 Kia ora. Welcome. My name is Alina Siegfried, and I'm a freelance storyteller, and I've had the great pleasure in the last few months of taking a really deep dive into regenerative agriculture in New Zealand, and talking to those who are involved in the movement, people who are working on the land for some of the farmers, some who are working more in the business space, and then others who are working in the scientific space, which will be a little bit more of the focus of today's discussion. So, yes, so just to give you a bit of a background, then I'll introduce today's speakers. This Our Regenerative Future series was something that we started talking about when I was still working with Admissory Fellowship last year to highlight some of the stories of the EHF fellows that were engaged in regenerative agriculture. But then, yeah, we got talking with Pure Advantage, who were also looking to do something around region ag and soil carbon sequestration, and a lot of alignment between the two organisations in terms of driving innovation and looking at alternatives for New Zealand, and building a bit more, I guess, of a reality around our clean green image from overseas. So, we got chatting and decided to co-produce a series, which has resulted in a 15-part content series, which you can check out online through either Pure Advantage or the Inventillery Fellowship's blog on Medium, and really got to dive deep with a lot of the farmers and the others that are involved in this in New Zealand. So, out of that has come this webinar series. And this is episode three of an original six. It looks like we might be tacking a couple of extra ones on the end there as well, so they'll be in the following Mondays. Just briefly before we introduce our speakers, I will give a shout out to the Edmontillary Fellowship, which is a global network of both Kiwi and international people who are interested in systems change and positive impact. So, it could be entrepreneurs, farmers, artists, investors, different kind of innovators. There's literally any kind of profession in there. They've got their, I think, final opportunity to apply for the global impact visa closing in 36 hours, so you can apply for cohort eight within the next 36 hours. And as I understand it, that's the final opportunity at that fellowship at this point. So, get in there if that's of interest to you. EHF.org is where you go for details. I think now we will crack into talking a little bit about today's session, which is on soil ecology and regenerative soil science. And we're very lucky to have two of our amazing contributors to the Our Regenerative Future series with us today. We've got Nicole Masters and Dr Gwen Grillay from Lancare Research as well. I'll ask them to introduce themselves in a moment, but we'll just take a quick look at these poll results. It looks like we've got almost half of the people on the call today, our farmers or growers themselves, which is fantastic, great to see people with boots on the ground here. But we've got a few people from business and media, science and academia. Most people have read at least some of the stories in the series, which is fantastic. So, you'll have a bit of a grounding of this series. And most people are at least somewhat or very familiar with regenerative agriculture, which is a fantastic starting point for diving into our discussion today. So, if you've got questions, you can submit them through the Q&A box, which you can access in that bottom bar. Please use that box rather than the chat function. And you can also upvote questions in that box too. If you see something that you'd love to hear a little bit more about, then you can throw an upvote on there as well. Wonderful. Thank you again for joining us today, particularly because it is a holiday. Appreciate that you've all taken time out of your Queen's birthday, or for those of you in New Zealand anyway, to join this exciting conversation. So, I think at this stage I will hand over to Nicole Masters and invite you to introduce yourself. Nicole, over to you. Hi, Alina. Thanks for pulling this together and inviting Gwen and I to this session. It's fantastic. So, yeah, my name's Nicole Masters. I'm an agroecologist, which means I'm really angry about ecology. No, it means I have a background in soil science and ecology, and I work with land owners and managers around Australia, New Zealand and North America, really looking at how do we bring ecological principles to agriculture and bring vibrant life back to landscapes. Primarily, I've been involved in education for the last 17 years. And working as a consultant for 14 of those years or a coach. So, yeah, that's a quick background. Wonderful. Thanks, Nicole. I'm sure we'll get to dive a little bit more into your experiences throughout the conversation. Gwen, over to you. Hi, Kaola. Well, thanks for having me here. This is great privilege and it's been really good fun actually talking with you and interacting with everybody that's worked at putting this series together. I've actually learned a lot myself. So, I had my, I'm a sol ecologist, and I won a PhD in 2002 as a plant ecophysiologist, which is defined as looking at the physiology of the plant in itself. So, you're looking only at how the plant behave in isolation from everything else around it. And after the PhD, I realized I was missing out on quite a lot of interaction that might have affected what was going on within the plant. And this is when I started to pay attention to Michael's or fungi. And I became an expert in particular type of Michael's or fungi. And realize that when you start to study an organism, you have to count the organism that interact with it. And just to cut the story short, as I grew into my career, I realized that each time I looked at one particular part of the system, I was missing out on everything that was around it. And I was driving, deriving conclusions that were possibly not necessarily accurate or a reflection of what was going on because I wasn't able to describe that part, how it was in the way it was functioning with everything else around it. So, my career grew like this. And that then took me to understand how soil ecology and soil biota interact with the rest of the community above ground, below ground, and even bigger how the soil biology is supported and manipulated by the humans and the decision that the humans make. And if we don't take all of this into