CarbonCurious Transcript - Growing tomorrow’s trees with CarbonCrop’s future forest planning tools - May 2025

In this CarbonCurious session, the CarbonCrop team takes a closer look at how to plan and coordinate future forest planting using our latest platform tools.

We walk through how our planting planning tools bring visibility to future planting, support landholder engagement, and help coordinate forest projects at scale. From catchment groups to carbon project developers, landholders to sustainability managers - anyone involved in planting projects across multiple sites or stakeholders will find something useful here.

Watch the recording or read the full transcript below.

---

Nick Butcher: [00:00:00] thanks for joining everybody. It's going to be a fairly large one today because we've got, we're gonna try something another, the usual is show and tell this. The way around this is gonna be, is gonna be tell, and then show. We're going to take the plunge with a live demo, which we'll get into some detail of later on.

But the, the overall topic for today is, basically an intro into the planting planning tools that we've been working on and how we think that they can help with collaboration across multiple people. We're working within the restoration space, to mean that it all goes better. Usual ground rules apply.

Like this is recorded. We've muted your microphone. Use the q and a function. If you wanna ask a question ask questions and if I don't answer it then we'll try and follow up the notes later on. I will go through that. The, so basically the premise of all of this is that I, I didn't wanna say that we were gonna achieve restoration through coordination because there's already lots of restoration that's happening and people are doing lots of coordination and there's many people that are working really well together in the space.

But we think that you could get more restoration if you had stronger [00:01:00] coordination. So I was. I presented some bits of this last week at a seminar at Lincoln. Apologies, if you're joining us twice, you're gonna hear some bits again. But as I was saying there, this is sort of how lazy I am with my stock imagery creation.

I no longer look for photos of farms. I look for a farm that I like the look of and our mapping tools, and then turn on the aerial imagery lab and zoom into it to sort of view a bit that sort of. Gives the message that I want to give. But the point was that this farm here I can't even remember exactly where it was, but it, I think many people who are looking at this, and they're in this space of trying to encourage mosaic farming methods and optimization of land use and all this kind of thing would say.

This is an example of what good looks like. Like it's, it's got, it's still a productive farm. There's lots of pastures there, but a lot of the steep slopes are regenerating to various degrees. Most of this riparian area has been retired and there's sort of in, in native bush, there's good stock exclusion.

The, the landslides and stuff, there's sort of some forestry on the hills. So we do know what good looks like and there are lots of examples of good happening. And, and we know that if we achieve all of this, then we, we not only can [00:02:00] potentially get removals that, I mean, we have to massively reduce gross emissions as well as always, but we might be able to get removals to the point that we could even become net negative.

Which is what we need to be. Like 422 parts per million of CO2 is not a good place to be. And we also get all these other benefits, like improved water quality, climate resilience, biodiversity, revenue, diversification. And given that pretty much nobody thinks that this is a bad idea, really. I mean, there's probably some exceptions to this rule, but in general, everyone would go, yes, love that.

Give me more of that. I wanna see this happen. Yet. We're still having these sort of ongoing discussions of why is it not happening enough? So there's, there's sort of two bits to it, like, why is it still so hard and why is it still so slow? Or almost the mirrors of each other, they, they amount to the same thing.

Like it's, it's not that it's impossible because it is happening, but it could certainly happen faster if it was easier. Part of the reason that it's so slow is that if you are an individual landholder who is looking at doing all of this stuff, there's a lot [00:03:00] of things that get in your way. Like it's, it can be very expensive.

Its result involves a change to the status quo and land management, it can be quite disruptive for your ongoing practices. I mean these, these last three I think, which are, well, the first three are a lot easier with support, but especially the last three, if you're sort of feeling a little bit like. We're doing this independently, there's a lot more risk and a lot more uncertainty and a lot of isolation.

And the what was like, let's say for example, you have an erosion prone slope and you're looking at doing a mixed retirement of that slope with some combination of native and exotic plantings. If you are actively engaged with your catchment group and your neighbors and you're all working with the same plan and you're working with some advisors and some funding agencies, the chances of this being sort of viewed as a negative activity that's just like.

Awful. Carbon and farming gone wrong, et cetera, are very low. But if you are sort of off doing it by yourself and you're not collaborating with anybody, and it's not clear what the grander vision is that you're working towards, you can feel like it's, it's quite hard just to even feel like you're doing the [00:04:00] right thing because you get none of this feedback.

So being isolated sucks and working. So going it alone is hard. Going out together with lots of other people, I put easy, but it's actually just easier. It's still quite hard, but. It's a lot easier than it is otherwise. But the challenge is that if you want to coordinate to go together, like the nice thing about going solo is that you're the one who gets to make all the decisions.

You don't have to arrange anything with anybody else. You don't have to send anything to anybody else. You just, you can move quickly. And collaborating can be quite inefficient. So the head of marketing made the comment that the inclusion of this cartoon is really kind of dating. Me and the whole presentation, but those of you who recognize this, congratulations.

You're my generation. This is Captain Planet. And the point is that it much like raising children, it takes a village to do restoration really well. And so I wanted to give you a quick, a quick perspective of what that village looks like, because it's more than just the stakeholders you might consider at blush.

So there's landowners, certainly they, it's pretty hard to plant a [00:05:00] forest without having land to plant it on, or to restore some forest or protect some forest. Landholders are a pretty key stakeholder. There's also developers who are really important to landholders for some of these risk mitigation activities.

They can be a source of expertise of funds. They can reduce the risks of marketplaces and other things. There's the financiers who I, if you're not paying out of this for your, from your own pocket, you're gonna need to get money from somewhere else. That's just as true for developers as for landowners individually.

