 Kia ora kato, no mai haere mai, greetings a welcome to this month's EHF Live session. Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investment change makers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa. These are informal sessions and they are planned in a way that when you leave here after 60 minutes you feel you know the fellows on a personal level and understand what their intentions are for New Zealand. And this session you're going to hear from Grant Phillips, an EHF fellow as he aims to connect fellows whānau and the New Zealand ecosystem that share the qualities of purpose-led investment and effort in ecological regeneration. He'll share case studies and more with us. So I'm going to hand it over to Grant now and he will take us through a cool presentation and then we will do some Q&A. So about 45 minutes of apprezzo and then 15 minutes of Q&A. Thanks Grant. Hello everyone, thank you for having me. I'm going to jump into our complicated screen share arrangement here. How are we doing there? Everyone has my screen? Yes I can see the screen. Wonderful. Today I want to share stories of stewardship in investment in regeneration, in regenerative agriculture, in ecotech, in agtech and clean tech. And just things I've been interested in for a very long time. And I want to share, I guess the stories of fellows that I've uncovered along the way but with having little time to connect and not being present in New Zealand quite yet with the latest cohort. I was hoping that this would be an entree into those sorts of connections and conversations. And if we have those in the breakout session or if we have those in future slot combos, I'm really excited to engage in that conversation. This first piece of art was a mosaic by a Ukrainian artist on a building where I used to live. And it was from the early 90s and it was a Ukrainian artist. And it was so wonderful at absorbing the complexity and diversity and wonder of nature for me that it's always held a place in my heart even after I left the area and I wanted to share it with those that might appreciate it on the way in. And I also want to take this presentation to be a pretty high end overall elevated space that view of things and thinking about New Zealand as a diverse ecosystem, and one that has a lot of exportable industry and many points to share with the world, just because of the diversity of that ecosystem and how it can really relate to so many parts of the world around the globe. My purpose for this presentation is to spark discussion camaraderie and collaboration amongst fellows share with the broader network outside of the HF in New Zealand. And I'll make some humble suggestions for what I think my contributions and what others could be toward New Zealand and towards the HF. I'll share my, my background and prior ventures I've done. And I want to make this as inclusive as possible so though I may touch on a few fellows in the slideshow I want to invite other fellows to join in and speak up about what they're doing in the ecotech and agtech space. And overall I'm just glad you're here and I look forward to following up in the future. I'm not afraid to share that broadly on the web. And if you want to email organic grant at Gmail you'll connect with me directly. Over the last year, year and a half, two years during these COVID times and we've been locked in our homes and thinking and introspecting. I took a lot of time to rethink what I thought of value creation and look beyond just fiscal value creation and what the other elements of that are in the world at large. And you may have heard the government of Bhutan was is known for promoting gross domestic happiness beyond just gross domestic product and other stories about that. I want to look at this from a holistic lens of value creation, more than just fiscal returns and financial returns, but what are we doing for our quality of life on the whole. And I want to invite everyone to share what their viewpoint is personally of what quality of life entails to them what are the elements with the metrics that you think deliver you satisfaction and happiness in the world. That's really what I'm focused on into the future for any entrepreneurial enterprise that I engage in. During this period of introspection I looked back and I reflected on what are my core strengths and skills and interested in the world. And you know here they are putting this presentation together really made me put it on paper. The last 20 years of my life has been consumed by these five things. That's a look at holistic ecology, ecology and all the systems that interact in the world. It's more than just a singular metric of carbon. There's water cycles and measured in cycles and everything else happening. My collegiate experience and interest was around resources and biomaterial science, agricultural byproducts and how they integrate with engineering and the engineering world. My skills and fabrication and rapid prototyping are reasonably deep and it's something I enjoy both in launching new enterprises but also as a hobby. I have an expanding interest in the juncture of consciousness and culture forging. How our deep dives into our own psyches unfold into how we engage with our friends and neighbors and societies and how we change that over time. And the core theme of everything I've done over the last 20 years has been some semblance of agriculture and regenerative agriculture. How can agriculture be done better in a different way moving forward. When I went off to college as a naive young teen off the prairies of Iowa in the fall of 1999, I had a deep realization within a few weeks time. If you look at this image on the left here, I grew up in one of the green dots in one of the forested areas along the Mississippi River in Iowa in the middle of the US. And it was a pretty idyllic place to grow up. It was one of the, it's the second longest river in the United States. It's quite the riverine ecosystem. But I was in the woods and I had unlimited access to nature, and we foraged and we ate well and we learned about the environment we grew up in. And when I got to university, I