GROUNDED Live - 2026: Nicole Masters - Keystone Humans: Examples of Community Tipping Points, Abundance & Collaboration

Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this closing presentation from GROUNDED Festival 2026, Nicole Masters invites us to step back from the practicalities of farming and consider the bigger picture. Exploring community tipping points, abundance, collaboration and the role of what she calls "keystone humans", Nicole reflects on the relationships that underpin healthy landscapes, thriving farms and resilient communities. It's a thoughtful and inspiring way to conclude two days of ideas, reminding us that lasting change begins not only with the land, but with the people who care for it.

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

G'day there. I'm Matthew Evans, and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tents live on the day. It's unedited, and I hope you enjoy it. At the end of two days' talks, there's a lot of big ideas floating around, a lot of people have and maybe maybe tested their beliefs and maybe had some of their uh what they already um were trying to do confirmed. And what I like to do at the end of the two days is bring up some sessions that throw ideas in the air, and there's no one better at big picture thinking than Nicole Masters. Now she's looking at uh um examples of community tipping points, abundance and collaboration, essentially the keystone humans that exist in our spaces and the vitalness of what they bring to landscape care, to farmer care, um, to human care.

SPEAKER_06 1:07

Okay, I feel incredibly privileged to introduce the last speaker of today and of Grounded. Um, Nicole Masters probably doesn't need an introduction to a lot of you. If you don't know her, she's an agricologist, she's a speaker and an author, which somehow feels like an undersell. In my own journey, I listened to Nicole's book, I read it, I watched all the YouTube videos. Somebody who takes the science of soil and brings it into bite-sized pieces for everybody to understand. So I'm grateful for that. Um, Nicole is also um one of the instigators of the Create program, which is uh fabulous. I can see lots of little t-shirts hanging around here. So without any further ado, I'm gonna hand over to Nicole. Nicole's gonna talk for about 20 minutes, and then we're gonna have 20 minutes of question time, and then Nicole's gonna wrap it all up in a lovely, beautiful package at the end. So thank you. Join me in welcoming Nicole Masters.

SPEAKER_04 2:12

Thank you, appreciate it.

SPEAKER_05 2:15

All right, then what do we come up with? What's a keystone species? Oh thank you. Thank you very much. I will take that. What is a keystone species? The wolf, brilliant example. What's another example? The beaver. Huh? A human could be a keystone species. When I ask a lot of regenerative leaders, really, what do you see as the future and how do you view human beings? I've heard some very interesting stories. There's a story that humans are a virus, that humans are destroying the planet, that humans are a cancer upon the earth and degenerating. Right? Have you heard these stories? If that's what we hold to be true somewhere out in the future, then that potentially is the future that we're creating. So I want to switch that narrative. I want to play with the story because you can always find an example of where the opposite is true. Where do we find human beings on this planet that create more abundance and more life and more diversity and find them and have them as a light, like this property that we're on? Yeah, that holds us, that nurtures us, and that that shows that we can bring back bird life and we can run regenerative food systems within diversity. So that's kind of been a big drive for me at the moment is looking for who are these people? And this is where Create was born is can I create can I work with the people that are making the difference in their community so they can be more and more effective? If I can get create students to stand up, please stand up. And a round of applause for these incredible human beings. Thank you, and thank you for your commitment in the work that you do with people. So often this world thinks that we have to do it all ourselves. How do I work collaboratively? How do I be generous with my knowledge and move away from a world of scarcity to worlds of abundance? And it is a really inspiring space to work in. Like every day I feel emotional in terms of we're seeing people change that narrative. So I want to start with a sobering statistic, and it was David Attenborough, so I believe him. David, it's a shame he's so old. I'm like, dude, we can hang out. And what he said was, and I want you to guess, how much bio how much mass of mammals on the planet right now is made up of human beings and livestock? What percentage of all the mammals, if you squished the elephants and the whales together and the dolphins and the koalas? 70%. Oh my gosh. Very good. That's close. What else? Six percent. So humans make up six percent of all the biomass and their livestock. The other way round. Yes, for the wind. Only 4% of all the biomass on the planet right now represents mammals, wildlife. And 96% of the is human beings and the livestock that we produce. Do you feel that? It's not that there's not space for wildlife, right? But we're creating the conditions that says, go away, go over there. There's no place here for you. You might eat my crops. I don't know if you've ever heard Betsy Ross, who was um she was a dear friend of mine and unfortunately passed away, but she was based in Texas. And she she said, I'm gonna do my really bad Texan accent. I don't care if you crawl, if you walk, if you fly, or if you hop, you are welcome here at my place. And I'm like, how do we roll that red carpet out to everything? And then how do we ensure that we can still grow food? Right? There's there's that fine tension, right? How much of animals might be eating my food production? What does that potentially look like? I have another fun statistic. So living in Montana, there is the concern about bear predation on cattle, which is is real, right? So some people range rides, some people have to find ways to mitigate bears because you can't shoot them. Well, not meant to shoot them. Not saying I know anyone that has. All right, doesn't happen. So if you think about there's a specific class of livestock that are eaten by bears in only one class. So they make up 86% of all the predation by bears is on one stock class of cattle. Only one stock stock class. You want to guess what that class is? Dead stock, you're hilarious. You can come to all my events. Sorry. What age of calves? Little baby ones? What kind of wieners? Wieners without their mums? Do you think they're boys or girls? Dear wieners make up 86% of what a bear will predate on. Why? Because they're boys, obviously. Not as smart. I didn't say that. Because they're curious and they're inquisitive, and there's no adult there to say, is that a good idea, son? What you don't sniff the fluffy thing, it's not your friend. So what I found is ranchers are asking the question if that is who the bear is predating on, then how do I change my management? Because I'm not number one in this environment. I need to start acting like I am not on dominion of everything, right? Instead, I'm part of the system. So the same things happen with bird life as it has with mammals, not quite to the same extent. It's about 30% wildlife are birds. And they calculate since the arrival of colonization across the planet, is that movement of nutrient from birds to insects and also androgynous androgy and andro and not androgynous and I can say it in my head.

