 So welcome to you all and as we begin I would like to offer a karakia to open up our space today So please just use this as a moment to put aside the rest of your day To empty your busy mind and to get yourself ready and prepared to receive The experience of this conversation that we're about to have As a bicultural nation, Aotearoa New Zealand culturally includes practices like the karakia Which draws from the wisdom of Tiamawri the indigenous world of the land of Aotearoa So I'm gonna do a karakia Tu ta wa mai i runga, tu ta wa mai i raro, tu ta wa mai i waho, tu ta wa mai i roto Kia tau ai te mauritu, te mauriora ki te katoa Homi e hui e taiikie In English this means I summon from above, below, within and the environment outside us all today To calm us and settle us and settle our vital inner essence and create a well-being space for all of us to be joined together as one Karakia is a sacred opening which aligns our group and prepares the mood and the focus of our conversation today So again thank you for being present with us as we enter into this environment Kia ora i te whānau kō Chelsea Toko Hengua Welcome family my name is Chelsea I hail from the Waitakere's of Tamaki Makaurau which otherwise known as West Auckland in New Zealand I'm currently residing in a different mountain range which is the Sierras of the border of Nevada and California My experience personally is all over the show but includes the space industry, the environmental management sector, climate policy, mental health and democracy I'm a cohort seven Edmund Hillary fellow and I'm going to be chairing today's conversation We are gathered here in this meeting as part of a wider event that a lot of you will already know about but for those who don't This is part of the EHF springboard and online conference of high calibre with incredible fellows bringing their views from around the world to bear on many many different topics This specific event today is entitled Leveraging the Unique Position of New Zealand We are joined by two esteemed speakers Gary Hirschberg and Will Marshall, both fellows within the EHF community Their experiences draw from insights in the space industry, in agriculture, food, data and land management all highly relevant to the development of the New Zealand economy This panel is special because it's actually sort of an outside looking in angle So bringing Gary and Will's views to the question of what is that special thing that New Zealand can be doing based on what you can see from close up and from afar This event is 90 minutes long and we will hear from both of our speakers in regards to their personal stories, some comments on their work and their experience and shift also into a Q&A I do have some prompts ready up my sleeve for this Q&A but it is also very very much an opportunity for all of you on the phone today to submit your questions and prompts via the Q&A function of Zoom or in the chat And as I mentioned that those who will be checking those include Michelle from the EHF team, hi Michelle and Paula as well Both of them are at the ready if anyone has any issues please feel free to ping Michelle and Paula So without further ado I just want to invite Gary and Will to share a little bit of personal story. I want to know you know a little bit more background, who are you holistically, how did you grow up, what's some important parts of your journey that you've been on So I'll invite you to take about five to seven minutes per person actually just let us know who you are, we've got time so let's let's really dig in. Gary I'm going to invite you to go first actually So it's just offering to Will. Well, thank you, thank you Chelsea and Chiara Tefano. I am Gary Hersberg I'm in quite cold New Hampshire in the Northeast US I'm about halfway between New York and Montreal. And as you know, our country is in quite a mess right now with COVID, and we're all quite isolated I live on a beautiful lake in the mountains here so I'm, I think, I'm grateful every day for my isolation and very sad for what is going on with my fellow country Although I will say as you can see from the side in the back I'm quite happy about the election which finally seems to be over and we'll, I'm sure talk about that in a little bit. My background as I grew up here in New Hampshire it was when I was a child it was a rural state it was a state where I knew the farmers all around me we are holiday hams and turkeys and rabbits were from farmers around us and all of that kind of disappeared in my childhood I The land became very suburbanized and I was a ski racer I spent most of my time outdoors and over the course of my childhood I realized we were really doing severe injustice to our, our planet certainly to my state. And so I wound up studying climate change, particularly as evidence of climate change at tree line at the edge of where trees and and Arctic or alpine environments began I actually studied dendro climatology and actually this was my first exposure to New Zealand because the world's dendro climatologist was a Kiwi, and I, he studied and worked in Christchurch. And so New Zealand got planted in me very very early very young, though it wasn't until many years later about 20 years ago that I first finally got over. And along the way I ran a ecological research institute in the 70s, doing integrated scientific approaches to food and agriculture and waste treatment trying to look at ways to eliminate our footprints we were talking about things back then that nobody really understood that are now very commonplace today and when Ronald Reagan and I was the director so I had to raise all the money. And when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981 we learned just how vulnerable we were to the political winds because all the federal funding for renewable energy organic research, all of it disappeared literally in the first days of that administration and our problem was we had advanced a lot of beautiful science and shown how organic and integrated organic agriculture agriculture all could work in harmony with the earth and be very productive but we hadn't really developed the economics. And so out of desperation my institute and many others started down the business path we began by consulting and developing ways of getting paid for our work. And I joined the board of a little organic farming school with seven cows, where that my partner made a beautiful yogurt, and we decided one day to start selling the yogurt organic yogurt to make ends meet. And today that company which I ended up leading for 30 years is Stonyfield farm it's the world's largest organic yogurt company. And of course the organic sector has grown we couldn't even use the words organic and sector back when we started in the early 80s. And to make a very long story short because we'll get into it and I want to hear from Will. I appeared in a film called food Inc which really looked at the the problems with conventional food systems and the opportunities and more ecological approaches and the organic Association of New Zealand invited me over as I said about 20 years ago to present the film. And that's where the hook got in and today I own a farm just out of Mochueka and not too much and I'm building an organic entrepreneurship center where I'm looking to work with certifying the land now it's about 180 acres I'm looking to model not only organic growing methods like we use back in the 70s and 80s here but also organic business methods to help the next generation learn how to make economic sense of all of this and I run an entrepreneurship institute that we just actually had it last week where hundreds of New Zealand entrepreneurs can learn also these methods so anyhow I'm delighted to be with you all and look forward to sharing more. Thank you. Thank you so much Gary that was a wonderful highlight tour across a life so rich with experiences. Yeah exactly so thank you so much. Will I would love to invite you for those of you who don't know Will and I are friends. Will sits on the board of the organization that I work with and is also a co founder of the organization I work with so we know each other reasonably well but will I wanted to just give you the chance as well to tell your story where did you grow up. What's your path been in a nutshell. Please please tell us a little more. Sure. I'm speaking to everyone here from San Francisco and my passions since the kid were in space and astronomy and then separately in nature and animals and care for animals and have a deep sense of justice that I care about for nature and that will get tied into some of the interests I have in New Zealand and what they have been doing recently in that which is evolving to give rights to ecosystems and that's an important passion of mine but the space geekery part of my life took more of a hold early on and it went into astronomy kind of went and then into actually deviated a little bit theoretical physics of quantum physics and then for my PhD and then went worked at NASA for a number of years on planetary missions looking sent a couple of probes to the moon with some colleagues at NASA, looking for water there we found water which is really exciting at the time because the moon had thought to be dry but actually it's quite interesting if you have water there makes it much more trackable to set up bases there and things like that which is something that Chelsea and I took a fair bit about but I've become much more interested in the earth and the earth ecosystems than anything out there far out of the building telescopes since I was about 16 so wouldn't be surprising that I would still be building