account, none of somewhat possibly deriving some conclusions that are not necessarily a terrific of what's going on. Now, the problem is how do we do that because those are complex system. And this is what I've been trying to do in the last three or four years when I met Nicol and started to really pay much more attention to this movement of relative agriculture. It seems to be very aware and mindful of the complexity of system. And that's what drew me to it. And I'm French in origin, so I will try my hardest. It's wonderful to have a bit of international flavour on the call. Nicol is calling in today from Montana. Just 36 degrees today. Fair bit warmer than Wellington today. Yeah. Wonderful. I thank you both for that introduction. I think we'll start with... I'd love to just explore what regenerative agriculture means to both of you, how you would describe it. Because it's a question that we get quite a lot and there's a fair bit of misunderstanding out there about what it is and what it isn't and different factions of it. So I'd love to put that question to you both. Nicol? Oh, I'd better say you go, Gwen. You go. All right. So my own kind of... It's not a definition, but it's a description of what regenerative egg is. It's the child of a lot of agricultural management strategies that rely on biology and whole ecosystem understanding. So it's the child of permaculture, biodynamic as well as organic agriculture, agroecology, ecologically intensive agriculture. All of these holistic grazing management, all of these way of thinking about managing the landscape such that one always thrives to maximise loads of different outcomes at once. So not just your productivity or not just your grain quality or whatever. And for me, that's a definition or that's a kind of a more kind of setting the boundaries of a box in which we can start thinking about regenerate. So the key thing is this concept of looking at the whole system and managing for multiple outcomes. Yeah. And I think that's what the challenge has been and I think that's what the opportunity is around defining regenerative agriculture is that it is so difficult to pin down because we're talking about outcomes and we're talking about principles as opposed to a very clear and defined practices. You must do this or you can't do that, whereas how do we bring and restore, bring more vibrancy, bring more health and diversity and have systems that work and it encompasses human wellness and wellbeing as well as water quality, greenhouse gases, nutrient density. All of this picture is are we in a system that you could say actually in a thousand years we could still be farming this way. And I think if we looked at a lot of the industrial model which is very degenerative, no, we're not going to be able to continue to do this for the next thousand years, probably not even in the next 20 years. So I kind of like that it's difficult to define and I know that the marketing people and the funding agencies and the scientists want to have it really pinned down and clear, but I actually think that that closes down innovation and right now we're in that very innovative birthing phase like Gwen talks about it as a child. You know, really we were taking the best of microbiology and there's just so much new science coming through as well as the best of management practices and it's an evolving space. And the other way it's really interesting how you can already pick up the difference with the conditioning of the academic and scientific lens looking at formatting whereas Nicole was straight into outcome. This is for me, this is really telling. I'm totally amazed whenever I interact with many people like this that you... And this is reflected in how people think about Reganag and the views and perspective they have on it. You can look at it from this other angle which a lot of people are flagging out which is we had this craze of sustainable agriculture and what's the difference between sustainable agriculture and regenerative agriculture and so for taking my ecological hat on and for me you could again formatting that could be a hybrid between restorative ecology and sustainable agriculture. So the idea is not just to do what we are doing right now and keep doing it forever because what we are doing right now in many places doesn't work or is harmful for certain aspects of the system. So how do we manage to continue to produce food and manage our landscape but also repair whatever is not working? And so then comes all of the questions how do you define what is not working what is working and et cetera and how do you assess whether you've repaired it or not repaired it and that's where the science comes in. And some. Got it. So there's that important distinction between what is sustainable and what is regenerative and I love the points there Nicole about taking a very long term view which we're not actually very good at. I mean a lot of what we hear is that from those who say we don't need this in New Zealand is that a lot of farming in New Zealand already is regenerative by nature so I'd love to just ask that question that's come through on the chat. What would the panellists say to the argument that New Zealand's traditional sheep and beef farming with rye, grass and white clover pastures is naturally regenerative? I think if that was true then we wouldn't be seeing the outcomes that we're seeing in terms of water quality. There is certainly some interesting conversations around some of the nutrient density of some of our foods but I think if we're talking about rye, grass and clover we're not talking about diversity we're not talking about deep rooting systems we're talking about plants that have been commercially grown to be on very short rotational systems for me that's not regenerative and there's also some links to animal wellbeing from just feeding them a very narrow diet so only feeding them rye, grass and clover is actually, I think we're going to see more conversations around humane animal treatment when you're feeding two types of food or when you're feeding them like a winter brassica actually is that the best thing for animal health and performance. Got it, Gwen, anything to add there? Yeah, this is a really interesting conversation and very polarising because there is no denial that the way beef and sheep and lamb meet producing New Zealand outdoors is so much better for the environment than feedlot produce