SPEAKER_04 8:57

I love it.

SPEAKER_05 8:59

Anadromous. Say after me, anadromus. Anadrimous. Okay, now I'm relying on you next time. Uh so anadromus fish, which means a fish that has once lived in the ocean and now comes up the river, something would eat that and then poop it in the woods. And it wasn't bears here, but probably other animals, right? A moving nutrient from streams out into the landscape. Or birds were coming from the sea and coming out. The flocks of birds here, I mean, you guys have incredible bird life. But the flocks of birds would have blackened the skies. In New Zealand, the bird life was so loud that the sailors, as they sailed away, had to recover from tinnitus that rang in their ears for weeks. Can you imagine? And we go now to these forests that are silent. So less than 4% of all the global nutrient that was coming onto land from all these organisms is gone. We're down to 4%, sorry, of that loading. So the more that we roll that carpet out and say, I want you to come and just roll your fur on my ground. That sounded weird. And it was like bring that nutrient. So, like in the forest, 90% of that nitrogen's coming from the bodies of insects and that frass. I want to be encouraging that life, but in every action I take. So when I get up in the morning, I'm how do I create more abundance? What does that look like? I'm not necessarily planting this plant for livestock, maybe I'm planting it for a bee or I'm planting it for a pollinating species. That thing on mistletoe, is he here? The mistletoe dude. They're absolutely incredible to think about the linkages of plants, and we don't even really understand how these things are interconnected and the impact that they're having on our lives. Every country I go to, the forests are dying. The forests are dying because they're reliant on all this diversity and all of these species. And who holds the key to that is us as farmers. Right? How do I create an environment that encourages more and more life? I asked this question yesterday, so you those of you that were here, you should ace this test. What's the most powerful agent for change? Peer pressure, right? The social squeeze. Not the extensionism, not the most powerful force. Humans to humans, socializing, what is socially acceptable? Because if we weren't part of that tribe, then we might have got kicked out of the cave and we might have got eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, right? We learnt as social beings to be influenced by that social squeeze. So you might have seen this is called an innovation distribution curve. I'm not going to show a bunch of graphs, I promise you. But this idea is that we have the early innovators. You've got the early innovators in the room. Can you stand up? Martin Roy, Graham Sate, David Marsh, Tom, where are you? Graham Hand. Come on, you know who you are. Stand up.