Catchment groups we've found have a very major role to play in sort of alignment and engagement and advocacy and support primary sector suppliers. This whole restoration picture is hugely interesting to them because. It's part of their social license and it's also part of the sustainability of their general activities within the space.

This is also true for processes, arguably even more so to the extent that they care about the environmental impact of their activities, which is to say a lot. What happens before it gets to their processing site is probably the most significant part of the whole picture. So they care very much [00:06:00] about enabling and encouraging these sort of restorative agriculture, sustainable agriculture activities.

My animations just stopped working. Field services are a huge part, so these are, even if we just consider planting, it might be the people who do the initial site preparation and scrub clearance. The people who do the pre-planting weed control, the people who do the pre-planting pest control, the people who do the ongoing.

Pest control and weed control, and the actual planting itself and the, the post planting care, the fencing upstream of all of this, there's nurseries, plants don't just appear out of thin air, unfortunately. They have to actually, the, the lead times can be years for some native species. A lot of this involves specialist expertise.

Landholders might not have all of this themselves, neither might developers or financiers. You tend to need FO consultants in both the agricultural and forestry sectors, and there's also a huge space of various non-governmental organizations, especially in the environmental sector, who are interested in enabling and supporting and advocating for these activities.

They've all got a role to play. Regional [00:07:00] government has a major role to play. They can set land use constraints, set land, use incentives, and they're interested in optimal land use outcomes for all of the constituents within the region. And then sort of at the central government level, there's also a huge role, but especially with the regulators who for New Zealand and for the biggest incentive for forestry at the moment really is the ETS.

This is a regulated market. The rules are set by centralized regulators and the rules that they set change the picture for all of these different stakeholders. And ideally all of this is like a beautiful cycle of collaboration and information sharing and cooperation. But even when everybody does want the same thing, that's not easy to achieve because this also happens across multiple phases.

And you'll be grateful that I haven't animated all of these out, but most projects that you're gonna do are going to touch on most of these points you have to. Figure out what you even want to do in the first place. Like what are your objectives? Then analyze your options. Do some sort of planning and scenario development.

Figure out [00:08:00] whatever compliance constraints might exist. Like can you even do what you want to do? Engage with a whole heap of different parties who might be required to make the project happen. Work through some procurement stages. Then actually implement it. Figure out how you're gonna get financing, figure out how you're gonna monetize it to pay for the financing, do ongoing management, and then ultimately probably reporting and.

For any non-trivial scale of project and especially a regional activity, this is cyclical. You don't just make one big plan and do everything. You are continually repeating these phases year after year after year, as you gradually roll everything out. And this is also happening at multiple different scales because if you are landholder, you might be thinking in terms of the sort of.

The small wetland planting that you want. And just for clarification, if you are planting 0.71 hectares, that's 7,100 square meters. That is not small. If you have to plant the trees yourself so that at the local level, this is actually quite a bit of work potentially. But this is sort of your lens [00:09:00] and then that's only a little part of your whole farm though, like at, at the farm level, there's probably a whole heap of activities that you're planning on implementing.

In stages over time as you can afford it and depending on your general farm land use objectives, but at the catchment level, your farm is really just sort of one dot amongst many, which might be various outcomes on your farm. Support and align with ambitions of the broader catchment stakeholders and all of these other sort of ecosystem providers like a nursery cares about.

Every one of their customers and also the portfolio of their customers in the overall demand for seedlings, not just this year, but the next year and the year after. And so when you put all of these things together, you get to meet the male strong, which is basically all of this happening all of the time simultaneously across all groups.

And I, I, this is a, a bastardization of a, a cartoon from Mexico cd, which I've referenced there. But it was talking about like how the whole internet kind of is balanced [00:10:00] on these tiniest little pieces, which just sort of have the tendrils all through everything. In the space of forest restoration.

It just made me think of it because it often feels that the whole complicated process of across all these different groups of delivering restoration pro processes and projects is just balanced on top of like spreadsheets and word and Google documents and emails that get sent back and forth and then shape files, which are, are sent around according to various different schemas.

And these get sprinkled all through this whole process liberally. And changing versions and changing standards, and it makes it pretty hard to be one of these individuals within the system and collaborate efficiently and make everything happen as quickly as it could be. So general argument here is that restoration is at least insignificant, part coordination, constrained. It's like there's other constraints as well. Capacity and money, but [00:11:00] coordination is a big part of it. And, coordination is an area where better tools can help. So we've been trying to build some of these better tools and we really want part of the carbon crop solution to sit in substitution for at least some of the activities for part of the stack to make things easier for all of these different groups to run through these stages.

So. I mean, this is a look at a customer who we're working with on the east coast of the North Island. This is sort of a decent sized catchment scale. This covers about 120,000 hectares, and so across this scale, you want to be working. Wanna know where you are, regardless of which one of these stakeholders you are like are, are you, where are you at with your farm?

Where are you at with your region? Where are you at with your next year's Seedling supply? You also wanna know where you're going because if you just stay where you are, then we haven't actually achieved anything. There's been no impact. The, the goal is to decide on some way in which you want the future to be different to what it is now, and then chart how to path to how you're gonna get there.

And you want to know [00:12:00] this at every scale, like from the. Right from the individual tree because at some point it has to get in the ground somehow, whether it's been naturally seeded or it's or it's been planted by someone up to the, the stand of trees that you're looking at putting up for your wetland, up to your farm, up to your sub catchment, up to your catchment, up to your catchment group up to the whole nation.

