 Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the none more people and pay my respects to elders both past and present, as well as to other Aboriginal Australians here at the conference today. The Australian cotton industry, including its farmers, belongs to a global textile market that extends far beyond the farm fence. Often our growers are really far removed from the end game, which in our case are the brands and retailers that demand our product or choose an alternative fibre, polyester being our main competitor. Over the years we've considered our customer to be the spinning mill and we have a great track record of supplying very high quality contamination free fibre that can be spun into high quality yarns. And so we have a product that we usually don't have trouble selling and that attracts a premium each year because of its exceptional quality. And that's the main reason that up until the last few years we haven't really been talking further down the supply chain. However, over the last few years the global textile market has significantly shifted and we've had to shift our thinking too. Two years ago we developed the cotton to market strategy to try and find ways to deliver value back to our growers for their sustainability credentials. I guess it's serendipitous that three things came together at the right time for cotton to market. A textile industry expected to produce products with higher environmental and social standards and how sad that a horrific event like the Rana Plaza Collapse in Bangladesh brought this into sharp focus. Nearly 30 years of solid data to back up our sustainability claims and at a time when our growers are feeling brave enough to stand up and put a flag in the ground and claim the improvements that they've made on their farms. And this is very important. When I first started working with Cotton Australia and Cotton Grows 15 years ago I came in from Landcare Australia and I could see there was just fantastic work being done in the industry that I thought we should be shouting from the rooftops. But what I found was that our growers were incredibly reluctant to stand up and claim the work they'd done publicly until they had it bedded down and could show there was significant change over a long period of time that the change was real. And this was definitely the right call. We needed to be patient. Clearly from the name of my topic today storytelling is critical to the work we're doing at Cotton Australia to position cotton in the world textile market. As you can see from this slide we don't have an enormous budget to spend on marketing. But what we do have is a fantastic authentic story that can be told by our growers. The ones who have been walking the walk and are now helping us talk the talk. And that's proved very powerful in the engagements we've had with the supply chain. Wherever possible we take our growers with us and ask them to tell their stories from a very personal point of view. Something special happens when you bring both extreme ends of the supply chain together to share the stories of their work and their challenges and you can just see new understandings emerging as those conversations happen. This is an example of why storytelling is so important. Under Armour is now one of the biggest underwear brands in the world. And about three years ago this was the marketing campaign that they released. Imagine our joy. The company carried pretty much all synthetics in their range, no cotton because of its perceived global reputation. And it wasn't until our colleagues in the US engaged with this brand to tell them an alternative story that they realized cotton could be an important part of their business. And now they're using a performance fiber called Charged Cotton and their slogan is nature made it we made it better. And we like this one much more as well. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking today about what our story is because probably a lot of you know that already. But I will give you a very brief rundown on some of the messages we're taking to the world. We can make some pretty big claims now that we couldn't make 20 years ago about our sustainability. And this is underpinned by the best management practices program which covers all aspects of cotton production. Soils, pests, OH&S, water and so on. There are over 600 standards that Grohls must meet to be comfortably certified and they're given support and resources to move through the program to continually improve their natural resource management. Over the last decade we've seen a 95 percent reduction in pesticide use, a 42 percent increase in water use efficiency. We're using less land than ever before and we have yields three times the world average. We don't employ child labor and we have very rigorous labor standards. Also an important part of our story is supply chain traceability which is becoming more important to brands as they're expected to understand where their products originate. Australia is only one of two countries in the world that can trace a bale of cotton right back to the paddock in which it was grown. The other is the US. We're also the only cotton industry in the world that audits itself. We conduct an independent audit every about 10 years. We look at the recommendations together as an industry and we make change. And we have teams of people in the field working with our growers to assist them to improve. We've also started releasing a sustainability report which will do at least every five years and that's really a way of checking in with ourselves to make sure that we're on track. Our R&D investments are being made in the right areas and it also gives us some solid data on our environmental indicators that can prove our success. And so now we have an industry that is transforming. We've got a great story to tell and a textile market looking for sustainable products. These factors have combined to make the timing right for leveraging our industry's sustainability to create value for cotton growers who've done the hard work on their farms. The link between sustainability and profitability has never been stronger. We believe value is delivered in a few ways, encouraging brands to pay more for responsible cotton, positioning cotton as a fiber of choice against synthetics and securing markets for our crop in a future where cotton that's not produced sustainably may not find a home or could become heavily discounted. All of this comes at a time when Australia needs to be shoring up markets for cotton because year on year synthetic fibers are taking a greater market share. As you can see here, cotton is now less than 30% of the world textile market and even when I started 15 years ago we're about 40% so it's it's sliding fast. Our competitors are also very very clever at finding new markets for their products. A great example of this is the athleisure market or the active wear market where people used to