Head Shepherd
Mark Ferguson from neXtgen Agri brings you the latest in livestock, genetics, innovation and technology. We focus on sheep and beef farming in Australia and New Zealand and the people doing great things in those industries.
Head Shepherd
Embracing Digital Farming and Global Challenges with Robynne Anderson
Our guest this week, Robynne Anderson, is an authority on global agricultural and food policy. Robynne grew up on a farm and started her career in agricultural publishing. After selling her first business and taking a short break to contemplate her next move, she founded Emerging Ag Inc. Robynne realised there was a lot of talk about 'food security', but very little understanding of what it takes to grow, share, and distribute food.
"Clearly, there was a gap between what we in the farming community understood as baseline knowledge and what those who are making agricultural policy, let alone more broadly, food, trade, finance, environmental policy, etc....have as an understanding of what we do. So, in that lies the origins of Emerging Ag," says Robynne. "The goal is to bring the practical reality of farming to the policy sphere," she says.
She groups the common challenges faced by farmers into three categories:
1. Growing and harvesting the crop, often under highly adverse biological and climatic realities.
2. Regeneration or sustainability, with a long-term view to the production system, often within multi-generational family businesses, staying open to doing things differently.
3. Resilience - Covid, climate, financial, policy challenges - finding ways to adapt (acknowledging and being proactively part of the changes).
For Robynne, it's essential for farmers to speak up and be part of the conversation, without being defensive. She elaborates, "We don't have to be bashful, but suddenly a conversation has turned, and we may feel defensive. Instead of being the rural 'local yokel,' you're now the villain destroying the planet." While both of those narratives exist in the world, a lot of people do have an appreciation of how difficult it is to be a farmer; Robynne's aim is to help more people understand what farmers do.
Robynne encourages farmers to take the time to explain and connect. "We tend to talk about things in terms that make sense to us as farmers," she says. "We tend to cut to the chase without explaining that we share the underpinning value that they're asking for." By adjusting our tone and unpacking what we mean, we can find a point of connection with the non-farming community.
When Mark asks her to run through what an effective issues management strategy looks like, Robynne shares three key points:
1. Identify the outcome you want.
2. Don't be wedded to the method of getting there.
3. Be open to working together and leave space for people to do their part.
Listen in for some absolute gems with on-farm applications!
You can find Robynne on social media at @Robynne_A or visit Emerging Ag or Agrifood.net.
And a final note from Robynne, "There's nothing we love more than a farmer who loves to speak up! We welcome the whole world of farmers to come and be part of the conversation."
Head Shepherd is brought to you by neXtgen Agri International Limited. We help livestock farmers get the most out of the genetics they farm with. Get in touch with us if you would like to hear more about how we can help you do what you do best: info@nextgenagri.com.
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Welcome to the Head Shepherd podcast. I'm your host, mark Ferguson, ceo at Next Gen Agri International, where we help livestock managers to get the best out of their stock. I want to take this opportunity to thank our friends at MSD Animal Health in Orflex for sponsoring Head Shepherd again this season, and I'm also excited to introduce our mates at Inaga as brand new sponsors of the show. Msd in Orflex, or perhaps better known as Cooper's Animal Health in Australia, offer one of New Zealand, australia's, largest livestock product portfolios, with a comprehensive suite of animal health and management products connected through identification, traceability and monitoring solutions. Like us, they see how the wealth and breadth of information born out of this podcast can help their men and their farming clients achieve their mission of the science of healthier animals.
Speaker 1:Heinegger will need little introduction to our audience. A market leader and one-stop shop for wool harvesting and animal fibre removal, together with an expanding range of agricultural products and inputs, the Heinegger name is synonymous with quality, reliability and precision. The Heinegger team have a deep understanding of livestock agriculture, backed by Swiss engineering, and a family business dedicated to manufacturing the best. It's fantastic to have both of these sponsors supporting us and bringing Head Shepherd to you each week, and now it's time to get on with this week's episode. Welcome back to Head Shepherd. We're excited this week to be welcoming Robin Anderson, who is president of Emerging Ag over in Canada. Welcome, robin.
