 Atmarie mai tātou, mihinui kia koutou ki te mana whenua o tini rohe antiātiawa mihano. I'm shaking because I knew that I would be moved by Charles's speech and as well as that, some of you who know me, I started out as a technology entrepreneur, so I have this really strong brand as a geek in New Zealand and I'm the first New Zealander who, I'm the first New Zealander woman to get what's called the ONZM, which for the rest of you is called the OBE for services to technology, so like I'm a certified geek. But a few years ago and I started a mixture of engineering and applied math and I specialised in environmental health and epidemiology, so like really, you know, all that geeky math stuff. But what happened I think is that I'd never had an experience of not being in love with the planet. And so no matter what I ended up doing, I ended up in the service of that somehow. And a few years ago I decided that I would become two things I would work in as a futurist in agriculture because I cared so deeply about New Zealand and the need for us to heal our relationship particularly between urban New Zealand and rural New Zealand and that divide is quite wide at the moment particularly as we see what degradation has happened to our rivers and our land and the world around us. And so in that I found myself, I saw that there was an opportunity for a non-farmer to stand for the board of beef in Lamb New Zealand and so for the rest of you from outside, this is basically the association of ranchers. And so I stood for that position and I am the first non-farmer to be elected to the board of our beef and lamb farmers. And I'm pretty cool, eh? Like really brave of them, really, really courageous of them and they've been amazing as I walk around the country and I get invited more and more and more to regional meetings and what I end up talking about is love. And I'm very open about talking about love and it's what they ask me now to come and talk about. It's pretty awesome, eh? Pretty awesome. And the main reason they want me to talk about love is that they produce food and I kind of come from a culture, you know, I have an Italian grandmother and so I was raised from a very small age. I could feed 50 people if you're giving five minutes. And I also grew up Ngati Pondike Marae where I was the little parkia girl in Kapahaka in the 1970s and, yeah, the little parkia girl, right? Let me make that clear. The blonde girl in the back row and so the same, I would find myself more often than not with Rangarewa in the kitchen because I really don't mind serving and I love to feed people and even last Christmas my son was teasing me and he goes, Mum, you're just a feeder. And he meant that I just can't help myself, you know. I was like, are you hungry? Do you need something else? And so when we think about food, it's very easy, I think, often for us to just associate farming and food. And when we think about food, the reason I buy food and the reason I feed the people around me is because I love them. And so that food has to have love in it all the way from the land that it came from through the entire production process to the point I put it on my dinner table and in fact after that as it goes back to the land. And, you know, my mother is a gardener and I come from a long line of nursery people, of gardeners and I have a big organic veggie garden and some of you who may have been here a couple of years ago know that I'm also a beekeeper and I speak about bees. And so, you know, for me that's very much that integrated agriculture. So I want to talk to you a little bit about regenerative agriculture and I'm currently doing my regenerative practitioner training so, you know, I'm a baby at this and some of you may be way further along. But what I really take from that last bit that Charles says is we start with what we've got in the tools that we have in front of us and what doesn't matter whether we're working on indigenous issues or if we're working on food issues or working on homelessness all of this needs to be healed. And I think what I really like about this approach is that we really think about it as a system instead of going I'm just going to do my bit and does it, you know and then feeling not good enough about our bit being not big enough perhaps or not taking on enough of the pie. So we have this big divide and we have this sort of discussions at the moment and it's interesting we're about to release our environmental plan from beef and lamb and, you know, we have all these kind of it's almost like the old sustainability movement has become one of like doing the least harm, right? And if we think about that medical model of doing the least harm that's not at all the same as saying how do I keep the patient healthy? Makes sense? And so we've kind of got caught in a paradigm for a while now of doing the least harm. And with that, you know, we've all got this like debates about organic and I want to be clear I'm not poking anything in the eye of organic I have this organic vegetable garden at home I'm really supportive of organics but we also all know the stories about industrial organic, right? And so we can no longer kind of go organic good, non-organic bad because suddenly if we start to play in all that data we kind of get to a place where we're not entirely sure that industrial organic any better than old fashioned or actually not old fashioned, new fashioned interventionist agriculture. It's not so clear. And, you know, I also want to be clear I'm not poking the eye on anybody that's permaculture specialist and I've got one right here in my face and I again, you know, I planted the permaculture food forest and it's doing its thing and, you know, I've just got rid of my chickens actually gave them to Gareth Hughes from the Green Party for their garden because we got sick of the mess, you know but so I'm all for permaculture but I want to be clear that there's perhaps something more that we can think beyond some of these labels beyond some of these good, bad, different systems and, you know, you've all heard these kinds of quotes before but the problems of today were caused by yesterday's technological successes and I think we often don't think about that that often what happens is we solve a problem and we solve the problem and in solving the problem we create the next problem and we never meant to do that but actually we probably just have to accept that that's part of the human condition is that we're never going to be able to see 10 problems ahead and so what we have to do is to think what are the principles by which we'll live and using those principles how do we solve the problems and your problems will come our way, yeah and we don't believe those sustainability stories anymore and again for the non-kewies in the room this is our biggest dairy company in New Zealand it's got these lovely words about sustainability but if you ask most people outside of the dairy industry they're going to tell you that these guys are not sustainable they're going to tell you that the belief from most urban New Zealanders is that these guys have destroyed our waterways