 Kia ora koutou. Greetings and welcome to our regenerative future, Webisode 5. Lessons from around the world. Our regular host and author of our regenerative future, Elina Siegfried is out sick today, so she's thankfully assisting me from behind the scenes with Ursula of Pure Advantage. My name is Simon Miller. I'm the executive director of Pure Advantage and producer of our regenerative future. An investigation into the science and business behind the growing mindset shift that is regenerative ag. Pure Advantage produced this series with Edmund Hillary Foundation who have just closed their eighth cohort recruitment of impact change makers focused on building solutions to global challenges. They are now moving on to the next phase of this journey by activating the impact of the fellowship in New Zealand. Just a quick bit of housekeeping. Please place your questions in the chat box and don't get dismayed if yours doesn't get answered because we will post them to our Instagram feed in the very near future to keep this important conversation going. We're now recording live and sharing on Facebook and with that let's welcome our guests from around the world. A big thank you to our panelists. I'll mention your name and a short bio and if you could please respond with a brief introduction about your current work and what regenerative agriculture means to you. We'll keep that to a couple of minutes each, that'll be great. I'll start with Erin. Erin is a former farm kid from the Canadian prairies who calls both Canada and New Zealand home. She spent 20 years building local, organic and regenerative supply change and now works to accelerate the adoption of regenerative farming education and know-how putting the power back into the hands of the producer. Erin, welcome. Thank you so much. I'm in Lile Bay, Wellington right now, so Canadian in New Zealand and happy to be here. Right now I'm working on a project in Canada. We are creating a decentralized education hub in the prairies where the farmers themselves will be trained in land monitoring to measure regeneration so that we can see how those monitoring can be used to change policy and to enter different supply chains. I'm working on that end in Canada and using those learnings here in New Zealand to see how we might be able to support, once again, the uptake of farmer knowledge to move to regenerative practices. Great. Thank you very much. Nicole, I'll swing over to you. Nicole is the founder of Integrity Soils and joins us from the big skies of Idaho. Nicole has been providing knowledge and leadership around ag ecology to producers in the US, Canada and across Australasia for over two decades. We've been fortunate to have had Nicole back in New Zealand before COVID. She's the author of The Must Read For The Love of Soil. Nicole, welcome. Thanks, Simon. Thanks for pulling this together. And thanks for the plug. It's awesome. My work currently, it seems with COVID, I've gone back to more of the one-on-one working with ranchers and farmers, like, on the ground. Whereas before COVID, I was just flying, really, in terms of workshops. So right now I am in Idaho at Older Spring Ranch, which is an inspiration for what's possible on some of these real dryland environments in terms of animal impact and bringing life back to landscapes. And that really is what regenerative agriculture is to me, is how do we bring back more vibrancy and see fully functional systems with water holding capacity and nutrient cycles and growing just, you know, the best produce that we possibly could. So for me, regenerative is all about the outcomes. Great. Thank you. Moving on to Salane. Salane Diaris is the founder and executive director of At The Epicenter, based in Boulder, Colorado. She has recognized for helping to galvanize the global regenerative movement by convening thought leaders from business, civic, academia, and agricultural networks to share solutions to extractive models in the food, fashion, and beauty industries. She is a former White House intern in better White House days, and I'm proud to say I've attended three of Salane's Epicenter events and highly recommend them, so when we can get there again, we should go. Salane. Well, thank you for that very warm introduction, and it's such an honor to be here, Simon. Thank you so much for including me, and I love that you all are doing this work on our regenerative future. My focus presently is continuing that work of bringing people together, but pivoting to much more of an online focus. We're going to be launching a new series called Regenerative Rising, and we're focusing very much on bringing all those sectors that Simon mentioned, but into a deep focus on how do we rebuild post-COVID based on everything that we're learning about the deep insecurities in our food system, the deep inequities in our society, and how do we start to be very purposeful in designing forward with those, kind of all these large systems in mind. I loved what has been said already about regenerative. My addition to what I think regenerative, a framework for how to think about regenerative is that it's a living systems-based way of seeing the land, and the land should be perceived in place where it is. It's a place-source system. Therefore, what you do in New Zealand versus what you do in the Great Plains of the US and what you do in tropical environments are all unique and different, and that is the power of this approach, because you're looking at what is going to create the highest level of evolution capacity for that land to be its best self. Exactly. That's great, Celine. And that's why the big monocultures and the big ag systems, they don't like this new system, because it's unique and tailored and specific. All boats rise with the tide. We're going to move on to Sam. Sam is one of New Zealand's leaders in Regen Ag, and following international farm systems research now works with a wide range of farmers, practitioners, scientists, entrepreneurs, supporting grassroots networks to transform our farm and food systems to deliver greater ecological and human well-being. Sam is a co-founder of the rapidly growing farm and network group Quorum Sense. He's also going to be a co-author with Dr. Gwen Grillet on an upcoming white paper that looks at the opportunities and challenges for Regenerative Ag in New Zealand. So we look forward to that in maybe six months. Sam, over to