- Well, originally I'm from Oklahoma in the states.
And so while we grew up in Oklahoma City,
we had a farm about an hour and a half south
of Oklahoma City.
So I grew up hanging out down there and riding horses
and we grew cows and we grew pigs and we ate them.
So I actually started on a journey
of understanding animal agriculture
and what it does to our health
and what it does to our land about nine years ago.
- And what was the kind of instigating thing
that initiated that shift for you?
- So I had a friend, he was just always banging on
about plant based eating and how great it was.
And I just kind of kept thinking,
well, no, in order to be healthy,
you needed to have meat and dairy.
We've all been told that all of our lives.
And he kept telling me
about this movie called "Forks Over Knives".
And after watching it, I felt completely gut punched.
I mean, it actually felt like of a betrayal,
like I had been lied to my whole life
about the fact that we needed meat and dairy to be healthy.
And not only did we not need it, but it wasn't good for us.
So I went up to the house and I found Jim and I said,
"Hey, we're gonna watch a movie."
And he said, "Oh cool, what movie?
I love to watch movies."
And anyway, I said, "I'm not gonna tell you what it is,
I just want us to watch it.
and then we'll have a conversation about it."
And we watched it.
And as soon as it finished
from the TV room into the kitchen, he said,
"We shouldn't have any more animal products in the house."
From that moment on Jim actually had this,
an interesting epiphany,
I was coming to it completely from a health point of view.
He already knew the environmental issues
around animal agriculture.
But even though I had been in
the environmental sector for decades,
I had been working with
one of the largest environmental NGOs in the United States.
No one had ever mentioned anything about animal agriculture.
They had talked about dead zones, ocean acidification,
deforestation, biodiversity loss, et cetera, et cetera,
but nobody had ever talked about animal agriculture.
And if you look at all of those things,
you can actually connect the dot back to animal,
if you put animal agriculture in the middle,
you can put all of those things around the outside
and they all connect.
It was not long after that, that Jim started educating me
on the animal agriculture piece
which was another sort of gut punch.
I was like, "You're kidding me?"
You know, being all about the environment
and sustainability and not knowing that,
I felt a little like a chump, I felt duped really.
- If we can go back
to this beautiful property that you have here
and the land that you've purchased here,
what was it previously used for?
And what do you plan to turn it into?
- So we bought our farm in the Wairarapa in 2011.
And this was before we went plant based.
There were already a few crops here and there,
but it was mostly dairy.
We had two dairies within the farm
and one of them being a very successful dairy.
And in may of 2012, we went plant based
and realized that our dream to have this beautiful organic
dairy organization didn't seem like the right way to go
at that point
after everything we had learned and researched.
So we closed the dairies down and one of them is,
we just actually gutted the building
where they do the milking and the processing,
and we turned that into a veggie operation.
So now we grow organic veggies in our fields
and we sell them to grocery stores and restaurants,
and of course, we get to eat them ourselves too.
- The switch that you made
from a dairy farm to farming something else.
- Yes. - Is this a change
that you think other dairy farmers in the area
could also take on?
- You know, I would hope so.
And I think that there are some dairies
that are starting that process.
It's a fine line because dairy farmers,
it's they're livelihood.
And I'm certainly not going to come in
and tell people to shut down their dairies
and people have to be able to
do it in a way that it's lucrative,
obviously because, why would they do it?
Why would anybody want to do something that loses money?
But I think that there are more and more people
that are making the change
that are able to prove that they're able to make some money.
It also has to do with being able to look at themselves
in the mirror at the end of the day,
knowing what it's doing to the land,
knowing what it's doing to people's health,
knowing what it's doing to the animals.
Even if it was healthy to eat animals, there is no way
that we can feed human kind by eating animals.
There is no way at all.
So if you look at an acre of land,
you get about, I don't know, two kilos,
two to three kilos of meat from an acre of land
whereas you can feed about 30 people off of an acre of land
if you're growing veggies and pulses
and legumes and things like that.
So it's a much more efficient way of growing food.
You need less land, you need less water,
you need less inputs in order to do that,
there is less pollution, there's less runoff,
there's less carbon going into the atmosphere.
- Do you see it as the kind of country
that could set an example to the risk of the world,
and what are the traits about New Zealand
that make it a great country
to influence change to the rest of the world?
- So I think one of the things that
we noticed very early on
was just how quickly new Zealanders can pivot.
And you saw it with,
when everyone started putting in vineyards,
it happened very quickly,
it happened with dairy very quickly.
When we first went plant based,
no one wanted to be talking about it at all.
People are talking about it a lot now
and it really has shifted.
And when we first moved in here,
we could only go to the health food store
to get our plant based products, but now they're everywhere.
They're at New World, they're at Countdown,
they're at Foursquare,
they're at all of the conventional grocery stores.
So that alone is a big indication
that people are starting to sit up and pay attention.
- What are some solutions that we can look towards?
- Well, I always go back to OMD,
and OMD stands for "One Meal a Day" for the planet.
So every time you put plant-based food on your plate,
you're doing something good for your health
and for the environment and for the animals.
And every time you don't put plant-based food on your plate,
you're doing something detrimental for your health
or for the environment or for the animals.
So one person swapping one of their meals a day
to a plant-based meal for one year,
one person saves 200,000 gallons of water
and the carbon equivalent
of driving from Los Angeles to New York.
And typically what happens
is once peoples do one meal a day,
they start to realize that they feel better.
They don't have those afternoon dips
or the morning dips, they sleep better,
they don't have acid reflux, all of those things.
And so then they kind of shift to two, it's an invitation
and it's not about being perfect,
it's just dipping your toe into the idea
of just swapping out one of your meals a day.
- So we have a lot of dairy farmers
and all sorts of farmers in New Zealand,
do you think there is hopes for New Zealand
and other sectors, other industries?
- I do well.
I mean, a lot of the industries are booming, definitely.
Plant-based food products are the largest growing sector
within the food sector around the world.
So there's a huge opportunity for new Zealanders
to start to create more plant-based food products.
- In terms of any types of political pushes
in the New Zealand government,
what would you like to see?
- In a perfect world,
it would be unbelievable if they were to incorporate OMD
through all of the businesses,
all of the schooling and hospitals,
it would be a huge saving if everyone in New Zealand
chose to do at least one meal a day
as a plant based meal.
That would be my dream, certainly.
And most recently
the thing that has come up that
should probably be the number one thing
on our radar right now is pandemics.
So 75 to 80% of all diseases that have been created
have been created because of the exploitation of animals.
So that I think is something that
we really, really need to be paying attention to.
Eating animals is like the next smoking, right,
it's the next cigarette.
And I have this hope and dream
that one day you'll go into a restaurant
and 90% of everybody is going to be eating plant based.
And there'll be one person over in the corner having a steak
and it's not gonna be about,
"Oh, yeah, well, they're hurting their health."
It's gonna be like, "No, no, no, no,
you are creating an issue for the future of my children."
So it's like secondhand smoke,
everybody was like smoking,
until finally everybody realized, no, secondhand smoke,
that's not just bad for you, it's bad for me too
and it's bad for my children.
Right, and so then they made everybody smoke outside
and now it's like
if you even walk by somebody that's smoking, it's an issue.
And they want to have their own rights to be able to smoke,
but when it's affecting other people,
then it's not okay and sorry to say it,
but anybody that's eating animal products
is affecting the rest of the world
and it's affecting the future for our children.
What kind of a world are they gonna grow up in?
It will not matter if we have electric cars
or if we have sustainable clothing to wear
or environmental schools to go to
if we don't do something about our environment.
And that is a huge piece of it
is to be able to shift away from animal agriculture.