telescopes at 42 but looking down to helping us take care of the earth now rather than looking up and trying to understand how the universe works because I think that's where we got to focus our energies and and technology can play a critical role in doing that and so when we left NASA my co-founders and I and our team that we dragged along with us not kicking and screaming they actually loved it there to build satellites to take care of the earth it was a sort of culmination of stars aligning towards our interest for taking care of the earth ecosystems and you know the strong needs on the planet to have the data to manage that you can't manage what you don't measure and the satellites can play an important role in that and I think it's critical what we were talking about here about the about technology for the earth and I don't think one should really be pursuing technology unless it has a critical and absolutely clear role to help us it shouldn't be to develop for its own sake and I say that as a space geek I could geek out with you about all sorts of like space technology that I have a passion about personally and technically but it's not relevant unless it's actually helping us advance as a species or protect ecosystems and that's that's where really planet was founded upon the ethos of and so now we have a lot of cameras up I can explain a little bit more in the next section about that but like we have a lot of cameras helping us hopefully to take care of the planet thanks well a lot of cameras indeed and you will all hear a lot more about planet but if you don't haven't if you don't know about it already and you haven't heard about it before please do check out plan.com as per what we were just describing and I'm sure there will be more there too Gary and Will have you ever met each other before or is this our first interaction this is fantastic so I had the chance to spend a week with Gary in the South Island of New Zealand about a year ago which was fantastic and well we've obviously spent some time together too so I'll just say I'm so excited to hear how the overlap between your two views can really you know dig out some nuance in the interface between managing the lands that we all love and care for and the life that lives in them and also do that with data at scale without losing the integrity and importance of the local so I'm really really thrilled for this. So as we really get into the meat of the discussion I do just want to let you both sort of state where you're coming from with the work that you do and with the view that you have. So again I'll just invite you to take with 5, 7, 10 minutes per person to really give us a fleshed out view of where are you coming from what are you working on and where do you bring to bear your views on the topic of how we leverage New Zealand's unique position in the world. So whichever one of you would like to start go for it. If you go wildly over time I'll let you know but otherwise we have got time so so please feel free to dig in. Okay, I'm happy to Gary and it is nice to meet you. So, I would say a few things that look as I said that I think the tech for a sort of theme of this panel is is great and it's critical that we use technology to advance ourselves and I like what you just saying Chelsea about doing so on a systematic and global scale understanding the local needs. Like, I think one of the beauties of our present technologies is that it can actually tie those things together so it can be both local and global at the same time and we have the power and tools to do that these days. And it's a big moment for technology. And as we've seen, I think, you know, we've obviously got an incredible array of technologies are disposed on the fingertips but at the same time, there's never a greater need for it. Because we're in a global crisis. And that's, and I'm not talking about the pandemic, which of course is a global crisis. I'm not a terrible one at that. But I'm talking about the crisis of our age of our generation of the environmental catastrophe. And by the way, I'm not talking about climate either. Because that's a common misunderstanding of what is going on on the planet. The climate doesn't give a shit. We should care about is the animals and the species that are dependent on it. The biodiversity loss is the crux of the issue. Biodiversity loss is actually being driven primarily not by climate is by being driven primarily by land use change. It's being driven by us cutting down forests in favor of agricultural lands it's being driven by overfishing. It's being driven by human activity, but not related to carbon the carbon and the climate is an important factor and it's sort of the third most important thing that we're growing and so I don't mean to suggest by any means that we don't need to take into account emissions. In fact, that's, you know, crucial and coming up, but I think it's missing the point in that, the thing that we actually care about and you know the planet has seen various climate climatic changes back and forth, much greater than we see not as dramatically fast as we've seen except for extreme events like after asteroid hits. But the, but the biodiversity loss is just staggering and it's clearly human created and it's already happened and 68% to just give you a few figures 68% of all life on the earth has gone and it's gone in our last in my lifetime in the last 40 years. These are UN reports, basically 82% of wildlife on land has gone 75% of fish in rivers and and freshwater lakes over 70% of insects gone over the whole of the coral reefs gone. These are not hypothetical future scenarios they are the already gone apart. Now that's very depressing and of course, but technology can actually really systematically help with these things and and one of the other brilliant things and something we've seen in a little bit of a window into in 2019 is the fact that nature can bounce back really strongly when I talk about 68% of life gone on the planet. I'm not talking about by species actually by species as much less, which is good. I'm talking about by volume and nature can bounce back if you afford her the opportunity. I love this Gary Larson cartoon that came out this year, which basically had in 2019. All the humans were looking at the animals in the zoos and in 2020 all the animals walking through the streets with the animal with the humans being locked in their houses because of COVID and nature did bounce back and come into our streets and we were more interested in seeing nature and and I think there's an even more than that psychology sort of effect going on which I find an exciting silver lining to the coronavirus situation of course we won't want on the planet at all but since we have it here one of the fantastic things I see is that we've shown ourselves the ability to react and significantly change our behavior at scale when we choose to. And what comes to my mind as a sort of thought experiment is had the 68% of life on the planet been wiped out in four months, like coronavirus came on, rather than 40 years, as in fact it did happen. We're interacting with a kind of emergency scale efforts that we have for coronavirus, and I rather think we would. And therefore, this, this is this coronavirus situation has been enabling us to flex our muscles of emergency response and now we have to turn ourselves to the the crisis and global emergency of our age of the biodiversity loss. And that's going to, you know, but we've shown we can, we actually need to fly less but not nearly as much less as we already just did. We need to change our behavior, but in some senses, not as much as we have, we need to, you know, get used to remote work and that's, you know, it's not exactly the same of course, and we've got to do things like be willing to eat more plant based diets, but we do have to fly fly less. We do have to change some of our practices, but on the scale of it. It's not as dramatic as not seeing one's loved ones for eight months or things like this is actually. These are doable changes. And now we've shown that we can do it. Anyway, that's a bit of a like a prelude into tech for the earth and what we're here for. Let me tell you a little few words about planet, which is the company that I represent and and and its connection with New Zealand as well. So, so the water and the why is sort of in brief planet. What we've done is launched a large fleet of earth imaging satellites. So these are cameras in orbit taking pictures of the earth. And and and what they do is we have two systems one that scans the entire landmass of the planet at 3.5 meter resolution once per day so all the landmass every single point on New Zealand every point on on the entire landmass plus nearby coastal waters. Once a day at 3.5 meter resolution and with all these different spectral bands that help us to assess things like crop health and and biodiversity loss and the things like this. So it's tracking wide scale change what you need to manage various ecosystems amongst other things. And we have another system of satellites, which zoom in and can have up to 50 centimeter resolution and can take pictures up to 10 times per day but a tar system. So basically these these tools produce data and then we sit on top of that a bunch of analytical work so that we can build that and pull out roads and buildings or or ships and planes from that data in an autonomous way so the millions of images we get every day it's quite a fair amount of data can be processed and understood. And so now we have erected that system we set ourselves this goal of imaging the whole earth every day about