realized that most people didn't have that growing up. It was largely either deeply rural, and the Iowa ecosystem of deeply rural was monocultural crop production, or an urban environment that really never got on to nature. So I realized I had a very unique perspective. And the curriculum that I was being exposed to that of industrial agriculture. I really did not vibe with I saw it as so utterly destructive. And it was not the agriculture that I knew of in my bio. And I put, I found myself at loggerheads with the curriculum of instruction of most of the professors I was, you know, supposed to be learning from were teaching me methodologies that I didn't agree with and it was a big, you know, a come to Jesus moment as they say, of having to reconcile what you're being told with what you believe. And one of the biggest themes there was that industrial agriculture as it was being promoted and presented in in my in my university was a conscious and deliberate reduction in biodiversity. It was attempting to annihilate the ecosystem that was there. The Iowa is the most altered ecosystem on planet Earth 98% of the original land cover has been destroyed and converted to row crop agriculture it's next to Ukraine probably the most altered land area on planet Earth. And that's it was 13 and a half million hectares or about 30 ish 35 million ish acres it's a huge area that's been altered. And I saw this biodiversity change as I went from my wonderful little forest ecosystem growing up into the state writ large where it was a major change in land use. And I had two narratives being told to me in the academic environment, one was that the only way to conduct agriculture was in destroying nature and planting largely one of two crops corner soybeans. The alternative the more, you know, the vegan environmentalist types also believe that corn soy were the saviours of our food system, which also is not not true in my opinion because I saw the ecological damage that was coming from the production of those food stuffs. You know you're not saving a cow by eating tofu when the tofu is destroying the habitat of so many life forms. And that was a really difficult thing for me to reconcile was that neither narrative I agreed with, and I went into a sort of not really depression but deep deep introspection. We were treated to the basement of the library at the university. And I was in the special collections area which is like the basement the really old books 100 year old books. And I was reading a book about timber framing, trying to just attach myself or understand something tactile and real. You know, a good quality building that can last and last in when I saw as really fake environment. I discovered permaculture designers manual, which is written by Bill mollison and David Holmgren to well known Australians. And my faith in humanity was restored. And I was able to look at all these Da Vinci like drawings of functional ecosystems and buildings and and livestock and vegetable crops that were growing in harmony and I was like, Oh, okay, this is good. I was a university professors. It was, it was mocked, and it was seen as a pipe dream and unattainable. And I realized that I had a major opportunity in life where I could integrate the concepts of synergistic design and holistic food production via the principles of permaculture and put them into more broad acre agricultural production systems. So my life has been, you know, really sense and shout out to coanga and all those folks carrying on mollison's dream and in New Zealand, I've been looking up to them for many years and I'm excited to have them as cohorts in the HF. I think my ideas and my feelings, I grew up in an environment that was probably more in the past of a hunting gathering foraging lifestyle, and my present assessment of it was was that it was reliant on hydrocarbons and mining and destruction of habitat, and it was an element of health in that people used to derive their health from what they ate, and they sought medicine from their landscape, and the pharma exposure in a university environment was, it made me realize how many people were using drugs recreationally or prescribed that were not really great for their well being. And my father was a pharmacist mind you grew up on a farm but he was a pharmacist and I would read the Merck manual as a 10 year old just for the heck of it. And I didn't realize the extent of it of, we have access to more drugs than ever and our health has been declining in the Western world in the last 50 years it's kind of a, it was a weird conundrum to me was another conundrum. I started envisioning what would the future look like. You know if I could design a utopia in my mind, and what were the elements that were good about the present, and what are the elements that should be avoided about the present. And I just created a construct of it in my mind and, and that's kind of how I would illustrate it there on the right. The industrial seed oils is one example that didn't exist historically and I saw high rates of obesity amongst what should be otherwise healthy 20 to 25 year olds in the university system. And it's, you know, industrial seed oils are a big part of that in activities another large part of that. And the vegetarian veganic argument was also not playing out to be what it was promised to be. And I know that can be a polarizing viewpoint. So in the future I see more regenerative agriculture as grazing livestock on real land utilizing technology to make it happen. So I think that the industrial food stuffs and fruits and vegetables that are in season and a high and accident quality and high micronutrient quality grown in real soil, not in a lab, not in plastic trays with, you know, mind nutrients. Proneal nut crops for all of their carbohydrates proteins and fats will become more and more common replacing a lot of the tillage based grains and pulses and legumes that we're relying on. And I think that science is going to take another look at the fungi and plants and animals that have benefited humanity for a very long time. With a critical eye and 75% of the common pharmacopoeia is really