SPEAKER_04 12:12

Stand up. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 12:21

So we have these incredible early innovators. What did people say about you in the early days, David? They might still say it now, but oh okay. So that so you like it like a thousand miles from you. Oh, I love that. Well, you don't care. That also puts you in the early innovator. So the tendency of these people Oh, you do care, but don't mind. Martin, did people say anything about you? Maybe a little bit. Just a little bit crazy. Right. So the aspect of these early innovators is sometimes people think they're a little crazy, right? They might say things about them that they're doing like this. You know, we wouldn't believe what they're doing down the road. They were naked. There was a full moon. It was stirring something.

unknown 13:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 13:13

And then you get the early adopters who kind of look over the fence or you have a few conversations and they're like, oh wait, that actually sounds quite interesting. Then we get into the early majority. Well, if that toy works for you, then I might just play with it too, right? Now we're at that tipping point and we see systems change. You get the late majority. Is this a good idea? And then you get the laggards. Why toys when a stick will do? And we say that the lagards are the ones where change happens one death at a time. Right? So, and you know them, right? So this is not where change happens. So we would train this with like a university. Some of you have seen this and you're like, okay, cool. So we just need to talk to each other. We need to move it more towards this space of soil health and regenerative ag. However, there's a piece that we don't talk about, which is the chasm. And what happens in the chasm, so if you see where the chasm is, it's in between those that early innovator and that early majority is this place of complacency or marginalization, right? And some of us have felt it. They just ignore you. Or then they start to tease you, but not David, because it's awesome. They don't tease you, it's great. But then they might start criticizing. Who's been criticized? Who cares? Excellent. Um before we start to reach acceptance with that early innovation, they start to listen to what you're doing and they start to take that on. It's the chasm that I'm really interested in. If you're laughing at me, brilliant, you're listening. We're starting to think, right? You're criticizing. Absolutely fantastic. Your mind is waking up. We're starting to think about these things. So behavior change really is the core of our work. It's no good just talking about soil health if no one's listening or you're just spouting your wonderful wisdom, and they were like, that you just took an hour of my life. Right? I want to know that when we leave, we're in action and that something alters. So this is one of my first clients in the US. His name is uh Roger Ingerland. And Roger and Betsy are just absolutely phenomenal people to work with, incredibly curious. We have so much fun. Do you guys know the Fraggles? Best. That was my TV show of my youth. I model my life on the Fraggles. We put our backpacks on and we go out on the rangeland and we do our monitoring, we write in our little notebooks, and I get this whole flashback that it's like Uncle Traveling Matt, and we're gonna write these things down about the weird humans. Um, and we have so much fun and we we see things. I thought one day he was having a heart attack because I could see him up on the hill. He got off his bike and he was curled over. And I'm like, oh my god. And he was curled over for like 10 minutes. I'm like, he's having a heart attack. So I'm ringing him and he's not answering, and I'm like, oh anyway, suddenly gets on his bike and he's like, he's coming over, and he's like, look at this dung beetle. And it was one of the big rollers. He'd never seen a roller, and as he tries to show me, it flies away. And he was very sad. He's in the cattlemen's association, he's a he's uh in the Republican Party. He has belief systems that are different than mine. Most of you might. Um what else? He's super well respected by the community and he's just a solid dude. All right. So if Roger says, hey, I'm looking at this thing, do you want to come and have a look? We had 140 people come to the first field walk that he did from the Angus Association, from people that are like super traditional. Now, the other thing that's interesting in Montana is it's one of the least regulated states in the US. There's no regulation, you can do whatever you want, just like that Yellowstone TV show, which is not real. Not real. You can do whatever you want, and yet, despite being able to do whatever you want, people are doing the right thing. So, as a community, we're seeing people try things. So uh you can't really see on this image, but he's always experimenting. So we got into vermiculture, he is the laziest worm farmer in the world. In New Zealand, we have a saying called a tin arse. Do we have that here? He is the biggest tin arse. He just put a pile of manure out, covered it next season. Vermicast. I'm like, that that's not cool, man. I don't understand what you're doing. But like made a bunch of vermicasts. We're putting seeds into the mineral, we put humate out. He's doing the Pat Colby mix, so thank you, Australia, for another one of your brilliant knowledge exporters. He has a sprayer that we can the first time he used it, he actually dropped it into a ditch, filled that sprayer, and then put out a grass fire so it paid for itself in the very first time. Uh they have something called Sagebrush, um, which is not palatable for livestock. So he's rolling bales out in the rangeland and he's drilling vermicast out onto extensive range. And we're seeing some incredible stuff. And he says, come and take a look. And he doesn't mind if you judge him, that's cool. Whatever. So he had a field that I thought that things would never change, and it was called the farm ground, and it was right next to the where this his bull yards are. It's covered in fanweed and yellow alyssum. So they're both non-mycorrhizal plants. The fields had looked like this for 30 years. He's like, it's never going to change. His grazing management is fantastic. Like he is moving animals regularly, he's doing his adaptive grazing. He's got those cool uh wheels that you roll. He has leases now where lease owners come to him and say, What can I pay you to come and graze my ground? Right? Those are the kind of relationships that you want. And he is a very genuine guy and he pays his lease owners. He goes, I'm not, I'm not doing this, you're not paying me, right? I'm also winning out of this. They had three, they