.
But we are trying to address some of these things
that continually come up in these reports.
Data.
We need more data, we need to be understanding where is the baseline, where are we and where
are going, and also supply chain.
the logistics of moving food.
So we are kind of trying to work towards those things
in two different ways.
We're building an Alaska Food Systems Atlas
and Data Dashboard.
This is a screenshot of where we
are right now.
We invite you, your constituents
and your districts anyway to please let us know
what data you need.
We have some amazing partners that are really great
at finding information that we didn't know existed.
And that is one of the kind
is trying to, wow, data sets are collected, they exist.
But if they're buried someplace deep in the internet,
ether, nobody can use it.
So I did, I know we're really short on time,
so I might just do, so we have these story maps.
So one of the things we've also been working on
is taking some of these data set and telling a story.
And if you've heard about story map,
it's a way to integrate.
language and narrative and photos with with data with information. So this is a
leafy greens and Ramodalaska. I'm going to spin through this really quickly but
these are on our website so this how does how do leafie greens get you
How do they move through the move? Through the state? Oh, I see and this is not on the slides
This is yeah
No, this sorry I the links are on this slides and we will and Almaria has
Chair divert
Has the lengths okay, but so this shows through
I don't do it that way, But day one right so, This Is how
This is how we are moving, you know, so we already we're at day seven and we've just reached the port of Alaska
and then we were getting out to our hub communities and
then dr. Jones will speak to
The spoilage that happens and the way that our food
The quality of our Food transitions over time as it's moving into our communities
And depending on its mode of transport
But just quickly, another story, Matt, this is a cow's journey, so with some local food purchasing agreement funds through the USDA and partnership with the Alaska Farmers Market Association.
Lake and Peninsula Borough School District, they no longer have their school lunch program.
They're not part of the National School Lunch Program.
That was a pretty quick decision that the district made, putting the communities into a scramble to figure out how they were going to feed their kids meals.
They worked with the Alaska Farmers Market Association.
We're able to purchase a cow from Homer
with a local food purchase cooperative agreement program,
funding and with support from Division of Agriculture,
have it processed, have its flown.
And so from Culture Family Homestead
through McNeil Canyon to the Anchorage airport
and Chuelliamna to feed the kids at the New Helen School.
This is the kind of, and I think it reflects really what TECON was talking about too,
the local and regional food systems that can be a win all around.
We have hungry children in this state.
We've hungry adults in the state, we also have incredible producers and
incredible subsistence resources.
And it's a connecting of the dots that is really the foundation of what Alaska
Food Policy Council works to do to help bring these pieces together.
And before you move to the next slide, it's like the record to reflect that we've been joined by
Representative Reffridge at 8.50 a.m. Thank you chair diver. Good morning
So and there is also this date of viewer and I'm not gonna go to that right now
But it is on that website where you can and where
You can click on so you see where are all the snap retail locations where all of the farmers markets in the state
Again, we are building this
actively and we see this as a long-term investment and so please let us know what
you see that is that it's helpful and what you would like to see. Finally I'll
just speak quickly to the Alaska Food Value Chain Coordination Council so this
is working in a again a cross-sector way to create the statewide advisory group
working together it kind of it is a listening space to learn identify
bottleneck share strategies and develop solutions about the movement of food in
We have over 100 people on the list serve.
We've had upwards of 60 to 80 people attending.
We only had two meetings, they're quarterly, so it's very new.
But we have represented almost all the major air carriers and smaller air carrier in the
state.
We had maritime, we had small and large grocery retail, and we were really trying to-
trying to reach the supply chain across the board.
We asked folks who are participating to let us know what are the challenges that they see
in the movement of food in and around Alaska and you can see weather transportation storage.
All right, cold.
So it's really, I mean, and this is, again,
kind of repeating a lot of what we know,
but pulling folks together to gather resources
and really identify, collectively,
some of those bottlenecks and come up
with some recommendations of how we could move forward.
These are some resources that are on the website.
Our next meeting is Monday, March 3rd.
We do meet via Zoom,
and we would always love to know what are the challenges
that you see in your districts,
that your hear from the people that
you represent in terms of
a primary infrastructure. We don't get to do this whole state living thing without basic
food systems. And so where are those challenges that you're seeing and that that your hearing
from your areas that represent and we would love to make sure that they're included and
involved in these conversations?
That's it.
Wondering. That was amazing.
Thank you so much for your presentation, it gave us a lot to think about, and chew on as we, I guess, no pun intended.
As we're starting a food week here in the legislature, we will move to our next presentation with Michael Jones, with ISER.
And as you mentioned, thank you, so, much and we'll take a brief of these.
We're back on the record, just a quick change up on our agenda.
We are going to, we have a few minutes for questions, and I know that you wrapped up
very quickly, I appreciate that.
We have questions from Representative Reifridge.
Thank you, Chair Dibert, welcome, thank you for being here.
I think the main question I had was funding sources for the council.
It seems like there's a lot that goes into what you're doing and there is a
lot of folks involved.
I'm assuming USDA is is
a major funder of your operations.
Are there state funds currently with invested in the Council?
And if so, where would we find your budget and things like that?
Ms. Lord, through the chair, for the record, this is Robby Mixon, we, yes USDA has in
the past been a robust funder through grants, recently we had a
$7 million grant terminated in July at most of that grant was to go to food and farm businesses
re-granting. We have a handful of private foundations that fund different projects like
Rasmussen Foundation recently funded a project to develop some local food procurement resources
institutions connect better to get more local food into our places like schools and hospitals.
