 All right, welcome everybody. This is our third deep dive webinar for the ecosystem restoration camps foundation Today we have the pleasure. It's gonna be a lot of fun and we're gonna learn a lot of having Patrick verms He's the senior science advisor for the world agroforestry center And he's also on the advisory council for the ecosystem restoration camps foundation. How you doing today Patrick? I'm doing absolutely great. It's a lovely evening here in Western Europe, and I hope it's just as nice as it is Over where you guys are. It's a it's a lovely late morning in Southwest Oregon here. Yeah, all right So, you know, I'm keeping coffee having coffee to keep awake, and I guess you're having coffee to wake up So yeah, I had my coffee. I just stand hydrated All right. All right. Good So shall I start? I think so. Yeah Wonderful. Well, thank you very much Timothy and thanks for the introduction now guys What I'm going to do today is give you some introduction to something Which I think is really the most important things in slice bread Which is an understanding of how to manage landscapes by taking all of the elements into account Which is like we're forestry and how that illustrates the principle of Intelligence collaborating and I'll be talking a little bit further about that as well. So but before I start maybe it's useful if I Explain who it is we are and we are a research center and there's 15 of these things around the world They're called a consultative group for international agricultural research And we are the one that looks at agroforestry systems and we've got brothers and sisters that do all sorts of things You may have heard and indeed hated some of our Cousins like the International Rice Research Institute which Engineered the Golden Rice or CIMMIT where Norman Borlau the father of the Green Revolution Used to work all of these are CG centers now We we've got about 550 scientists and other staff and we look at the role of trees in agricultural landscapes And we use this research to advance better policies and practices that benefit the poor in the environment And what does that mean in practice? Well, it means that when we look at things we always look at them from the perspective of livelihoods economics Profitability why because you cannot convince a land owner or a land manager Be it a rancher or a farmer or a forest or somebody else to do something that goes against their economic interest It's got to help their livelihoods be successful Only after you've guaranteed that can you move on to the next thing which is to ensure that all of this becomes also ecologically perspective that these Land-use patterns are patterns that make sense from an economic and an ecological perspective And there's a reason why we need to do that and that's because agriculture look that broadly is an absolute disaster It's one-third of global emissions. It's 50% of global employment It's two-thirds of global land use and it's three-quarters of global freshwater use It's a giant consumer resources and a massive source of pollution But it's a rounding error when it comes to the economy There's something wrong there and that's what we have to fix Now the reason we have to fix it is pretty obvious if you're interested in land degradation is a Universal issue and it's not just an issue in these places Which we picture as being like this Niger in the 1980s where the land has been so exhausted Now nothing can grow in it anymore But also in these places in the America Midwest and the black earth of Ukraine and the Brazilian Serrano All places on which the globe now depends to generate the very limited number of crops that it needs to feed itself and That are being subjected to the best that modern industrial Agricultural technology can provide these places are just as much at risk of land degradation as the poor countries of the African Sahel where people are merely trying to survive and to make life even a little bit more difficult This is not even the best that we can do within 30 years or so We've got to more or less double the amount of available food, right? Now you could argue with that we need to add 30% or 80% of it Whether you get better at saving food before it rots and putting it on people's place Whether you get better at training consumers to eat the food they buy instead of putting it in the bin But by and large your consensus seems to be that we've got a double world food production within 30 years Now you've got to do that while the planet is changing and changing more rapidly than it has changed in millions of years So you've got to make the entire system more resistant to extreme weather's and by the way remember that 30% of emissions Well, it would be great if it could reduce that as well Now and you have to do all that in a context in which certain things just aren't changing for example sub-Saharan Africa The place which still has the fastest population growth rate in the world The place that is has one country Nigeria that is only three times the size of France But it's going to have more people than China or India by the end of this century if nothing changes Well that place has not seen any increases in its serial yields and that is because People don't know what to do The population is rising really rapidly most of them are smallholder farmers the old times practices they use like following They cannot use anymore because you know, it's easy when they have a small village and a lot of land You leave a piece of land to rest for 20 years you come back It's great, but when everything is is people and in the Sahel the population density in some areas as high as it is in Holland then you've got to farm the same soil every single year And so your fertility is dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping So where are you going to get that from what industry tells you that this is going to be a solution fertilizers bags of this stuff? Yeah, well, you know African soils are exhausted soils exhausted soils tend to be very acidic soils Here's an example from Zambia That's a soil map of Zambia and it shows you how acidic Zambian soils are now The agriculturalists amongst you will know that as soils become more acidic plants have a greater difficulty in picking up nutrients from that soil and Here is where the majority of Zambian soils are they are so acidic But apart from iron almost nothing gets picked up you put fertilizer on that soil You might as well burn money in a barrel. It's got about the same effect So what could you do you could do what the Brazilians have done you pee Let's line the shit out of that soil and correct the pH and put lots of fertilizer in and have vast machines and farms the sizes of Small countries and we can feed the world. Yeah, right. This is Zambia These are every single metal roads outside of the cities in a country, which is absolutely huge What do the other roads look like? Well, they tend to look like this Good luck getting a truck with fertilizer or lime across that the costs of getting inputs to farms is horrendous And by the way the cost of getting farm produce to the cities is horrendous as well Which is why in Lusaka supermarkets you find South African tomatoes rather than tomatoes growing in Zambia 50 kilometers away And this problem is compounded by the fact that the African continent is absolutely humongous It's the size of China the US Europe and India put together the United States the most powerful country in earth It's just the size of West African Sahel. It's an enormous continent So where's that fertility going to come from it's going to come from trees and trees do it in all sorts of ways in the Left you have a system in Ethiopia It's like an acacia called fight herbia albida and a cereal crop called teff on the right You have a multi cropping system in Sumatra with rubber trees and bananas and coffee and cacao and there's some maize and there's some rice And there's timber trees and there's honey and there's pepper vines and cardamom and all sorts of things growing in there And farmers have known this for a long time now with remote sensing you can do things like this You can measure where are the trees on farms and remove all the trees that grow in forests And if you look at that map, you notice a pattern and keep that pattern in your mind as I switch to the next slide This is a slide that shows human population densities and this is the slide that shows trees on farm They are always together wherever there are trees on farms There are people or wherever you have people you have trees on farms and indeed the amount of trees on farms is Increasing the better we look this is a study we published in nature last year And it shows that 43% of all agricultural land globally has at least 10% tree cover 43% almost half of the land on the planet is already agroforestry in one way or another and the reason for that is simple It's because trees work you don't just plant them like a forest of wood and then wait 30 years to cut them down and sell the timber You put them to work long before you do that Here's an example of the kind of work they do. This is also data from Zambia And what you see in blue is conservation agriculture with a fertilizer tree in the guminous tree that fixes nitrogen called gliricidia and what you see in red is conservation agriculture without any trees at all but with fertilizer and what you see in green is conservation agriculture without trees and without fertilizer and it's on different soil types in Zambia and what you see is that on most soil types the trees are doing as well as the fertilizer and Always much better than no fertilizer and these effects you see everywhere Which is why agroforestry is universal you see it in temperate zones You see it in arid zones and humid zones. You even see it in the Arctic You see it in Central America in coffee systems with timber if you ever fly from Europe to India You will spend hours gazing at this kind of landscape. These are windbreaks Established by the Soviet Union around these large fields If you are Somebody who likes to pamper yourself perhaps you have shea butter products in your bathroom Well, this is the kind of landscape that the shea butter comes from It's an agroforestry system for those shear trees under which you're growing cereals and then you have the animals eat the stovet Here this gentleman in Uganda. He's growing bananas He's growing coffee and what you see in the foreground is vanilla pods growing on very heavily pruned Latrofa another agroforestry system Here is Europe's biggest agroforestry system. It's reindeer herding in the far north and Here is my favorite all palm plantation of all times it's one we're running in Brazil and I can guarantee you that there's all palm in there You can see a few palms and there but there's so much else going on there And that system alone produces almost twice as much oil as a monocrop oil palm plantation plus everything else that's happening in there It also happens in industrialized systems This picture was taken in France and what you have there is poplars growing together with wheat or you have these really complex systems There are humid tropic systems You have them in Indonesia and Central Africa in the Amazon and these systems are so extraordinarily Complicated and looks so strange to our western eyes that I can guarantee you could walk straight through them and have no idea You're on a farm but think you're in a rainforest and yet they produce a bounty of stuff And here is is maybe the most amusing agroforestry system I know the crop is the coconuts and the agroforestry component are the gliricidia trees these heavily copious trees You see in the middle they are very good nitrogen fixes So what you do is you copy stem you strip off the leaves and leave them for the coconuts And you take the branches which you bundle together and in this particular case They are being sold to a nearby electricity power plant, which is burning biomass And if you happen to be a gourmet then you will enjoy your champagne These are the cork trees from which the champagne corks come from and you will perhaps enjoy that with a lovely slice of Perfectly aged pata negra ham and that comes from those pigs who are eating the acorns of those trees Here amongst Mon Calimanjaro You have complex multi starter gardens with coffins bananas card amongst and much else and here in Zambia You have an industrial semi sorry Yes, an industrial agricultural system using fight herbia another leguminous tree with with maize and in some of the porous Patches of land on earth like in Niger what you see is sorghum and millet growing with these fight herbia albedos That's the green trees you see on there and fruit trees around the villages Those are the the dark red trees you see at the top right of the slide So everywhere in the world from the arctic to the semi desert from mountains to plains from humid areas to dry areas From rich places to poor places Farmers use trees Why is that? Tell everybody we've had a lot of new people come in I just wanted everybody to start thinking of questions I wanted to remind everybody and people that just came that at the end We're gonna have a question and answer session like we do for about a half hour So as you think of questions, you can type them into that Q&A box at the bottom of your screen I just started sorry to interrupt I just want to make sure we go a lot of good questions No, no worries at all and I very much look forward to your questions everybody and I'm going to look at the Q&A box after the presentation is over and Well, I guess I'll just continue from here on So the question is why why the why have farmers around the world in different cultures and different environments? All come to the conclusion that having trees in your field is a better idea than not having trees in your field and if you start looking at it It's pretty obvious But an obvious thing is trees have deep roots and crops don't have deep roots So trees can pump nutrients up from deep soil horizons and then make these nutrients available to the crops simply through the natural process of leaf and twig fall these leaves and twigs land on the soil surface where they mineralize and Hey presto, you've got nutrition available for your crop Another pretty obvious thing is is a water cycle buffering Trees are actually giant rain cashing devices these branches capture all of the incipient rainfall and They root it along the trunk and down into the soil Which has been opened up thanks to the tree roots and so the water gets stored under the ground where it becomes available Later on if there's a dry spell to your crops It's also a much better system when it comes to the use of sunlight