meat there's absolutely, I mean nobody's ever thinking of arguing this is not the case so the issue is yes, what we are doing here in New Zealand is so much better than many other places in the world however, could we get better and this is where that question for me this is one of the questions that frustrates me a lot of the time in my profession it's this is not the status quo is just not enough can we get better at what we are doing so when I go and I go here walking and I walk in the pastures and I see that whenever there's rain falling all the paths are completely destroyed because the soil doesn't hold and there's a huge amount of soil erosion and yes, there is natural geologically driven soil erosion because New Zealand is a really really young country but the management of our pastures is really contributing a lot to it and this is just talking about sheep and beef but start talking about dairy and overload of nitrogen for example this is like New Zealand is the highest usage of fertiliser per unit's surface area in the world way way above any the UK, the United States, France so for me this kind of conversation are kind of a little bit still when people are not prepared to our knowledge that we do have there are practices that we are doing that are not really optimal and can we do better if we want to still be there in 1,000 years or 2,000 years Yeah, I love the long term the long term outlook there perhaps we can just dive a little bit into what regenerative agriculture actually is seeking to do with the soil and some of the issues that we have in soil in New Zealand and how regenerative can help so what are the actual measures of soil quality that you're looking at and looking to optimise? The water issue and it's interesting to sample around New Zealand we really see that there's a breakdown in the water cycle and not only water absorption but also a slow water release so we don't get these flash flood drought conditions that we're seeing globally so when we do infiltration tests on properties that are not practising these practices then it's taking nearly an hour if not longer on some of these properties to absorb an inch of water so what that means is that water maybe if you get a small amount it's going to evaporate but it also means that we've become very, very close to drought so that would be one thing around soil? When if you want to add another one? Yeah, so what I guess we have a Nicole and I complement her and have a slightly different focus my training and I want to understand what's going on like I'm fascinated by the new movement it's a lot of time some of the I would say claims I don't want to offend anyone I'm just saying claim for the sake of addressing the scientific community for example and if you talk to farmers and you tell them these are only claims and their livelihood is at stake and they know very well that the system is working it's really offensive to use that word but for the purpose of science there hasn't been a really, really solid science measuring what's going on and so that's what fascinates me and a lot of the things that I have started to deploy in my research was to look at say yes the water cycle how do we best assess what's going on with the water so doing the water infetition rate and then pushing it beyond can we look at what's going on with the soil aggregate can we look at where the carbon goes within this different fraction of the soil aggregate and what's the role of carbon in holding the soil and looking at the soil biology how important is it to have a balance of all sorts of different type of biota in your soil so the concept of the soil footwell has been developed by multiple input into this concept one that is really pure academic and uses all sorts of very fancy technique to assess it like EDNA and so on which is what I've started to do and then you have another strain of tools that's been developed initially by Elin Ingham which is at the moment not at all regarded as being rigorous by the classic academic scientific community but the farmers are using this test to indicate whether their system is trending towards a balanced ecosystem below ground and when they are making their decision in terms of management they are seeing success so from my point of view I'm looking at this and I'm thinking where is it that we have a gap in our knowledge how can we try and put all of these pieces together to better understand what's going on and then to make much more informed decision to where we could do whatever practices we could implement and the other thing is in terms of the phosphorus and nitrogen cycle it's so much assumption that we are making and the regentive ag movement is really pushing and pushing the boundaries in terms of those assumptions the currently accepted assumptions are being very very much questioned by the organic community and it's fascinating to watch it Certainly a very timely topic at the moment the drought that a lot of farmers have been experiencing in the Hawkes Bay and up north Queen I'd like to just dive a little bit more into how you how you manage to study something like regenerative agriculture which very much takes a whole systems approach as a scientist when a lot of the focus in the science community is quite reductionist in terms of studying just one thing so what is the approach that you take I'm taking multiple approaches and I have to be really crystal clear and transparent here I have just started to build this research portfolio so there are a few other scientists in the world that are starting to do the research on regenerative agriculture per se so the science processing science is actually new so we can't say that I've been there for 20 or 30 years doing the science just taking the whole system right so the difference is there's been quite a few like actually hundreds and thousands of papers looking at individual practices that are deployed in Reganag and looking at what could be the effect of these individual practices and that is for me taking a reductionist approach where you say comparing no-till versus stilling or rotational grazing versus strict grazing or whatever so each time the focus is on very much controlling what are the different practices that are being used and comparing the different treatment Reganag is using all of these different practices constantly adapting constantly being responsive to what's going on with the system so doing and