 The talk of the conversation today is Opportunities in Integrative Agriculture, building on a lot of themes that Lou and Kenny have already spoken about today. And quite broadly, when there's a lot of topics about conversations in agriculture, there's a lot of focus on the problems. There's a lot of talk about the problems that we're facing in agriculture relating to malnutrition and the injustice in the food system, relating to energy and fossil fuels which is the structural underpinning of industrial farming, and of course the worsening effects of climate change as evidenced by the substantial and historic drought in California or the polar vortex, etc. Kenny, thank you for the sobering reminder of the planetary boundaries that we face. But right now I don't want to talk more about the problems that we face. I don't want to talk about some solutions that are emerging in response to these problems. And the good news, I've spent a lot of time over the last couple of years looking at different projects, different technologies, approaches relating to the challenges that we face and the solutions that are emerging and looked at this from a range of different perspectives from a sort of technical perspective, a philanthropic perspective, an investment in business perspective. And what I wanted to do is just share the really good news. And the really good news is that there truly is a global decentralized movement of millions of people showing up in thousands of different ways all in their each unique way addressing the issues that we face. From elementary school gardens in rural Nebraska to the big institutions like the Harvard Center for Health in the global environment, financial institutions are increasing their investments in these areas, open source communities online are spreading information and technologies at exponential rates. There's just this massive amount of energy and outpouring as we as individuals of the world all recognize our common challenge that we face with ecological degradation. But the movement's very diffuse. There's not one organization. There's not one thing that we can look at. It's not even easy to know how big the movement is. Can even mention that he thinks the revolution is much larger than even many of us would maybe appreciate. And so, you know, it's going to be impossible for me to even scratch the surface of all the different solutions that are happening or try to prescribe any one specific solution. So instead, I just wanted to share three stories and three examples of things that I found that I think are most exciting and give me a tremendous amount of hope. So first, let me ask you, what comes up for you when I bring up Detroit, Michigan? Bankrupts, GM, urban blight, death of the industrial age, right. So, yeah, exactly. In 2008, the U.S. manufacturing of the automotive industry basically imploded. And Detroit was the center of all the big car companies, and that essentially bankrupted the entire city, along with the government and pretty much every civil structure available. This has created tremendous amount of hardship on the people. Basic services like electricity, water, community police and safety, road maintenance, all of these things have just completely been left as the government is just completely and utterly bankrupt. And, you know, that's a real serious challenge. And if you were to drive through Detroit now, you would just see miles and miles of deserted abandoned suburbs. The populations dropped by more than 60%, leaving a huge amount of just vacant buildings that are now being overrun by grass and weeds in the natural habitat, or being used for manufacturing of drugs or other really antisocial behaviors. And this stat I saw recently is that the Detroit government owns approximately one-third of the entire property within the city limits through foreclosure. People simply abandoning the properties. But the government can't afford to keep these properties up. It would cost more than their whole budget just to do the maintenance to keep these properties up. So they're falling into massive urban blight and the structures are deteriorating and they're just rotting from within. And so, yeah, maybe you could just bring up a couple of those pictures, Dave, just to sort of show the scope of this. It's truly astounding. There's just so much waste happening there. But when we look towards the natural ecosystems and sort of the biomimicry that was mentioned earlier, you know, things are never wasted. Waste for one organism is always food for another. And in this case, Detroit has two really important resources that are completely being wasted. The first is this land, all the land in the natural environment that is simply holding derelict structures overgrown by weeds and providing a haven for nothing. The other major resource are all the people, unemployment at an astonishing rate in Detroit as the car companies have shut down. So there's been this new generation of impact entrepreneurs that are rising up and leading an urban agriculture revolution within Detroit. There's a great organization called Food Field, led by two impact entrepreneurs named Noah and Alex, who basically said instead of fighting the natural trends, which is that nature wants to regrow in these spaces, when you stop mowing the lawns, forests come back. And this is what wants to happen. This is the natural process. So instead of fighting that, instead of investing resources and