you. Welcome. Well, thanks, Simon, and great to be here. Yeah, so my work at the moment sort of has two main parallel streams. I didn't found Quorum Sense, but I got on board early, and I'm now effectively managing the network on behalf of the group. What we're working on at the moment is kind of grow the support network so that we can support as many farmers as possible across different farms throughout the country, just with really practical farmer-to-farm and knowledge sharing and learning and sort of supporting farmers to help each other innovate and adapt ideas and practices to those different contexts that have been mentioned. And the other sort of parallel stream, which is nicely tied in with that, is you're working with Dr. Gwen Grillet from Minaki-Fenua and a whole lot of other scientists and agribusinesses and practitioners to kind of complement that on-the-ground farmer practice with some of those other kind of knowledge systems in terms of science in particular, and actually trying to bridge those two together into a pretty cool partnership. So, exciting stuff at the moment. And obviously, last week, I gave my sort of personal definition of regenerative, and there was a question on the Quorum Sense Facebook page. Last week, I think it was asking where and what people's definitions were, and I picked that one that I really liked, which I've adapted slightly, and it was from Maury Leyland-Peno with the original. And I'll just read it out here. Regenerative farming is the application of an ecological approach to the agricultural landscape with a particular focus on the health of our soils, plants, animals, and people and an expectation of similar or improved profitability. It encourages a mindset of continuous improvement, takes into account that every farm and farmer is different and recognises the connection between the health of our farms and the health and resilience of our communities, waterways, biodiversity, and climate. And yeah, I sort of particularly liked that one, so I just thought I'd share it with you all. Cheers. Thanks, Sam. That was fantastic, and we're really happy that's recorded, so people can look back on this and work through that themselves. Erin, with a foot in both, you know, North America and New Zealand, how do you, what's the view from Canada and how does that compare to New Zealand? Hmm, same, same, but different. It's interesting, and that could be said of the world over. So right now there's two different things happening in North America. Well, there's two different systems that we're working with. There's a lot of pasture-based animal integration, so bison and beef and sheep, but we have a huge arable crop farming industry in North America, much larger than here in New Zealand. And so the opportunities are very, very different. Right now there's Gabe Brown working with the Soil Health Academy and doing a lot of work on arable landscapes, and that has taken on a huge amount of traction, which might not be as relevant in New Zealand because there's not as much arable landscape, but what is happening in New Zealand with the grassland and what QuorumSense has going in really ramping up the understanding of how those systems can work is something that's very interesting to me for in North America. In Canada we have a lot of interest in how to increase the regeneration of grasslands and then link that to outcomes so that we can get policy shifting, but we have not yet cracked this really sticky peer-to-peer interaction that's starting to happen really rapidly here in New Zealand, which is really exciting. That's really interesting. Could you just talk a little bit, just for a little bit more on that policy shifting that you see starting to happen in both North America and here? What are the opportunities? Yeah, so we're finding that... You bet. So right now everybody is chasing carbon and how to measure carbon. And although that's a very nice shiny thing, of course ecological systems have all of these different ecosystem functions, mineral cycling, water cycling, all of these different things that make a healthy system. I'm really curious as to how farmers can be taking the measurements and monitor how those ecosystem processes are improving and then use that data to show how that would increase resilience for flood and drought situations, things that governments in both places are having to spend a lot of money on to see how those monitoring and measurements can then flow to other financial mechanisms for farmers. Okay, great. Nicole, would you like to comment on that and also secondary that comment to Erin's statement. Just talk about what's happening where you are in Idaho, Montana and you've been to New Zealand recently and you've travelled around Australia. Just give us a little bit of an overview of those different areas, what's happening. It's a really fascinating time and I think it's a fascinating time from so many different aspects. I mean, you could call it the perfect storm if that wasn't a cheesy thing to say is to see the pressures from so many different angles and seeing some really interesting conversations from, let's say, traditional industrial agriculture farmers who are really asking these questions about how do we farm into the future and really starting to, they're not using the word ecosystem services but that's what's coming through which is how do we build resilience, how do we build a sponge, what do we do about fire. I was on Kangaroo Island and the food kind of broke out and popped more my way over to Montana to get out of there but looking at what is happening in Australia right now and they say this isn't, we don't have fire seasons anymore, we just have fire. How do we produce food into the future with climactic variability and with the breakdowns that are happening in terms of marketplace and I think here in the US it's really, I don't know what's happening in New Zealand right now but it's really coming to the forefront of food to people. What are the breakdowns in and along the way and I think we need to be thinking regeneratively is that real whole big picture of how do we supply good quality food to people where the farmer themselves is actually being remunerated and not being propped up artificially. Great. Selaine you're probably good to add a comment on the back of that as someone who weaves together business people and farmers, growers soil