Well, hello and welcome to this 100 Climate Conversations. Thanks for joining us. I’d like to first acknowledge the country on which we’re speaking today, acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral lands on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and we pay our respects to their Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is number 73 of 100 conversations happening every Friday. This series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. And we are recording today live in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Before it was home to the museum it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. My name is Gabrielle Chan I’m rural editor of Guardian Australia. Now to Rowan. Rowan Reid runs the Bambra Agroforestry Farm and is managing director of the non-profit Australian Agroforestry Foundation, through which more than 2000 Australian landholders have completed his award-winning Australian Master TreeGrower course. He runs a family farm in the Otway Ranges of southern Victoria, where he helped establish one of Australia’s most successful Landcare groups. He has written or co-authored nine books including Heartwood: The Art and Science of Growing Trees for Conservation and Profit. So, we’re so thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in welcoming Rowan. Now Rowan, you come from a family of farmers?

I come from a family of farmers, but I wasn’t brought up on a farm. My father was actually a church minister. My mother, from the time she was three years old, her father died. He was passionate about farming. And during that, from when she was three, she effectively was the half owner of a farm. And so, my growing up was hearing stories about the farming life. This was a big property up near Walgett, sheep growing country. And learning about that history which went over 100 years of farming in the family. Droughts, flooding, rains, all the issues, the Korean War boom compared to the bad times. But I wasn’t involved in that farm. When I was studying forestry, my brother became a dairy farmer and that was when I really understood my passion and interest in working in farming communities.

So, you became a surfie?

Well, that’s all related because we lived in a church house in outer suburban Melbourne — way out back then, Springvale — and my mum was always looking after her– looking for her escape route, her security. So, she actually purchased a place on the coast down at Great Ocean Road. She loved nature. She loved rural areas from her family history — she used to holiday down on the west coast as a child herself — but she went to an area where there was no towns, it was just 15 or 20 houses. It was right on the beach overlooking the surf. And coincidentally, it overlooked one of the reasonably good beach breaks along the Great Ocean Road. So, from age eight or nine, I was surfing and that was my passion as a child. Surfing in a landscape that was surrounded by forest where there was no towns, no other distractions other than just with kids running wild in the coast.

So, that experience of the ocean and presumably the landscape around it, how did you learn to be in and interested in trees, in and around trees?

It wasn’t because I was particularly interested in biology or ecology or science, and it was– the surf and the forests worked very well together because when there’s no surf in summer, it’s a safe time to be in the forest because the southerly winds and onshore winds, so it’s not a dangerous area. So, we spent a lot of time in the bush — Mum would purposely get us lost in the forest as part of her sort of ‘exercise to try and challenge us’. Sometimes she was lost herself and I was very comfortable in the forest. And I felt like I didn’t need to know it in terms of the ecology or biology, to value it, to understand it and to appreciate it. And it seemed to work very good with the ocean because being involved in one forest — and I still walk through that forest every summer because I still go down there with my own children, now grandchildren — I spend time in that forest, and you see it changing. So, I’m really interested in trying to convey to people that a forest is as fluid as the ocean. It changes like the ocean. There is no– it’s not a calendar shot. It’s not something we can preserve in state. It’s a dynamic system and it changes slower than the ocean with changing winds, but it responds to those same influences, whether it’s fire or drought. And we’ve had big fires through that area, including Ash Wednesday. So, watching things change and thinking this is always different, not just seasonally, but over time and if something’s changing so much, what is it that we’re protecting? What is it that we’re managing. And I think I came to that relatively early.

That was amazing in your book, where you talk about the binary because as someone who follows politics, binary is such a classic trope in any public debate. And you write, forests — this is the kind of attitude — forests are for either conservation or production to be saved or plundered. Just talk about the idea of a third way of coming through the middle of that binary and how you came to that idea.