Speaker 1:Hi It's fantastic to have someone of your calibre on Head Shepherd really looking forward to this discussion. It's one of the great joys of doing a podcast is to get to talk to people all around the world about agriculture, which is often a shared passion, as it is today. It would be nice if you could just start off telling us a bit about your background and career path and how you ended up where you are today.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been a wonderful journey. I grew up on a farm. like you, share that passion for agriculture, and started my first agricultural company in publishing, producing about nine agricultural titles, and then ultimately sold that business, took a short break, contemplated what I wanted to do with my rest of my life, decided agriculture was still the thing and started my current company, emerging Ag Excellent.
Speaker 1:That was quite a few years into a short spiel there, so many of our listeners might not be aware of Emerging Ag and its role in supporting farmers. What can you tell us about that organization and what you do as a group today?
Speaker 2:Well, as you said, it really does span from passion for agriculture and food, and so I had this particular experience early in my career. I was working with a man who was then the Deputy Prime Minister, and he became Agriculture Minister on quite short notice, in addition to his existing duties. And we went over to the Agriculture Department and there were people who were passing around a picture and several of them had been out to a farming area for the first time And here they were making agricultural policy and they were looking at this picture and people didn't know what it was. And when the picture got to me, i recognized that it was a combine, i recognized it was a mass Ferguson combine and I recognized they were harvesting barley.
Speaker 2:And I realized then that, though I had not spent my life on the farm, assuming that I had any particular facility for this clearly there was a gap between what we in the farming community understood as baseline knowledge and what those who are making agricultural policy, let alone more broadly, food policy, trade policy, finance policy, taxation policy, etc. Environmental policy, would themselves have as an understanding of what we do. So in that lies the origins of emerging ag, and out of that I realized that in the international space in particular, there was a lot of talking about food security but very little understanding of what it takes to grow and have and share and distribute that food security, and that was the birthplace of emerging ag, for now, a team of almost 30 spread out all over the globe, and what we do is work on food, agriculture and health related issues, and we do that in an issues management practice that is really geared to helping people in the sector build consensus and work together towards the improvement of the sector and, ultimately, the long term goals globally.
Speaker 1:Excellent Pelley, pretty, extremely important work for all of those listening and we, i guess, often feel like policy doesn't listen to farmers, and I guess the last few years it's been maybe even wrapped up further with. In Australia there's lots of issues at the moment where I'm recording from today, and New Zealand's got plenty as well where I'm flying to today, yeah, so obviously lots of listeners keen to hear your approach. I guess. If we think globally, what are the most common challenges that are faced by farmers and how can they be, or how can they be effectively managed?
Speaker 2:Well, i really do think that goal is to bring the practical reality of farming to the policy sphere, and I think some of the things that farmers face are really common to those of us who come from a farming background. So the first job of a farmer is always to grow the stuff Right. if you're harvesting a crop or you're bringing in dairy from a cow, whatever you are up to, you need to actually deliver, and you do that in incredibly adverse and difficult physical climate and biological realities from that production of food. But then, on top of that, i think there are two other things. So if you get that job done, you get the crop in. then there's this question of regeneration or sustainability, and I think those words are being used a lot now in a way that works together, which is actually good, because I think, coming from a farm, you really see a lot of long term ism in the thinking. There's an immediate demand of that production cycle, but for the most part we're all in family businesses. We're looking at multi-generational farms and we want that to be stewarded well, to be managed well. So the idea of thinking and caring about soil isn't new The way on our farm that we dealt with it.
Speaker 2:my grandfather's time was to leave land fallow. I remember it being perfectly black. We have heavy black soils here and it was bare and we felt we were protecting that soil. It was a point of pride that it was being rested. And then we realized it was also blowing away in the wind and that we needed to move to conservation tillage. And so 30 years ago we began that journey of low-till operations on our farm.