and I want to be super clear I'm not saying that they are sustainable what's happened is that this word sustainability starts being bandied about by everyone and we no longer trust it I fly a lot much to my embarrassment at the moment every time I sit on that New Zealand plane and I see the video about how they're supporting the Antarctic and I think my flight just killed another kilometre of the Antarctic but they're trying to tell me that somehow their research is supporting it I just stop believing it anymore and you wonder if they do so we've got this much bigger problem and I really take it out of what Charles was saying is that we want to unfuck the world and it really, truly doesn't matter where we start because there's so much of it that's fucked up so isn't that serious? so right now I'm starting with agriculture but you guys just pick a path because we need it all done so what I wanted to think about and it was lovely Charles set me up beautifully is starting to think about what if our farmers weren't actually just in the food business but were in the soil business and if we were in the soil business because New Zealand made the transition some time ago to being in the grass business and it really has when I talk to sheep and beef farmers I am an awe truly of what they do so you don't know this but 25% of New Zealand's forest is on sheep and beef private land sheep and beef farms 25% of our indigenous forest and it's growing I know yeah the only place there is more indigenous forest than there is on New Zealand sheep and beef farms is in our national parks and so when we think about it we already have this groundswell in the sheep and beef industry particularly about stewardship of the land when we start to think about how could we grow the soils how could we really protect our soil so that it isn't just the top centimetre and one of the great things I heard recently is two things so the word organic basically means carbon right and what we're wanting to do is to take as much carbon out of our atmosphere as we can and put it in that soil and lock it up and every time we till that soil every time we expose it we're taking carbon back out of the soil and putting it back in the atmosphere and I thought it was really fantastic is this idea that photosynthesis is basically another word for carbon sequestration right isn't that cool and what it means by that if you think about it a plant breathes in carbon dioxide keeps the carbon and breathes out the oxygen and so the more green that we have and the deeper the roots of those green the more it has the ability to be a source of carbon sequestration for us and we often don't think about it that way and we think oh they're going to come along and take my land and plant forests on it but what we really want to be doing is thinking how can we get the most possible photosynthesis on my land and so these lovely long root systems that perennial grasses and perennial herbs have draw water up from much lower than ever before need less irrigation and of course are much much better at carbon sequestration so we have a lot of work going on in New Zealand as well as in other countries as to how we can really think carefully about how we create polycultures on our farms in order to have not just great food but to sequester carbon and also to encourage all kinds of life forms to come back so my beef with sustainability is that it seems to be doing the least worst what we really want to be in the business of is healing the soil healing the land healing the biodiversity that lives there and healing the human beings who are on that land really healing the communities and we can't just say oh it's a sustainable development thing we should be moving right through to how do we heal that so there are four key steps you can read them but the two I just want to pick up on really closely is this idea of thinking about how we can really grow our communities and really heal the people who are there globally farmers have the highest rate of suicide of any professional of any profession and in New Zealand our suicide rate amongst our farming men is really high it's completely intolerable and so when we see that we can't separate the healing of the soil from the healing of our men particularly who are on our farms and so strong rural communities is also important we have a third less people working in rural farms in New Zealand then we did in 1990 a third less that means there's a third less people living in those rural communities that's a third less people to look after the elderly who live there a third less people to turn up when you have a baby with some dinner a third less to turn up when you have post-natal depression and you need someone else to talk to in the nearest farmers an hour away all of that is starting to dissipate and that needs to be healed as much as possible some of you I know there are a few people here I saw at the Tuhoe Working B, Joseph and a few others and so I'm also the only independent on the board of our largest architecture firm in New Zealand and we were the architects for this building and when Tuhoe got their settlement they decided to build a building that was more than a building a building that would heal their community and would heal the whole of the settlement process with them and the Crown and they built this beautiful living building of which we were lucky enough to be architects of and it's an extraordinary building they're very willing to have you come and visit and have a look but it is designed to heal the community not just to house an administration and it is utterly extraordinary if you get the chance to go you should go I mention this because some farmers I really admire and the Dakotas have done very similar relationships where they've brought bison back to the land that they work and healed the land through their relationships with the indigenous people there and by bringing back the original animals I'm going to quickly talk about corn because there's a big study about regenerative corn growing that showed that farms that use regenerative practices had far less pests on the land than the people who use the pesticides shock horror and because they did integrative farming they were able to not use any pesticides on this land but their pest levels were way lower they were also far more profitable and I'm just going to talk this is a New Zealand example those of you who eat meat, I'm doing an ad for them they will do boxes to your home and and they're an extraordinary farm who are practicing regenerative farming in New Zealand I spoke recently at the Beef and Lamb AGM and over a dozen farmers who practice regenerative farming came and spoke to me and asked me to champion this cause which I've agreed to do so what I can say is this last idea and it's often been credited to Goethe but in fact it's from a guy called Jay Murray that Goethe was quoting which is that boldness is genius and power and magic in it begin it now get on with whatever you can wherever you are the soil that we live on the animals and the beings that we live with and you can't go wrong thank you