 Right. Hello everyone. Welcome. So today is another five-side chat, but today, sadly, not with Inga. Inga can't make it today, so I'm hosting a place for Inga. And I will just share some of our camp updates before John takes the floor, introduces the session, and then Gareth and Conan from Camp Sioccia Cree in Ireland, who are the guests. The camp guests today will be sharing everything that we'll get up to. Gareth, would you be able to share the screen from now after all? Yeah. Great. Thank you. So I'll work for you, Kat, our friend. Yeah, that's great. And you can also, if you click Present in the right hand corner, it makes it full screen as well. Great. Thank you. Okay. So camp experience is best for just to share some important news from ERC. You can go to the next two slides along Gareth and the next one along. Yeah. So we have three camp experiences coming up. We have one in just over a week that will be at Camp Embercum, which is based in the UK, and it will be an edible wilderness course for the autumn season at the rewilding camp. So Camp Embercum is particularly focused on rewilding. And Altiplano will be running one just straight after that. Camp Altiplano is based in Spain and they'll be doing a general introduction into ecosystem restoration. And finally Camp Habiba are continuing their community experience camp experience. And that's an ongoing camp experience. You can register for all of these through the ERC ecosystem restoration camps website. On the tab for events, you can see the details of the events and click to register there. Next slide is, thank you Gareth. Next slide. So this, here's some news about ERC. So Camp Regenesis have just finished their latest camp, which is called Bamboo Origins. They had 28 campers, and many of them have just returned from this camp with this time together with friends. They brought along friends and they planted a range, a diverse range of economically and ecologically valuable bamboo species. And they also gathered around the campfire and listened to indigenous stories with music from rare bamboo instruments. They've also, next to their camp experience, been expanding their bamboo nursery into a commercial operation. And they're preparing their first food forestry zone at the moment. So watch this space. I'm really curious to see what comes next. At Camp Hotland, they have been visited by the California State Department because following the wildfires, the ground has been intoxicated. And so they're working with the State Department and they will be removing those toxins over the next weeks. They've also submitted a plan to get a grant in order to replant the 15 acres and plant 4,500 trees. So let's keep our fingers crossed that their grant is successful and that they received funding to do so. Camp Green Pop in South Africa has just finished up their Eden Festival, the Eden Festival of Action. And that's involved planting trees of pioneer species along with film screenings, biomimicry workshops and loads more. If you can ever, if you're based close to South Africa or planning to be in the area, really recommend going to one of their camp experiences. And finally, Camp Rocia Viva based in Italy is gathering their forces to start. So they will have a full four days gathering with the local community to design the entire project and they will be working together with the local owner of the land to do so. Exciting news. Okay, that's the news at ERC. Without further ado, I'm going to hand over to John for your news and an introduction to today's session. Well, hello, everyone. Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, we can hear you. So I am today in Valencia, I'm traveling internationally for the first time during this COVID pandemic. It's quite extraordinary. I've just learned how to do this. If I could share my screen, I wouldn't mind showing you something. Let me see if I can do that. But I have to find it first. Oh dear. I'm so slow. Let me see. Good grief. Why am I so slow? I'm not going to be able to show you. I'll put it, I'll put it into the chat or put it, put a link in. I just visited my granddaughter, my youngest granddaughter. So she's quite lovely, Leilani, which I'm told means sacred flower in Hawaiian. She's four months old and I didn't get over there to see her until now. So how exciting. And I'm here. I'm meeting with Professor Mianne Mianne, who is a very well known meteorologist. Here and also teeth Vanderholten from the weather makers. And we're discussing restoration here in Valencia and also the project in the Sinai Peninsula. If you don't know about that, you can look up the holy grail of restoration. Where a very large area in Egypt is being prepared for large scale restoration. But it's today, it's all about Ireland and how exciting is that. So I can't wait to learn more about this. And I'm so glad that all of you have come. And I will stay on as long as required to the park afterwards. But back to Fay, thank you so much. Yeah, so as usual, we'll have a presentation from, well this time from Camp Siltia Tree. And then we will have a Q&A session and after that we can keep the chat open and keep chatting with each other. Going forth after six o'clock if you choose to stay. So a little introduction to Camp Siltia Cree and I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. I'm still not saying it right. Siltia Cree. Siltia Cree. Siltia is seed and Cree is heart in Irish. And we're really lucky to have Conan here today because Conan has been chasing lambs. Is that right? Yeah, the lambs had, we had them all eventually in a trailer and ready to set off back home with the lambs. And one of them had just tipped across and ended up having it chasing around the mountain for maybe 40 minutes. And then got mixed up with other sheep, got them back into the car and got them to this side of where we had let them out. And of course the one field I wanted them to go to is not where they wanted to go and I'm here. I made it on time, but slightly stressed and edgy but yeah. A good story of a type of Ireland. She found one. In Nettles things and with stocks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you both for being here. And just a brief, a really brief introduction then while, well, Gareth, if you want to have, get your screen share. So, Siltia Cree, Shilter Cree is based in Ireland and their mission is to restore islands, ecosystems and communities. And they're doing this through three pillars. So the first is education focused on regenerative cultures. The second is on exploring resilient and regenerative food systems. And the third is carrying out ecosystem restoration work, getting slung by Nettles chasing off the lambs and more details that we will hear about now. So do you want to take it away? Yeah, cool. Just to mention to that we've got also Karen and Lily here as well. They're deeply involved in it too. So they're in the back. They're supporting it here as well too. And yeah. So thanks very much for having us, Joan and Faye and Kat and ecosystem restoration. It's really a pleasure and everybody for coming. So yeah. So Siltia Cree, we're seeds of the heart. It means, yeah, seeds of the heart. So I'm going to go back to this. That's it. So we have our base here in Ireland. You can see the capital city there marked in red and where the other red dot sort of halfway in north, northeast of the country. So slightly on the drier side of the island, but we still get plenty of rain and it's still really green. Lots of water all the time and a good, healthy dose of water. Like it's very, once they were drumlands is the word for the land form we have around here. So small hills and I think if you move on to the next slide, we have a, actually that's the camp in a red. So yeah, the black outline was the land that was originally up for sale. And the neighbouring farmer about the rest of the land in the black. And then this land in the red outline there was the basis for Camp Siltia Cree. The next slide shows three acres or like that's half a hectare. So it's quite a small scale. So the exact land but it's. Yeah, that's that's it then from Sundin perspective. So you can see over the field at the back there. And then there's the Hayshed and there's a dwelling house down where we are now, more sheds. So we go into that further in a while. But we just show you what's around and around, around and about the site. Lots of industrial agriculture. And basically it's dairy, beef, some sheep. But all of these fields have been cleared over the last year. I suppose Ireland was colonised back in the over the over maybe eight for 800 years ago. And the British Navy is sort of the woods of Ireland to explore the rest of the world. There's other reasons as well for land clearances and lots of other social things going on. But this is what we've ended up with today. So sort of large fields for dairy cattle, mostly sheep. And that's just above the camp. Now we're just having a bit of an aerial spin of the site. And then there's one of houses down around the base as well. So people drive in and out of their towns to their schools. And it's become, even in the last 20 to 30 years, very more isolation in rural areas. Ireland's a very agricultural country too. So again, a lot of farmers, a lot of farmers. And they're part of this system as well too that they suffer from as well. So one of the key groups that we want to work with is farmers to support how they can get a fair living while also restoring the ecosystem too. Often in Ireland, and that's probably another place in the world too, it's farmers pitted against the environment. It's, you know, rather than seeing farmers being key to regenerating the land. So yeah, rather than having green deserts, we want to work with farmers across Ireland. Yeah. Sorry, I'm going to... So our mission as Faye said is to restore the ecosystems in the community of Ireland too. So again, we say like, when we say restoring Ireland's ecosystems, we include humans as a part of how we say like, fundamentally the issues we face as a global community stem from a delusion that humans are separate from nature. We talk about humans and nature. I go to nature. I want to spend time in nature. All these words are subtly and grossly separated from the natural world and from wider nature. So when