Land to Market Conference 29-31 March 2021, Albury NSW
Walter Jehne, Regenerate Earth
Walter Jehne is an internationally recognized soil microbiologist and innovation strategist. He has immense field and research experience in soils, grasslands, agriculture and forests at local, national (CSIRO and Science Adviser to Australia's National Soil Advocate), international (UN) level. Walter's specialisation is the role of soil microbes' symbiotic processes in the ecology of diseases, plant health, nutrient and waste cycling, soil pedogenesis and the regeneration of bio-systems. Decades of research have made him expert in plant root ecology, mycorrhizal fungi, glomalin, and soil carbon formation. He also has worked on biology's enormous influences in hydrological cycles, weather patterns, regional and global cooling, and cloud formation and rain precipitation. Recent work has focused on commercializing leading bio-innovations which will urgently help restore agro-ecosystems and urban agriculture and ecologies. Walter is determined to advance the practical verification, application and extension of these innovations, including for cities and their supply chains, to sustain the current 8 billion and projected 10 billion people by mid-century.

Grazing Ecologies in Regenerating Australia's Natural Capital and Safe Future
Australia is aridifying, degrading and burning dangerously, and unless addressed this decade we risk further loss of rangelands and forests. We need new visions, values and practical solutions to secure our landscapes and future, and to recognize that our economy and society depends on these bio-systems, their resilience, buffering, cooling, biodiversity and bio-productivity. We must rehydrate landscapes by ensuring rain infiltrates into healthy soils and our 'in-soil reservoirs' to sustain the longevity of plant growth and regional cooling. We can only do this by regenerating the Earth's soil carbon sponge, with perennial pastures and grazing ecologies that re-create our former deep 'mould' soils that retain and enable plants to use most raindrops; by extending the vision and practices of innovative farmers bio-sequestering up to 10 tons of carbon per hectare per annum back into their soils, and by extending 'Regenerate Australia' to retain 1 million Giga litres of extra rainwater, protected from evaporation and at fraction of the cost of dry dams. We only have this decade before dangerous extremes limit our last chances to do this.