AAFCO invests in next-generation regulators

Steven Kilger: Hello! My name is Steven Kilger, I’m the managing editor for Feed & Grain magazine and the host of the Feed & Grain Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we dive deep into the issues affecting the feed manufacturing, grain handling, and allied industries.

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Today my guest is Austin Therrell, executive director for the Association of American Feed Control Officials, or AAFCO. Austin wears many hats managing the strategic plan, meetings, events, and training workshops for the association. He works closely with state and federal regulators, including the FDA, to help keep animal food safe and support innovation in the industry.

We talk about some exciting projects AAFCO has planned this summer, including their annual meeting in San Diego and a new graduate student poster contest aimed at engaging younger professionals and showcasing research that impacts regulatory authorities and animal health. Austin shares how AAFCO is evolving with the industry, the importance of outreach to the next generation, and how the association fosters collaboration across the feed and pet food sectors.

I hope you enjoy the interview. If you want to help out with the podcast and are listening in a podcast app, please rate us and subscribe! If you’re listening online, sign up for the Feed & Grain Newsletter Industry Watch to see when new podcasts drop and stay up to date with all the news from around the industry.

Now onto the show.

Kilger: Well, Austin, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Austin Therrell: Thanks, Steven. Always appreciate the opportunity to come on and share a little bit about AAFCO and some of the things we have going on.

Kilger: Yeah, I’m excited to. It seems like you’ve got some exciting projects going on this summer. But before we get into all that, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do at AAFCO?

Therrell: I have the privilege of serving as the executive director for the Association of American Feed Control Officials. In saying that, I get to wear about 20 different hats, doing everything from managing the strategic plan of the association and our meetings, our events, different trainings and workshops that we put on. And really, it’s a pleasure. I get to work with our members and our state regulators and federal regulators at FDA all over the country. So there’s certainly never a boring day with this job. And it’s exciting to be in the feed industry and have a role with AAFCO.

Kilger: It’s always fun with associations, right? You do tend to end up wearing a lot of different hats. We used to be owned by the American Farm Bureau Federation. And even if we had a very specific job in the publishing part of it, you kind of get dragged into a little bit of everything. So you get to see the industry up close. They’re really cool places to work.

Therrell: Absolutely. It’s always exciting. And you know, the industry — AAFCO has been around for about 117 years. And we’ve had the same mission and vision throughout that time. But as the industry changes and evolves, the work that we do kind of changes and evolves too. And so it’s a fun job.

Kilger: Yeah, including some very big changes you guys have made over the last couple of years due to, you know, all the FDA — whatever, the canceling of the memorandum or whatever the official title was called. So it’s been like a big couple of years for you guys too, just figuring out what you’re going to do going forward.

Therrell: Whether it’s, like you said, the MOU expiring, some new changes in the ingredient space or pet food label modernization — it’s ever evolving, and it’s exciting. It’s nice to be able to wake up each day and you have something that you’re passionate about going to do. And for all of us within AAFCO, that’s keeping animal food safe and supporting a system that really helps provide some innovation for the industry as well.

Kilger: Memorandum of understanding. I’m going to cut that in earlier, so I sound like I know what I’m talking about. A couple things I want to talk to you about, but first and foremost, you have your annual meeting coming up this summer. It’s in San Diego, out on the West Coast from me. I realized I’ve never been to one before. What do you guys do at your annual meetings? What kind of atmosphere is it?

Therrell: It’s a very casual atmosphere. What we do at AAFCO, whether it’s our annual or our midyear meeting, is really unique within the industry. It’s certainly different than the type of open forum and open dialogue we have to discuss emerging issues or trends, or if we’re kind of jointly working together on guidance or regulatory language. That really is unique in the animal food industry. Both of those meetings that we do each year are open forum, and we invite the entire industry, whether you’re in the feed industry or the pet food industry or in the ingredient space, to come together with regulators — with state and federal regulators — and we can all get together and kind of have open dialogue about emerging trends, issues or things going on in the industry. And really the goal there is just to have that open dialogue to discuss things and get different perspectives from people all over the industry and to be able to collaborate and kind of come to some solutions that help address certain issues that may be going on or just make things better.

