 security and likelihoods while minimising the environmental footprint of rice production. But what do we mean by environmental footprint? In fact, I think in phase two we might change the wording a bit. So I think it's given Sarah a few sleepless nights trying to see how we can get good indicators of that. But basically it's looking at, given we've got a certain set of inputs, which are water, fertiliser, fuel, labour, etc. What are the issues if we have too high a use of these of these ticket inputs in terms of pollution? Greenhouse gas emissions, for example, lost by a diversity, health impacts, how much land will be needed to offset that, to balance that? And of course we need to take into account one of the beneficial outputs. So this is what the ecosystem services provided by rice production. And they were looking at food production, obviously, and also the impact on livelihoods in the rural sector in those countries. And you've probably seen over the past two months these banners, hopefully you've all seen them, the banners outside here at Erie. And these banners were initially the idea was linked with the World Environment Day on June the 5th, but also in the Hall of June in the Philippines is supposed to be the sort of the environmental month. And there was certainly a strong presence of Corrie Gap associated with rolling out this story of promoting Erie's environmental stewardship. So we're promoting it, but we still want to know what are the indicators as well as making good progress along these lines. And this is where Sarah comes in. And when Sarah began looking at this in 2013 and she had some meetings with our colleagues from different countries, I think there were over 50, I think Sarah, different indicators that were identified in these different workshops. It's now been collapsed down to 12. This is part of the Sustainable Rice Platform and the Initiatives with the United Nations Environment Program. And of those 12, there's certainly some in the social aspects such as women's empowerment, where we are getting some indication of data on that, but worker health and safety and child labour, and to a degree food safety, they're not issues that we really are monitoring that closely. But when it comes to the other indicators, these are ones that we are certainly very interested in. We're looking at the, as Maddie says, triple bottom line. So the economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainability. And it's these indicators that now we're trying to see how we can, what sort of data is required to be able to give us a good measure of how we're tracking from an environmental perspective. And so with Corrie Gap, there's been quite a lot of effort on the research farm here over the last two years. And that provides a sort of baseline survey data. And on the on-farm experiments also then enables to validate what is happening with those different indicators, and perhaps what we're not measuring or which we cannot measure at the moment. And then at the landscape level, this is mainly on-farm, and so at a field level. And at the landscape level, we're looking at impacts on water and soil quality. One of the indicators that wasn't shown in those 12 indicators is biodiversity. And this is something which is interesting, we're talking to one of our colleagues from Kellogg who was very much involved with SRP. When we're saying, okay, are we ready to roll out a biodiversity indicator? The answer is probably not yet. We don't really know specifically how the indicator species, one of the things we should be measuring. But the point he made was it's so important to show that at least we are beginning that process. Because public perceptions, they want to know, are we treating biodiversity seriously or not? And so we've had a project with a PhD student, Richard, who I think some of you would have come across over the last three or four years, is currently writing up. And he was looking at the bird communities in the Philippines, looking at AWD versus continuous flooding. And also during his PhD, there was an initiative by the government of the Philippines to look at trying to grow in certain areas five crops in two years. And so he looked at what was happening, what that mean in terms of the bird communities? We had two crops per year versus five crops in two years. That data has still been analysed and certainly Alex and I, who is supervisors, will be very keen to see that come out in the next six months. We're also, Bu Yong and his group of building on work from Kaili Yong and from Thunbao Hogan and looking at predator guilds of insect pests and the responses to pesticide use. And there's some work on amphibians. And with amphibians, we're linked with Northern Arizona University with Professor Catherine Proper and her PhD student, Molly, who was here for a couple months recently. We will be back again in the next couple of years from about May through August during the monsoon season. And she's been looking at amphibians as indicators of pesticide effects on the aquatic physiology of amphibians. What is it? Can we get measures on variables that drive the amphibian biodiversity and abundance within the rice paddies? And also, are the amphibians also effective consumers of rice paddy pests? So she's looking at the diet of the different frogs and toads. With this here, most of that work will be done on the tadpoles where you get a much clearer measure of what's happening. And there's Molly and so you'll probably run across to it next year. Understanding the key players and the factors involved in the value chain. So there's a few slides on that and to give you a flavor. And so I'm trying to give you a flavor of what we're doing. The learning alliance. This is works