A brand new topic and a brand new venue for our September Green Drinks! Join us as we hear from three locals about the future of our food production, both locally in our region and nationally. We'll get an insight into electrification on farms, diverting fruit away from landfill and the role of biodiversity in farming.

Meet your speakers:

💡 Mike Casey is the CEO of Rewiring Aotearoa, an organisation focused on rapid and inevitable energy transition. There are approximately 10 million machines in NZ that run on fossil fuels and the replacement of these is an effective and immediate form of emissions reductions. Mike and his wife Rebecca spent the last few years electrifying over 20 of these machines on his farm, Forest Lodge in Mt Pisa, making it an 100% electric orchard.

🍒 Stephanie Cavell is the Sales Manager at Cherry Corp in Cromwell and leads their 'Cherry Rescue Project' which partners with other businesses to ensure 'cosmetically imperfect cherries' are used in other products rather than going into landfill. Steph recently won an award for her commitment to the improvement of the industry through waste minimisation and will be sharing how this works at a food production level.

🌱 Greg Whall is the biodiversity coordinator at The Southern Lakes Sanctuary; a landscape scale conservation project focused on a long term strategy to increase biodiversity, and protect our native taonga across our incredible region. Established in 2021 Southern Lakes Sanctuary is one of the largest and most exciting conservation projects in the country and Greg will be shedding light on the role of biodiversity on farms.

We're also thrilled to have Queenstown local, Jaimie Stodler, from the Sustainable Food & Fibre (SFF) Futures* team at Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) join us to share the projects they're supporting locally and what the future looks like at an MPI level.

*SFF Futures supports problem-solving and innovation in New Zealand’s food and fibre sector by co-investing in initiatives that make a positive and lasting difference.

Huge thanks to Jaimie and Anna Ryder from MPI who have collaborated with us to make this Green Drinks happen!

And now for a new venue...Lone Star! We're excited to take Green Drinks into a new (for us) space for September and were stoked to hear about all the actions the Lone Star team takes to make its operation more sustainable - things like reducing food waste, improving the use and efficiency of appliances, moving from paper to online where possible, being a RefillNZ station, introducing a vegan menu to offer meat free options, and lots more!

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday 28th September - don't forget to grab your $5 ticket and spread the word! All welcome, and feel free to pop into Lone Star earlier to grab some dinner before we kick off.