and you know Science is good, but sometimes takes science takes a while the horizontal line here Is 40 years long this experiment was run by French scientists for 40 years And all they did year in year out was to measure one variable How much sunlight is used by the experimental plot and on the left you have an agricultural plot a wheat plot In the middle you have a freshly planted walnut forest and on the right you have an agroforestry system combining wheat and Walnut and what you see on the left is that in the agricultural system About 70 to 75 percent of the sunlight is wasted Because it's a winter crop so you plant it in late summer and you harvest it in late spring and In practical terms that means that when it's really really sunny in Europe. There's nothing growing on your land The in the middle the forest system behaves much as you would expect So as the seedlings are small most of the sunlight is wasted But the trees grow fairly rapidly and by the time they're about 20 years old their crowns have fully developed and they are Absorbing about 60% of the incipient sunlight. They're not absorbing more because it's a deciduous tree It loses its leaves around October and walnut gets its leaves quite late in the season Around May late May so a lot of sunlight is wasted there as well Now look at the right in the agroforestry system and notice that the black area which shows wasted sunlight Over that 40-year period is simply smaller. It wastes less sunlight than either the agriculture or then the forestry system Trees and crops have learned to get along with each other the tree Influences the crop the crop influences the tree. How does the crop influence the tree? Well, the most obvious way is that it pushes the tree roots downwards Because there's no room close to the surface to send your roots sideways and what does that mean? Here's another experiment done in France on the left there you have a forest on the right You have an agroforest and what these two charts show is the amount of rootlets by depth. So the vertical axis is depth so from zero to four meters and Horizontal axis is the rootlet density You notice that in the forestry system your roots are much closer to the surface than in the agroforestry system Which means that when a drought is coming in the forestry system you tree stops growing It just can't get the water it needs anymore Whereas in the agroforestry system it just goes hey, hey, I don't care my roots are down and it keeps on growing Once you understand that you understand the giant lie that most industrial agriculture is telling you here's an example Look at that gorgeous picture It is taken from the website of one of the big ag input sellers it shows a Land of bounty it's a kind of picture a priest would use in a church to illustrate a story from the Bible and yet all I see is a temperate zone system in Summer when sunlight is 16 hours of the day and in which there's a fair amount of rain and there is no Biological activity. There is no photosynthesis anymore. It might as well be a desert at least here When you're harvesting your wheat You still have trees that are going to be synthesizing photosynthesizing biomass for another three to four months and Because of all of these effects there is a fundamental concept a fundamental number Which is always higher than one and that's the land equivalency ratio the land equivalency ratio is Simply the amount of monocrop agriculture the green Square or rectangle rather and the amount of monocrop forestry the orange rectangle that you need to achieve the same productivity as one unit of agroforestry and in this fictitious example The land equivalency ratio is zero point six plus zero point eight so one point four So you get forty percent more productivity from mixing things up than you do if you Split them and the evidence is there. That's a model, but here is a real-life example It's a poplar and winter wheat system and What you see is in green that the productivity of the trees is going up and in brown that the Productivity of the wheat is going down as time progresses and as the tree crowns are hogging more and more of the resources In blue at the top is the land equivalency ratio year after year And what you see is that at the end when you are ready to harvest your trees? The land equivalency ratio is one point thirty four thirty four percent more productivity Simply by mixing things up in a number of experiments that have been done in Walnut Street and winter cereals where the walnuts on 40 year rotations You get the land equivalency ratios between one point four and one point six 40 to 60 percent more productivity now the last time I checked the website of the input salesman They were print trumpeting productivity increases of three or four or five percent Thanks to their latest seeds or their latest fertilizers here simply by mixing things up We are getting almost ten times higher productivity increases and you know what the most beautiful thing about it is You don't even need trees. You could even do it with solar panels as in this system where you have solar panels on these On these pylons and you have a vegetable production under it And that's been measured to have a land equivalency ratio of one point three to one point seven so again, this is an experiment that was done in France they're quite active and What is happening there now is that farmers are beginning to tweak and if they're putting the The panels down they are adding either animals or horticulture under them Lots of examples from around the world Here's an example for one of the poorest parts of the world Mali maize and cow peas together boom 47% higher productivity. This is in Java intercropping teak and maize 90% more productivity Here's my famous Brazilian oil palm production again. That's just the oil in green in red is the monocrop and Remember you have everything else as well bananas a chai coffee and cacao and Here is an example from Malawi. This is not a test This is simply for measuring farmers fields And so what we did was to the sampling frequencies the number of fields where we measured the yield and we divided What we measured to four classes the first is maize without anything no fertilizer no trees and that particular growing season They got 1.3 tons per hectare The next line is maize with fertilizers and first ma, Malawi has a fertilizer subsidy program So lots of farmers get free fertilizers, which is why so many fields had some fertilizer on it And yeah, you get an improvement. It's 1.7 tons So it's 40% the 400 kg more than if you don't use anything But compare that to the third line maize with fertilizer trees no fertilizer just fertilizer trees There they got three tons per hectare almost double what you get with fertilizer And the clue because fertilizer is free or cheap farmers are using it even when they have fertilizer trees That's the last line and it's about the same productivity. There's no statistical difference in practical terms in that particular agricultural system Fertilizer is totally useless as long as you have trees and trees perform much better than fertilizer If you don't have anything so your choice of the farmer always ought to be to plant some trees Same thing in France. I'm not going to go through this in detail Except to say that this guy who was an obstreperous or coot when I met him was a Pioneer and he was a pioneer because in Europe the common agricultural policy penalized you if you put trees in your fields So this guy planted his agroforestry system 35 you well, it's a bit old enough 38 years ago So at a time when it not only did he not get any subsidies But when he lost subsidies for putting trees in his fields along the principles of I don't care what Europe tells me He made plenty of mistakes the agroforestry amongst you will see that the lines are too close together His machine is running half on empty when it's going back The trees have not been proved properly enough so that the bowl of the tree is too low So he's losing money that way but despite all that when he harvested his crop of walnut Which coincided with him going into retirement. He got himself a nice little bonus of two million euros When I met him he had a twinkle in his eye and he asked me one very simple question Patrick Ferrari or Lamborghini Now that is a nice place to be when you're a farmer His daughter took over the management of the farm and she's putting trees on the remaining hectares that have no trees And of course replanting here Here is a less anecdotal and more measured example. It's a short rotation copies for bioenergy and Rotation mostly wheat in the alleys and here are the results. They have a land equivalency ratio of 1.43 and sometimes The land equivalency ratio is much much higher in this particular case The land equivalency ratio is actually infinite because in this landscape in the 1980s Nothing could grow in this environment You have one rainy season lasting four to six weeks when a lot of water falls And then you have ten months of daytime temperatures in the 35 to 40 degrees Celsius range without any rainfall at all You can't grow crops in that environment. It's too harsh But you can when you have trees These are these five herb your trees. We love them because they have a reverse phenology They lose their leaves at the beginning of the rainy season, which is why they look gray in this picture all these lovely little leaves filled with nutrients land on the soil surface and Help to grow crops and today that region is growing. This is all data. We have fresh data now It's about 10 million hectares of agroforestry park lands out there now And it's generating between one and two million tons more cereals than before Including and I stress this in drought years and that's why in the development world When the great and the good of development look at everything that you could do to improve agricultural productivity The things that are greatest for production for resilience and for mitigation are always things that involve trees and of course You get better performance when you have more species now Farmers who do this well always have one thing in common They are extraordinary scientists and I'd like to introduce one here Sebastian Scott. He's a Zambian farmer He's a white man as you can see and he is Uniquely enough a small holder. He's got two hectares and he has spent the last 20 years Performing and improving a management system there that involves no inputs and that involves no machinery In order to demonstrate it to other farmers who can apply to their own thing And what you see there is this maze in an environment, which normally maze is a small Sickly green yellowish plants that produces very little and the reason why it's so productive is Because he's mixed it up to a much larger extent and I'm going to spend a few minutes explaining the way his system works Because it's such a beautiful illustration of how you can mix trees and crops and animals together to achieve enormous productivity gates So here's this first rotation He's got three alleys and the alleys are bounded by pigeon peas and in the first alley He's got ground nuts in the second alley He's got maze climbing beans and pumpkins and in the third alley He's got soybeans and these alleys are quite narrow the the space for the crops is only about five to six meters They're the reason for that so he's harvesting from His first rotation and of course he's getting maze beans pumpkins soybeans ground nuts and pigeon peas But then is where it gets interesting This is the only farmer I've ever met who told me that he is managing and protecting his Weed seed bank. Yes, you heard me right his weed seed bank Because after harvest he's letting the weeds run riot in those alleys and Then he's sending in his livestock and the livestock is eating all of those weeds And it's also stripping the pigeon pea of all of its leaves the pigeon pea leaves are high in nitrogen so it's excellent for the four animals and at the end of that process what you end up with is beautifully manure soil without weeds and with Empty boughs of bear boughs of pigeon pea So in addition to his vegetable products He of course got some milk and some meat now the second season what happens the He is taking Waiting for the pigeon peas to come into the first flush of their leaves at the beginning of the rainy season He then copies us the pigeon pea right down to the ground and carries those branches of pigeon pea and lays them down onto the alley Where the ground nuts was previously growing and where he's now going to grow maize and that by the way It's why the alleys are so narrow because poor African smallholders have no machines So all the labor is done by hand and if you have to carry all of those freshly cut boughs Along distance you're not going to do it But this way the maximum carrying distance is 10 meters Why does it put it all onto the land that used to have ground nuts? Because both soy beans and ground nuts are legumes and if you were to over fertilize The alleys in which you're going to put your soybeans and your legume and your ground nuts You're going to get the lazy nodular effect So it's not much use but the maze is very hungry and therefore you put all of the pigeon pea onto your maze the pigeon pea then grows back Your soybeans and your ground nuts and your maize and your climbing beans and so on are growing Now with this system. He's getting close to 10 tons of maize per hectare of land and Everything else as well No inputs apart from the animal manure. It's pretty extraordinary wouldn't you say and that's why we know That agroforestry systems are so productive here is an example from Indonesia from Sumatra on the left You have a rubber plantation It could be any size because it's easy to manage you need one manager and a bunch of slaves to spray the Pesticides and it could be a thousand hectares five thousand hectares ten thousand hectares Which is why alligars and generals love it by the way easy to manage easy to program into a spreadsheet on the right Is a dam are agroforest with all of these different things going on in the middle level you can see Yeah, you can see it here this layer is rubber So you have a lot of rubber going on in there as well But you have all sorts of other things as well. You've got your bananas. You've got your coffee You've got your maize. You've got various other things and you've got your timber trees at the top Now what's happens when you compare these two and this is the measurement that was done in the early 2010s The jungle rubber farms have to be small because they're really difficult to manage So they're typically three to five hectares whereas the plantations can be very large The