practitioners, ecologists advocacy groups like carbon underground and I mean some really cool stuff so how do you see what's happening where you are in the interplay with all of these different people in the space? It's interesting, I think a lot of what Nicole just said is really accurate especially given what we've seen with COVID and all of the I guess the underbelly of how our food system is very vulnerable to disruption you can still go into grocery stores and still see a lot of things not on the shelves. As far as what's happening in business and where is the conversation right now there's there's some contraction and there's also some conflict around how a lot of the CPGs that were in sort of their gasping for breath leading up to COVID have had an extraordinary resurgence in your very conventional grocery types of items from the craft types of products and those things that were losing footing have gain. There's an interesting question that I'm hearing a lot of people talk about right now is well what does this portend in terms of the conversation we were having pre-COVID that was moving toward this deeper consideration about how farming is happening and I think there's a lot of dysfunction that is going to require greater effort on the part of those of us who want to see systemic change there's I perceive some rising up of pushback there's been some interesting departures of some of the most influential people in some very big companies of late so I'm mildly concerned about what that portends. Nicole did you want to come into that? Thinking from the New Zealand context? Yeah I thought we were going to respond to that what Celine was talking about there or? I was tuning out because I was thinking about what CPG meant. What does CPG mean? I'm so sorry consumer packaged goods so those are all the processed food on the shelves those are CPG companies consumer packaged goods I thought everybody knew that We'll put that acronym on our list Hey Sam we'll jump back over to Sam what's the lay of the land in New Zealand and what are some of the challenges that we're facing now and if you could because there's always about food because we're food producers too they say 40 million people and we talk about value add and commodity so just talk about in essence what are the challenges we're facing here in New Zealand what's the lay of the land? Big question Simon I was just thinking when Celine was talking before about this kind of alongside the conversation around regenerative there's also this parallel conversation which has maybe been going a bit longer around resilience and what resilience looks like at the landscape scale, at community scale and that talking about how a lot of New Zealand had this really nasty combination of drought and COVID at the same time and for a livestock producer that meant being short on feed and combined with the impact of the processing plants around half capacity which meant that people couldn't get rid of stock which is still having ongoing effects in terms of I think one of the last example was dairy farmers with cull cows that they can't get rid of what they usually would early enough which is putting pressure on feed and lots of the anecdotes that were coming around of all of the farmers that have been I guess whether you want to call it regenerative grazing or plan grazing or trying to build resilience into their grazing systems in terms of being able to withstand that had really noticed that they grew past your longer into the summers they managed to maintain animal condition better than they used to and when the rain did come they really bounced back a lot faster and this is all just their observations and looking at how their farms are performing versus the neighbour's place which might have been graced a bit harder and longer relatively speaking and I think it was just a really great example of what resilience looks like and in this case it was a double whammy of unforeseen events and the ability to bounce back which is what resilience is all about so I think what's going to be really interesting seeing these conversations kind of come together and it's not one or the other it's not a regenerative thing, it's a resilient thing it's actually those concepts are really woven together and I think one of our challenges at the moment is just around language and communication and understanding and that's really what we're doing now is the regenerative agriculture conversation has gained more traction at higher levels there's been a lot of people really trying to make meaning of what that means and sought out the claims from the reality and what is an American style regenerative in New Zealand or is it what does this look like on the ground what's actually making the difference and there's been a real lack of specifics and talking in generalizations and I think it's time that we get specific about what we're talking about and that's where the conversations between the farmers and practitioners that are kind of operating at ground level and people in industry and government and science for example that's where those conversations I'm excited that they're starting to happen yeah. Right, okay good yeah that's I mean let's get to the soil then because what's growing and we talk about deep deep rooting you know forages Aaron there was a quote in one of your contributor article it's not a question of whether we should stop raising meat and dairy or whether we adopt plant based diets but rather a question of how we manage the land. Ruminant animals grazing on deep rooted pasture are essential for carbon sequestration can you talk a little bit about that in relation to what Sam was talking about with the resilience and the droughts because droughts are not immune to New Zealand they're also in all these other countries so you talk about that a little bit. Yeah you bet so part of the understanding of regenerative agriculture is also that every landscape and area is different and so I mean what ends up happening in Teranaki will be very different than what happens in Hawkes Bay if you put the same principles in play in both areas you're going to have very different outcomes which means that these systems have to be really nimble and adaptive to be able to work for whatever the environment is and the communities want or the desires of the people there on the landscapes so where I am from in the Canadian prairies we have