what others have been doing is not trying to compare practices A versus another kind of practice but taking the whole management as a whole and just trying to factor out or control as much as possible the inherent environmental viability so we've been taking a comparative approach where we are looking at a farm that is regenerative and managed versus a farm that is managed using best current practice and we're trying where we are sampling we're trying to match the soil type, the topography everything that is in the physical environment is the same so that's one approach and this is the one that I've managed to get funding for and I've started the other approach that we've been thinking of is not at all trying to do a comparison because comparison assumes there is black and white so it's either regenerative or not regenerative and actually this is totally incorrect because even within the best current practice there are some management strategies that lead towards some regeneration in some outcomes and vice versa some of the regenerative practitioners haven't really fully optimised their system and there are still things that they are doing that are potentially degenerative so instead of taking this black and white approach which is also again still slightly looking at reality through the lens, the reductionist lens would be more taking a gradient so measuring quite a range of key viable of a large range of variation within your agri-ecosystem this haven't managed to secure funding yet if there are any funders listening to this please contact me after the end of this talk that was my pitch, thank you Wonderful, you heard it first here folks there is a legitimate opportunity for you to go did you have anything you wanted to add at the end of the call? No, that's great I think that's a really interesting place to head into a question from Jim Bennett that's come through in the chat just around the way that we use definitions in New Zealand regenerative in New Zealand not including organic in its name as the Rodell Institute does so how can regenerative practices be true to sustainable concepts without owning that organics is already regenerative and is that a view that you share is that organics is regenerative by nature there's definitely a lot of debate around this so I'm very curious to hear your thoughts Nicole do you want to? Well it comes back again to this are we talking principles and practices and really when you look at the original organic standards and what organics was out to do was around outcomes and improving quality and reducing the need for inputs and improving outcomes but then what it got turned into was a set of practices and so what you can find is probably some of the best properties I've been on are regenerative organic and some of the worst properties I've been on are organic because you can follow a set of practices and still not be regenerating and really looking after your resource certified organic regenerative organic label coming out of Rodel which is absolutely fantastic but by becoming organic then it rules you out of some of the flexibility like say you have a sick animal and you want to be able to give it antibiotics well who's to say you can or cannot do that I mean I think what I like about regenerative agriculture is it doesn't have the dogma you know if you need to if required in the transition maybe you need some of these chemical inputs or controls or whatever so that you've got a productive profitable harvest there's nothing to say that you can't do that but are you looking after your ecosystem are you looking at improving it then for sure so I mean I really enjoy the flexibility I used to be involved in the organic sector and was really seeing some degenerating practices whereby there were some insect pressures that were happening in the pitford industry and so they just started to cultivate and cultivate and cultivate and they couldn't control these insects because they weren't thinking about it holistically and yeah it wasn't good for the industry right do you have any thoughts to add to that topic Gwynn? Yeah by enlarge everything that Nikola said is like I fully agree with ZCC's the debate we're having all the time of this that we could probably touch down on now is a lot of the definition and certification framework have come from outside of New Zealand and so I'm just going to tell you a little story of within my career when I arrived in New Zealand so we probably spent as scientists half of our time at least is about securing additional funding to do research and so we write proposals and so we have to find ideas and we have to justify why our ideas are really essential and should be funded and when I first arrived in New Zealand having worked in the US and in Scotland mostly the thing that really shocked me was everybody was stunning me you have to acknowledge that New Zealand ecosystem are very different from elsewhere and basically we have to repeat everything that's been done overseas and I couldn't understand that from an ecological standpoint for me an ecosystem is an ecosystem it's not because it's New Zealand that all the ecological laws that have been proven elsewhere wouldn't apply and since I've started to work in I've started to understand where people were coming from so a lot of this certification definition are based upon the kind of evolutionary trajectory of the ecosystem and agroecosystem in say South Africa, the US, Australia they have a very very different history from the New Zealand ecosystem they have a different biota they have different geological biotic climatic constraint and one of the concession that I think is needed to be had is what does it mean to be a regenerative for New Zealand how are we going to handle the fact that all of our productive landscapes are relying on exotic species are we going to start embracing producing food using our Tongua species are we going to try and put more effort in bringing native species inside of our agroecosystem as part of the position outside on the verge of it what does it really mean and what about our cultural identity should this be part of our definition of regenerative ag and this is not, I don't have an answer this is not a concession that I'm probably even entitled to have but I can ask that question okay fantastic there's a lot of sorry do you want to add something Nicole no just thinking of the New Zealand context when you're