 So here we all are as stakeholders in this great project. We have all committed our work for the land. We are all understanding that we have a lot of work to do in this transition together. So everyone's gonna start with where they sit, from where are they working for that work. Hello everybody, yep. My name is Erin, I'm from Canada. For the last 20 years, I have worked with a small, I've owned a small grocery store that brings farmers up through from conventional farming to regenerative farming in a supply chain maneuver. So I'm interested in how the supply chain works here in New Zealand and how we can bring those smaller producers who are changing up into the system and get you guys connected to them. That's really important to me. Also working, I'm finding there's a pinch point within training. So everybody who wants to make this change then is looking for direction as to what do I do next? What are the first steps? So I'm very fascinated as to where that pinch point is and how we can grow it. Kia ora tātou, my name's Sam Lang. A hill country farmer from Hawkes Bay and an aspiring agroecologist. And my work at the moment is really around connecting with the sort of emerging regenerative farming communities around the country and having a background in climate change and policy and a few other things, trying to bridge those conversations. And most recently with a big research proposal we put to the government around regenerative agriculture. And I like moving cows. Kia ora, my name is Hannah. I come from Toronga. I have a background in sales and marketing, mainly with Living Earth Compost, which is the biggest municipal composting company in New Zealand and in the Southern Hemisphere. I then went on to leave the kind of business world to become the grower or the artisan farmer. So I've had the pleasure of going up to North America and working with some of the world's best regenerative agriculturalists and small scale profitable market gardeners. And I've just returned home three months ago and I'm getting the lay of the land and the people and I'm ready to help support the farmers that are here to pull us all together to help restore Papatūinuku and restore a lot of the people as well through that process. Nice. My people have been living in Taranaki and Whanganui for 900 years and seriously considering staying. I realised that, you know, blond hair and blue eyes is generally regarded in animal husbandry as a recessive gene. So we've been strengthening the gene pool of those who arrived in setterships for a while. I'm going to representing the new landlords, the people who've been guardians in Kaitiaki for a long time who are now new landlords in a corporate designed incorporated farm. So the short bit of that is like a number of people here. I'm a shareholder in the second largest provider of milk fats of Fonterra, 40,000 acres of PKW incorporation in Taranaki and 101,000 acres of dry stock farming on and around the Whanganui River from the Aotearoa Incorporation. So finding the whole eternity between being essentially a nation within a nation who are financially illiterate, going back to the understanding of our relationship with the Ngāhi there and dealing with that in another realm and redesigning what that looks like for us. So on behalf of other landlords, I welcome you here. Hi, I'm Shane Gleely. I am the manager of the investment portfolio at the Ministry for Primary Industries, which is a really long title. What my team does is we look for partnerships and investment opportunities. So our big challenge is bringing new voices into what the future of the primary industries will look like for New Zealand. And do you have land? Me personally. Does the government managed lands in New Zealand, are those a place where the public is learning about the best regenerative practices? Are there opportunities for new growers and older growers to be modeling those practices? Is that part of our work? Not for primary industries, it doesn't actually own land, but we work with land owners to look at new ways of doing things and bring new voices into that. I'm a landowner. I've got a silver title in Diamond Harbour and also in Greyland. And 40,000 acres in Taranaki. Can you talk a little bit? This is for the younger farmers. What is the social change that is part of this work? How is this a safe space for a dialogue across generations, across traditions? From what I've experienced overseas in America and in Canada as well, and since coming back home, there are a lot of parallels that I see happening and it happens within this very framework with what we've got. We've got 900 years of Tangata whenua who have been living very closely with the land. They know it very, very well and they have their own worldview, if I can speak for this a little bit. And I've seen that as a pakeha and I've seen it iterated in a similar thing happening in North America with Native American culture and I've seen it here as well. And New Zealand, we're in the same room, we're talking around land, which is very a difficult topic, but we New Zealanders and we kind of do it. We can't leave the island, we're here. I would like to see that everyone can work together in this room from all levels within regenerative agriculture as a potential model for that. But it is about creating a safe