 To be in the black, you must be at least 50 shades of green. He's pretty sexy, isn't he? Quite cute little thing. It might seem like a strange saying to apply to a farm, however, when you stop and think about it, the opportunity isn't challenged is that face Australian agriculture today. It describes the current status quo pretty well, perfectly. We've got a declining, and in some cases degrading, natural resources base. The cost of our input, such as labour, energy and fertilizer, is extremely high, especially compared to the rest of the world. In order to maintain our social licence to operate, we must meet the demands of clean, green and safe products at our own expense. And to grapple with these factors and maintain a productive and profitable farm, our family has adopted the 50 shades of green concept. And this utilises a resilience mindset, working within our natural assets capabilities and adopting any new effective technologies that come our way with both hands. So here are some pictures of our farm, a bit of a show and tell, that my brother and I run at Breiser in northern New South Wales. We're on the unique Black Soils of the Liverpool Plains and we have an intensive irrigation and broad acre cropping operation. We predominantly grow food and fibre crops, ranging from cotton and wheat to sorghum, sunflowers, corn. You name it, we'll try and grow it if we can get a return. We consider ourselves farmers that utilise the natural assets of soils, water and sunshine to produce the highest yielding with the highest quality crop in whatever commodity will give us the highest return per milliliter. That's our formula, pretty simple, or is it? Ag use is a single largest use, human use of land and water on the planet and we have the greatest potential to impact our planet. Agriculture uses 60% of the arable land and 70% of its fresh water. One could say that we have enough natural assets to feed the world of the future. However, unless we're smart about it and how we carefully utilise these natural assets, the world may not have enough food by 2050. The world population is projected to increase, as you know, by at least one third or 2.3 billion people by 2050. This rate of population increase far exceeds our current rate of increase in food production. It's why we need to be serious in agriculture about how we care for our natural assets, of the arable land, the fertile soils and the clean water. And the challenge for me as a farmer is to try and work out how to do this with maintaining my productivity and my profitability. So how have my brother and I tackled this issue of doing more with less, was reducing our environmental footprint and still remain a viable and profitable agribusiness? For us, it comes down to three things. Using the natural resources judiciously and more efficiently. Adopting and adaptive management mindset to increase our resilience and utilising the best research and development on farming practices and grabbing new cost-effective technologies with both hands as fast as they come. Using these three themes, we've targeted each of our main natural assets that drives our business and we've changed how we operate with them. The option of doing nothing and continuing to do what we've always done is just not on the table. Especially if we want to survive in the natural resource constrained world that demands superior food and fibre products from us at the cheapest price. So the engine room of plant and growth and development is the obvious place for any farmer to start and focus on. My father first started experimenting on our soil health and our nutrition over 40 years ago. He embarked on a journey to understand the soil biodiversity, structure and composition so that he could improve its productivity and its long-stirmed sustainability. My brother and I continue the work that he started and it's based on integrated plant nutrition. This includes what we apply to the soil, how we till the soil and the farming equipment we use on that soil. A lot of what Neil presented earlier is what we do focus on. And in case you're wondering that wonderful earthworm in his hands, I think you can see it in the picture, we didn't place it there. You know, our soils are really healthy. You dig up anywhere and you'll find one. Some of the tactics we've put in practice today, we use annual multiple soil nutrition tests and they take in infield during fallow periods and prior to planting. That information allows us to apply prescription rates of fertiliser by field and improve the nitrogen use efficiency. All of our fertiliser is in liquid format and we tailor mix it on farm using ratios of USA or urea sulfate ammonia. And this has matched the field soil tests and the yield that we're actually targeting for that crop for that year. This purpose-big solution is directly drilled to the root zone of the plant and allows us to ensure that the right amount of fertiliser is applied and that can be taken up and any residuals is minimised. We also have application of microbial and navelisers such as molasses, zinc and nanoparticle organic fertiliser. We actually pulverise guano or chicken shit, thanks Julia, to about a 600 mesh size. And this ensures that these soil microbes can access this very easy. And it also allows it to break down quickly and enhances the plant being able to uptake those nutrients and it reduces the overall amount of fertiliser we have to apply. We also increase our organic matter of soil through appropriate crop rotations, minimum tillage and reduce soil erosion as well. And we've adopted a two metre semi-permanent plant-big configuration and this has improved our soil moisture retention reduced our compaction and it limits the soil disturbance and allows for direct real planting technology. The single most limiting factor for crop production is water. Mark Twain said that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting and I would totally agree with him. Not that I'm, yeah, I am a fighter I'll disagree with that, I am a fighter. So unfortunately we've had many fights over water in the past to ensure that first of all we have access that we use it sustainably and that also we maintain its quality. Generally speaking an irrigated crop has the potential to W yield. With this in mind we've focused on the natural asset with the utmost care as it's not only improves our resilience to drought it also improves our productivity. Our operation uses groundwater and unregulated river water we've invested heavily in our on-farm irrigation infrastructure to improve our efficiencies and uphold our stewardship. What something Julie was talking about of the judicious use of the precious resource. So some of the actions we've taken is to reduce our wastage of water by improving our infrastructure. We make every single drop count and we have redesigned our irrigation systems to take advantage of erratic rainfall patterns. We've increased our water use efficiency significantly across our farm on average around about 30% and we've used sophisticated technologies such as infill, C-pro moisture monitors and software irrigation systems. We've had EM surveys and lasering of every single field. We constantly maintain our infill tail drainage systems and we utilize remote channel sensors that control the amount of water that's applied to every field so that we don't actually have overwatering of the field. We have conservative crop programs that don't stress our water budget but it allows us to irrigate every field on time even in severe dry periods like we're experiencing at the moment. A yield of a crop is severely diminished if you can