I think change is is something that
keeps this sort of creative and alive
and excited and I'm like a changed junkie.
Give me something new and creative all
the time and that's how I feel about change.
For humanity it's the same as my
feeling about change in that change is
good for us it challenges us and it
makes us think harder about things than
if everything's always just the same and
that can help us as society get better
at what we do because we were challenged.
I took a group of organic farming students
to a friend of mine up at Glen
Innes and he had a property up there but
he was my AG teacher at high school.
 The first thing he said to me when we
started he said you know all that stuff
that I taught you at school and I said
yeah he said don't do that anymore so..
A lot of the stuff I learnt at university
was not what I teach at all these days I
some of it was almost the antithesis of
what I teach now.
Education is about the development of a rounded approach to
understanding life it's about the making
of meaning in each person's life it's
about an individual journey it's about
an end point where a person can go out into
the world and improve that world.
So it has many facets to it but largely it's
really about a journey that individual
goes on because they have a purpose and
that purpose relates to a greater whole.
We need a reward curiosity that's what
schools ought to do because inevitably
and traditionally the study of science
has had rewards for the human world.
We're always doing the best we can with
the information we have and sometimes we
find out later there was more
information that could made us do things
differently and that doesn't mean we
were wrong it just means we had more to
learn. Our education system is letting us
down. So in most of the major
universities we are still being taught
old-school agronomy you know where it's
not whether to add chemical it's how
much at what time of year.
The hope for me has come out of some of
the much smaller and younger
universities I think is they have a
nimbleness to them where they're
prepared to make change and be
responsive to society.
they're not the establishment saying
we already have all the answers.
In terms of degrees in agriculture in Australia most are
agricultural science degrees and they're
reductionist in style
it's about subjects and about
examinations there isn't one on
regenerative agriculture in this country
the course at Southern Cross University
in regenerative agriculture will give
students an understanding of the
nature of what they're working with the
ecosystem that is there how to work with
that ecosystem how to know what happens
when you do what you do on the farm and
how that might impact on an ecosystem. So that's what we want our graduates to
come out with is a knowledge of ecology,
a knowledge of themselves and a
knowledge of how to work in a community.
Southern Cross University has taken the lead in this space.
They are very well equipped,
they've got a leading Soil lab in the world,
a leading plant lab, they've
got farming together so they've got the
networks of farmers all over the country
they've got capacity and they've got the
will and they're brave enough to go out
and actually address things in a
holistic manner and so they are now
right at the cutting edge of this
regenerative agriculture movement and
leading the way in all things ecology.