We do things like pickle it, give the state lotto. Yep, so.
We do have our 990 available online and Rachel, did you want to add?
Yeah, it was just through the chair for the record, Rachel Lord.
The Division of Agriculture also has been there.
They provided some match funding.
We appreciate the support of Director Scorsby and the Commissioner and
the Governor's Office in a lot of the work that we do.
the standard issue of federal grants, foundation grants
and working to find match funding.
Just to follow up, thank you.
Do you know how much currently, just for your year
that you're in right now, of state funds
that we support your counsel with?
Through the chair, for the record, this is Robbie Mixon.
of the matching grant that Rachel mentioned, we have about 50,000 left on a year and a half
project. And the bulk of that is funding the work of Dr. Mike Jones, who you will hear from shortly.
I guess last follow-up last followed up. Thank you Madam Chair
Is it possible to and this would be for the whole committee if you'd like it
I Guess to have your just see your budget and what you're working with at some point. Absolutely. Yeah, thank you
wonderful
All right, and with that we will take a brief at ease once again on a boss seat
Thank You so much for your presentation. You know brief it is
All right, good morning, everyone.
We are back on the record.
This, our next presentation is a virtual presentation
from Mr. Jones.
If you can hear me, welcome to Tribal Affairs.
Dr. Jones.
Thank you so much.
Thank You, Dr Jones, please put yourself on
the Record and proceed with your presentation.
Thank you very much for the record my name is Mike Jones
I am a research assistant professor of economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage within the Institute of Social and Economic Research
Just a technical question first
Would it be easier or more convenient if I controlled the slides from my end sharing screen or is it preferred to change the slide in-house?
Thank You for that question. We will control it here at
the capital
Understand it. Thank you. Yes, please proceed
Thank You. So today. I'd like to talk with you particularly about supply chains for fresh food
and I would like too touch if we have time on
supply chain as well that our
medicine delivery system depends on as Well, particularly focusing on off-road
of work that was funded predominantly by the state through aviation technology related
grants and has been continued through the USDA project funded through AFPC with thanks from
the match from the division back. Great. Within rural Alaska, particularly off-road Alaska we have
that are extremely important. We have a very outsized importance from wild food collection and
as TECON commented, there's also an extensive cultivation tradition within Offroad Alaska
and many different communities, whether for home garden consumption or retail sales.
also have a large amount of food that is moving around the state that's either coming on the
retail side, which is either from Alaskan of meat, larger farms, and fisheries to retail,
or the Big O outside sources to retail. Now we know it's hard to put a
Perfect finger on the percentage of food that's coming from outside of Alaska that we are ultimately buying and consuming in Alaska
But it is a significant source and there are many many miles on that
Food before it even reaches the state and it has a very very long journey to go before
It ultimately reaches consumers and we have this blend
consumption of food, a blends of dependencies of
food between wild and traditional foods, home
cultivated foods and foods that we purchase.
But we do know that retail food systems are extremely
important as part of that mix, as not only risk
management tool, when wild food system's falter.
And we have years that are
extremely challenging with much lower than anticipated
subsistence harvest.
and for general broadening of diets and dietary diversity.
Next slide, please.
And so, when I'm approaching this as a researcher and I am thinking about the data behind these
systems, I work a lot with the FAA directly.
I worked a with air carriers and work with Alaska DOT statewide aviation, trying to
understand how our aviation system serves as core circulatory system that is moving
out-sized dependency that Alaska and off-road communities have on aviation systems compared
to anywhere else in the country and significantly more than anywhere in Alaska as well.
So, the Alaska Aviation Systems Plan denotes different communities based on characteristics
to do with the airport.
And so, they have HUB airports, which can essentially accept a JET 737, can land there.
And then, have non-HUB, or they call it rural off-road communities.
And these are the villages. These are
the most downstream communities that
face the longest journey for goods to move through.
And we can map this and we
can take through the Bureau of Transport
Statistics databases, we
can understand by...
even by carrier, by aircraft,
by month, you can get a lot of detail
on the pounds of freight, mail,
and the number of passengers
that are moving to each of these communities.
And so we can take that as a numerator,
think about total cargo destined
in a certain year for a specific community,
and then divide that by our department of labor
and workforce developments records
for population in these
communities and understand per capita
reliability on these systems. And overall, Alaska has a state average at about 550 pounds per capita.
That is super high compared to the rest of the nation.
And again, this is intuition that we know we're just quantifying the stories that
we now in Alaska and trying to communicate that more effectively with our,
particularly with federal partners, is they try to advocate for us in D.C.
Dependency, for example, is Hawaii at less than half of Alaska, 25, 250 pounds, and the
next highest state by volume, Alaska it leads by total air cargo volume moving within the
state in a relative term, in an absolute term.
The third highest is California, eight pounds per capita.
It turns out highways are really, really convenient when you're able to connect your major communities.
dependency up to 2,000 pounds per capita and we see that fade out and change quite differently in
southeast in the Aleutians and even down in uh the the Gold Coast areas um as as DOT work force
development categorizes these into economic regions. We have a split supply chains in Alaska and it's
Food moves around the state and the implications downstream in Southeast Alaska.
Mostly folks are receiving direct barges out of Tacoma and therefore the aviation per capita cargo drops substantially.
