biochar

Timber Talks Podcast: Craig Sams Pioneering Carbon-Conscious Practices in Food and Forestry

From Forestrydegree.net:

Lessons You’ll Learn:
Listeners will gain valuable insights into the benefits of biochar, particularly its role in supporting the soil microbiome, enhancing soil fertility, and aiding in carbon sequestration. Craig explains how biochar helps retain soil nutrients and moisture, making it an essential component for sustainable forestry and agriculture. The episode also explores the emerging technologies and practices that are transforming the forestry industry, including the use of biochar in urban tree planting, agriculture, and even road construction. Additionally, Craig discusses the importance of carbon pricing and the potential future of biochar in global environmental strategies.

Craig Sams is the Executive Chairman of Carbon Gold Limited, a company at the forefront of biochar and sustainable soil solutions. With a background in organic food, Craig transitioned into the world of sustainable forestry after realizing the profound impact of soil health on climate change. He has been instrumental in promoting the use of biochar in various industries, from agriculture to urban planning. Craig is also a former chairman of the Soil Association and has been a vocal advocate for carbon pricing as a means to incentivize sustainable farming and forestry practices. His innovative approach to soil health continues to influence global discussions on sustainability.

Topics Covered

This episode covers a range of topics related to sustainable forestry and biochar. Craig Sams discusses the origins of Carbon Gold and the company’s mission to promote biochar as a tool for soil health and carbon sequestration. The conversation explores the science behind biochar, its benefits for soil microbiomes, and its applications in agriculture and urban forestry. Craig also highlights the importance of regulatory frameworks like carbon pricing in driving sustainable practices. Additionally, the episode touches on the potential future of biochar in global environmental strategies, including its use in construction and even space exploration.

.About the Guest: Craig Sams Executive Chairman Carbon Gold Ltd

Craig Sams is a visionary entrepreneur and pioneer in the fields of organic food and sustainable agriculture. He co-founded Whole Earth Foods, a company that championed the organic food movement in the UK and brought natural, healthy products like organic peanut butter and cornflakes to the mainstream. Craig’s journey into sustainability didn’t stop at food; he later co-founded Green & Black’s, an organic chocolate company known for its commitment to ethical sourcing and environmental stewardship. Under his leadership, Green & Black’s became the first company to launch a product certified as carbon neutral, highlighting Craig’s dedication to reducing the environmental impact of food production. His early adoption of carbon-conscious practices set a precedent that continues to influence the industry today.

Transitioning from organic food to forestry, Craig founded Carbon Gold Limited, a company that specializes in biochar—a form of charcoal used to enhance soil health and sequester carbon. Craig’s interest in biochar was sparked by the discovery of terra preta, an ancient soil enrichment technique used by indigenous peoples in the Amazon. He recognized the potential of biochar to improve soil fertility, retain moisture, and reduce nutrient runoff, making it a vital tool in the fight against climate change. Today, Carbon Gold is at the forefront of promoting biochar in agriculture and forestry, offering sustainable soil solutions that support long-term environmental health. Craig’s innovative approach has positioned him as a leading figure in the sustainable forestry sector.

Beyond his entrepreneurial ventures, Craig has played a significant role in shaping the broader sustainability agenda. As the former chairman of the Soil Association, the UK’s leading organic certification body, he has been a vocal advocate for organic farming, carbon pricing, and sustainable land management. His work with the Soil Association helped to elevate the importance of soil health in the public consciousness and pushed for policies that recognize the environmental benefits of organic farming. Craig’s contributions to sustainability extend beyond business; he is a thought leader who continues to influence global discussions on environmental stewardship and the role of agriculture and forestry in mitigating climate change.

Episode Transcript

Mindy: Welcome to another episode of Timber Talks, the podcast, where we dive deep into the world of forestry and arboriculture. I’m your host, Mindy, and today we have a very special guest with us, Craig Sams, the  Executive chairman of Carbon Gold Limited. Craig has been a pioneer in sustainable forestry practices, and his company is at the forefront of innovations and biochar and soil health. Welcome, Craig. Can you tell us about the origins of carbon, gold and the journey towards becoming a leader in biochar and sustainable soil solutions? And I would also like to add, could you define what biochar is for our listeners?