plant and fungi based. Moving on, I suppose. No, that was the clapping on. That was like, yeah, fungi. My second home out of out of college, I thought I was getting a really good deal on a kind of a bombed out old mansion was about 4000 square feet tile roof very large house. And then when winter came around this is a cold climate that I was living in that's that was the lowest we'd get in wintertime is 20 below Fahrenheit 29 below Celsius in the wintertime. And my, my January heating bill was twice what my mortgage was. And I was like, Oh boy, this is expensive. What am I going to do here? This house is huge. Uh oh. And I went down the rabbit hole of, you know, inexpensive fuel sources. And with access to having a wood stove, you know, you can heat your house with wood, but you're basically tending it all day long and that's its own expense is just time spent in front of the wood stove. And I started looking into alternative feedstocks for heating and heating fuels and I found a kind of a crazy eccentric inventor that had developed a wood pellet fired automated boiler. And he was a terrible marketer and the aesthetics of the product were not great, but we collaborated to make it a functional effective saleable system. We made the company nature heat and developed a biomass boiler that could burn any woody woody feedstock. Everything from local black walnuts that were falling out of the trees to crack hazelnut shells to pelletized fuel or any sort, whether it was agricultural byproducts or you know saw dust pelletized and sold the company within a year. And my first entree into entrepreneurship was that I was solving a need I couldn't afford to pay my heating bill anymore, and we found a way to utilize inexpensive fuels and feedstocks. A few years later, you know, I grew up in the, in the 90s elsewhere in the state that I was living in, and we had curbside recycling everywhere it was a given, of course you had it of course you recycled. And in the town that I was living in, we did not have curbside recycling pickup. And there's a bit of a moral dilemma there where you could take it to the transfer station but you have to drive it there yourself. And it took effort and it took time and that was money. And the city and the municipality refused to offer curbside recycling pickup. So, with some neighbors of mine we created a web based portal and a private recycling service, where any citizen that felt the moral imperative to recycle could pay to get their recyclables picked up. We had easy sign up, we had really slick logistics system. And we sold that company as well within six months to another operator in the area, because our intention was not to become garbage men or owning recycling company it was to scratch the itch of how do we get our recyclables consciously cared for and not deal with them anymore. And felt really good about that enterprise. And we ended up open sourcing this website and the tools that we had to let other operators do the same. And a few years later in the post 2000.com bus that occurred in the US and probably worldwide. A lot of people were putting their capital out of equities out of stocks and into land and into real estate into more stable investments and land prices increased dramatically during this decade of time, probably around especially where I was. And the rental rates were not keeping pace with what the property values were capital rates are being severely depressed. And I saw it as an inequitable system in that landowners weren't getting fair rents and they didn't even know it, because there was no efficient price discovery system at all. And I felt what is effectively an Airbnb plus bidding platform for agriculture real estate, probably 15 years too early. And the weakness of this product was great. It was very solid worked really well. The weakness was was that the ownership class of land was in their 60s and 70s and always is least in the US, and they weren't online yet. So you had plenty of demand side of operators, but not enough supply side of landowners and managers. And this company was sold to the second largest farm management company in the US, and they immediately killed it upon acquiring it because it was perfect. It was, it was. It could have cannibalized their own business, it was, you know, they had really good management rates for their traditional land management companies and anyway, now there's several operators doing this in the US. And then later doing it successfully. It was just too darn early. And it was a good lesson. Since then, I went on to have my own farm and put together and deploy a lot of these ideas technologies that have been developed over the years. Learned a lot, developed some really cool things and realize at some point that my talents were best deployed, helping others do the same thing. And I realize that my impact on 145 acres is great, but it's not my biggest contribution to planet Earth. It's how can I facilitate this and more places for more people and moved on from there. Okay, enough about me. I want to talk about, I'm going to get going a little bit faster here too I feel like I'm dragging slowly, more of the themes for how I think EHF and the New Zealand ecosystem can aid and act around the world. And first and foremost, it's thinking about ecology as a holistic system, not just a singular metric of carbon or atmospheric carbon. There's so much more to planet Earth. And I think when we're so removed from natural systems and from rural living or being in the wild, we forget how complex planet Earth is and all the things there is at play. I'll begin with focusing on water and everything that entails. Human beings are 60% water and one device that I've deployed in my life is whenever I meet someone new, whether I have a positive experience or a negative experience with them, I realize that they are at least 60% the exact same as me. And we have that commonality so deep in us so it's a great way to think about empathy and compassion and I don't know patients when I interact with humans around the world. This next slide is Iraq pre 1980. There was a pretty extensive. The Custron