 Kia ora koutou. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to this webisode of Our Regenerative Future, where we'll be unpacking the question of what is regenerative organic. I'm Elina Siegfried. I'm the author of the Our Regenerative Future content series, which is produced in partnership with Pure Advantage and Edimentillery Fellowship. And over the past six months or so, I've taken a real deep dive into the world of regenerative agriculture in New Zealand. What started as a remit to write a few articles about farmers that were involved in doing regenerative things on their properties has turned into a 15-part series that we published back in April and six webinars so far. And we've had so much dialogue and conversation and great momentum around this question of regenerative agriculture and the opportunity for New Zealand that we've launched another six webinars. And this is the first of those second series. So welcome. Thank you for joining us. We'll be exploring all sorts of regenerative topics, expanding a little bit outside agriculture in this next six, looking at tourism, regenerative forestry, and basically how we can build a regenerative economy in general in New Zealand. And the recognition that it's not all on farmers to solve our environmental climate change woes, it's really going to take all of us working together at systems level to put in place strategies to face a challenging future. So today's webinar, we'll be looking at the interplay between the organic market, the regenerative agriculture movement, and what is this thing of organic regenerative or regenerative organic. So yeah, we'll be looking forward to unpacking that with three great panelists today. We've got Jeff Ketch, who is the Chief Impact Officer at Rodale Institute. Very excited to have him on board. Jeff is responsible for expanding Rodale's global influence in the development and execution of the Institute's core strategies and overseeing opportunities for partnership and co-investment. And this is really great to have Jeff on the call because it was, of course, Bob Rodale, the founder of the Institute who coined the term regenerative agriculture back in the 1970s. So we're super honoured to have that representation here today. Robyn O'Brien is the Honour of Being Called Foods, Erin Brockovich by The New York Times. She's a dual citizen of New Zealand and the US, co-founder of Replant Capital, a leader in the Good Food Movement and advocate for organics and serves on the Board of Advisors for Organics Aotearoa New Zealand. And finally, we also have Scott Lawson, who's one of New Zealand's largest producers of organic berry fruit. He and his partner Vicki Meach have been pioneers in their field with their business True Earth, becoming certified organic more than 25 years ago in 1994. So Scott's on the Board of Organic Aotearoa New Zealand as well and Chair of the Hawkes Bay Vegetable Growers. Thank you for all participating in the poll. Most people have now voted. It looks like we've got about 40%, 46% of you are farmers or growers yourselves. Welcome. And we've got a few people from Science, Academia, Business Media. It looks like most people have read either some or all of the Regenerative Future Content series, which is great because you've got a bit of a grounding to this conversation. And again, most people are reasonably familiar with regenerative agriculture, which is fantastic. So I'm going to give our panelists a chance to introduce themselves in a minute. But before I do, I'd love to invite you to put any questions that you might have for these panelists, either the whole panel or individually in the Q&A box. That's different from the chat box. You'll find it in the bar below. And please put the questions in there. You can upvote questions. So if you see something that really you want to hear about, feel free to give it an upvote. And we'll see what kind of conversation we can spark today. So I think without further ado, I would love to invite our panelists to introduce themselves, provide a little bit more context. Let's start with you, Jeff. And if you could also include in your answer, what does regenerative organic mean to you? Great, great. Well, what an honor and what a pleasure it is to be here and to represent the work of Rodale Institute to such an illustrious crowd. Again, my name is Jeff Katch. I serve as one of the leaders of the Rodale Institute. Rodale Institute is widely known as the global leader in regenerative organic agriculture. So as Alina alluded to, our founder, J.I. Rodale, pioneered the organic food and farming movement in North America back in the 1940s. And along came his son, Robert Rodale, who coined the term regenerative in the 1970s. At the heart of who we are, we're a science and a research organization that's trying to uncover the best practices for farmers all over the world and help you be empowered with more information to how to transition away from chemical dependent agriculture towards these regenerative and organic practices. So our primary objectives are to do research and then education to equip and empower farmers to move in this direction. Thank you, Jeff. Over to you, Robin. Well, I just want to thank everybody for hosting this and for inviting me to participate. It's very close to my heart. I'm named after a farmer in Palmerston North, Robin Tanner, and have so much family in New Zealand that we were so lucky to get to spend a Christmas with before COVID hit and everything else. So I just want to thank you guys for that. You know, at Replant, we believe that no matter what the metrics are, no matter what the intentions are, if the finances for the farmers don't work, then the system isn't going to work. So we put the farmer first. And unfortunately, not a lot of financial institutions did that. And where we really landed was you can't fix a broken food system with a broken financial system. And in order to have a resilient food system, there has to be financial resiliency for the farmer. So to think about regenerative agriculture and organic on a spectrum, and we're not here to dictate where somebody should land on that spectrum. We're here to meet you where you are and answer questions and take that feedback and figure out what makes the most sense economically for a farmer that's considering that transition. What we do know from the work that we've done is that there are farmers that will come to us and say, you know, as we transition from a really chemically intensive agricultural system to regenerative agriculture, we were able to save half a million dollars over 7000 acres in the first year. So as we think about that, we think about regenerative as a reduction in chemical inputs, which that's cost savings directly to the farmer, as well as the building out of soil health, which again, there's something incredibly intuitive when you talk about the regeneration of soil that comes, you know, from a deep understanding, which so many farm families have, because they've been third or fourth or fifth or sixth generation farm families. So, you know, for us, it's not to dictate, we're not here to tell anybody what to do. It's to really sit down with these families and better understand what's the financial model that works for your family that keeps your children on the farm so that there's food security for New Zealand. Thank you, Robin, and