And you want to do this at every stage of the project because it's like at the same time as you're planting one lot of trees, you should be thinking about the trees that you're gonna be planting the year after and the year after that. And the pest control activities that need to happen and, and who should be involved in contributing to this?

And you need to think about this from every angle. So the different contributors and stakeholders. They care about different things and they care about 'em at different times. And so this is, you want, and you want all of this ideally, to be continuously updated as you collaborate with these various different groups and as you plan and implement these projects.

And ideally, you want all of this to happen in real time because there's nothing that kind of paralyzes action like waiting for or losing something or losing [00:13:00] track of a task that had to happen. So. Dreams are free. The question is, does this all work? Obviously we haven't built every single part of this perfectly yet, but we've, we've built quite a bit of it and this is what we're gonna gamble on doing a live demo with.

So bear with me for a moment while I try and shuffle my screens around, to switch to demo view. Is this still showing? I've got, I've got my audience in the other panel nodding sweet, right? So. So this year is a demonstration catchment, i'll start over in the map view of the catchment so that it's sort of, it actually covers quite a bit of New Zealand, but the first thing we can take a quick look at is the ability to filter by an area of interest, which is a pretty important bit.

So we're, we're talking about Y noi, which is a part of this catchment I was talking about. So these are, these are all of the sites as we've defined them within the Y NOI region. And what you can see about the Y NOI region is that it's not easy farmland if we look at the highly erodible land within this area.

So this is stuff that's defined as. High landslide risk with delivery to stream or not severe earth [00:14:00] flow risk, moderate earth flow risk or gully risk. You can see the maps kind of lighting up with a lot of the unvegetated areas are very prone to this issue. Similarly, if we look at the land use capability classifications, there is not a lot here that we're seeing in sort of the nice easy, I mean, I can basically turn off all of LUC 1, 2, 3, and four and you see there's only a tiny bit of the maps disappeared. I talk about LUC six on and off. A lot of this area is LUC six and a lot more of it's LUC seven. So this is, this is pretty hard farming country and grant like, there's still a lot of great farming going on there, but it's not, it's not easy land to deal with.

But you can sort of flick these layers on and off and you start to feel like you're getting a sense of the land, but it's not really a sense in a number. You could, like, you might get a vibe like, oh, it feels, feels pretty orangey to me, man. I don't know. This is, this is gonna be a tough one, but what we wanted to do was turn this into some numbers.

I'm constantly paranoid that I'm gonna be showing a slide that's not the right one. We're now, we're now looking at [00:15:00] a, a numbers graph, hopefully. Again, we're filtering down to Y noi. So these are the individual sites that are within WaiNui and what we can immediately tell, so this is, with fully automated.

Nobody has done any work on this yet. We've, we've sort of reset it to the original state. We know that the WaiNui sub catchment or catchment has 31 sites, which meet the definition we're using of the certain sort of minimum size, covering a total of 16 and a half thousand hectares. A very small fraction of this is currently forest and most of it is exotic forest.

Almost 50% of the land is considered highly erodible in some form or another, and we can see that almost all of the land is LUC six and WC seven as we were looking at before. And we can also see here that nothing that we currently know about, I have to get my piece of paper because there's so many, so many points I have to make through this.

There's nothing that we currently know is scheduled to happen that will change any of these numbers. Like what, what we have now and what we see now here on the forest cover. That's still what we're gonna have in 2027. That's still what we're gonna have in 2030. Similarly, the highly [00:16:00] erodible land cover, we're still gonna have just as much highly erodible land in 2027 and 2030.

Is that showing okay, Abi, or is it sort of cropped to the wrong amount of the screen?

Abi: It's looking okay for now. 

Nick Butcher: Okay. I'll keep running with this then. So we want to start changing this. Like we don't want to keep the land as it is today. We want to do some sort of land use transition and optimization, at least in some cases.

And the, I. It's very easy to, sorry, I'm jumping back and forward, come back here and kind of go like, okay, well we want, we want to increase our highly erodible land cover to, to 20% of that. We want to transition that to forest by 2030. But you can have a target like that, but for the target to actually be achieved, it needs to involve individual or groups of landholders on their farms, making decisions that are right for them and their situation.

They're not just gonna go, oh, cool, well, whatever the regional government or the catchment group does, like. Your wish is my command. They need to [00:17:00] think about what's right for their land and align that with their land use objectives. And the nice thing is that these generally align pretty well. So it can work, but you, it's not just gonna happen without anybody talking about it.

So what, what we've done is one of the ways you can use these tools is kind of figure out who the. Who the leading ones are gonna be, like, who do, who do you really want to try and get on board to move the needle on these objectives at the regional level? So you can see that a bunch of these little tags here, I've put, I've picked some of the big ones and put in lighthouse.

So these are our farms that we think are gonna be the early movers. We can very quickly filter that down and we realize that now that now rather than 31 farms, we're talking about nine farms, nine groups of people we need to sort of initially engage with and get moving. And we're still covering roughly 65% of the total area, like we're 16,000 hectares before just these nine cover 11,000.

And they're also fairly representative in the issues. Like we're still seeing forest cover around about 20% and almost 50% of this land is highly erodible, which isn't [00:18:00] surprising given that we're, we're still looking at. 70 odd percent of the total area we were looking at before. Right. And, and what we've done.

Has gone out and actually identified every single one of these farmers and bribed them to join the webinar today. To, to help actually, no, it's like what we've done is each person within, sorry, a couple of the people within the carbon crop team, they're standing in today. So we don't know these farms.

Everything we say about these farms is entirely conjecture. This is not to say that what we're gonna show you is the right land uses for these farms. It's just an example of how the platform could be used for sort of multi-scale collaboration to try and line up the dots. So I'm gonna jump across everybody, put on your best carbon crop Smiles.