Speaker 2:And it's just hard not to believe that we're making each of those decisions, perfect or imperfect, but continuously improving towards that sustainability factor. And so I think you grow this stuff, then you grow it in a way that makes it grow well the next year and the next year and for generations to go forward. And then I think the third thing for farmers is resilience. COVID, climate, you name it. there are a lot of difficulties in farming right now. One might argue. the financial environment and also, frankly, the policy environment are part of those challenges at this moment. So for farmers to be resilient, to find ways to adapt to that, to acknowledge those changes and not just be subject to them but to be proactively part of them, is one of those big challenges. I think those are the three big ones right, growing the crop, regenerating and resilience.
Speaker 1:Cool, it sounds like you've had the same experiences. I grew up being very proud of a very clean fellow and lots of people doing a lot of work to keep it that way, whereas now it's the opposite of that, and I grew up in an area where lots of it did blow away. Yeah, so things change all the time, as you say, and each of those generations made a decision that they thought was right at the time. But it's always improving. I guess in our business and generally at conferences and stuff, we hear people asking farmers to tell their story and I'm not sure that they know what that means, or even we know what that means when we're asking them to. But I guess what we think that means is asking farmers to make sure their voice is heard, because there is. I guess those of us in Ag know there's such great stories out there and such passion for that long term nature, but we live and feel and breathe that gap between our urban cousins. How do you suggest farmers ensure their voice is heard?
Speaker 2:It's such an important question and it's particularly timely. As you said, our urban cousins are increasingly our cousins and becoming distant cousins, as we see that urban population outstripped rural for the first time in global history, so far as we know. So we need farmers to speak up, and I think I have a few tips about the tone in which to do that, and then also a couple of practical examples about what that means. So the first job is to speak up, and if you are not being heard in that vacuum, other decisions will be made. So if you're not in the room where it happens as the song goes from the musical, you are not going to be in the midst of the action, you will not be president, and when you speak up, i think it's an important moment for us to remember not to do it defensively. And this is a really strange moment that we're in, because at one point maybe if we go back a few generations, right, you had this sense that farmers were the uneducated rural hazeed and they were looking, looked down upon as being perhaps uneducated or unsophisticated, and so there was that element of defensiveness or discomfort. Now we feel a different kind of pressure, right As the sector has increasingly professionalized. You and I both know every farmer is operating probably a multi-million-dollar enterprise with incredible number of variables and a high degree of responsibility for staff or land, for assets. So those are really thoughtful voices. Most of them have a university or a higher degree of education. So we don't have to be bashful about being a local hazeed. But suddenly this conversation is turned so we may feel perhaps defensive about what we do, because instead of being perhaps the rural local yokel, now we are, you know, in the village, the villain who is destroying the planet. And I just want to say that it's not all about that, right, because there's also as many people who are worried about agriculture taking up the resources of the planet or polluting. There are also people who are equally excited to go to a farmer's market and see local produce, right, so both of those narratives exist. We still have a well of interest and support and appreciation for how difficult it is to be a farmer, and I think we need to draw on that and come into our conversations in a way that's not defensive but is respectful of us and our space.
Speaker 2:But then the other thing that we tend to do is we tend to talk about things in terms that make sense to us as farmers. And sometimes that's defensive. So we say, well, of course we are doing conservation tillage, so that's important and you shouldn't bother us with. You know your concerns about XYZ general public or policymaker. And in fact, if you say we really care about soils and we are worried about soil health, then or we care about the quality of our land or we want to preserve moisture in our soils, then you are connecting about a goal that they understand and you can explain that you're doing conservation tillage. But we tend to just kind of cut to the chase with it's this and don't worry about it, we've got this without actually explaining that we share the underpinning value that they're asking for. The reason why we're responding this way is because we care about that underpinning value.