time and energy and money into fighting that, why don't we go with that? Why don't we go with that trend? And this has led to a tremendous amount of urban agriculture in Detroit. So Food Field's stated mission, and I think this is just beautiful, so I'll just read it to you. It says, our goal is to join in the revitalization of Detroit by developing a successful community-based business to meet the need for local, affordable, sustainably produced food. We believe in a triple bottom line, setting environmental, social, and economic goals, all of which our urban farm contributes to. Our priority is to produce fresh, healthy, and delicious food while improving the economic and creating neighborhood opportunities. So, you know, this, Food Field is just one of over 1,500 urban farms within the city limits of Detroit. They're producing an enormous amount of their own food, resiliently and without dependence on long supply chains or financial infrastructures, and not only doing that, it goes so much beyond the food. It really touches into something so much deeper. I mean, imagine living next to a burned-out warehouse that's being used by drug addicts or criminals in some sort. And imagine the conversion of that into a beautiful green field with fresh vegetables. And imagine the sense of hope that comes to a community when they realize that they don't have to wait for some external entity, some government, to bail them out, to provide them loans and debt, but that they can just provide what they need directly for themselves using the resources that they have at hand. And, you know, what's happened now is Detroit has reemerged as a leader in America, not of producing automobiles, but now in this new, very fast-growing field of urban agriculture. And the lessons that we learn in Detroit are extremely applicable in cities like Chicago and Richmond, California, or any of the hundreds of other cities in the sort of rust belt around the world that are facing the similar sorts of challenges that Detroit faces. So I think it's really inspiring, and there's a lot that we can learn from and then replicate from what's going on in Detroit right now. And I think it's just this sort of beautiful example of when something really good can come from a situation that's perceived as bad. And I'm sure that we've all had this experience in our own life. And so maybe we could just kind of take a minute and chat with the person next to us and just tell that person, like, when is something in your life, when something beautiful has come from something that you originally saw as something that was bad? So let's just take a minute for that. Great. So I'd like to just kind of bring the energy back and want to launch into sort of the second solution, and it's really quite different. But to do this first, we're going to have to kind of zoom out and take a little bit more of a historical look. In the 14th century, China, there's evidence that the farmers began to, in the rice paddies, allow fish and bring fish in to swim amongst the roots of the rice paddies because they found that the effluent, the waste from the fish was a natural beautiful fertilizer for all the rice paddies. And they recognized this just by looking at nature, looking at the natural patterns that existed, that hormone, sort of four billion years of R&D that was mentioned earlier. And they found that by working with nature, instead of fighting against it, they could produce substantially higher returns and produce healthier fish and more food for their communities. And that system today is what we call aquaponics. Now aquaponics is a technical term for essentially a farming system that mimics the natural flow of energy and nutrients between fish, you know, aquatic animals of all sorts, and then plants in natural ecosystems. And you can see it's this beautiful circle. It's a beautiful circle, the water that comes in, because the fish waste, that normally would become toxic, and a fish farm what they do is they build these huge troughs and they put all the fish in there and then they start throwing fish food in. Well, the fish all eat it and then they have waste. And right now what happens in traditional fish farming is that that waste just builds up and builds up and builds up and it becomes very, very toxic. You can imagine what that would be like. And so what they do is every couple of days they drain like 20, 30 percent of all the water from the huge fish farm. Well, what are they doing with that? They're just draining that out into lakes and rivers of this highly, highly contaminated water. And so it's hugely water intensive and it has huge negative effects on the local environment. Whereas the aquaponics system, it takes that polluted water and then turns it into food for plants. The plants now have this beautiful natural or organic fertilizer, but then through the process they actually purify the water. They pull out the parts that the fish can't use so that you can cycle that water back into the tanks. And this produces unbelievable efficiencies. We're talking like 90 percent less water than traditional systems. Google has a frame for a lot of their Google X projects where they say, we want to talk about 10X thinking. So this sort of 10X thinking, getting 10 times the amount of protein per gallon of water in farming is the sort of radical stage level change that we need to have in order to offset and reverse the effects of our traditional farming