This is the, oh, why is it Gemini's yelling at me? This is a bunch of the team. You've got a mixture of our engineering accounts, team marketing all here and me obviously chatting there. They're gonna be, they've each adopted a farm. And over the next 10 minutes, oh, we're running roughly on time.

We we're gonna try and do this in 10 minutes. Basically, this is the 10 minutes crash [00:19:00] restoration program. It's gonna be a little bit messy and rough. We're not saying it's a good idea to try and plan the future land use of your farm in 10 minutes. That would be a terrible idea. But it's to show you how quickly you can sort of start to get a picture of how things might look differently.

So I'll, I'll go away. So they stop needing to all put on their best, best smiles, but each of the, if I just quickly jump into a couple of these, so you don't feel like I'm hiding anything. So this is, this is the farm that I'm gonna be taking on. I got one with plenty of erodible land, but you can see that there's all of, it's just automatically mapped at the moment.

There's nothing in there that's been drawn in. And if I just quickly cherry picker a couple of the others, this one, which we'll come back and have a look at in more detail later. Again, there's, this is all just as it came out of the machine. And again, sorry, I moved you guys out of the, out of the screen so you're not feeling quite so in the this one also, just as it came out of the box there's a lot of forestry on this one already.

The system's picked up. But yeah, the, we haven't prepared this earlier [00:20:00] is basically what I'm saying. And I, I should briefly say, so I, I've picked up this farm from CCPE 1 4 9 2 7. I can use these same tools to look very quickly at that. Was it 1 4 9 2 7? Yeah, like this is the same data for the farm.

Like, as you can see, I'm at sort of 65 ish percent highly arable land. A lot of that's just moderate earth flow risk, which is a little bit different. Very low forest cover, very large amount of value C six and seven. And I haven't made any plans yet. So this is what we're gonna sort of see evolve. So, all right, back to our, our lighthouse.

View of things. What we're going to show you is how this planning can lead to sort of a new plan that has some costs and has a change in the highly erodable land and has a planning of the forestry activity at various different scales. And it can all be sort of coordinated and in audited. So with, without further [00:21:00] ado everybody on your marks get set, go and we'll, we'll map some farms and I'm gonna set myself a timer and I'll check in after three minutes and I dunno, two minutes and we'll, we'll see how it's evolving just so that I don't get too caught in my, my own little waffle.

So, right. This is my farm. And the thing that I want to do is make good land use transitions for my farm that in particular address some of the. Risks around landslide risks with delivery to stream that I have on my farm so I can, I can see where my streams are. I mean, it's my farm, so I'll have a pretty good idea anyway, but one of my stakeholders I'm working with might not, and I can also see where all of my highly Erodable land is.

And I skipped past this pretty quickly before, but these high landslide risk areas with delivery to stream, these are some of the worst from a water quality perspective and also a land stability perspective because this is, it's stuff that probably is going to trigger landslides. Or have landside, you can see along these slopes.

And when it does, it probably goes into a waterway, which means you just get loads of sediments. So I'm going to [00:22:00] start by putting in along this area here, a bit of planting to try and sort of retire some of this land and get it back into. Sort of something that's less prone to fall into the thing. And I'm gonna say that I'm gonna try and do this in 2026, a bit late for me to plan it this year.

I'm gonna put in this, we can specify arbitrary combinations of species and planting methodology and everything else. And I'm gonna. This, this methodology I happen to know cost $3,000 per hectare, and that involves 1500 plants per hectare. So you can immediately see the system's now calculated how many plants you need for this region and what the total establishment cost is based on the assumptions that you have.

And has my time gone off yet? No, I've still got 23 seconds. I'm, I've also found that actually this area of imagery is a little bit out of date. A year or so ago, I was super worried about where's the area? Oh, it's up here. Oh yeah, I actually planted out this hill. And I did it back [00:23:00] in 2024. So this forest is actually, I did that all in the same mix as what I'm doing now.

And that's planted and that cost me, it cost me 2,800 a hectare then, and I've allowed a little bit for inflation. Now that, that was my timer just going off there. Oh, sorry. In this one here I'm not actually sure about this yet. I'm gonna set it as draft. It's not yet for us that I know I'm gonna plant.

It's, I like the idea, but I haven't, I haven't got finance organized yet. It's still a bit of an unknown. So you've just seen me doing this while I've been doing this. Hopefully everybody else has also been diligently planting, so we now have. Planting planned right through to 2031. Establishment costs estimated there's a, a spendy chunk in 2026 from somewhere.

And this what, and you can see we're beginning to make, we've made quite a lot of progress already towards our 20%. Highly erodible land and forest cover target. So freeze that in your mind. We're already well underway. 700 hectares of cumulative total forest area planned. We'll do a little bit [00:24:00] more on, on my own, my own wee block because I've only got a, a 2024, I'm talking too much, so it goes slowly.

2024 planting 2026 planting. And 2027, I think I wanna do a little bit over in this next valley, which is also extremely highly erodible. You can see that the tooling is auto snapping to the boundaries, so it makes it a lot quicker to, to set some of the stuff up. We'll put that again in the same species mix.

This one, it's actually a bit further, but I've, I've already confirmed it because I've got an agreement in place for the planting office area. Same establishment cost. And I also want to, I'm particularly concerned about some of these, sort of, these areas along the coast here where it's not such a huge area, but it's, it's like.

Part of the farm that's particularly exposed to erosion. And I want to, for these areas, I'm not actually gonna put them in exotics or even that exotic mix. I'm gonna try and plant this up in a sort of a native mixed planting which we're calling the Ocean Hillside mix. It's [00:25:00] quite a bit more expensive.