You also have much more reliable year round ferry service and other boat.
based transportation, maritime-based transportation systems
that are important in the story.
Similarly, in The Illusions, you also see quite a bit
of maritime year-round access,
and it just changes the mix.
Next slide.
And when we're thinking about the journey,
I really like FPCs.
Food journey for leafy greens and when when I'm thinking about how we dig into this data
There are systems that are based on the ADSB transponders. It's a little unit that sits under the
plane that sort of
that pings out at different frequencies.
I'm here, please don't hit me.
It's an essential part of aviation safety.
We have satellites that are sitting right above Alaska
and they allow us to actually track these planes.
And I am currently working with a company
that maintains this database.
And you can see very, very clearly the hub and the spokes
and through their data, which is
Probably the best highest fidelity data set we're going to get about patterns of flight traffic around the state.
We can start to measure how many planes are actually landing in each of these communities.
I'm just starting to work with them on that. So this represents a lot of ongoing work,
just communicating where we are thinking about using hard data here.
There's there's some
Regilities that come about and particularly important are we have
Mainline aircraft that are flying predominantly out of Anchorage Anchorage is by far the most important
Regional regional or true regional hub in the way that FAA talks about it as they move to our off-road hubs
when those mainland aircraft go down or have
repair issues
or they simply bogged down by whether or other infrastructure issues, things can back up in
Anchorage in really important ways. We can get tremendous volumes backing up, in Anchorage,
hangers. And then sometimes, as those planes go out, they can flood the downstream hubs,
like, for example, Bethel-Nome, Kotzebue, Dillingham, Kjagvik. It just creates a really, really intense
many times that food still has to move on forward. And so, next slide. We see some headlines that
are really troubling in my heartbreaks, truly when I see these headlines, we saw that St. Paul,
for example, had a significant amount of their community's food that was stranded in Anchorage
communities like Quithlek in Southwest have some serious transit issues not
very far from Bethel but still subject to those vulnerabilities with the right.
supply chain disruptions.
And we even saw this past month articles about AC
and enhancings and gnome,
struggling to keep food on the shelves, which is gnomes.
I mean, this is the hub community that was struggling
because of disruptions in the aviation supply chains.
And so these are the facilities.
They can come from weather and we're gonna break down
sort of weather-related challenges
and how they interact with infrastructure.
Folks mention runway issues pretty frequently. It's super, super important that our runways
are well maintained. The contractors with DOT are plowing the run-ways in the right schedule.
They hear quite a bit about runway lighting systems as well, and I know DOT has some.
progress and some programs in progress there and I hope that that is something
that expands because I hear that quite a bit.
not particularly in areas that have very low, simple twilight hours at higher latitudes,
but also just we have carrier disruptions in a really thin market that really can ripple,
whether it's in the mainline market or downstream if we had issues with our bush carriers who are
ultimately bringing the last mile of these goods. Next slide. Let's talk about weather.
So, we hear a lot about weather in Alaska because, and the data is super clear on this.
We have the tremendous, important group here through the National Weather Service.
And I really want to thank these folks working in this Alaska Aviation Weather Unit.
They produce really, really good data and they need models to be able to produce the
strongest forecasts available.
flight conditions and in the ability for pilots to navigate in difficult weather.
It's really important what the cloud ceiling and the visibility is because it creates different flight rules. You can have
the visual flight roles and you can
have
instrument flight Rules and under instrument Flight Rules you have to have
a certified weather report that comes out of a very specific stations,
either called the AWAS or the ASOS stations.
This is the automated weather observation station or
the Automated Surface observation Station.
It's really important that these stations are working.
There are a few procedural workarounds,
some of which I'm more familiar with than others.
But these stations are sort of at the core of best practices for quantifying where the
cloud ceiling is, where their visibility is.
And as they are broadcasting through the MITARS, M-E-T-A-R's, you can watch patterns
in the weather and really make an informed decision about flying in a legal and state
We can see this is a map of June and the percent of days in a four-year period,
so sort of a flight rule's climatology, if you will,
denoting the percentage of time that they had IFR conditions.
in the summer, especially along our coastal communities,
this easily jumps up to 20, 30, 40, over 60% of days.
We can see these folks, for example, in a pre-bluffs face
near constant, what's called low IFR conditions,
especially in this summer.
That...
creates an extreme dependency on landing systems to work, for example, in St. Paul,
the ILS system, which is a precision landing system was out and they were relying on some other
less precise ground infrastructure that required the clouds to be higher to legally land,
which likely contributed to the inability of planes to move and therefore we see the
But on the left here, what I've done in my work that started in the Food Strategy Task Force
is we had the head of Alaskan Commercial Company within the Transport and Infrastructure Committee,
and he said AWAS outages are killing me. And that was early on when I was looking at aviation
and economics and I said, What's an AWOS? So I always taught what an AOS was by the
He said, OK, let's map that.
Let's see where we are.
And so I was able to get records on FAA systems and map
all of the outages going back to 2019
through when this was run in 2024.
And we see some of these outage lasts for literally years
in some other worse circumstances.
We have, on average, what's they call a reduced service
It is only lasting about five or six days, but the top 10% of outages are lasting over a month.
In our downstream smaller communities, we're more likely to have longer outaches.
And you get these really cruel catch-22s that arise, that are rise where tech ops
from FAA, they are extraordinarily important.