being led by Martin Goumet and Rhianne Colloy. And they've been looking at using this approach, decision analysis approach, which brings in together different actors in the value chain. So it looks at support, use of technologies, one of the best major practices and its adoption. And it's looking at how we can have joint learning across the different stakeholders. So these stakeholders would include not only the farmers and also government officials, but also millers, traders and millers traders and different types of traders. We've got export traders and local traders. So it's an iterative process. It's flexible and adaptable. And we're looking at targeting change. We're going for a planning process. What is the actions that can overcome certain identified blockages in terms of progress, reflect and capture that and go through that process again. And we've been implementing this in Myanmar, in Vietnam, in Thailand and in different contexts. In Myanmar, it's something which Martin has done before in Cambodia, for example. It's an ADB project where it's focusing primarily on some of the post-harvest aspects. And so that has proved quite successful. But here in Vietnam and Thailand, try to apply that learning alliance approach where they're thinking more about issues to do with sustainability and sharing of resources. So it's quite a learning exercise and something which is ongoing. Matty and Peter have been looking at analysis of the value chain Vietnam. And for those who sat in on Matty's talk yesterday, during the Board of Trustees meeting, then I decided I didn't need to have Timmy's slides because Matty gave an excellent overview yesterday. But basically, we're looking at the rice value chains and the Mekong Delta. And they are changing rapidly at the moment, particularly in terms of the presence of service providers. And at the national level, the Vietnamese government are now focusing on quality rather than quantity and seeing what that means in relation to their export market. And looking, they're also interested in one of the changing of the factors that may influence the feedback in relation to the domestic consumption. One of the people preferring in terms of their purchase of rice and how this all links to sustainability. And this is sort of a summary slide of a lot of work. And one of the questions that have been asked is, can other stakeholders benefit from sustainable farming practices? So if we work closely with farmer cooperatives and farmer groups, and they are adopting what we see as best practice, which is also environmentally sustainable or sustainable in terms of income, then we can see that, yes, exporters see benefit in controlling production processes and empowering farmers. And the international local consumers are demanding sustainable practices. On the other side of the equation in terms of what we need to think about a bit more is the, there's a more, how we can get a greater focus and high quality, particularly in the farmer groups and how well the farmer groups can get paid a premium for having that focus. The health and safety aspects of what is being marketed. It's interesting, traceability is something which has been demanded by consumers. And that's something which now is happening in Thailand, where they start to introduce the, they can just do a little quick scan and you can get an idea of where the rice has grown, but it's still a very early stage. And supermarkets seem to be drivers of change and there's a familiarity between them. Once the consumers come more familiar with products, then they understand more about what's happening. And there's some information too in terms of Matty and Peter try to understand one of the consumers willing to pay in terms of their premium price for these better products. So where next? We want to render a new site in Myanmar. So at the moment there's Sadeer and Rami Kabungan and Yomi Trey are over and looking at this site and planning for the next field season. We want to still continue this marriage of ecological footprint and closing the yield gaps. So we're trying to see how we can use the field calculator. And also how we can get the field calculator to be used by our partners. And there was a workshop held just two weeks ago, here at Uri, and we had participants from six of the countries that we worked with looking at that. We want to document some success stories, particularly that's happening in South Sumatra, Guangdong and Kentu. This is a busy slide because Sarah will be very busy over the next 18 months through the end of phase one. So I won't go through it too much in terms of detail but you can see that now we have these indicators pretty well described, the 12 indicators of which nine of those we're going to get data upon. Then it's a matter of going and looking at collecting that data, looking at further development of the field calculator and also the work that she's doing that really does at that stage now where we're begging to be published because the overview, the advances that are happening here does put us ahead of the game, particularly in terms of the rice systems. Sustainability, the food value chain work that Matty and Pedro will be involved with looking at a set of sustainability metrics and develop those, fine tune those, identify the government systems and internalise the incentives for sustainability promoting these government systems and looking at equity as part of the social sustainability and seeing how that can link through to the value chain level. So this is just a really brief snapshot of some of the activities that they'll be doing through until the end of phase one. And as I mentioned, documentation of key findings is so important and I come across this quote and sometimes