Speaker 2:Also true in the animal sector. Right, we are grazing our cattle because we believe grasslands are a vital carbon sink in the world and we want to protect them. Thus, grazing animals is the most efficient way to reduce this. This is a conversation that makes sense to people rather than why are you wasting land that could be quote productive for a crop by feeding it to animals? because we can presumably all eat plants. I think plant-based diets are incredibly important, but we also need a full range of production on the planet. That's part of the mix Understanding how you can explain that, if you were to take that grassland and put it into crops, that that land is generally at risk for being degraded very quickly. That's usually why it is a grassland. You have to protect that land and protect that soil. By having the animals on it, you are doing something that is very natural and protects that space Finding a way to speak to the core values of the people that you are speaking to, about what you do.
Speaker 2:I think that's the real key in how you speak up is you have to be present, but then you also have to adjust the tone in which you're saying things to find a point of connection with the person that you're speaking to. You can really think of it as a conversation. I were able to connect immediately, mark, as being two people from farms, as being two people who actually care about the wider world. We share a Commonwealth background. There are things we have in common that we were able to establish very quickly.
Speaker 2:When you're out speaking up as a farmer, you need to establish at the same level of connection, even if you're doing it in a sense in a public policy process or on a podium or on a Twitter account.
Speaker 2:I think those are some of the really important things. If you'll just forgive me a moment longer, just to say, for example, there was recently World Milk Day and farmers were encouraged to do videos with their animals. If you have people who are concerned about animal welfare and then watching a farmer interact with their cow and seeing how much affection and interaction and comfort there is between that caregiver and that animal, it's the best way that you could counter perhaps a very anti-animal agriculture video that might be out there as well. They need to see both sides of the story. You don't want to get into a fight online with people, but you do want to show them what you're doing. If you don't show anything, if you don't show the counter narrative, then you're not being present in the conversation at all and that won't work. On the other hand, you don't need to get into a screaming rage and fight with them either. I think also part of this is the fine art of understanding, with the positive way to put out your message without getting into an anti-conversation.
Speaker 1:Excellent, some great tips there, and I think it's often hard to separate the emotion from what we say and think, or think and say, i guess, but obviously we all know how the heat of the moment is never the best time to act.
Speaker 1:Having that real or trying to find that connecting part is a massive part of how we can communicate. I think one of my great joys of working at the New Zealand R&D Company where I used to work, was the connection to many US brands and stuff and that opportunity to have them out on farm and just seeing the things they loved were the farm dogs and the kids and all the things that they could connect with and find commonality with and then realize that these are real people doing real things that just like them, have similar value sets and could connect in that way. So yeah, some great tips there, particularly for some of our social media warriors to maybe just get the tone right. I guess it flows on really. But issues management when I read your sort of background and read through what you've done in the past, it's been pretty central to your career and I guess, whether you're negotiating an on-farm succession or a global trade deal, if we break down what issues management is. What is effective issues management strategy look like.
Speaker 2:Well, i think there are a few principles. First of all, you really have to identify the outcome that you want, and then I think the next piece is don't be wedded to the method of getting there. Be open to working together and to leave space for people to do their part, which really demands taking a very long-term perspective. So if you were to think about a few examples on this, we've been talking about soils, so what's the outcome? you want More attention on soil health that allows you to have perhaps ecosystem services for farmers actually maybe payments for being good stewards of land or for carbon sequestration. There may be several methods that you, as an individual farmer, may have to protect soil health right. You might be using a conservation tillage method. You may need to be supplementing organic fertilizers and chemical fertilizers in concert. There are a number of things that you might be doing And there may be a number of actors who are doing different things. There might be conservation zones that are prepared to create permanent pasture land and grazing land near cropping lands that allow them to interact, or there might be some agroforestry in the margins of what you're doing. It doesn't have to be a prescription. I think that's one of the things. That gets farmers the most excited is if they're, since they're being told what to do on their land because they take this so seriously and they have such a sense of long termism. But then you get into an issues management situation And often those of us in agriculture don't exhibit that same patience with that process. So we need to identify an outcome we want. We need to be open that government, conservationists, consumers everybody has a part to play the retailers, etc. And leave space for people to do their part in a way that's constructive and doesn't necessarily mean they're telling you what to do anymore, that you were telling them what to do, that you are building an ecosystem in a community And I think that's something that should come very naturally to most of us because we're from rural communities, so we know how to live in concert with other people in the way in which we live in our relatively remote towns. In many cases, we know that there are different types of people and there are people who are perhaps a little more in everyone's business and people who want to be a little more left alone, and the people who are building everything in the community and the kids who are running around, and some kids want to do soccer and some kids want to have a piano school, and we have to figure out how to do all of that amongst a very few number of people.