Scott, you'd like to introduce yourself. Welcome, everybody. Thank you very much to Pure Advantage for asking me to join the panel and thank you for our American friends joining us on late on a Sunday night. So I appreciate you digging in. I know Jeff's on holiday as well, and Robin should be having a quiet family time. So thanks for taking your time out to join us here in New Zealand too. So, short by about myself, I've been growing, I grew up in the Heratonga Plains here in the Horticultural Area in Port Spain, New Zealand, and I've spent most of my lifetime here working, living, training, except for the trained as an engineer, mechanical, and then I've also studied forestry, but my real passion for the last 25 odd years has been the sort of organic vegetable growing and very fruit production as well too. So apologies if I'm not so I favour the pastoral farming stuff, I'll try and answer some of those questions, but that's my area of expertise is in the vegetables and berry fruit, and I was invited to speak as a member of the Ohans Board, and I have a long history in association with certified organics New Zealanders, biogro certified for more than 25 years now. So that's really a short bit about what I'm interested in, I'm interested in everything natural and my philosophy is in organics, I particularly like to speak about certified organics and some organics with integrity. We have a problem here in New Zealand where we don't have that integrity and registration under the word organic, so as an industry we've been pushing for that for a long time, so I'll often refer to certified organics and we're alluding to this national standard which we hope to get into place at some stage. I think that the definition of regent is, as I guess we refer to Bob Redell's version of it, is beyond sustainability, it's better, it's continuous improvement and many of us have fallen into the sustainability trap in the past of just saying it's okay to keep doing what we're doing is being sustainable. I think we need to regenerate, we need to help others regenerate and grow the and as a certified organic producer I think we've often dropped that ball and explaining to people that the philosophies of organics to me are actually regenerating continuous improvement as well and I don't think we've solved that story very well and hence now we're ending up in a situation in the organic industry saying regenerate organic. Let's add this add-on to what we're currently doing because we've done four jobs. That's enough about me but I'm happy to be part of the panel's story. Thank you. Thanks Scott and yes certainly this conversation does need to go beyond just pastoral farming into all methods of land production and primary industries in New Zealand and really cool to see also from the chat window that we've got somebody watching from the Philippines, so welcome girly, amazing to have people from around the world. I'd love to start with a question that actually has come through on the chat window from Jenny Lux who's with the Soil and Health Association as a organic market gardener. It's an interesting question around how do we unpack this regenerative organic so she asks is a regenerative a subset of organic or is it the other way around so what's the interplay here and maybe I'll invite Jeff if you could start off that conversation. I'll certainly start and attempt to answer that question but I do believe in the reality that Robin sort of laid out there it's a continuum for farmers. We need to begin to meet farmers wherever they are in that spectrum and help them march down this path towards regenerative organic. At Rodale Institute many of you may know that we've recently launched a new standard in agriculture called the regenerative organic certification and if you're interested in reading more about that you can go to regionorganic.org. Essentially to Scott's point you know at Rodale Institute we believe that you have to constantly be about continuous improvement. Robert Rodale loathed the word sustainability. He felt that as he was traveling around the world and he was often visiting countries where he saw broken agricultural systems and it was at the time when the word sustainability was coming into vogue that it was a really poor choice of words because as he saw in his own travels there were often systems that weren't worth sustaining they needed to be completely rebuilt and in agriculture or in any industry there needs to be that you know setting a higher bar we always are about innovation and about pushing to new heights and so we've set this standard that really brings together organic as a baseline. Rodale was very influential in launching the organic standard ultimately that was passed in the year 2000. We began to see the roll out of the national organic program and we are absolutely making that the baseline to attaining the regenerative organic certification. We're saying that you at least you know must be certified organic and then this whole regenerative concept takes into account three pillars. One is soil health because the current USDA the standard that we adhere to in the United States really doesn't have a pillar that addresses how is a farmer improving the health of their soil. So we've added that in. The second is around animal welfare. There's really nothing in the current organic standard both at the iPhone level and at the NOP level here in the United States that's addressing how animals are really being treated in the system and then thirdly and maybe most importantly is the human well-being the human labor piece. Many of our brand partners here in the United States were traveling around the world to source products like cotton or palm oil and they were finding that as they were going to these countries where they were sourcing their own products that were certified organic and meeting that certification they were finding that there was horrific working conditions where young children were often working long days in the field without the kind of human rights that that we all want and for our own children and so the regenerative organic certification really embraces those three pillars which are animal welfare human labor and soil health. So that's the high bar that we've set and at the heart of it it's all about innovation and and really helping to set an aspirational goal for farmers to attain. Yeah absolutely I'd love to hear your thoughts if you've got anything to add on that Robin given your familiarity with the regenerative organic in the U.S. Yeah so I think you know what we saw happen here in the United States was farmers embraced this chemically intensive agricultural system and they were they were misled and there's no there's no other way to put that. They were misled and in the last couple of years they have woken up to the fact that their kids don't want to take over their farms. The kids don't want to embrace that chemically intensive agricultural system. Some farmers say like there's sort of an addiction now at this chemically intensive agricultural system but when you really step back from that you know it takes a lot of money to sustain that chemically intensive system and so what happened in the U.S. was that U.S. farmers got into deeper and deeper debt to the to the extent that now U.S. farmers carry four hundred and twenty six billion dollars in debt. I think in