it rings a bit too true. We think about squirrels, autumn's coming, where can I bury the work that I've been doing. And so we'll have to do better than the squirrels and we're planning to do so with our publications and we've already had a number of publications come out this year and next year will be an opportunity to consolidate that. We have an external review of phase one and that will happen in December. So the review team will be here on December 1st and 2nd. And Karen Broga is probably known to many of you. She's with Phil Rice and she's in Development Communication. She's one of the reviewers and Ian Willett from Australia is the second reviewer and Ian Willett is a background in water and agronomy and soil. That review team will report back in February, our next annual meeting in Job Jakarta. And after we get that report, then STC will invite us to develop the second phase. But STC has already budgeted for a second phase. And the second phase is about $5 million and so we are at a stage now thinking and developing that and we had say two weeks ago a two day workshop here before the other workshop where we had our collaborators and we'll start to think about what should be the way ahead for phase two. So we're at this very early stage of our thinking for phase two which is another four year project from 2017 to 2020. This is the team of players that we've got in phase one obviously they've done an excellent job of looking to carry that through into phase two. But if anyone's interested in getting involved in phase two like Bert Collard has already made it very clear that he would like to see one of the particular varieties being used in our main hubs and study sites and can he help us advise on whether we can improve upon that. So it's very important to get that sort of input and feedback. So in conclusion we've had strong progress across a very, very diverse array of disciplines. We've had excellent buy-in by our NAS partners and that led to strong local champions in each country and this is so essential for the sort of project that we're doing. The early results and reduction of your gaps are exciting but we still need to understand more about what is leading to these yield gaps. And that's where the social economic approach with Maddie's is working closely now with Alex to see if they can disentangle that from the data that we already have. Impressive progress towards ecological sustainable production I can't hope to emphasise by having the set of clearly defined indicators that's where well well advanced than what we were two or three years ago. The engagement of more actors via the learning alliance is a key to see how we engage more particularly of the private sector but also of government government partners, the extension, the scientists in country. Impressive progress exploring the rice value chain, the work that Peter and Matthew are doing and we're well positioned phase two in the next, well from 2017 onwards. Thank you. I think we're going to get to projects. Does anybody have any questions they'd like to ask? One of the novel aspects of the project is bringing the field calculator to the table to enable users to pre-test various recommendations. So if we look at the possible clients going from researchers, extension leaders, managers up to policy makers where do you think that's a real interesting view? Yeah it's a good question and certainly we've had a lot of interest from our counterparts in country and they part of the interest is they see not only does it help with when it comes to working with our extension counterparts and training trainers but also they see it as can provide particularly that's the spider diagram approach provides a picture which policy makers can absorb. So provides brings that together in a format which is so important to be able to present to the policy makers. So I think it's at all those different levels. Now when I'm answering these questions I'll be looking across to the other people involved in curriculum because the whole idea was this presentation is give you an introduction of what we've been doing over the last two or three years and hopefully open up opportunities for discussion with the various people who are involved in the different aspects of what we're doing. Very nice brand to very nice overview. Something I might have missed but what are the biggest agronomic sort of interventions that seem to be having a bigger impact on reducing yield gaps. Is there something specific? I mean I know there's a lot of things that seem to be adding up together but I'm really curious about what management has you know what effect that has had and where do you see it going. Okay so one of the clear messages that we had from the donor is that they didn't want to see component technologies. That was higher RC where we had different work groups that were looking at fertilizer management looking at water management pesticide or pest management etc. So they wanted to look at a situation where we're bringing together the best practices. And that's what we've been doing but so we're doing that within the national scheme. So we're looking at one must do five reductions for example in Vietnam. One must do is quality seed. The reductions is the amount of seed is the amount of pesticide, the amount of fertilizer. Well fertilizer is more the timeliness of its application, the amount of water use and also the post harvest losses. That's what they're trying to reduce. But looking at that we're also seeing within that particular set what else can we add. And so one of the two initiatives for example has come out of Martin Gummitt's group. Not so much of Vietnam but for the other countries. One is Solar Bubble Dryer. So that's a new initiative. It's