we say, well, yeah. So we aim to restore Ireland's ecosystems and communities. And so how we do that is through regenerative cultures. So looking at decolonial taught, you know, as Conan mentioned, Ireland has a long history of colonization. And we still speak the language of the colonizer. And I mean, that's okay. We're thinking, you know, all that things. So how can we go back to, yeah, the people of land indigenous... I think what we're saying about decolonization, like the industrial agricultural thing that's come. So a lot of our beef and our milk and our cheese is exported down to England. America is still based in this colonial model. And I think that's what we're trying to challenge there through that regeneration and the regenerative cultures to reconnect people with their more native hands on. And be like our says, like connected with nature and part of nature. We're following a lot of the work at the moment, too. Again, Gabor Mate, if people have heard of him, but like trauma and how our trauma is as individual and collectively. And we prepare to continue to prepare for that on each other and then on wider nature as well too. So how can we begin to break these cycles of trauma of colon and colonialism and that too? We've run a couple of courses on this. One this year online, nonviolent communication and definitely more to build. We've really exciting plans for next year that we'll talk about at the end. The second pillar down is resilient and regenerative food systems. Because yeah, if people can't have their sustenance, if they're not being able to, their meat's not met, then they don't have the luxury of looking after other things if their immediate needs aren't met. So looking at how can we work with farmers and land custodians and people to build resilient and regenerative food systems too. And taking a lot of inspiration from different people all over the world as well too. And as part of that, we've planted food. We've got three different food system models in the field. Four actually potentially would have ponded, but we've got a forest garden, we've got an annual market garden, and then we've got an agroforestry system as well too. And then mixing that with animals. And then yeah, as I say, we're putting it upon, hopefully soon, which is a potential under opportunity. And then ecosystem restoration work. So again, very much leading on from the work that John and many people on this call will be involved in how can we restore the ecosystems of Ireland. Again, we don't see our work stopping just at the gate. The ecosystem here that we're restoring isn't very important, but it's such a small scale that we really see ourselves. We really want to link with other landowners across Ireland and support them to restore that ecosystem because none of us can do this by ourselves. How can we link in, connect with other people to begin the restoration work? And there's been some, in the real, in the very recently, a social housing charity in Ireland have gotten in contact with us. And they're proposing the idea that they want to put this at the heart of their work and they have housing estates all across Ireland and they're looking at us to how can we put in ecosystem restoration. So we're opening the link in with them that will begin to put in edible food systems and ecosystem restoration work in the middle of their estates across Ireland too. So how can we, these are all connected again, they're not separate points that we're going to deal with cultures and then we're going to look at food systems and then we're going to work with ecosystem restoration. There's obviously deep connections between each of them. So the land here, we're just going to talk about how we worked through this acre or acre and a half on land here. In the bottom half of the screen in the bottom left hand corner you can see the barn. We're going to convert that in coming years. But for now we're using it as a tool shed and as an alpaca space for them guys to over winter and then just to do all the work that we need to do inside the cover area. But initially when we started it was sort of very degraded, exploited. So what we did first was to do nothing really, just to let the land breathe and to do what it needs to do in itself. The first year the grass actually turned yellow from basically drug withdrawals that it had obviously, you know, it was just as it was detoxing itself. You can see actually maybe two or three fields away that are brown, field high up on the hill there. I don't know if you can see Garrett's mouse. That's been spread which basically effluent from these sheds that are next door as well. You can see the sheds next door. They have slanted sheds, so it's cows on top of big tanks and they spend the winter there and the poo falls into the big tank and then it's spread on the land and it's a tendency to run off as well because it doesn't all, yeah, the soil has been degraded and there's less carbon there for the nitrates. So it tends to run off as well into the water courses. I mean, you have big problems in our lakes and rivers with nutrients and beautification and such like. But yeah, these are the photographs of the start of the project. So the house was the first thing to be tackled and it was got it really. You can also see there actually just on the behind the house in front of the barn is one of those slanted sheds that I was just talking about. So there's a tight there full of nutrient rich material and it's liquid or it's solidified now but it's liquid when it's spread on the ground. So that's still there. Initially then the design was done. Do you want to talk about more about that garden? How it was a story of it basically. Yeah, we've linked up with different people like some people might have heard Darren O'Darry and Regrarian's platform in Australia. We did some work with Darren and a land designer here as well too and began just basically framing out. So get Darren has the Regrarian's platform which is taken from Pea Yeoman's work of like how you've designed up there to farm from climate to water to trees and that too. We began to put that in process. And it has tweaked and changed as we've gone along and started finding its way now. We've had groups in. So again, what we see ourselves very much is an education space too and as a community space. So we've had different European projects and different groups. And this project here specifically was one of the first ones we did and it's called what's on our plate. And it was people from all across Europe exploring their food and the food systems and permaculture. And so again, the experiential part of the learning bringing them onto the land to begin to restore it. So these photographs then are 2019, October 2019. There's trees planted there in one of the areas. The alpacas are there. I think grazing on one side of the fence and the trees are on the other side. And so just to keep to manage the grass as well and to start to, yeah, less intensive agriculture basically. So there's less nutrients spread on the ground. You can see as well under that big tree, B bucks, beehive. So little bits of biodiversity being brought back. And yeah, there's what January 2020 just to stay in the shade as well before any work was done. So it was an old farm yard that kind of been run down and not really looked after properly. And yeah, it's all started to. So again, linking with animals too. So the animals we have on the land at the moment we have two alpacas and we're vegetarians originally. So it was like looking at, like I'm looking for like what fit our context too. So size-wise, we didn't really want to get into cattle or that too. So we were thinking goats, but then goats are notoriously difficult to keep in. So alpacas were our animal of choice too. So we still have Alan Paddy are their names and they're up on the land there. And so yeah, again, they're one of the reasons region is bringing in for grazing for holistic management. And then they're also supposedly going to keep in the fox away from chickens. So chickens then are second. So we've got, yeah, we've chickens, 50 chickens now. And they're the one thing that we're sort of selling at the moment, eggs. And yeah, so we moved them rightly to the alpacas and then the chickens and fall too. Yeah, the holistic grazing plan now. There you can see the figures that Gareth was speaking about on, that was last summer. And Lily out doing some clearance as well. We, the pigs were, we cleared an area for market garden there. You can see behind Lily there's a pig shelter. So from where she is, say back as far as the barn, all that area now has been cleared off by the pigs in a rotating pattern. They chewed up the air, dug up the sod, turned over, killed all the grass. And then we came in behind with breaks and took all of those sods away and piled them up. So they are now rotting in another corner. But we have got tear sort of topsoil then to work with. And then. It's interesting too. So from this process, it's been as much a learning for us as well too. So again, myself and Karen and not so much you come with or vegetarians and we're veg. So we didn't get the pigs with the idea of killing them at all. And we got them to work the land linking with nature. And in the end, that is, we decided then that we did end up getting them killed for food and that too. And there was different reasons for animals. It's not a decision we came to lightly. When we took a lot of inspiration, I spent a bit of time previously with the Maasai tribe in Tanzania and how to see their animals is very, yeah, to see it very spiritually too. And to treat it with a lot of reverence too. And then every part of the animal gets used. But it just brought up a lot of questions on certain conversations we had real hardcore vegans and on the other side, we had hardcore meat eaters and very dogmatic in their approach. And we were really just trying to explore like, how do we, what's an ethical food system that regenerates the land and needs to meet? And we still don't have an answer to, but it just was really interesting for, yeah, it just brought up a lot of interesting questions like what gives us the right to kill the pigs, but then which is more environmentally friendly pigs or avocados from Latin America that's possibly used