income after the costs for the rubber plantation is about $800 per hectare per year Why because it's a monocrop. So it's very susceptible to disease. So you need to spray spray spray spray and Spraying is expensive whereas in the jungle rubber garden. You very rarely have pest problems. So you don't need to spray on Your rubber plantation you have one thing to sell rubber and if the price of rubber crashes, you're stuck That was a good year for rubber in the jungle system You have over 10 different things to sell and some of them you can eat So even if the rest of the world goes to the dogs, you're not going to starve The biodiversity in the rubber plantation predictably enough is practically zero compared to that of the forest that it replaced But in the jungle system, it's about 60% compared to that of the forest that it replaced Spraying high in the plantation low to nil in the jungle system Social costs quite high in the rubber plantation because you've kicked all these people off their land And then the only job they can get is to spray your poison onto your trees So Usually without much protection and much training. So they are poor. They're exposed to nasty chemicals It's not a nice life Whereas in the jungle system, you're a master of all your survey may only be three hectares But by God is a productive three hectares and the environmental costs are of course very low and just stop to think what that means This is Indonesia is an emerging market. So it's not quite poor anymore But it's still a country in which 10 to $15,000 family income per year is a huge amount of money And indeed it is when you walk in those landscapes What you see is concrete houses With a satellite dish on the roof and a motorbike or sometimes even a car in the driveway This is real development. It is something that is making people richer and healthier. So you may ask Why doesn't it spread? Well, I already gave you the answer The rubber plantation is easy to manage if you are an investor living in Jakarta the jungle demar garden You can't manage it. You need to have farmer owners and 10,000 hectares with one manager is a lot easier to control than 10,000 hectares with 2,000 different farm families on it By God, they might have demands. They might want democracy. They might want to be masters of their own fate If you're a good dictator, that's the last thing you want And that's part of the reason why plantation forestry is so successful in poor countries It's easier to control But it's so much less productive Here's a picture I took in Cameroon. This guy switched over from kakao full sun kakao to agro forestry kakao And on the left is his old house and on the right is his new house. Guess what? He's happy with agro forestry Now you can even make it work on rented land This farmer Stephen Biggs in Cambridge share has a 15 year tenancy. He's putting apple trees down in between his His wheat He's doing it mostly for the wind shading effects or to increase his wheat productivity But also to get the fruits and because the timing of the work you have to do on the apples Sinches well with the work you have to do on the wheat and he's getting a land equivalency ratio of 1.1 So it's still 10% more productivity, even though he's only got 15 years to make his money So there are two lessons to be had here from all of this wonderful story the first is that To get good crops to feed the world you don't need inputs and you don't need GMOs Simple agroecological interventions adding one tree species to one crop species is going to get you a half the way there and Advanced agroecology like what Sebastian Scott was doing in Zambia is going to get you most of the rest of the way there And yes, you might need some inputs because after all you're off taking food That means you're off taking nutrients and sooner or later you're gonna have to replace these nutrients But by and large you can get a long long long way without using the things that industry tells us are essential but there's a second lesson there and The second lesson comes from this gentleman this gentleman was born in the 1860s and died in the 1940s and is a German scientist by the name of Jakob von Uxkul and when Jakob von Uxkul Did and the big insight he provided to science was to help us understand that Every creature on this planet Has a perspective a way of looking at the world We humans we have good eyes. We have language. We have prehensile thumbs and we have hands So our perspective of looking at the world depends a lot more on our eyes Than it does on our ears for example We also depends on the knowledge that language gives us So what he called our umveld is the human umveld that we are all familiar with what agroforesters Have learned to do is to understand the umveld of this creature a Tree a trees umveld is about the air. It's about the sun It's about the water But a lot of it and perhaps most of it is about what happens under the ground what happens in the soil You don't have a neural system in the way that animals do and you don't have movement in the way that animals do But you have ways of communicating with your neighbors of communicating with other plants of Adapting yourself to your environment protecting yourself against pest attacks And you do that in ways that our minds cannot begin to imagine But yet with a little bit of sympathy We can at least see what pleases that creature and what this pleases the creature and that way we can help it thrive Likewise in an agroforestry system The creature crop and the creature tree talk to one another and collaborate with one another The crop is looking at the world in a very different way from the way the tree is looking at the world But both of them have a way of looking at the world And if we understand that way if we understand their intelligences if we understand how To marry these intelligences we get that higher productivity Now you may say what is this guy talking about? How can I imagine myself as a tree? Well, it can be just as hard if you are a mammal Just imagine yourself as this bat Your eyes are practically useless the way you see the world is through echolocation You send up Send out a series of high-pitched cries that come back to you even in the dead of night and Paint a vivid an extremely precise picture of what's around you This is good enough so that you can distinguish between different kinds of moss on the wing in the middle of the night and Capture the ones that you like to eat and avoid the ones that are poisonous That's how precise it is. What is it like to have a mind that sees the world that way? I have no idea Here is another example This creature is a mole the way It understands its umveld is through its nose These tentacles the shape like a star are The things that it uses to taste and explore the soil when it is digging and traveling along its galleries It's umveld is an unveld of touch and of smell and of taste It includes no sound it includes no vision, but yet it is rich and That is what agroforces do They try to understand and to work with the umveld of the creatures that they hope to harness to their needs But now moving on a little bit. I would like to tell you I Would like first to ask a question to To Timothy Timothy are you there? Yes. I'm here. Yes wonderful Now I have a lot more slides divided into a lot more sections But I'm sure that people are getting tired the question I have for you is how much time do you think I should? use to continue and When should I wrap up? I would say you're just two minutes under halfway if we if we do a half hour Q&A so Okay, that's great because I'm about halfway through the presentation. I would say go for it. Oh, I said do it. Yeah, all right Yeah, it'll bring up a lot of good questions, too So yeah, so now we've looked at mostly at the fertility impact of trees and We've tried to understand how trees can be perceived as creatures and how we can understand those trees Now, let's look at something else the trees do nutrition trees are Absolutely fantastic because in addition to giving you the calories that cereals give you they give you vitamins and proteins and minerals That are sometimes difficult to find in other places and that's why environments like this is so nutrition This is in Central America and this complex system This mill per system with trees has kept high population densities well-fed for centuries Whereas this system another picture I picked up from the website of an input seller is A picture of disaster. There are no people there. There are no trees. There's absolutely no nutrition And nutrition is crucial part of the reason why Africa is doing so badly is because it has so little access to micronutrients Stunting is more prevalent there than anywhere else except South Asia and Stunting doesn't just mean that you grow up to be a small person Stunting also means that you grow up to be a weak person It also grows up to mean that your mind is working less well that your cognition is not working as well In other words is setting you up to work for a life of poverty and a life of suffering Stunting is horrible and stunting is so easy to fix all you need to do is ensure that kids by the age of five Have received all the nutrients that they need and what kind of nutrients do they need? Well in addition to cereals Meat and milk is pretty good idea and in those environments for the trees are wonderful this particular Species there. This is in Kenya Has a nitrogen content which is higher than anything you can buy in a feed bag So grow these in the margins of your cereal fields and boom you've got milk for your kids another thing that you can do is to look at Diversifying your diet what we did here. This is work that was done by a colleague of mine Was simply to compare what would happen if you actually succeed in getting people to eat golden rice Which was developed by by the international right research Institute Well, if you have golden rice you get much more vitamin A than if you only have white rice And this is particularly an issue in Southeast Asia where people eat a lot of rice and where blindness due to vitamin A Deficiency is a serious issue, but even with golden rice You're only getting a half the vitamin A you need and you haven't done anything For all of the other nutrients that are useful for life Whereas if you add to white rice a simple fat carrot You're getting all of the vitamin A you need and if there's no carrots in your environment You've got cassava leaves You've got mooringa leaves with palm oil butternut or mangoes that will provide you with the same amount of vitamin A Now expand it again by adding an orange and boom you've got your vitamin C covered And again, there's other things you can do if you have no oranges in your environment Add a little bit of beef a tiny bit of beef 50 grams. That's well, what is that? That's Let's see how many more how much is an ounce? It's two ounces, isn't it? It's two ounces of beef. It's nothing But that's enough to ensure you have the zinc you need and to significantly boost your iron as some lentils and some spinach and your set So encouraging people to multi crop to poly crop to grow lots of different things around their farms is going to be absolutely crucial to beat the curse of stunting and What kind of fruits you might ask exotic fruits like mangoes or bananas or oranges, which are the same all over the world? No Indigenous fruits Indigenous fruits beat exotic fruits hands down on a number of metrics that first line and then Sonya digitata is a tree You all know it's the baobab tree and the baobab fruit has up to ten times more vitamin C than an orange and And the same applies to a number of other crops tree crops in the area and on top of that You can harvest them all year round So all you have to do is to look at the trees that are fruiting being the hunger period either period when your stores of Cereals are running low But you haven't yet harvested the cereals of your next cropping season Which often corresponds to the time of year when you have to do the most work to prepare your land for the next cropping season Well, just choose the trees that are producing their fruit during that time Pick the ones that are producing the vitamins and the nutrients you need and boom you've got your problem solved But you might ask where are people going to get their seedlings from? Where is the germplasm going to come from even for those native trees when deforestation is such an issue and here I'm focusing on West Africa and the way we do that is Very simply by teaching farmers how to do what we call participatory domestication So we teach farmers how to do marketing. We teach them how to do grafting We teach them how to reproduce trees in seedling beds We don't do it for them and the reason we don't do it for them is because in an environment of high scarcity The one tree in the bush that's producing well and whose fruit has desirable characteristics It's tasty. It's sweet. It was this disease and so on You're not going to tell some foreigner who's turning up a new village where it is It's your secret because if people know where the tree is people are going to go steal the fruit so You can't do it for them even if you wanted it to but you can tell them how to grow an orchard And that's what they then do they pick the tree that they prefer from their own landscape And they plant orchards from the resulting germplasm There's other advantages to these to these orchards if you travel around Africa, you'll often see people in wheelchairs or in locally manufactured equivalents of wheelchairs and Half the time the reason for that is because they fell out of trees while growing fruit and they broke their back In these orchards The trees are small. You don't have to climb to get the fruit a Natural tree you may have to wait 15 to 20 years for it to fruit in these orchards You can get fruiting after two or three years So for all of these reasons those techniques are extraordinarily helpful and the clue from our perspective is because we are not Giving them germplasm. We are not giving them something developed in a land far away and telling them plant this but we're giving them the techniques to Domesticate and plant what they themselves say in their landscape What we are seeing is a rapid improvement of the genetic quality of the trees across the landscape But with every village having domesticated its own tree So you improve genetic quality while maintaining genetic diversity It's a far more resilient way than to try to over engineer something in a laboratory And for that reason in West Africa people are Domesticating over 50 different species and they are well proud to show you how they're going about their job Now that's