New Zealand it's something around sixty billion dollars in debt so you've got to start there so I completely agree with the metrics and the standards and everything that Jeff just presented but if it doesn't make financial sense to the farmer they can't embrace it because they're already under such record debt levels because of this addiction to the chemical system that most farmers have been implementing for a long time and it's not to shame that it's to simply step into it and say economically financially does this make sense. Are you are you kind of you're addicted into this model so how do we actually break that chemical addiction and I think that's where regenerative ag is a first is a starting point is is so brilliant and there's so many farmers that are sort of coming in sitting down at the table and they've been they've been growing chemically intensive agricultural systems for the last 20 30 years you know so they're not they're not anybody that's sort of at the front of this movement and I think that's really important to to emphasize they come in because they know financially their business model is not in a strong enough place for their own children to want to step into it and take it over and so then what happens to the farm then what happens to New Zealand's farm when that starts to happen and so for us you know really it's really important to think about how do you actually make this financially resilient for the farmers and you know that I think unfortunately with a lot of the larger banking entities hasn't always been the case and so to think about regenerative agriculture you have to think about regenerative capital and we've seen systems start to shift where you've had a fossil fuel system and all of a sudden people shift and they go to solar or wind energy and you have a system like conventional agriculture and people start to shift where they go to a regenerative organic agriculture the same thing with fans you have a toxic financial system and people need to shift and what's interesting is that there's a transition happening with generational wealth where 22 trillion dollars in the United States is changing hands into this younger generation and the younger generation you don't have to convince them of this they understand exactly what's happening with climate environment with some of these bigger entities that have really kind of corrupted and consolidated certain systems and so they're actually looking for places to put capital we believe that regenerative capital as a system needs to exist and be built out and you know we're starting here in the U.S. but it is an open invitation and we've had incredible collaboration with groups in New Zealand as well there's so many people coming around the table who recognize that this is absolutely in the best interest of New Zealand's farm economy yes absolutely and and certainly we've we've been trying to take a systems perspective as we are in these in these conversations and seeing what are all the moving parts there are certainly some you know farmers that I've been talking with as part of the research for this series who are organic but not regenerative and then others who are employing regenerative methods on their farm but are not completely organic yet so I'd love to ask you Scott what do you see as some of the low-hanging fruits in New Zealand for the for those who are in organics in New Zealand to become more regenerative in their practices if they're not already? Good question there Alina the I think it's just all about the the system a systems approach rather than a product replacement approach and I think it's very much about the soil the soil the soil and I have this old mantra that I harp on about that sounds like I'm preaching but I say healthy soil for healthy people for healthy food sorry soils for healthy food for healthy people healthy society and that and it goes around so I I think the where we can just harp back to us really just pick up on that point sorry just lost my notes and what I'm looking at there is um to be it's all about the awareness really I think that's the lowest hanging fruit that we could grab and all the information's often out there it's just about being aware of what we need and and reading up and getting getting into that whole certified organics can I think we've dropped the ball on picking up regen and I think we need to be aware that uh good organic practices are regenerative and should be and we need to encourage more of that we we without um being too cynical of some organic farmers they may not be doing as good a job as they could be in their in their approach to things is really what I'd suggest yeah thank you there's an interesting question come through in the in the chat window from Deborah Crow which is uh how do we best engage with balance or or Ravensdown or any other how the key farming influences do they have a role to play in this do you think or um or is that perhaps uh being naive to think that they're going to encourage people to go organic Scott have you got any any thoughts on that New Zealand sorry I muted my microphone I I see and and for Jeff and Robin Ravensdown is one of two or three large fertilizer cooperatives which which we often as fertilizer users and and growers we we buy into this co-op and we get given a rebate credit on the amount of tons of fertilizer we buy not the dollars of fertilizer so um Ravensdown were certified organic many years ago and our other large co-op balance agri nutrients they're actually certified organic and they're an important input supplier to our certified organic production system in New Zealand and and we we would be somewhat lost without them we we utilize them for many of the macro and the micronutrients that we need to feed and to produce a healthy soil because many of our soils are naturally deficient in certain items and we need to purchase those from sustainable sources use them wisely and and use them to build our soil fertility so it's part of our regenerative processes definitely including the Ravensdown etc etc and I guess the the question was coming about from how cynical do we think they're going to be in supporting our future towards more of a regenerative approach well I think they need to step up and and get on board and be part of the discussion be part of it and part of the transition from getting off the chemical bandwagon the reliance upon many many artificial and often detrimental ingredients to our natural food production systems well thank you you know I can I can I can speak to that from what we've seen in the US too I think you know this transition from conventional chemically intensive agriculture to regenerative and organic it requires it requires technical expertise and so what we're seeing is that companies or organizations or people who are once in the fertilizer business and I mean we've been we've been through the same transition here in the US they were in the business of selling these inputs all of a sudden recognize that there's a technical expertise that's required in that transition so you got you go from a model of actually selling inputs to a model of selling services so all of a sudden there's a consulting service that's being sold in the technical assistance partner and I mean again as a as a regenerative ag investment partner that's not us but we partner with different technical