eight or nine and a bit years ago now and we achieved that a couple of years ago we now have 1300 images on every point in the landmass we have 150 satellites. It was the largest satellite fleet ever launched until SpaceX recently built a little bit with their satellites although I think we're still the largest operational satellite fleet. And why are we doing it well it's all to do with the, you know, earlier comments about protecting biodiversity you can't manage what you can't measure. And the first step in our evolution in the global transition the global economic transition to a sustainable economy, whether you're a company doing ESG targets, it's like monitoring your supply chains what have you, or whether you're a country measuring climate targets, or whether you're a bank measuring green bonds, you need to measure all of those systems that those things depend upon and so we have to measure our forest we have to measure our coral systems we have to measure our keyed by diverse biodiverse regions and so on. And so we're trying to do that on a systematic scale. I can give you a few examples of that like in coral reefs and deforestation if people are interested. Our connection to New Zealand is, in addition to launching all these satellites, well some of them got launched in New Zealand with the first customer of the company Rocket Lab which is based in New Zealand, which has nano rockets. We bought their first set of rockets because we buy lots of rockets. That's one of the things we do. And so we were their first customer and had the first satellite on one of their early launches and recently launched more and we've got another set of launches coming up with them. And we also build ground stations down in the very southern tip of New Zealand, where we have some in Aurora is a very southern tip of the southern island, which, because we're trying to send them as far north and south in latitude. And so New Zealand is one of the spots. We put around the world we have about 50 of these around the world and a couple of them in New Zealand. And, and, but finally and most importantly in my mind, which is why I applied to HF is how we might be able to work with the New Zealand government on its progressive policies to do with monitoring ecosystems giving rights to ecosystems so that cup is coupled and hand in hand with a data piece that you can enable those sorts of policy policies with. And so I believe there's a strong connection there. I'm really pleased that the EU has put forward its EU a sustainable transition plan through the Green Deal. And that's sort of the very centrist and very powerful at scale. But I think New Zealand is more at the cutting edge of the bleeding edge of what could be done in the next generation of thinking around climate. And that's a little bit about what we do at Planet and and how it connects to tech for us. Awesome. Thanks. Well, again, a lot of territory covered there, but you did a great job of kind of opening all of that up, helping us see all of those different layers. A few people are asking questions and just sort of chiming in in the chat so feel free to go in there if you'd like to have a chat with those folks. Gary, I'd love to invite the same. So what's your work right now? How does it fit into this cope up of this topic of today? Thank you. It's really difficult Chelsea because I actually want to just talk to well now. I will do my best to put some more data out there. You can do that in a few minutes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I wanted to connect the dots. You know, as I said, I wound up being somebody who spent a lot of time at tree line. I was very I was fascinated by the warming of the planet and the kind of fundamental mythologies that underlay, you know, the rights that we gave ourselves to do this damage and of course, I couldn't agree with more with will about the biodiversity as being the really the epitome. I mean actually extinguishing life is just, you know, audacious to say the least. And along the way in my work on climate I discovered that organic methods of growing of agriculture of all sorts. sequester far more carbon, then non organic methods and specifically that there is really no way to reverse climate change. I mean stopping or slowing it even the 70s was already absurd what we really need to do was reverse it. And that meant taking carbon and other carbon warming gases out of the atmosphere and putting them back in and that's what organic does every day and so that led me to go to work at this Institute which I mentioned. And, you know, as a general overview I would just say I've kind of, I came into Stonyfield in my business life after many years of proving the efficacy of these pro biodiversity carbon sequestering water quality improving water volume saving processes with it with sort of a notion of three myths that govern human behavior one is, and I call them the modern day myths one is that the earth is a subsidiary of our economies, which is of course exactly 180 degrees wrong. All economics is has been made possible by a bountiful earth. We just have it backwards. Secondly, that the earth is infinitely resilient to handle whatever we throw at it and you just heard from will and for me, this ample evidence that that's wrong. And then the third and this is what led me into business and what will lead me to New Zealand in a moment is this idea that externalities. You know the direct consequences of our economic behavior as a species, our social behaviors are real, but because they don't appear in our profit and loss statements, or our balance sheets, or in our markets they don't exist in in in economic terms nobody's able to handle. And so my last 36 years has been about proving the economics, the economic advantages of ecological food production ecological skincare product ecological, just whole system thinking about commerce. And what I'm trying to do right now is to bring a 21st century market view to New Zealand and I'll explain why. The idea here is for me, my own work is to use my Institute which I run, as I mentioned with hundreds of entrepreneurs training and teaching and helping them with cash flow raising money, measuring these other other non here to for impacts of our businesses and turning those into positive marketing communications, but also I'm trying to use this farm as I mentioned to be a real model for commerce, as well as for ecological methods. You know I want to be clear. I see some some very unique and extraordinary opportunities for New Zealand, social and environmental entrepreneurs, but I want to be very clear that I'm not naive about the actual gap between New Zealand's perceived and actual I call it the high talk due ratio, but but but but the fact that there is our global perception of a green advantage here is is something significant that should be capitalized upon and to be clear there's a lot of work to be done to help New Zealand live up to your green reputation but there's a lot here. New Zealand has abundant natural resources a strong independent entrepreneurial spirit as an island nation there's lots of innate creativity that comes from learning to live within limits. The cost of shipping in and out forces more creativity, a strong national awareness of the threats of climate and and attacks on biodiversity and a need to really alter our behaviors and of course on the farming side there's lots of grass based protein production which is far more carbon and and life conserving than the other way. There is as will mentioned a progressive government that we certainly cannot take for granted here in the States that for instance has not capitulated to chemical companies pressures on the GMOs for example and I chaired the national campaign to label GMOs here in the US so I know how pernicious these companies are and how astonishing it is that New Zealand has withstood that those forces. And as I say, most importantly there's a global perception of green that other nations would kill the cultivate. And so before I go right to those opportunities and risks in New Zealand, let me just say a little bit more about the market conditions that I as I mentioned I'm trying to help promote awareness of this. Just to be clear, since 2000 the organic sector globally has grown at about 14% annually. That is astonishing. Convent, it's 14 times faster than conventional non organic production and I'm talking about personal care as well as food and beverage. The US natural and a product and organic products industry is continuing particular during COVID as people have become much more aware of health and preventive health and avoiding toxins. Another huge factor in our biodiversity challenges. And so this year again in the UK and the US organic grew far far faster four or five times faster than non organic. 