encouraging But what's perhaps even more encouraging in the world in which over 70% of the farmers are small holders and they produce The majority of the food is that betting on small farmers is such a good idea Look at this chart from the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations What they did was to measure the productivity of a range of crops in a range of countries of All of the farms in that country Dividing these farms into four size classes From the smallest quarter of farms in blue to the largest quarter of farms in purple No matter where you are no matter what the crop is the small farms Produce more than the big farms sometimes grotesquely so small holders in rice in Nepal Commonly get over 15 tons of rice per hectare whereas large farms barely manage a ton per hectare And this by the way is not just something that happens in small countries It's the same in the US. This is all data from 1992, but I would be surprised if it had changed a lot The smaller the farm the more your net output your profit per hectare or per acre excuse me Is the larger your farm the lower your outputs per hectare? Why is this because when you're a small farmer, you're an effector gardener. You know what every plant needs You know there's disease. You need to cut it out here. Something is wilting. It needs a bit more water There's something is a bit pale. Perhaps we can add a bit of manure. Oh, there. There's a little bit too much shade I'll cool in the tree You are managing the land as a gardener would and so of course it's far more productive Where's some these big farms or you can do is sit in your tractor with your iPod on Drinking a can of coke and letting the machine do exactly the same thing Heck acre after acre after acre after acre Now it turns out that small farms are also the background of development if you would not recognize a farm if you stumbled upon it This guy Joe Studwell is an economist Here's the editor was I don't know if he still has that job of the China Economic Quarterly and before that He was an editor at the Economist magazine and he wrote what for me is the best book on development economics I've ever read called how Asia works and it's simply comparing the development pathways of four successful Asian countries Namely Korea Japan Taiwan and China with four unsuccessful or less successful countries namely the Philippines Malaysia Thailand and Indonesia and I'm gonna read this quote Which comes from the review of that book in the Economist because it is so pertinent to what we're trying to do Asia's post-war miracle economies emerged by following a recipe with us three ingredients land reform Export-led state-backed manufacturing and financial repression. What that means land reform is you break up the large land holdings And give the land to small landless peasants export let what does that mean? Well, Taiwan in 1960 was exporting two things that the world wanted asparagus and mushrooms and Financial repression means you ensure that the money stays locally There is no free capital movement and that is invested locally The process began with the ousting of the landlords feudal estates were broken up and divided among small farmers who also received cheap credit and valuable advice Notice valuable advice not fertilizer subsidies valuable advice Small holder farming requires grotesque amounts of labor, but that is a good thing Because countries as poor as Taiwan or South Korea were in the 1950s have labor and only labor in abundance The book Shows you that the same mechanism played in the US Where immigrants arriving in New York went west to claim there? What was it 90 acres of land where they started farming? In China in Germany in the UK in Belgium anywhere in the world that developed followed this recipe and That is why I'm confident in saying That advice is so much more important than anything else The small holder farmers who have two hectares need one thing only to know how to care for those hectares What Taiwan did in 1960 was about 10% of GDP to agricultural Extension it had a university trained extension officer living in every village not visiting Living in any village and living there for a minimum period of four years Becoming a member of the community and helping the local farmer gardeners become better and better and better at what they did That's why I'm convinced that this guy however much I respect what he's trying to do Actually has very little influence on the development of African agriculture all its billions are trying to go into high-tech solutions and genetically engineered this and Precision agriculture that and blah blah blah, which makes very little difference to the life of the hundreds of millions of Africans who are small holders This guy however who to the best of my knowledge has never spent a penny on philanthropy in Africa and Who was pictured here having a rather uncomfortable time in front of the US Congress? Has probably done much more than Bill Gates. Why? Simply through his tools Look at this group. It's a closed group small-scale farmers farming as a business. It's a Zambian group In August it had three hundred and twenty thousand members Just a couple of hours ago. It had four hundred and fifteen thousand members Zambia I'll remind you is one of the poorest countries on earth and yet over 400,000 small farmers have Facebook accounts and have joined this page Where what is most frequently done is asking for advice and giving advice a typical comment there will be I have 200 quattra. That's about three dollars. I have 200 quattra to invest What should I do and somebody will reply by tomato seeds the market is good in the soccer right now And somebody else will say no, there's only too many tomatoes being grown go for cabbage It's a longer term bet, but it's going to make you more money, etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. It's fantastic Here is data from Niger from the read from the Reso des chambres d'agriculture du Niger the network of agricultural chambers of Niger and what they are running Is a fight of sanitary helpline so you have a problem with your crop you call them up and they give you advice The horizontal line is weeks. It's French so s stands for cement or weak and It simply recalls the numbers of calls. They're getting per week first on mobile in blue and on WhatsApp in orange and The week 52 is the last week of December of last year and the WhatsApp figure has grown even more now People are using what's up? Why Niger is so badly run that only 10% of women can read and write only 25% of men can read and write That means that text messaging is pretty useless It also means That nobody has money so paying the cost for voice call is something people can't afford, but what's up? What's up is wonderful. You can send pictures You can send voice files. You can send little movies You can film your critter and send it to the advisory people who can immediately identify it and tell you what to do opposed to the Telephone thing where somebody speaks you and tries to explain what the critter is and you're trying to understand what it is And it takes forever especially in an environment We have dozens of different languages with hundreds of local dialects and where a given bug might have hundreds of different names so just imagine the difference that that makes and Finally, we know that this is so because the key agroforestry input is not germplasm and it's not machinery and it's not fertilizer It's skill if you are a monocrop farmer and you are doing what the input companies say You're following the advice on how to manage the seed and how to fertilize and how to pesticide use etc All the farmers in a given area exposed to the same climate and having the same soil are going to get roughly the same years The forestry farmers are going to be spread out a lot more. They're going to be a bunch of geniuses who are going to get a fantastic yield There's going to be the mass that is getting a yield that is better than the monocrop, but only slightly so maybe a lot of equivalency ratio of 1.2 or 1.3 But there's also going to be a significant minority who are going to get a lower yield Because they have chosen the wrong tree species I've seen one example of eucalyptus interplanted with coffee in Uganda and it was not a pretty sight Because they have planted the trees too close together because they have not pruned them properly because of many other factors Agroforestry demands more skill and more knowledge than monocrop farming does It demands gardening skills and that's why this lady is the real future of precision agriculture Not whatever gizmos they managed to put into one of these Let's not talk about the environmental services that trees provide As we all know climate change is coming and it's not going to be pretty As we may not know despite the evidence that land is collected to climate The world has taken a long time in finally deciding to do something about it Look at the date on this november 2017 less than a year ago They finally decided to include agriculture into the global climate negotiations Despite the fact That the emissions related to agriculture land use land use change and forestry Are huge about a third of total emissions And I suspect this is probably another estimate because it does not take into account the change of carbon in agricultural soils Which many of you who are holistic rangers will know is an absolutely massive issue So what roles do play tree in that? Well, I'm almost embarrassed to say it because it's so banal if you put more trees in your landscape You're locking up more carbon. There's more carbon under the ground It has more carbon above the ground and you can use that biomass to do whatever the hell you like So the mitigation potential is absolutely huge. This is an example from europe It's research that was done in europe and they reckon on fairly conservative numbers that if agroforestry was done everywhere Where it's suitable in europe you could mitigate about 1.4 Gigatons of co2 equivalent per year That's one third of total emissions of the entire european union from all sources power transport construction industry and farming It's a massive potential and as already pointed out Trees are very present on farm now. This has been studied in some detail And if you're interested there's a whole book that's been devoted to it To try to understand and analyze the carbon sequestration potential of agroforestry system but To do this We need to encourage farmers Farmers Are being asked to take a risk when they put down a tree First that tree is going to take a while to grow before it provides you with any return But meanwhile you've got to put in the labor and the protection and the watering and all the stuff To help that tree get over the first few years of its life So you have the costs now and the benefits later these benefits can be uncertain And not only because agroforestry is more complicated than monocrop farming But also because you may live in an environment like africa for example where tenure Rides are extremely uncertain Just imagine what it must feel like to plant a tree or regenerate a tree and care for it And then wake up one morning And find out that somebody cut it in the night and this is common across africa So unless you have a Way of encouraging farmers to plant those trees Many are simply not going to bother And in rich areas You still have that problem of the cost So how do you encourage to do them? Well by paying for environmental services, of course But that's difficult Because how do you measure If a farmer is doing well or not without having armies of assessors roaming the landscape, which is too expensive Well these days with satellites you can do a fair amount of work of high quality We've developed some pretty nifty algorithms that allow us to map soil organic carbon at very high resolutions five or 30 meter resolutions using satellite imagery and we can do it at a degree of precision Which is in the region of 95 percent of what you could get in a lab So as long as you can ground truth Your soil organic carbon system the algorithm will do reasonably well We've done it for Ethiopia for the entire country at a resolution of 30 meters And that means that Ethiopia now has a much better soil organic carbon map than any european country We are very pleased by the fact that the joint research center the european union research arm Is working with us to adapt our methodology to try to do the exact same thing in europe So it's one of the few areas of science where africa is outperforming europe in research Now Even if trees mitigate a lot of carbon We are so voracious for energy and for comfort and for all the gadgets of modernity And there's so many of us that no matter what we do we're still going to be pumping a lot of carbon in the atmosphere So we need to adapt and adaptation Is something that trees are absolutely fantastic at You know that beautiful field of weeds Well, here's what it looks like before you're putting the next crop down The wind is blowing and it's carrying your soil away And you know that beautiful monocrop of cassava in a place like wonder. Well when the rains are coming They're just washing your soils away So you're just losing soils at an accelerated rate when you don't have any trees in your landscape And trees protect you even against the worst that the world can give you natural catastrophes This chart shows an increasing trend for natural catastrophes such as climate events temperatures droughts forest fires floods Landslides and storms. They're all rising rising rising. And what happens in an agroforestry system in such an environment? Well Back in 2009 there was a natural experiment in southwest france Locals weren't lucky, but we scientists where because southwest france is also the place where the most agroforestry in france So this map shows you the temperature the speed with which the wind swept through that area And this picture shows you what a local plantation forest looked like immediately afterwards There's very little left there. The only thing you can do is chip it for biomass value practically zero This is an agroforestry system in the same area the summer after the storm went through The trees were fine The land is fine and the system is just as productive as the year before why of course Because the roots are deeper the trees are much better anchored in this soil We also know that crop plants such as wheat or maize Have a production that goes down if the temperature goes too high And we all know that shade is cool. Well, we're scientists. We had to go and measure it So we did we went to measure the temperature under an albedo canopy and outside of an albedo