152 Excerpt. It’s Re-Connection: Zach Bush, Ella Noah Bancroft & Tanya Massy, live in Byron Bay

In all seriousness . W ith that quintessential stat of the native foods industry bush foods industry being 1% indigenous owned . I wonder what it means to be in an emerging new story that Tans was fleshing out from her point of view and Zach , obviously , with the big picture from there ?

An d perhaps you're witnessing some of it , or you've got a sense of what needs to happen where land access comes in and where land holders can play a part , or just us as public constituents of Crown land ? What is it that you're seeing or would like to see and get help with ?

They gave us a chemical license and taught us as Aboriginal people because at that stage it was only open for Aboriginal people that we were to monocot bush foods . And so this is again the assimilation process of our knowledge systems , trying to fit a system that is ultimately ill health and broken . And so I quickly left that Tafes course .

I don't think my teacher liked me anyway because I refused to sit in the chair and I studied permaculture instead . But you know , it's very confronting for Indigenous Australians because the reality is that we have been kept out for a really long period of time . You know , I grew up with a grandfather who was denied education .

Our stories as Indigenous people are very common . Our grandparents lost their songs , just like your ancestors did . But it's closer to us .

We sit around the dining room table with these people who got beaten , bashed and some of them who can't sit around the dining table anymore because they were killed at trying to keep their culture alive for us , not just us as their descendants , but all of Australia .

And so when we don't invite Indigenous Australia on this walk with us , we are never going to heal as a population . We are only 3% of the population . That's not a lot , you know , not in comparison to 97 . And the fruits that you all have is because of the hard work , is because of the beautiful culture that existed pre-1788 .

And that needs to be recognized . And it's not about making you feel guilty or bringing in shame . It's about recognizing that something was done wrong to you and that maybe you are perpetuating that trauma out to other people in our lives .

So how do we heal that and come together with a common story that unites us , that this system is actually not working for anybody . It's actually broken and it's actually keeping us all really unhealthy . So how do we say no to money and yes to community ? And how do we bring everybody on that journey ?

Because I don't want to be somebody that gets land back unless every single Bungalow person can get that land back . And we're not looking for your houses . We're not looking at water goes . You know , where does looking ? Jambi would like water goes , but I'm a bit smarter than him .

I got the foresight to know that probably not going to be there for a long time . Right Water goes , so we are just looking to find a common story of give us crown land back , you know , give indigenous people an opportunity to have the opportunity that you have all been given on this country , and that's really all we're asking for .

You know , we have to look at these eternal value systems if we really want to make change , and it starts with our children . You know , I'm lucky enough that my mom applauded me even when I was drawing on her walls .

I'm lucky that my mom applauded me when I was getting Cs or when that I was put into a class because I had dyslexia and they told me that I had to be with people with disabilities when I was in year eight , because I grew up on an Indigenous mission where I didn't learn numeracy and literacy , but I learned how to speak Bungalow and I learned how to find

my native class and I fished with my community .

You know , so we have a backward Western education system that tells us that we need experts to tell us what's going on rather than to look within ourselves and our own embodied experiences , sit with each other and share stories of our own embodied experiences and then feel your somatic body , know the difference between a lie and truth .

What can we do to adopt regenerative minds and to develop that in ourselves regenerative mind and to reconnect and , in practical terms too , some of which we've heard about tonight already .

So you'll hear this continue to be woven in as we get to the end of the evening , zach , on this note of how do we go about this , it's really interesting when we talk about reconnection and we talk about community and land and food that comes from somewhere that you're doing work .

You're finding an audience or a connection with big companies too now and finding it to be positive and potentially transformative .

The macro scale , everything , monoculture to monopolies that whole system is now completely failing at its core , which is always an exciting moment when you see transformation , because energy is infinite .

All this energy that's been created in the current paradigm is prepared to transmute and become the new thing , and so , like all the carbon in the atmosphere , all the viruses ready to manifest this new life , all of the economics and all of just the hard work of the engineers and the construction laborers and the transportation guys laying out the pavement , I mean

so much human ingenuity and human production goes into building this system . That's now utterly failing us and it's ready to be captured and transmuted into the new effort .

And so it's a very exciting time when companies like Nestle who is arguably probably the most damaging empire on the earth , right now largest food company , has driven more indigenous peoples off their lands than any nation state ever has really these corporations command so much economy that it just dwarfs the economy to most countries , and so these are starting to

fail and the new CEOs that are coming into these companies are not only are they of a different ethos , of recognizing the failure of the business itself , so they're being called in to imagine the next thing , because Nestle can see that by 2030 , they lose their market potential and they're failing as a company , and this has actually happened to all the major

companies . If you go back to the Fortune 100 companies when that list first got formed in the 1960s , there's only one of those companies left today , and it's at the very bottom of the Fortune 100 . Today there's 99 companies better than that one or bigger than that one , and so the point that we've proved through the whole Fortune accumulation is that it fails .

Monopolies fail , and so we don't really have to fight or take down the Bayers of the world or the Monsanto of the world or the Nestle's of the world . We can recognize that either they transform or disappear , and so , again , we can lose our judgment and start to make room for communities .