slave trades and all sorts of issues too. So it's very complex and really highlights like these, there's no simple questions or our answers to. And yeah. So yeah, all the work obviously we're not outside digging all the time. There's websites and social media work to be done. We've had people around that making videos and we've done project work ourselves making videos with two local towns to teach them how to grow vegetables just in vegetable or in what they call them containers like raised beds. So that was during COVID as well. So we deliver the beds to the houses. Then from here, we had the same beds at the front and we delivered videos to teach people how to manage the beds and what to do next year. And hopefully then they've got a good experience of just getting their hands dirty and engaging them with us through social media and through the videos. Yeah, and other works then like planning the holistic context, visioning these kind of things that, yeah, in time inside work that can happen when it's not so nice outside. So yeah, the fourth thing is like social decree. It's a non-for-profit cooperative. So that is one of the first things we set it up to sort of as a mechanism for the work. And there's a couple of questions there I see. So Rhonda asked about alpacas-tolerated wet conditions. They're okay with the cold. The wet is what alpacas struggle with too. So yeah, it's trying to, you know, we have sheds. We bring them in if it's too wet and then try and give them, yeah, covering it, you know, that the king thing. The rules of trees like monoculture, Charles, there was no trees on the spot too, but everything, rather than the perimeter is like hot or like a lot of that, which is generally a traditional hedge for things. But everything we've planted is very diversified. Like, you know, we're planting in, you know, many different crops and that too. There's absolutely diversities that care what we're doing. Cat's asking about the positive influence on our neighbour farms. Not yet. I think it's a bit early. We really want, and I think we will. It's very, it's a very conservative farming background area too. So like, yeah, a lot of permacultures around the world talk about the benefits of not coming from an agricultural point of view. If you're born and raised in agricultural families, there's very dogmatic things. But, you know, we definitely want to link in with them. And we've had, they've supported us. And I think the best way of like, what we're trying to do is create systems or show systems that work. So rather than running sort of hypothetical things or actually creating things that actually they can see and see the benefit from. The neighbour's teleporter is used for two now and again to move some heavy like big bales or big bags of compost. So he does come down and, you know, help us out with that. And by building those kind of simple connections that he can see, I don't know, he can see trees over the next couple of years or if there's a drought, maybe his land will be dry and hopefully the land here will be lush and green. So I think it's, yeah, it's difficult in ways because it is conservative, but also those little things. And yeah, we'll make a difference. But actually I've had an inquiry from a guy as well who wants me to have a look at his farm and just talk around doing different things, which is positive as well. So I think that's in a different area, like the other side of town as well. So I think that, yeah, but slowly but surely we'll start to gain more traction, I suppose, in this work. There's new things like new policies at a European level coming in as well for like common agricultural policy of Europe's biodiversity strategy. So there will be more funding made available than like even the climate action policy of the Irish government. You know, one of the biggest carbon contributors in Ireland is agriculture. They have a very strong lobby too, but that's, there's policies are starting to change. I was actually at a walk this morning, like an agroforestry farm, like looking at, yeah, how we can start to put these systems at the heart of farming too and support farmers for the ecological work too. And again, breaking this narrative of those farmers against nature. Yeah, third, so you want to August? Yeah, that's just us setting out the beds now. You can see kind of the lanes been set out and as we're picking stones there, you can see Karen doing. But the next slide, actually, yeah, it shows then how we've set out those rows. So when the pigs came and cleared the land, we collected the stones, rate the land reasonably level, then set out some mulch and some mulch was straw, and then other beds were cardboard mulch and then spread this mushroom compost to be imported from the big mushroom industry in Monaghan here, where we are. And this is one of their byproducts, other waste products that we got reasonably cheap. We get for free or was it paid for? We paid for it, but it was just delivery. Yeah, so yeah, these beds then were left covered over the winter then and planted into them last springtime. John there's asking about the housing people and we can talk about that and go up with them. Maybe you can ask us more about that John. It's not a hunch out what you mean. And then Mayad talks about the balance between feeding the world and regenerating our environment. But again, try not to see this. How can we create systems that work with nature? Gareth, I think there are a few questions coming through in the chat. If you like, we can open them up at the end if you want to finish it first. Cool, yeah, that makes sense. So that's this again. Again, we've got the three different systems that the idea will be able to run workshops into the future. So vegetable grown, annual vegetable grown. Then we've got a food forest at the back and then agroforestry. So that was this last year. Engaging the community with sort of that was a tree planting day. We were building a pond currently. So we haven't been able to afford the pond liner. It's very fast road, draining free draining soil. So when we were getting our work done last year, we got the pond dug out. And the idea for biodiversity, for rainwater harvesting, and then it's at the highest point of the land that we'll be able to gravity feed it around. The moment we weren't able to afford, haven't been able to afford the... It's not very clay soil. So yeah, we're going to get a geotextile liner. It's the whole clay-based liner that we can use as a pond. But that hasn't been possible yet. But you met Sepozer. I'd love to hear more about that, John. And again... Could I just add then, go back to the pond for a moment? Yeah. What I saw in Tamara, in Portugal, they had a very porous soil and it was really going to... All the water would go into the ground. And Sepozer came and looked at it and he said, all right, let's dig it out. And then they got clay and they sifted this clay very, very well and they brought in heavy machinery and they put one after the other... One after the other, small layers and they rolled it with a very, very... One of those giant machines that you fill the wheel up with water and it just rolls around and tamps it down until they got a pretty large... I guess it would be probably 20 centimeters or something. And when they got that done, the thing just filled up and it doesn't leak it out and they've got now a series of ponds because they're on a hillside so they could end several ponds and the ponds feed the other ponds. Now, so it's... And they've actually even brought back springs on the property in Portugal. So I would be a little careful with these industrial fabrics and things that they're using because... It's worth looking at that other approach on doing that pond to maybe doing this pond and clay. I would be very... I would be very careful with those industrial things because what I've seen is after about 20 years or something like that, it's a real mess. Can I jump in, John? Yeah, go ahead. I'm going to suggest why don't we arrange a meet-up and we can bounce these ideas back and forth perhaps for the sake of the other people in the session. It'd be nice to hear about the rest of your plants. Thanks, Faye. But I'd really definitely love to hear more about that, John. Yeah, so that's earlier to hear. This is planting our raspberry bushes, so we've got our summer variety and autumn variety. So the idea that we'll have a succession of raspberries throughout the year. And then some cob nuts and our food, forests, and then the uphack is just chilling in the sunshine. So... It's another section in the same video. I think it shows that... Yeah, it's a drone footage from a couple of weeks ago, actually. You can see the tank again. It's covered over. It's from a different perspective, though. So we are building an education centre that we get to, so this will be it here. And this is going to be designed by a famous enough, kind of well-known Irish land designer, like Mary Reynolds, and she does a lot of great work. So she's going to design an ancient alphabet. The ancient Irish alphabet came from trees, like native Irish trees. She's going to design an alphabet that's from the trees. And here's a meditative outdoor classroom and an education space as well. Here on the left, you can see our vegetable garden. On the right, you can't really see them because it's so high up, but we have planted an agroforestry system tree. So there's a... You know, we've planted them in trees following Steph and Steph, I can never say it's lashing. It's a Canadian permaculture orchard too, planting in trees. So we've got a nitrogen-fixing fruit tree, nut tree on the right side there. And in... in alleyways then, and then running... and the chickens through that. And then at the back of it, here you can see that's where we're planting our food forest too. So more and more like to put it into a forest because to say again in Ireland, it wants to be a forest. And as long as we're fighting against it, it's a sustainable regenerative way as a forest because that's what the land wants to be. So how can we begin to plant a forest? We're going to put a native forest at the bottom here and at the bottom on the right side, that's north. It's on a slope. We're going to be putting a lot of that back into just native trees as