And again, these figures are just speculative. Don't, don't expect that you can necessarily get the forest in the ground for this amount of money. It would depend a lot on the species and the situation and the methodology. But we'll put that in 2028. And again, this one's just, just a draft stage.

Oh, and, sorry, that's native future forest. And then I'm gonna, I'm gonna quickly check in again just so that you can see that. Things are still kind of evolving. We're now up to almost a thousand hectares planned and we're getting, oh, that's interesting is some, some earlier forest that's appeared pushing us much.

We must have missed some forest in the past. It's sort of much closer to the maximum threshold number with like, we're passed our 20% now. Basically what this is saying is that somebody has identified forest that our system has missed. And it's got a larger area, so we'll check on that in a wee bit.

Then I'm gonna come back and sort of see where I'm at. Are there any other big areas that are highly erodible, which I might want to think about? Unfortunately, there's still a lot. I'll add in one more block for this forest over [00:26:00] here. Kind of like, and I mean, this is approximate. The, if you're the landholder, you're gonna know the farm better than I do, and you're gonna decide where it actually makes sense to put this stuff and where your fences are in similar.

But again, you can see that all of the existing forested areas are not being included in the total planting required because we're not saying we're gonna get rid of the existing. We're again gonna go for the, we'll try, we'll try the, the expensive option. There's probably things we can do that are smart to make it cheaper and say that this is, again, like 5,000 a hectare 2000 stems.

But if you're looking at this and going, oh my God, this looks painful to have to type this in every time, like we hear you, there's another feature in the works for this, which we'll, we'll, we'll demo another time. And I'll say again that this one is draft. And because I'm missing, I don't think I've actually got any forest planned for this year.

I'll put some in over on this. Slope here. Basically just filling in all this highly erodible area above the big river. That's, that's on my, [00:27:00] my 2025 to-do list. So I'm gonna do that in the same mix as before, 2025, $3,000. And it's confirmed as well at 15 hectares. Oh, alright. Now. That's us done with the farm for the moment.

We'll go back and see how this has all played out at sort of the broader our, our regional level of planting initiatives. So we're up to somewhere around 1200 hectares of total aggregate forest planned at the moment. This is across nine sites. Every site has some combination of either planted forest or confirmed forest.

No site is in a situation where it only has draft forest, but you can see that in the projections ahead. A lot of these plans that we have. Currently just drafts and how you use these status conventions is totally up to you. It's easy for us to add additional statuses and we very much expect to over time, [00:28:00] but the way that we're working with some partners at the moment is planted means it's literally in the ground.

It's very weird if you see planted forest in the future because it suggests that someone's got a bit confused about something or has a time machine. But confirmed forest means that it hasn't been planted yet, but there's a concrete plan in place to get it planted. Like you've, you've got financing in place, you've got a supply agreement with seedlings or a planting contract where you've contacted with a developer.

And draft is. You're kind of just trying out the idea. You might even as the landholder not be convinced that it's the right way to go, but it's a possibility that you're exploring and if you are, if you're sort of working at a regional level and you're trying to get these broader land use changes, you're trying to sort of see how much of your, if your impact is actually a concrete plan versus something that you're just kind of trying out.

And so of, of the total area that we have here, we're talking about 1200 hectares to plant only. 397 of that sorry, 744 is just draft 397 is [00:29:00] confirmed. And you can see most of this planting, we're in a catchment group that has a. A lot of LUC six and seven land, so no surprise that most of the planting is intended on LUC six and seven.

And also a lot of this planting is happening on highly erodible areas of land. So if we look at how the highly erodible land is gonna look, oh, I see the, the mystery historic forest has disappeared again. Now it must have an area we are up to 20% by 2030. So we've reduced our highly erodible land cover by roughly.

Or, or rather are unvegetated, highly erodible land cover by roughly 20%. I can see what this means in the context of my farm alone if I'm a landholder looking at this. So we'll go back to the I or you can also see that all of these people have started, like as these land haulers have sort of adopted their land and begun to make it their own.

They've started adding names to it, although only in a couple of cases, because if everybody's been too busy furiously drawing trees, I think. But Charlie is, is now the, the proud proprietor of the bog. Abi has [00:30:00] Slippery Slope Station aptly named No doubt. I forgot to give mine a name. But you can certainly personalize these.

And this is visible across multiple groups, so they're stopped being just these anonymous numbers. But if I go 1 4 9 2 7, which is my farm, 1 4 9 2 7, you can start to see this plan that I was just walking through creating with you. Like the 2024 forest that wasn't identified is indeed now planted.

There's. 8.3 hectares that I've got confirmed for this year. And then next year. These, there's these bigger blocks in sort of various stages, but it means that as a landholder as well, you get a continually evolving visual depiction of how all of this is gonna play out. And let's say for example, that.

Jumping back that my plan isn't gonna make it for, like, I go to this forest and like, look, 2026. I just haven't been able to get the finances in place. I haven't been able to get the agreements in place. This is gonna slip out to 2027. Like it's a shame. I wish I could do it next year, but fingers crossed here.

Haha, it worked. I mean, of course it worked. [00:31:00] Now all of this forest is, you've got an updated picture immediately across every single person involved in this project. No, that plan has changed. This is no longer gonna happen in 2026. It's now happening in 2027, which means that everybody can adapt. Or people who knew that they were not going to be able to finance projects in 2026.