expertise around the country you know that are working buoy or barley or whatever it may be but I think it's that same opportunity here and you'd be surprised because you know from those big fertilizer companies we call them the alumni people that have been in those big places for 20 or 30 years and they start to spin out and those alumni actually have a lot of a lot of insight a lot of expertise of how to work with a farmer and you just transition a little bit so instead of selling those inputs you're talking about cover crops instead of selling certain equipment there's different equipment that's need for regenerative organic agriculture so it's really thinking about it again you again you I mean policy is going to follow the money so you've got to think about what is the financial model here that's accompanying this transition that benefits the farmers of music yeah thank you thank you for sharing those learnings Robin I want to flip that question now because I've talked to a quite a few farmers that are regenerative on their land and they want to continue practices like no till but are finding themselves needing to to spray occasionally and use small amounts of synthetic inputs so do you see there being any obviously it is a continuum but do you see that as something that can gradually move it's it's an interesting question particularly in the the wake of the buyer settlement last week the 10 billion dollars settlement for the the connection between Roundup and and cancer so that's that's obviously been making a lot of headlines and is getting people to think about the use of glycophate is there any opportunity or room for using just just small amounts or do you think we need to be able to go fully organic regenerative to really take advantage of the market opportunities Robin what do you think I'm going to throw this one to Jeff because we get regenerative organic certification speaks to a phased approach which I think makes it accessible to everybody and I think what you want here is 100 participation so you don't want to feel like anybody's being screened out so Jeff I'm going to turn this this to you sure yeah thank you Robin so I think there's two ways of looking at this you know if you're looking at it purely from a certification perspective then no there is absolutely no place for synthetic fertilizers or pesticides in in a certified organic system or a certified regenerative organic system and rodeo lens and now I'm going to speak purely from the science so the second part of my answer is that rodeo Institute sits on over 40 years of science that would prove that organic agricultural practices or regenerative agricultural pro regenerative organic practices can actually out yield and outperform conventional chemical systems by up to three to six times especially in years of extreme rain or droughts so there's plenty of science that would suggest that we can farm just fine without those chemicals pesticides or besides however going back to our earlier point we're going to meet a farmer wherever they are and help them along the path and and help them move away from those dependencies I guess the question I would put back to the to the agrochemical industry is you know just as we're all sitting here talking about innovation through this this phased approach at the end of the day regenerative organic is about innovation you know my question is is how are those agrochemical companies going to innovate to more safer inputs we clearly are seeing in news headlines that the kind of chemicals that our farmers are depending on are making people sick they're polluting our environments or waterways in our air we have to put it we have to we all have we have a responsibility to play in this and I think the product innovation pipelines as I as I see it really don't have a lot in play that would actually begin to move in a more environmentally sound direction so I think we have to challenge our industries in the same way we've challenged the food industry and consumers have created demand for healthier more nourishing and certified organic food and our food companies have responded beautifully and the organic food industry in the United States is now 50 billion dollars and I believe it's a 100 billion dollar industry worldwide why are we not putting those same pressures on our agrochemical companies to make products that are safer and so I don't think they're off the hook and I you know I think if you were to look deeply at the news of what happened with the settlement this past week with bear I'm certainly no like litigation expert but it would seem to me that someone in our world felt that it would be extremely detrimental to our economic well-being to completely put a company like that out of business they're they're trying to work with this company they're trying to create settlements and so I think we all have a responsibility to play I think we need to put pressures on these companies to to make better better decisions for the health I would I would echo that and also say you know we're talking a lot about farmers here clearly with policy the work that Scott's doing and Chris Morrison on the board with the corporations play a really important role and I think it's really important for the corporations to understand this isn't an either or scenario you don't have to do one or the other hedge your portfolio from Terraderry for example begin to think about what it would look like to have regenerative dairy farms in that portfolio the best example globally for that is Denone I mean Denone was not anywhere near any of this 10 years ago and yet as they embrace the pink corp certification they began to transition their portfolio it's been fascinating to watch what that company has learned over the last 10 years so you know again it's embrace this transition and it doesn't have to be an either or situation you're able to sort of build out your portfolio with both and yes absolutely and going back to Jeff's comments we do have the added complication and in New Zealand that we are sourcing our phosphate or a great deal of it from Western Sahara and we're one I think we might be the only Western country who's who's still importing phosphate from that that occupied territory which has resulted in the displacement of a number of people I would like to hear from you Scott a little bit about your thoughts of the organic spill going through Parliament at the moment what what will that mean in terms of certainty for the sector and certainty for the consumer good question and as I mentioned before we've been on this crusade for more than 10 years and it's not very often that we who complain about too much regulation etc as primary producers have actually gone to the government said hey give us some tea give us some regulation we appreciate there might be small paperwork hopefully not too much more cost of it's done well but please give us give us some tea so our markets and our consumers can actually identify and verify what the word organic means to them we've had a quasi system in place where MPI have been able to use the biogrow and your sure quality New Zealand stands for our exports and a rubber stamped that system in place but still we see a lot of times when we need the word certified organic or the word organic even verified to give some people some teeth and and this has been a big process of