 Craig Sams: Okay. First of all, my background isn’t in forestry. It’s in food, and that’s mainly an organic food. And I didn’t really start working with trees until I was moved on from my peanut butter business, which was called Whole Earth, to my chocolate business, which was called Green and Blacks. And suddenly I was dealing with a tree crop, cocoa beans. In the days of my food business, I launched a brand of corn flakes called Whole Earth, and we also launched a brand, Organic Corn Flakes. And we discovered that we didn’t have to pay for many carbon credits because the corn was grown organically and the farmers added carbon to the soil every year. Where they grew the corn, and that offset almost the rest of the carbon footprint of making the corn flakes, packaging them and shipping them, distributing them. And that’s when I realized that organic farming certainly is a way of dealing with the challenge of climate change. And I was the treasurer and then chairman of the Soil Association, which is our organic body here. And,, so I pushed for us to campaign for carbon pricing because, you know, if you’re an organic farmer, the big problem you have is people say, oh, organic food is too expensive. The minute you price in carbon. Organic food in most cases would actually be cheaper.

 Craig Sams: That made me aware of the importance of carbon. Then I read a book that described terra preta, which is something they found in Brazil in what used to be before the Amazon rainforest took over the Amazon farming district of South America. In other words, the people there in their finding it. Every time they clear the rainforest, they find evidence that there were farmers there and they were making biochar out of all kinds of waste. They just dig a pit in the ground, throw in their food, waste any other waste, woodland waste, set fire to it, burn it without letting oxygen in. In other words, making charcoal. But the instead of burning the charcoal like like we do in barbecues or whatever, they would spread it on their lamb and it created these fertile patches of land in Brazil, where farmers would actually just sell truckloads of their soil to neighbors who didn’t have that kind of land because of the difference it made to fertility. So that’s when I thought, well, there’s this is something that should be marketed to farmers and growers in Britain. And so I founded a company called Carbon Gold, and we launched a range of products that were based on biochar. And basically biochar is charcoal.

 Craig Sams: It’s ground up fine so that it really penetrates the soil. And once it’s in the soil, it has various benefits. The main one is it supports the mycorrhizal network in the soil. This is the microbiome of the soil. All the little fungi and bacteria that make for healthy soil. It also retains water. It helps to reduce the runoff of water, which often when you have runoff of water, you have runoff of the soil nutrients as well, which you don’t want to lose. And to support that, it has something called cation exchange capacity. So the biochar itself has lots of positive and negative points on it that stick to nitrates and phosphorus and other soil nutrients so that they don’t wash away when it rains. So when you put it in the soil, you are building up that mycorrhizal community, which ultimately fungi are not immortal. Bacteria are not immortal. When they die, their bodies, their cells become carbon as well. They break. So you build up soil organic matter more rapidly if you have biochar in the soil. So you’re building up long term fertility at the same time as you’re hanging on to the soil nutrients and to moisture. So that’s the difference between biochar and the charcoal that you might barbecue your sausages with.

Mindy: Okay. Well, in the US we we’ve been playing around with the carbon credits and stuff like that, but that really hasn’t. I know Europe with the ESG is you know, they have goals and stuff established. But in the US we’re typically slow at adopting some new ideas as far as agriculture or forestry goes. How has the forestry industry evolved over the years in terms of sustainability and environmental impact.

 Craig Sams: Both up and down at the outset? You know, one of the things that’s happening in Europe at the end of this year is what’s called the UDR, which is the EU regulation on deforestation free products. So there’s going to start to be more control over food produced in the EU and important to the EU to make sure that there’s no deforestation associated with it., I founded a chocolate business in the farmers use bio char. They make their own, but an awful lot of cacao comes from deforested land. And because the stuff we use is organic, it’s the trees have shade trees to keep them healthy. But modern sort of ethnically chemically advanced cacao production uses chemical sprays to fight fungal diseases like black pod. And then you end up with the degraded soil and the need for more chemical fertilizer. Now the Forestry Stewardship Council and something called the Pefc program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification are both rising up the agenda. In Britain. We have the UK Woodland Assurance standard as well, the Soil Association, which I used to be chairman of, and I’m still on the board of the certification part.

 Craig Sams: It’s a charity, but it has a certification business now certifies woodland to that standard and is rapidly expanding its role in certifying sustainable woodland and forestry and the associated products. And I think that’s the future. And the more that there is a legal requirement that deforestation doesn’t happen, the more it’s not going to happen. On the other hand, we still in Britain import huge ship loads of woodchips from Louisiana., that comes from forests in Arkansas that are planted, harvested, turned into woodchips, shipped to Britain. A wood pellets, I should say shipped to Britain and burned in a power station called Drax up in Yorkshire, where all the carbon that those trees have sequestered over the previous 30 years ends up back in the atmosphere in a couple of days. ,, to generate electricity and it you know, when you take into account that carbon footprint, it would be better to use oil, gas anything than wood. But. It’s renewable. And for a while that was what everybody wanted. Right, right.