82% of American households now purchase some organic products and so what's behind these trends time doesn't really allow but I'll just say there's some obvious sticks in that there's incredibly compelling health and environmental data favoring, or, you know, regarding the costs of conventional agriculture and favoring non favoring more sustainable or regenerative or organic. And generally, and here's getting to the kind of heart of my of the opportunity generally millennials that the gen that is now the primary target of most advertising most focus of most business has shown the fastest growth and the highest consumption of these more transparent, more green approaches to products so this is an odd there's no surprise you this is an audience that, unlike my generation I'm 66 does not need to be taught about climate change biodiversity toxins animal health, water pollution or other consequences and of course there's plenty of carrots to match the sticks we know for example with organic methods animals live twice as long farmers and farm families are less exposed to toxins, more successful pregnancies. I mean I could go on and on this studies galore now that weren't there when we started 35 years ago that show that, you know, for example, a study that followed 70,000 adults for five years in France showed that the one the most frequent consumers of organic foods are 25% fewer cancers than those that never ate organic foods which means that, you know when you understand that in America we have this national debate going on about supposedly health care but it's not about health care it's actually about sickness care it's about the treatment really the cheapest form of health care is prevention. And to come to the point and to really dovetail with will. What we now know about these consumers is that they the carrots of better sequestration of nutrients, we know side by side with the University of New Zealand has shown this leading land grant universities in the states have shown it and abroad and Europe that, as I mentioned, organic farms sequester and trap more nutrients because it's more biological life, using those nutrients side by side farms. There's no nitrogen runoff on organic farms there's enormous nitrogen runoff on conventional as New Zealand is is addressing right now. Farm or biodiversity, the 35,000 acres where we grow our organic sugar has had 300 species return to these farms from hundreds and hundreds, several hundred insects to kumas, cougars, large cats because the whole food chain has become healthy. And so this is all to say that there's a market demand now for this kind of thing. And I just want to mention quickly, there's been very recent consumer data but it's been building along, backing me up on this a survey that was done this fall of 1000 diverse Americans weighted by age and gender and region showed that 77% of those surveyed now say personal health is more important today than it was even two years ago. No surprise with COVID, but 67% said environmental health is more important today than it was two years ago. At grocery stores, there's rampant data that consumers are paying more attention to food waste, plant based foods responsible meat seafood dairy buying organic buying products with environmentally friendly packaging and so forth. And so what we know just a couple of stats before I bring it right home to New Zealand 69% of consumers now. Again, this is rich poor urban rural north south racially diverse 69% of consumers believe it's important to know how their food was produced 60% want to know if an animal is given hormones 67% of consumers want more information and packaging these data did not exist when I started in business. I could go on and on but you get the gist so let me come to the punchline here and the point of my, my work. First, regardless of whether New Zealand entrepreneurs want to take care of, take advantage of export opportunities. They're just enormous ecological and economic advantages to increasing the acreage of, of sustainable organic regenerative methods. You are less dependent on importing goods to subsidize the soil. I'm doing this on my very own farm with composting. You get cleaner waters, better watersheds, more wildlife which means more natural pest and insect controls, a better farmer and farm worker health better economics. Animals live twice as long and again better overall health so if my contention my thesis is that if New Zealand can document and substantiate its greenness and again this is a, you know, a lot of work to be done here that this will become a competitive 21st century advantage for food and personal care and houseware. And people say well what about the long distance to shipping I can tell you from a total carbon footprint as the first consumer product company in America to measure our whole footprint. I can tell you that shipping, particularly by by boat is negligible compared to how it's grown how it's produced. New Zealand is far from these markets but to Will's point using technology as we are doing today look at all the time zones joined tonight. Digital and social media eradicate those differences. A consumer in New York can see her lamb growing on the South Island or bees producing the manuka honey in her favorite skin cream. 40 years in business if I was going to summarize my entire business trajectory it's this is that I, I had much poorer gross margins because I actually paid farmer farmers, a proper price to grow things ecologically. And so my cost of goods was much higher, literally twice as high as non organic, but I didn't have to spend as much on advertising because I use social media bloggers influencers opened up the transoms of transparency to actually invite my farm, my consumers to visit our farms, meet the farmers and understand what's going on. And that gives you when the consumer can see what's going on. There's something much more powerful than a left brain motivation and purchasing. There's the emotional power, and that gets you loyalty which is the most powerful purchase influence there is. And so we'll get in I'm sure the Q&A into some of the current legal. There's some very positive legal developments and legislative developments in New Zealand that are favoring this but the key is really to help producers seriously see the benefits of these kinds of approaches to growing and I think there's no better laboratory on earth then to do this then then New Zealand. wonderfully said Gary nicely rounded out at the end there. Yes, I mean, I just want to affirm briefly that, you know, as someone who's worked on climate change science and policy for some time. I mean, the consumer demand piece, I think I would put at a personally a little bit of a lower importance, but I understand that you know any any food business is going to be thinking about that intensely. And I think like what you were just saying at the end there this feedback loop between consumer demand and political appetite. And so, you know, we need to leverage that feedback loop as much as we can to get both the top down in the bottom up expression of change that we need to see. So fantastic. Thank you for giving that overview. I want to start shifting us into some sort of faster paced dynamic back and forth Q&A. I have a little list of questions here. I feel like you actually kind of answered the first question that I was going to ask you Gary which is really about what some of these market demand opportunities mean for New Zealand. So I'm going to go right into a question that I have queued up for a will and then come back to you Gary. Well, the question that I want to ask you is quite sort of a mirror image to some of the topics Gary was just mentioning the question really is sort of tapping into your experience in the satellite imagery context. What are the promising examples of how New Zealand can leverage that work to inform better environmental decision making. Because you know that's the eye in the sky. How do we actually use that information to guide those choices, especially in the New Zealand context. What do you think of that? Yeah, well my mind immediately jumps to agriculture. But let me just say that I think it's important to think about these things as connected with challenges on the ground and if it's not again like there's no point doing it. But how does it help local people and we've actually seen some really novel use cases of our imagery amongst the agricultural communities in New Zealand, including measuring the height of grass to know when to move cows from one field to another, which I'd never heard of before in my entire life. So that was a new one. We do use our data quite a bit in agriculture normally for monitoring crop health and yield to then improve efficiency which is important for multiple reasons including feeding the planet and stopping the pressure on the deforestation. But the particular thing that comes to my mind is sustainable agriculture and regenerative agriculture and whether or not we can monitor those practices from space and whether New Zealand can be a sandbox for experimentation in that domain. So, for example, we've got to move to less tilling practices and more from monocrops to polycrops and a few other sort of practices like I'm not an agriculture expert, but just reading a little bit about sustainable and regenerative agriculture points you in that kind of direction. And we can actually monitor that from space and some of those things we haven't and we have a lot of academics that use our data to back up these claims but and that's mainly so far have been on the traditional agriculture and just improving yields, which is an important thing in and of itself as I said for the pressure on reducing the pressure on forests. But in terms of sustainable agriculture we're just early on in the phase of understanding this, but it seems pretty self evident that we'll be able to monitor from space the tilling practices and whether or not there's polycrops or monocrops practices being used and therefore it can be an experimentation for that. So that's the first thing comes to my mind. The second thing that comes to my mind is key biodiverse areas and New Zealand has a few. And if you look at key biodiverse areas.org I think the site is this is part of the ICUN, the International Conservation Union, but they put out this like where the key biodiverse regions the areas where there's the biggest both the idea of all the different