many many years lots of hard work it's it's cross-party political situation now we're into the second hearing of the reading at the moment and to be fair it hasn't played out as well as we in the organic industry had hoped we were asking our Ministry of Primary Industries to support what we had asked for and and rub stamp and take on board the biogrow and assure quality certification also the Demeter the biodynamic certification and we've we're at a stage now we've had a little bit of return and feedback from the from the government that's going to be somewhat different than that so we're just working our way steadily through that process Scott while we're on you I'd like to put a question to you from Sean Peale who's a Kiwi fruit supplier to Zespry how can the horticultural systems go regenerative in New Zealand when there's the global gap system doesn't permit stock and compost inputs from fear of E. coli contamination so that's quite a tricky one for horticulturalists in New Zealand that that can't use those those particular form of regenerative methods due to the fears around that is that potentially a regulation that we need to look at I think it's a very good question from Sean and there's just to verify we have the GAP the good agricultural practice systems in New Zealand and we have the global gap which we use for export around the world and we have the NZ gap and our main retailers in New Zealand you have to be certified at least to the minimum of NZ gap to actually supply the supermarkets I think we're coming to a stage where it's fair of brand and image and damage etc and it's it's reducing some of our good natural processes in place which is involving livestock etc in the system and just like we're seeing with a COVID epidemic around the world as well too there's fears and and we are now seeing some retailers say to yourself be really careful with what you're doing with your food supply remove your animals from this etc I don't think that's actually right I think we need to be involving animals in our regenerative process although there's practicalities and there's risks involved in that if you minimize the risk and manage those practicalities I think it can be done well and I think all these rules and regulations and systems we as producers have to be involved in them and provide some feedback to them so I don't see for instance in Sharn's situation with kiwi fruit I don't see there being a risk with having animals in a kiwi fruit situation where the fruit's two meters off the ground and you've got great UV light etc I do see a high risk if I was putting raw animal manures on to salad crop production or something like that which is one step closer to the food chain so under a certified organic regime these these are taken into account and you have to be really really careful in what you do with that and I think the global gap and or any gap standard will evolve over time to help find that balance between the risk and the benefits of animals in our system I've been involved with that many times where we took animals out of our vegetable production systems because electric hotwire would not hold a group of cows sometimes keep them out of your onion field so there was a practicality we were six months off selling those onions so there wasn't a risk for many contamination from the manure side of it but the practicalities of it were the economic damage of the cattle standing in your onion field was horrendous so in mixed farming operations we need to find this balance Interesting points and yeah I'd like to actually riff off that in terms of a post-COVID situation that we're looking at Jeff interested to know what what Rodale is is what's your position in this post-pandemic world is there an opportunity to be engaging more people on on rethinking the connection between how we produce and consume food? 100% absolutely you know Scott I think you alluded to this earlier but our founder Jai Rodale he actually came forward with a mission statement back in 1942 where he said that healthy soil equals healthy food equals healthy people so that's the mission statement that guides our work and I think it's true now more than ever that we as consumers we're waking up to the fact that our health is absolutely dependent upon the health of the soil where our food comes from how it's produced and so all of a sudden we see this global pandemic hit in the month of March and here in the United States we're seeing growth in the organic sector of I think it was 20% in the month of March and 18% the month of April direct farm sales are at an all-time high we're seeing consumers that are trying to make connections with farmers in their own community I spoke to a farmer last month here in my community who said his his direct sales were up 400% year over year so I think that there's this mass awakening where consumers are really realizing that in order to take control of their own health it's going to have to be up to them and I think people are wanting to connect with source we're actually seeing gardening seed sales spikes so people all of a sudden retreated to their backyards this spring here in the States and our planting garden so there's this real hunger this real yearning to reconnect with nature with reconnect with our with our personal health and I think that a global pandemic has ex has expedited a shift towards healthier lifestyle and towards healthier relationship with the soil and with with our farmers ultimately I think we've also seen a massive disruption in supply chains and so all of a sudden when we go to the grocery store and there isn't food on the shelves then consumers recognize that there's a flawed system and that we need to we need to change that and so I'm very not only myself but I think I speak for our entire organization that I'm very hopeful and I see a lot of positive change in individual people as a result of this very scary time that we're living in it's good to hear that you're hopeful I want to ask a question to Robin on the on the topic of proving the economic cases as you've discussed Rodale's 30 year trial and I think it might even be a 40 year trial you correct me if I'm wrong Jeff but it's got fantastic evidence supporting the economic case for mixed cropping enterprises can either of you share any examples of something similar or similar longitudinal studies that have looked at the dairy or red meat enterprises Jeff you want to take that one sure and I'm actually going to put a link to the study where if anyone is interested in reading more about it it's called the farming systems trial it is a 40 year study that's looking at cropping systems I also put a link just above that to an integrated crop and livestock study that started about four or five years ago that would speak a little bit to the question posed to Scott a few moments ago but essentially what the farming systems trial is comparing our conventional grain systems that you would see and pretty much anywhere in the world mostly corn and soy but also weaving in wheat and oats into the rotation and those those plots are grown using chemically intensive high tillage methodologies and those are grown directly next to plots that are grown in a more regenerative organic manner using cover crops and heavier crop rotations and in some cases sort of getting nitrogen from natural naturally occurring sources