a very brittle tending environment we have long periods of time where there's no rainfall there's no precipitation so in those areas they traditionally were not treated areas it was all grasslands and those grasslands require huge herds of ruminant animals moving over them to be able to lay down that grass armor the soil get the nutrient cycles going and keep that biodiversity happening New Zealand is a very different situation the whole country was 85% in forest before human habitation so as we've been changing the landscapes it changes the environments of those meaning you'll have to be more nimble in the different systems that you bring in so for some cases means animals on grasslands allow that deep rooting you can have really high biodiversity of grasses as opposed to arable agriculture which might just be a monocrop and cause more runoff or less holding capacity of water depending on how you do it so both systems whether you're doing animal or plant-based agriculture can be helpful or harmful and all of it is in the adaptability of how it works so just like the resilience of food systems means of diversity of different options that will create a diverse supply chain so is so for diversity of farming operations so making sure that we have those really diverse systems that can be adapted based on what is needed in those areas okay great Nicole you talk about that in your contributor article you say many people talk about regenerative agriculture like it's this new thing but that's doing a great disservice to indigenous people around the world they've been regenerating the land for hundreds of years the Maori world view is inherently regenerative could you talk about that a little bit yeah and I don't think it's hundreds of years I think we're talking thousands of years and I think one example might be the Hopi people you know looking at some of their their management or what was happening in China before the industrial revolution you know some of the methodologies that they developed but I think in New Zealand when you look at some of the most fertile and valuable and beautiful lands in New Zealand particularly around the Auckland area those were developed through extraordinary market gardening that the Maori people were doing and pretty much you know Europeans come in they colonize they destroy what those people were working on and then you know turn that into maybe you know production land you know it's where we grow our onions and grow some of New Zealand's most productive landscapes and yet there was no there's nothing offered in terms of acknowledging who came before and what they were doing with their land management and some of those garden beds would have been 600 years old you know an extraordinary deep soil for compared to landscapes that would have just been in trees you know and and I think that's part of you know regenerative agriculture is not going back in time but it's also acknowledging what has come before and then looking at what are some of the best science that we're seeing what is some of this molecular science what are we seeing in terms of diversity and biological and plant education and how can we enhance that and so I think with regenerative we're really bringing the best of all of those worlds together in terms of how do we actually increase these outcomes for landscapes. I'll come to you in one second Celine with a different question but Sam I'd like you just to comment on this thread when you did your research overseas and you'd come back with after your Nuffield scholar you know work you said once I'd seen a few living examples of farmers doing things that conventional agronomists tell us aren't possible regenerative farming became pretty convincing. What were some of those things that you saw on your travels and you brought back home? There was actually the two examples that spring to mind were both kind of intensive vegetable production systems actually one in New York state and one in Ecuador up near Quito and in the Highlands there and effectively both of those farmers actually both on 10 hectares had bought their land in an incredibly degraded state in the case of the New York state farmer it had been corn on corn on corn with the odd soy for 40, 50, 60 years high tillage, high input it was like concrete and the farmer in Ecuador it was basically just a rocky alpine barren landscape with no water and both of those farmers took on a I suppose they were organic organic by a dynamic he inclined although that wasn't again it wasn't a prescription so much as just a community a practice that they were working with and to use the example of the New York farmer when he first broke in that ground he couldn't pull more than one subsoiler through at a time it was that hard and he tried to and he kept on breaking things by through a combination of multi-species cover crops on half the farm and growing veggies on the other half of the farm each year and grazing those with 6 to 10 cattle or something on 5 hectares just grazing those cover crops he turned that so we dug holes and it was feet of chocolatey black so despite actually quite a high tillage system and I was grilling him on the inputs that he had been putting in and that kind of stuff and it was seed and rock dust seed for the multi-species cover crops and the vegetable and the seed sorry and rock dust for certain trace minerals that were missing and letting the biology do the rest of the work in terms of breaking it up and I one example of that probably isn't that convincing but once you come across a few and you see these patterns and you're like wow there's something going on here and it was really that kind of treating the soil as a living organism and understanding how to feed it and that kind of starting that upward spiral and that was probably those were the key ones that came to mind there okay I was going to just stick this through just one more little bit Celine I'll come to you but just Erin I thought maybe you could comment but the question came in from Gemma Carroll possibly the greatest challenge in the horizon in New Zealand will be waterway protection and regional council regulation pressuring farmers interestingly enough vegetable growers have huge nutrient leaching issues could this be an opportunity for a region to work with government and farmers what do you say about that yes there was a short absolutely I mean when you