had uh, what do you call them? But like a credit mortgage type group. And he's one of 300 clients that they have in Montana. And they said to him, You are our only client out of 300 that doesn't have off-ranch income. You're fully sustaining yourself on this operation out of 300. So we'd kind of given up on these fields. He's like, you can see the manure's not really breaking down. Uh there wasn't a lot of diversity in here. So finally, I said, let's just do a trial. Right. So we did a 150-acre trial. We put vermicast, a bit of humic acid. We use a little bit of magnesium sulfate, like 10 kilos. We didn't put a lot of product in here at all, just enough to kind of tickle the system. Bit of fish, bit of molasses, some homeopathy. I'm a big fan of like B vitamins, vitamin C, like anything for human health I put into here. Why not? And you gotta be naked. Um and so we did that. There was a little bit of moisture, but this is a pasture that has in 30 years never grown anything, and this is what grew. They are native flowering plants, some of this. So we planted uh trick triticale and um hairy thatch in fall or autumn, and then the following spring, this happened. So you can't even really see the triticale in there. You can see some of the hairy batch, but these are native cone flowers. Alfalpa came away. He's like, what Lucerne? Lucerne came away. So where did this stuff come from? Just this incredible diversity that responded, I think, to the vermicast personally, but to that stimulant, right? The soil system recognized that food and that life. He did it once, he's not had to repeat that treatment in this. So you can see the triticale in here. We'll see the hairy thatch. These are pastures, I'm not kidding, that would probably come up mid-calf of very, very low palatable plants. The land was waiting for that wake-up call. And for him, it was like, well, that wasn't a very big investment, right? Is that we can start sparking something. And not only the abundance of insects of which he has. Um, he had Jonathan Lundrin Lundgrin come out, which I hear is hopefully coming to Australia, which would be great. I just missed him. Coming again in March with Vic Notil. Yeah, someone else, cool. Uh so that Be great to see him. Love, love his work. Yes? Oh I thought it was like peace, love, and mung beans. Um okay. But wait. Okay, wait for this. Okay. So one of the things that we look at at this property was the growth of uh the the explosion of native spiders. So if if you're managing your property very well, you could have anywhere from say two to five million spiders a hectare. Do you know how many insects a spider eats in a year? Like two thousand. So if you go two thousand times two million, or five million, depending on the size of your property, it's anywhere between two to eleven billion insects a year being eaten on that hectare of ground. Insects are nitrogen thieves, their body concentrates nitrogen. Your pasture might be two to three percent nitrogen, the insect is 16%, and it's concentrated nitrogen that's coming from their bodies. So we see a lot of spiders on this property, which I, you know, in Australia I'm not that excited about. I just want to say. But in other places, cool. So what we what's happening? So Roger and Betsy are the gray dot in the middle. So within six years, we're seeing over 40% of the land area is now being managed using either regenerative or adaptive grazing practices. They're using uh fish, they're using humics. That's 26 producers in that 16-mile diameter. You are now the weirdo if you're not talking about soil. If you're not talking about moving your cows and talking about health and well-being of your family, you're the weirdo. How cool is that? So I was on this property and we were it's a head and heel, it's a traditional branding. We're doing all the cowboy traditional stuff, which don't let Peter out there just saying. Um, it's cool. I really, I really enjoy the process. But there's 16 uh ranches were lined up and a helicopter flew over. I went, that's weird. And I said, What's with the helicopter? And he said, Well, we put algae on last year on our hay fields, really effective, so we're doing it again this year. So you've got people practicing some of the most traditional practices, living traditional cowboy lives, and they're using helicopters to apply algae. And it's not happening from one organization, right? It's happening because we're all sending the same message. What I love in Montana is we're there's not it, this is not about competition. This is not being, I'm gonna be better than you. This is how do we all work towards the same goal? So these organizations, which actually I think nearly all of them have students that have done create, just a plug, um, to have this conversation about what does it look like? How do we ensure that farmers and ranchers are winning? So just lastly, because I think this is important, this was a study done in New Zealand. The references there, I'll leave it with the team here. But they looked at poor industrial, I'm gonna call it industrial, I'm sorry, not conventional. It's in the industrial ag model of dairy, best practice, industrial dairy and Z practices versus the regenerative dairy, and what you're looking at are what they call ecosystem services, but in fact, planetary, planetary life support systems is the poor industrials providing about $62 a hectare in services. That includes the value of their milk, that includes the pasture that they're growing. What else are in ecosystem services? Water quality, temperature, cooling, biodiversity, greenhouse gases, pollinators, water quality, all of this stuff has a value, dust. We're not talking about small steps up, but a hundredfold increase in these ecosystem services provided by good land management. Now, that's not dollars in your bank account, that's dollars for someone not having to clean up a flood damage. That's someone not having to deal with a dust storm, which in the US, in the last 10 years, 254 people have died in dust storms coming off poorly managed ground. And you can track it from outer space. So, what I like to say from the Americans is you can see who's murdering people. You just murdered someone, so start sorting out what you're doing with your land management. They love me over there so much. So we calculated just in this one area, those ecosystem services shifted from 1.2 million based on modeling, okay, whatever, uh, to $9.5 million in services to that community, water quality improvements, increases of those of pollinator species, increased air quality. This is the stuff that we want to be digging into. And I believe the 98% of the population that relies on you guys need to be interested in this because it's life support system.