Therrell: It’s collaborative. And typically we have 500-plus people. And we move that meeting location around every year. And so we’re in San Diego this fall. We’ll be in Florida at our midyear meeting coming up next January and then Milwaukee next year. So we try and get around the different regions within the U.S. and make the meeting as accessible as possible for the industry and for our members to get to.

Kilger: I mean, that’s always nice to do, especially always nice to hear Milwaukee in there as well, you know, Wisconsin boy originally. It is hard. San Diego is nice and all, but not everybody can make it out there, so it’s good that you give options everywhere. And also really cool that it’s more of a discussion format, because you don’t really see that a ton in this kind of annual meeting, annual convention kind of space. Normally people are getting kind of talked to about what’s going on, and then the members of committees and stuff going behind and actually doing the discussion part. So it’s really cool that you guys open it up to everybody. Sounds like a really interesting meeting. I legitimately am going to talk to people at Watt about whether I can go this year since it’s pretty close by as well. A quick, you know, seven-hour jaunt through the desert. Not too bad.

Kilger: One of the really cool things you guys are doing this year, which kind of piqued my interest, especially since one of my passions is how do we get young people more involved in the industry, how do we tell them that this is an industry that’s open and welcoming and available to them and that they should consider while they choose their careers. And you guys are targeting especially graduate students with your graduate student poster presentation contest. What made you guys decide to go, No. 1, this direction, and then No. 2, just your general outreach to younger people in the industry?

Therrell: We’ve had, Steven, the same sentiment within AAFCO for years about, you know, when we look around the room and we ask ourselves, how can we get more students involved, more younger people involved and really kind of open people’s eyes up to — within the industry, there are regulatory jobs as well, whether that’s with the state or with FDA. And I know, personally speaking, as an animal science student coming up, I had no idea that this kind of regulatory world existed outside of just traditional feed manufacturing or nutrition space. And so we as an association have kind of prioritized wanting to do more outreach and just tell more people about these types of jobs and the type of work here to keep animal food safe.

Therrell: And we have, each year historically, the AAFCO president gets to make a donation, a charitable donation on behalf of the association. And so, in years past, that’s been — we’ve made donations to FFA, to 4-H, to purchase vests for working canine dogs. And the list goes on. And this year, I proposed the opportunity to our president right now — Dan King from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture — and said, “Hey, why don’t, for your charitable donation as president, why don’t we consider using those funds to support a student session?” And Dan is excellent and was all over that idea. And so it’s exciting for us because we’re not in a traditional scientific meeting space, but it’s more of the regulatory and industry meeting. And so it’s cool for us to have an opportunity where we can invite students into that environment and highlight them and some of the work that they’re doing that could be impactful to the regulators, but also to the whole entire industry.

Kilger: Yeah, really, really cool that you guys are doing this. I never planned on writing for an agriculture magazine when I was growing up, certainly. And then when I was in college, it was never really where I planned to land. But that’s kind of how life works, right? Like you start going one direction, get an opportunity in another, and you move in that. So showing students just the full breadth of the industry and all of the opportunities out there seems like a really noble goal. What type of research, what kind of projects are you guys looking for from these graduate students? What kind of categories do you want to see?

Therrell: We wanted to go fairly broad for this first time around on that. So we didn’t want to put a ton of parameters on it, but we really wanted to look for research that’s applicable to regulatory authorities, so state or federal, and really how that research could be used to protect animal or human health or improve the lives of animals. So that’s kind of the broad parameter we put around it, but anything within those categories, we’re open to looking at, and we certainly have a review committee that will kind of take a look at it and choose the top 10 options that we feel like would be applicable to the audience that’ll be there in San Diego.