Society of harvesting Reeds and literally living in floating ecosystems and Saddam drained this ecosystem in the society. Prior to the Gulf War. Motivations are still unknown to me, but it was such a utopic existence that I can look back on and be inspired by But it makes me think of what what another future might look in a water world scenario. And, you know, the difference between this existence and this one is simply one of cultural standards. I mean how porous is the ethnic of social accountability. Point source pollutants are obviously considered to be known emitters, you know, a factory that's dumping pollutants out of a pipe, or a smokestack. And non point source is things like air pollution or, you know, water pollution like this. And the reality is, is that there is no such thing as non points pollution. It's all point source that just gets a total lack of ownership or accountability it becomes an aggregate source of pollutant. And I really want to foster ethics that eliminate the idea of non point source pollution, you know that everyone is accountable and how do we engage and expand upon that. Obviously the definitions of that are a bit of a farce of my opinion. To share how pump diamond be a part of EHF between planet and space base. And this elements of being accountable for the entire planet Earth and giving imagery and accountability for that via satellite imagery via UAVs and drone imagery is one of the most exciting things. I think of in 20 years, and I'm excited to see how those are used to deploy ecotech and active technologies into the future. It's also, I guess, appropriate to congratulate planet on their successful SPAC, which I think happened today officially, and their conversion to a B Corp, which is to major undertakings and I'm really pumped about that and being amidst wonderful people like that. To continue this water story this is Chicago on St Patrick's Day every year. They released a fluorescent dye into the Chicago River to diet green to celebrate the Irish history of that town, which is pretty crazy from an environmental perspective and it's been happening every year since 1962. This is the expression of an environmental ethic. Contrary to that, in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States, every single day year round, this little thing named Mr trash wheel collects riverine trash that floats on the river leaving town. And it keeps out of the harbor and out of the Atlantic Ocean. And it's a pretty amazing technology in my opinion. The design is a simple skimmer net attached to a waterwheel. It's largely passive powered. When the river is flowing it turns the water wheel just like an old steam ship, which moves the collection elevator picking up trash. There's not enough river flow solar panels on it pump water which then turns the river wheel. Phenomenal example of passive technology that's appropriate and successful. One great use case of satellite technology or UV technology is the accountability. This is post a rainstorm and seeing the amount of flotsam going into this trash wheel that otherwise would be out in the ecosystem and in the Atlantic Ocean. They've done a phenomenal job of making it, in my opinion, a multi effect enterprise where it's become a cultural phenomenon where because of the design was so goofy and lovable, but also being functional. It's become an exciting thing for kids to learn from so you're eliminating that point source pollution the actual origin of that trash being emitted by educating the children or adults for that matter that are aware of it because of it's so kitschy and weird. But it's also an end of pipe intervention on its own by its function by collecting that trash and removing it from that waterway. It became so well known and love that expanded and they started building more and more of them and moving them on. And they kept it funky and they have design contest for naming the next one. It's evolved a pretty interesting ecosystem where it was known for collecting a ball python that had been released in the wild one time and since then they came out with lost python ale a beer in the end Baltimore. And there's t-shirts that feel the churn and there's pins and there's so many elements of it that keep it in the cultural zeitgeist that doesn't get forgotten and it stays engaging, which is pretty incredible. Just in Baltimore it's grown into four machines all with their unique names and they're staying engaged in the public eye with social media with weird names and being culturally and seasonally irrelevant. And again it's solving so many problems at once, not only educating to eliminate point source pollution but collecting the end of pipe effluent coming out of it, but also eliminating it from becoming endemic in the microplastics that exist had it bypassed the end of pipe and getting in the oceans and being an odd one thing. Other firms are obviously collecting in the ocean and using satellite technology to find where the big trash islands are to get them out of the water. And let me catch up here. Number three, Vanessa with Ocean Works is has a marketplace for reselling the, a lot of the collected ocean plastics, which I think is exciting interesting that once you collect these things how do you add value to those plastics and those feed stuffs. Other firms are doing similar. And I think it's interesting when I started this presentation thinking about different forms of capital and you know where is value actually created with enterprise like this. To look at all the elements of value creation is interesting to me because it's a deployment of appropriate technology, so it's accessible. It's geographically scalable there's riverine environments and rivers all over planet Earth, so you can deploy a similar idea elsewhere. You can play it transparent invisible with the public eye. So, you know, it's not like it's a secret people know what's happening and they can see it and appreciate it. It's low enough threshold of entry that it can be locally adaptable I think that the ideas of patents that eliminate competition or government bureaucracy can eliminate some some of these ideas