Mindy: Could you give us some examples of the innovative technologies and practices that Carbon Gold has implemented to improve soil health and carbon sequestration?

 Craig Sams: Sequestration? Yes. Yes. The. Well, one of the things we’re quite excited about is the Stockholm tree pit method. Mhm. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

Mindy: No I haven’t.

 Craig Sams: Well, Bjorn Hembrom was the chief environment officer of Stockholm in Sweden. He developed something called tree pits where he would just put crushed granite into a sort of framework. And the urban trees, I mean, if you’re a tree in town, you’ve got to deal with the fact that they’re building, sticking up, that are getting in the way of your sunlight. There are cars and trucks rbling away, causing vibration that rattles your roots. The polluting and noise and not a lot of fertility. Bjorn started by using crushed stone crushed granite. He now adds bone. Stockholm is there that pioneered it. They add our biochar mix, which also has worm casts, seaweed powder for trace minerals, mycorrhizal fungi and something called Trichoderma. So you get a really strong biology with the biochar. The trees don’t need any other. They. Well, somebody asked Bjorn. So where is the soil in all of this? He says, don’t worry. The microbes will make the soil. It’s absolutely right, you know, the soil builds up as the trees get bigger. And it’s now being adopted in London, in Bristol, in New York, in quite a few towns in the UK. Now, people are planting urban trees because it means they last longer and they grow better in that sort of thing. So we’re quite excited about that. We also supply fruit growers. So there’s a apple grower in Shropshire up north, planted 2000 apple trees a few years ago. He expected, you know, normally 10 to 15% don’t quite make it. The only apple tree of those 2000 that didn’t make it was the one that he accidentally ran over with his tractor.

 Craig Sams: But otherwise they all established they started fruiting earlier than he expected. We cocoa farmers that we work with in Belize, we gave them a couple of kilns so they could make their own biochar, and they now use it on cocoa production. And it’s pretty much having it in the soil has eliminated Black Spot, which is the curse of cocoa growers, because a beautiful cocoa pod suddenly develops this fungal infection and you can’t, you know, you just have to throw it away and hope that the rest of the tree isn’t infected. So those are the kind of examples of the kind of success we’ve had with trees. It really makes a difference in connecting a tree to the biology, the soil microbes, the biology, the microbiome, the biology of the soil and the. Once the tree is connected to that, it has a whole army of microbes on its side, bringing it food, giving it medicine, dealing with,, any problems that tree might have. And in exchange. Drawing down through the mycorrhizal fungi. Some of the carbohydrate, you might say, sugars that the tree is making by photosynthesis in its leaves. So the tree uses some of that to grow more branches more, leaves, more seeds, but it also uses that pp some of it down into its ridge system to feed that fungal network in the soil. And biochar really supports that fungal network.

Mindy: Okay. What upcoming technologies or practices do you believe will have the biggest impact on sustainable forestry?

 Craig Sams: I think we’ve got most of the technology. What we have is a emerging regulatory system that makes the difference. The other thing that is really coming up fast now is that satellites can measure soil carbon. What You you still validate it by doing sampling in the traditional way. But you can then say, okay, when the satellite measures this, it’s 90% of the true figure or head over. This is the true figure, but you then calibrate it so that you get an exact figure. We are coming rapidly towards carbon pricing. And I think that’s going to make such a big difference for forestry and for farming. Once we know that the numbers were getting are true. It’s going to make a big difference to how people manage forests. One of the ways is you will get more mixed broadleaf type woodland. You know, it won’t all just be conifers. , there’s still a role for conifers and they play their part. But when soil carbon and biodiversity rise up the agenda, then people are going to respond. Now, if you’re a farmer growing wheat or barley, you can respond in a couple of years just by adopting more organic regenerative farming methods. Trees have a longer time scale. You know you can’t just change the way of a forestry establishment is in a year or two. It takes 20 years, 30 years, you know, you have to you have to think in a much longer term. But it’s it’s all going in the right direction. And, you know, when you get companies like Microsoft and other really major global companies who are saying, okay, we’re going to we’re going to start dealing with our carbon footprint. That’s probably the biggest single change.