species type and risks from encroachment and other things that are driving biodiversity loss and, of course, conservation, both of forests and especially the key biodiverse regions of forest and other wetlands and coastal areas, all of these things and also marine parks is critical. And so we see a role there in tracking and stopping deforestation. We did a big project within the government of Norway a few weeks ago tracking all the deforestation for tropical countries we haven't yet applied it to New Zealand, but we should. And we also did a project last year on track doing the first map of all the coral reefs around the planet which I was surprised to find that had never been mapped before, but also then revisit them every day to track and stop illegal fishing to have early signs of ocean bleaching and she's first sort of report started coming out just last week on that like where it's like here preemptively there's some ocean bleaching what can we do. And so these are the alert systems his deforestation here or encroachment here illegal fishing here bleaching over here that enables us to then do policy enforcement with whether a coast guard stopping illegal fishing vessel or forest or police force going in and stopping illegal deforestation having that quick learning loop between those data and action is why I see an opportunity, especially in a sustainable agriculture space, but also in the conservation space, being the first things to come to mind. Yeah, awesome. Sorry, Gary, can I, can I ask a quick follow up because there's a bit of a theme happening in the chat and also in my mind. Well, can you just make it a bit more explicit how those relationships, how they're structured so for example like people have been asking, like, how do people get access to that data. And I don't necessarily need you to, you know, roll out the full explanation but just a couple of examples of, are they government relationships, are they private partnerships, how does that occur based on what you were just describing. Yeah, I mean we have various different relationships with all of the above happen. So we mostly sell our data to governments to private companies that buy our data for the various different purposes, like agricultural companies to improve agricultural efficiency. And we also provide it to NGOs and education research organizations, normally through institutional partnerships that enable, for example, all the researchers to get access and so on. And so that that, if you like, do good work can can happen. And that's again why we started planning where we also have to pay for all the satellites that we launched and all the rockets and stuff that are not so cheap and so we do have to pay, get people to pay for the data to make that system work and have a sustainable business that keeps better and better data enabled for all of these actors. But, but I mean, you know, I could quickly retort that you just go to planet calm and there's various different ways to go and access the data. Awesome. Thank you. Well, that was that was helpful. Gary, sorry, what were you going to say? Well, I was going to add to amplify on Will's point. You know, if you take that lens that I offered at the beginning the sort of narrow way that humans have been thinking about our relationship to the planet and you realize we give ourselves license to do things. And once we learn this how, unless we truly deeply take in those myths, we're just going to repeat the same practices using buzzwords, you know, the word natural here in the US means exactly nothing now it was a idea and advertising concept of the how there's ice creams out there that don't change shape when they melt, but they say natural in the label. And a term in agriculture that is subject to enormous abuse is no till. And no till is is is the idea that you don't tell and it's for to, you know, conserve soil avoid soil runoff. And that has actually become as an excuse for chemical companies to use more herbicide, and particularly, and also there's a lot more water runoff and the encourages row crops on unsuitable lands, namely slopes and so we need imaging technology to model on a scale to show the myths that these large chemical companies are advancing, you know, here in the US where we are desperately in need of campaign finance reform. You know the lobbyists control the money and the data it's a sort of fake news thing. And the problem is that they go out of their way to talk ecologically, but imaging work or technology, such as will is describing here could really shatter that because there's plenty of places where no till makes a lot of sense. But it's, but there's also plenty of evidence that it absolutely is the wrong idea in other places and we could really use an eye in the sky to help advance that case. Absolutely. Actually, Gary will and I have a mutual friend who's working on a project like that. So we should talk about it. But to my next question is actually to you Gary and links to something you were just saying about the erosion of meaning of words. And the question I have to ask you is really about this sort of new legal ideas that are coming through into New Zealand at the moment around watershed protection organic standards the debates that are happening in Parliament about having national on what organic means. So if you do have any comments on that I'd love to hear them because obviously that debate has been had many times in many places so if you do have got any views please share. Yeah, no it's very good it's very current and now as a landowner I have a deeper appreciation. Policy and words matter and look no further than our country to see, you know evidence of the abandonment of science right in the last four years. And, you know, so to your point earlier to this is why markets matter, as markets are both consumers that create opportunity but also markets are voters. But we need better educated voters. Now in the in New Zealand. Well, let me back up a second in the US. Some of the older folks in the cohorts may remember that there was a time and it was when I started, and we did not have a unified national standard for what organic was it was the province of small individual certifiers. We did not know for the next one group had one set of standards a group up in Oregon had another and, and in 1990, a great many of us finally managed to convince Congress to pass a unified standard now it took 12 years for it to become law. That's another story, but the point is, is when you look at the actual explosion and the growth of organic, going from the millions to the billions. It was tied to having a national organic standard a definition of what is and what isn't. And you know a lot of people are using this word regenerative right now it's a very dangerous and vulnerable word because there's no law attached to it. So one of the first things that a group of us did in New Zealand, when I started getting very active a bunch of years ago is to meet with Damien O'Connor, your agriculture minister and work on persuading him and members of parliament that you all need the same benefit you need a unified national standard and as you know, as you may know but folks on this call may not. There is now a bill going through and we actually got, you know, a lot of support behind it the first pass at the bill went through parliament unanimously but then it ran into some political obstruction but there's now going to be a new select committee bringing the bill announced on November 25 and this will be a catapult for organic growth because now you'll have for growth of the sector because now everyone will be able to agree on what it is. And I'll just quickly mention one other bill that was recently passed, which is also very promising and and Americans on this call can now start to see with jealousy. Because, though controversial, the Minister of Primary Industries and the parliament have now passed a regulations in 2020 called stock exclusion regulations under this new resource management legislation. This is going to help a lot. Now I can tell you as a landowner, what it really means in practice is that there's actual defined distances that you must keep livestock away from screens and watersheds which, again the eutrophication problem I'm sure I don't have to explain. But it's a cost. It's a cost and that's why it's controversial, but it is so overdue and needed. You know so much of the bad name that dairy has in New Zealand as around the world is really because of a few, shall I say bad apple, a confined animal feedlot operations which this legislation will address. And I would also just have one last one Chelsea and that is, I mentioned it earlier I want to say it again, which again New Zealanders can exhale right now with this government, keeping GMOs out. You know we're fighting in the US, just to even be able to know what's where GMOs are, you know by having a label, but you know GMOs are another excuse for using herbicides 85% of genetically modified crops have been engineered to use to withstand and therefore allow farmers to use more herbicides. So these are three examples that back up my earlier point and will point that when you have, you know, not no government no regulations are perfect but when you have let's just say, more conscious government and also a more active citizenry who wants to protect the waters, who wants to support more sustainable ag and you can really make things happen. Yeah, no, absolutely. And as you said, a couple of different ways. I mean, everyone is always under the financial incentive system and therefore, there's obviously a massive role for a government