think of who managing the landscapes in all of our countries it is farmers it's everybody who's in agriculture and of course we all need to be working together and it isn't just what I love about the region movement it's this huge spectrum of people on the farm on the huge spectrum and as people get into it and move in they're finding different ways and moving in the great amazing direction they're finding new ways of doing things and so I get stuck on this science thing because of course we need proof how much proof do we need right there's all of these in person things that everyone is seeing and it's working it's working for farmers and it's adaptive so you can't repeat trials in all these different places they won't work the same way in every year in every place so that's where there's a little bit of a push up against to be able to work with government we need to have this proof but how much proof do we need in an adaptive system so I always liken it to raising a child if you have ten kids and you follow the exact same system and you raise them every day will that work will every child successfully be an adult that is well balanced and you know happy and healthy no because there's too much complexity there's too many different things as a parent you have to be adaptive and how you're raising your children based on their needs and the environment and a million different factors same it holds true for regenerative farming great awesome I'm going to shift tech out to Saline with a twofold sort of question Saline and there's been a few questions from our audience I'm sure asking about networks in the US to join up and talk about you could just maybe talk about your network I think in response to that but I'd be really interested to know and maybe our audience didn't see it but there was a blog that went out last week from the World Resources Institute that stated agriculture also has minimal potential to sequester global greenhouse gas emissions this was refuted by some significant soil ecologists Dr. Keith Pashtian and Ratan Lal and that's a great paper and if people want to get hold of that it's part of a global soil sequestering carbon and soil listserv that we're part of reach out to pure advantage and we'll get you in touch on that but Nicole could you Saline could you talk please about the networks that are available to you and how they may be responded to a very high level discussion that went around last week sure I'd be happy to there's a lot of organizations in the states that are holding different pieces of this complex fabric there are organizations like mad agriculture which is doing work directly with farmers helping them reimagine their farm plan from a regenerative lens there's kiss the ground that's working to educate the public and how to talk about the power of soil as part of this larger potentiality for addressing climate change there's at the epicenter and we're actually in the process of being part of a group of folks that will be launching an online community that will be sort of like a regenerative ag facebook if you will so keep an eye out for that we'll share that with you I would love to have pure advantage participate so we can really build a very interactive global community that are talking to each other cross pollinating with each other because that's going to be something we really need to combat the disinformation and this type of thing that came out from the WRI and when we were talking a little bit before we got in this call I sent out a comment to that group because I have been disturbed by the hyper focus on carbon it's a very reductionistic way of approaching the complexity that we're talking about and Erin I loved what you were saying earlier about the multi-systems measurement and we have a lot of expertise to do that already we can determine if we have high bioactivity in soil we can measure for increasing organic matter in soil we can see indicators above ground that tell us we are having an impact we can learn so much from just observational skills that all humans have and so to have added the shiny bobble of that we have to have a whole new system that we need to invent new markets that we need to be able to measure specifically for carbon and no one can agree how that is done for me is an obstacle that is in fact stopping us from moving with great alacrity forward to help bring these new approaches not as everyone said new but new for many farmers to think about their place a whole present organism that they have a relationship to and also how do we help those farmers have diverse cropping systems have other types of things moving through their landscape by having animals part of their ecosystem they will then have potentially a far more resilient financial foundation to stand on so I have become impassioned about pushing back the hypercarbon conversation I think we're carbon based life carbon is not our enemy it's our ally it's just misappropriated it's in the wrong place and we really need to work on restoring ecosystem harmony and balance and that will set things right and in the proper direction and what's so beautiful as all of us know thank you Erin as all of us know you know life is amazingly resilient if we just give it a gentle amount of support and get out of the way I think what we're going to find is like a cascade that is quite extraordinary and working with humanity to heal the damage we've been doing and that needs to be coupled with shifting away from fossil fuel energy and a host of other ills but this way of thinking we have to measure for one thing is really it's reductionistic it's anti-regenerative in every aspect of what regeneration means that's awesome and Sam you would have to respond to that and that is exactly what you and Dr Grillay and others are working on right yep now Selenia sort of summed up our entire project quite nicely there just at Cappadocia people are aware so the National Science Challenge and the next foundation of partnered to fund Gwen from Malaki Finoa Research and I to run a small project developing what we're calling a regenerative outcome framework and that's really just trying to help set out the kind of part of it is about outcomes and indicators specific to New Zealand so what does a regenerative system look like in New Zealand how does it differ by context in terms of regions all type farm system etc and what are the different