well. Yeah, I think that's it. It gives a good overview. It's pretty much... It repeats itself from this angle. Okay. I'm going to... So... I'm going to just stop that because I want to share it again because I'll share this one on YouTube because it's... Yeah. So this is a video we made earlier or a workaway of a person who was staying what has made it for us. And it's a video that sort of just tries to capture the essence of what we're trying to do here to connection with each other, connection with ourselves, with our community in wider nature as well. So let's play this. Cool. Yeah, just make sure the sound is visible, okay? Can you hear it out there? We dedicate this place to healing, transformation, regeneration and restoration to the practice of compassion we dedicate this place to the development of wisdom we dedicate this place. Don't oral that side there is strife. Hear me there be peace. Don't oral that side there is hate. Hear me there be love. Don't oral that side there is grief. Hear me there be joy. Not by words or by talking not by hoping or wishing but by our own efforts towards learning and expanding our hearts and minds we dedicate this place. May our minds become open may our hearts become full May our communication with one another be open, honest and loving. For the happiness of all beings for the benefit of all beings with body, speech and mind we dedicate this place. So I think that's the end of the presentation side of things. Are they able if you'd like to come in? Yeah, that was beautiful that video is so touching it really it really shows your intention and the culture the culture you're building. I'm going to share the video the link to the video in the chat because I think it was a bit jumpy for me I'm definitely going to be watching it again here it is in the definite jail if anyone's talking. Okay, so it'd be great to share some questions back and forth I have lots myself as well perhaps I can begin with a question to clarify your ecosystem restoration techniques you mentioned food if market garden food agroforestry and a forest garden and can you explain what the difference is between those three and your idea about using those three actually, yeah. One of the things we want to do is have livelihoods as well so we wanted to be a space where people can build livelihoods for themselves too but again also meet their needs too vegetables being annual vegetables and being the main crop that most people eat as well but also then the issues that come with that too so moving away from annuals to more perennials and then again Ireland being wanting to be a forest taking inspiration of the guy in the UK Martin Crawford is quite well known for designing forest gardens and food forests so how can we create systems that model nature so that's one of the reasons exploring the forest gardening and in the agroforestry we really want to work with farmers so much land in Ireland is agricultural land and farmers are such a lot of people put as the scourge of the environment or again just pitting it against you but they're locked up into the same shit system that everybody else is and they're victims to the system as well too so supporting them and working with them to show alternative ways are possible that not just benefit nature benefit sequester carbon but actually can benefit them as well so having a system so again they're all small scale education space that's the extra thing we have a crowdfunding now too so the thing I didn't mention in the presentation is that one of the reasons of buying this site all is education being key and our backgrounds are in transformative education so we want to build an education space and we applied for funding recently and we found out we've got it that will cover 75% of the build for it so the tender was $30,000 to do the build so we'll have an education space where we can bring groups to do this work to support them to learn about ecosystem restoration to heal as well being a key thing and groups like farmers so that they can see these systems impossible so we have to come up with the other 25% and we have a crowdfunding operation I'll put it into the chat if anyone would like to support it it'd be well received by seven and share as well support giving support by sharing is equally as appreciated so yeah so I think as part of the education space to have those different elements for people to see as well as to demonstrate that agroforestry silver pasture is possible on a small scale as well as on a larger scale and it's just as a demonstration that's why there's so maybe three different elements so three different types of different systems packed into such a small site it's really as that education hope and then obviously we hope to bring people to camp here but to restore your systems not just on this site but beyond in different sites in the locality similar to camp control lines that we had last week we had to cover them and they had different sites around one area so yeah we see ourselves as expanding out onto different land and work with landowners to bring these elements but for the rest the reason the logo is down the line doing like at the blowing of the seeds so the idea is like it's seen as a weed seed but it's so much more benefit for nature for all things so like you know we are blowing this so like we see in a space here and the seeds then spreading across we see ourselves really focusing on Ireland but then connecting in with networks like the ERC that then support that might see them now to support we'll support Ireland and Lincoln with other people doing it all around the world together we can begin to make the work. Yeah and having those different ways of producing food really open up so many different possibilities of inspiration and that demonstration exciting I've seen here that Majed also has written in the chat a balance between feeding the world and regenerating our environment I think that's that really resonates with exactly what you're tackling as you're taking these different types of food production I'm going to does anybody from the Zoom room have any questions John also perhaps It's Andreas and we're talking to John before he goes into the area in the week too but you know the Irish just like I don't know there's many Americans here too but like you know the what's called the Irish famine but there was never a famine in Ireland it was like it was a question of power structures colonialism too where there was lots of food in Ireland in 1846 and everything but actually it was like it was being held held by certain people while other people starved so like really putting liberation education and like food and all of this is that sort of like social justice of key of what we do too and learning from our history of our past so that we cannot recreate that it's the same patterns which we are recreating the same patterns of oppression Yeah could you can hear Lily singing in the background Yeah, you mentioned in your speech also that the food the beef the milk being exported a lot to the UK and I think you said the US also can you explain a bit more how that model of colonial food model is continuing and what you mean by that Ireland we had a revolution I suppose in 1916-1920 so maybe a hundred years ago actually yeah we're kind of getting through this centenary celebrations as we speak and but yeah we got a new government we had to I think the idea there was a whole Gaelic revolution and there was a kind of indigenous revolution at that time but then in order to get our own government and that kind of thing we had to make some certain sessions to the British and the legal system and the money and that kind of thing was part of that so you can have your own system of government as long as you follow these other structures and the Department of Agriculture was one of those things that was kind of held in the hands of civil servants and you know they replaced the government at the top but the civil service the kind of permanent administration still maintained control over the agriculture in the country really and how things were managed if you look at the rail network in Ireland everything kind of centres on Dublin and so all of the crops and beef and yeah it's everything from carrots and sugar wheat and any of our outputs were exported eastwards towards the capital and towards the ports and that was kind of a lot of Irish people emigrated via those routes as well to England and to America but those that system just continued in the formulation of the new state that kind of that revolutionary spirit would be there before the treaty was signed for the new system of government or whatever that that whole system of bringing agriculture crops and selling them for money it was kind of continued and then consolidated I guess and now like in systems you've got people like and it's the same again all over all the stuff corporate control and that too you don't have necessarily nations colonialism but you've got like certain individuals that are worth billions and there's like one particular person I'm thinking of you know is known as the beef bar and like so much he gets to make so much money while farmers struggle to make any income too and so like you know while it's not necessarily nation states occupying now it's like these trade structures that are colonial in their own right in their own way and it's just again passing forward it's like we begin to break them and create alternatives sorry John I interrupt you Yes John and I see you Charles as well I just wanted to say that I think in contemplating this question about about historical economics we have to recognize that this kind of economic system has massively degraded ecosystem function on a planetary scale we have huge deserts that you know that have replaced magnificent forests and wetlands and grasslands and biodiversity everywhere around the planet and the reasoning for this is flawed because the concept is that the things which are being made and bought and sold are somehow more valuable than the ecological function but it's clearly not true the ecological function is vastly more valuable than anything that human beings have ever made and all of the things that human beings make end up in the trash heap they're just useless they're wasted and but those