A lot of people reject something they don’t like, and they look for an alternative. So, it’s the sort of Robert Frost story: two paths divided in the woods, and I took the one least travelled, as if there is a path there, it’s just not very common I’m going to choose that. And I keep thinking, well, if that was– if you’re not comfortable with the way the forest is managed, now you’re going to choose another path. But that doesn’t allow us to explore and innovate and find that there might be something, a new path through the undergrowth that people haven’t tried yet. So, I was thinking, ‘Well, conservation or production, it’s actually not quite new’. And people often talk about, you know, Western thinking and modern thinking as being something, you use a forest for these particular reasons or you lock it up for particular reasons. But right through history, in both European and Australian culture, forests have been managed. There’ve been involved people in them all the time. And over time they begin to reflect, the ecology begins to reflect, the fact that people are involved. And then you start saying, ‘Well, are we going to remove people from this and how can we actually get people involved?’ So, when I started forestry, we were taught ecology. It’s not– forestry education people think, oh, it’s just like you learn how to grow a crop of timber or something. But we actually started with ecology and the forests in Victoria were being managed for water and recreation, biodiversity (as it was understood then) and timber production. But there wasn’t a line on the map that said this is for timber production, that’s for conservation. But since that line’s been drawn, we’ve had the forestry wars and it has prevented us having a discussion about whether there is another way of doing both together in some complementary system.

So, talk about agroforestry. What is it exactly and how is it different from either forestry or agriculture?

As an academic for 25 years, academics spend a lot of time defining things, and I fought against that and said, it’s really just tree growing on farms. Let’s not get hung up about what [the] tree looks like or which combination it is with the crops, because as soon as people start trying to define a system, you’re preventing innovation and you’re constraining what it might look like. And I’ve always gone back to the farming community and said agroforestry is what the farming community want and develop trees growing to look like. And it’s going to look very different, of course. Soon as you say that it’s going to look different in Indonesia, Vanuatu, Africa or western New South Wales compared to high rainfall areas. As soon as you pre-judge what it looks like, you’ve missed the opportunity to let it express itself. So, I’ve never liked any definition of agroforestry other than, it’s what farmers want to do with trees and how they do it, because that’s the only one that’s going to drive change towards a new future that’s not constrained by what we’ve done in the past.

And does it necessarily involve harvesting?

No, no. But that’s the good thing about it, is it raises that prospect. Now, it doesn’t have to be harvesting for timber, could be as simple as your firewood, which I guess is a timber as well. But in our little agroforestry network down in the Otways, where we grow shiitake mushrooms on some farms, on logs that we harvest from the trees; the banksia flowers that do really well, particularly during COVID — and so, we’ve got both nurseries and producers doing very well out of that; native food production from some of our local native species, but also others that have come in; the seed — we sell seed from our trees, both exotic and native and seed from trees is becoming increasingly valuable because people want to not just grow what used to grow there, they’re interested in growing something that may be genetically improved or selected or comes from another region that they want to grow for a range of products. So, you can get those range of commercial products. But the good thing about agroforestry, it just tips that– maybe it’s the notion of agriculture that they can be a productive element to it and that it may not be the driver, and rarely is if it’s timber because it takes so long to grow, but you want to keep that opportunity alive. So, it’s challenging that notion that on a farm you’ll plant just a shelterbelt for shelter, just an erosion plant here, just plant natives for conservation and you’ll have your plantation over there. We try to put it all together.

Does every farm, or should every farm, have plantations of trees?

No. I guess I would never say that, because that’s a judgement about that farm at that stage. And landholders, their families, and they’re all at different stages and for some they have a long future. They see passing the farm on to future generations, which we often see. They add, ‘We want to pass it on in a better state’. Well, when a landholder says that to me, it’s very easy to start saying, ‘Do you think trees are going to be part of that?’ And it’s very easy for people to be comfortable with the fact that trees take a long time to grow because you’re talking about your grandchildren. So, it’s a very easy step to get onto. But if someone says, ‘I’m just going to turn this farm over in five years, sell it back — the market in our region is for people who just want a productive dairy farm’. We can still start exploring well, can trees enhance the capital value of that property in any way during a short period of time? Quite possibly by re-fencing it can. I’d turn that question around and say I haven’t seen a farm yet, or anywhere in the world, that couldn’t do better to meet those landholder objectives with some more trees or better-managed trees. And that second point is important as well. People have a lot of trees on their property, but they’re not the trees they want in the right place, or they haven’t been managed effectively to provide the values that they’re looking for.

Okay, so tell me about Bambra and the agroforestry farm that you’re running. Where is it?