environment to call people out of the hills no matter what you're working for, no matter what your personal style of agriculture is, but to come and talk about the soil because soil is a common ground in itself. We can't own it, but we can restore it and from whatever angle we're coming from but it's about coming into a room where we can do that collectively and safely in order to restore our waterways. And I think we're doing that already right now, which is planting the seed. Can we talk about the relationship of land health with human health and how will we know when we're winning? Maybe you could talk about animal health and he could talk about human health and you could talk about grocery store health. Yeah, so I suppose one of the epiphanies for me of sorts, I was traveling around rural about three years ago with the view to, with the question, how can we support rural communities in this impending transition and what does that look like? And that's what led me to in this, we call it regenerative agriculture. There's a lot of other names for it, farming with nature. And one of those sort of things that dawns on you when you hang out with health and nutrition people and when you hang out with farmers and everybody in between is this kind of microbiome thing and you start talking about soil ecology and we had a friend of mine was here yesterday who's a soil ecologist and gut microbes and how they basically run us. And the same is true of the soil and the same is true of animals and actually when, and coming back to starting with the soil and actually soil runs off minerals, microbes and organic matter in many ways we've been suppressing the microbe part of that equation with what we call maybe industrial farming systems or practices and that. And so actually when we flip that equation we actually work on the microbes piece, the organic matter piece falls into place and everything sort of rolls on from there and there's just this direct correlation in health across all systems once you get that sort of soil microbe piece happening and that is the kind of preventative health care approach that I'm really excited about. And happiness, happiness starts in the gut. It's very connected to your brain sense of well-being so you feel much better like kombucha is in the microbes also. We've already get it off of my, I don't want the microbe. So one of the things for us is really around again coming from a position of not having or any kind of executive power authority but actually having a relationship with something that we've known innately for as long as we've been here. And so one of those things is making the transition and saying, I just thought about the political thing. So just about one as a shareholder, we're the largest single farmers in Taranaki, every white farmer's watching. And so if you make one mistake they're on to you straight away. And the reality of what we're growing, we're not actually growing cows, we're growing the souls of our people. For those who've gone and were so young people. And so it's an investment in that. And by the way, we're not the second largest provider to look outside of the encourt, but actually we're not about cows. And our riparian planting is much more sophisticated than the others. And so we're redefining what it is to be Māori by having this as an organism that is an organism that we're part of. And if it wasn't farming, it would be something else. But it brings us back to our relationship with the stripped Māori anyway. So ironically we're coaching other people around and growing the hearts and souls of our tribe, you know, young people. And what's the opportunity for young ones, young iwi ones on the lands that are yours? Just being involved in the farms and increasing their skill there. And then we're investing in all those other things. So all tribes are doing that in different ways. This just happens to be one of those conduits to doing it that leads us back into the land. It's a kind of quite an unremarkable story, really. Now, transients or cultures that we're actually saying we can't just use, say these things in terms of more teatea and chance and a symbiotic relationship and all those kind of things and all the metaphysical stuff without doing the action and then the growth of that is to, you know, farmers that are learning about their whakapapa for the birth of Christ is slightly different from someone just milking cows with financial imperatives. Yeah, that's it. So what is that prosperity? What do those increased rural employment options mean from the standpoint of small and medium-sized businesses out on the landscape? The training opportunities for people who are growing up with access to land if they're young iwis or not so much access to land if they're young hipsters, partnership possibilities and new enterprise on the landscape. Let's like talk about that from maybe the grocery store world. Sure. So I saw it firsthand. We, I come from a city called Winnipeg, 800,000 people. Our province is double the size of New Zealand. We only have 1.3 million people. So it is a rural landscape. We'd work with over a hundred different farmers in our province and bring them in and move them through the supply chain to get them up to regenerative, organic. And the process in doing that, you would see layering start