thinking of how historically how were soils built New Zealand never had grazias and we never had mammals except for a couple of bats so you think about the difference between a soil that's evolved under forest and shrub and wetlands compared to our grassland ecosystem and you know this ties into the carbon conversation as well as in terms of forested ecosystems have very shallow topsoil all that carbon's really concentrated in that top layer whereas you look at grassland ecosystems those soils are incredibly deep with a lot more carbon or topsoil to depth so I think New Zealand has a really unique opportunity but I think that it does involve what Gwyn was pointing to which is we need more diversity we need these mosaic type patterns not just you know here's a pine plantation and you know here's a dairy farm but actually you know how do we incorporate all that the benefits of what some of the New Zealand natives actually have to offer in terms of even fodder for you know animals you know there's no turning back we're not going to go to an ecosystem and go okay no actually we're going to get rid of all the mammals and actually that would have to include us if we were going to do that but we have the new natives now and how is it that we can create ecosystems that can function in the New Zealand context Can I just add something else in there that's going to be slightly provocative but you know pure inventory is into the business of being very provocative so I recently visited the US and I went to visit you know redditive wrenches in California and there was a system there where wrenches have easement and are paid to manage the grazing so that they manage the entire ecosystem in the wrenches there to promote certain to promote the restoration and the revival of the habitat that is more suited to some of their endangered plant species now I went to visit these places and basically even the wrenches told me and so I don't have that out there this is just an anecdote okay but basically to manage the habitat so that that particular plant species was revived and restored the ecosystem in itself was managed to not be thriving so the most thriving state of that ecosystem at that particular location would be to actually encourage more of the exotic because the exotic were much more adapted to cope with the current drought flood situation in California this is another question I don't have an answer but this is something that New Zealand has to ask itself when we are when we are really managing our landscape to promote and looking after and making sure we don't lose any of our native species do we do that at the cost of the ecosystem health itself and this is a really provocative question it's very I love it and I don't have an answer but I think if we not prepare to ask this question somewhat we are just going to be traditional in what we are doing in our policy regulation that we are making yes certainly no silver bullets here we are trying to tackle multiple issues with some level of urgency you talked a little bit there around trees and natives and soil sequestration that's something that regenerative agriculture has touted quite often as a solution for soil sequestration I wonder if you can speak a little bit to exactly how that works what the capacity is and any of the research that's been done in New Zealand on soil sequestration you're talking to Miu to Nikol let's start with you Gwen love to hear your thoughts on the New Zealand context so there are multiple questions there there are a lot of debates about the fact that New Zealand soils are quite rich in carbon already they have a high amount of carbon and the our current understanding of the processes that are driving carbon sequestration so sequestration means that your carbon stabilizing a form or in a space so it could be just a physical separation so that it will stay there for tens of hundreds of years so we have found for example some highly labelled carbon glucose that stays in the form of glucose at depths and is not chewed by the microbes because it is sequestrated away so it doesn't mean that the carbon has to become really complex in its chemical form it can still be supposing very labour but if it's taken away and cannot be accessed by the microbes then it is stabilized and all of the processes our understanding of what drives carbon sequestration is it's not that we don't know anything we know quite a lot but it's still emerging I was looking at it just from a kind of a curiosity and it's only in 2002 when people started to question whether the ability of soil to sequester carbon was lost in the clay content up to 2002 which is not such a long time ago we thought that the only way we could sequester carbon in the soil if there was a lot of clay recently there was a paper published last year that showed that if you increase the diversity of your plants the size of the pores in the soil are a change and there is a biological and physical separation of your carbon so there is much more pores many more pores of a particular size that encourage the growth of microbes that will kind of draw down the carbon, the kind of term that Reaganike liked to use but basically encourage carbon transfer from the plant into the soil biota the soil biota then decompose that carbon and because the decompose that carbon in forms are much more soluble this forms then diffuse and get stored or get put away not accessible anymore by the microbes so they might be very labile very decomposable carbon but they are stored in a location in the soil that means it cannot be shoot so it cannot be lost through soil respiration this is super new it is published in Nature which is one of the most prestigious journal it involves really really complex fancy measurement no doubt years of research for us to try to decipher that process so what I'm saying is at the moment we have we're starting to have data emerging data that show that if you deploy a regenerative management you are secreting more or you have greater stocks of carbon in the soil stable is a different a different question we are starting to understand the process what I think is super fascinating is this is given us so much opportunity to decipher other processes of life I mean nature is constantly showing off with loads of different processes and loads of different life forms that do all sorts of amazing things so this is really an opportunity to look at all of these