When I think about the urgency of the problem I think of that old farmer
saying you know when's the best time to plant a tree 20 years ago
when's the second-best time, now. That's the urgency of the problem we're facing.
We know from the IPCC report that the climate is changing very rapidly we're
looking at what up to a two degree increase in temperature within the next
11 and a half years and that's not that the world ends in 11 1/2 years but it
means we have a lot more extreme weather events ahead of us I put my faith in the
farmers who are making the changes. Meanwhile what our job to do as those of
us part of collective organizations we'll keep working on the politicians we'll
work on those cycles of government and getting them on board but meanwhile the
house is on fire so we need more farmers to actually be here putting out fires and
making more resilient systems.
So the journey into regenerative agriculture
and the concept of the Regenerative Ag Alliance really came out of the farming
together program we'd had enormous uptake from farmers fishers and
foresters to want to collaborate together to improve their state of
effects basically to improve profits back at the farm gate and we ended up
with twenty eight and a half thousand farmers connected to that farming
together program but when we supported them through experts support and
consultants and when we supported them with grants of money to do their various
projects every one of those projects had a triple bottom-line outcome it ticked
the box of being good for the environment good socially for the
community and had great economic returns for farmers. So it was a natural
progression to think well where do we take farmers now where do we need to go.
The whole climate change and drought scenario was really starting to kick in
and I knew that we needed to go to another level we were beyond sustaining
in this country and in the world we actually needed to take our farmers to
the next phase and the next phase was to repair and to regenerate the land.
So because we already had these wonderful farmer groups doing fantastic
things it was just a natural step to take and it would then make or assist
them to be resilient around climate change.
Yes so for me the Alliance is
kind of like a really good biodiverse farm right as opposed to a monoculture
of the same kind of people who all have will just want to grow the same crop and
why we've got down to what is it nine crops in the world or 66% of our diet
this isn't doing us any good so the Alliance is a kind of new space where
we're saying well actually we need more biodiversity in this space we need women
and men we need large and small farmers we need other people who are helping
support those farmers and we need educational institutions we need all of
us coming together to grow a really beautiful and diverse system.
You know the heart of the community is tremendously important in how we
maintain respect for each other how we move as a community and share
information and I suppose that's where I see the the Regenerative Ag Alliance is
particularly important because now we're broadening our community we've got a
group of people that are all looking to try and change we've all got different
ideas and we're all sharing those ideas now in a way that's building the
possibilities for everybody. And I think that's a beautiful way of looking at how
we want our soils to be you know if we want ourselves to be rich and full of
life and full of bugs and critters and conversations and you know fun and
love then that's what our community should be. So I think that you know if we
were able to mirror and understand that for our soil to be diverse for our soil
to be rich then our communities need to be the same.
I don't think there's any other way to fix it.
I think the only way that we can fix the fix the problems
at hand is to work collectively and diversely
across our many many systems.