Speaker 2:If you take that skill and apply it to issues management, think about identifying the community. So what are the community of actors you're dealing with on an issue? In this case, it might be as big as the United Nations and the 193 countries that get a vote there, plus all of the multi-stakeholder actors floating in that space. Or it could be the G7, or it could be a set of actors in a totally different community inside your country, where you're talking about the whole of the agri-food value chain or you're talking about the government. But identify that community and think about that in the broadest terms so you can bring academics right.
Speaker 2:Think about the universities and think about the other people that you could engage. They might be social media influencers, they might be government types, they might be local governments. Once you've identified them, think about the messages you want to deliver to them, and they may be bucketed into different messages for different parts of the community, because they may have different layers of texture on the issue of, let's say, soils or livestock or agricultural trade, and then think about how you can build consensus. So that means synthesis. You have to be willing to then listen to what they said, back to your messages, adapt your messages and work together towards that outcome that you wanted in the first place. So the actions are find, you know, identify the broadest definition of that community that's involved in that decision, come up with your messages for them. Then you have to synthesize those messages to build your consensus, and that's an iterative process, but that's what's going to get you to the long-term outcome you're looking for.
Speaker 1:Awesome. You can tell, with the precision you speak about that, how well you've done it and how often you've been involved in that process, which is fantastic to hear. We're very lucky to have you explain that in that way. A quick interruption here to remind you of Head Shepherd Premium and our consulting services at Next Gen Agri International. If you love this podcast and want to hear more of them, visit the hubnextgenagricom and sign up for Head Shepherd Premium and get an extra podcast each week.
Speaker 1:If you're listening to this and thinking you really do want to maximize the genetic gain of your livestock and feel more confident around the decisions you're making on farm, then send me an email at mark at nextgenagricom and we'll get in touch and see where that takes us. I guess, maybe moving gears a little bit, agri Tech is something that's interesting to me and interesting to farmers. That's probably been overhyped and underhyped and whatever at various times. I guess how do you envision the role of Ag Tech coming in and transforming and optimizing our Ag practices, and have you got any promising examples over there in Canada that are sort of starting to make real difference?
Speaker 2:Well, i think, first of all, we have the opportunity at Emerging Ag to be the secretariat for the Digital Agriculture Association, which is a new global association being stood up for people working in this space, and there's definitely a lot happening And, as you said, some of it is emerging technology, not just emerging Ag is in my company, but we see lots of things coming, but some of them, i think, have become so embedded we couldn't really imagine doing without them.
Speaker 2:If I think, in our case, the yield monitor. So it would be impossible to think about running combine without a yield monitor. Now, right in the layer of detail to which you're going with, that is, you know, is textured for different people as they're looking at the data and what systems they're using. But whether you are looking at cow monitors for your animals or yield monitors for your combines, or whether you're thinking about flying a drone over top of your field so you don't have to drive in the quad out into the middle of that field, there's no question that the category of monitoring has been the first and most successful entry point for those systems. I mean, i assume on your farm mark you're using grain bin monitors, right? You wouldn't even go without a moisture sensor and a heat sensor in your, your green bin, right? Well then, by the same token, you wouldn't be thinking about not having those animals tagged, knowing where?
Speaker 1:they're at.