differencing assumptions that we made about how the system function sorry but I think it raises a really good point and it's part of what's been happening in New Zealand for the last 20 or 30 years that's quite insidious which is this New Zealand soil carbon is stable and that's the end of the conversation you know New Zealand's already saturated already high and what we're seeing is and this comes back to like carbon is much bigger topic than just carbon like it's what is happening with water what is happening with gas diffusion what is happening with rooting systems and soil structure and production and so for me I think the practitioners and the farmers and all the rest of us need to just get on with it and do it in terms of improving the soil structure because we're talking about functional carbon which is the sponge and the powerhouse that really is driving microbial interactions and the soil food web that you were referring to and what is happening with water and so just to see some of these functional breakdowns in the New Zealand agricultural system I think just means we have such a wide range of opportunity out there that we're barely scratching the surface on in most of our operations so that's why I think it's exciting that the science is really starting to look at it but actually farmers in New Zealand have been seeing the benefits of this directly for 20 or 30 years themselves I mean there's a lot of producers that have been practicing regenerative agriculture in New Zealand for a long time that we can look to and go hey these guys aren't putting all the nitrogen and phosphorus on they're still growing comparable yields what is happening in their system you know and that curiosity which is really cool Yeah another of our participants in this series has described that healthy soil functioning as a three legged stall soil biology the chemistry and the physics the structure and how they all work together so I think you've captured that really well there what do you I mean what do you we think about the role of native trees I mean a lot of it the carbon conversation in New Zealand is around planting trees we've got a billion trees we'd really love if they weren't already out of time so what would you yeah how do you see natives working in other regenerative agriculture systems yeah I think you're right if I think it was ready at a time that would be terrifying absolutely terrifying but yeah again I think it comes to that mosaic happening of you know landscapes that are that silver culture where you might have different types of hardwoods or different types of trees that are performing different functions which is where the permaculture principles really come into can some of these landscapes be grazed is there animal health benefits from some of these is there water cleansing you know it's much more than just a token riparian strip I mean we really got a look and there was some good work that came out of that raglan riparian project that went ahead with Fred Litchwark and they found even some of those farmers who were dramatically reducing the amount of productive land like some of them maybe by like 30% still found that they had similar production because of all that edge effect and shade and shelter and all the other benefits that that the native trees were actually providing which I think is really really exciting and there's good work around you know what the edge effect actually provides for production and grass and animals so yeah I mean I don't think we can have this conversation and exclude natives you know and you fly into Canterbury and you just see these big open spaces where you know where are the trees where has that where is it gone yeah I've got a curly question for you Nicole since we love the contrast I do and there's a little bit of debate going on in the Q&A about this so I would love to hear your thoughts would you please speak to the great deal of research showing that entirely going plant based in terms of diet I assume is much better for the environment soil climate change and of course the animals so you're saying the opposite so if you go a plant based diet it's worse for the planet is that what you said I don't I believe that they mean the opposite so oh I see so suggesting that it's better for the environment and the animals and climate if we were to adopt a plant based diet is my understanding yeah I think unfortunately it's like one of these knee jerk reactions of where we throw the baby up with the bath water because the industrial model is not working so we think to solve it that we need to go to a plant based diet and I just don't think it stands up at all and I don't think it's a question of meat or vegetables or whatever you want to eat it's a question of how is that growing and those are the questions people need to be asking and getting really interested in so how was that impossible burger growing you know like oh a whole lot of sprayed out soy beans planted in monoculture and they killed all the insects and the diversity no I don't want a bar of that but you know so no you got to look at is this an industrial or is it a regenerative model and I think this is what's exciting for me about COVID one of the benefits of what's happening right now is seeing people reconnecting with the local food producers and getting really interested with how is that food growing and who are my local producers and how do I get food you know and like here in Montana right now we couldn't get any free-range chicken we couldn't get any grass-fed beef in the supermarket but I could go and find that directly from producers which is great. So taking the science hat on this in this discussion so there's of course there's the you know building on what Nicole said is throwing the baby out with the bathwater which is it's no denial that you know reducing our meat consumption especially in western countries can only be a good thing from the human diet point of view and for what's going on with our agro ecosystem but then going to the point that we need to stop the production of animal-based produce is like it's a completely it's such a step you know it's like miles and miles and it's such a leap there was a study I was trying to look for it earlier so I can't quote the author in the year but there's a study that was published two or three years ago I'm one of my colleague in Germany that showed that if you remove the animals the grazing