 Craig Sams: And it’s something that has been bubbling under, as I said. I mean, I launched those cornflakes. The first carbon neutral food product ever to be certified in 1994. So that’s 30 years ago. But the world has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. So I think that’s probably the the biggest single thing that identify. The other thing I think is happening there are skyscrapers. There’s one in Kyoto, in Japan. There’s a student dorm at the University of Vancouver. Buildings that are made out of wood but are like 50 stories high as I mean the house I’m in at the moment. Our house was built in 1770. Wow. It’s got an oak frame. It’s absolutely as long as we take care of the roof. We don’t have to worry. Nothing else goes wrong. My oak is a hardwood. Mhm. But I think. I think there is a movement more and more towards using wood in construction to lock carbon up in buildings. You know why? They have concrete and bricks and steel with a high carbon footprint if if it’s economic to use wood instead. So I think that’s an emerging market and we’re going to see a lot more of it the next few decades is some some of the examples are quite amazing really that you know how you can build a building. I mean, my house is I we’ve got we’re three storeys high, so there’s nothing particularly exciting about that. But when you get to 50 storeys and you’re still using wood as your framework, and in the case of Japan, where they have regular earthquakes, wood buildings can bend with an earthquake. They don’t fall apart in the way that concrete based ones do.

Mindy: How is carving goal preparing for these future changes and what new projects are you most excited about?

 Craig Sams: We’re going in a couple of different directions. One is we have a range of products for gardeners, and we actually use this slogan saving the planet one garden at a time. , because if everybody who gardens, you know, people don’t take stuff out of their gardens that much, they tend to just grow stuff for their pleasure. , we have something now called no mow May, where people leave their garden alone for the month of May. And, you know, I’m looking out now at my window., you know, we have grass that’s nearly knee high. I think that we’ve gone for gardening, and people use it for growing vegetables and in greenhouses. Vertical farming is coming up. The agenda now by Charles. Very helpful in hydroponics. It keeps your nutrients in the flow. So we’ve got we’ve got that the and of course these I mentioned the Stockholm tree pit method that’s really taking off now because it’s you know when you’re planting trees, you want to you’re thinking 30, 40, 50 years ahead. So you want trees that are going to still be trouble free in 30 or 40 or 50 years. We’re shipping more and more of our product to places like Qatar and Dubai in the Gulf, the sort of countries which are desert but actually are only desert because goats and sheep were prioritized and they overgrazed. And then gradually the vegetation died away, the soil lost its fertility, and the quickest way to rebuild that fertility is to get biochar, or particularly enriched biochar, which is what we make at carbon gold.

 Craig Sams: And, , you know, the Cop 28, the last climate conference, I was a speaker there, and they had an urban farm, an example of sustainable carbon sequestering farm. And they had our biochar product throughout it in the soil. And it makes a big difference. So I think that’s another area where we see a lot of growth in the Middle East and anywhere where soil needs remediation. Funnily enough, biochar char also ends up in asphalt. You know, it’s especially with electric cars. You get more potholes, like holes in asphalt roads that people swerve to avoid, and then they run into an oncoming car. If you put bio char into asphalt, it strengthens it and you get a much more resilient service. California is now leading the charge on that. Yeah. In terms of getting buy chart into road building. It also goes into concrete. And I mentioned in buildings, but really the sort of the areas where we’re seeing the most growth is gardening, because people want it in their own gardens, because it makes a difference. Vegetable growers, they they’re seeing the commercial benefits. You know, they can use less manure or compost or fertilizer if they have by chart in the soil. And,, there is a,, we’re working with some people who are going to be at the,, it’s in Lincoln, Nebraska in September, and it’s a Great Plains bio char control that it’s the first one, but they’re they’re the Nebraska State. I was born in Nebraska.

Mindy: Oh.

 Craig Sams: I’m quite proud about this, this development. But the Great Plains Biochar Conference, the,, Nebraska Forestry Service participating and supporting it because,, the prairies that. Well, as I said, I was born in Nebraska. My great grandfather plowed prairie that had 250 tons of carbon per hectare.. What’s that? About 100 tons per acre. By the time I was born, that was down to ten. Wow. Rest ended up. Most of it ended up in the atmosphere, but then the soil structure broke down. And as that happened, and in 1927, it rained and it the soil just gave way. And you had flooding down in,, Missouri and Arkansas, where all that farmland from places like Nebraska and South Dakota and Iowa just washed away. And that’s why there wasn’t any carbon in the soil or hardly any by the time I was born. You may have heard of Muddy Waters. Well, he was named after a song called Muddy Waters, and there was a whole slew of blues songs from all those farmers in the who, you know, got 40 acres and a mule when they were freed from slavery after the Civil War and they got washed out. All right. The they ended up in Detroit or Chicago working in car factories, but it wasn’t what they had expected. So there’s plenty of room to rebuild those rich prairie soils the Pawnee used to use biochar. The tribes of Pawnee in Nebraska would create biochar out of prairie grass. The following year, the buffalo would all graze in that area, and the Pawnee had created drive lines. They could, even though they didn’t have horses or guns, they could stampede the buffalo down the drive lines because they were all congregated there, and they would chase them off the edge of a cliff and down below the teepee makers, the clothing makers and the food processors, the butchers are all there. But. So the biochar had a use in North America historically as well as in the Amazon. Well, it.