It's so important that they're well-funded
and are able to do their jobs,
but sometimes they wanna get out to a station to fix it,
but they can't fly out, to fixed it
because the station's broken,
and therefore they cant get the clearance to fly
out there, so they rely on very expensive charters.
So there's this really cruel catch 22.
And so, let's go to the next slide.
major program. I think this is a bright spot for us, frankly, that I want you to be aware of.
Major program called Diosi, the Don Young Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative, and it puts
about 150, 180, I'm trying to remember the total off the top of my head towards investing in aviation
And we have it's to improve the performance,
but really to improved the number of sites
that are available to expand,
that're mostly expanding within our smallest,
most vulnerable off-road communities.
DOT now has a real-time outage dashboard.
product, the word real time outage dashboard. That is a link that you can go to this. I
know someone who is the a major climatologist in the state and he says every morning he
gets up, gets his cup of coffee and checks this dashboard
to understand where we are today. And I know carriers do it as well. The Alaska Air Carrier
Convention just met or just had their conference this past week. I spoke a few times at it.
And this was a major topic of importance.
The purple dots that are quite small in here and represent the new sites that
are going to be rolled out for automated weather observation stations. It's about 50 of those
of blue dots represent sort of a cousin that's a cheaper and potentially really interesting can
potentially provide some of this almost the same functionality at a fraction of the cost
called a visual weather observation station which will provide automated weather for the first time
for these communities and I personally would really really like to understand and study
as these program rolls out.
how the building of this infrastructure improves flight
landings and proves flight reliability
and ultimately improves survival of goods
to these communities.
Next slide.
So that was a real-time dashboard.
And so over Christmas break, I worked
to develop a tool that can automatically generate
historical or backward-looking data.
And so what this tool does is it is able to auto produce reports just looking back
really intensively at the last quarter and sort of give a snapshot of trends over the past five
quarters to complement this real-time product to see when we're on any given day how many stations
And, again, it's not about grading the FAA.
It's about putting our finger on them.
It is about just even the FAA, understanding the performance of their systems, and the
communities that rely on, being able to advocate for themselves or understand why it is they
see the patterns they do in their communities.
So, we can see, for example, in this past quarter, actually we're doing a bit better
blue line denotes complete outages when we were getting no reporting at all from that station
and the red line reports when stations, the daily count of stations that were not reporting,
some of the really key things like temperature visibility, cloud cover level,
dewpoint wind speed and other things that pilots, I worked with pilots to identify
seven that really, really matter.
We saw a ramp up actually we had a bright smile and then we
had to ramp it got it was just an extraordinary cold winter.
This was hard for the entire aviation community to maintain proper.
operations, and it's also just really hard for tech ops to get out there.
They need survival shelters as they go out to communities to maintain.
They can't be out at 50 below, for example, or even 30 below and risk that they might
get weathered in.
They they need a place to stay.
So there's some complimentary inputs here.
But I look forward to running this again in April and helping us understand how we did
in Q1.
Next slide. This report also breaks down regional performance and I'll sort of
quickly move through here, but overall it is some you and your districts and
it even breaks out to the individual station level if you'd like within each
of these groupings to understand the percentage of times.
or the percentage of hours that the station was not reporting.
So for example, in the North Slope and the Arctic region,
about 23% of all hours
that should have been recorded were not,
but that compares to about 35%, 34% last quarter,
or last year, so the Q4 of 2024.
I do want to note regional disparities here, and so it's easier to get to these stations,
but we are creating inequities inherently in this system because in South Central and
the interior, we only had about 2% or 7% of hours that we're not reporting that should
have been.
I'll move to the next slide.
So when we think about the infrastructure challenge that are faced, there's some active
frankly for years. But how does this system interact with the data that we can actually
see within our communities? We have a couple different ways that food actually moves out
to our community. Predominantly, this is through the bypass mail system, the subsidized USPS
where right now I believe folks are paying about $57.58 a pound to ship from either Anchorage
or Fairbanks out to a host of communities that does not include Kodiak in southeast.
This includes our off-road, mostly western and northern communities.
Bipass represents about, by the numbers from what I can tell, about 24% of all statewide
much higher for bypass eligible communities.
Air freight is, why would people choose bypass?
Bypass, it's just known it takes longer in general for
bypass, there's been some
Tracking issues that USPS has really cut down a lot of their staff in the bypass program,
and so it's really hard for their
staff to monitor and push transfers when things are taking too long.
There's a statutory limit of time things
are supposed to sit in a hangar before they move,
but it is frankly pretty hard to enforce and that gets reported pretty widely.
But when your alternative is air freight,
The economics just are difficult because the bypass rate is the same if you're sending to
It's like a flat rate shipping essentially. Air freight is when you're contracting directly
with an air carrier and that depends very much on what air carriers you have, what your volume
discounts might be from the capacity you are pushing through, and also just how remote you
are going. And so an Air Freight option is much more viable for someone shipping to NOM, for example,
to gamble. If you want to perhaps pay a little more, get a
little bit more of this ability on the product and perhaps have
some liability protection because bypass mail is a shippers
risk program.
by accessing this subsidy that you are not guaranteed any form of your product arriving.
So, fresh produce. If it arrives all spoiled, there is no repercussion for this statutorily
under the PO508, which is the governing rules for that program. It's been like that for decades.