animals out of the agro ecosystem the agro ecosystem actually breaks down so and this was in Germany so this was a European ecosystem and we remain part of the way I've been you know I've evolved but basically what it says is that for an agro ecosystem or any kind of ecosystem to be functioning you need the animals sorry and I think too if you consider where a lot of land of where sheep and beef are growing you're not going to be growing vegetables on the top of the high country where animals here in Montana where I am right now there's nothing else that grows out here it's grass it's not possible to get large scale cropping or vegetable production out here these are the landscapes of the livestock and they are stimulated by animals and you know we're looking at one of the principles of regenerative agriculture is the incorporation of animals and even say a market garden or you know the smaller settings that benefit of still having animal manures is massive that inoculation by microbiology I'm sure Gwen probably needs the study for that but you know we certainly see landscapes come alive from that incorporation of having animals in the system you know I just think it again it comes down to how we're treating those animals and being humane and the low stress animal handling stuff is fascinating and seeing some of the stuff that I've seen in my travels you know I think New Zealand has got a big opportunity to really improve on some of the animal management practices and I think that idea of having a free social licence to do whatever you want has gone because we have drone technology and we've seen stuff in New Zealand coming up because someone can fly a drone and see what used to be no one needs to know what's happening behind the shed it's no longer good enough and I often think when I'm working with people what would someone say if they were leaning over your shoulder and they were from a city with animals like could you justify what you're doing right now and I think there are some unjustifiable practices that need to change globally and yeah I think that people are becoming aware of that Yeah I think as Erin Crampton who is another contributor to this series put it it's not the cow it's the how it's much more about the management practices and we'll be chatting with Erin in a couple of weeks time in our lessons from around the world episode which Nicola will also be featuring with another couple of panellists as well Erin is from Manitoba in the Canadian prairies and describes how in the 70s you know every single farm had cropping as well as animals and it was a system where there was no waste every output was an input for something else and I think that's largely what we've lost there's a specific question in here that I'd like to put to you what do you think about biocontrol benefits like cotasia into regenerative agriculture I think you might mean contigo which I'm guessing that is what you mean which is a there's a couple different contigo products they are an entomopathogenic fungi so there are a type of biocontrol it's a fungus that eats insects there's different types and some of them are very selective and narrow and Gwen and I were in the fungarium which were down in landcare research so everyone needs to go it was amazing and looking at the native entomopathogenic fungi that we actually have there was a wetter that had one growing out and it was so cool so these are products that can be used to control insects but for me they're very much in that transition because they are naturally in healthy soil there are we're seeing more products coming in that can help people through that transition if you have a system right now that has plants that aren't very healthy then they're going to be ringing the dinner bell for insects and so in order to get over that hump we have some of these transition tools which that contigo product would be one of them but it's something that we really only use in the first one to three years and then we should be really having a system that's working yeah I guess there's a whole lot of research and practices and products that have been developed as a result of that in the space of integrated pest management for example or where you have loads and also other kind of biological control to the fungal disease or bacterial disease and insect here before and always what I think it comes down to the principle these are tools that are potentially less harmful than a synthetic totally man-made product chemical but in the long term so I don't have data for this but it's you're looking at your ecosystem if you want your ecosystem to be balanced and continuing to produce in that state you want to try to have a balance between all your different organisms so if you're starting to manage your system to emphasise one particular organism to dominate company or community we don't know yet what's going to be the long-term impact of this which is why I really like it when we discuss these topics with Niko this is really a tool for the transition so it's a tool that has got so much potential in terms of shifting away from using all these synthetic chemicals but it's also again looking at what is the principle and what is the goal of management and at the end we want to reach a balance yeah absolutely there's another question which I'd love to hear a little bit more about about the newer practice of inversion tilling and whether there's a role to play within regenerative agriculture there something I'm familiar with no yeah these people that are now involved in regenerative agriculture with big advocates of that 20-odd years ago and surfer themselves how you really were crashing your system so you'd get a growth response because you are inverting soil bringing rich organic matter burying carbon and I see that scientists are probably trying to push that as a carbon initiative because you're going to bury it but it's another one of our kind of mechanical fixes for a biological problem that we really need to be focusing on actually how do you get systems how do we manage for a system to open itself up and not be resorting to machinery and these operators up north that were doing this inversion stuff found within about 30 years they ended up really having soils that became incredibly dysfunctional I was very disappointed to see that that's starting to be pushed by certain scientific sectors I'd rather ask the question really which is