canopy and lo and behold It's cooler under the tree and that's great for the kind of crops that african farmers grow Now the rest of you know that this is true for livestock These cows which have access to shade are going to be producing on average four to five percent more milk than cows Which have no access to shade What's not to like So that's why in agroforestry terms when we talk of mitigation and adaptation We don't really know where the first one stops and where the second one begins Um, it's really hard in agroforestry to adapt without mitigating and to mitigate without adapting It's really having your cake and eating it That's not all you can get you can also get a bunch of environmental services from agroforestry systems For example in industrial agricultural systems one big issue that we have is that a lot of the fertilizer runs away into The water table and into the rivers and pollutes the oceans Well in an agroforestry system you have those tree roots under the crop roots And they are going to pick up a lot of that excess nitrogen It's not going to be quite as good as the performance of a forest But it's going to be a hell of a lot better than the performance in a monocrop system You have a much better soil biodiversity when you have tree's presence Here you have a system in latin america That's comparing the presence of earthworms beetle centipedes termites and ants In the agroforestry system in blue and in the cropping system in red And the only thing you have more of in the less of excuse me in the agroforestry system is termites Which you're happy about but everything else which are good adjuncts to have in farming systems You have more of pest control We had lots and lots of anecdotal evidence but we recently have research That confirms that agroforestry results in lower abundance of parasitic and non parasitic weeds And in a higher abundance of the natural enemies of pests So more trees more complex ecosystem less room for pests to munch away at your crops You also have impact on the water cycle It's a local story, of course You have that local buffering effect. You have the drought protection effect of the trees And you have water recharge. This is work that was published in nature a couple of years ago And what it shows is A chart that illustrates what happens to rainfall in environments that are degraded To the left and in environments that are completely forested to the right And in degraded environments You have very little infiltration the blue arrow You have very little transpiration The red arrow pointing up But you have a large amount of surface runoff the yellow the orange arrow pointing left And or soil evaporation the yellow arrow pointing up On the extreme right when you have a lot of forest you also have relatively little infiltration ground water recharge Sorry, ground water recharge. You have a lot of infiltration, but you also have a lot of evaporation The trees are transpiring that water back into the atmosphere So you have very little surface runoff, but you also have very little recharge of groundwater The balance is somewhere in the middle And the picture that you see there that black and white picture is a Sahelian parkland landscape In that environment you optimize groundwater recharge And we've done the measurements. We find that in the Sahelian parklands the water table far from Disminishing because of the trees is rising thanks to the trees and in some environments has risen from 30 meters Back to about 5 meters making the digging of wells and the irrigation of gardens possible again But it's also a global story What I'm going to tell you now is a kind of information that the army would pay millions of dollars for Probably billions if they knew what was good for them First study this map what it shows is Where dominant winds are blowing So you Timothy are in the American Northwest your dominant winds come straight off the Pacific Ocean And me I'm in northwestern Europe. My dominant winds come straight off the Atlantic But if you're in Kenya, you're in the North West But if you're in Kenya, your dominant winds come off the Indian oceans from the east And if you're in the Sahel in Niger or in Nigeria or in Ghana or in Liberia Your winds are coming straight from the east from the Ethiopian and Kenyan highlands What happens when it rains? Does all that rain go into the rivers? No much of it evaporates again Mostly through evapotranspiration And this chart shows you what proportion of rainfall Evapotranspirates again in east Africa almost all of the water that falls as rain goes back into the atmosphere As it does over Tibet and across much of russia kazakhstan Turkey and southeastern europe and as it does in northeastern brazil Where does that rainfall come from then? That's another question we can ask does it come from evapotranspiration or does it come from oceans? Well, you can measure that because the isotopic composition of the water will differ depending on whether it evaporated from an ocean or whether it evaporated from a plant And if you look at eastern africa if you look at south central Well some central southern america If you look at china You find that most of the water that falls as rain there evaporated from trees Where you are timothy in where i am Almost all of the water came from the oceans, which is the way that we've been conditioned to think about rain Right? It's something that happens because it evaporates from the seas But so if you compare all these maps what you notice Is that the rains in the sahelian region come from east africa? The rains that fall in kenya and in ethiopia and in uganda Evapotranspirate and are carried by the dominant winds all the way across to west africa where they fall of rain And this is a global phenomenon when you measure the proportion of rainfall that initially came from plants You see that almost everywhere. It's above 20 and sometimes it's as high as 70 Look at this again And here's where the pentagon should take note. Look at southeast asia The dominant winds are coming from Malaysia berma and are moving into the bread basket of china Look At where that rainfall comes from about half of the rain that china gets in its breastbasket comes from evapotranspiration Right now you have lots of chinese companies that are cutting down the forest in southeast asia What china is doing is literally sowing the branch on which it sits It's going to be reducing its rainfall and it's going to find it increasingly difficult to farm Thanks to this misguided activity so Having said all that we now have a pretty good idea Of what the transition to sustainability is going to be looking like It's going to be requiring fewer inputs and fewer machinery thus fewer less capital But it's going to be requiring more expertise more knowledge more skills of more labor And that gives you all sorts of goodies like resilience sustainability risk-proofing micronutrients, etc And it reduces all sorts of baddies like greenhouse gas emissions land degradation biodiversity loss Etc etc Your yields are going to be roughly the same. Maybe a bit higher. Maybe a bit lower depends on how good a farmer you are But because you have lower costs your net incomes are likely to be higher So while the future is pretty win-lose. Yeah, it's good at producing one crop But apart from that it's lousy at using resources and it needs a lot of inputs The future can very much be win-win Where you have much better use of natural resources. You still produce your crops But you also produce all sorts of other good things including cultural amenities Now I hope I've convinced you that this is true That the land equivalency ratio of agroforestry systems is always higher than one and that these techniques are part of the future But then we have to ask a serious question if that is true Why then Does the world look like this? Why do farmers across Africa when they picture themselves as being successful imagine this kind of landscape? well There's a number of reasons for that the first is because The way we build institutions is to build silos So To manage a complex system we create a complex thing called a government And that government is going to have a ministry of agriculture a ministry of environment a ministry for climate change A ministry for this a ministry for that And so each of these boxes is going to have its own little group of specialists its own scientific journals its own Conferences its own businesses and its own financial flows largely self-contained The real world of course looks like this in the real world Nutrients and water and gases flow between each of these systems And if we were to manage the real world we'd have to manage it like a gardener and not like an engineer That means we don't need a ministry of agriculture and we don't need a ministry of forestry We need a ministry of natural resources that's able to adjudicate between all of these different land users out there So that's the first issue our tendency to think in silos The second one is a cultural issue To most everybody show this to your mother and they will say god. What a beautiful healthy soil What a gorgeous field But we know it's not healthy And most people looking at this will think my god. That's a picture of abject poverty Whereas we know that this is probably quite a healthy field that can keep on going for centuries So we have that cultural thing. We've all been Dictated upon by the idea that this is the future and this is the past when of course, it's the exact opposite and that's linked to a nasa human disease called progressivism modernity Futurism This is the enemy What this postcard shows Is birmingham england in the 1920s? And what you see is a mixed-use system You have housing on the upper floors. You have factories and shops on the ground floors. You have markets. You have transport You have pedestrians There's life going on there But this had to go In the 1950s it was replaced by that This rapidly became this rapidly turned birmingham Into the sickest city in the united kingdom With rapidly rising rates of suicide depression Domestic violence crime unemployment alcoholism Because there's nothing there. There's no room for people There's room for cars There is single-use buildings You're supposed to be live a long way away Take a bus or a car to go a long way away to work Take another bus or another car to go a long way away to shop You don't know your neighbors You have no sense of rootedness and of community You're alienated And if you think that this was only a problem of capitalism by the way I have a nice old collection of soviet posters and this is my favorite This is one that's extolling the power and the prowess of soviet agriculture Now what you see is the proud claim that they are now producing a million tractors a year So it's an agricultural poster, right? You see a fertilizer plant in the background and a tractor in the foreground There is not a single plant in that poster not a leaf not a grain nothing green at all And yet it's an agricultural poster So there's that we've got to deprogram ourselves from this kind of thinking that the future always means better machinery Then another problem is Our business model. Oh god You want to know what a business model is like? This is our business model Right now Arminization strategy mostly involves us begging for money from people who have it And the reason for that of course It's a cash flow issue if I teach you timothy how to do agroforestry Maybe I spend a couple of days at your place. Maybe you're generous and you pay me a few hundred dollars a consulting fee But then you know what you're doing Maybe you'll call me a few times to ask how to prune this or where to plant that But you'll be on your own and it'll work But if instead I miss a syngenta And I sell you my gorgeous seed that has been stacked with just the right genes to give you that fantastic yield With this particular fertilizer and those particular herbicides fungicides and pesticides And I'll guarantee you it'll work and you know what it will work It won't work for very long, but it will work for a few years And when it stops working I've got an even better seed with more genes and better fertilizers I've got also work For a few shorter years you keep on working. That means that if I'm syngenta here in Europe I'm going to be making on average 200 euros per hectare per year from every farmer in the landscape Whereas if I'm an agroforestry I might be making 200 euros from one farmer once I have no business plan. I have no cash flow. So I can't market I can't research I can't lobby I you know when I run my job is to run around the european institutions that get into the more of this There's one of me. There's hundreds of people representing the input companies and big big ag So we have that problem But we also shoot ourselves in the foot. Oh boy. Do we shoot ourselves in the foot? Our marketing They call this conventional agriculture or traditional agriculture And we call it traditional agriculture or conventional agriculture. There's nothing conventional about it There's nothing traditional about it. It didn't exist 70 years ago and it won't exist in 70 years time. It's Industrial agriculture. That's all it is and we should always refer to it as industrial agriculture But their genius has been to call this Conventional agriculture Irrespective of what that monocrop is whether that monocrop is maize or wheat or hogs or beef Or or cabbages. It's conventional agriculture we we We don't have marketing We have gurus and every guru Reinvents the wheel and brands it with its own little name And so out there there's dozens upon dozens upon dozens of names For agricultural systems that all basically mean Combine crops perennials and animals and think before you spray And there's lots of them. There's a massive amount of them and i'm collecting them And if you have some good ones, please send them my way. I want that slide to become a full pink and finally We are really bad at learning the lessons of this guy we know When we think about it that we should consider the umveld of other creatures And perhaps we'll look upon the umveld of this elephant with sympathy What is it like to feel the entire world through this really complex trump? That you can smell with drink with grab with battle with Must be strange, right? But you can just about imagine what that would feel like to have your nose growing and turn into that But how can you imagine what it feels like to be this? this jellyfish What does it feel like to float in the ocean to feed to find a mate to reproduce? in that environment where you have a distributed neural system no central neural system And where you are so good at your job that