But can finance projects in 2027 can suddenly come and engage and say, Hey, I, I saw your forest like was delayed. Are you still interested in talking? All righty. The other thing I wanted to show, let me check my list. We can see what the cost implications of all of this are at the farm level. If I filter this down to future forests in both categories.

So I'm planning on an aggregate planting 121 hectares across my farm. And it's not cheap, like it comes in two big hits in 2027 and 2029, and you can see it takes a while before this starts to actually pay itself off, but it will over time with the assumptions that we have in place here. You can [00:32:00] also see just how much of my total 121 hectares is going onto highly erodible land with landslide risk delivery to stream like.

All of this, oh no, 22 hectares is going on to land. That's not highly erodible at all, and the rest of it is very landslide prone. You can see what the mixture of native and exotic planting I have is, and you can see what the sequestration is that this is gonna achieve over time and, and how much of it's on LUC six and seven land, which is gonna be very important with these L-U-C-E-T-S restrictions that are coming up.

So that's just for my farm. We can also see what this might be at the region level perspective. So now we're looking at all the lighthouse farms. Nine of them. We've got 1200 hectares of forest being planted. The cashflow here is a little bit more evenly distributed because it's diversified across this portfolio, but it's starting to look even more like something that's going to pay itself back.

Over time. And at the site level, we can give all sorts of details of returns on investment and internal rates of return and net present values. Again, almost all of this planting is on LUC six and level seven land. [00:33:00] The majority of it is on highly erodible land. And across the portfolio we've actually got slightly more native than exotic, which is part of the reason it's so expensive.

Though again, these numbers are not set in stone and you're actually doing quite well under some methodologies to plant natives at these costs. Let me check my list. There was one other thing I wanted to. Show if we, if we're looking here at the capital required, so establishment costs, I like actually it's not just one more thing.

This is the establishment costs that are expected for the portfolio. Sorry for the combination of plantings for the year. But if we limit it just to the stuff where it's actually confirmed, you see that it's now filtered down to just the confirmed plantings. This is sort of much more moderate sums. The rest of it's sort of projects that are still not quite at that stage and we.

We're still mostly in LEC six and seven land. There was one other thing I wanted to show. Oh, that's right. Tracking of actual delivery. So this was the one that I was, oh, that was 2024. [00:34:00] This is 2025 over here. So at the moment, this is showing us confirmed. And if we come back to this picture and we look, we're sort of wondering how the year is going, we want to see just what's happening in 2025.

So there's two sites in 2025 with confirmed planting. Did I limit it to confirmed or it's just everything in 20 this? No, it's across all status. They're all confirmed totaling 48 hectares, and at the moment it's all just confirmed it's not planted. Now over the course of the year, we would like to see progress on this target, and so let's say that we sort of fast forward to, I'm planning on doing this planting in sort of August, September that happens and I now change it to planted, and we come back here and we refresh.

We can not see the change planted. That's disappointing. Why did that not work? Am I actually looking at the right site? Ah, right. I think it's because of the planning. So this is my 8.3 hectares in 2025. [00:35:00] So we've got it working now. We go back to 2025. We'll say that it's not just my farm, it's all of the lighthouse farms.

And you'll see that before to show that I'm not making this up. And we had this as confirmed. I think now it's trying to catch up with itself. The, there's a couple of delays just in propagation. It sort of takes, takes 10 or so seconds. It's not purely to real time, but this, this what was confirmed forest, oh, there we go.

Is now going to become a planted forest. And so we will see that here. Increases by the amount that we just planted. And so this is sort of a sign to the people who are involved in this area. Of your plans that you had confirmed for this year, how are you tracking? How far through it all have you gone?

Alright. That was a bit of a marathon. I think I'm through the list, but I. So this is, this is really just a snapshot of the features. Also, I should add a note on permissions here. We've said everything wide open so that everyone can see [00:36:00] everything. You do not have to do it that way. Like you can share the amount of this data that it makes sense to share between parties and within parties in an appropriate context.

And we're happy to work with groups on what they think might be appropriate in a certain situation. And now I have to find out how to get back to my panel to work through. Oh yeah, back to the slides. Back to the slides. So. The live demo gamble worked with the exception of me getting confused at the end there.

I'll, you can wave goodbye to all of the, the team who are waving in the other view. Good job farmers. Thanks very much for all of your input. Thanks for making it work. I would just want to kind of close off, so. The goal that we have is that all of these groups are using the system to collaborate efficiently.

But we're also very conscious that like that is not the whole picture. Like we are a little part of a broader network. We don't run nurseries, we're not forestry consultants. We, well, that's not strictly true. We are in a certain context, but we're not the only forestry consultants. We really want this to be a part of the puzzle, and we're enabling collaboration between all of these other groups more efficiently with this [00:37:00] tooling.

Where you think that if we do this well, then we'll get more action. The economics will improve. Like almost all of this stuff has a return on scale where the, the more you do of it, the bigger it gets, the cheaper it gets to do. And if we do that well, then we get all of this other stuff that we were talking about before, which has numerous benefits and everybody more or less wants as mentioned q and A functions.

I'm going to try and find those there and check if anybody has asked any questions. So yet we have a couple, so there's the tree farmer decision tool more of a timber focus. Yes, we will. I haven't actually had a look at that in a wee while, but I will take another look at it. Good call. The question around LUC six land registration allocation, which I think was actually one of the previous questions that we had in the backlog too.

So I will cover that when I work through these pre-submitted questions, so. One of the first ones proposal to phase out forestry from the ETS. This will have widespread implications, not just for forest owners, but for fulfilling New Zealand's climate action goals. What's in store? As I always say, we don't [00:38:00] have a.