things that people like let's get specific about what we actually want to know about regenerative systems or about farm systems or landscapes in general like what are we wanting these systems to deliver and so that's part of our kind of canvassing work where we kind of try to take quite a participatory approach to bringing in you know farmers, scientists, practitioners, bankers, investors the works and then making sure that we can really specifically address that so rather than delivering just a kind of a framework just for science and policy we're also trying to deliver something that would really help a marketing company for example navigate what regenerative might mean to their consumers and their producers and try and marry that so that they can actually communicate and articulate with a degree of integrity and robustness in terms of the data that sits behind those claims that they're making same with a farmer you know everyone's got different tools, different resources so we're really trying to kind of bring together these different knowledge systems and create some kind of common understanding that's not going to be the one definition for New Zealand that lots of people are asking for but it's going to go a really long way to help and kind of describe what that means to different people and how we can actually understand these things with some degree of common language so that's kind of just kicking off now and hoping to wrap up by November okay great fantastic we look we all look forward to that Ralph Gray had just commented no this is not a question but Ralph Gray had commented that CPG or consumer packaged goods in North America is referred to as FMCG here in New Zealand so fast moving consumer goods either way they just sound awful and I don't want to eat them but so let's talk about what are the opportunities for New Zealand farmers and say what are three things those leading the change in the industry could do to scale so three things that people so what's the biggest opportunity for regenerative ag in New Zealand so we're seeing some just fantastic conversations that are really being driven by those that are closer to the consumers which is some of the brands so looking at what's happening with New Zealand Marino I think is incredibly exciting I think the opportunity is we already have there is already this view of New Zealand in terms of clean and green and I think the regenerative approach really means that we can stand on a foundation of integrity and I think a lot of us are aware that there's some issues around integrity of seeing New Zealand as clean and green I mean really we just were one of the last places to have industrial agriculture applied to it so we're seeing a lag in terms of the degradation and seeing what's happening in terms of you know water quality and other issues you know but I think so what was the question three things that we can change three what are three things that those leading the change in the industry could do to scale like just just yeah we'll go around the panel for that three things that we could do to scale this change this movement yeah I mean it's really interesting because it is something that if we look at China's scale in terms of trying to make you know one size fits all model is that so much of this comes from the ground up and it is like Aaron's been reflecting in terms of being adaptive and nimble is and this is where I think it comes back to having farmer hubs and farmer groups and getting in behind farmers instead of what's currently happening in New Zealand which is a real reaction and a pushback and no it's not possible or no this is different to the US or Australia or the you know the whole show me your data as opposed to getting really curious and having a sense of wonder of how is it that we have dairy farmers in New Zealand that are using less than 20 units of nitrogen and are profitable you know get really curious about that instead of going oh no no we can't do it in New Zealand so I think the thing for scaling is we have structural we have structural systems in New Zealand that are actually limiting innovation instead of getting interested in trying to defend the status quo okay alright we know we have a water quality issue yes we know that New Zealand is number three in terms of phosphate use alright we know there's all these different things going on and going okay well what would it look like if it didn't look like that instead of just defending what we already know so I think that would be my other point but I'd like to hear from the others okay I might just stick with that just for a second and open it up to Aaron and Sam in the New Zealand context it's a question from Angus Gordon much of the discussion about regenerative ag is around landscapes of low slope that have been overworked by machines over multiple crop rotations what is the mechanism that farmers of hill soils that are too steep for cultivation as well as being very erodible and young can use given that these landscapes tend to have low productivity grass squads that tend to smother out diversity and not promote it what are your thoughts to that this is my favourite topic I'm a hill country farming where I spent four and a half years doing and looking forward to getting back there when I can to be fair there's nothing particularly flashy about managing a hill country in a regenerative fashion you know 80-90% of it's still management and decision making there's actually on the Quorum Sense YouTube we recorded a webinar with Hamish Bielski talking about poster out residents and that kind of stuff and that covers that often a bit more detail if anyone's really interested but you know just understanding that relationship between soil plants and animals in terms of their respective health and performance and I think what's you know these tools around using higher density short duration adequate recovery grazing systems that are still really animal performance and therefore animal health focused but are working with with the kind of seasonal variation of you know growth and pastures and using animal impact as a tool it's not, it's kind of hard to I struggle to put this into words but what hill country farms are observing is when you know it's to an extent it's rotational grazing you could call it that but it's actually apply bring that adaptive piece adaptive element in understanding you know