to happen, layering of different industries on that same farm as things went along. And when we brought our customers into that story, people are hungry for it. Everybody wants to know how I can help in this revitalization of the landscape, in this healing of the earth. How can I feel a part of it? There's a hunger out there. And when the consumers who are eating the food, we're all eaters. When we are a part of that story and that journey, it really gives a lot of extra push to it. But I would see as people move to regenerative industries, suddenly there's a meat processing plant on the land. The kids are doing chickens on the side. Suddenly there's layering of opportunity and a vibrancy that comes back to rural communities. So not just one pastor, a hoop house, an orchard. Oh, she wants it. Okay, sorry. Lot more enterprises stacked on top, one through in the other, working together, cycling the nutrients much more effectively between themselves and making more economic output per acre, more nutrition per acre, more soil health per acre, more microbes per acre, but also more money per acre because there's more bodies making more value. So, what can you question for our government men? Does this government have a... You have a mandate to see the increase of this work and to invite more innovators into this space and to partner more deliberately into what was the word, grow this sector. Do you not? Let's talk about that. Yeah, so I think the point that you just made around how do we get more people connected back into the land and how do we actually open up pathways for youth, which still feels weird saying that because I still kind of feel youth adjacent. But when you think about it, New Zealand is of the land and I think the good thing where community desires and consumerism is kind of going now is back actually to more connectedness. So people wanna know where the food is coming from. People wanna know and see authenticity in their organizations. Is there a consumer demand? Yes. Okay, sorry. Yeah, so the good thing is that's actually changing the way that the economy works from farming and from the primary industry. So it's actually opening up more opportunities for youth. If you look at the changes in technology, if you look at the changes in culture, that is a youth driven culture now. And if our rural communities are going to survive, that's going to come from the next generation and the generation after that. So we have to be involved, we have to have the conversation and we have to be future focused. So relatively cheap housing in rural areas, you cute server boys, come on over and let's co-work together. But can we talk actually just a little bit about the mapping of opportunities for learning, for sharing, for training, for transition, for succession, for success. How are we welcoming in this work and all those who we're working with? And like what's some of the work ahead in terms of mapping that network of resources that already exist here in Aotearoa and in the outside world and what some of that has been. I think it's about getting in the same room and talking together. That is the first step, getting everyone down from the hills. And that includes the consumers in the cities because they are the ones that often drive a lot of the trend and the food and they are the consumers. And I know that in New Zealand at the moment, from watching from afar, there is the rural urban divide starting to happen and I would like to see more of the young farmers from the next generation that are coming through that we need to enable. Being a little bit more respected as farmers and having a higher standing within society. So that first of all means going out and seeing who is out there. We've got many good people like BossDoc. The BossDoc brothers are doing apples. We've got some people in Hikarangi Enterprises just absolutely leading the way with the land use that the land that they've got and needing to bring their people back home in that process that got an economy to live on. We've got our dairy farmers who are doing young farmers but we've also got people that are living in isolation all around New Zealand at the moment. And I think that's kind of what I've heard echoing around the place is that farmers are in isolation. We see this through depression and through the high suicide rates that we've got. And then we've also got our humble farmers that are very full of humility that have got amazing ideas. They're watching their salad farm grow of pasture and they're seeing that it works but they're not quite feeling like they can share it with someone else because they're not putting tons of super phosphate or whatever it is onto the land. So it's about creating that safe community and I think that first mapping out and getting together is the first thing. Yeah, and I suppose off the back of that I think the really exciting thing is that what I'm seeing across the country and kind of what some of us work in this space kind of see and feel is that there's probably 10% plus farmers who already think in a, call it a biological or an ecological mindset that are actually doing things on their farm like that but often just in quite a initial away because they have that, you know, rural community that's super connected, super tight and we've got this kind of tool