you've been floating around that ocean for hundreds of millions of years Come a hell or high water It's a lot easier to imagine this type of creature, isn't it? We know that when that kind of creature is happy It's got access to the food that it like we know how to bunch it to imitate what happens in natural systems We know how to manage it to put carbon back into the soil using the beneficial impacts of these remnants So so far what we've seen Are sympathetic creatures whose umveld we'd like to understand but would struggle to Weird creatures whose umveld we would be really really hard pressed to understand no matter how we try And creatures that we work with whose umveld we try to Make our own in order to make them more productive Now what about this creature? How is the umveld of that creature? Do you understand that umveld? Do you know how to work with that umveld? Perhaps you find it easier to work with the umveld of this creature After all he's trying to do the sorts of things that we do to convince his parishioners to change their behaviors in a different way Oh, why is this in french? Sorry What about this creature? What is it like to go to you this office every day of your life? And to be surrounded by these piles of moldering paper Now perhaps apart from mr. Trump, you haven't seen anybody here who you have an immediate negative emotional reaction to And yet we have them all the time What about this creature? This worker who's assembling a nuclear power plant Do you think he's an evil person that is trying to poison the world? Or is he a guy who is generally convinced that the technology has is a key part of the solution? What's this umveld like? How can you sympathize with him? What about this gentleman? This is a scientist. He works in a greenhouse and his salary Is paid by and the greenhouse is owned by one center Is this guy an evil genius? Or is this guy also believed that what he's doing is helping making the world a better place Can you get into this umveld? Can you can you understand what he has to contribute to the conversation? Well, maybe you can but probably not If your idea of dialogue is this or that and yet we know That we need all of these intelligence around the table Most of you have probably heard of the drawdown site And i've just outlined two Of the solutions number 19 manage grazing which a lot of people here know about and nuclear power The ability to help the world is currently estimated as being roughly similar and We need both and if i can leave you with Any message it is this Yes, we need agroforestry god knows we need agroforestry and boy Do we need holistic grazing and agroecology? And to empower small farmers and to ensure that we grow a multiplicity of good food close to the consumers But we also need gmo's Because we also need to protect certain crops like papayas From diseases that we don't know how to handle other ways and we also need nuclear power We need all of the above. We need every single one of these solutions Does that mean that every single one of these solutions will always be applicable and always be good in every single circumstance? No, of course not like most of you I really dislike the way that gmo's are being used by large corporations to fatten their bottom line as opposed to doing things for the benefits of a wider world But I do know that that technology can be just as useful as a hammer is useful to put A nail in the wall to hang a painting After all we don't ban hammers because some people use them to bash in the heads of their partners So I will leave you with this saying By this one gentleman. He's steward bramd He was the founder of the whole earth catalogue And he is an absolutely fascinating thinker and he has come to the conclusion that on this planet Humans have become gods It doesn't matter whether we want to be gods or not. We are there is no part of this planet We're not influencing the very climate is changing the oceans are changing because we're here We cannot abdicate the responsibility of being gods So we have to learn to do it well And in order to do it well The one species that you can never never never forget the one keystone species that must always be at the center of your thoughts Is us Thank you very much All right. Well, thanks patrick That was uh, it's quite a lot And and keep those questions coming. We're going to go ahead and get started with the questions I know I have a couple but we'll uh, we'll get some of these first and then if we have time maybe maybe we can Go there, but um, let's let's start with uh, the first one kirsten Earlier on asked uh, dear patrick What are some of the most? Oh, what's that patrick? Yes? Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out. Where do I? Oh, yeah here. Okay. I see kirsten van reizen asked Dear patrick. What are some of the most common mistake this made in agroforestry systems? Oof that hamper the 40 productivity increase that you refer to so as you I assume kirsten that you are referring to the reed walnut system that I showed earlier Well a common mistake to make is to mismanage your trees in that system uh trees Are organisms that will seek to take up the available space So the most important thing that you can do is to prune them And while most people understand that they have to prune them above the ground Some people don't understand that they also have to prune them below the ground in these systems If you're going to be growing In an alley cropping system It pays to actually disk the tree roots regularly to ensure that they don't invade the part of the land that you want to devote to Of course, you don't need to do that if you're doing a short rotation copies For biomass for example because the roots then don't have the time to spread into the system um Other mistakes that are made Are really mistakes of caring with the trees remember that most agroforestry systems started off as farms Where farmers are adding trees rather than as foresters where foresters are adding crops and farmers have no training in forestry They don't know how to manage their trees. They don't know how to recognize diseases or signs of stress or signs of nutrient deficiency And so unless they receive advice and help They are going to find that their trees are going to do a little bit less Well than they were hoping they will still do well enough But so instead of getting a 40 productivity increase maybe at the end of the day You only end up with a 20 productivity increase. Nice to have but not as good as you could get Then John hello, john i'm glad to see you joined Um, you're asking if the camps could be helpful in spreading these kinds of agroforestry systems Absolutely, the camps have two advantages over normal farmers first They have lots of people coming in and leaving That means they have lots of people who are fresh and who are fascinated and want to learn and want to contribute As opposed to people who get bored and people who want to move on and do something else The second thing that they have as I understand it is they're planning for the long term And so when they are starting the restoration camp they're putting the key lines in they're They're designing the system before the first spade hits the ground And that means that it's much much easier to build in a much more complex agroforestry system than the simple ones I have described systems where you are using six seven or eight different tree species rather than just the one All right So we move on to uh, the next question then Ruben Heinecker So farmers are moving to the city because their plot is too small. Should we read the question or Yeah, why don't you read it? Okay in the south of spain sierra Nevada mountains Many farmers move away to the city because their plot is too small to have sufficient profits with conventional farming so agroforestry Would be such a great solution. Unfortunately, the government gives subsidies for agricultural use of the land and in particular when I was there I I know I learned that they they give subsidies for for tilling, you know Um, maybe that's what he's referring to in practice. This has a counter effect for the farmers Take the subsidies while living in the city at the same time neglect the land Is there any data available about good combinations to go for in the specific area? Absolutely, it's a disaster and it's a disaster that we in brussels are working at We may know that right now the european union is changing its common agricultural policy And we're trying to push it in a direction that's taking this more into account because right now About half the income of a farmer in europe comes in the form of subsidies from the european union And that's the same for spanish farmers And if you make a mistake and you don't get the subsidy as a result of that mistake You suffer badly one mistake you could make is to have too many trees on your land Because then it stops being seen as agricultural land and it becomes seen as forestry land and forestry As a completely different subsidy regime from agriculture So farmers are reluctant to put trees in because of that Another thing that you can do is to move over to systems that are Very low in labor demand But that provide environmental services and money and typically those will be the systems that in in spain are known as the Tejesa Or in portugal are known as the montado systems where you are combining animals and trees as opposed to crops and trees Southern spain is a relatively dry environment. So it's an environment in which waters are the premium So typically the kind of the horticulture that is happening there is happening thanks to irrigation That means the water has to be pumped from below grounds. The water table is dropping. It's not a sustainable system A silver pastoral system a system where you combine trees and animals could be far more sustainable in that environment It would also have an additional benefit is it would suppress the risk of fire Some of you may remember that last summer there were very very heavy fires in portugal that killed over 100 people And these farmers happened in two kinds of environment In plantation forestry where people had put sitka spruce scottish pine and eucalyptus Sorry scottish pine eucalyptus not sitka. What am i thinking? Oh In very dense stands and once they start burning the fire spreads With extraordinary rapidity And the second region is because of a phenomenon similar to the one you described in the serra nevarda Lots of little plots in the mountains that have been abandoned by the people who own them and where brush is accumulating And that brush of course burns when a fire comes The way to deal with that is to encourage these people to join a cooperative So that you can farm animals under those trees. They will clear the brush pigs sheep Cattle will clear the brush exploit those resources and provide you with an additional income Now I personally don't know what the situation in the serra nevarda mountains is I don't know the rainfall patterns. I don't know the soils So I cannot give a recommendation about what would be appropriate there, but I suspect that's something like this A collaborative system where the owners of the land are cooperatively letting animals manage that landscape Maybe the solution you're looking for Right, we have a couple other questions in the uh, that were put in the chat. So um, instead of the q&a box So it's just takes a little more time, but uh, here it is So first we had theresa earlier ask It's similar to the last question, but I think specifically referring to the sort of human psychology motivation Of the let me interrupt you. Where do I see the chat of the chat if you click on the chat thing at the bottom You can see the chat the chance thing on the bottom. I don't see a chance thing at the bottom There's a chat icon at the bottom Uh, I'm using a mac and I don't see a chat icon. That's okay. I can read it out loud It's it's oh hang on. It's maybe at the top here. Did you remote control more? Here we go. I've got the chat. All right Okay, so theresa asked a question Yeah, how do you think it is possible to get people to do intensively? Uh, too intensively farm So like on the land a lot of people when we see the overwhelming desire to move the cities and city life I don't think there is an issue here on the country city life I mean, there's so many of us on the planet We have to pack most of them into cities And if people want to do that anyway great, you know Um, there are people who want to stay on the land and there's enough of them who want to stay on the land And people want to get back on the land if farming becomes more like gardening If farming is something that involves sinking as well as labouring And you see that I don't know who it's like in the u.s But in europe you see that a lot you have long people Who are setting themselves up as 40 culturalists usually small plots of land highly productive often permaculture style Where they are generating fruits and vegetables which are then selling in direct sale Uh to to customers I mean, you know, I've got there's one kid, uh, who is 20 Kid he's 26 now He was at school with my son and he's got his farm not far from here and every week I get a box of fresh vegetables, uh, and it's always a pleasure Um, the difficulty is to get access to larger farms to those people um larger farms are Farmland is expensive, especially in europe because of the subsidies you get so it's really hard for young farmers to get started However, there's an interesting development here and it has to do with the aristocracy There is a farmers organization in europe called el o the european landowners association And they're basically aristocrats There are people who have owned and managed Hundreds or thousands of acres of land over centuries And who are continuing to do that and one thing I find interesting and i'm really astonished that as a good leftist I am now sympathizing with the aristocracy Is that these people have a long-term way of thinking about their land? I'm also speaking to people who manage agricultural funds in the city of london and such life Those people have 10 year time horizons their funds close after 10 years They're going to extract the maximum value of their land over 10 years And if they leave a radioactive wasteland at the end of it, they don't give a fuck because after 10 years they're closed Aristocrats want to pass the land on to their children and their children's children And they got it from their grandparents and their grandparents grandparents So they're interested in making money, of course But they're interested in doing so in a way that will maintain the quality of that land for future generations Right like like enough