living systems which are eternal and self-replicating that's where the true value is so I think we need to have this conversation repeatedly continuously until this is understood by everybody on the planet because as long as we leave in place these fundamental mistakes then we're repeating history again and again as we destroy the earth and we're now at the point where we have almost 8 billion people on the planet it's not really possible to continue with this thing and you know it's very difficult because people seem to be able to imagine the end of human civilization before they're able to imagine a transition or a transformation of the economic system it makes no sense whatsoever and that's why we put really like the general culture at the key as well like what we call it trauma and formwork spiritual work but greed, hatred, delusion as toddlers and buddhism do how we can begin to work on that level it's not just about restoring ecosystems I mean it is a big part it's also about recreating that connection working with that trauma that sees humans as separate from yeah it's very inspiring but powerful I think your approach because you're literally planting seeds of hope but you're also very you're acknowledging the trauma that's there with it as one of your third pillars and through the conscious trauma work and I think that's especially powerful in your approach that you're because it does come all hand in hand ecology comes with culturally socially, historically but it's all tangled together yeah I think Charles had something to say and also Masha I also see your hand raised as well so Charles yeah in the US has been a history of industrial agriculture it's still predominant all the pesticides and fertilizers and heat plowing and all the things that rule in the soil and so there's a lot of farms that have been abandoned because when you do that and then only use cover cropping enough when you do that of course the soil becomes depleted and I'm wondering in your case Colin what do you find have you done any soil studies at all or have you any measures of carbon sequestration before and after the restoration we don't actually know we've done a basic soil test soiling around these tests this year just where the soil was regenerated where we put the pigs and then subsequently we put the mulch and the compost on top and then cover it for the winter and as the crops are growing this spring this summer we put a pair of cotton overpants in the ground and that's actually a national project to do with the National Organic Training Centre here in Ireland and they've got a range of different I suppose overpants back in but ours was just basically the band was all that was left the piece that was left above the soil everything else huge uptake in microbes or soil activity so already it's gone in two years to being fairly active in that section but we've got no baseline I don't think we did a soil test at the beginning of year one it's absolutely something we want to do is documenting it along the way and actually again I was at a training connect with the Chagasus Day and I grew the forestry system to get people and I know you all see this but like how we can document it but again we're only two years into this so it's probably too early and ready to be but definitely we have the soils there so we're from the first year and definitely we want to look and document it as long as we go along you said there were toxins in the soil you said there were toxins no I thought you originally said there were toxins in the soil no fertilizers that was just withdrawal from nitrogen phosphorus John your signal to come in there just one thing get yourself some very large jars and every year at exactly the same time fill one jar with your soil and label it carefully and put it on a shelf and over time you will have a record that will show everything that's happened whether you have done a baseline study or not so this is one of the most famous research labs in the world has done this and they are because they started in 1850s it's just fantastic you should definitely do that I mean get as much as you can like a gallon or some amount so you can do the testing repeatedly and what's interesting about these tests later on those samples show everything so like if you take pre Chernobyl soils and then post Chernobyl soil so you actually see the irradiated moment and you see the depletion over time it's very interesting so and just putting it away on a shelf if you don't have the money or the equipment but you get a couple of graduate students and a post-doc or a professor in the local university and you're going to be able to have everything from this information there are a lot of really cool lo-fi ways to connect data we actually will be soon working with a new coordinator to help camps with collecting these data and sharing the different techniques to make it as accessible as possible I see Majed also has his hand raised is that how you pronounce your name Majed yeah Majed it's okay good evening everyone and thank you for this wonderful work I would like to share with all and especially with John about we are trying now most of us we know the best practices and we agree on how to regenerate and my main issue here we are in the UN decade and the shoot we have COP 2726 now in UK and next year we will be honored to host COP 27 in Egypt and I really for me it's a nightmare to see all this big industrial agriculture on the desert that already our delta and the inner land already destroyed since the high dam didn't allow the mud and so it's not regenerated like on the past and right now we have the new lands and now we are destroying also our new lands with this bad practices so I don't know really what to do and we need more I don't know I need more help more advice to whom to talk we are on the ground individually we are working and then you found those people entering in like my city like in my neighborhood or in different other places they are destroying what we wanted to put on the mind of the people and how to educate the people the communities about the importance of regenerating the soil so if anyone can help me it would be great and through the UN maybe we can raise the collective request I don't know solution to divide this big industrial to be more cooperative the small scale farmers this is I don't know thank you I didn't catch the penultimate sentence to help you with what Marguerite? I said how we can use the UN Decade ecosystem restoration to make more pressure or something or more awareness I don't know to instead of having this big industrial agriculture to divide this big pieces of land into small farms small scale farms especially on the desert the new land etc. I don't know how to reach that and to have more cooperative I see the example of Israel for example it's similar to here but they succeed to expand and to make the desert very good taxes etc. Thank you Thank you for sharing that important question maybe we can invite if anybody has ideas I would like to continue discussing that as long as I am happy to coordinate conversations together so you could share your emails or contact details perhaps in the chat I also see that Martin has shared some ideas on the data collection for you guys Gareth and Conan so perhaps also there's a conversation there for you guys to connect up Martin welcome to share your contact details if you want to continue these conversations it's great as well to come together and tackle these questions there's another question there from Katrina saying is it so this comes back to the question we had about the colonial the continuation of the colonial food system and Katrina asks is it in Ireland that this way of farming was mainstream before the industrial revolution and that these are more forgotten methods of farming more than new methods Katrina could you perhaps clarify your question are you still here? Yes I am sorry I am eating dinner enjoy I work for Master C Trust and we support ecosystem restoration camps so what I often get to see coming back from some of our historical research and often other research is that this is all particularly amongst indigenous communities this new way of farming, this regenerative way of farming isn't what we always used to do before big ag came and industrialized everything so I'm wondering if that's obvious in the continents of Africa and Latin America and I'm wondering if that was also the case in Ireland whether we were more in tune with nature before we yeah before the revolution we've got sort of a historical connection with the beef industry with the cattle like a lot of our ancient tales like our similar to the Greeks or whatever Ireland has this ancient tradition of storytelling and stuff and a lot of our how we measured our wealth in previous generations and I'm talking before Christ type time like 10,000 years ago was true cattle the amount of cattle that a family had and yeah this kind of way of farming has kind of been evolved but now we've cleared all the forests but we still have that historical or that I don't know if they were for that visceral or that connection with our cattle and with how we farm our cattle so the farmers who do have cattle and have this big beef industry they use this connection with the cow basically to kind of drive this and what's the word for it narrative of the environment is trying to come and take our cattle from us I think and that yeah you want to say something about it as well? yeah it's just more like the industrial like of the chemical like that's more like say 50s and 60s too and so that's real living memory there's a friend one of the women who is involved in nearly the poster boy for industrial agate but tearing down hedgerows and coming so that level of intensive agriculture is only like living memory so there is still a memory of sort of old more fishlings but then in iron end in the last couple of hundred years what happened was that you had yeah plantations so landowners coming in and kicking local people off the land so then they were forced to live on very marginalised land so I had to grow potatoes and all those in very intensive ways like not chemically intensive but in small things that would grow in basically we're not much else would be because they've been kicked off the