methodologies. It's not just water though. This approach also radically reduces the amount of runoff, as I mentioned. It saves a huge amount of space. These systems can be built self-contained so they're really good to be used in urban environments. One great example in Detroit that I saw is that one of the main ways that Detroit is now using urban agriculture is they're putting aquaponics systems in abandoned parking garages. And they're perfect for urban farming because what you would need, imagine a big, huge tank of water full of fish, the thing is going to weigh a lot. So you need industrial structures that are open air, allow the air to flow through, that you can have sunlight coming in, and that is set up so that trucks can come in, and all these different things. So it's this beautiful thing of like, wow, look at this. Here's abandoned parking garages, quite possibly the sort of archetype for sort of this. And somehow, through this process, through this natural process, through the creativity and the resilience of the people of Detroit, they say, oh, well, actually, here's a resource. We can make it into something beautiful and useful for ourselves and our community. So the story of aquaponics, there's a lot of different facets to it. I think it's really, really exciting. But part of the reason that it's been so successful is not something that we would immediately imagine. What's happened in the aquaponics story is it's an ancient technology. It's known many, many years over, but the modern aquaponics farming system has really accelerated its adoption because of a few groups that have been doing open source technological development. Groups like the New Alchemy Institute and groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute, both in the US, and I'm sure many groups around the world that I'm just not familiar with have been taking the technology, modifying it, to meet all the different sorts of unique criteria and conditions that every community needs, because every community is different. What's going to work for here in New Zealand isn't necessarily going to work in Dubai, probably won't work in Siberia. These are all different environments, so the systems need to be adapted and changed. By creating open source, no one owns it. No one owns aquaponics. It's a movement, and it's enabled by this free flow of information. That allows everyone from schools to backyard DIY farmers to big, huge multinational institutions to food resilience government programs. There's all these different organizations that can then take that seed of knowledge and then adapt it to fit into their environment and then apply that in. That's both helped in rapid expansion of this technology as well as relevant to expansion of the technology so that it actually works in the communities where it's employed. One thing that I come back to a lot, I'm a firm believer in the value of open source. I think it's incredibly important that the knowledge and understanding that gets developed in the response to these challenges is not held captive by private profit. That it's released out, that it's remixed, it's shared freely and openly with everyone, both to push the knowledge forward but simultaneously to ensure that that knowledge gets applied globally and at a fast rate because private institutions that are trying to maintain profit will often stifle the application of this technology. So the third sort of solution really speaks to what Kenny was talking about around systems level challenges. As I've seen a lot of... I kind of started this with this big sense of hope there's all these organizations, all this stuff moving but realistically, even though there is this huge groundswell of support we're candidly it doesn't feel to me like we're making progress fast enough and I think that a lot of that is because the problems that we face are all interrelated. We can't address agriculture unless we're thinking about energy and we can't address energy without thinking about water and we can't address those issues unless we're all thinking about our economic paradigm and our social paradigm as well. These things are all interrelated but so often the solutions that we're putting forward are specific point solutions. I'm trying to address this one specific thing and so activists are spending all this energy and this time but then like right now in California despite this crippling drought there's still not a price on water and until we address that it's really hard to see and it's still in the same economic paradigm so how's a startup going to be able to get traction for some water saving technology if there's no incentive for farmers to save water? So these issues are all interrelated. So I really think that systems level thinking is critically important as we move forward and try to as change agents affect things and that's why I'm such a big fan of the third solution I like to talk about which is permaculture and many of you are probably familiar with permaculture. You might think it just sort of means organic gardening but it's definitely a whole lot more than that. It's really a design methodology. It's a way of solving problems. It's not a solution in and of itself it's an approach to find solutions. It's a way of thinking about things and I know that Gary, Emily, Kay will talk a lot more about this so I won't go too far into it but it's basically a way of designing symbiotic ecosystems where humans and the