of them like the owner like alfonso who owns the land at the first campus on their family's been there for In the region for 500 years farming. They have a vested interest and it going well Yeah, absolutely And I know a guy like that in portugal as well that welcomed us last summer for a research project You know great guy 500 hectares of montano, of course. He wants to do it well. Yeah, you know, no Absolutely beautiful. All right. Well, we got toby's question next Shall I read it? Yeah, sure. Go ahead because you're still in the chat window, right? Uh, this one's in the q&a now. We're gotta go back and back and forth depending on where people put it, but Oh, yeah, I see it. Yeah. Yeah, toby kelner says, um, hi patrick. This is an interesting question. Um Well, they're all interesting in their way, but you mentioned managed grazing I am in some facebook groups which advocate savory's holistic management grazing as an alternative Uh, often a superior alternative to reforestation I know the simple answer is it depends on the climate zone But I have seen both reforestation and holistic grazing proposed for the same kind of arid regions What is your take on this? Um, I have no take it depends, you know A lot of this depends on what people want to do after all it's a land manager has to be comfortable with a solution Um, if it's an arid region reforestation as such is probably not a good idea because trees do need water Um, yes, you have some trees, you know, that's You have trees like saxowl in central asia. It can cope with practically no water at all And it sucks up pollutes the pollutants. So it's it's wonderful But hey, it takes half a century for the damn thing to grow to three feet. So Most trees will demand a little bit of water. So in arid zones um Reforestation is probably not an issue So I suspect that your question can review formulated as saying do we have holistic management? Or do we have a form of silver pastoralism where we have trees and animals? And to me, there's no conflict between the two if you have a silver pastoral system You've also got to manage it holistically in order to get the maximum benefit from it The fact that you have trees in that landscapes is not actually relevant to the idea of holistic management And if you look at the environment in which uh, alan savry did most of his early work It's in babwe it's completely filled with trees. So, um through to me, um Um Properly grazed land properly managed land unless you're in extremely dry areas It's probably going to have an element of tree regeneration as well right yeah, and I I know I've heard similar from savry and from uh Uh, darren doorty who definitely incorporates holistic management into his regrarians platform I think that's more and more common is this kind of hybrid approach. Um in those sorts of approaches We have a question here from I might pronounce this wrong jury Zvart That's uh, hi all two questions regarding the presentation Why is the root system and agroforestry deeper than in conventional agroforestry agriculture and forest? So I guess she wants a recap of that and then or he Uh, and then what is the lazy nodule effect? Right. Thank you the first question is It's simply because when you put crops down like wheat, for example They are planted at very high densities and they have roots that are about 80 centimeters deep So if you put yourself in the gestalt in the umbelt of a tree root and you are shooting sideways looking for some room You're you're meeting this forest of wheat roots And so you can't really move very far without a lot of effort So you die out whereas your brothers and sisters rootlets that are deeper down in the soil Find that they can move sideways more easily Now in a forest system Most of the roots are going to be close to the surface for one very simple for two very simple reasons The first is you want to grow really quickly. That means you need stability and to have stability You need to have a large base. So you send your Your uh, your roots sideways as much as possible second by sending you root sideways You are claiming this plot of land saying hey, this is mine No trespassing and you're preventing other trees from growing too close to yourself So you maximize your own chances of growing tall and straight and thus getting to the light because remember in a forest All the trees are yearning for the same light and are competing for that light That's why the root system is lower in an agroforestry system than in a forestry system Now for the lazy nodule effect, it's simply you you have plants that are Legumes and when a plant is a legume, it means like like peanut or ground nuts Or soy it means that it fixes nitrogen It's not actually the plant itself that fixes that nitrogen It's little bacteria that the plant lives in symbiosis with and these bacterias live in in in root nodules literally little Little growth on the root areas Which are filled with these bacteria that fix the nitrogen And so the the plant benefits from the nitrogen that the bacteria supplies and the bacteria Benefits from the sugars that the plant produces and you get a lazy nodule effect when you have too much nitrogen in that soil The plant does need to host so many Nitrogen fixing bacteria since it's having another source of nitrogen and from the plant's perspective that other source of nitrogen Is better because the bacteria it has to reward It has to pay with a little bit of its sugar production Whereas the nitrogen that's just available freely in the soil you can just take without paying for it So that's what I mean by the laser nodule effect Right. Yeah, cool John Lu has another question Do you think that the economy could change? I've noted that the ecosystem is much more valuable than stuff Could there be a new currency or a new economy that compensates people for restoring ecological function rather than just extraction of food as as commodities The the short answer is yes, you can pay to restore ecological function and Various actors including private foundations governments multinational organizations like du and indeed you john are trying to do exactly that But I don't think that means that you go into a new economy the economy As it exists today Is a reflection of who we are as a species and we are an extremely collaborative species We discovered a long time ago that the best way of surviving was to bang join together in order to divide our labor Because the result of that would be higher than if everybody was trying to hunt their own bison and grow their own food and Build their own house and mill their own beer brew their own beer and blah blah blah blah It's much easier if everybody specializes in the things that they're good at And if we then trade with other people who are good at something else in order to get what we need For example, all these books over there. It's a lot easier to buy them because then to have to try to write them myself Right and the economy does that that's what the economy is good at The economy is good at creating these kind of super organisms called governments or civic societies or corporations That are good at maximizing value What the economy is really bad at is giving value of a non-monetary form to these entities Human beings have ethics We know for example that it's a bad idea to take money from a starving child when you have a lot of money already Corporations have no assets Corporations are profit maximizing entities And it doesn't matter whether the corporation is there to grow food or to build mobile phones or to do anything else It belongs to stockholders and most stockholders are only interested in the returns that they get from holding that stock So a morality is built into the economy And the way we deal with that and the way we have been dealing with that for centuries, perhaps even millennia Is to put in place rules and regulations that prevent Corporations capital owning and deploying entities From overstepping certain boundaries and we used to call that religions Now we call it laws and regulations, but these things always exist And these things are never good enough and these things are never foolproof There's always a corporation or a capitalist or a capital deploying entity could be a government, for example That deploys that capital in the wrong way In a bad way in a way that is antithetical to life or to the interests of the wider community And the way we deal with that is as a society by having these conversations and these debates And by lobbying our decision makers and by coming together in groups that are protesting against things And that's how things slowly change For example to take a different Thing let's talk about human rights Now most people will agree with the following statement human rights need to be given to all human individuals Irrespective of their race their creed their gender Or their sexual orientation That's the modern standard right but 30 years ago it would have been different 30 years ago it would have been all men need to be given human rights And under that would have been all white men maybe 70 years ago so things that we believe to be Ethical foundation stones are nothing such they evolve over time They get better and better over time and sometimes they get worse We see a recriticence of nationalism and of right wing exclusivism Outright white supremacy and all of those things and it's not just happening in the u.s It's happening everywhere in the world. So these things are it's not a smooth progressive curve It's more like a like a like a saw And sometimes it can go quite deep it did so in the 1930s before it starts climbing again So it's it's maybe two steps forward one step back and sometimes it's two step forwards three steps back But I don't think I think what the history of the world shows Is that these widely different economic outcomes? Sweden the United States or Somalia Zimbabwe Russia Are always achieved with the same basic economic system a system where there's a division of labor And where people use a means of exchange called money in order to acquire that which they are bad at producing themselves And that money they get by doing something which they're good at producing themselves So I am now promoting john lew to a panelist because he has three more questions And why don't we just have a conversation a conversation with him instead, huh? Hey john, let me unmute him. Here he is now. He can talk to welcome john Turn on your video if you can john it'd be lovely to see you Uh, I think I'm blue But Let's see It's a party now. All right All right, where are you right now john Beijing? Yes, it's uh, almost four in the morning. So I'm good go to bed john I know that's what I thought I But allard allard pushed me Well, I'm glad you're here. John. Are you uh, are you open to asking the the next three questions that you That you wrote down in person. Do you want to either speak to it or read it or whatever you like? I can't say they disappeared Would you like me to read them or do you want to uh, and then you guys can talk They're more like comments. Let's go ahead and read it I'll just read them their comments and then and then we'll see you guys can engage Um, do you think that the okay? We did that one. Um Your you your statement suggests that the only way to create value is to buy and sell things I think that this needs to be discussed more than this explanation We can go further in our understanding that means we don't need to produce things to create values Uh, I think that all living beings have inalienable rights And then you do agree that it's a societal choice Amen to all of that obviously. I mean, you know the the economy the way of you know, all of us Associate with others usually in families sometimes in much larger groups where we create things together Without expecting a monetary reward either implicit or explicit Um, all of us participated community groups all of us are helping to do things that we believe in All of us are for example standing up in the middle of the night to listen to a webinar when we could be asleep And not getting paid for it. So of course Of course we are all it's what gives us meaning it gives us meaning to change The world or at least to have the illusion that we can change the world It gives us meaning to raise children It gives us meaning to see our partner be happy and none of that can be measured with money But what money can do is provide us with a more comfortable way of expressing or in a nature as human beings And I think that in that sense The economy is invariant You can run it. Well, you can run it badly. You can have a bunch of assholes running it You can have a bunch of saints running it But the system as it is Is unlikely to have earned a go an absolutely fundamental change Which doesn't mean that you can't have changes in the proportion of things For example, you could very easily reduce the proportion of time And of resources that you devote to monetary exchanges and increase the proportion of time and of resources that you devote to non-monetary Activities and that is in fact what is happening around the world some countries do more on the monetary side like the u.s Some countries do less on the monetary side like sweden Should we um, maybe lose the um, the You know the background or the yeah, why don't you stop sharing screen patch a good idea? Maybe you could Okay Other people and let them talk Yeah, hang on. Uh, here we go Uh, what do I click on this one post share? Stop share. Here you go. My screen sharing is is gone. Is that all right? Can you is my screen gone? Yes Marvelous here. Let me turn on this This slide so you can see my face. It's not an idea or is that worse Does that make me look like some kind of ghost in the machine probably all right So but I still have the q and a's. Yeah Yeah, well, we're still uh, there's a lot of stuff in the chat box Yeah, but uh, I don't think we have anything new. I think we've gotten all that stuff in the chat box John, did you have anything else to add to that conversation that uh, patrick's response? Um, I'm good. Are there other people who can talk or can people get on or not? They can only write Well, no people anybody can that I just got to click a button Would anybody else like to speak john, uh, john, that's a nice suggestion anybody We could we could have a full party Uh, we I don't think we have the bandwidth to have everybody have video. So I think that's Elimiting a limiting factor or we could have a screen full of people talking which could get pretty confusing, but um Yeah, I'm down. Anybody want to talk? Uh Put it in the chat box and uh In the meantime, I have a question. Um couple questions If you want to hang around john and