Speaker 2:And in most cases now they've got a caller that's also monitoring how much water and food they've consumed and all of that's coming in. So the monitoring, i think, is the front line of success. And the next element of that success is going to be measuring, and some of that again is already in place. So whether that's rapid tests on your grain quality measures, whether that's measuring your milk quality, measuring rapid tests for animal disease or health, same for grain. There's lots of new tech that's giving you measurement capacity. That's really important And that's, i think, the next frontier. That's going fairly well. And then the next big layer of this is probably the tracking element. So you've monitored what you're doing, you have measured it and then you're putting it into some kind of tracking system.
Speaker 2:So e-payments I think that's increasingly becoming a part of the mix And in some parts of the world they're just leapfrogging that if you go to Kenya they wouldn't pay you in cash shillings anymore, they would pay you on M-Pesa And that would be e-delivered to your account. Because why would they bother going back to setting up old school systems for everyone when they can just move ahead? And I think for increasingly lots of farmers those kinds of things are getting set up with their handlers or their milk distributors, et cetera. And the next layer of that is to layer in some potential blockchain where you're seeing that delivery and payments happen as it moves down the whole grain handling system And with that comes packages, potentially, of information about what was that treated with? was it pasteurized or not pasteurized? Did it have any animal hormones in the process? Did it have any? Was the animal vaccinated? Was that grain treated? somewhere along the line, those packets of information become possible as part of the larger traceability system.
Speaker 2:So I think tracking becomes an opportunity.
Speaker 2:It's also a challenge, as you're moving large amounts of product around about what you do with all those pieces of information.
Speaker 2:The ability to have them is much more manageable, And where the system begins to work together to say certain parts of this are highly valuable to them, then I think you can get that benefit And that will certainly be necessary if we're looking at potential ecosystem payments. So whether that is perhaps a carbon market right, so you're getting some kind of carbon benefit for putting trees into your farming system or for not turning over that pasture and keeping it into grassland, or whether you're using a conservation tillage system, some of those things will be necessary and technology will be part of those solutions. So I think we're walking that curve And then, the more we have all that information, how we analyze it is the art, and we see people who are putting out different systems to help you with that analysis, and I think that's the part that's still an art form, where we're waiting to see all of that come together in a way that's really coalescing for a farm or delivered value that they're willing to pay for, and that's both what the digital companies are looking for and also what the farmers are looking for. Excellent.
Speaker 1:That was a great structure. to breaking it down into those components. I haven't heard it put that way before and it makes a lot of sense. Do you think digitalization of all of this technology helps us move away from that? I see the thought that people think of, when they think of a farmer, as someone who's maybe less intelligent and just doing it because that's anything they could do, and do you think, as we become more sophisticated, that has any impact on how people view farming?
Speaker 2:I think it has the potential to have some impact on how people view farming, most importantly the people who are thinking about a future in farming. So it's really hard to imagine a next generation transfer in any family if you're not doing things differently. The next generation is going to come fully embedded, not only with the comfort with running the yield monitor, but also the ability to take that data and put it into a yield map and make decisions around it. That's going to be hardwired in their being, and the fact that their phone is going to call them when their brain bin is overheating is absolutely perfectly normal to them. So I think the absolute front line of this is not only public perception but most particularly, do we want a next generation of people in this? And I do have the good fortune of working around the world quite a bit, and in some places that's even more daunting than others.
Speaker 2:There are places where people and where grandparents are still using hose in fields And there is no way a next generation is going to choose to do that over a move to a city unless we give them an alternative where we're deploying basic mechanization and advanced electronic technologies, whether that's in vertical farming, making the use of small pots in different ways, or whether that's how you're managing dairy herd. You have to do it, and the other imperative is labor. Labor costs are too high not to be able to do this, and, as people continue to move to the cities and we don't have the population in rural areas, we, as farmers, are simply going to have to get on with the job of using these kinds of digital solutions, because it's our only way to get this job done.
Speaker 1:That was an awesome answer. That's a big question, but I don't know anyone better equipped to answer it than you. What are the key global priorities in ag and food that global livestock producers need to be aware of?