poppy thing which is as rife in rural communities as anywhere else and it's also rife across the entire sector. So we've got this, it feels to me and I'm playing with this idea that actually our sector is so connected that it actually promotes homogeneity and we tend to chop that down but the exciting thing there is that as this, you know, I'm just saying kind of, yeah, the flip side of that conversation is that these groups of farmers and others that they're connecting with that are just coming out of the woodwork, you know, it's an exponential growth curve and Mike Taitoko spoke to that a bit yesterday and the cool thing is that once we tip that balance because everybody is so connected and this is the interesting conversation with government around policy barriers and enabling things is actually once we tip that, it feels like that shift could be rapid and quite different perhaps to other countries around the world because of that. So yeah, it's that sort of social change lens which is just getting really exciting. So I also want to mention, without making the history lecture, you know, 1963, 1964 was the year that Māori moved from being a rural to urban, that was the flip side. So we've been more urban since 63, 64 and so part of the change and it didn't mean that we were disconnected in any way but we had to drive past white farms to our reserves and so now we've kind of got the farms back and so there's a lot of catch-up happening for our people so some of it doesn't mean that our people aren't in part of this kind of conversation but the transition is a big one back so most of our people are not in that space but they're spiritually also so the kind of functional stuff that we're describing is also part of the renaissance in terms of the catch-up in that space and so you mustn't leave us behind and otherwise it becomes, you know, the conversation of those who come from leafy suburbs and now leafy suburbs in rural areas and that's not being scathing, so we are catching up at the same time as we're determining what it is for us. And I can speak to that because this is me personally but I'd like to get behind EWI because I see that in the path to self-determination again and to having a place because there are a lot of answers to our dilemma that is sitting right next to me and his whole lineage and going forward too so I'd like to listen in that regard. Yeah. Yeah, the working together part of this, you know, we were doing a little, we had our farm hack session before yesterday and we were all doing kind of resource mapping, decentralized process of brainstorming, what already is here, who's connected to what, what opportunities are where and Savannah, there was a handsome, I wasn't as an abstract handsome surfer hipster, it was an actual one saying, well we don't know how to get access to land and Savannah said, well, you know, have you talked to the Marae, they have land. So what would it mean to be in cahoots from the beginning working together, not us versus them, landlord versus tenant, intergenerational tension, mom versus dad, you know, all these patriarchies and colonialisms and coercions that have been a part of our extraction project? What is it to be non-coercive with one another in cooperative accelerating circles of engagement and excitement? And she's one, this one has managed a lot of spreadsheets and complexity to know that all these products come together on the shelf. So hopefully you have some kind of synthesis because we are out of time. Oh, we have a field trip, you can announce that. Oh yes, you can announce that and you know about it. Thanks to Mike, where there's a field trip for going out in the field and talking in the paddock, talking, what do they say, outstanding in the field. If you'd like to come along and increase your embodied understanding of what is at stake, what is possible and what a spongy earth feels like that holds the moisture from the rain because of all the life in the soil and you wanna see on the faces of the people who are caring for the animals that benefit from that health in person and feel it in your personhood and then chat and stuff and have tea. We're gonna do it all together. And also one of the big asks we have in this work of mapping out everything that already exists in the New Zealand ecosystem of Regen Ag for some gas money and some paying girls to do admin and men also, to do admin and web presence. So those of you who can, if you wanna make a donation to a charity which we will choose upon receipt of that gift, we'd like to raise 20 grand to accelerate this work for youth entrance, for transition, for regenerative ag in New Zealand and the people on this stage are willing to put in time and also the other crew that we worked with in all of our workshop sessions. We already have 17 pages. 9 a.m. from the valley and I have a clipboard. You gotta put your name on the list and then we will have our total list of names sign up after lunch at the latest today. Mike, it's tomorrow. Just to repeat, he said his goal is 100% regenerative agriculture in New Zealand by 2025. And can I also say that carbon is the big hot topic. We've got climate AKL happening in Auckland soon and soil holds a lot of that carbon and we have a lot of soil in New Zealand. So we're all speaking the same goal. See you there.