sometimes. And it's accessible all around that I really appreciate it. But the externalized costs, just like a smokestack of oh that you know power plants not accountable for mercury poisoning in a baby 1000 miles away. I think that in time, you might see a bounty program or a subsidy or premium for specifically plastic that is removed from waterborne environments because it is eliminating micro plastics and food stuffs and the long, long tail health effects of that, which we'll see over time. Anyway, once you get that plastic what do we do with it and make creative things. If you remember phone blocks from a few years ago was a public service project kind of a design in the open, and it saw about 380 million impressions globally which is significant. And that was one tiny little four person design studio that went on to have influence with Google, Fairphone, etc. These all became real products. And they didn't necessarily become market worthy because it wasn't super profitable for these companies, but they did not give up at all. That design studio was called one army, their domain is called one army dot earth, they're based in the EU, and their next product was much in the same way of vein of ocean works was called precious plastic. And that was how can we take localized plastic resources how can we aid recycling and how can we make more and more businesses more economic opportunity and more education in the process and they open sourced every element of the way from collection to the cycle to extrusion and injection molding for products and an e-commerce bazaar that actually enables enables people to sell the same products that are created around the world. Precious plastic dot com phenomenal enterprise and it's a great example of scalable noted entrepreneurship that I want to know find ways to elsewhere in the world for other products. Bringing it down to earth and land and and the New Zealand ecosystem with agricultural plastics whether that is silage tarps or food containers that have some sort of organic waste contamination it's challenging to recycle them oftentimes because of those contaminants, and it means economic economic sense to wash them and clean them necessarily several manufacturers around the world including future posts in New Zealand are turning waste milk cartons and waste silage tarps into agricultural posts. And as regenerative agriculture expands and more and more grazing is conducted consciously, you have less set stocking and more frequently moving livestock populations which requires more fence. And conventional treated wood posts oftentimes use CCA or ACQ copper arsenate and and other heavy metals which are the exact things you don't want to have leach into the food that you're eating. If you're in a vineyard or grazing operation, you don't want to have copper and arsenate in, you know, what you're eating. So these plastic posts are organic certified, they're rock resistant, and they're a phenomenal use of resources in my opinion. And this gentleman is an Alberta Canada, he created his own injection molding and extrusion facility to reuse agricultural plastics, but because the heat loads that you require for injection molding and extrusion. He's actually operating this using shredded up pallets he's reusing local bio biomass for the plastic formation process which is pretty exceptional and kind of speaks to my farm hack geekery that I just appreciate it a lot. And it's another example of a scalable system that can be done anywhere and everywhere on planet Earth. Back to this element of past future present past present future, and what we can do to create a new regenerative world. I think that I'm seeing a lot of right now is a fixation on carbon emissions, and we sometimes wonder where those necessarily come from and how we're writing the ship. And you can look at charts of them, you know, some of them come from industrial emissions with concrete manufacturer and steel manufacturer, some of them come from automobiles and some of them come from tillage based agriculture and oxidizing soil carbon. One of the most examples we have of recreating and sequestering carbon on planet Earth is engaging in regenerative agriculture. So I want to talk about soil borne solution moving forward. In my university days I saw animal agriculture be really vilified for its supposed climate emissions which I don't think is wholly accurate, given that the alternatives also emit carbon and or more with tillage based soil practices. And even in a no till environment you're then choosing to either engage with herbicide use, which is still hydrocarbon sourced and still kills ecosystems. Or alternatively you're burning hydrocarbons in a propane burn natural gas weeding environment, which is again the exact same thing of carbon emissions. So this either or conversation, you know, is not wholly factual. And I think we were going to really rely on animal based agriculture in grazing environments for sequestering carbon moving forward. And New Zealand is one of the best examples of well done ruminant grazing on planet Earth. And I'm excited to be able to showcase that and hopefully contribute my skills to building that ecosystem. What I would call agile grazing systems are how do you move animals, often with minimal browse that is taking no more than 30 to 50% of vegetation off the plant before moving on to the next paddock. And conventional set stocking environments, you know, you're putting livestock in a fence and you're forgetting about them for six months or a year or two years until they're fat. So agile grazing, you're moving them often to maximize your forage yield, minimize impact on the soil and maximize carbon sequestration in the soil. And this actually shows a big opportunity for applying tech, whether that's software or appropriate tech or visualization technologies with with drones and mapping and silence, etc. And we're seeing a lot of, you know, money being made in this industry right now and I want to showcase some of those examples. 