Mindy: Seems what I’ve been kind of seeing as what is old is new again, we seem to to become a circling back around to some old techniques that that worked because we, at least in North America, we’re kind of seeing are we seeing what we’ve done to the environment and how we’ve been responsible for that? Because when I teach, , I was teaching classes for senior citizens through the AARP organization, you know, chemical application and all that stuff that I always tend to go in the organic way because it’s it’s kinder to the environment and it’s better for people. So but, you know, organic gardening hasn’t always been the, the big thing that it it is now. And unfortunately in North America some people don’t know what organic really means. So it’s sometimes it’s an education.

 Craig Sams: What advice. Wendell Berry, his great quote,, he said we didn’t know what we were doing because we didn’t understand what we were undoing. And I think, you know, for my great grandfather, here was this miraculous land where you didn’t you just. You plowed it, you put in your grain, and you got these abundant crops every year, and it never seemed to run out. But then by 1930, while a few years later you had the dustbowl, the same thing happened. Not as bad as the dustbowl, but in Europe, you know, a lot of our soils are just. And they’re just not what they were. Melody. And, you know, we can’t use and do chemical fertilizers by you a bit more time, but ultimately you just have to keep using more and more to stay in place.

Mindy: Right, right. Well, in North America, you know, we’ve we are learning the lessons of but we’re really not doing much about it, about the cost of removing wetlands. You know, we have more flooding. We have like a Louisiana as an example. We’re we’re beginning to see the, the cost of that behavior. We know better. We just continue to one not adjust. And and two, I guess some ways that’s just han nature. But I love Wendell Berry. I’m very familiar with him. So okay. What are the common issues that forestry professionals face when it comes to soil health. And how can biochar help mitigate these issues?

 Craig Sams: Well, I think the issues you’re talking about are ecosystem services. You know, forest isn’t just somewhere where you get wood sequesters carbon. It purifies the air that we breathe. It reduces the risk of flood. And it’s good for han health and sanity just to, you know, be in or around woods. And the fact if you add it all up, you’re the real value from an ecosystem point of view is sometimes even more than the value of the wood that you harvest from it. I think that’s what we call natural capital, public money for public goods. And it’s something that we don’t, you know, we don’t pay people who grow trees, who have woodland for the fact that they’re making our air cleaner or, you know, more oxygen. We don’t pay them. Well. We have a group here. I have 20 acres of woodland. My neighbors are quite small, most of them 48 years. A few farmers. We had terrible flooding in January of this year. Where near the sea and the people who are down in what used to be the marshes and got drained, they all got flooded. And it was really, really sad. Some of the stories of what happened were all now working together. We call it the Future Landscapes Trust, but we’re working because part of it we’re putting in what are called,, they’re like log dams that just slow the flow of water so that it doesn’t. Just when it rains, it doesn’t rush off because we’ve got hills leading down to the sea. So when it rains, the water, you know, gravity being what it is, the water washes down and,, and the people near the sea take the hit. So that’s these are all economic things that, you know, never got calculated when people were just talking about wood and wood as fuel even. Yeah, even more so. Nobody thinks about the impact on climate of burning wood.

Mindy: Right. Well, I see, you know, in North America we have, you know, this kind of divide on forests, you know, multi-use type of approaches. And, you know, everybody, you know, their opinion is the top of the pile, so to speak. So and we always have, you know, somebody wants to cut our national forests in some way, you know, take a million acres as an example and harvest it just, you know, like it’s it’s a disposable product and it is to away. But forest in the in our environment is so important to our health. I mean science is proving that over and over and over again. So there’s a local story of a gentleman. They actually named a park after him. And it was in the 1930s, and he was sick, and he kept going to his doctor, and his doctor said, I don’t know what’s wrong. All I can suggest is you spend 30 minutes a day in the forest. And so he did. That felt better. He started increasing the amount of time. He ended up being a naturalist and talked and taught people, you know, and the 1930s how being in a forest can actually make you healthier. And, you know, it’s a continuing education in my in my neck of the woods of educating people of of the value of a tree versus, you know, the beauty, the wood, what it does for our environment and what it does for us as hans. And I think that’s kind of a new concept, that trees have that type of value. It helps us stay healthy and that type of thing. So, .