It’s a very small place. It’s only 42 hectares. It’s the next dairy farm down in the Otway Ranges, not far from where I grew up surfing, not far from where my brother had a dairy farm at the time — so, we used to share a tractor when I started, but it still was a day to get the tractor down. The story, as I recall it, is I met– Clare and I were travelling in Europe, and we travelled to Africa and my mum was actually in Nairobi visiting her cousin, who was living and working in Africa. And that was where she told me the old family farm had been sold. And she said to me one night when we were there, if I could give her a good reason why I should carry on her father’s passion for farmland — and my brother already had, so there had been that connection — she would sort of give me a boost up. Now, it’s really difficult to talk to 25-year-olds today and say, who’s got that opportunity to buy a property when they’re 25? But it wasn’t a– it wasn’t a gift that didn’t come without any strings. You can imagine my mother saying, you’re going to do something with this, with this gift. And my goal then was, yes, I said to her, ‘I want to make forestry attractive’. I’ve chosen this profession. I spent six or seven years studying it and travelling around the world looking at it. I’m not comfortable with the direction it’s going, but I can’t describe or articulate what it looked like. So, I need some place to express it and to give me the learning for myself, but also the way to articulate and communicate that, because just writing papers at a university wasn’t going to have the influence on the farming community. So, she backed me and I found a property that was a degraded– it had an eroded creek running right through the middle. I chose it on the basis that it didn’t have good rainfall, it didn’t have good soils, so people couldn’t say, ‘Oh, it’s easy for you to grow trees, look at the rain, you got a thousand mls of rain’. So, I get 650 to 700mls of rain. The clay soils, well, if I’d really known about it, I wouldn’t have bought the property — they’re shocking soils, very difficult to stop eroding — but the landscape needed trees. And I wanted a place like that because the first starting point was, I didn’t want people to say, you’re planting trees on good agricultural land. You’re planting trees because you need trees. But they’re the trees I wanted to make commercial. Not the competition for land that I’d seen the plantation companies purchasing farmland, and the community’s reaction to that. Not the conservation idea of just buying a patch of native forest or planting Indigenous plants and locking it up and putting it in a covenant. There’s got to be a better way, a way of doing all those things that involves people.

And so what does it look like now?

Well, what it looks like for me, you know, I walk the dogs every morning and they love it because of the wildlife they chase up and down the hill. The birdlife has come back. The wildlife has come back. I’m really pleased the dogs don’t see the sugar gliders, but I certainly see their impacts. The rakali, the water rat in the creek. Things that, you know you couldn’t have had had the landscape not being managed in some way, not been planted. You wouldn’t get your sugar gliders without trees, for example. So, I know I’ve had an impact on the biodiversity but the most important thing for me, and I hope the rest of the family looking at it, is that we’ve built a legacy. We’ve taken a property that was just your conventional 100 acres without anything on it, and we’ve actually created something which is different and also encapsulates time. And I think that’s what people don’t understand about trees — and I’ve got to tear when I think about it. When you plant a tree and grow it and you gift that property to new generations or next owners, you are gifting time trapped in those trees. For example, I often– when I’ve got a group coming, I talk about this when we look at the black walnuts, and they’re an exotic species, very valuable timber. They take 60-80 years to grow. So, when I planted that seed, I knew at the time that they wouldn’t be mature in my lifetime. Well, maybe they will if I live long enough, but you cannot go and buy a 30-year-old black walnut tree and put it on your farm. So, the only way to get it is to spend that time. And my great friend Andrew Stewart talks about time beautifully as a farmer saying, we have this time to actually manage our farm, but at the end it’s the next people’s time. And if we can give them a half-grown tree or half-grown forest or better landscape because of the tree planting, they’re off and running. And I’m really– we’re starting to see it in our area now what that next generation does because we started with no trees in our landscape. Now, they’re starting with much more and that’s going to be really exciting. I hope I get to see all that play out — what people do with these trees and forests.

What sort of trees are they, that you grow? How do you choose what you grow?