10 years ago when I was really getting into quickly moving animals, all of the technology that we're using was coming from New Zealand. There's a Gallagher and Kiwi Tech and Stafix. They're basically almost all owned by the Gallagher group now which is based in New Zealand that has a more or less monopoly of innovation on agile grazing technology on planet Earth, which is incredible and not it's not given enough fanfare. And I'm excited that through this involvement with the HF that it might see even more tech being applied to it. So worth mentioning UPCO who I've been a fan of for six years now I guess, and still wanting a two by two. Those tools being deployed globally for agile grazing are going to be great. Another theme for regenerative agriculture is is the idea of capital redirection. And I don't know Mike's cohort maybe we can get a shout out Paula and Michelle. Yeah. Conventional agricultural lenders shy away from anything perceived to be regenerative agriculture at least in the US anyway. Because it's hard to explain there's more variables. And even though if it's de risked from a perennial perspective of having more species diversity on a spreadsheet, whenever you have more variables it looks more risky to the analyst. And I think that we need to see more and more capital being deployed towards regenerative agriculture, and we need to get more innovative about ways that's being done. And these are just some great examples of it, whether it's crowdfunding for land purchases or equipment, you know asset purchases, or finding philanthropic or patient capital that can be deployed towards regenerative ag. And that's going to be tech tech is going to make this happen whether it's socially, operatively tech is going to do it. Another theme that New Zealand has strength in and great opportunities for growth in is remote and real time stock management. Whether that is virtual fencing technology that you know imagine a collar being worn around an animal with an audible or shock electrode, where if they get outside of a GPS enabled virtual boundary, they're told hey you should turn around. And as incremental marginal cost come down on these products you're going to see more and more of that around the world. Real time thermographics with different remote centric technologies infrared or otherwise hand held UAV based or even satellite based animal health can be monitored in real time and if you have a sick animal. The first thing is their body temperature is going to raise. So if you can automatically via a steward interface or via identify which animals are having health concerns. You can immediately address that efficiently economically and save the health of your herd. And then other things we know stock management etc. Are going to be great to do this. Rokos based in Auckland is is I feel like it's an investment I missed in the last year. I spoke with them early spring, I was enamored with what they were up to. And they were acquired by the end of the year, they were required in August or September of this year. And drone deploy bought them which is a US based previously UAV dominance technology company. They developed a platform for consciously and efficiently and easily managing fleets, diverse fleets of robots. UGVs unmanned ground vehicles and UAVs unmanned aerial vehicles, in addition to conventional rovers and you're seeing a Boston Dynamics dog here which you see a lot of those around the world. It's a platform for the every person the common non tech operator to be able to manage these fleets, and it's going to continue to crush. And it's a big growth opportunity, not only for them, but for other operators, producing similar products. Movement pathways are important in especially in agricultural environments when you're doing management whether that is moving fence posts or mowing accurately and repeatedly. In environments like orchards or vineyards. How can you mow the understory of a vineyard, not Nick tree trunks and plant stems and do it autonomously without human intervention. And unmanned ground vehicles in these environments are going to be a huge growth environment in the next 10 years. And whoever manages this best as a platform is going to be like the Bloomberg terminal moving into the future it's going to be a layer of management with huge market share. And from what I've seen of Rokos there, they're the leaders so far. Another element that I have experienced with and that I see a lot of growth in the New Zealand ecosystem is dynamic data in horticulture and digital twinning, and that occurs in two ways predominantly. One is getting good visual spatial understanding of what production environments doing so how can you measure fruit yield or bacterial wilt in a kiwi orchard. How can you monitor a vineyard. How do you determine what the crop is looking like in an apple orchard you need to thin the crop is your is your fruit load too heavy. Is that going to impact you know size of fruit and grading down the road, and that data collected using UGVs predominantly is huge making production management decisions. And on the other side of that is digital twinning meaning mimicking an individual fruit or a case of fruit with sensors so that through the logistics pipeline from field to table. You're able to monitor in real time what's happening there. So things like ethylene gas in fruit crops determine how ripe that product is temperature monitoring. Is that in a reefer truck or a container that ran out of fuel or had an assistance failure. Well if you have a container of fruit going from New Zealand to the US, and you know it's going to spoil before it gets there. You're able to adjust your logistics accordingly. And it's a big deal and it's going to be a major growth environment moving forward in New Zealand because it is so good at agricultural production, and it exports so much of the crop through, you know, reasonably long supply chains. It's going to become a leader or could become a leader in this space. Grant, I'm just conscious we've only got 10 minutes left. Should we, and we've got, hard's got a question there, how about we move into some questions? Oh, sure. Sorry, I'm going slow. Yeah, go for it. Ask away, Hav. Grant, thanks for this look. I'm interested in