 Okay, well, first of all, thank you for having me, and I'm not sure if I will be asked back once I start. Put your seatbelts on, buckle up, I'm going to talk fast, so put your listening too fast forward. I'm going to talk to you a bit about intensifying production and why we should be doing this. I'm going to discuss, you know, all the, what we need to do and show you how we can achieve better outcomes using protected copying, substrates and hydroponics. And then I'm going to show you some examples. And then hopefully I'll come up with a recommendation. I keep doing it. Okay, I'll push the right button next. Okay, so why do we need to intensify production around the world when a quarter to a third of the food that's been produced already is wasted? And this was actually a big, a hard moment for me in my nuffield when 56% of the developed countries are wasting the food at the consumer level. But then you go to developing countries and they were wasting 44% of the food just in the production, the transport and the growing side. So why are we wanting intensify when we've actually producing it already, but we're not just rooting it correctly? However, there's 7 billion people in the planet right now. In 2050, we're going to have 9.6 billion people on the planet. The way we are using our resources at the moment, we're going to actually need three earths to sustain ourselves. Every month, the world population grows by a city the size of Hong Kong. Yes, that's 7.2 million people per month. Farming land around the world is diminishing. We went to the international rice institutes in the Philippines and we watched this little video and I'm not sure what's going to work. But we sat there watching for 22 seconds as there was another 60 people born in the world and three hectares of land was disappearing at that same time. This was actually quite confronting. We all know that water is really precious and some of our things that we eat every day consume a lot of water in a conventional way to produce what we eat. Diminishing nutrients, so apparently the peak phosphorus is only going to last us another until 2030. It's quite frightening. We're using up our resources quicker than we are feeding our existing and exploding population. Every meal, I'm sure everyone you've seen that costs this much to the planet. Topsoil, we're losing it at 75 to 100 gigatons per year. At the rate we're going at the moment, we'll only have soil, topsoil for another 48 years, frightening. Some cities will be so large and vast they're going to have to learn to feed themselves. Just logistically getting the food from the country into these towns is not going to be possible. The challenge is to produce more with less resources. Welcome to my top product of protected cropping, hydroponics and substrates. I'm really passionate about this. We need to think of unlikely places to grow. I'm not asking any of you big wheat cattle producers to give up some of your land. I'm wanting us intensive horticultural growers to think of other places that we can use to grow food that is really unlikely. Rooftops, abandoned industrial estates, mines, there's going to be a few of those in Australia in a few years. Unused car parks, poor soil and marginal soil land. Desert swamps on the water, floating barges, underwater in the sea. We need to consider bringing the production to the cities, maybe in buildings or underground. These are the types of things I've actually seen around the world and it works. I saw the first rooftop greenhouse in Montreal and Lufa farms. I then saw urban farms in New York. I heard about and I didn't go and see them personally about in Mongolia where they're actually doing the greenhouses underground and just putting the glass on top. Containers being used in really small spaces to grow food on top of them, floating barges, supermarkets with greenhouses on top of them. Perfect opportunities of places to grow and you don't need soil in those places. You just need substrates, things like coca-peat, which is made out of a renewable source of coconut husks. You can use perlite, bemiculite, even clay stones to grow in. I really would like to see minimising crop loss to climate disease and pests through putting up plastic tunnels, glass greenhouses, netting and buildings. Putting our crops under protection so we don't lose a cherry crop to splitting and rain. We don't lose our berry crops to birds and infections. Retractable greenhouses is something that actually makes use of a protected environment but also opens up to let natural sunlight in when you need to or even to let natural rain in to actually clean the crops up from dust accumulation. We need to be efficient with our water usage, capture runoff water from these protected cropping structures and have the capacity to be able to store it, recycle it and reapply it on our crops. Be a lot more careful with what we are doing. This is actually a rose crop in New Zealand with an excellent 100% return system of their water and nutrients. We do the same on our farm here in New South Wales. We need to be really efficient with our nutrient use. Our farm, where we are, we actually recycle all our nutrients and we get, as my husband says, we get two parts of the cherry. We can actually reuse and reutilise all our nutrients so we're actually not wasting and flooding streams and getting leachate through the soil. We need to be more labour efficient and being able to grow in these very intensive systems like deep flow lettuce in Mexico, I've seen that in Mexico, California and Canada where they're putting the lettuce in as little plugs on the one side and then as they grow and they reap off the other side of the pool. It's fantastic and it's very, very efficient and it's really, really profitable for these growers. They're not doing it just because it's fun. It is making their money. Being able to work in smaller areas with your workers and not worrying about the weather. So if it rains, you can still work. Our workers, where we are, they're not like the tradies who get a day off when it's raining. They work all the time and being much more labour efficient, talking about fruiting walls that you can actually get your staff in and they can harvest quickly at a height. They're not bending over and furrows picking strawberries from the fields and being really intensive with your cropping. The middle photos actually are one of our greenhouses. 