Crystal ball here. But I would say that the proposal is a question of which proposal because there have been various ones over the years. Specifically, I think this probably refers to the proposal from the Parliamentary commissioner for the environment inquiry that was released a month or two ago. And I think it was specifically proposing a staged so basically, I'm trying to think of how to phrase this so I don't misrepresent it.

That forestry would be excluded from ongoing registrations in the ETS, but it proposed an existing forest register. But the ETS would be grandfathered in. It would be allowed to stay there. So that's, it's likely to have the biggest implications for future forest owners in some respects. And yes, it could also have implications for New Zealand's climate action goals.

And there's various assumptions that are made in those forecasts around. How much decarbonization is going to happen anyway, how much decarbonization will happen under certain carbon price scenarios? How much forestry will happen anyway? How much forestry [00:39:00] management will change in response to the ability.

To access the ETS or not. I have many opinions on the proposals that were in that paper. I definitely won't try and go into them all today, but we'll probably do a session on that in the future. As for what's in store, I think at the moment there's no concrete proposal to or at least no government sponsored proposal to prohibit further ETS registrations of forest, except for the restrictions around the LUC one through six land, which was mentioned earlier.

Kind of a related question. It is clear from the recent decline in the NZ price that there is understandably, a lack of confidence in the government's commitment to the ES. Surely it would be unwise to invest in further plantings at this time. I don't really want to comment on whether it's wise or unwise to invest in further plantings because obviously we've got a conflict of interest here.

Like it's generally good for us as a company when people plant trees. So I won't advise, but I would say that the decline in the NZ price isn't [00:40:00] necessarily lack of confidence in the government's commitment to the ETS at the moment. It's more driven by assumptions around, or at least this is my take.

ETS market participants assumptions around the likely future carbon price given the availability of carbon removal units or NZUs in the future under the current policy settings. So if anything, it's almost that the market's saying that it thinks there's going to be too many units in the future and therefore the units will not be worth as much.

There's so much extra detail there that I wouldn't take that as like a. Two line summary of the market forecast. But the government's actually demonstrated generally fairly strong commitment to the ETS even though some of the coalition partners aren't supportive of it, like national are investing in ETS integrity for the most part, and.

That's true on the other side of the political spectrum as well. Like I, I think if anything, the ETS is likely to be further strengthened in the future. And the [00:41:00] current price trends are firstly just a symptom of short-term supply and demand balances and a certain level of market speculation, but also to some degree, a commentary on what people think might happen in the midterm with supply under the current policy settings.

Which is actually born out by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the inquiries report for the environment's report on future unit prices and availability if forestry isn't restricted from participation in the ETS. Okay, so here we are onto this question that we also got is a live one LEC six land.

So all I can say is what's been published here. I just want to clarify that the, there is not a limit to pine, a forestation to 15,000 hectares. What's proposed is that in addition to the, so this is in relation to the restrictions on ETS registration on certain land use categories being one through six.

Basically any given farm can register up to [00:42:00] 25% of their LUC one through six land. I'll try and frame it a bit better. Overall, you can't register any new forest in on a LUC one to six land, but there are exemptions to that rule. One of the exemptions is that if you had an investment that you can demonstrate with sort of in progress as of December, 2024, then you're allowed to register that land with some caveats.

Another exemption is that you can register up to 25% of your LUC one through six land in exotic forest. And you, this, this is your sort of, your, your quota. And then there is a further, or LUC six land, 15,000 hectare per year proposed quota, which is available to be applied for or allocated. Details are not defined, but you can, that's additional well, probably additional, dunno the details yet to the, the 25%. So the question here is around that for the 15,000 hectare per year pathway, which is additional to the other pathways, how will it be selected? Short answer is, we don't know. The, [00:43:00] I think the announcements made reference to a sort of a first in kind of mechanism first and best treated as it says here.

That's as much as we know about how it will work and the sort of various flaws that you can identify in different approaches. But that's too soon to say how it will be implemented in practice. This one's a very big question, and I won't try and give it a completely full answer because it's big, but.

A bunch of constraints for successful implementation of tree growing with small holders, carbon projects. I would say the biggest on the ground one is just the economics and the complexity of planning. This is where we think that we can do the most to make a difference. The biggest methodology related one is I don't think the methodology restrictions are really that big.

The challenge, some people point to the fact that the ETS doesn't permit registration of a forest of less than one hectare as a methodology restriction or a methodology constraint. It's really an economic constraint. Like I was talking to someone yesterday on this, [00:44:00] even if you can register a forest of only one hectare, if you were just gonna participate in the ETS at the one hectare scale, you probably don't want to.

The economics of it aren't great. The bigger methodology concern that we have is the lack of available incentives for pre 1990 Native forest restoration. This is a huge issue. It limits pe control, it limits weed control, it limits enrichment planting. It's a really bad situation, and that's one where I would put most of my votes on.

It would be nice to improve the situation. Should I put riparian plantings in the ETS or am I better off using them to offset my so-called emissions from my dairy herds? It depends, really, is the answer. I would say follow your incentives. See what you can get for offsetting your emissions from your dairy herds, from your dairy partner, and see what you can get from the ES and compare the two.

Generally small scale repairing plantings. In many cases, they may not be eligible at the ET in the ETS for all. And if they are, they may not deliver you a lot of carbon because again, like a hectare [00:45:00] of forest, you know, if you've, if you've got a three, three meter rep repair buffer, it takes you 300 meters of river fundage to get to a hectare, give or take.

And it's not going to deliver you an enormous amount of revenues through carbon. So run the numbers as my advice, and this is something that we are working with various groups on including in the dairy sector and can support with if you're interested. Why is forestry and pastoral management systems not counted in your carbon accounting?