to play to figure out how to incentivize uptake of practices rather than making it always feel like the cost is on the person making the most changes on the ground. So definitely some baby steps there that are very promising, and also still some challenges in regards to cost, both for the consumer and the producer so yeah very very clear what you were saying. Well, I've got a question for you going to your biodiversity lost piece and also linking it with what you said about the hyperspectral and very nuanced tools that you have at your disposal in the CubeSat dove fleet. I'm curious what are the kind of proxy measures for the types of biodiversity that you're talking about. So for example, you made the point of the two things New Zealand could do is monitor, you know, best practices and the effective best practices in agriculture. And the other thing you mentioned was to be able to measure and what witness, you know, levels of or proxy measures for I guess biodiversity taking place over time. So since this is an extremely complex kind of web of life type of dynamic and it's sort of inherently messy. I'm curious, you know, you keep saying, you know we can only move towards what we measure. But in the case of the biodiversity loss challenge what exactly are you pointing at measuring. Yeah, well, so you have to couple data sets. So there's no one tool that just solve the whole thing but but I mean the main thing is just tracking land use change and preventing it. So we know from ground studies where biodiversity is rich. Mainly for example in tropical forests or in coral reefs or you know we know this kind of zones. And we know that if they turn to you know, say for instance in agriculture region or a coral reef goes from from alive to to bleached, which isn't actually that's bad, right. So these are the indicators that we need to watch it as opposed to for example we're not getting a measure of the number of species in a spot. Now, having said that, there are some other slightly more detailed proxies than just land use change that is, is it, is there other trees still there or did somebody knock it down and is there a farmer's field. You know, and there are things like for example we can tell by bio mass, although it only gets at the canopy level. We can tell different types of species and that in types in coral reefs, because of our spectral data said these are all things based on our spectrometer, talking of which the next generation of satellites is likely to have even more spectral bands and more spectral bands you can just start distinguishing more like there's, you know, 15 different species of tree in these, you know, in these areas or what have you. So there are ways of getting towards that it's never going to be perfect is always going to need cross referencing with ground truth but but where you do, you can then extrapolate quite easily to large regions. But again, the first order thing is, is measuring literally is, is the field is a field replaced a tree has a tree gone down. And that's, you know, that's the starting point or is the coral reef still there healthy. And, or is the legal fishing going on, and, and that is just a visual thing like is there a ship there, or is the to the tree go down. And that we can just tell without visual imagery. Right. Yeah, that makes good sense. Yeah, the one of the reasons why I think this is sort of a bit nuanced and I'm sure that you've thought about this plenty. My exposure to the United Nations climate work taught me a lot about Lulu CF, you know land use change policy, and one of the continuous complaints about land use change policy and land use monitoring from indigenous communities around the world is that land use change monitoring is sort of a bad proxy. In the case of, you know, like what you were saying about ground truth the nuanced reality of people living in an environment, etc. So I'm sure there's a lot of detail there and I know that you have teams that specifically address that but if you did want to add anything on that. Absolutely it is, it is way nuanced and we do have people that think a lot more than I do about that but in my understanding you're getting towards the edge of my limit of my understanding here but I am. Firstly, let me say that indigenous groups do represent a big fraction of the key biodiversity regions are under indigenous group people as management. So, in fact, we have some partnerships underway, which are exactly about conserving in collaboration with indigenous peoples by diverse regions, and so it's not a. So that's an important point, I agree. And then it's definitely imperfect, but it's. There were various limits in the past, and that were made even more imperfect, which were that these things were only typically measured once a year, and they were typically measured at very course resolution, because of the satellite limits that were there. And just the fact that we've roughly 100x the amount of data flow from space overnight and 10x sort of overall imagery by area image per day. And all the sources from Landsat, NASA to Sentinel and the European Space Agency and the EU and all the other private sources overnight gives us a and then the main thing we've done there is up the area coverage per day. And that basically means coverage times frequencies increased to the point where you, I mean I see this trend mainly from, from a sort of awareness of what we were doing screwing up various parts of the environment and ecosystems to an action, a data that enables action. And, and so those data gaps help that bridge that point, which is the data has got much better at being more nuanced, it's not perfect and so your point remains valid. So the data it's a it's a self observation meditation at a planetary scale, where we get to witness ourselves and then I say like this the Apollo program in Apollo 17 took that incredible earth rise shot and, and the blue marble picture earlier Apollo program. And those people say galvanized the green movement. You're of course we knew on a planet but suddenly we really saw ourselves as a, you know a small planet in the vastness of space protects by a thin membrane the atmosphere. And suddenly we were like, wow, you know that we woke up a little bit it was a phase change in planetary consciousness and your point there about the mirror is where I think it's going now now we look up and there's a big mirror. We look at ourselves all day. It's a bit ugly, you know, and it's the realities of that. But, you know, warts and all, but by having that real time mirror with damn well now cognizant and beyond just the, we've woken up to the challenge of a fragile planet now we get the data on the basis seeing how we screwing it up. And so we can actually do something about it. So the, there's a beauty in that close up observation, even if it's a little bit sad on first, first view. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, cool. Well, we've got two more questions from me one for each of you. And in the meantime, I challenge everybody who's on the phone to write in the chat some questions that you want to ask after I'm finished asking those two more questions. In a few minutes remaining together, please use the chat to explore what questions you'll ask. And I've actually got on my notebook in front of me a few from what's been said so far in the chat. So I am paying attention. And I will do a little bit of picking and choosing as to digging into questions that I know will be more rich than others. So, forgive me if your question question gets missed. Hopefully you'll get some value regardless. So question to you Gary before we go to the rest of the group. So, the question I want to ask is about the scale of implementation of new forms of agricultural practice. And I want to, you know, we talked before about the organic standard and obviously there's a certain market incentive that goes with certification as well. But what are the other kinds of crowbars that we can sort of jam into the machine in the New Zealand context to radically incentivize these change of practices. And who, who's either holding those crowbars now or who should be holding them and who can actually pick them up off the ground and jam them into the machine and actually start changing something so what's your view on that. Well, that, that's a nice bundle of questions that requires about an hour's response but I'll do my best here. Look, let me first segue from something that you and will that in your own wills exchange you know I was one of those people who had the wow moment when I saw soil loss or desertification. Globally from those original satellite images and they zoomed in this is, you know, in the 70s. And I thought, okay, I was young I thought okay, we're we see it the data's here. Now we can be smart right we can, like you said warts and all. And unfortunately as I then went through my own career I wasn't seeing it. I was seeing the traction that you're asking about Chelsea I was, I was seeing it being fiercely debated at the UN and enlightened environments, you know, with with progressive political folks but utterly, you know, didn't reach the level of kind of consumer action, that's the crowbar in my in my view now I speak as a business person and I believe me I worship, we, I absolutely believe we have we must have the data, because we must inform policy and I spent a plenty of time on Capitol Hill. And it's, you know, you got to have your stuff where you're not credible, but the crowbar is markets. And the, so here in the US, just to put this in perspective I've mentioned, you know what's a 60 plus billion dollar sector, and