Kilger: Yeah, it’s a good segue, good job. It’s like you’re the podcast professional here. Let’s speak a little bit about how you guys are choosing or evaluating submissions and choosing those top 10 students. You’re working with K-State on this, I believe?

Therrell: Because of some of the new processes we’ve put in place in the ingredient space with our new scientific review for ingredient submissions, we’ve got a really cool new partnership with Kansas State University’s Olathe Innovation Campus. And so they’ve really, outside of helping us on some of our ingredient reviews we’re doing now as kind of the scientific adviser for the association, Dr. Haley Larson and Dr. Garrett Asher-Brenner and a lot of folks there have been really great about coming alongside us and helping us to figure out how we can get students involved as well. And so we’ve got a collaborative group that will be looking at any submissions we receive from students. That’ll be made up of K-State faculty, also AAFCO state regulators, and then a couple FDA regulators as well.

Therrell: And obviously they’ll kind of go through the gamut of looking at the relevance to our audience, research methods, poster quality, you know, presenter quality, design — those fun things that are traditionally what you would see within a scientific poster session.

Kilger: Nice. You said there’s prizes to be won for people who are submitting, obviously?

Therrell: Absolutely. I’ve never known any student who wasn’t interested in earning a little bit of money for the work that they’re doing. We’re happy to do that. So we’re going to provide some travel assistance up to $1,000 for all 10 students that would get selected to come out to San Diego. And then top three prizes will have $1,000 first place, $750 for second, and then $500 for third place.

Kilger: And as a guy who goes to San Diego quite a bit, especially during the summer here, it’s a good prize. So it’s a fun one to go to. It’s a fun one to win. Tell me a little bit more about these presentation sessions that they’re going to do as well. You’re sectioning off a spot for them to come up there and talk to the industry too about the research, right?

Therrell: So outside of just the monetary prize, certainly I think the other more intangible option there is that we’re going to have a dedicated space for people to eat lunch on site there where those posters will be available and people can walk by and observe and talk to the students about their posters and their work. And then during that lunch session, we’ve carved out 30 minutes specifically where those top three candidates will have an opportunity to share their abstract, answer any questions. And so really, it’s a pretty unique opportunity, I think, for students to have that audience there from state and federal agencies, but also from the industry. And who knows who you can network and run into in those opportunities, and it might set people up for hopefully additional opportunities later on in life.

Kilger: Well, yeah, it’s a great chance to network, especially at that stage of their career journey where they’re graduate students. And so, in theory, you’re going to be graduating into the industry in a few years. And that’s always my advice to new people in the industry, no matter what level you’re going to, is try to be involved, try to go to stuff, try to network. It’s a small, somewhat incestuous industry sometimes, so you’ll see people move around from company to company. There’s a lot of opportunities, but it is a small industry where knowing people, having connections, can be a real leg up in your career.

Therrell: Yep, absolutely.

Kilger: Anything else being planned for the annual meeting this year? Anything cool or out of the normal?

Therrell: We have 12 different committees covering topics related to ingredients or pet food or animal feed labeling or just current issues. And so we’ll be in San Diego the 26th. And the day prior to that meeting, we also have a full-day medicated feed labeling workshop as well too. So if there’s anyone interested in that, that’s certainly kind of an addition you can add on and come out early for. And you know, an extra day in San Diego is not a bad thing. Those committees will be covering topics related to pet food label modernization, implementation, and how states are doing that. I think there’s some conversations about defining high-pressure pasteurization and a whole litany of other ingredient-related discussions that if you’re nuanced in that space, you may find exciting and interesting.

Kilger: If people want to find out more information about AAFCO, the annual meeting, this project, where should they go? Where should they find you?

Therrell: They can find everything on our website. It’s AAFCO.org, and we have an entire event section there that lists out the annual meeting details, and you can find everything you need there.

Kilger: Thank you so much, Austin. Thank you for talking to me and coming on and telling us all about this.

Therrell: All right, thanks, Steven.

Kilger: Thank you, everyone out there for listening. Until next time, stay safe.