There's also no requirement under bypass rules, for a carrier to have any cold chain assets,
I know that carriers try to move perishables first, but talking with folks and it's hard
to isolate it just for bypass, it is a less reliable program for some communities than
air freight.
So people gravitate towards that.
And we're going to talk about specific food spoilage numbers that I've been able to get
for at least some community's afterwards.
Let's go to the next slide.
So we have certain outcomes.
We have food spoilage and rattle.
We had delayed or limited access to perishable goods.
And of what survives, what quality is it?
It's hard to actually assess that
from a researcher perspective.
But folks who are living in.
consuming retail foods in those communities are very cognizant of this. And also increased costs.
And we won't talk as much about costs in this presentation. There's too much talk about.
We have some active, ongoing projects where we are really, really scrutinizing urban and rural
costs, which I'd be happy to come back and speak to in more detail another time.
So we've had a research really great research has come out of the University of Alaska system thinking about store keeper perspective
So what do people say so we're gonna talk about what people. Say and then what I see in quantitative data
They say storekeepers reported profit losses of up to 50 percent due to food spoilage.
The costs are assumed by the store and passed on to the consumers.
So we see high product, high food prices in rural Alaska. It's expensive to get it there,
but folks are also eating a lot of what's called the shrink or losses along the way.
And when you have a thinner market with less folks selling, economists know it is easier to pass
Also, folks say that we just stopped trying to bring it.
We just stop trying bring certain food products.
And so that is, in general, fresh produce products that a lot of doctors say are quite
healthy for us and we should be eating more of.
Those are by structure, by design, the hardest products to get out and the ones that people
sort of pull back on as a manager in response.
Next slide.
Okay, so let's go into fresh produce shipping data and some initial insights I want to thank the
out of conversations from the legislative food strategy task force. There's been a lot of data
sharing and I'm really grateful for that. The Alaska commercial company has provided me under
contract for limited use of the data. Six years of sales in spoilage history to be able to
understand spoilaged rates over time to each of their stores with some minimum aggregations
required for groupings for food products. And so I am actually able
comparing hub stores like Bethel versus a village store that would move through
Bethell and by definition take longer to get there. There's nothing, there's
not an official partnership with the last commercial company. I'm not getting
funded by them. And I don't owe them anything from it. But I think they just
really see value in elevating these issues and they keep really structured
records which is great for a researcher that wants spreadsheets. Next sheet.
So, within the spoilage data, for example, and I have through 2023, I
have 2024 and 2025 incoming very, very soon. I'm excited to get updates. We can
see, per example salad vegetables in Bethel. This is composed of things like
carrots and cucumbers and a few other things, but I can't speak to individual
products under those agreements. But in general, salad
If we compare it to an Anchorage store, it's pretty high, but you're about to get shocked with the next slide would if we look at the
Y axis here this runs from zero to 30 percent. So in general, for example moving to Bethel
We're hitting a mid single digits mid to low single-digits in spoilage. Next slide
When we think about Hooper Bay, which has to transit through look it the
axis, the y axis. I had to adjust it because it just, it was going to pinch things too much.
Zero to 75% is that axis and so we are seeing easily kind of averages in the 20 to 30% range
and there's a lot of dots here and each dot represents one month's percentage of
salad vegetables that were thrown away the second they got to that store.
They didn't sit on the shelves and then get thrown
away. They literally got thrown
away, the 2nd they go to the store, these kinds of
spoilage levels are staggering. And we are moving through
a more formal, econometric or statistical models
to be able to think about how the weather
influences flight data traffic through ADSD monitored flight traffic records, how infrastructure
performance impacts things and moving through a FOIA process right now with FAA. It's going
slower than I wish, but that's the nature of FOIA is sometimes federally. And being able to tie
that directly into being to directly show what is causing the changes in these food spoilage patterns.
Next slide.
I just want to note that it's not, explicitly that is not isolated to Bethel, even in Dillingham,
for example, this is salad vegetables as well.
They get a lot of regular flights.
Dillyham seems to be one of the lower spoilage markets in off-road Alaska, and we can compare
that next slide to the downstream community of Togiak.
Again, on the left-hand side,
Y-axis 0 to 30,
mostly data is hanging out
outside of a few really tough
months in the lowest single digits.
Togiak, rather, it's in
the 30-40 percent region even.
There's very difficult weather in this area.
Through the next slide,
through the AC data,
because they have so many stores,
we can understand how groupings of stores compare.
We have the south coast barge that really produce doesn't get on a plane to go to most
of the stores, to really any of these stores from the way I understand it.
And that's true in the Aleutians and in southeast area.
And we have some direct flights that are coming to Cordova and Yakutat out of Anchorage.
are our cots of use gnomes and cjogbicks, even haniacum agrath, they get direct flights from
Anchorage generally, and then our off-road non-hub villages, which are take the longest.
Next slide.
We can break this down by food group and I'll run through a couple that I think really stand out
We see really important patterns in the winter. It's significantly higher. Also if the green
Bars here they represent the villages downstream of the hubs the blue represents a hub that requires air
Transport to get out to we have Cordova and yak tat broken out separately because they get really direct
Flights and it seems to be significantly more reliable
in the south coast barge and so we see just significantly less spoilage for example from
barging where things are really protected for a long time and then off load quickly
rather than even touching our aviation system and we really exacerbated the villages
and that exacerbation is particularly high in winter but also we
see important spikes in this summer when things might sit and might be too warm.
especially in our hangers and our off-road communities where we just really don't have a lot of
refrigerative storage particularly for our part 135 carriers. Next slide. You can see in tomatoes,
it's even higher approaching 20% of all tomatoes that are sent out to village
stores get thrown away the second they get to the store in the winter and that's still cruising
Talk about leafy greens and you can see the result of that journey and leafie greens in lettuce
Again, it's 15%
And actually we have packaged salads which are even more sensitive and they get even higher
next slide
Just two more examples berries and salad vegetable salad vegetables and berries are particularly sensitive
But we see really extreme disparities here
And I actually want to stop here and pause because this is the end of sort of that food data part of it.