The shift from the wealth of monetary systems , the wealth of connection , is really starting to be felt , and here's Mark Schneider of Nestle , just a few months ago now , announcing to the world that 97% of the food portfolio coming out of Nestle is bad for human health and that CEO kept his job , which means that his board must agree with him . And so they .

About six months previous that , mark Schneider actually unbeknownst to a lot of his executives and everything else announced that they would have 14 million pounds of regenerative supply chain in Nestle by 2030 . Right now they have zero . And he called up a couple of weeks later to farmers footprint and talked to him for an hour and a half .

His first question is what is regenerative agriculture ? Just guarantee the world that they would have 14 million tons of this a month Didn't know what the hell he was talking about , Was aware of that and didn't care that . He didn't know because he didn't think that was his problem to define it or to make it .

He saw himself as a potential force of change by giving an avenue for those farmers to have a future market . So this is how , how exciting it is . That's kind of a macro system of the worst of the worst . How much faster can we pivot as a Byron Bay here In this audience ? Right now , you have city council members .

You have mayoral office members In this room . Right now you guys could pivot on a freaking dime and literally by next week , you all in your offices could be talking about .

Let's make Byron Bay the keystone of change in Australia by becoming the first county to make sure that all of their school systems are connected to a farmer and the children know that farmer and that farmer is empowered to understand that their food and market garden is going to feed those children .

That would be a first in the world , and that's easy because you have some farmers in the room that raised their hands at the beginning , and so we should do that again at the end . Let's remember to raise the hands of the farmers and you all who are in these decision-making spaces .

What if your kids and we don't care if it's a regenerative farmer what if they just knew a farmer that was growing the carrot that ended up on their school plate ? They might eat that carrot and so that's a super simple transformation moment .

And what if Byron Bay was the very first water side community to ban all organophosphates from the Department of Transportation in here ? Ban organophosphates from school yards . Ban organophosphates from the correction facilities . Those three prisons , schools and your highway systems use more glyphosate per inch than any farm in the world does .

Stakeholders are all over the place and it just takes a moment to just say well , what would happen if there was some weeds which any farmer in Regen knows are renamed Forbes because they're doing good things for the formation of soil ?

What if we allowed the borders of our highways to start to build soil by stop spraying glyphosate so we have clean shoulders on our highways ? This is it .

But then that's unleashing a whole other level of reconnection , and including with First Nations . Give us a hint . I mean , it's another big story , only big Tarns that is happening back at Seven Park right at the moment .

That other half of the farm , 900 acres of it , is under biodiversity covenant for grasslands and the owners that came in didn't always treat it the way that it needed to be treated and so I guess for 10 years our family's pulled back and has been focusing on the area of land that we still have stewardship over .

And at the start of this year , when I made the decision to move back to the family farm for good , we heard that that piece of land is going to be going on the market and we also heard that a lot of the farmers that were looking at it were part of the sort of conventional system and would wreak havoc on the sort of the really precious grasslands that

had been protected for some time . So I pulled together as sort of an investment proposal with my family with the idea of creating a new model for farmland investment in Australia that isn't about corporate ownership and isn't really about ownership at all , because you can't own this land with an item looking at .

Well , how do we , with land prices that are now above the cost of production and pricing the land out of the reach of any farmers unless you inherit it , unless you come from a lot of money , how do we solve this problem ?

Because we need more diversity in our farming population , we need more than white males managing our landscapes and we need our first peoples back on country and we need our migrants coming in with incredible knowledge from their countries on country .

So we sort of sent this proposal out to a couple of people that I'd been working with for some time , that I really trusted for feedback , and they got straight back to us and said we think we could do something here .

We think we could work with you to create a model that enables the stewards that we need to have stewardship of country , that brings in First Nations connection to country and that sort of removes this corporate extractive model of farmland that is owned and farmland that is returning value to people far away but not to the community where that land is .

So we– that's that set in motion right now and looks like we are going to be regaining stewardship of that piece of land in partnership with our community and in partnership with bringing back first people's access to that land as well .

Okay , in the few minutes we've got left here together , I'd like to bring in something , zach , that you said at a conference that you attended online with us a few months ago , when we were in Brisbane , and you started with a meditation , much like you brought to the table here tonight , but with a room full of largely farmers and station holders .

This was held in Queensland and unlikely place perhaps to hold hands and conduct a meditation , but it worked . It worked . So what's happening there ?

You said , as we move into our stewardship phase of the regenerative movement , it's critical that we all begin to coalesce in a state of being rather than doing , in the name of our querying about how we shift our internal story , heal deeply and adopt , let's just say , regenerative mindset whatever language we like reconnected mind .

What are the practices that you personally employ to try and do that ?

One of the most powerful things for me , and I think anybody with a neurologic system , is to lay on your back and look up through the branching system and leaves of a tree to see a blue sky behind it with clouds moving by .

There's so much data in that quantum physics patterns of the way that trees branch that you're tying into this original math of the original light that would have hit the belly of a woman laying under that tree , imagining the child that would come forth from her body .