wear cotton pants or a pair of jeans to pick up the kids from school. They're now wearing stretchy yoga pants made from polyester spandex and elastane products that are built to perform just like cotton without being cotton. We're seeing brands and retailers promoting non-cotton products as cotton and actively looking for cotton alternatives that are cheaper and don't have the global reputation of cotton. The example on the left here uses a cotton bowl as a marketing exercise and in fact the product is 100% polyester as an example. We're also up against huge multinational companies with enormous marketing and R&D budgets being spent to position synthetic fibers as natural products or low impact products taking advantage of the requirement for greener fibers. This example is from DuPont. It's a Sonoma. If you look at the marketing materials that come out with this you would think that it's a pretty natural product where in fact it's about a 75% chemical product. I'm now going to cover a bit about the strategies we're using to deliver value back to our growers from the cotton to market strategy. In 2013 we were approached by the US cotton industry to form a partnership with them called Cotton Leads which is quite a unique thing because the US is one of our biggest competitors and yet we went into a partnership with them to together tell our story to the brands and manufacturers of the world because we realized that our biggest competitor was not each other but the synthetic fiber market. We found that despite the fact we led the world in sustainable cotton production and the US can make similar claims we were not on the list of preferred suppliers for some of the world's biggest brands. To be honest we didn't even realize brands had blacklist and preferred supplier lists until we went to a meeting with Tesco in the UK. It's an enormous supermarket chain bigger than Coles and Woolies combined and Tesco's only approved cotton suppliers were organic cotton, better cotton, fair trade cotton and cotton made in Africa. Australia wasn't on the list and we found a similar experience with IKEA who used nearly one percent of the world's cotton. That made us realize we needed to be telling our story because no one else was going to be doing it for us and we're now on both lists which I'm happy to report. A small budget meant that we needed to target our efforts and so we did lots of thinking about where the influence in our supply chain is exerted. Was it the consumer, was it the spinning mill dictating product further down the line or something else and we quickly discovered that the brands and retailers not so much the consumers were the key influences and that they in turn were being influenced by pressure groups, governments and their shareholders. We also quickly realized that collaborations and partnerships were going to be very important and so we joined a couple of global sustainability initiatives to provide a platform for our story. One is Cotton Leads which I've touched on briefly and the other is the Better Cotton Initiative. This was set up by the World Wildlife Fund and some of the world's biggest brands Nike, H&M, IKEA, Levi Strauss etc, just over five years ago who were under pressure to be sourcing their cotton from sustainable and ethical sources. BCI is a global sustainability initiative that Australia's cotton girls can now be part of. It has a set of standards that must be met by individual cotton farmers in the world who are then audited and can sell their cotton into the into the market as BCI. The retailer members of BCI create demand for the product and in 2014 over 1.2 million farmers were in the program representing 9% of the world's cotton crop. BCI also funds training for cotton farmers in countries like Mali, Pakistan, Turkey, Mozambique so that they can become part of the program. BCI in particular has delivered profitability benefits back to our growers because it's a program that is actually creating a market for sustainably produced cotton. What we found is that the Australian girls who are in the Better Cotton Initiative and to be in you need to be fully MyBMP certified they're currently getting a premium for their crop because it's in high demand and short supply at the qualities that we can deliver. Sustainability in its own right is critical and thankfully our growers see this but the greatest incentive to be sustainable is when a market is actually prepared to pay a bit more to reward that effort. We know that our most profitable growers are also our leaders in sustainability and now we have a way to show the whole industry that by being sustainable you can actually get more for your crop. One of the unintended consequences of cotton to market has been a much deeper understanding of our role in the global cotton industry. No matter how well we're doing here in Australia we're still part of a global industry that has child labour in some countries and where thousands die from pesticide poisoning on small holder farms in India and Pakistan each year. These stories become part of the way brands and retailers make decisions about the kinds of products they'll use. Will it be cotton or will it be something else? It's tough. We're a very small player in a big big market but we're starting to get some traction. We have over 350 partners in the Cotton Leads program. We've delivered our message to thousands of manufacturers and brands through partnerships, events and one-on-one engagements and we're partnering with iconic Australian brands to tell the story here on home soil. I'd like to end on this slide because it really highlights what we're on about at Cotton Australia. This photo was taken at a spinning mill in Shanghai and these two guys are both cotton growers and directors of Cotton Australia. So we're at the mill and we were looking at a laydown about to go in for processing and there was a whole row of cotton bales from all over the world, some from India, China etc and they mostly looked pretty brown or grey, lots of contamination and there in the middle were three or four bales of gleaming white Australian cotton and they looked absolutely magnificent and our growers couldn't help themselves. They sort of rushed over and just gave them a big hug. They were very very proud and I like this picture because it really brings home what all of this is about for us which is about finding a place for our growers crop and trying to reward them for all the decades of hard work they've done to transform their industry and we should never lose sight of that. Thank you so much for listening to me today. This is a relatively new program for us so we're still learning and I'd be really keen to hear from others about the experiences you've had because we're always open to new ways of thinking, we're looking for collaboration opportunities and I know there's lots of great work going on out there in other sectors of agriculture. Thank you very much.