SPEAKER_06 27:13

Good question. Yes. I mean, some of those of those statistics are mind-bending, and um, yeah, thank you for bringing them out into the audience like that. Yeah, don't stand in that section. So I'm sure everyone has lots of questions. I'm interested, how do you get the vitamins into the verma vermicast?

SPEAKER_05 27:41

How do I get vitamins? Well, there's vitamins already in vermicast. Yeah. Um, so I will just go down to the local, you could go to the IGA and you can get some vitamin C. It's that easy. It's simple. Anything I'm taking for my own body, I use the same rate as I'm using for my body on a per acre basis.

SPEAKER_06 28:00

Okay. So if it's one tablet for one human, it's one tablet for one human acre. Yeah, yeah, cool. Thank you. Okay, I'm sure there's lots of questions. Hands up, don't be shy. Anyone? I'm gonna hand over to you first, and then we can go up to that person there.

SPEAKER_03 28:22

My name's Michael, I'm from New Wagger. Uh Nicole, how much fall through, like tying in a few of these other talks about the importance of food and um you know, we've got the human health and the soil health sort of working together. How much can we just rely on consumer making better choices to get this to happen? Or do we need sort of uh top-down intervention?

SPEAKER_05 28:50

So I think, Mick, that it's unfair to put this on the consumer because right now it's really the brands that are driving, the CPGs are the ones making these decisions. And when you talk to them about why they are interested in regenerative ag, guess what they say? Do you think they give a shit about food quality? Why do you think they'd be interested in regenerative ag reliability of procurement in an unstable environment, an unstable climate, that's what they say. They can see that we're getting this variability and we know that we can still produce crops growing regeneratively. So they're aware that something's coming down pretty hard and fast, as you guys are well aware of how do we do that. So I I personally believe that the whole structure has to come down, Mick. The whole thing, right? It's relying on commodity markets and not working locally. It's having a system that drives the price down while everybody else is making a living off farmers' backs, right? Is we need to be standing up in our own power and going, that's enough. It doesn't mean more expensive food, right? Necessarily. But I don't think it is to put it on a consumer. Some studies have looked at consumer interest, and it's like 80% of the population are never going to read a label. And now we're like, but we have this incredible magical metabolite. Look, and they're like, Wow, I got my two-minute noodles and my KFC, right? Is I want that KFC to be regenerative. Like, what does that look like? So I think it's a bigger whole systems approach, and I think everybody in this space right now is working on their different aspects. So you might be working with farmers, you might be working at policy, you might be working with consumers or children. All of it is equally legitimate. This is a movement. So let's not focus on putting the pressure on people that are surviving, right?