Speaker 2:Well, the first one is definitely climate, greenhouse gas emissions and getting to a path to net zero in any aspect of livestock, first and foremost, but agriculture more broadly is absolutely business critical. It is the existential threat to what we do. Whether you're in Australia or whether you're in New Zealand, or whether you're in Canada or in Europe, we see public policy decisions affecting that greatly. We've said for years it was coming and there is no way, no rock to hide under. That doesn't say this is a policy reality for every farmer and it's a policy that is driven by this bigger question about the health of the planet. I think the next big thing is soil health, as we've discussed quite a bit. Obviously, i come from cropping, you come from livestock, but no matter what it all goes back to, we've got a footprint of land that farmers uniquely have right Other than governments. We're the biggest managers of land there are in the world, so we've got to use that resource in a careful way. How we think about land management is integrally tied to the next set of priorities that farmers need to have. I think it's one that comes naturally because we've always thought about our land as a vital asset class and business unit for us, just as that will be true for you in livestock as well but the understanding how we see that impact on water, on the biodiversity around us and the soil around it, and understanding greenhouse emissions from it. We're going to see that package in a way that's not alien to us as farmers. We've thought about those things before, but we're going to just look at them with a slightly different lens and we need to be able to articulate that in a different way.
Speaker 2:Then I think another thing that's emerging just to give you one last one is there's a big negotiation going on related to plastics use in the globe. We often hear about it from the fisheries perspective, from the marine plastics perspective, with all these plastics floating around the ocean, islands of it. Supposedly, we see the plastic use impact all over the world. You don't have to be only in a city to see a random grocery bag floating around in the wind. In agriculture, plastics have become part of our mix.
Speaker 2:Think about feed wrapped in plastics. Think about hay bales being wrapped in plastics, or even just twine around a hay bale. Think about plastics for lagoon covers, plastics to sell milk jugs. There are so many ways in which plastics are in every part of our ecosystem, every part of our food system, every part of our production. Right now, we are going to be under incredible new scrutiny related to this. I think every farmer needs to be thinking about how they're managing the plastic stream, what they really need it for, what's a long-term use, what's a short-term use? The plant protection guys were way ahead. They've been recollecting those pesticide containers for years and making fence posts out of them and all sorts of creative things with reuse, just to keep that protection of that product fully under tight control. I think that's going to be the next big frontier for farmers.
Speaker 1:Excellent, thank you. For those who want to understand more about what I'm urging Ag up to or to interact with the team, give a rather blog that people can find, and they can find your website, which we'll put all that in the show notes. How else do you suggest people follow what I'm urging Ag up to?
Speaker 2:Well, I have robin underscore A, So that's a spot to catch up. We also have a group that we provide support for called the International AgriFood Network, which coordinates some of the private sector input into the UN Committee on Food Security and some other key UN processes. That's at agrifoodnet. There's nothing we love more than a farmer who's willing to come and speak up, Whether you're a farmer, a fisher, a kiwi, an Aussie or a canuck. We welcome the whole world of farmers to come and be a part of the conversation. So we'll give you a platform to just speak your piece if you're able to come and join us at any point.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Thank you very much for your time. It's been a real pleasure to have that chat and understand a bit more about what you do, but also hear how succinctly you can talk through those issues and opportunities. And yeah, it's been an absolute joy from my end And thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 2:Safe travels, Mark. Thank you so much for reaching out.
Speaker 1:Thanks, robin. Thanks again to our mates at Heinegger, who are proud world leaders in the manufacturing and supply professional sheep shearing and clipping equipment. They understand that their customers rely on the quality and performance of their products each and every day. Also, thanks to our friends at MSD Animal Health and Orphlix, the AlfaNc extensive livestock portfolio focused on animal health and management, all backed up by exceptional service. Both of these companies are wonderful supporters of the Australian and New Zealand livestock industries and we thank them for sponsoring the HIPAA podcast.