how, how does New Zealand position itself from at the moment we produce food as calories to sell? How do we position from selling food as a healthy, as a health-based product, right? So it's, I've worked in Agfa 30 years, been involved for 45 years, and it's still predominantly very, very traditional. I've worked on a number of projects at the moment that are producing land, for instance, that will stop cognitive decline as you get older. But it's very, very hard to position a niche product like that in the New Zealand ecosystem where it is predominantly still around commodity. Are you talking about for domestic marketing? Or international. Is my, my present slide still showing? Yep. The idea of nutritional provenance is emerging. If you think about French wines or French cheeses and local terwa and brand awareness because of where it's grown and the flavor profile it might impart. The idea of nutritional provenance is expounding upon the value of that food stuff. Based upon where it's grown and what its actual nutritional value is. In the US, we have kind of blanket nutritional analysis for a commodity, and it's assumed that that same piece of broccoli, it has the same nutritional qualities, whatever it is, and that's fundamentally not true. And I think that via tissue testing or via soil testing or both in a lot basis, you're able to assign value add for that crop based upon its nutritional analysis. And I think that speaks directly to your question as one idea of achieving that value. Simple ideas like on package QR codes that have video tutorials or expound on, you know, that education for an individual food product are also opportunities, I think. That's my thoughts. I'd love to hear others. There's massive opportunities, particularly in the sheep sector, where I don't know why with lamb, but they have a remarkable diverse gene call. And I've been involved in one project where we found the gene marker for omega lamb. So producing lamb that had the same omega levels as a fatty fish. However, it's still really bloody hard to extract value out of a market where the whole system in New Zealand is predominantly devoted to commodity. And now at the moment I'm looking at another gene program based on identifying and speeding up selection based on nutritional values that will literally, if you eat lamb once a week or decrease cognitive decline as you get older. And I'm just really interested and but frustrated in New Zealand that we do not seem to have an ecosystem that swarms over the stuff. We still have a very clunky system devoted to commodities. Sounds like a marketing opportunity and value to be extracted and harnessed. Absolutely is. The paleo movement in the US, paleolithic diet movement in the US is more conscious of omega 3 to omega 6 ratios. And oddly enough, the majority of the true grass-fed beef that's sold in the US is sourced from Australia. And that marketing is being done here through those movements through a kind of a preeducated consumer. I don't know how much genetics of individual animals affects the omega ratios more than the forage that they're eating. But if that can be done with genetics, that's huge as well. It's a combination. Yeah, combination. What the question is, I just, I get frustrated with our, with the system that we've got to go through the same freezing works. That it's very hard to keep control of a product. Well, maybe you should buy a few hundred thousand pounds of lamb and develop your own marketing and market it into the world. It sounds like an opportunity. Any other questions at this juncture? I know I'm getting a horse and being slower than I'd like to be. I have perhaps 15 slides left. I do know that Cheryl had offered to introduce you to the R&D director at Gallagher Group at some point. So she's left, put her email address in there, so that's good for you. She has to jump. Cool. Yeah, there's about five minutes left, but Paula has offered that she can stay on if anyone still wants to ask any more questions. But if you want to go through your last 15 slides, if you just want to check if there's no more questions, what they are. I'm happy to stay grant and I'm also happy to hear to those about those. Okay. I'll soldier on. Yeah. Cool. I'll soldier on. So, the real time food labeling is another opportunity for marketing. Swiss researchers identified carbon nanotubes that could effectively be tied to chroma indicators. So rather than have an arbitrary spoilage date on a package of food, you know, 30 days from X, it can be tied to the true oxidative sense inside that package. You could have, you can reduce, you know, food waste for one, but also increase consumer trust that when they take home a package of meats or a gallon of milk. It's truly going to be fresh and not just spoiled early or affected otherwise marketing opportunity. What I would call lemonade businesses, finding ecological dysregulation and making a, you know, finding golden fleece in it. Around the world we're seeing in Hawaii we're seeing feral deer being marketed as high omega three. Great, you know, pasture raised meat. We're seeing invasive autumn olive trees, marketing their fruit as having 40 times like a peanut of the best produced organic tomato. Miami in southern Florida in the US and in Central America, you're seeing a wild feral iguana being marketed as a delicacy. The bottom right is kind of my joke, but it's not should be considered as the idea of cane toads as a food stuff. If you think about Northeast Australia and the cane toads go on a muck, that's a great free protein source in my opinion. And really it's just a matter of can you convince the consumer and any regulatory body to allow it. And in many places where it's done it, it's happening successfully. Responsible agriculture in my opinion is a major growth environment, especially in a coastal environment like New Zealand. Keyword responsible. I've seen agriculture done right and I've seen it done very, very, very, very wrong. So offshore fish farms were basically making the mistakes of conventional land based agriculture and exporting them into the ocean. You know, feeding corn and soy