the that whole kind of concept of plant competition if you change the way that you manage and you know every every farms got its little quirks and it's like oh why is that paddock behaving slightly differently compared to the one next door despite they were saying what did I do with my management differently in the last you know six months or a couple of years that might have affected that because the you know the opportunities about how different plant species are collaborating and how you can actually utilize different species in different seasons and actually having and so it becomes a collaboration not a competition and you know for example the there's quite a few farmers starting to use high density grazing on sort of steep north faces in particular during rain events to try and get a little bit of gentle plugging to try and actually create a texture on the landscape I guess you call it that actually traps water and helps it infiltrate more so you can actually grow you know so you hold more moisture grow more grass and so thinking about yeah I mean there's a there's a pretty active grazing conversation starting to emerge the quorum since Facebook groups one place but it's definitely possible and there's a whole lot of other things we can do looking at obviously backing off the things that might be harmful to the soil ecology and then Nicole's done some cool work around just getting that fungal bacterial balance right and helping soils kind of retain their structure and actually repair their infiltration capacity first and foremost so Nicole would probably be better to speak to that kind of stuff but okay cool Aaron do you want to talk about any of the hill country or unusual terrain for regenerative agriculture I think Sam pretty much covered that but I just came back from the East Cape so I was up near Uawa, Tolaga Bay and Gisborne which is hill country that has been infiltrated by monocrop pine forest and it is a horror just driving through those areas seeing how the landscape has just been ravaged by these monocrop forests that when they're cut just devastated whole communities and in that nimble adaptive nature there's all these other opportunities so of course yes totally agree with what Sam is saying there's all of these different management solutions to hill country grazing and there's also the opportunity to replant native bush and to see how we can start figuring out what are really marginal lands that really should never have been cleared in the first place and how can we get finance and support and flow those supports through to landowners and land managers so that they can make that choice while still providing all these ecosystem services for their communities so I think one of the barriers or one of the things that could be useful for scaling this movement is figuring out how to fund all of these management solutions because government and industry love trying tech solutions for these management problems and we need more funding for outreach and peer-to-peer learning and education and all these different grassroots management needs and tools that people can make those choices adaptively that are most useful for their contexts. Fantastic Selena I'll come to you in a second there was an awesome answer you know just to we're going to take our audience on a little bit of a journey in the next few weeks we have some more episodes on regenerative organics we have something around resilience and drought and we're looking to talk about native forestry regeneration and forestry and how that works with the land with with Dame Anne Salmond and Dr. David Hall on the panel it's going to be a fantastic webisode in a few weeks Selena we had a question the CPG thing keeps cropping up and what were the reasons for the fragility of the farm to table and the renewed emergence of CPG processes what's your comment about that well I'm not certain I am the most adept at answering that question that's an excellent question and I think it's not clear whether or not the farm to table is failing I think you know when you've added complexity of social distancing farmers markets many are not happening I know like in our community it's an online farmers market I know that the consumer supported agriculture csa's have just exponentially increased in people purchasing a share to be able to take advantage of that local harvest but the constraint on that being part of people's normative notion of how they get food I think the panic that ensued with the whole lockdown covid stay in place types of scenarios a lot of people who had depended on eating out found themselves eating in at home and they really weren't well equipped to cook their own meals so they went back to a lot of old that they were familiar with that is some of the arguments that I have been listening to different colleagues about kind of trying to tease out what are some of the reasons that we've seen suddenly this huge uptick in the sales of things that were plummeting precipitously and also all of the challenges that have happened for local food and interestingly I've been asked to review an article on this topic what whether or not some of the funding that happened in the United States during the government's distribution of capital also had some serious issues in terms of getting money to smaller farm producers to make sure they had resources to bring people on to do or planting that they appropriate time so it's complex and it's been again there's a lot for us to learn from this and I think we're still all going to be unpacking from the different signals that we're getting from the community and one thing I just wanted to throw in it's not precisely what we're talking about today but I think it's worth having all of us be considering is how are we helping really bridge the gap to the people who are the real investors in our food systems that's who buys the food the amount of money that moves through we the citizens of the world to the foods that we have on our tables it's massive we're talking trillions and trillions of dollars and we need to really help lift the bar of considering for people to align what their deeper value propositions are around what they say they really want and are they investing in a way that will support that as the systems that we have and I think that's going to be an interesting I like shifting the notion that we're consumers too we are investors