and over that 40 year study I mentioned earlier that we've proven that out that organic systems can out yield conventional systems they're about comparable over that 40 year period except for when we see these extreme weather events either drought or rain we can see upwards of three to six times greater yields in the in the organic systems but here's where it gets really interesting we're actually using about 45% less energy in the organic systems we're we're storing water at much deeper depth so when we when we look down through a lysimeter we can see that we're capturing water using less energy we're emitting less carbon into the atmosphere but the greatest statistic is that we're producing up to three times more profits in the organic system so the organic systems are three times more profitable and to me that that ultimately is what move you know convinces markets that this is a real viable system one last thing I'll say is that this farming systems trial though it's been run at Rodale Institute for over 40 years it has been replicated here in the United States at five other locations where there's five other university partners that have created their own studies not they haven't run as long but when you look at the data coming out of those other five studies it's very very comparable to what we're seeing at Rodale Institute so it's quite convincing that we we can do this the other thing I will add is if you think of the farm system that we've embraced globally over the last 50 years it involved layering in a lot of middlemen and I think what COVID exposed was how that actually created the crisis by not having that direct relationship to the farmer between the consumer and the farmer so by by removing the middlemen you're actually making a smarter financial system that goes along with the farming system and so I think that was one of the silver linings of COVID and like Jeff touched on the statistics that we were getting from farmers that had even a very basic e-commerce shopping site on their on their site the shopping cart they were telling us that within a couple of weeks they had done as much in revenue online as they had done in all of 2019 and the consumers were hungry for that direct relationship to the grower and then on top of that you know it's really important to remind viewers so we're not we're not talking about going back today we actually have 21st century technology and innovation in our hands that actually help facilitate this transition in ways that farmers 50 years ago didn't have and that whole space of ag tech is a fascinating space with being able to use technology to really deploy on farm when you're talking about water conservation, soil organic matter, carbon sequestration and we have the technology now that enables us to capture these metrics that we didn't have even 10 or 20 or 30 years ago so to think about leveraging 21st century technology the data that it provides on farm you know with any farmer that's got their handheld phone and leveraging that as we consider making and financing these transitions right thank you um I want to bring it back briefly to that those definitions of regenerative and organic because there's a question in the chat window from Jenny coming back to the glycophosphate issue and is it sort of disingenuous and a co-opting of the term regenerative for a farmer who is still using some synthetic inputs to be using that term there are certainly a lot of people that as you said are on the continuum and we don't want to be exclusive but but is there a do you see it problematic as people using that word regenerative when they're putting something on the soil that inherently isn't regenerative and is killing soil biology are you posing that question are you posing that question to me um if you feel called to answer it let's go with you yeah yeah for sure my answer is certainly not the end I'll be all but um to Jenny Lux's point in the chat um yeah farmers here in the United States are and we're co-opting that word regenerative at least from Rodale's vantage point which is why we launched an actual certification combining the words regenerative and organic um we you know Rodale Institute was very instrumental along with other other leaders in launching the organic certification 20 and 30 years ago and we worked really hard to create legislation and to get the federal government behind that word and it took a lot of work um and we did that to safeguard that word um yes Rodale coined the term organic but we actually gave it over to the United States Department of Agriculture to house that standard and it ended up you know being the right thing to do and here we wanted to avoid this any potential chance of the same thing happening to regenerative that that word would become ultimately meaning everything and nothing we wanted to really put some definition to it and so we have launched an actual standard but however I think it is and Rodale is also having conversations with some of the people here on this call about what the standard might look like in New Zealand and that's very exciting because you guys have an opportunity to get it right right out of the gate and um and I think you have really smart people working on it but um I don't you know I don't I think as long as these three words are defined so regenerative organic and regenerative organic then I think it helps the consumer ultimately understand what they're supporting and uh and also potentially gives a farmer that's embracing any one of those practices and an economic incentive so I think as long as those words are defined and clearly identified by the consumer and you're helping the consumer make a more informed decision then I think it's okay yeah absolutely and those definitions I think are important we've had we've had a lot of conversations around the definitions of regenerative in previous webinars and it's it's something that's debated a fair amount but if we're talking certifications those are going to be absolutely necessary are there any other key learnings do you think New Zealand's could pick up from from the US in in terms of adopting a regenerative organic standard and that that higher level of certification uh Jeff or Robin? Well I think you have that I think you have the opportunity to learn from some tremendous mistakes that we've made here um you know with complete respect for the work of Rodale Institute and the other organizations that were around the table defining the organic standard for us um in the 1990s unfortunately it wasn't rigorous enough and so what ended up happening was as these larger corporations came into play they realized that they had the opportunity to water it down or dilute it in some way and unfortunately that's what's happened and so the struggle we have in the US is that all of a sudden the law comes regenerative and the consumer who is paying that premium for organic products thinks that the definition of regenerative is already integrated into those terms she thinks that soil health of course would be part of an organic standard so that's where you have all of a sudden this conflict and I think the worst part about it is that it puts the farmers in eyes and it is so important to bring the farmers together you've got to think about it as one farm economy you know and of course they're not all growing the same crops they're not all