broader environment coexist in a vibrant and healthy ecosystem. A practical example of something that we're applying here is basically, and this is like really, really simple but grazing chickens underneath your orchards. Now in like a monoculture approach you're like, well no, we're a fruit farm so we just have 50,000 acres of apple trees and that's all we do is we just do apple trees but what happens in situations like that is you have fruit that falls down on the ground naturally, starts to rot, that attracts bugs. Those bugs having just free reign on all these apples will multiply, multiply, multiply now creating such a huge population they start to threaten the trees and all the fresh fruit that's still on the trees whereas when you graze chickens underneath the trees they're just eating all that fruit that would have otherwise gone to waste. They're mulching up the soil and then they're through their metabolism re-injecting all that nutrient back into the soil supporting the trees again. So it's this really simple win-win and obviously that's not going to save the world but it's these layers and layers of these things on top of each other and I'm really looking forward to our conversation this afternoon more about permaculture because it's still relatively new to me but it's an idea that it's an approach that makes so much sense to me because I really do believe that the systems level thinking is absolutely required to solve these problems. I don't think that we can solve these problems just with some new gadget, some new approach it really has to be a total systems level all of the solutions have to be integrated together an integrated approach and sort of on that word integrated farming the European Society for Sustainable Agriculture has published a beautiful framework around integrated farming which helps us see the multi-dimensional aspects of our food production its effects not just on direct water plus sun plus seed equals calorie that sort of linear I like to call that the old approach sort of linear agriculture and this sort of new approach sort of integrative agriculture where we're recognizing all the different stakeholders that are involved in food production the local community that eats the food the biosphere where the food is created the culture and the business environment and the government institutions everybody needs to be brought to the table we can't exclude anyone in this conversation if the sort of green movement is going to be successful there can be no enemies you know it's really easy to demonize Monsanto and I'm so guilty of that I do that all the time but it's so important that we don't Monsanto has something to offer to this conversation I believe that and if they're not involved I think it's really difficult to imagine that we'll actually be successful in seeing a global movement to regenerative agriculture unless everyone is brought to the table so you know I think that one thing that really really inspires me is that this room represents such a diverse set of stakeholders and shareholders already like it's so cool to see you know government leaders and permaculture experts and business people and high-tech Silicon Valley geeks like all in the same space talking about these ideas because that's that sort of integration that I think we actually need and to sort of highlight to what Matthew talked about this morning I think that New Zealand has a tremendous opportunity to be a leader in the global movement towards an integrative regenerative agriculture it builds on the natural assets that New Zealand already has in terms of an advanced agricultural economy paired with a first world highly developed globally minded educated population which is a rare dynamic it's not something that a lot of other countries have plus great ties, really strong geopolitical and trade relationships a sort of willingness and an interest not a willingness a passionate desire to see this be and that's been one of the things that's been so exciting to us as we've had all these conversations is you know I've never had even though this is something that lights my heart up so much I've never had to pitch this to anyone in New Zealand this is something that New Zealand already has a vision for and we're so excited to plug into this because there's just such a movement already underway in this country on so many levels which was talked about already today where New Zealand can just really help lead the way and this has very practical benefits for the country three key opportunities that emerge is we sort of look out is first just through the application of these practices there's a huge amount of issue relating to nutrient runoff from linear agricultural practices in the country that's something that can be addressed we can fix that, that's a fixable problem doing that not only increases the sort of economic output from the country diversifies away from this sort of over emphasis on just a single dairy crop decreases the negative effects of linear traditional industrial agriculture and just provides a higher quality of life for everyone in the country and nothing new has to be invented to do that no new science, no special insight it's just applying what we already know to the farms that we have today and doing so with excellence and doing so on the cutting edge can provide tremendous opportunity for New Zealand and in doing so and in leading that way there's also a tremendous opportunity