Well, this has changed dramatically. The first 10 years, probably as a young forester, I wanted to see trees grow quickly. It’s fantastic when you get it all right. You’ve got eucalypts which are 10 metres tall in two or three years. And we’re all fascinated when, as all of those in research, how much we could actually get trees up and running very quickly, by doing effective weed control. Not fertilising generally because you’re dealing with farmland, but we could actually get trees to grow very quickly. So, that starts dominating your thinking. So, you choose fast-growing trees. And what I’m leading to is, then we hit the millennium drought, and those trees are the ones that suffered the most. So, what I started with is not what I’m doing now, and that reflects the changes of climate change. I looked at some of the bureau data in our little region — it certainly has been a 1.4-degree temperature increase, just in the period we’ve been on the farm — say from the early 80s or mid-80s — and just raises the question, would you plant something that had grown there naturally, if the temperatures have already increased that much? Because we’ve seen our native blackwood and manna gum dying in the forest and some of the local species are tougher, they’re more resilient — and I know the messmate will carry through and it’ll affect its wood characteristics, but they’re not all bad — but when we look forward, I don’t like– I would never say we only plant Indigenous, or I only plant Peruvian exotics. I’m planting everything. So, we’ve got about 70 different species: Indigenous, native and international, which I judge, particularly the introduced ones. They’re not a weed in terms of potential. They have the prospects to produce a product or a quality or an aesthetics or, like the oaks, protect the house from fire. They have some qualities that the other species haven’t got. They may or may not be more resilient, or I just want to learn how to grow Australian red cedar. And now I’m thinking Australian red cedar from Queensland and New South Wales, it grows really well in southern Victoria and we don’t have tip moth. And if you come to our place now, most of what I plant is actually not Victorian, it’s a New South Wales or Queensland native species because I’m looking for things that can survive long periods of high temperature without rain, and they’ve all got mechanisms in New South Wales and Queensland to survive if the rains don’t come. But Tasmania and southern Victoria, it’s always been cool enough that you’ve always wetted up in winter and there the species like shining gum and blackwood that are really struggling with the increased temperatures and droughts. So, we do everything. I’m not suggesting all farmers do everything, I just love learning. And some– like you drive around our community and the farmers make decisions based on their confidence and they’ll– some of the species I’ve grown, they pick up and go with them. Others say, no, it’s not for me, but I like to learn, so I grow everything.

So, you have a lot of farmers through your place. I think there’s over 10,000 people now who have toured the farm, who comes? Are they all farmers, and what are they looking for?

Well, some of them get forced to come because they’re my university students. But no, the majority now are landholders, and they don’t come to just my property. We try to make a point of having at least two properties open, and when we have larger events — so they might come to our property for a couple of hours and then go to the Stewart farm over the hill, because I don’t want them to think there’s an answer, that this is the solution. I want them to be inspired to explore what might be the appropriate solution for them, and that’s hard to convey when you’ve got a really nice tree and they’re all looking at it and saying, ‘What spacing did you put it at? What did you do?’ Because they want to copy what we’ve done and I said, ‘Please don’t copy’ because there’s going to be more nuances and design issues to come through. But today, just think about that forestry can be a lot of things you’d never thought it would be, because most people think forestry is either a monoculture pine plantation or now a blue gum woodchip plantation or a patch of native forest. And I guess I’ve travelled enough or read enough and seen enough around the place to say, we’ve got to tell farmers it’s much more to it. We’ve got to tell the wider community there’s much more to it because until they break out of that they’re not going to see how adaptable forestry is. And I use the term forestry because that just implies management. It doesn’t need to be for timber, but implies the active engagement like gardening, forestry. It’s a doing word.

Is beauty a factor–

So important.

–for you?

Yes. Well in a number of ways, I get in a lot of a lot of trouble with my peers because I often when I’m talking to forestry people, I point out to them that forestry is ugly. I do that to say this is how other people view our plantations or our clear field operations. Now, you might have scientific or economic rational arguments why you need uniformity — it’s large scale and all the characteristics — but someone looking at that says they don’t like it, they feel it’s not welcoming, it’s certainly not something they want to put on their own property. And I say, well, that’s not– it’s not a judgement about whether you should or shouldn’t do this practise. If you want to make forestry attractive to other people, we’ve got to see how adaptable and changeable forestry is. And I got that right when we started planting because we haven’t got any traditional forestry on our place, whether it’s traditional native forest, because I’m still managing some of the regrowth in there, no traditional plantations or straight rows. I mixed species up. I try to do it in a way that shocks people and just say– well, someone said to me, she walked around the farm, she said, ‘I didn’t realise you could grow timber if the trees weren’t in straight lines’. And I thought, well, just sort of, yes, of course. But they never thought of the fact that you’ve got all this time, if the trees are well managed, they don’t have to be in straight lines because I don’t need a million dollar harvesting equipment to come in there because the trees are worth so much that I can manually fell them and that would still be a viable operation. So, we are with forestry starting from a very low base and a very negative base if we can make it attractive. And as I point out, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney and Melbourne and other cities, they’re just the application of science of tree growing. That’s what I’m doing. But they are created to look beautiful. And to me, beauty is really important. And it’s not just visual. It’s the pride and how it feels to be the owner of a property that’s got a tree growing history. And we convey that. An American professor I worked with — I actually brought him out to Australia, Professor Jim Finley — he knew nothing about the Australian landscape, but I brought him to talk to farmers because he had this great way of talking about the fact that you have an opportunity to write a history on the landscape with trees, and a history that you’re proud of to pass on to future generations, and it resonated. So, it has to be attractive, but not just visually. It has to be attractive: I like to own this. I’m proud of it, what I’ve achieved on the property. So, I’m always exploring how forestry can do that.