going to grow the same way and to have that grace and flexibility I think is incredibly important so to learn from that mistake I think you know New Zealand is sort of a late adopter to this organic standard globally and it's surprising really because it's just it's such a forward thinking country when it comes to agriculture and just with the capacity for what it can do and so to really to really process and digest these different mistakes and to really think about how do we make sure that this organic certification includes that definition of regenerative so that it makes sense to the consumer so that the corporation has an easy time explaining it so you've got to just think about it like how can you translate this at a 10 year old level like how can we communicate this at a 10 year old level it's got to be that easy and that's straightforward and I think the beauty of when you're talking about soil health it's pretty straightforward and there is absolutely nothing in the United States that's bipartisan support anymore and yet when legislation is introduced for soil health it immediately got bipartisan support so what is in the best interest for soil health for New Zealand it is regenerative organic agriculture yeah I think there's there's a lot of a belief in New Zealand that that what we do here in conventional farming is already regenerative and and I don't know if that's perhaps a reason why we've been so slow to adopt an organic standard as we have this story that we're leading the world in so many in so many ways um Jeff did you want to have anything to add to that otherwise I'd like to um talk a little bit about the consumer side of things I don't I don't think there's anything more that I could add to what Robin said I think she was spot on okay wonderful um Scott looks like Scott wants to say something yeah Scott I'd just like to add something in there and I think both Robin and Jeff both touched on it we we as and people who are involved in the organic industry we or consumers producers we have a philosophy that we wish to see the greening of conventionally agriculture and there's people along that continuum at all different stages we'll have some of our good friends who are conventional farmers who are looking across the fence looking at making some change looking at reducing reliance on glycophates those sorts of things because it's really it comes back to the previous questions is you have to be a pretty slow farmer not to look at what's happening around the world and say hey there's something happening we're not going to be reliant on glycophate in the future that if we reduce our reliance on these the world's changing our consumers are driving more of the decisions that we make on farm etc so I think we have to help our conventional farmers come along the way we don't want to exclude anybody as Robin alluded to everybody's at a different stage in their life towards what is good soil health and good food for them and what's good for their business and I'm rather pragmatic process say we shouldn't just turn the tap off with these chemicals that people are used to at the moment we need to show the conventional farmers that they can reduce their reliance while still making money out of what they're doing and I think that's what we can learn from the US and the mistakes we don't want to learn from the US is not to regulate these words I mean New Zealand's done a really poor job of regulating kiwi fruit in the past and and many other things as well to we're getting the America's cut back we're going to keep that again next year as well on our sailing as well so there's some things we've done really well and some things we've done poorly we've got a chance now to actually retain the word organic and give it some teeth and bring in regenerative agricultural guidelines into our organic standard I hope we can do that without annoying or turning off any of the people who are that along their way or who don't even know they're yet going to be heading that way in 10 years or 20 years time and I think it's a it's an issue for us in New Zealand that we often think that we're green already because we live in the wide open spaces we have good rainfall good climate we it's what we actually should be thinking is actually it's one step easier for many farmers to be able to take that step to regen organic they may choose to stop at regen and that's okay as long as Jeff said it's defined in the words and we can have that understanding although I do get concerned that the consumer is often bombarded with so many different messages and we have to be clear and concise in those messages yes and that's that's something I think I hope we'll we'll see a little bit of clarity around with this bill coming through parliament curious to know from perhaps you Robin around costs that might be passed on to the consumer with this with this new standard so have you found that regenerative organic products are more expensive than current organic products in the US this gets back an earlier statement so you've got to think about capital is the first product the first ingredient in the food system so the way that these loans have been structured have been with a complete lack of understanding of what it takes a farmer to transition to regenerative or organic you know if you were to sit down with any of these big banks I mean very few would be able to tell you walking through what exactly has to happen to transition a farmer from conventional ag to regenerative or organic so you actually have to start there and when you think about the loan terms that the extractive loan terms that are put in place on so many of these farmers do the banks are the banks are happy with it you know they've just got these huge debt levels they're just managing that debt you know they're all the interest in everything else they're earning off the farmer debt I mean they don't really have any incentive to change that system you know they want to keep the farmer in that pocket I mean it's just brutal to say it that that's straightforward but you know unfortunately we have a broken food system because of the financial system that has financed this so you have to step back and say what would it look like if you actually created a loan to the farmer that was tied to soil health so replant we thought you know what would it look like if the terms of the loan were actually tied to carbon sequestration soil organic matter and water conservation I mean farmers that are farming regeneratively are doing this stuff anyway but they're not compensated for it so you get a lower cost of capital because you've implemented these smarter practices and once you start to do that you're changing that entire equation when you're talking about costs so you know the other thing I think that's really important to emphasize is there's enormous job opportunities around this right now there are innovation industries that need to be built to support this transition we're talking you know replant for one is like let's build out a financial services industry around this space of regenerative ag investment partners we want many partners at the table the second piece is clearly the technical assistance partners they need to be at the table you think about crop insurance I mean that's just in cover crops I mean there's so many places to intersect and create these models