does regenerative agriculture mine soil because I think that's often what comes up for us against regenerative agriculture also if you're not putting all of these phosphate and nitrogen and everything on then you're mining your system because you're exporting it in terms of dairy products or meat or whatever I think if you think about our current industrial model where rooting systems are only about that deep if you are not applying phosphorus and nitrogen then yes you are going to deplete that and you will see reductions in yields but we're talking about systems that how deep can that root system go and how much mineral do you have and if you think every handful of soil is actually mineral are we making the most of our whole resource and if you needed to use a little bit of phosphate then yes but New Zealand is what number three on the use of phosphate in the world absolutely pouring the stuff on and we don't need to because the regenerative farmers in New Zealand are showing that sorry we got in my high halls okay all about the controversy we've just got five minutes left so I think I'm going to grab one more question out before we wrap things up interesting question here around you know somebody was looking to transition from conventional to regenerative and I suspect this might be a question of how long is a piece of string but how much funding do you need as a ballpark figure to say transition the average farm how much funding very interesting question so if I can just if I can give some of my cropping clients as examples I mean some of these guys are really big so they're not thinking larger than the New Zealand context but on say 23,000 operation first year they made a million dollars year two they made 1.5 million so I think this idea that you're going to have to spend more money or have more funding in order to do this is a fallacy and it really is okay what are you doing now and if you think about the efficacy of most of our nutrients like even if you're a really good farmer still only probably 35% of your nitrogen is used by the plant and the rest is going up into the atmosphere into the waterways so a lot of what we're doing in regenerative agriculture is increasing those efficiencies which makes it more profitable and we need some more studies to look at that I could go on and on so I think in there this is certainly a conversation to be had and to had ways open eyes so I'm hearing and I know some of the exemplary that Nicole has put forward but also we've just started an economic assessment to do with regenerative ag a very small number of replicates i.e. number of farms that we're looking at this whole concept of how much will it cost to transition is a stigma rising from the transition to organic agriculture where in there to transition the system and we now sells off from the use of chemicals there was going to be a drop down in production and money was going to be lost in regenerative ag this is not the case necessarily however there are many regenerative practitioners that incur a loss in production for sure and some loss in profit in their state of transition so the question is how much of that lost can be mitigated if the transition is better optimized can it be better optimized for New Zealand is the amount of loss acceptable can it be funded elsewhere is there a way of doing it where there will be no loss and increase profitability as Nicole is showing so in some studies shows that the profit increased straight away and some studies show that there is a transition so at the moment we don't absolutely know so I think we need to look it comes back to your string question and there is no one way to do this and there is there is no one system people are always looking for these silver bullets just give me the answer and I am going to do ABC and you can go out and spend a whole lot of money on your equipment or new types of drills or whatever it is you want to spend money on and you don't have to do that and the other thing to consider is like I think in organics the story of organic agriculture there was no doubt this has been studied and well documented there was usually three to five years of transition where there was a loss in profit and afterwards the profit regained or perhaps exceeded a little bit what was there before but we regented agriculture what has been the story being a report is not only does it recover if there has been any loss of marketing has been done in a proper way then so the question then arises to what are the trends what are the conditions that we need to nurture for these to occur specifically in New Zealand and I think that's a discussion to be had at the entire agri-food system yeah Yeah I think you're right and we've got three at least three to five more episodes to dive a little more into that we have reached the top of the hour so I think we will wrap things up now thank you so much everybody for attending it's been fantastic to have such an animated discussion there's lots more questions in the chat that we didn't get to and we may try to see if we can address some of those on the pure advantage of social media in the coming weeks we do also have as I said a few more episodes left of the series next Monday's one will be in the evening so we are alternating between evening and lunchtime sessions and next week we will be talking about the community and mental health benefits of regenerative agriculture and so we've got John O'Frew and Sam Lang from Corum Sense and also a colleague of Nicole's Jules Matthews will be joining that session as well so that should be an exciting conversation we've also got lessons from around the world coming up after that and then a conversation around investing in regenerative agriculture and helping people make that first initial leap if they do need it just saying again that Edmund Hillary Fellowship has got their cohort 8 applications closing you've got about 36 hours to get into that final cohort get your applications in super inspiring community you can check out more about the series on the Pure Advantage website which is pureadvantage.org and also Edmund Hillary Fellowship blog is where some of their stories are which is stories.ehf.org thank you so much for joining us again it's been a really exciting conversation today thank you Nicole thank you Gwyn for joining us thanks to you since when I saw us really appreciate it wonderful we'll see you next time bye everybody