 Craig Sams: Well, there is a book called 13 Ways to Smell a Tree. Where is it? It captures some of what you’ve just described. There is also a book by a guy called Jake Robinson that I recommend to everybody. It’s called Invisible Friends and it’s about the. It’s not just oxygen. The trees are exhaling into the air. Every tree from their leaves. It’s all kinds of therapeutic chemicals called terpenes. Pinions. Fir trees and pine trees. And these have a real benefit. I’ll be involved with trees. And so we,, you know, if you go back far enough in han history, we were monkeys living in trees. And the benefits of tree exhalations are really hard to measure. But they are. I go for a walk out my back door. I live in a valley that faces the sea. So all the stuff that trees exude, the breezes when the wind comes over. It doesn’t. Unless it’s coming directly from the southeast. It when it blows it away inland. The rest of the time it just goes over it. So it kind of acculates here. I just go for a walk and just take a deep breath, stand still.

 Craig Sams: Sometimes I’ll bunch up some leaves of a tree. Just take a deep breath and you’re getting all that stuff that’s just sitting on the leaves waiting for someone to grab it. Somebody put a value of in sterling 2.79 pounds. For every pound of that you get from woodland. So, in other words, the real value of a woodland is actually almost three times the value of the wood itself because of the benefits for water quality, air quality, soil quality. , we dug a we’ve put a wildlife pond in our garden here, which is on a slope or on a hill, which was forest for until this house was built, as I said, 270 years ago. And we wanted the water. We just thought it would be a nice little pond that would be two feet deep. Well, the guys who did it said we have to get down to the clay. We have to get down to some kind of subsoil. And they had to go find more than five feet.

Mindy: Wow.

 Craig Sams: The trees have just over the millennia. Every time the leaves drop, they decompose. And we got more soil. And we have this deep, rich soil that, you know, is gold dust. Really? Yes.

Mindy: Yes. I totally agree with you. , and people don’t, don’t really realize that soil is really like gold dust because we would be really hurting if if we didn’t have soil. And the soil has served us well, but we as a species haven’t always served soil well either. So, you know, it’s hopefully we’re seeing a change, a global change. I know that the change has to start somewhere. But I mean, in North America, farmland is getting and woodlands getting be absorbed for urban development. Like it’s, you know, an unlimited resource. And it’s not it is a limited resource and just some bad, , what I would consider some bad urban planning. But you know, again, that that will be a lesson that we have to learn. Unfortunately, in North America, I think we’re a little slow in those lessons.

 Craig Sams: So North America, you know, it’s,, everywhere. And they. I think I’m a big believer in carbon pricing. You know, farmers are businessmen. They count every penny. They they more than anybody else, they really from year to year, they depend on the economic impact of the weather, of the soil, of the market for what they produce. And if you put carbon into if you could put a price on carbon, people would farm in a more sustainable way. They would plant more trees on their land. I remember my uncle, he moved from Nebraska to Iowa, but he showed me a corporate farm that had an avenue of trees leading up to the farm buildings, and he said, I don’t get it. Why are these people growing these trees? Don’t they realize that the shade from those trees is going to reduce their yield by six bushels per acre all along that site? And of course, if you just look at the bushels per acre, they get rid of the trees. But, you know, there’s so many other benefits from trees, like holding the soil together and the network. I mean, you look at a tree, what you don’t realize is you can be 20ft away from it and you’re still standing on its roots, and the mycorrhizal network can go much further even than that. So it’s all happening. It’s just invisible.

Mindy: Right, right. What best practices should professionals follow to maximize the benefits of biochar and other sustainable technologies in their day to day operations?