and then I think lastly you know glyphosate and what we're seeing with bear is a perfect example the liability of sticking with the status quo is huge and it's because a consumer is so much more well-informed than we were 20 years ago and it's because every single person has one of these so we can pull this up at any time we're able to figure out what exactly is going on on the farm and what's fascinating is that companies are coming out all the time where they're embedding different technologies and platforms where you can use your phone to figure out what's going on in your food so the more transparency that's coming at the consumer for the food the more the food companies actually have to be in front of this and that means they have to be in conversations with their farmers now so you know I think it's not an apples orange just saying we were talking about changing that entire equation yeah I think there's a long way for the the financing sector in New Zealand to be starting to think about about these movements we've got just a few minutes left so I want to give each panelist just one minute to add any final thoughts that you haven't been able to bring to the table so far let's start with you Scott well I'd just like to pick up on that point about the capital and New Zealand was lucky enough to have Prometheus finance ethical investments etc and and I think it struggled to gain traction because it didn't necessarily have those metrics in place that you could assess and then benefit the farmer and then say hey well done where are we heading to now we we have a carbon trading platform in New Zealand but not on soil carbon and that may be something that we wish to see evolve there's a lot of work going on on soil carbon I'm hoping that this the basic metric of organic matter and then what percentage of organic matter is actually soil carbon and then what percentage of that can actually end up as humus because we keep forgetting this whole thing about humus humus is where we need to be getting to not just a simple soil carbon stage so that's something that I encourage everybody to look at yeah thank you the soil carbon markets will certainly be an interesting one to explore in the future and we did we did have a panelist last week Mike Taitoko from Toha who's also looking to bridge that that gap in investment as well Jeff any thoughts from you final thoughts yeah I'd like to just build on a comment Robin Robin made a few moments ago but you know currently we're externalizing the price of food so consumers aren't paying the real price for real food they're paying for it on the other end here in the United States we're seeing an explosion in health care at unsustainable and unprecedented rates I think we're paying like 3.2 trillion in health care on an annual basis it's like 17% of our GDP and that trend just continues and so yes we've asked our farmers to produce cheap food and they've delivered that over the over the last few decades and we now need to pay for it on the front end and instead of the back end we need to re-pattern consumer behavior and help consumers to understand that food there's a there is a value in what farmers are producing we need to value Scott's crops and the way in which he's producing food he's setting a higher bar and when we purchase food from him we're doing ourselves a service and we're doing our environment a service and we need we need education to help consumers understand that so I think there's work to do around empowering consumers to make better decisions but also helping them to realize that yes we might have to make some other sacrifices in other areas of our life in order to pay the real price for real food but we all win in the end it's a better world if we're buying food according to how it was produced. Thank you Jeff that's a super important point about the externalization of costs Robin over to you for any last thoughts. Yeah I'll add to that it was last June I was in the beehive actually we were looking out the window and someone was telling me about the National Cancer Center that was going to be built in Wellington and as I was meeting with different people there you know we had the conversation you can either pay the doctor to make you better once you've already gotten sick or you can pay the farmer to keep you healthy and I think New Zealand right now has this opportunity to really work with the farmer to build that financial resiliency to build a healthy farm economy for New Zealand and build a healthy New Zealand and we didn't do that in the US and the US one in two men are expected to get cancer and one in three women cancer is now the leading cause of death by disease in children under the age of 15 in the United States and that's where it's like I don't want this to happen I don't want this to come to New Zealand so you're at this incredibly important place this incredibly important inflection where you have the opportunity to really invest in your farm economy that builds a health resiliency as well and I think that's the opportunity in front of New Zealand and then I also think it's just so incredibly exciting because there's so much opportunity for innovation the younger generation of farmers that's coming up underneath the way that they can leverage technology they have ideas that the older generations haven't had and so really to invite that just incredible collaboration that's required for this is what actually makes it fun and it's actually going to be what makes it successful. Oh those are some sobering statistics thank you Robin and thank you everybody for joining us today to all of our panelists it's been a fantastic session thank you to everybody for joining us our next session next week is going to be on building farm resilience and we will be speaking with Gary Williams who's a a long time thought leader and permaculturist and organic farmer and regenerative farmer here in New Zealand and also with Greg Hart who is a co-owner of Mangarara station the family farm in the Hawkes Bay and of course the Hawkes Bay have and a lot of parts of New Zealand have had a brutal drought this summer here in New Zealand so it's going to be a really exciting conversation around building resilience not just to environmental factors but to economic factors as well same time next week at 12 p.m and we've got a bunch of other webinars coming up I believe Ursula is going to put the registration link for the next one in the chat window if you want to check that out otherwise please check out the Pure Advantage website and the Edmund Hillary Fellowship website for details on the upcoming webinars on regenerative forestry tourism urban agriculture we've got some super exciting speakers including Dame Ann Salmond in a couple of weeks time and a lot of a lot of things still to explore in this series do check out the social media we've been broadcasting this on Facebook as well as recording it today so you'll be able to access it so I hope Pure Advantage will be continuing this conversation on their social media and perhaps trying to get some of these questions that we didn't get answered today sorry we didn't get to go with all of them just so much excitement around this topic so really good to see all those questions coming through thank you so much for joining us and we will catch you again next week thanks again to all our panelists bye bye