in high volumes, having genetically modified fish escape to hybridize with wild populations, poisoning predation, you know, an eagle overhead of a fixed pen and killing them. I also always do it well. And I think that identifying well done aquaculture and promoting well done aquaculture is a major growth opportunity in New Zealand and around the world. My interest and deepest skill depth is around the idea of precision agroforestry that is conscious melding of forestry and agriculture done, ideally with multi band precision GPS, both for accurately checking yields, but also long term digital twinning and data collection. The idea of agroforestry is becoming more and more popular because of it's producing edible food crops. It's improving conventional agricultural yields and other field crops and grazing operations in hot environments having simple things like shade every 600 feet improves yield and production of animal based agriculture. You're seeing more carbon sequestration from those true crops with deeper root systems, and you're encouraging faster turnover of grasses and pasture, which is increasing rates of root sloughing which is actually increasing rates of carbon and soils versus destroying them. This is a colleague of mine, Christopher Anderson is a Dain. We're demoing a product that is allowing us to track fungal yield so this imagine a truffle orchard. We're able to track fungal yields meaning truffles collected with centimeter accuracy through multi band GPS and tracking that over time, related to the trees that exist in that orchard. It's getting us multi layer data sets but it's also allowing for split testing between different management practices across different orchard blocks much so we'd split test a software product. We can split test management techniques in real time. In general, I'm not a fan of root crop agriculture even though I'm immersed in it. But if I can convert more soybean acres into agroforestry crops, that is my life's work. This is a system that we've been working on for about last 10 years. This is like one replicate of the things that I've been doing. On the left you're seeing a chestnut tree, on the right is a pecan tree. This is obviously a 3D visual graphic, not a real photo, but chestnuts are basically replacing corn as a carbohydrate crop. Pecans have the protein and fat profile of soybeans that are replacing that. We're meeting in the carbon sequestration by eliminating the otherwise tillage based production practices of corn or soy. We're able to graze the alleyways in the meantime. And again, the big cool thing is that we're conscious of the fungal populations of the soil and we're actively inoculating for truffles. Tuberlionii, which is very similar to the white Italian truffle, is native to North America. We're growing with pecan trees. Tubereshtivim, which is like the burgundy truffle, French truffle, black truffle, we're growing with chestnut trees. So I'm really excited about this and wanting to skill this up as a major thing around planet Earth. And again, about year 40 for chestnuts and year 80 for pecans, there's also timber yield. There's well-known stock analysts that think that black walnut trees are the best investments globally beating out the stock performance of the S&P 500 over the last 50 years. So I'm excited to be able to have bio-diverse perennial production systems that also have, you know, high-end timber yields, you know, as those systems are turned over. And with that, I leave you with a buck, Mr. Fuller, quote, that I should have opened with. And that is us in EHF, our group of decision makers and change makers. How will we change the ship of state on planet Earth? And that is by accessing our inner trim tabs and kicking in the ship of state. That's our foot and our collective feet right there are being kicked out, creating areas of low pressure, turning around the rudder of the ship of state and making a better world. So with that, I'm totally done with my presentation and any conversation afterwards. Well, you had two questions that you're going to leave everyone with. And I think we could do like to those 50 people that registered. I think we could do email them out those two questions and then you could sort of go pick one of those slack groups and you could start some kind of. One is along the lines of capital sourcing is how do we find more sources and more pools of patient capital for longer term regenerative agriculture projects. Specifically, the rate of return on an annualized basis, the IRR of regenerative ag is better than conventional ag. But you're looking at five to eight years of negative cash flows to kickstart those systems. How do we find more sources of capital and de risk those systems to make it a functional investment. That's one. And the other is. I love the first six months of a startup. How do we collaborate passively or actively to create a venture studio. How do we base the New Zealand to engage with specifically regenerative agriculture. How do we, I, you know, ideate and promote and build effective informed teams to launch more products that can scale globally in regenerative ag from New Zealand. Can you expand on the second question. I don't. Haven't quite grasped it yet. Sure. Instead of a conventional venture capital firm that invests in other companies. A venture studio. Like idea lab and bill grosses enterprise in the 90s and 2000s is we're going to bring in together entrepreneurs and residents smart capable people. Have them brainstorm ideas and turn them into effective companies. Yup. And there's a great source in New Zealand already for that now. So we've got our first carbon positive farm and registered in down in place called Lake Harwear station would be an ideal place to base that from high profile. Lots of smart kids being attracted to it be perfect for that grant. And I think it does take it takes a land base to actually prototype and deploy this stuff, you know, nearby. And it probably takes an engineering or an ag school nearby as well. Yep. Yep. It's not nearby. It's an hours flight away, but I think that's a wonderful idea. Awesome. I think we can.