There's sort of two questions that go on here. So the reason that we don't do pastoral management is because the, there isn't a compliance framework for the recognition of pastoral carbon sequestration in New Zealand at the moment. So there's not really a market that we can bring the product to.

There are various soil, carbon, voluntary methodologies, but. We are very cautious with them because proving sequestration and then proving durability of that sequestration, both of them are risky and difficult, and we just see it as a smaller opportunity than forestry. Although that said, regenerative agriculture and improvement of soil organic carbon is very [00:46:00] good for a bunch of reasons, and I think it's still important, but it's not where we see our strengths.

Clear failing of forestry plantations. Yes, it is a massive carbon release. Some of that ends up in durable wood products, but when you cut down a forest in New Zealand's national inventory that forest is generally considered. As an emission of carbon in our inventory. The reason that I pause, and there's some caveats is that for rotational forest, it's treated on an average basis where as long as the forest is replanted, it's sort of, it only really gets recognized up to the average long-term level so that you don't sort of have these weird up and down year by year pathways.

And at an individual level, you also in general face this liability, but only to the extent that you've been recognized for it in the past. And it depends on the scheme that you're registered under. Like if you were also under the averaging schemes and you just sort of get the average value of your sort of up and down and up and down of the, the growing and clear filling monitoring native vegetation, carbon growth for properties.

And I think there was another [00:47:00] one here around. Carbon credit availability for existing Native Forest. We do a lot in this space. It is now in use by a lot of fairly large scale actors. The challenge for monetizing it is the sort of liquidity of the market and the availability of incentive frameworks that actually have dollars behind them for it.

There's, it's basically a continuing saga. If it's post 89 forest, we do a heap in that area. If it's pre 1990 forest, which is to say forest, that you can't demonstrate that it was established after 1989, then your, it depends on the sort of the incentive frameworks that you may have access through to, through partnerships.

But more broadly, I'd just say if you're in the space, keep on pushing with any party who will listen that the, it's an issue that we don't have enough incentives for pre 1990 Native forest protection and restoration. That was a bit of a marathon. Thank you very much to all of those who joined and listened.

Really appreciate your interest and if you're [00:48:00] in a position where you think that you could use some of the tools that we shared today to make a difference, or you think that you could contribute to the expansion of these tools to help address your use cases please get in touch. We've got a huge amount more in the pipeline with this stuff for sort of.

Future forest planning and financing, and we'll be, we'll be sharing more details as that sort of comes to, to availability, but for now, that's where we're at. So 

Abi: Nick, 

Nick Butcher: cheers for your time.

Abi: Before we finish, we've got two more questions that came in to answer. 

Nick Butcher: Sorry. Thanks. I'll cheers. Abi, where's my little q and a? Oh, there we go. Right.

Have we trialed this already in catchments in New Zealand? And do we see this providing a benefit for catchment groups to set up bulk order buying RA regimes and administer catchment wide savings, much needed as compared to current ad hoc approaches. Brilliant question.

Thank you. Yes, we are trialing this in multiple catchments now. There's been a lot of interest from catchment group coordinators [00:49:00] and collectives. We are on track to have, I think, probably 200,000 hectares active on the system through catchment groups by the end of next month. And it's going pretty quickly.

And a lot of it is for exactly the reasons that you described. Like, I mean, bulk ordering requires quite a few different groups to be. Engaged and keen, like you, you want to, you want to get enough landholders saying, putting their hand up and saying that they're interested to actually be at the point where you could put a bulk order together because no nursery is going to sort of accept your order for something that you think might happen.

You have to actually show projects and sign contracts and that's, that's what gets you pants in the queue. But it's very hard to. Get that sort of consensus and alignment and commitment. If you just have to call people individually or try and email back and forth their plans and then bundle it together in a spreadsheet and then make sure you didn't get the numbers wrong.

So this is where we see that tooling for this sort of collective action and alignment can make a huge difference. And then the other one. So if you're in the [00:50:00] situation, please get in touch. We have multiple people using it in exactly this way now, and the yeah, we've had a lot of very positive feedback from them.

I'm not gonna quote quotes. It should end up on our website soon. It was, yeah. But we often get people saying this is transformational. Finally, we have the tools to actually do what we're trying to achieve which is a nice thing to hear about your product. Okay. Another one. We know that the forest is continuously emitting CO2.

This is from the soil biology decomposition of dead plant material and fallen trees, et cetera. It's being sequestered by the trees and aiding their growth. How is it being accounted for in your formulations for sequestered carbon? Our formulations are based on research in the space by third party.

So we basically, we've, we've never gone out and measured the carbon and forest matter ourselves. It's very expensive. It takes a long time. It requires a lot of expertise. We just draw from the research in the space and apply that in our systems. Much of that research does. Include the below ground biomass and in some cases, which is roots and stuff, which can be a [00:51:00] huge amount of a tree.

And also the below ground organic carbon, which can be sort of leaf litter or on ground or, or organic soil carbon. 75% sounds like a lot to me. 25% below ground biomass carbon component compared to the above ground biomass is a pretty standard figure that's actually used depending on the forest type.

So, short answer is that yes, we do consider it. I'm pretty sure that the ETS numbers also consider it and are based on it, which we use for ETS registered forest. And yes, it makes a big difference and is very important both for carbon sequestration and also general ecological health. Like if you have dead soil.

It's not very good for the climate. It's not very good for absorbed organic carbon because it probably isn't very much, and it's also not very good for everything that lives in the area. All right, one hour coming up. Thanks so much for all your time, everybody and appreciate your interest.