I'll get to New Zealand in one moment. So the good news is a 60 billion up, you know, constant double a compound annual growth rate that is many times faster than non organic but from a smaller base. The bad news is that it's only about 6% of total US food. The worst news is, it's only about 1.5% of us agriculture problem. And the worst news is that we only have about 1% of the entire USDA research budget. So, you have this, the, the foundational pieces, those levers those crowbars, you know, we need more research we need more data we need more satellite imaging we need more run off data we need more correlations with health data we need, you know, more funding. But the way you create that is you create human benefit and, and that translates to market. And so what I tell people. You know, obviously in New Zealand, it's a tiny market. And so it's, you know, 5 million people and so forth. So exports do tend to command a disproportionate amount of attention and funding and support. You look at China, and you look at Europe and you look at the US, the fastest growing exports have been in the better for you space, more sustainable green and so forth, more transparency. And so I really believe the key is to empower producers to see those markets to close that gap. I mean that's, you know, my grand scheme boils down to very simply is there's a lot of demand. Don't you want to meet it and right and while you do it, you're going to find that you're going to save, you know, lots of money and I just want to just say one quick example of very local scale. My property is very, it's got lots of gullies. And the first thing I've done in certifying is I've gone in to find we have some native virgin forests there that I'm working with QE to trust to preserve. But next to it is a bunch of gullies that are all filled with non natives. And of course no birds. And you all know this well, the birds live in the native in the, in the, in the virgin area. And so we have gone through and removed 10s, literally several tens of thousands of non natives, and we're planting natives. We're also experimenting with different ways of controlling the weed growth after so in one I admit we did before we were certified, we did herbicides because we needed that as a control. But the other ones were using goats and we're using hogs and we're using other methods and, and, and we're going to measure those so that we can show farmers and producers and we're already seeing it's far less expensive to do it are our way. So you need to educate the producers about the markets you need to also help them to see the methods but of course ultimately you need consumers pulling that through and there's a whole lot more consumers in other countries who that's the engine I'm trying to use. Beautiful. Yeah, I mean, what you're saying is it makes sense to me if you're exposed to both sides of it it would be probably make you feel a little bit frenetic on any given day just seeing so much opportunity and not seeing these worlds meeting more readily. So that absolutely makes sense. Yeah, I could quickly Chelsea say one last thing. So I've been on the board of a company called blue apron which is a meal kit company. You guys call them meal schemes I think, and we all of our animal products and by the way most of my name is in non animal based agriculture I agree with you well, but, but blue apron, all of its animal products come from New Zealand. And why is that because their consumer who's an educated consumer wants to know that it's being grown in on grass it's grass fed and they understand you know what those benefits are. And, and so this is now been, and we have farmers lined up now to sell us and cove it's been very good for meal kits which is and the end been very good for New Zealand. Yeah, no that's a very, very interesting point. And that included a comment about the phrase educated consumer which I think is part of that other piece you're referencing as well. Yeah. So will my last question for you. That was mine and then I'll switch to the last three from the audience. New Zealand has a strong environmental sector. New Zealand has a strong agricultural sector, and now it has a new space sector. So, given the overlap in the things that we've talked about today and given specifically your cross cutting interests in all of the above. I'm really interested you know in examples you might have of the collision between those sectors. And for example just to kind of wet the appetite here I'm very interested also in examples that you have of public private partnerships with governments that really maximize the interface between the space community the agriculture community and the environmental management sectors. I believe a member of your team mentioned to me that you have a project with Norway, specifically with a public private partnership interface. And that might be an example of a win win that could be replicated in a New Zealand context or something analogous. So I'm curious how do we really activate that overlap. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, the, the, the, I think the overlap really is there. And you have to stay focused on it in the sense that you know, again it's easy to geek out on lots of data and then not and then forget about connecting it to the real problems and unless it's connected then then it's not useful. Yeah, the Norway forest example is probably the one that my colleague was mentioning to you Chelsea so basically this is a partnership to track all the forests in the tropical regions of the world that I mentioned it briefly earlier. And at an individual tree level on a regular basis to help prevent deforestation so basically this was 64 of the tropical countries basically the whole tropics. And, and, and, and it's in partnership with Norway that's basically funding it together with the UN food and agriculture organization which is what monitors is just like the title they also do forestry as well as agriculture for the UN. And, and, and yeah there isn't a novel partnership where the government is funding it, the Norwegian government is funding it so that the UN can access it so that a bunch of NGOs can access it so that those nations can access it their forestry ministries. And at the same time some of it, a limited amount becomes a public good, which enables scrutiny from everyone else. And so, if you like it gets access to all the people that need to have access to the actual job of preventing deforestation in those countries and there's a part of it that enables other countries to look at them. And other the press to look at it and other the you know civil society outside the critical NGOs that are even part of the project to access it. So yeah I think it's a pretty interesting project and the kind of thing we want to replicate for other projects. Another one I can mention is on coral reefs I mean I did mention that how we're doing the tracking of the coral reefs and, and that was actually funded by a foundation also puts a fair bunch of the data online in an open format. But mainly the aggregate stuff so that it doesn't just destroy the business value for planet but at the same time enables the public good piece of it that we think is so important to do with protecting coral reefs. And then final third and final example I'll give is in the area of forest fires. We've been doing a fair bit of work here in California, looking at helping try and prevent mega fires, which are bad for of course biodiversity bad for climate and, and bad for humans as well. And, and although we tend to only focus on the ladder, you know the bush fires in Australia killed, you know, over a billion animals, and there it's a real tragedy. But anyway, for places like California and, and, and, and, and Australia, we just did this thing called the California forest observatory, which literally maps every tree in California. And it's for two purposes. One is to tracking the extent of the fires during the clock, during the fire season to enable the firefighters real time information to help their resource allocation. And then, but perhaps just as importantly, it looks at the fodder for future fires to help them with preventative work outside of the fire season, like making lanes and basically these the mapping is what enables them to have smarter resource allocation outside of fire season. And I'll share these links in the, in the chat actually if you want. Awesome. Thank you. We'll just a follow up someone on the Q&A tool has asked us a question about not only applying the data and capacity of existing satellite technology, but also thinking about how could New Zealand be a global global leader in the development of the technology itself. So both on the creation of which technology. I think the, so you were commenting on satellite imagery specifically, but since we have a burgeoning new space sector in New Zealand, I mean what would you like to see it create that would be complimentary to all of those things you were talking about we've got the chips at work happening at Auckland University. But is there any other key pieces of that puzzle that you think would be valuable for the New Zealand space industry to add to the consortium of things that exist today. Absolutely. I can give a very concise answer to that I think which is data analytics. The big value out add here is in all the, the services that you can build out of this data that the combining of our data and other people's data sets local data sets. You know, in agriculture they use soil moisture together with our data together where the data and piloting to help. But the same is true for a prior