Now, be honest, how hard is it to cut a tree down when you’ve nurtured it all the way up for 30 or 40 years?

There’s two elements to it. While the trees are growing, you plant many more than you anticipate harvesting. And that’s just common sense in a way, because you know there’ll be genetic variability, there’ll be wind damage or droughts and you might mix species up. So, there’s a period, probably once after you’ve got through the establishment phase, this is talking about a new planting, where at about five or six years old, the trees will start to compete. Now, there’s a lot of conversation at the moment about trees cooperating and sharing resources, but they also compete. There are positives and negatives going on in forestry. I love to read those positives and negatives and then understand how I can manipulate that. So, the analogy I use is, I filmed a little boy in East Timor, rolling a bicycle wheel down a hill and tapping it with a stick, and that’s your growing forest — gravity is just taking that wheel down the hill. Growth is just making your forest grow. But then all these things, these ecological processes of competition; shading; moisture competition; sheltering, which is a positive interaction between trees; the fact that some species like our silky oak and eucalypts are very compatible, they can grow on the same site because they have different root system types. So, you have all these positives and negatives going on. When you start seeing that play out and you realise, if I just tap the forest by cutting this tree down, I’ll release that sunlight moisture and make it available for that tree over there. I’ll direct the forest to grow so it is better. Now this is where people start saying, ‘You’re playing God’, but I’m taking it to a place where I hope it meets not only our values, whether they be commercial or aesthetic or shelter for the farm, but also to enhance its biodiversity, because that also has a positive feedback in protecting that forest. So, cutting down a tree that you’ve spent five to 10 years nurturing and saying– I often go, there’s too many eucalyptus in that forest. Our forests and particularly our planted forests and Landcare plantings would benefit a lot if almost half the eucalypts removed because they’re crowding out the other species, they’re a sun-loving species, they bend to search for the light and they’re competing a lot, they’re reducing their vigour. The little tap can suddenly make some of those ecological processes run again. And so, I get people to do that. Let’s just cut down, you know, half the trees in this little patch and you watch how the ones we leave respond. They put on more leaf, they grow healthier, they produce more flowers for bees and wildlife, and they start growing faster in diameter because they’ve got more leaf area. And when they see that response, they say, ‘I can see why it’s healthier now because I’ve tapped it’. So, that’s one step. Then you’ve got a mature tree and you say — and this is the great point we’re at now — I don’t cut down a tree because its time’s ready. You never have to worry. If the tree’s healthy, it can grow on for a few more years. So, you’re effectively waiting ’til you want it. And if you want it, depending on what you want it for, then you’re actually going out. So, while we’re building a house at the moment, I have to go out and say I need another three pine trees or I need two eucalypt trees, or we’re looking for some lining boards, which tree do I want for that? So, I’m already into the next phase. So, cutting it down is just moving on to– the next beautiful phase is where I’m using that timber or I’m selling it to someone who wants to use it, who I’m happy to pass it on to. So, I’ve never had the problem of doing that because I’m always saying, what’s next? What’s the next stage?

So, let’s talk about that because everyone knows planting trees is a good thing to do. It locks up carbon, but it only locks up carbon for a little while. Talk me through why it’s also good for climate change to cut down trees.