land from by landlords and that too so that's going back over a couple of hundred years there and so yeah I think the industrialism and the industrial agriculture we had small fields and we found cattle and I mean we did export them but that has kind of evolved or yeah industrial agriculture has come in and said yeah clear these fields clear these hedges because we had smaller crop or smaller plots and now we have as you can see in the presentation much much larger fields which facilitate big tanks come in and spread this story and yeah just large herds to Grace I don't know if does that answer your question that's her follow-up she's got her mouth full again well I was going to ask Ketrina if I could just speak to your question for a moment all right did you ask a question just to see if my question or our answer sorry our answer what grade 50 so I'm wondering yeah we are talking about a new way of farming so I suppose you've sort of answered my question we can't compare it to anything can we because this is just mass farming is like nothing we ever did before is it I agree with you Ketrina none of this is new or general of agriculture it's not new it's just come back anytime you talk about the chag of people in Tanzania northern Tanzania have done what's called permaculture for thousands of years you know it's not new and again I mean there was a thing on recently I read about like indigenous leaders reading and all that like talking about like even like sort of you know we need to decolonize permaculture patting as something new or a new one that's not new it's old matters but Jon you're going to come in there and say something yeah I would just I would just mention that agriculture is a bit about commodifying things and buying and selling things and of course it's about food but I mean something's gotten lost here because the industrial agriculture systems have tremendous amounts of food waste so they're not really they're not really working from the point of view of food they're working for cash flow so instead of nutrient cycling they're cycling fiat currencies and it's going to some people but it's not going to other people and this is this is different than understanding the value in ecological systems so if we understand that the ecological systems actually have value then our currencies and our economy need to express the actual value and the value is of the commodities cannot be as high as the value of the system itself it's impossible so you know we need to get to a very high level that goes beyond just our agricultural techniques we need to understand how nature functions and the value how nature functions and then we have to understand that functional ecosystems are always more productive than degraded ones so if we restore the ecological systems not only will we have self-replicating living systems we'll have much more productive systems yes and I think that's the element that does make it new now so while the techniques have been around for a while these techniques now operating the current economic system and the current global system which is in transition it seems that is the new element and I'm curious what your conversations are like with this is maybe a tough question but what's your understanding of what's your relationship with the farmers around you because there are different reasons that make the transition challenging for farmers and operating within the current economic model this can be a challenge for them so what have you seen in your own experience and either in events that you've had or conversations you've had with farmers or your understanding of the context in Ireland I had a conversation with a farmer this morning on the way to town yeah she knows I'm doing this work and I sent her a link to a podcast about Angkor Faro Street and about how the benefits of it's basically having trees on pasture it's good for animal welfare and I think she saw maybe 10 or 20 years ago when she was being forced, not forced but advised as opposed to take hedges out and build slatted sheds and do these kind of modernisation techniques she said it wasn't common sense because she knew in her own self that cows are happier browsing through ash trees and stuff they have they're able to medicate themselves and they're able to look after their own, regulate their own temperatures and seek shelter when they need it or go and find water when they need it so she kind of saw it 20 years ago that the systems were being directed in the wrong way but still had to do some of it in order to satisfy certain conditions for funding grants like what do you call them cap funding common agricultural policy funding so I think farmers were ill-advised and sort of directed into these new fangled avenues and she kind of didn't hugely invest in these things but other farmers like the neighbour here has a massive herd and massive machinery now and she did some but didn't do everything so I think maybe she's already ahead of the curve by not having jumped in the previous curve if that makes sense I think it'll be a case of that there'll be bits of boat like I was in a workshop on a farm both this morning and there was lots of people there that were really interested in agroforest she's got two people, the first two people I talked to were younger guys they've just inherited their family farm and they want to do things differently they want to transition in their way too I also imagine like that person I mentioned there's a chair person and she had to create her father-in-law since he's the poster boy of he was the poster boy of industrial ag this whole changing and uptaking out all the trees and that too nothing will happen while he's still alive he's an older man now but when the next generation takes over man would be different too but I also know my cousins that look at me like what we're doing is quite strange too we haven't really begin the process because we're a very new organisation I suppose what we're doing now is we're creating our systems and we're creating the education space and then we'll bring people in so it'll be more next year not really when we have something to really engage with that we'll be working to connect with the landowners more and that won't necessarily we'll be us facilitating but we'll bring in maybe experts from around Ireland who farm in different ways to support so that's the great thing about being a co-operative that it's we can bring in the expertise we're needed in that too so I think we'll definitely be met with skepticism but also then on one side but also met with a lot of enthusiasm on other sides too yeah and well through skepticism we can also learn a lot and grow a lot too I think well it keeps us in our toes too that we don't have all the answers either we don't claim them all the answers we're exploring it as well too yeah and your food hub plans are also really exciting on this track too because that's also really thinking about well about the sustainable business models around your transition with your land something I'm just looking at the time we normally finish at six I'm aware that people may have plans for the day depending on what part of the planet you're on perhaps we can invite a final question from Charles and then if anybody wants to continue to stay we can also talk more about the food hub and any other discussions more informally going forward Charles would you like to the reason that you keep large grazing animals on your lands is so that their defecation that feces and yarn can actually fertilize soils and generally what happens especially if you're dealing with something like cattle for example is that you rotate them every few days into a different paddock so that they don't chew the grass down to its roots and I know you have a small grazing area for the apalca but I'm wondering if you could use a similar type do you rotate them use them in a similar fashion yeah we do we rotate them and the chickens as well not like we're still like again learning and we're still developing systems and putting the infrastructure in so not in a way that's savory we haven't just yet but like so we're moving them maybe weekly as opposed to daily now and that's just time and resources and different things that I'm supposed to but yeah we're definitely moving that way so moving it that way but we're not just there yet either finding the grass is benefit from this yeah it's very yeah so we definitely have a new pack is running and the chickens after it too and then there's a lot of basically it's grass it's stalks and it's tistles at the moment and there's very little else too so after the chickens run and they they create sort of scarifies now it's called but like so thinking now would be great too so we're hoping that the native seed bank would start to come back up which it hasn't in other places yet so maybe throwing in a bit of clover as well in the past that the chickens have moved to get that diversely going within the seed too thank you but then that's the point you're just documenting it too so again this is really one year we've done this so far so really it would be great to have that soil sample over the years to see what's going on at a more detail level I'm certainly far from an expert on holistic grazing so excuse me if this isn't an ignorant question just to hear that you can the method works with just two alpacas can you share I know that many people here also are not experts on holistic grazing so maybe you can share that well share a little bit how that process works to anyone who's not familiar with holistic grazing and tell us a little bit about what you're learning from it your learning journey probably it doesn't really work with two alpacas really to again because we're doing every smaller scale but essentially it's like modelling and I'm not an expert either I've just read some stuff and maybe someone else might have heard that but it's like moving them regularly so that they eat the grass and eat to a certain point I think six inches opposed to two low and that supports the grass grows much quicker and sequesters much more so it's much more like what would have happened in like the predators would have kept the buffalo moving so that there wouldn't be one area that's too long so they eat and they eat everything as opposed