And after this, I'd like to speak as time permits on some pharmaceutical shipping data
that also moves through these same supply chains and offers a really interesting lens
to not only study the pharmaceutical supply chain patterns,
to the same communities with the
same challenges.
So if you don't mind,
I'd like to pause here for questions.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for your presentation.
I'll just do a quick time check.
We have about 20 minutes for the next
part of the presentation,
so with that, maybe we have one or two
questions if the committee has any thoughts.
Rep story. I thank you chair dibert and through the chair. Thank you very much for your presentation
It's certainly concerning
I'm just glad to be so much more aware of this than I was before in a an hour half an
Hour ago, and I am wondering if you can direct me to
aviation equipment that we have in our our planes. I don't know if there was a
slide on that because I know southeast we've been able to get I
know weather's always a concern in different parts but sea planes put on so
much more good satellite information so they can land in much low visibility.
How are our plans equipped for that across the state?
Through the chair, thank you very much.
And this is where I get a little nervous as an economist.
So I'm going to do my best to convey my own technical
understanding.
These systems are called ADSB systems.
And they broadcast out on either a 1090 Hertz frequency
or a 978 frequency.
And, they can either be detected by ground stations
that have a fairly limited scope or satellite.
And satellite can only detect 1090 due to some properties of physics that make that more
achievable with geostationary satellite systems. And so the satellite-based ADSB data, I have
reviewed it. I can follow up with you on this.
I actually have 30 full days of the entire state in the movement of all the planes that
It is quite clear that satellite-based systems provide a significantly higher level of visibility
than our traditional, called L3 Harris, ground-base systems.
There is a thought that satellites- based systems could be used to direct air traffic.
I'm not under the impression they are used for that in
practice because we have more our ground-based stations provide a lot more coverage where we
have sort of tower- demanded towers where it's more directed. But their equippage rates
are fairly low in Alaska and it is important to touch on that. The FAA did a review in November
Only about 27% have any form of transponder on them.
That's quite low, so a lot of planes are actually flying without
any way of pinging out and telling other folks where you are.
And there's a variety of privacy reasons and perhaps cost reasons that people do not equip as they term it.
But there is a concerted push to increase that right now.
And so if you've seen an increase in equipage in Southeast
It's probably due to a couple of different cases.
One, there's a push to increase right now.
There's perhaps some federal regulations coming down through the FAA through a program
called part 108 that really pushes people to equip.
That's open for public comment now, but also if you want, if there is an aviation accident,
want to be found as quickly as possible. And I've worked with the RCC out of the base,
this is the rescue coordination center that comes and finds people. When they have a
Mayday or their ELT goes off, and I'm forgetting the name of it, the acronym,
emergency location, transponder, perhaps.
And they are able now to cross-reference that
with satellite-based ADS-B systems
to really pinpoint where you are.
And so there's a very strong search and response component
here as well.
Thank you.
There's, there is a lot of nuance in this story.
Thank-you.
Thank You.
We have a question from Representative Reffrich.
Thank Thankyou, Chair Dibert.
And through the chair, I guess for me, the data here is,
is not surprising in the least.
I feel like as this is part of the Alaskan independent spirit, particularly in remote
or rural Alaska, we understand that it's going to be very difficult to get food and other
products to where we're at.
In the case of fresh food, I'm wondering from an economist's perspective what the cost
I feel like we've advanced quite a bit in hydroponics capacity to grow some of these
things on site.
And if the cost is being passed on to the consumer at the end use, is that just still
not to a place where it's cost effective to try to
grow?
Some of those things in one of the, in
Is that something you feel comfortable speaking to?
Dr. Jones?
Through the chair, I feel comfortable speaking
to it conceptually because I have not seen and I I
have looked fairly hard for an economic analysis of off-road
Alaskan food production and understanding the financials of
indoor ag.
growing systems for more year-round production that doesn't necessarily preclude selling directly
in season when it's a lot easier to grow and creating linkages between stores
and community members, some of which as Ticon explained might not even be always
visible to the USDA. But the, when you say you aren't surprised by this, this a
have reacted pretty strongly to this data site. I didn't know it was this bad, but I knew it
was bad. The other part of it is that I think there are some important infrastructure investments
happening right now.
that have the potential to reduce these numbers and understanding how they reduce
these members and alter frankly the economics of trying to produce locally versus have things
moved through the supply chain to a community. It does alter that in the risk ratio.
When we think about the cost drivers of indoor agricultural systems,
There's a couple of different things that really stand out,
but energy is probably the first thing people talk about.
And so understanding what energy costs
are, costs per kilowatt are in the kilobots that
are going to be demanded in certain systems,
under certain climates, are really important.