SPEAKER_04 30:51

Why?

SPEAKER_07 30:56

Why? Why would you use synthetic vitamin C to put on those pastures? Why wouldn't you not use something a natural version of vitamin C?

SPEAKER_05 31:05

Oh, you could. You could. I'm talking about 250 grams per hectare, but yeah, if you want to use it, I I use really high quality, I use salcore products. I use really high quality. I don't go to IGA, I'm just kidding. That's okay then. Sorry, thank you. No, no genetically engineered. You guys like to sneak your GE into your food.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

Um, the slide you had with the pit in it, falling into the pit. Can you um elaborate on a bit how a bit more how we provide support to c to people to climb back out of the pit.

SPEAKER_05 31:38

Oh, that oh that the cat the the the the chasm, sorry. Oh, the cat how do we how do we how do we get out of the chasm?

SPEAKER_04 31:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 31:48

Uh we do it through being an invitation, right? So what I why I use Roger and Betsy as an example is they are what I call opinion leaders. So some of us in the room are those early innovators. People, you guys have led the way and you've provided the information and the knowledge, but you're not the ones that are gonna tip this. I'm sorry. And that sucks. And I want people to acknowledge the people that are those innovators because we're building up on the top of your shoulders, but it's the next group that are coming through that we need to be looking at. And that's the earth what that early majority are the ones that are interested in well, what's normal, right? What's okay, what's what's the peer pressure, what's socially accepted. So finding people in your community that are regen curious, right? And they're well respected, they're pillars of the community. Is go, uh, do you want to come for a walk, or do you want to do a field trip to your place, or just invite a few mates and let's have a conversation? Is they're the ones I want to work on, right? Those are the leverage points for a community, and you have them in every single community. It's the people that are open, curious, thoughtful, find them and start loving on them. Whatever that looks like for you, right? To start loving on them.

SPEAKER_04 33:06

Yeah, good, good question.

SPEAKER_03 33:11

Uh David Marsh, um, I'm from Borough, Garden of New South Wales. Um, where are we now on that uh graph, do you reckon?

SPEAKER_05 33:22

Well, well, I I think globally we're still just in that early adopter phase, but in the example I gave you, we're in the early majority. And that's why I gave you that example. How do we find people that tip the conversation? And they might be influencers on social media, right? There might be people that other people listen to and respond to, right? It's like, why is black angus? Why does everyone want blank angus? So because someone cool said, uh, this is cool, guys, we should all do this thing, and everyone's like, Well, they're gonna do that thing. Sorry. Offend all the black, there's like a riot, you'll leave. No, but like, most of what we're doing on farm was driven because someone cool did it that you admired and you respected, and they said it was the right thing to do, and you're like, okay, cool, I'm gonna do that. And then 20 years later, you're like, that guy was crazy. I don't know about that glyphosate stuff.

SPEAKER_04 34:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 34:25

What part do you see government intervention? Why does it want to go there? And I might have even laughed before I heard Stephen Chen talking about it and thought, wow, that's actually something that can happen in terms of feeding people good foods to make them healthier. Yeah. Funded by the funded by the healthcare system.