something which is certainly generate lots of interest in Myanmar and also in South Sumatra in Kalamantan. And also particularly when they're looking at in Vietnam and elsewhere for solidation and small farmer large fields is use of laser levelling. And so there are things that we would add to that. But if you're looking at places like South Sumatra or in the OE Delta in Myanmar there they're not ready for that sort of technology as yet. So just using the drum seeder because labour is one of the major factors that we come up with interview farmers. The cost of labour. And so where they've been transplanting in the past they're converted to direct seeding finding lots of problems of weeds and other things and pests in general. And so the drum seeder is a good compromise for them. And in fact in Thailand they're now a farmer group there is mechanised the drum seeder. They're put onto the back of a tractor and they're dragging along. So it's some of those practices where we're trying to add to what is already recognised as being the best practice but seeing how we can add again to that. And it's looking at those opportunities. But certainly just even when there are best practices when you look at GAP if you ask the farmers yes we're rolling out best practice but when we then implement what we see as being Moc Phai Nam Giang we're still getting this increase in profit. So it's and there is some analysis that can be done as underway at the moment where we can try and hold certain factors constant and see which one could be contributing the most to the yield gap differential. And that's where we've got the data set there. We're going to compare the top 10% or maybe the top 20% aisle with what's happening with the other farmer groups. And what are they doing differently? And that analysis is underway. Great, this is related. I was just interested in the slides showing the yield gaps. And in Indonesia the significantly higher level of achievement by the best farmers compared to even some of the other sites that were on the slide. Any way of accounting for that significant higher level. Certainly in some of these places too we have taken into account that the farmers will have another source of income. And so some farmers will be spending more attention whereas as just sort of just put the seed in and walk away and do the minimum amount. We're trying to understand that there's a huge yield gap, a huge variation across fields in the same small location. One of the reasons could be the different crop that planting in the third season some are growing a third rice crop, some are growing maize or legumes. There's a huge variation in fertiliser use especially. And the field sizes range and they're quite small field sizes so that can have a big effect on the conversion of the yield to hectares. Thanks for the presentation very well. Corry Gap goes into the country and looks at the national program such as one must do five productions. Do we then take, if we see some missing from the best practice, do we then take that technology and what sort of opportunities are there to influence what we obviously have very quick connections in the national program so how does Corry Gap influence? That's precisely what we do do. And certainly like the post harvest is an interesting one and I'm sure Martin could talk a bit about that but it's also looking at what are the opportunities and given the current practices and what are they missing out on. Now something like Myanmar obviously is quite an open book so there we're bringing across the technologies and so Dona has been involved with work in the Ayawari Delta with the UN funded project and Romney Lagus is over there as well and so there it's like when Dona first went there Shadow's plans to throw stuff out and the first question they had was weeds are a big issue what do we do and we didn't know what weeds they were so we spent this a season trying to characterize that and so it does depend you can't sort of be that's the adaptive research is that we are responding to what the needs are. So they have a best practice of national level. Indonesia for example has this integrated crop management which is this thick, their booklet but a lot of the action is focused on variety of quality and integrated pest management and that's basically it trying to promote things like alternative wedding and drawing, water management and Roland has been very much involved in other work looking at trying to promote the rice crop manager in terms of fertiliser, the timing of use and Roland is now working with Verenda in Sri Lanka to see how we bring that in as well. Grant thanks very much for that presentation. We see Corrigat and formerly the IRRC leading into that very good Nari's partnerships that have been cultivated. We look at Cure and we see the consortium and we see a very good set of partnerships that have been built over the years with national governments, different divisions etc Strassa we have a different type of model but a very good relationship in terms of investments like government etc and we have a project like CISA where we've finished two phases and the whole engagement of partnerships in moving forward has struggled tremendously these are all examples within the one institute and I was wondering how do we as an institute, suggestions and maybe David wants to comment learn from each other so that best practices are able to be used, better practices have more chances of success etc as we move forward. Open questions. Yeah and I think it's a very good question and we've thought about that a fair bit. Now one of the advantages I suppose are coming into say a consortium that's been going for, well when I first arrived, been going for nine years, nine years