It’s really sad that we start saying how can we use forestry or tree planting for climate change positives? And it’s very easy to list those. We know through the process of photosynthesis it takes carbon out of carbon dioxide and turns it into a simple sugar. That sugar gets used for two things. Either it gets used for respiration just to drive growth. Same way we– in which case it goes back out to the environment as carbon dioxide is again — it doesn’t have a long life. It may be stored for a period of time as starch but then gets burned off to help grow new leaves. Or, it is actually locked into the physical structure of the tree in the wood. Now, half the dry weight of wood is actually carbon element. So, it’s very easy to look at a block of wood and calculate how much carbon is locked into that, into the standing tree or into the piece of wood you harvest. So, there’s no question about that. But as soon as you start saying we’ve got to develop a carbon market or we’ve got to start planting trees because they’re good for carbon, getting people to accept that next step, because if you just plant trees, they will grow to a certain height which is determined about how high can water be lifted in that landscape. So, if you go and look at any planting native forest, you’ll see there’s a maximum height for that species in your landscape because that’s just physically what that tree can do on that soil type and that climate to lift water. It might be 20 metres in a dry landscape, 30, or it could be 100 metres in southern Tasmania in the Styx Valley. That’s a physical restraint. So, if a tree can’t grow taller, it can’t lock up more wood in height. How much can it do in density? Now if people love to extrapolate, my trees are growing this much and then they extrapolate, ‘Gee, in 100 years is going to be such and such’. Well, you go through that little exercise, and said you wouldn’t be able to walk through that forest, those trees. So, you can go to an untouched native forest, so 100 years old, it’s never been harvested in any way. There’s a lot of space between those trees. And that’s because the trees that are there have effectively outcompeted all the ones that were there in the past. And they’ve all died out. The carbon store in those forests has reached a maximum. So, if you plant, you will reach this maximum. While it’s standing there as a forest, it’s fragile. It could be lost in a drought, fire or flood or disease, because when that wood decays, it releases methane and carbon dioxide and it’s all back into the environment. So, it’s a net loss. If we can harvest some of that and lock it up in many houses, if one house burns down, well, that’s a tragedy, but it could be locked in many houses. I’d like to say, well, rather than just having a carbon sink sitting on the land, you’ve made a carbon factory — it’s producing carbon every year. You’re just taking a percentage of that off, or percentage out of the landscape and locking it up and then growing more. You can do it forever. But our current carbon modelling and carbon market schemes do not acknowledge that you can do that, and they simply pay on the value of the carbon stored in the landscape, which is finite. So, if you’re using tree growing to offset fossil fuels, you haven’t completed the loop. You haven’t taken the carbon from the forest and put it back in a long-term store because it’s still in there in the landscape, and climate change is going to put those forests under threat.

So, you’ve really made your mark in the area and the career that you’ve had. Can you anticipate any other changes in terms of combating climate change? Is there anything that you would like to see, I guess more broadly?

Again, in the field I work in — the agricultural sector, and we’re talking soil, carbon and carbon neutral farming products and those areas — there’s great opportunity there. But again, I don’t– it cannot be the only horse pulling the cart because there is lots of other good reasons to do these activities on farms, to produce cleaner food, to have organic matter in the system that don’t require that that landholder getting involved in a program that increases risk and liability for the farm. So, for example, if I accept carbon money now — which I can’t because we’re too small and diverse in activities — but if I had 100 hectares of uniform forest that was viable to put into a carbon market and be cost effectively audited, I would effectively be taking on a liability that could go for at least 25, maybe 50 or 100 years that will reduce the value of my property on the day that I sell that carbon. And I can see why many farmers are reluctant to do that. But every tree in every garden and every farm and every street is locking up carbon. So, we haven’t found a way to reward all the active participants in tree growing. We’ve set up a scheme that only rewards some and in doing so, who carries the risk? The actual landholder is ultimately carrying the risk. In some areas they’ve got to take out insurance for the planting and that’s an added cost and you can see why it’s unviable. So, we haven’t got it right because we’re only talking about carbon. But this is a really good reason why we also need to talk about resilience in farming, the quality of the food and the timber and other products we produce. And that, as again Andrew says, when he started planting trees on their farm, when it was only 3% tree cover and now it’s up to 18 on a working sheep property that puts off a thousand or more lambs per year. He said, ‘We weren’t thinking about climate change and cut looking at carbon then’, but it’s a bonus and they are now able to demonstrate carbon neutrality in their food production. Had they sold the carbon, they wouldn’t have had. But they can actually demonstrate that without having that ongoing risk and some uncertainty. So, it’s a nice add-on. It gets people interested. It should be the motivation for government and universities to invest in, for example, shelter on farms or what erosion on farms or high-quality timber on farms, because all those also lock up carbon, but they don’t carry the risk and uncertainty and difficulty that just thinking of carbon as a market does. So, we can have it all, but we’ve got to avoid focusing on just one.

There you are, we can have it all. Thank you very much, Rowan that was really enlightening. Amazing. So, please join me in a round of applause for Rowan Reid. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.