 Craig Sams: I think on the biochar there are it’s it’s good to put it in the ground when you plant trees. It also works with trees that aren’t well. So there are a lot of examples. We work with a company here called Apex Soil Solutions, and they have a device called the geo injector, which is going to be rolled out in the US next year. It’s a device that goes, it’s like a tube that goes into the ground. That is a compressor at the back, and it blows air sideways into the soil, so it compacts the soil. When you put biochar in with the mix that we have with the mycorrhizae and the worm casts, etc., that goes into the soil as well. We have a mulberry tree in our garden that has been there for a couple of hundred years, and it’s a huge tree, and it started getting little black spots on the leaves. We gave it the treatment with the geo injector, and I’m looking at it now and it’s absolutely blast. The first year after it was treated, there were just a few spots still on the leaves. Last year it was almost perfect this year so far. Touch wood. It’s it’s it’s still it’s really doing well. And so I think there are ways of getting, making existing trees healthy and there are ways of making trees of the future healthy by putting biochar in the ground before you plant them. Then the roots get away. They connect to the soil microbiome and you’re on a roll. You know that they’re away.

Mindy: Do you see? , I used to. I did a couple of projects for NASA where I grew tomato seeds. I grew tomatoes from seeds that went up into the International Space Station. I did the same with basil. And I know they took soil samples of the soil and Mars and and mimicked the soil here on Earth. , what would grow and everything that they planted, , vegetables, herbs, trees, etc. grew in this mimicking of Martian soil. Do you see way in the future biochar being,, a component of us, , growing food on other planets, that type of thing, using the same technology. , because I would, you know, bio char, , is probably a lightweight product. Would probably be lighter than soil.

 Craig Sams: Have you been reading my mail?

Mindy: No no no no no no, I’m always, always curious.

 Craig Sams: I am meeting on this coming Tuesday, the 16th of July with a company called Vertical Futures to do vertical farming. They are also working with the International Space Station on developing resilient growing systems. For that, I’m not sure we should mess around with the climate on Mars or the moon, but, you know, yes, I think forgetting about them, we’ve done enough to our landscape that needs remediation. There’s plenty of work getting our planet back into good soil. Help before we go into outer space. But that’s it. Just interesting because, you know, people are looking at that and looking at the role that biochar can play in that.

Mindy: Right? I’ve written three books that have to do with herbs and seeds Will travel. That’s what I tell people. Seeds will travel and if we can take every medicine with us. But that is an option to grow our own medicine, so to speak, to. But to be able to do that, we’re going to need some, some things. And I’m not an advocate of sending synthetic fertilizer to Mars. , but I was just curious because I know that’s kind of one of the limiting factors of growing our own food wherever we go, Mars or the moon or whatever, if that was, if that was something that was in the pipeline or, or an idea you had thought of or so. Well, that brings us to the end of the episode of Timber Talks. Craig, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights on sustainable forestry practices and the future of the industry. It’s been a fascinating discussion, and to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with your colleagues. Stay tuned for more episodes of Timber Talks, where we continue to explore the latest in forestry and arboriculture. Until next time, take care and keep innovating

COP28 - Soil Carbon sequestration, Food productivity and Climate Economics

I want to start by quoting a Joni Mitchell song called ‘Woodstock’ which goes:

We are stardust

We are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

back to the garden

Carbon is in almost all of the food we eat.
Carbon is in all plants

1 in every 8 atoms in our bodies is carbon

Getting ourselves ‘back to the garden’ means making sure that carbon is our ally, not our enemy

It was, as carbon dioxide, once 95% of our atmosphere

Now it is less than 1/10 of one percent

We are converting carbon from 12-15% in healthy organic soils to as little as ½%. 

Atmosphere 95% Carbon dioxide. Now:  .04%

Cyanobacteria were the earliest lifeform that could convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrate, paving the way for microbial life and ultimately, all plants and animals.  Today the total biomass of microbes is over 90 billion tonnes, about the same amount as in plants all animals are 2 billion tonnes C and humans are less than 1/10 of a billion  tonnes of carbon.  It was, as carbon dioxide, once 95% of our atmosphere.

“In my book a pioneer is a man who turned the grass upside down, strung barbed wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land and called it progress”
— Charles M. Russell – ‘the cowboy artist’

We humans, once we started farming, emitted a lot of carbon from the soil, where it does good, to the atmosphere, where it stops our planet reflecting sunlight, trapping it and thus causing global warming

‘We didn’t know what we were doing because we didn’t know what we were undoing’
— Wendell Berry

Farmers in the US sent billions of tonnes of soil carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Nobody knew this was happening, but soil fertility eventually ran out.

I was born in Nebraska…near that red X on the map above.  There were over 250 tonnes of soil carbon per hectare when my great grandfather ploughed virgin prairie back in 1885.  By the time I was born, about 60 years later, that 250 tonnes was down to 20 tonnes of carbon per hectare.  The other 90% had disappeared into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  The  fertility of the soil suffered, but chemical fertilisers came along just in time to keep things going.  The nitrous oxide from those fertilisers made things worse, though, as nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that has a refractive index 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide.  So nitrogen fertiliser increases the trapping of heat on the planet, too.