SPEAKER_05 34:44

I mean, I I think there's a this is the piece of like everybody plays a role in this, right? And I think policy just plays just as much a role. And if you're interested in lobbying and you're interested in activism, there's a role for that. The piece is when we work with government, how do we how do we create an invitation instead of dogma? I promise you, when glyphosate gets banned, which is happening, what's gonna happen? Are people gonna just like oh lovely? I don't have to use herbicides anymore. Not so we're already seeing it in the States, and in fact, uh, if you buy Roundup at um Costco, which a lot of people do, it no longer contains glyphosate. What's it got in it? Dicamber and something else. Um uh fleur clip clip pour. I love it, I don't know how to say these stupid words, but it's got residual long-term chemicals now in it, and grandpa and grandma are buying what they think is Roundup, and now they're buying residual chemicals because Bayer didn't want to deal with it, right? If we ban these, they're gonna switch, they're already switching to 2,4D, Paracot, Dicamber. The stuff that's banned, they're now unbanning because they're like, cool, we're gonna ban glyphosate instead. That kind of mentality, which I think sometimes with government, it's like we're gonna fix this problem with sticks and a little bit of carrots, right? That never creates it, creates change, it doesn't create transformation. And all of you in this room, I know are committed to transformation. That doesn't happen because someone says you're only allowed to do 50 kilos a hectare and you've got to plant a tree, right? You resent that tree for the rest of your life. It's someone major plant it, right? Is how do we do this? Because actually it's the right thing to do for every single aspect of society.

SPEAKER_02 36:39

Yeah, hey Nicole.

SPEAKER_05 36:40

Yeah, mate.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

Thank you for your presentation. It'd be fair to say you're not normal.

SPEAKER_05 36:46

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 36:47

For thank you for a Kiwi worm grower to end up in Montana, yes, riding a horse, telling farmers how to do stuff. Yeah, they love it. Yeah, it's it's it's not usual. Um when Dr. Jonathan Lunderon spoke at Wilmot at Armadal earlier this year, the audience is a bit different to this, they're a bit more senior, a bit more established, but he left half the audience in tears. And the reason for that was that he gave evidence on 1,700 farms in the US where one seed coated in fungicide and insecticide was responsible or attributable to killing 165 bees, plus other pollinators, plus birds, plus fish, etc.

SPEAKER_03 37:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:35

So when I spoke to Dr. Alan Williams, who was always at the concert, I said, Does Jonathan always leave audiences like that? He said, Yeah, it happens everywhere. So there seems to be this growing awareness of coated seed. Are you noticing anything in America about people starting to stop using coated seed and use a more biological coating to enhance soil biology?

SPEAKER_05 37:58

And I want to make a proviso. I don't think banning a lot of things works. I do think banning neonicotinoids is non-negotiable, right? So I think a lot of those insecticide seed treatments, when there's so many other viable things, we should ban that. And if you need to lobby government to get them banned, then please do that. But um, yeah, we are certainly seeing the growth of organizations that are able to either not put those seed treatments on or put biologicals on. So a lot of the seed companies I work with now, they they automatically are putting biologicals onto those seeds, which is great. Um, and also what we're seeing is this idea of growing plants for seed that have been grown in a regenerative manner that are taking that biology through the plant and then taking that to the next generation, right? Epigenetics and thinking about that with seed. So I I do think seeds are a very exciting aspect of this, and you know, the idea of seed coatings is such a backward step. Um, yeah, and and I think this is why I'm I did a workshop last year in Nebraska. We had 140 growers at that, and they were all row crop farmers, and they're excited. It's a large amount of land, they are respected people. I I think if we can get into the Valley of the Beast, which is the home of Bayer, then we're we're starting to see real change and and the growth and the supply of things like cover crop seeds for sure. So I I feel very heartened wherever I go, but I do live in an echo chamber because I just want to hang out with cool people.

SPEAKER_08 39:37

Dale from Tumut in New South Wales when progress can't happen fast enough, when we want ten years of progress to happen in in six months, what's your guidance to us as individuals to take home to kickstart, you know, to to work towards how do we when there are many different pathways, avenues, opportunities, how do we particular ones that uh we think might work?

SPEAKER_04 40:05

How long did it take for your soil to get buggered?