only half irrigate it and the moisture monitors and the irrigation software that we utilize helps us with the timing and the volume of the water and when it's applied. Reducing the tillage operations within the actual field itself also helps increase our soil moisture retention and it reduces our compaction. So agriculture is essentially a factory without a roof. It's the first thing to be affected by changes in climate. Rising temperatures, increasing evaporotranspiration, God, that's a big word, increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, drought, flood all of these are factors that impact on the health of our natural assets and the health of our business. The billion dollar question. How do we as farmers have some sort of control on these unpredictable influences? So here are some pictures of some events that we've had in the last five years. And one of them was the top one is a severe thunderstorm that dropped 85 millimeters of rain in 40 minutes and completely decimated the paddocks. The top right is a cotton crop that was completely wiped out by hail. When I say completely, there was nothing left and we lost 90% of our entire crop for that year. So our entire summer cropping regime was decimated. The bottom is the flooded Mukai River which completely inundates our farm in a major flood, which is a good thing. We live on a flood plain, that's why it's so fertile. It's just the timing of that flood was in late November and we lost our entire summer and winter crop in one guy. But these types of events shock our operations and we have severe financial impacts that we've just got to be able to recover from. It's just that we have no option. So we operate on the assumption that these things are gonna happen regularly and again, there is no silver bullet. So we've taken a multi-pronged approach to increase our resilience to these climate drivers that make or break our operation. The foundation of our approach is a resilience mindset. However, it is heavily linked to utilizing the best research development and technologies that are out there. So some of the tactics we're currently using is biological controls to reduce our exposure to weeds, pests, and diseases. For example, and Brooke showed some of the slides here, the introduction of GM cotton, has reduced our insecticide use from about 14 to 16 sprays this season to zero or one. That's a huge reduction. We also have reduced the number of in-crop tractor passes for managing weeds from about four passes to one. All of these help reduce our chemical usage. It reduces our use of energy, labor, and also our compaction. The development of germplasm selection and enhancement has over time improved our cotton varieties, not so much in our other commodities. We're hoping that that will be the future for them. The knowledge and application of integrated pest management practices across every single one of our crops. So what we've learned in the cotton industry, we're applying in absolutely every other commodity we grow. And that has reduced our chemical usage. It's also increased the beneficial insects we have available in the crop to manage themselves. Precision agriculture utilizing GPS technology so that plant beds are maintained in the same spot, compaction is controlled by control traffic, and we actually maintain our nutritional plant lines as well. Acknowledging that agriculture has large boom and bust years is that in a constant cycle, depending upon their weather extremes and commodity prices, is a key factor for our resilience. We have informed and disciplined long-term financial planning. It's the key to controlling our debt levels and being able to bounce back from these shocks that we constantly get. And it's the resilient mindset that allows us to make the decisions in the good, good financial decisions in good times and bad times. What we find is that average returns consistently over a number of years is far better than boom profits and unfortunately bust losses. Some of the tactics we would like to use to utilize in the future, so anyone who's out there investing in innovation, grow for it, are farm robotics. It will help reduce our labour costs, perform routine practices such as weed driving a tractor or actually weed management. We want to manage our crops at an individual plant level, not a field level, but a plant level. And for that, we could use drones or GPS or satellite technology to map each field and actually pinpoint the areas of weakness and we can go to that exact GPS location and do what we need to do to boost that area of the crop. Utilization of infrared and GPS technology for direct application of herbicides to the appropriate weed at the appropriate spot at the appropriate rate. We don't want to spray the entire field. That will help reduce our chemical use and also increase our resilience to weed resistance. Progression of biological tools in crops targeting yield potential and also our drought tolerance and our disease retolience. So things like GM technology is really important and is a big part of what our future should have. Underlying all of this and we've heard a lot of discussion about big data is improved telecommunications in regional areas. We can have all this big data but it's totally useless sitting on a shelf if we can't actually connect to the internet to get it to someone to analyze it for us. I've only outlined a few obvious innovations that could be applied to our farm and these are all based on reducing our inputs, reducing our environmental footprint and maintaining our natural asset base. Investing in research development and innovative technologies, the obvious pathway for us all to conserve our natural assets and also to make our schools being economically viable. So when you look at the future of agriculture, what do you see? It's an industry in structural decline. It's just too hard to handle the constant climate shocks and make a dollar or is it an agile industry protecting its natural resources and working on innovation to embrace the global opportunities of feeding the world. I think Australian agriculture is the latter and we've learned from past experiences and smarter, leaner and more productive as a result. Julia and Brooke have outlined the chicken and cotton stories of success and both show incredible resilience, responsiveness and profit. None of this would have occurred without the natural assets that they rely on being cared for. Australian agriculture is clean, green and safe. It's a premium world product and we're highly sought after because of this and it doesn't matter what commodity you look at, whether it's beef, whether it's wine, whether it's dairy. Everyone actually acknowledges the superiority and the traceability of the Australian product. So demand will continue for our high quality products but we cannot achieve the growth and the profitability at all costs. We have to adhere to the older age. If you like to wear clothes and eat, you're involved in agriculture. So that means we have to care for our natural assets as that's what is expected of us from our supply chains and it's also what our social licence is being demanded. In our experience, caring for your arable land, soils and water is inextricably linked to on-farm productivity and productivity. You will not have one without the other. So that's why we as a family embrace the 50 shades of green concept. It's the only way we can secure our sustainability, be socially acceptable and above all be economically viable as an agribusiness. So I'm not saying it's easy. However, it is achievable and above all, it really is rewarding. So thank you.