I've heard some discussions about trying
to pair indoor growing systems or hydroponic systems
to take some of the off heat from buildings.
think there's some initiatives that are trying to think about how geothermal can interact with
that. But overall, sir, you have this very high cost energy environment. And when you
have the PCE program, for example, it subsidizes residential consumption, but the commercial rates
I think the regional economics likely differ substantially between, for example, Southwest,
where you can get much lower cost per kilowatt hour and you have lower energy demands because
of different climatic conditions. And so I would love to see some comprehensive work on this.
I'd love partner with folks who are interested in exploring that, but I haven't seen that
formally done around the state. So that's as far as I can comfortably speak to it.
Thank you, Dr. Jones follow-up and good
Representative schwankie and just a quick time check we have about
12 minutes left with dr. Jo and so we'll
Final question then we move on to the last part looks like about fourish more slides, so
Thank You through the chair dr
Jones I out of curiosity
one of the things that I've seen in rural Alaska is an awful lot more people
with friends and neighbors that are going into town for different things.
So they're jumping on a plane and they are headed to Anchorage or Fairbanks for
doctor's appointments or whatnot. And they all go to Costco and then they take
back with them large quantities of in some cases fresh foods.
And so I'm kind of curious if that um if you've
seen any data on that and how some rural communities are able to
Collaborating kind of with those trips to town if that makes sense
Great question. I do love my Costco. Dr. Jones
Through the chair, I agree this is so as a researcher
You can only study what's visible and what you can quantify in my in. My world and there's these qualitative
Understandings that this happening are extremely important. We absolutely know that is happening
It is essentially invisible from the data that I have tried to think about.
I think the way you could get at this.
representative is through surveys and surveys are just fairly costly to run and they have
to be funded through a specific program or you're going to
run them regularly. There has been an understanding of my colleague Jennifer Schmidt, who's a
phenomenal ISER researcher, did collaborate on a study that was very highly published,
targeting some specific communities and understanding how the flow of goods moved to those communities
and the extent to which was locally purchased versus brought in. But in terms of regular data
collection, this is largely invisible to my great frustration. Quick follow-up. Jen is a good
friend of mine in Fairbanks, so I would actually love to see that additional report if you get
I was wondering if that was our Jennifer Schmidt from Fairbanks.
Love her. Yeah, if you could give us her contact, that'd be great.
Yes. All right.
We have about nine more minutes,
so please proceed.
Thank you. Next slide.
Now, I'd like to talk to you about some ongoing data collection through again,
This is a solidly state funded work that really started through the governor's drone program trying to understand the potential economic benefits of integrating unmanned aviation systems into Alaska's airspace. One of the hot
sort of areas of interest is pharmaceutical shipping. They've done a bit a few trials.
So my role here is trying to understand the entirety of the pharmaceutical
shipping landscape to the best extent possible using quantitative data, understanding where
bottlenecks are in specific communities and really problem mapping the ecosystem. And again,
pharmaceuticals are flowing through the same aviation supply chains largely that food are
of understanding the public health infrastructure or public
health downstream implications of these same systems.
Next slide.
This took a long time to get to the road here.
You can understand, understandably, pharmaceutical data.
It's important to really respect.
the confidentiality of the data and ensure that no and patient information is ever identified.
This ran, this project, just to give a caveat here,
this Project ran through many layers of IRB at my university level, at the AAIRB level.
And within each of the tribal health organizations
who I'm currently partnered with,
and will be for any additional ones that I partner with.
And what I receive within this data
from the South Central Foundation,
for example, who's authorized me to share this initial insights,
is a completely de-identified data set
that just has, within a generic medicine,
And I don't know what type yet either that is moved from one community to another community.
So predominantly from Anchorage and put through the mail to one of 77 communities that South Central Foundation Services.
And we have about 3,000 prescriptions per month, about 20 hundred prescriptions, per
month. They de-identify all of that under a strict protocol and I just get the sanitized data set.
But I'm able to understand the landscape really interestingly. Next slide.
community by community and compare our on-road communities,
given the network of the South Central Foundation to off-rode communities.
So for example, for about a two-year dataset here,
we can understand the percentage of pharmaceutical shipments that
took either over five days to get there in red,
over seven days, to
get their in green or over 10 days
to go there and blue.
Very rare.
for it to take that long in anchor point or even in Cordova, for example. But when you move to
communities like, I'm going to butcher the pronunciation and I apologize, coconut,
I believe coconut. And St. Paul, these require two flights either to Illiamna and then to
really persistent, and the seasonally dependent levels of delays, particularly in the summer,
which is almost surely weather related, but also general traffic related in spikes in
the deep winter.
all pharmaceutical shipments take about over five days to get to St. Paul and even thinking
about 10 percent, we have certain months where we're almost 30 percent of all medications are
taking 30 days or taking over 10 days, to go there. And so next slide. Some
base statistical analysis, kind of understanding of mean transit time by estimated air segment
about one and a half days to get there on average.
That doubles to about three.
When the first time you have to
get on a flight and then that doubles again
to almost doubles, to
about five would you
have take two flights and goes up over 10 for folks.
For example, in St. George,
where you'll have
to take three flights to
get their Bethel St Paul and St George.
The mean actually lies late.
the really consequential implication of just extreme delays,
the percentage of extreme delay.
So when I talk to them, we're thinking,
okay, well, what percent take over perhaps a week to get there?
Where it can be really disruptive and you can have some issues
with patient timing and that might disrupt medication schedules or.
and lead to a patient outcome that's very undesirable.