SPEAKER_05 40:09

How long did it take for your soil to end up in the state it's in right now? Yeah. Although there is arguments about how sheep quickly sheep altered soil in this country, but then we expect it to turn around really, really rapidly. And I think that's where having some of the showcase examples that you have. I mean, go and see what Vic Notilla doing and go and see some of the the the what farmers teaching farmers, farmers leading farmers, farmers skipping with farmers, farmers helping farmers is um to see or how how how far does it how how good does it look? How long does it take? And I think we still don't have any idea of how good soils could be in Australia. We really don't. And if you go back to old accounts of people talking about the amount of water that was around and their carriages getting bogged down and the diversity of plants, is we're so far from being able to achieve that. So I think looking at our own mindset of thinking that something's gonna happen really fast when it actually took a really long time to get there. And I've seen stuff happen in weeks, right? So it's like keep the magic, it's possible we can turn soils around quickly. But again, you're raising a child, you've got different children, some of them are hard, some of them are easy. Don't look at someone else and go, well, they did exactly that. I'm gonna do exactly that, and I'll get the same outcome because you won't, because you're a different person, right? Okay, we move on. No. No, we can have questions all afternoon. So good. I appreciate that. Okay, so I just want to share this example. I had the privilege of being in Kenya um 18 months ago. And I went to the Lewa Burana Conservancy, which I do recommend you take a look at. They have 90,000 acres of intact Kenyan wilderness just on this property. They're protecting 28 endangered species. It was just, oh. And actually, there's that Lion Rock is on this property. So the the Lion King movie was was inspired by this property, and everyone else was gonna go, all the creatures. It was and and I got to canter a horse through zebra. I could have died and I would have disobedience, like I'm done. I'm done. Well, yeah, I didn't even know I had a bucket list. It was on the bucket. Okay. So we went and looked at what they were doing with their grazing program. They have uh this is one herd of a thousand head of cattle. In this operation, there are nine different cattle owners. And those cattle owners are Maassai, right? So the the Maasai community own that thousand herd. Some of them, which I'm not beating up on the black cows, but they were black cows that were not adapted for Kenya, right? So you see them, they look kind of licey, they were skinny, they were not adapted for these conditions. And I'm like, that that thing doesn't look like it's gonna live long. And the manager was like, it doesn't matter. If those cows die, and that that that farmer came to us and he only had four heads and they're all dying, we took them because we want him to be part of this. We want him to be part of that journey. So even if his calves didn't survive, he still gets an economic return. So across the conservancy, they hire over 400 local people. Since 2015, there hasn't been a single case of poaching because the community is so committed to seeing this place succeed that the poachers are not getting through the villages to come in and take animals, right? The community's like, this is our place. So as these animals are moved up to seven times a day. But what I want you to notice is look at the birds. There were no flies on these cows, they don't stand a chance. The birds have figured out, hey, wow, well, that's where all the bugs are. Those are the flies, those are Australian flies, just so we're clear, right? Sticky ones. I'm like, is the incredible diversity that starts to come back. It took them a while to train the lions. So apparently uh they were losing one head a night for the first couple of months, and they had to really work pretty hard to say to the lions that they're cool, but they're not for you. Like go over there where these tasty, stripey things uh and eat some of that stuff, right? So seeing the zebra and the Cape Buffalo, incredible, incredible diversity. But what was interesting watching is that these animals were moving behind the livestock like they were fenced in. They were coming in for something and in for some response that the grass was happening in the grass, and they were also following them a year later. You had this phenomenon of everywhere that the livestock have been, these the wildlife are coming in behind, and it was increasing the diversity and the populations and the biomass of their wildlife. There was no competition in this, there was no livestock against wildlife. It was together we succeed. How do we create environments like that? That actually everybody gets to win out of this. If 96% of the population on the planet right now are humans and livestock, how do we also create an environment for wildlife? So that's the question I want to leave you with. Next week we have a soil health master. I'm actually going to talk about soil. And I still want to talk. You don't even talk about soil. Uh, we're gonna talk three days on soil, we're gonna look at uh fire recovery, flood recovery. How do we work to really get soils moving quickly? Like the example they gave of weeks, how do we do that? And we do actually have some heavily subsidized tickets. Where's Fran? At the back of the room. Okay, so there, so take a photo. Now I want you all to stand up. And I want you to take a look around the room, and I want you to see who you are seeing are the Keystone humans. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to the organizers. What a phenomenal event. You guys are cool. You're all just yeah, so thanks so much, wherever the family is.

SPEAKER_06 46:15

Big, big round of applause. Thank you so much, Nicole. That was absolutely fabulous.