for the development of tools, techniques and technologies that enable the shift for other countries so instead of it just being about we are great farmers we're also helping everyone else be great farmers and helping spread this approach to other countries around the world because New Zealand might be sort of the healthiest place on earth but there's no escaping global climate changes New Zealand is not immune to this and unless the whole world makes this shift New Zealand's in it with the rest so the isolation can help in the incubation but it's not enough for us just to solve this problem for New Zealand we have to solve this problem globally we're all in this together there's only one planet and it's really, really exciting to see the way that through technology and embedding this philosophy through technology New Zealand can help lead the way and enable for the rest of the world the same shift and in doing so build a vibrant economy for the people who live here and the final aspect that this does is a little less noble is that this really can help the New Zealand primary sector spend a lot of time understanding the challenges that exist in the farming business and it's a real challenge the overemphasis on a single export the commodity prices that the country gets for most of its sales overseas and sort of the brand of New Zealand at risk if these sort of linear agricultural practices continue and I think this is one thing that has really heard this from a lot of farmers is like as long as products are sold as industrial commodities like as long as we're just dropping the raw logs on the boat and we just ship them out we don't do anything to the tree and we waste 60% of it there's no margin in there for farmers to try anything new there's no room for experimentation there's no room for just sort of investing in the biosphere because a lot of the farmers and I really want to make sure that none of this comes across as any anti-farmer I really love farmers and I think that what's important is that we help tell the story of New Zealand farming in a way that enables them to really do what they want to do invest in the land that they want to invest in the land not use heavy chemicals and pesticides to embrace the organic farming as they want to and that's a trend that's already there and I think that just by better telling that story to international markets that it could actually provide that sort of economic space that's required to make this shift because realistically it's not going to be free to make this shift is going to require resource and it's going to require connections to international markets to make that happen but I believe that's entirely doable and there's already a lot of really good people in New Zealand who are working on that and making a lot of great progress so there's a three kind of disparate solutions that I sort of talk about around is urban agriculture stuff there's this aquaponics stuff and permaculture and you might ask well how are these all related and what can we learn from their interrelation that would inform future movements how can we all be as successful as the Detroit urban agriculture movement how can we all be as successful and see things spread the way that aquaponics has spread and what I would sort of note and what seems to be the defining characteristic for these projects to me is their integration their integration with the natural environment their integration with cultural and societal norms and their integration with technology and the more that projects are integrated into the real world the more successful they seem to be and I think that New Zealand provides this beautiful space and this is one thing that we're really excited about testing out is here in our local farm here is how integrated can we be how much can we just work deeply in with nature and what sort of results will that produce and then what sort of layers of technology can we build on top of that collaboration with nature that just help augment and accelerate and spread those effects elsewhere and then how much can we integrate with our local community providing the food that we need focusing primarily on supplying the foods that we need instead of just on global export markets you know to me it's so crazy how expensive good food is in New Zealand I bet the local Kiwis will understand this like it's for an agricultural nation it's insane how expensive good produce is and I think a lot of that is just not being integrated with the local community so I just sort of lay that out there because this is a theme a theme that I'm extremely passionate about this is something I'm going to be working on for the next 20 years of my life I very much want to extend an invitation to collaboration with all of you this is why I wanted to be here and speak about this topic today was just so that I could have a chance to open that door for collaboration I think it's really important that we all work together on these problems I think agriculture is the linchpin Kenny mentioned just the most destructive thing that we do to our planet it's the foundation for our own personal health and it's just a sort of spiritual connection that connects us with the land that I've just never found anything else that's going to be as high leverage for shifting global consciousness forward and building a sustainable thriving beautiful future for ourselves in the future generations so thank you all Thank you