Like this is like deep , deep reconnect is looking up through a tree so that , combined with the roots below your back and the experience of being between the two canopies of the root system and the tree , put yourself into these places where your original math is being remembered to you , even if you're too distraught and too emotionally caught up in the human

experience right now to maybe do the out of body journey and do everything we did tonight . The tree can hold that space perfectly for you and you're welcome yourself back into that womb of the tree , between root and canopy , to receive that original information back and to start to decode the belief systems and start to express the real truths within you .

So there's many ways to do that , but nature is a calling there .

But the other piece of this would be what Mari showed us tonight , which is the power of vibration that we would create through music , and so this is the best way for me to communicate with my family now , because families , as we understand , develop many different perspectives , and the older you get , the more these paths tend to diverge .

Our time , and nobody's right or wrong , but those differences do you . So family unions and all this can be very intense . And when you're named the Bush family , there's plenty of stuff that can go around the table there to really upset people and everything else .

And so my parents did a brilliant thing I give a lot of credit my dad here of inspiring every single one of his four children to learn instruments , and to learn multiple instruments really .

And so when things get to tense around the table , we know to break the meals process and go , step into the living room and get all the instruments out and start playing music together .

And so I would invite you to sit beneath the tree , beneath the canopy , and rebirth yourself into that and then play music with somebody near you , and for that we will create , you know , a much more beingness that would express more beauty than we might be doing at the moment .

forward with many of her planetary boundaries transgressed and the sort of the kickback I mean again Paul Hawkins talks about it as though we're getting homeschooled by planet Earth . You know she's responding to what's been done to her and it means that we're facing these huge extremes .

And I know that in this region you face some pretty brutal times in the last couple of years too , and it was just so obvious to me that sitting in that from a place of fear is not what's going to get us out of here .

Because of fears , what got us into this fear is driven colonialism and patriarchy and genocide and white supremacy and all the systems that have wounded all of us .

And so , similar to what Zach said for me to sort of feeling this fear , feeling kind of the systems around me that have always supported my life and supported my family , feeling like they're turning on me , felt like what I was being called to and what our family is being called to is to a bigger love of place and country and life that is not conditional ,

that isn't just for when the times are good and when it's treating us well , but goes sort of right deep to whatever happens . Here we are committed to you and we are here .

And so I guess ever since then , my daily practice has been to just sort of sit in that space of love , however briefly in the morning , so that I can send it out into the world and receive it back and operate from love , not from fear .

That's continued to separate us , and if we know anything about this system , that's what it's always trying to do separate us from ourselves , from community and from the natural world , and so like . When I return back to nature with a group of people , we have a fire and we can all just sit around it and yank .

Some people will be weaving , some people will be swimming in the creek . You know , this is a portal into the place of magic of our existence and in that space I can rest fully in that . Sometimes I find it weird to be in nature by myself , especially if . I find like only one other human there .

I'm scared of that human , so I feel like it's a bit hard for my nervous system to rest into that unless I'm in this more collective space . The other thing that I would invite all of you to do is to regularly meet with one another .

I see like beautiful women sitting here who are from a women's group who have supported me and my journey in this community , and I have supported them and our profound bond from sitting together fortnightly .

Thanks to Helena for bringing us together and sharing ourselves vulnerably with one another , which is something that this society doesn't really allow us to do quite often . We'll intrinsically build the framework of this community , and you are also incredibly blessed to be here , because this community is one of the best . We exist on the first light .

You know the east coast of Australia is first light . What we do here impacts not only the nation but the entire world . There is a reason why people come here to heal , and they have for 60,000 years .

So this is the work that we are to do Look around at these beautiful people and build your connections with them so strong that you don't need money in your back pocket , because you will know that you will always be fed by the person sitting next to you .

Gold sponsors , bardi , who are in the room , who are transforming food waste into protein and fertiliser with insects . A nd I so wish I could play Chariots of Fire right now . But please , one enormous final thank you to our special guests , Tanya Massy , Ella Noah Bancroft and , of course , from across the seas , Zach Bush MD .

That was Zach Bush , Ella Noah Bancroft and Tanya Massy . A nd Blair Beattie's kind voice of thanks at the end . For more on Farmers' Footprint Australia and to see the full film of this event , including the short film I mentioned , see the links in the show notes .

Podcast subscribers , you can get 25% off the purchase of the film with thanks to the Farmers' Footprint team . And if you'd like to hear more from Zach , including his fascinating backstory and that reference to Chariots of Fire , listen to episode 62 .

And a reminder that if you're in or near Brisbane in late March , join me for a live podcast conversation at the World Science Festival . You'll find me at 10am on March 26th talking regenerating country with brilliant First Nations guests Jacob Birch and Zena Cumpston . The link for that is also in the show notes .

Thanks , as always , to the generous supporters who've helped make this episode possible . If you , too , value what you hear , please consider joining this great community of supporting listeners so we can keep the podcast going . Just head to the website via the show notes regennarration . com forward slash support and thanks again .

As always, if you think of someone who might enjoy this episode , please go ahead and share it with them . The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden off the soundtrack to the film Regenerating Australia . My name's Anthony James . Thanks for listening .