to eating just what they like and then the other what's called weeds grows stronger everything is it and it's doing and there's more of a balance of nutrition so that's kind of very loosely holistic management on my understanding of it in terms of the alpacas so again we should have more higher density ideally moving in that too the way we're doing it is that we have a paddock and then just try and measure how much to eat per day and then just moving moving them so that they have Richard Perkins is quite a well known regenerative farmer we were in a course with him before and he mentioned trying to have like sort of three days work having them in an area of three days paddock so two days is what they would have would have eaten so they have a bit of room and then just every day moving them trying to how much to eat in one day and moving that much to defend that much eat per day so that they have that bit of grass slowly but yeah my understanding is the same as yours Peter ideally it would be higher stock rates higher stock rates and it's all that too so I wouldn't claim that we're doing holistic management it's just taking some inspiration from us let's see how tree, I tend to move tree sheep in small paddocks as well so let's compare tree sheep to alpacas and see how that works as well there's more experimentation going on I think that's part of the journey and people's ecosystem restoration journey is to not be stopped by trying to get it perfect just by trying something being having the right intention and doing something that you know is in the right direction is better than doing nothing at all and you'll definitely learn from getting it wrong you know you don't get experience without making some mistakes so yeah and learning from each other learning well learning from you mentioned Richard Perkins the other camps in the the camps in the network yeah learning by doing it I've just shared a in the chat in case anyone's interested in learning a bit more about holistic raising so nice little introduction from Alan Savry who's the man that came up with the technique and nice video speaking of experimenting would you about to share a bit about your food hub idea and yeah yeah so the food hub again we're not for profit but again we're working sort of not like in sort of in organizations just trying to instead of being fund and driven constantly always trying to like trying how can we generate our own income that gives us like that we can support it too so the food hub as well is we want to work with farmers and land custodians to restore land but again supporting them to and then taking the money away from the select few the the co-operation a more direct selling too so the idea of the food hub is that again it's the open food network we're linking it with another group cooperative in Ireland the open food network Ireland too they brought up this open food network so essentially it's online food an online farmers markets the idea of bringing local producers and local families and local consumers together too the idea for us would be that we'd be able to link with farmers to support them to restore their ecosystems but then giving them a direct market to sell so they can get a fair price for the farm the work that they're doing as well too so connecting that too that's what we're hoping to do there's only so much hours in the day too so we've not stopped it but we've paused that just until we can get the reason there's a livelihood there for somebody but it's just at the moment there's just so much going on we have a European project application in with ecosystem restoration camps to support us documenting that process and then that might offer the resources to support someone to do the work while we get it open then we come to generate ourselves so connecting access to regenerative food, taking money away my thesis and my Masters was looking at supermarkets and for every job a supermarket creates to say like to create, it happened to test going in my towns they're creating 100 jobs but they're costing 150 minimum for every one job to create the cost one and a half to the local community and then that has all sorts of knock-on effects and that's before you get into how the food is produced and all that too so the food hub is the idea of keeping the money in the local economy supporting farmers farmers to have a fair price local economics and then families to have regenerative non-toxic food for their families and communities if that makes sense or if that's clear faith, if not please ask yeah perhaps other people have questions from that what I'm going to do now is close well two things I'm going to close the facilitated part of the session and just from here take a back seat in a sort of organic conversation from here but I would before I close just like to remind everyone of the crowdfunded that Gareth has shared in the chat it's one of the last links in the chat here and just to thank everyone for coming and for your enthusiasm and curiosity and let's keep learning and experimenting with this important work perhaps I'll as I now hand over perhaps Patricia I see that you have a question welcome to jump in, anyone jump in and have a conversation and a big thanks again Gareth and Conan and also Kath for doing all the technology taking the time and thank you to you Fe and Kath and John and PRC for creating it creating the work and creating the platform and then yeah so we really appreciate it and it's really part of the network and thanks for everyone for coming we do it together and you might get our job back for next month now Fe Patricia did you want to talk I was I was just wondering why did you choose alpacas, these animals that are from another regions to be there I don't know because I also am also thinking about animals for my farm maybe and if they have some advantage I see a lot of people now with alpacas everywhere but I don't know exactly why only because they are so cute or because they look nice or what do you do with alpacas how is this the main reason originally was because well we were vegetarian so we knew we didn't was like an animal that we were going to kill so we wanted to graze her and so we were thinking we were thinking goats and apparently goats are just like ridiculous to keep them just won't keep them in their scapegoats and eat trees and then do a lot of damage too so we sit for travel around Latin America so and I don't know how alpacas became so that was and also we were getting chickens so like as well too alpacas was very good at keeping the fox away from the chickens so the main reason originally was yeah the fox away from the chickens and grazing the land too if it was now just if it was a productive farm and it was like yeah I would possibly get rid of them and maybe get something else too but most people here are not here but in general we're doing ecosystem restoration which are not that interesting. Two alpacas are fascinated by so there's a creator like it creates a real yeah people are fascinated and really curious and interested by them too so that's another reason now too exactly this was the whole thing this way a good reason because sometimes you are with the traditional farm animals so interesting for people we have the wool as well and I would love the idea of spinning it and we give it to a young lad that did the permaculture course he's 17 and he said he wanted to spin wool and so he wanted to buy the wool and I said no you take it all spin it and then we can split the wool and a friend who knows a lot of it said to me yeah you're ripping him off because it's so much work to spin alpaca wool it's really good quality but really difficult and in the end he gave it back because it was yeah it was too and then Karen's mother works in textiles and she was running a workshop with it again and again he did so much and gave it back so it's four years worth of alpaca wool upstairs but yeah it's something we'd love to okay and it's easy to get alpacas here in Europe I think yes because I've seen several people walking with alpacas here in Austria for example as pets but was it difficult for you to get alpacas or you no it wasn't there's a farm not too far away and that's where I bought them they're castrated males too so when we got them we were doing a couple of hundred giro for them whereas she was showing the field we went into and it was like maybe ten male breeding ones and she said there was none of them worked less than ten thousand giro because there's different things like just the wool and all that is depending on the colour increased price and then the breeding and that too but two guys we have are they're lovely but they're not sure what alpacas that say very good and the way they eat the grass is okay but because I know certain animals damage more or cut very short and maybe is it okay as they do they tread they're not very heavy I think sometimes actually heavy is good like one farmer because he was had sheep a lot and he wanted to get cattle because he wanted stronger impact and again go back to the holistic management thing but these are more soft and they're not heavy there's a new Johnny put in horse we did get the loan of horses before the problem with horses is they eat them much more as well and we don't have that much space so I think we've run out of grass quite quickly just horse but again it's that actually we're a cousin that horses and didn't needed grazing and we needed a bit of grass so he brought his horses for short space of time and they got a bit of grass and then that so yeah okay thank you very much for your information thank you what I'd like to know is how much rainwater you normally catch on your land and how are you prone to flooding your areas yeah I think we did the calculation and we had someone in and they calculated how much rainwater we could get off our roof and to feed the pond and we've got to just meet her cubes of rainwater kind of stored by the side of the the garage right now but it's I think 750 mill per year there's just lots of rain but not lots of flooding because it's such a hilly landscape that water tends to flow from here down and actually we're based the water that lands here on this land flows east to the Irish sea but the water that lands maybe half a kilometer up the road actually flows