we are investing and we need to think of ourselves as investors and why is this regenerative and organic conversation about how food is how we're trying to get the food system to evolve itself towards this approach why it matters beyond just the carbon conversation it matters for nutrient dense food which is lacking in huge ways all over this planet from a lot of bad lack of honoring soil as life fantastic that's that's a really good estimation of that question whether much wider lens we've got a few minutes to go I'd like to go around now and ask each one of you what is a challenge that you're facing right now in the work you're doing and how can we overcome that challenge by working together across borders so how about I start how about I send it back to you Celine oh okay you know that is directly what my focus is right now is how do we become more collaborative and coordinated throughout the world for those of us who are really sitting on top of this large ecosystem of conversation and how broad this is because interestingly regenerative agriculture is a subset of regeneration and regeneration is such a beautiful word and it holds so much promise for giving us some new ways of attending to we as human beings towards one another and we as human beings toward our living planet there's a quote I'd like to read to you by Dr. Danella Meadows who said she's a very influential environmental thinker from the 20th century the world is a complex interconnected finite ecological social psychological economic system we treat it as if it were not as if it were divisible separable simple and infinite our persistent intractable global problems arise directly from the world so we are holding in this regenerative conversation sort of the reawakening of humanity to the fact that we're in this complex interconnected finite ecological social psychological economic system and if we can lean into that it will elicit from us new responses that I think will be very meaningful over the next several years. Fantastic thank you so much Sam just quickly we've got a few minutes left we'll go around the rest of the panel challenge and opportunity I'm going to go quite very personal here challenge is time this conversation has grown so fast and a lot of us have been putting in sort of been involved in it for a long time with a lot of voluntary effort and now there's myself and quite a few others but you know have all these relationships and networks and experience that we've been building up over time that are now kind of being called and demanded for much more and just from a real personal perspective it's like how do we build really effective teams to operate and you know support my whole driver is how do we support as many people as possible through safe and exciting and successful transitions to wherever they want to get to and that's not yeah between the work with CorumSense and the science that's getting quite demanding and so just trying to figure out how we can creatively build teams and it's kind of that awkward stage between you know whether it's still some questions around legitimacy from the I suppose places that typically have a lot of resources and power and it takes a lot of investment and energy and time to have those conversations while also trying to support the grassroots communities at the same time so that's kind of the the teething phase we're in at the moment and the opportunity I think there's just a more mature conversation and kind of the connectedness between all of the different conversations that are going on whether it's the post-COVID kind of stuff in food systems or health or you know economics, local food system, resilience et cetera once we start to see and piece those things together you know but the different skills and perspectives that people are bringing into the same room that's what's really exciting me at the moment and that's what I think is going to be really cool going forward Fantastic well I'm seeing that surge with all of us here talking and working together 45 seconds Erin challenge is how much proof is enough proof so we can stop filling in all these bloody funding applications that make me want to scream like we just need to get money flowing down to get this stuff happening we know it works biggest opportunity is that there's a paradigm shift coming so we need to be I am operating from the we are in a new paradigm we have to be operating from that if we're wanting to usher the new one in forward which means sharing all information sharing all networks tools funding opportunities not holding anything close for each individual or organization or farm or country because we're all in this sinking ship together we need to move ahead and behave as though the new paradigm is here Fantastic thank you Nicole 45 seconds challenge and opportunity the new paradigm is here I live and breathe and that is like all I see is opportunity right now and we cannot like Sam says we cannot keep up with this wave so our biggest challenge is capacity building and we hope to launch a train the trainers course next year because this is what I'm seeing is some of the hand holding in terms of you know large-scale big operations that are wanting to transition that are concerned about risk really have a concern about you know what are those first steps and because it is so context-specific you need people on the ground that can really see what are those steps for people so yeah we I mean we would like some funding for that but it's not going to stop me so yeah certainly the train the trainers course will be hopefully we'll be rolling next year Fantastic hey look on that note look regeneration is about allowing nature's chaos to reach its harmony and in so doing we as humans find ways to thrive within that so with that we'll have to call it quits today as always these webisodes are available at pureadvineage.org and EHF and pureadvineage youtube channels big thanks to this panel and Alina behind the scenes and Ursula and Polly I'm keeping an eye out for some additional programming coming up around organics region ag resilience and regenerative forestry please sign up for Webisodes 6 next week investing in region ag with business journalist and author Rod Orham Mike Taitoko of Toha calm the farm and Jeff and Justine Ross of Lake Harwea Station with that Kaki Tiano see you again thank you very much thank you thank you so much bye bye