diversity the same is true with sustainable ag the same is true is with protecting conservation the same issue. So I would encourage the focus around the data. Right. You can sit on top of that. We need someone to start a machine learning boot camp that'd be great so that New Zealand can have immense capacity in this data area. I mean, and look, the rockets and even the satellites are sexy things and they garner a lot of attention and, and look, you know, it's exciting to me too. But I think the data is in an absolute revolution the rockets are in a sort of evolution, and it's interesting with nano rockets with SpaceX doing reusable rockets. Wow, there's some changes. But let me tell you, roughly the rocket costs have come down per kilogram to the forex at best. The capabilities that we're putting in each kilogram into a rocket has changed by 1000 fold overnight in the last few years, and the data they're generating has changed by orders of magnitude as well. The evolution is not in the, it's so much in the rockets and the, and the, and the satellites as the data and the services that come on top of that. And I think that's the exciting area of fruit. Now, if you like, we have the rockets, we have the satellites, it's in the data and the, and the value added pieces that can service the real things on the ground. That's where people slightly less sexy, but with machine learning and all these data sets, I think it's, it's huge. Yeah, and the supply chain in regards to that 1000 fold modification as well. A couple more questions before we close out. And these maybe can be quick fire so we can get through a few of them. Gary, a quick fire one for you. Netherlands is a tiny country that is now the second largest exporter of food in the world by being the center of industrial scale fully automated organic controlled environmental agriculture. Could New Zealand be the Netherlands of the IPAC region. Well, go all the way back to my mythology. The problem here is on a total footprint basis. It's a disaster. There's more chemical use per hectare in New Zealand, particularly in the Netherlands, particularly in the flower production area. Look, we do need to be efficient and effective but it goes to wills last point we need data analysis. You know, just maybe this is because time doesn't allow me to go into all that I'd like to say about that I'll just tell you a little anecdote that might be helpful here. I chair this group in the US called organic voices. And we're trying and that the number one obstacle that we have as companies is the largest companies in the organic business. The number one obstacle we have is consumer confusion, because so many of the conventional producers want to do, they want to confuse, they call it natural they call it, you know regenerative they call it, you know, fair trade and and we and we spent years trying to get this right and we finally figured out all we needed to do, because if we say it's chemical free or less chemicals than somebody splits hairs or we find ourselves in court. All we said all we we built a campaign on a very simple statement which is over 700 chemicals are prohibited when you see the organic seal. Right. That's what the markets need to know. And you know we have a lot to the Netherlands question. It means we need. I mean, there's a tremendous amount of analysis needed there and a lot of educating but to be very simplistic about it. Having the organic seal. That's what it means and everything else doesn't mean that so right. That's what I talked about moving markets. Yeah, yeah, and as a quality versus quantity thing that you just mentioned, sort of embedded in what you just said as well. I do want to keep a couple more quick fires going before we close. Quick comments on the Biden administration. Any top level comments in regards to your hopes, what you expect from the Biden administration in regards to the types of measures that we've talked about today, and whether the Biden administration will have any effect on what we're seeing in these sectors. Oh, well it has to because we're bringing science back. I mean, his, his fourth appointment is, is, is a climate czar right somebody who actually knows the science. Yeah, just just I mean one of the great problems of the last four years is the number of policy, number of scientists actually out of government now and we've got to bring them back so I have high hopes for at least getting back into the world of science and facts and objective but but I would also say very quickly that you can bet rest assured climate is going to be, you know, top of the agenda but I also want to say very very fast. We have to get out of this partisan this, you know climate biodiversity these are not partisan issues and we need to find ways in many topics in the US to bridge the divide. One of the early signs that I like about this administration is it looks like he's going to be bipartisan. Right, we don't believe in the folks over here do we'll get nowhere. Yeah, yeah, good point good point all right well any words on that before we move on. No it's just shocking to see there's something strange going on there they seem to be appointing people that have competence in these relative domains. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's like the Canadian cabinet, everyone who holds a portfolio has a master's degree in that subject or something and I was like wow. This is a revolution. Yeah. Know something about the domains that. Exactly, very, very good. All right my friends we are coming to a close here. I do want to check both Gary and will if you have any final rounding out comments that you want to make about your whole experience on this discussion today, just a couple of minutes each or less because we only have three remaining that would be wonderful if you do have any closing little Gary, why don't you go first. I'm just going to stay narrowly a capitalistic here about my night my formula that markets drive change. Look, there's still a lot of challenges to building a really successful transition to a, you know robust organic sustainability regenerative sector. And nobody should be fooled that it's like a automatic if you're green, you, you win. Right, we've got to deliver on taste and functionality. Good news is that most organic tastes better. You got to be packaged for greenness we've, we, you know my dream for yogurt is when you finish it in the yogurt you'll eat the cup we have to get back to. I want to eat the cup. Okay, well I have one for you to try. Think of the ice cream. We'll talk about it. We have to provide, we have to be priced fairly right we have to provide value, especially with these economies I'll tap so these are prerequisites to get you in the game but the thing what I want to leave our audience with is that the key to all of this is authenticity but the real key is how we communicate and that's transparency and the and social media and digital media can be your advantage. I had 500 people on a farm tour the other day in cove it they were in their homes, but they're walking they were, you know, seeing the soil they were talking to the farmers. We have many many tools available that we never had before this to help explain be more transparent. People make choices based more on emotion and heart than on head. And, and that's a different type of transparency as well. Digital technology allows us to convey emotion. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Will any last words. Well it's been a enjoyable conversation I just said I'm hopeful for how we can turn this biodiversity crisis around. It's the crisis of our age. I hope it motivates everyone here. I think we know what we need to do. There's only really two things we need to do at a global level and more conservation of the forest of the keyboard reverse regions of marine protected areas and sustainable food and fishery systems. That's really it. And at a consumer level you can help, of course, by eating more plant based diets flying less and combating for for conservation keen politicians are aware politicians. And, you know, we know what we've got to do and we've got to do it really quickly. And as I mentioned, I'm, I'm hopeful that the current of our situation inspires us. And I think big changes in short order when we decide to prioritize it and now's the time to prioritize it. Thank you. Beautiful. Paula, please put out the poll for all attendees to fill out their views. If you are still here, please do submit your views to close and to honor the immense wisdom and experience of these two incredible human beings Gary and will. I'm going to offer a very short way to which is a song. This way it has to acknowledge you to acknowledge the work that you do to acknowledge the effort that you put in and the amount of passion and care that you bring. The translation is stand like the kaheketeer to brave the storms embrace one another. We are one together. And I see you both as tall trees in this beautiful rainforest that we call our community. So thank you for the strength that you bring despite the storms we are weathering as a global community. I'll close briefly with a karakia and then we will turn off the webinar. This means draw on the sacred supremeness, the God of peace, fully immersed we draw together. Together. Together. Together. Kia ora everyone. Thank you for coming. Thank you again, Will and Gary for your immense contributions. Thank you, Michelle and Paula and ants and everyone behind the scenes making this possible. There are so many other sessions for you all to join. Please enjoy the rest of the experience of this incredible springboard.