west to the Atlantic we're on that border of two catchments so we're high up and water flows well in both directions away from where we are so footing is not an issue for us here but yeah definitely in low lying areas the water that goes from here will flow I think into Bay or the Shannon but one of the bigger catchments in Ireland that area flows more regularly every year now it's the next system though definitely to rainwater harvesting we have once we get the pond then we do want we're trying to build it up and we're going to get it we're let down with that but definitely looking at how we can store more water in the land and then harvesting it off the barn by average rainfall multiplied by the size of it friends we'd be able to capture 333,000 litres of water a year so we're kind of yeah that'll be the next stage how we can capture it store it and then gravity feed it around the property that's the next that's the next big project like this the next big systematic investment after the barners are focused this year to get that education space up and running but the next sort of mission is the water systems okay we're happy to have you come and help if you'd like Mark okay thank you you said this is about the water situation on your own land but if you you said you want to help the farmers in the area I would suggest to map out the watershed the water sheds in the area that you are because when you have such an amount of water maybe your land is okay but I could imagine that further on throughout the watershed there are more problems ahead in the future because we're doing one of the projects we're working on the moment is making a film looking at pollutions in two lakes in the region too and a lot of the problems agriculture and you know Conan mentioned the slurry that spread in the field that keep the water washing that into the streams and then bringing it down too so yeah no absolutely and working on that too but because there's such high rainfall and there's such a high rate of cattle in those sheds over the winter creating lots of nitrogen rich material to be spread on the land again often the equation is not balanced if you know what I mean the water will land on that the freshly spread slurry and wash it into the sea wash it into the lakes and the rivers primarily and we're trying to make a video we are making a video trying to highlight the issues but because the industrial agriculture lobby is so strong and has such an influence I suppose here over the media and people like to buy cheap meat people like to eat meat as well and it is kept cheap to people like that and there's such a problem a disconnect between actually naming the problem and even through making the video over this summer we found it very difficult for people to name the problem or for people who say for example swim in the lake or use the lake as an immunity even still don't want to say what the problems are the water quality is really bad but people don't want to be seen to be challenging the system or whatever so we have many challenges in that regard as well so it's something we're working on but it's a tough not to crack the talk I was in today is what I'll do looking at agroforestry systems and it was a research that had an agroforestry system for the last 30 years showing that too and how even if there's excess nutrient spread on the farm to how trees and agroforestry systems can actually eat that up a lot before so again it's the same the problems and the solutions are all interconnected we can't more trees we can't spend more carbon but we also deal with runoff too and yeah just healthy ecosystem it's the oversimplification of that process there's a very simplified process there now but they're not looking at the externalities like the bits of runoff or the environmental damage and then also the environmental solutions that are available they just don't fit into that simplistic model and therefore are sort of disregarded or pushed to one side and it's yeah something we're working on okay what strikes me is that this is all about technicalities and your video was a lot about things from the heart what I can see is that when you can't get your finger on the problems when people don't tell, don't show what they are going through it's very often the possibility or the problem to talk about their fears and if things are not going forward then there's always a resistance for change and this is most of the times a fear that people can't handle the problems that are facing towards them so maybe that's a key item to dive into further if there's a taboo if you can't talk about certain things then you can't solve the problem thanks for that it's a way that we can maybe host workshops to address fears but I think we're kind of some climate cafes are starting this a local organisation to do work about climate cafes and bring people together to talk about climate change and to talk about environmental problems I'm not sure these places even attract farmers to be honest and I think the people we have around here that we spoke about earlier about that conservative mentality and even if we're doing something different on our land that the other four or five farmers around us are meeting at field gates and speaking about us in ways that are like look at your man over there what is he doing, he's crazy they're reinforcing their own prejudice I suppose with each other and trying to break one or two of those people out of there that collective chatter that gossip I suppose and once you start breaking the dam or the water starts flowing but then more and more people will come but yeah like you say it's that fear I think is fear of doing something different as well so we're trying to set an example by doing something different but often having one or two people more join us will be a good catalyst to create more change Extinction Rebellion Extinction Rebellion Extinction Rebellion, the resistance of cultures people are your natural partners if you have a regenerative culture group in your neighborhood, contact them I would suggest could I could I add something I think that you should plan some really carefully designed outreach I know that Irish music is really good and I think it would be really great to like plan a big organic food music thing where people could come over and you know just like tell them just talk about the music and the food and then prepare your your propaganda well to share the types of work that you're doing and explaining why because I think really the situation as it continues to unfold a world is collapse now the scenario doesn't look like this can play out for centuries more you know when we look back over centuries of history that's one thing but now if we look into the future we can see predictable catastrophic outcomes this is terrifying so there's a lot of not just what you're talking about this inherited trauma or ancient trauma there's also this anxiety situation this is I think also where the extinction rebellion people are at this time and lowering the lowering the anxiety levels are really really important at this time if we're going to have peace because it goes it starts to build up to some really collapsed scenarios and if everybody's in a hyped up crazy state it's very dangerous so have the people come over make these festivals and make it fun so that people will enjoy themselves and have a good conversation and pray together a little bit because I think the time requires some prayer now too maybe you could get in contact with Green Pop in South Africa they are a completely different climate different landscape of course but they for a couple of years organized festivals that could be an example or you could derive some ideas from that John has got contact with Michelle Tiersdale so maybe that's an possibility to start your festivals yeah they're also one of the ERC camps and they shared a training for the other camps on how they organized the festival actually so can share that with you if you find that interesting well it's available on the knowledge platform and also on the YouTube but let me know if you find it happy to share the link I think they've logged off though, they lost connection maybe spread the link right away okay have we lost them looks like maybe they'll log in again in a moment they lost connection well Francois I'm in Spain where are you I'm in Belgium nice to hear your voice yes likewise nice to know that you're back in Europe yes I saw that you're in Valencia yeah I'm actually working on the restoration of the Albuferra Lagoon so if you hear people that are busy with the Albuferra Lagoon please direct them towards me okay do you know Professor Mian Mian yes I've met him at the weather maker's congress right but I indeed thought it might be a good connection but I don't know if he knows a lot about the lagoon itself well why don't you I'm going to see him in a pretty soon why don't you send me a couple of some information about it into my email John D. Liu at iCloud sure I'll do that at iCloud just make sure it's the iCloud one yeah I'll do that sure let me know if you come by the Netherlands or Belgium I'll be there to welcome you yes I think I have a wonderful osteopath in Brussels and I'm thinking about going there as I look at 70 and try to process what that means let me know were they able to connect back or they're gone forever yeah here we go here we go we were just saying just as your internet cut out this green pop had actually shared a training for the other camps on perhaps might have been before you joined but they shared a training on how to set up festivals I attended that training as well actually because it's a restoration camp festival what we want to do is because it's the smallest case area we've actually had some issues with our neighbor as well you know so it's like it's a small it's 15 like so it's limited numbers we'll be able to have so but what we really want to do within the community especially the area here is once this is a training about how to create an ecosystem we're giving them basically a voucher to our courses that the neighbors support them to get involved because I'm definitely looking at ways to connect with I think we've reached an organic end hmm a few minutes to spare as well and we'll be stopping the recording now