3,000 blueberry bushes in 3,000 square metres. So that's a blueberry bush per square metre. So you can imagine harvesting that is a lot quicker, especially when you're doing it by hand. Using space like in a propagation nursery I saw in the Netherlands where they were bringing up the young plugs of plants at the bottom and they had their mother stock hanging from the roof. Really clever ways of intensifying and maximising the space use. Layered cropping. I know this might not get through some of the food things but having chickens in your greenhouses being able to do a little bit of IPM or integrative pest management for you. That's Capsicum's grown in Mexico and this was working really, really efficiently. The bees, that's actually our greenhouse here in New South Wales. We've got bees in there to pollinate our berry crops and they actually produce honey. So it's actually having two incomes from the one structure. In the Netherlands they're doing lots of fish aquaculture where they've got the fish on the furrows below and then they're actually growing tomatoes above. And actually in Sydney in Coppity there's actually a really good aquaponic setup as well. All the way around the world at the moment it's just flourishing with factory farming in these buildings and I am a bit of a greenie but I do see this has got a place in our society going forward. There's just no risk. Everything is controlled. What you sow is what you reap. No ifs or buts or whys. Integrative pest management. In these protected structures you can minimise using sprays because you're not getting the fungal infections. You can use your biocontrol agents when you've been blown off to your neighbour. We are using predatory bugs. We're using biocontrols. We have not sprayed our blueberries, raspberries or strawberries for three years since we've had them and so that's got to say something. We've got to sort of investigate a little bit more about the intima vectoring using the bees to disseminate inoculants for botritas but these things are on the horizon and something that you can do in a protected environment. We've got to look off to our pollinators and it's another part of my little passionate little crusade. Honey bees. In Australia we're limited only using honey bees because that's what's here. If we get varioamite in this country we need to consider bringing in bumble bees and actually letting them, we use them commercially but it can be done really easily. I've seen it done in Canada where they don't let the bumble bees go out into the natural environment. They are controlled and it doesn't infect the natural species. We've got to think of other things to pollinate like blow flies. We don't expect to have strawberries pollinated by blow flies but we have to think of things like that because they're very good buzz pollinators. One thing I did learn about solitary bees if you need to put them into your greenhouses make sure they're only every 25 metres because that's as far as they fly. The other thing is to be able to offer multiple florals in your greenhouse so that there's diversity for your bees. So we've got blueberries, rajbees, strawberries, we've got passion fruit and some citrus and some figs in our greenhouse that are there for our bees and lots of lavender as well to make sure that they're really efficient and effective. We've got to consider bringing more crops into prediction especially the high value crops like cherries, mangoes, apricots and figs. I saw in the UK beautiful, hydroponically grown, cherries actually grown in librae undercover and they were yielding 20 tonnes of first class fruit per acre. Every year you're in, you're out. That's pretty damn good. On Japan mango has been grown hydroponically and been sold for the equivalent of about 300 Australian dollars for two mangoes grown like this because they were absolutely pristine. These sort of things are very, very futuristic and they seem far-fetched and far away from us but let me tell you it's a lot closer than we think. Going back on that one, that barge picture there is actually starting to be constructed in the Netherlands at the moment and these things are starting to happen now. It's not something that our grandchildren are going to see. It'll happen in our lifetime. We're already doing this around the world. Intensive production where people are reaping 80 kgs of tomato per square metre. I went to a farm in Canada and they were reaping 300 sticks of cucumbers per square metre. That's incredible production. In the Netherlands they're producing 15 kgs per square metre of strawberries per annum. Incredible yields of very, very little footprint. Retractable greenhouses are really coming into the fore. Using drones to do your scouting in your greenhouses is something that's already happening. I just wanted to give you an idea of comparative results using a substrate. This is coca-peat and this was done at a study in the Netherlands and it's actually remarkable. The same variety. There's a variety in soil and one was grown in coca-peat. The year five is actually... You can't deny that. 37 and a half tonnes compared to 8.2 tonnes of blueberries yield in comparison in just five years. So that is the answer to speak for themselves. In protected cultivation this graph is very, very interesting and very dear to my heart. If you were growing tomatoes in a field you could use 80 litres per kg to produce that amount. In a completely controlled greenhouse in the Netherlands they only used 4 litres of water per kg of tomatoes produced. So for me it's the way of the future is putting a lot of things that are quite delicate to produce and being able to produce them using minimum resources and making sure you get your crop. So my recommendation, if I would be so bold as to tell you what to do in your own businesses which are probably far more successful than mine consider putting your crops under protection. Even things like the Cravo retractable greenhouses that you can get the best of both worlds. Consider clean energy to keep your projects growing. Solar and wind energy and also bio-digestors anaerobic bio-digestors all your waste products put it in there and generate the energy to run your projects and to heat your greenhouses and recycle your water. So those are my recommendations and thank you very much for your attention and I'd like to say thank you to a Bears Art Look and thank you to Nuffield and Horticulture Australia for putting faith in me to giving me this scholarship. So thank you.