maybe we'll get the party bigger um First question real quick when you were talking about the role of trees in the hydrological cycle Can you uh say add one thing to that maybe speak to the the role Of the condensation nuclei that they create in the rainfall patterns because you talked about the local effects with infiltration You talked about the wind and their transpiration But I don't think you address the condensation nuclei that they emit and how that can affect either the rainfall In c2 or somewhere else Can you speak to that? Um, yes, I didn't mention it because I don't know anything about it. I'm sorry. I can't speak to that Okay, great. I know it exists. I know it exists, but I don't know the details. I haven't read the relevant papers So, um, you know, I I know I know it's a good thing, but my comment cannot be on that Okay, wonderful. Um So my other question, um Has to do with I guess So we're talking about human intelligence we're talking about domestication and ways of making that more More sensible ways that are more like an ecosystem um You know because the way we've done it in the past we've domesticated a lot of things It's given us certain yields, but it's decreased certain ecosystem functions. We've we've domesticated rivers We've domesticated the oryx, you know in each case we've gotten something, but we've also sort of Oftentimes decreased nutritional value oftentimes decreased the resilience and the ecosystem benefits of that species And also I think of how my friend Byron Joel in Australia. He says he prefers these semi-wild landscapes um The question is I guess You know, so you mentioned we've become as gods. We might as well act as such and there is that um Then there's also this question of like say you mentioned in the Great Plains and the bison for many thousand years now since the Holocene um, they've pretty much been gods in the Great Plains So can you speak in any way to like collaboration where? other land managers kind of resume their roles Uh, maybe that mystery that what we can never know and how our intelligence might play a role that's not just the controller But that's also the collaborator with other managing intelligences. Can you speak about that? Yeah, that's that that's the you that's the humility of the land manager Is the land it's you know, a good land manager is somebody who looks and listens and and waits and feels before deciding what to do um A good land manager understands what his trees and his animals are telling him He doesn't ever understand them in great detail because he's not god But he understands them well enough to do better than what he's doing today And all all the best land managers I've met and I use the word land manager In order not to fall into this artificial dichotomy between farmers and ranches and foresters All the best land managers I've met have one thing in common They are geeks. They are total geeks They spend their time from morning to evening on their land listening smelling touching waiting Observing and then they change a little thing here and a little thing there and they see what happens and they improve over time And that's the humidity of of the manager and it's the humidity of common intelligence. It's understanding what your Your environment is trying to tell you An industrial farmer has a completely different approach an industrial farmer sends in a bulldozer and gets rid of absolutely everything on the land He then turns into the into this perfectly flat Landscape in which he puts one seed down with giant machinery And he then has to supply all of the ecosystem services that environments gave you for free He has to supply the nutrition. He has to supply the pest control. He has to supply the shade He has to supply the irrigation So I really don't understand why people do it. It's really expensive It completely destroys the local environment. It doesn't make a great deal of profit And it's really boring because all you get to do is sit in this stupid machine all day long breathing in noxious chemicals I don't I really don't get it Could I just mention that I I think that We have a a kind of a hybrid thing that we have to do Clearly we're required to put some things back in place but When we're when we're working, I think one of the outcomes that we want to see is an evolutionary outcome you know The reason that we have an an oxygenated atmosphere and A freshwater system and soil fertility and biodiversity is because of this non human intelligence that permeates in in a symbiotic web of life It is it is this outcome That we can't determine We don't know enough to determine that and we and we never will know enough to determine it exactly So I think what we're trying to do is restore Some basic ecological functions and allow We're trying to align with evolutionary systems And and then when we do the outcome in the long term Will not be simply a cultural outcome It will be You know, it will have had cultural impacts But it will go back to having an evolutionary outcome. That's that's yeah, I think that's absolutely right I think what you know another way of talking about a commonality of intelligence is Or talking about the humility of the land manager who listens and walks is understanding why A place is the way it is and the reason why a place is the way it is Is because of long evolutionary processes the evolutionary processes that have affected every species And the evolutionary processes that have affected how these species interact with one another in that unique context that's Clear and you know and a clever farmer knows how to observe that And use it to his advantages a stupid farmer just knows how to blast it with chemicals, right? Um, well, we are near the end. We have a little special thing We haven't done yet in the last two and we're going to get an update from the camp John if you want to can you unmute yourself and give us a little music intro music for this for this update from the camp I am going to promote kirsten who's a longtime camper Two panelists and we're going to get an update from the camp Yeah, we have one more question that just came in there. Oh, okay Let let's uh, we can do that question and and then get the update and kirsten we can uh We'll do Ruben's question and then we'll get the update from you kirsten. Okay um Ruben says Areas lacking biomass often have high unemployment numbers and face poverty While there is a lot of work to be done in terms of restoration It is often considered voluntary Would it be thinkable that restoring land could be rewarded money-wise in the future? This in terms of salary for the good work that is done the need is there the knowledge is there and the people are there What are your thoughts? Here here here Yes, that's a key thing that we're trying that that we're discussing here in brussels trying to To figure out a way of ensuring that some of that financial mass of agricultural subsidies flows in that direction Obviously industry has no interest in this so it's not blocking it everybody thinks it's a good idea But everybody will tell you it's a good idea, but nobody's actually going to write the text and allocate the budget lines I think that's what we're working on I think this is the way that we change the economy I think I think this is this is where we really see That it's ludicrous to talk about the value of stuff When these ecosystem functions are the basis of life and we've said that they're zero It can't be true. So we really need to address this and the people who are doing this I think what what what I started to do about 25 years ago was to follow this path And I believe that what happens is you end up creating huge value unbelievable value Value beyond what anybody is imagining Now so it's not like you have to buy and sell more and more junk In order to create value you don't you need to restore the natural ecological function And all of the people in in the camps all the people in this movement all of the people There are billions of people who are disenfranchised and have been by those those historical inequities that have come from feudalism and from All these other other slavery and and genocide and and suppression I think you know all of these people have equal rights and You know when we say that when we when we understand that Then you know, it's it's going to be a completely different economy and it's going to be a completely different outcome You you won't be able to pollute. You won't be able to degrade. That is a new paradigm That has a higher level of consciousness. That's where we need to go Yeah, we're going to get to this. Uh, we got one more question came in But I think you kind of covered it But uh, elizabeth says can we consider value coming from functional ecosystems as green infrastructure that can be supported as we see Hard infrastructure supporting our economies in california. We need to manage for ongoing and growing water needs Do you feel like you addressed that kind of the functional ecosystem as yeah Yeah, we get we we have that we have programs in europe to do just that so there's actually money flowing Called the life program with the tour 2000 program. It's conservation. The life program is about functional green infrastructure You know Yes, it's it's it's it's not nearly enough It's not nearly as quick as it needs to be but it's a step in that direction. That's that's definitely happening Great. All right. Well, that's it for the q&a and we're gonna we're gonna close out with Kirsten is uh, my friend over at the camp there. You're you're there right now and uh Let's get an update. What's happening at the camp now. What are you guys up to? How's it going? Good to see you. Hi kirsten. Hi Hello everybody Um, thank you patrick for this excellent session. It's been great and Uh, I I have to switch mindsets a little bit to back to our own little reality here Um, we are really excited because we moved to camp a couple of weeks ago Um Finally, so we've been living in this house that I'm in now for the wi-fi Um for the past year, but now we're finally actually living there and we're ready to accept more people Um, so we can really start growing this movement and start offering courses Um, we're also in the process of developing business models to make our our Local camp more financially sustainable and not be so dependent on the foundation So that we can use the the money that the members donate to build more camps around the world And not it just going into this one camp. So it's a it's a really exciting time It feels like we're growing up and we're becoming this adult place. Um Yeah, it's a lot of fun and our cover crops are looking amazing Um, we can already see the difference between where we put organic compost and where we just put some fertilizer pellets The there's different things growing in the different places and it's much denser in the composted area Um, and we're learning a lot about that through observation Um, one of our volunteers is currently enrolled in a course by Leningrm on soil microbiology And we're going to start monitoring that with an intern that just came here from Wageningen University Um, so we are soon purchasing a microscope and we're going to be looking at all the little things going on in the soil It's really exciting. It's great That's wonderful wonderful. I saw in one of the pictures too. It looked like there was some of the cover crop coming up Did you notice a pattern that was formed by where the deep ripping was? Can you speak to that? Yes, not not by the deep ripping because there was um, all of our site was deep ripped so you can't really see a difference in that. Um There's a small part that wasn't deep rip, but that's our market garden. So it's difficult to to tell the difference Um, so the biggest difference is really you really see like a deeper green where the compost was and that's the biggest difference that we see Very cool Yeah, have you been have you been all right in terms of rain and local climates? Has it been more or less what you expected? We've been so lucky this year. There's been so much rain. It's like a blessing on our project It's insane. There's there's really been incredible amounts of rain. It rained today again at the weekend We had huge thunderstorms It's a lot colder than it normally is this time of year so I don't I can't really um gauge what that says about climate change here because I I've only been here a year but um I think the the climate is definitely different and Um, then it's supposed to be but but it's working out because it's our first year here and we need all that water So, right, I think it's going to be really important. I think it's going to be really important to Observe what happens in the de vegetated? out, you know outside the camp area outside of the restored areas If there's a difference um in temperature and a difference in available moisture in the soil surface Yeah, and at depth these these will be hugely I think What you're really proving out there is that people can go and dynamically change The they can rehydrate dehydrated biomes This biome is dehydrated But it it wasn't it. There's nothing when I went there After after coming from china and then going to spain to look at this. I think oh, it's easy to fix this compared to the lusplat though Really really much better situation. So, you know, you I'm expecting some really dramatic stuff from you guys No pressure All right, no pressure except we got to heal the planet. Let's do this right? Or else we're not going to be here long. Oh, yeah, okay. No pressure All right. Well, thanks everybody. Thank you so much patrick. It's been a pleasure and uh, thanks for having me And I look forward to more conversations with you in the future. John. Thank you so much For everything and for staying up till four in the morning to join us Amazing and kirsten. Thank you so much our first update from the camp and uh, let's let's do the report Let's do this next time too, huh Every time Every time. Okay. Yeah. All right. We'll try every time. Well next time I just want to say next time we have the harlins on uh, maddie and tim harlem the The founders of the permaculture magazine in england, uh the international So that's going to be a lot of fun and um Y'all have a wonderful week catrick. Anything else to close with? Uh, yeah, just send me the uh time for that next one so I can put it in my diary and not overbook myself Okay, we'll do. Yeah, maybe we'll pull you up with one of your questions. You want to take us out with some music, john? Sorry, I'm just noodling now It's wonderful All right. All right folks. Well as john noodles, we'll bid you a fond farewell until next time and uh until next time Take good care everyone. Bye. Bye