Next slide.
And so we can actually map this out.
So this is a heat map, for example,
grouped by deciles of communities
that have at least 10 shipments per community.
So we're not operating on very low accounts for percentages.
Most have hundreds or if not thousands
of shipments, per-community.
And we could see the road in, again,
to representative reference point, this should not be that surprising that it takes that much
longer to get there. But we see these clear patterns where on the road system, it's much,
much faster, less than 2% generally take over seven days. When we get out on air to a road
20 medicines are taking over seven days.
And then it jumps up, so the 20% of all communities
that they're shipping to are are
taking, over one in seven medications
are taken over a week to get there.
What we're gonna be doing in this analysis
is not just saying, okay, look at this map
that folks intuitively thought about,
but maybe not have understood the scale of,
we gonna to be taking a next slide.
We're going to looking at econometric analysis of drivers.
as an outcome variable, the length of the transit time,
or the propensity for delay.
And NOAA has been able, they can go in and estimate
when there was high winds in a community,
when they were low visibility conditions.
So we can actually say, OK, during that transit window
for well over 100,000 total shipments,
what percent of time was it low-visibility conditions?
What percent time do we have high-winds?
What percent of the time was the infrastructure not working when it should have been?
What was there in a quantitatively more cargo congestion and when is there just less flight hours?
And can we estimate the causal effect of each of these components on delays to understand how
our infrastructure improvements directly improve movement of core medicines and, frankly,
everything else moving through the aviation system? Thank you. Next slide.
I'll wrap up there.
Thank you, Chair.
All right, thank you so much, Dr. Jones.
So that was a lot of wonderful information to move forward on and how we could help all
Alaskans, whether they're on the road system or three flights out, we all deserve healthy
food.
We all deserved to get our medicines and anything we can do here.
at the legislature to help with that is our goal so with
that, is there any comments from maybe from our pharmacists or
might be a question or two on that last presentation representative
reference? Yeah thank you through the chair. Thank you Dr. Jones. I was
And I'm wondering if there was effort for data from a lot
of the pharmaceutical shipments actually go outside
of USPS supply chain, they go directly from like a hub
in the lower 48 for bulk medicines
and then they are delivered by air.
and then directly given to a pharmacy,
like in many of these communities that are on your map
have like either a tribal health center
or FQHC of some sort.
Did you ask for wholesaler data?
And I imagine that would be hard to get,
but I feel like USPS is gonna accentuate the problem
because they're just gonna be a little less inclined
to move things quickly.
Is that something you're still working on?
through the chair. So, yes, sir, there this is medicines that are sent directly from South Central Foundation's pharmacy
out to those communities.
So they actually manage the prescription shipments for the SCF constituency
for all of those
communities and we are working with the YKHC
UConn CUSCOUM Health Corporation as well.
looking at from when they start in Bethel
and move out to their hub communities as well.
So we are, this is the last mile, if you will,
of getting two patients or two clinics.
We're also working with Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation.
They do not ship meds through USPS at all.
They shipped through an air-free contract with one of the Bush carriers
And so that involves a fairly complex procedure of linking up. You might be familiar with a script pro and understanding when
prescriptions were requested and actually
Filled when it was shipped and then when was ultimately received through a separate software called Q-Track and so
Norton Sound, for example, they operate outside of the USPS system as well, I'm not yet working
with them, but it does involve looking beyond mail data.
These are all ship priority mail though, and so it is, in general, priority-mail is one
Uh, the mail system, depending on the reliability of your, uh, local post office,
which probably reflects why some have chosen some routes versus others.
I want to give a quick note that in Dillingham, for example,
if they want a mail, something from Dellingham it goes.
If you want it sent it from the Dallingham pharmacy to a community outside of
Dalingham currently it has to go to Anchorage, then back to Dealingham and
then out due to some, um, very confusing rules within the post-office system.
probably a core reason why they're avoiding the mail system.
So each tribal health organization is adapting to the best case scenario
for their patient population, but still facing substantial challenges.
I think you, Dr. Jones, and we have a final question
from Representative Kerrick.
Thank you through the chair.
I actually just had a comment.
presenter for this information today and I think the second slide you shared
just wanted to really note that for the committee. It says Alaska has extreme dependence on aviation.
We talked a lot about aviation today, and the new opportunities, especially with drone technology,
food transport. Just wanted to note that interior northern and western Alaska have to transport
twice to three to four times as much as other areas of the state by aviation. And I'm a huge
supporter of The Alaska Marine Highway System. I always will be and I we talk a lot about how
it's a lifeline for Southeast communities. This slide really shows to me and this presentation
all of that and more for our interior, western, and northern communities.
And I just really thank you for highlighting some of the challenges that exist in this part of our food system,
while still recognizing that all parts of food and transportation system are extremely important for the communities they serve.
Thank you so much for that question.
I need another cup of coffee.
Thank you so much Dr. Jones for coming before the committee
today.
Your presentation was very informative and it's great
to get a more in-depth look at the supply chain
throughout our rural communities.
That completes the agenda for our meeting today again.
A big thank you to all of our presenters.
There were many great questions and discussions
to think about and as we move forward.
thinking about food in our in Alaska. And this Thursday Tribal Affairs will continue with the
food theme this week and we'll be hearing an update from the Food Bank of Alaska on their
statewide services and rural food programs. On a bus seat, thank you all for being here.