A lot of that soil carbon was lost because farming destroyed the soil structure and when it rained heavily in 1927 huge amounts of soil washed down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, wiping out many black farmers who had small farms after slavery ended. 

Mississippi Floods 1927

Most emigrated to Chicago or Detroit.  Many blues songs described this wipeout, including ‘Muddy Waters’ – not the singer, but a song about losing a farm to that tide of mud.

Dust Bowl 1935

A few years later the fractured soils of the Midwest gave way again and started to blow away.

An Englishman, Richard St Barbe Baker, one of the founders of the Soil Association, was asked to set up a tree planting programme that created a line of 220 million trees from the Canadian border to Mexico that stopped further soil loss.

Of course fossil fuels are part of the problem, but agriculture, up till 1980, was responsible for half of all the carbon dioxide increase since 1850.  Fossil fuels passed farming around 1950 and then increased by 5 times. Farming emissions more than doubled, largely thanks to chemicals. Now it’s a total of 37 billion tonnes a year.   

50% of total CO2 increase 1850-1980 is from farming. 100% of total CO2 reduction can come from farming

From 1850-1980:                 Today

Total CO2 from Farming:        160 billion tonnes             10 billion tonnes

Total CO2 from Fossil Fuels:  165 billion tonnes             27 billion tonnes

If we change the way we farm and even keep burning fossil fuels, we could reduce greenhouse gas levels by at least 20 billion tonnes a year and be back to a stable climate in a decade or so.

Mycorrhizae

Mycorrhizae take the carbon that plants make in their leaves as carbohydrate (sugar) and use it to grow the underground population of microbial biomass, the soil microbiome

Mycorrhizae Networking

They form a network that is the soil equivalent of the internet – if a plant needs something the mycorrhizae feed more sugar to the microbes that can help.

Actinomycetes and streptomyces - Nature’s antibiotics

Actinomycetes                                          

Streptomyces

They feed poisonous bacteria that make chemicals that kill plant diseases (and are the source of our medical antibiotics)

Mycorrhizae feed Trichoderma fungi, whose threadlike hyphae strangle root-eating nematodes. It’s hard to imagine fungi killing worms in the soil, but they can.

All these materials are made of carbon and ultimately decompose and become the carbon in the soil from whence they came. Chemical fertilisers reduce mycorrhizae and therefore soil carbon

ANNUAL GLOBAL NITROGEN FIXATION

                              Mtonnes N2 per year

INDUSTRIAL

Industrial (Haber-Bosch)         ~50

Combustion                               ~20

                           TOTAL           ~80

NATURAL

Agricultural land                       ~90

Forest & non-agricultural land   ~50

Lightning                               ~10

                           TOTAL       ~150

Total Industrial and Natural:       230 M tonnes

WE ARE LOSING…

39 FOOTBALL FIELDS A MINUTE (Volkert Engelsman - IFOAM)

12 MILLION HECTARES OF LAND DEGRADED EVERY YEAR

12 million hectares of land degraded every year -      1.8% of available land lost to farming

WE ONLY HAVE 1.5 BILLION HECTARES THAT EQUATES TO ONLY HAVING 125 YEARS OF FARMLAND LEFT.  

This madness has to stop. EVEN IF IT JUST TO GUARANTEE FOOD FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN, NOT TO MENTION REDUCING ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE

Stop subsidies

Put human health first

Green Revolution had unintended consequences

Genetic Engineering a problem, not a solution

Little time left

Protect our agricultural capital (soil)

Support small farmers and diverse ecosystems

Study and learn from traditional farming

Reward farmers who prevent climate change

The path to sanity was marked out 15 years ago by the 400 scientists on the  International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, the IAASTD.   Its conclusion was that we need to reward farmers who prevent climate change

Eight years ago at COP21 in Paris every nation in the world signed up to an agreement that included Article 6 which said we should reward farmers who prevent climate change

Agriculture must be included in reducing Greenhouse Gas levels.  Sultan Al Jaber, who organised this conference, has said that agriculture will be high on the agenda in COP28 in Abu Dhabi this November and this is why we’re here.

CARBON FARMING EFFICIENCY

Industrial Farm – 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce

               1 calorie of food

Organic Farm – 6 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce         

             1 calorie of food

Farmer with a hoe – 1 calorie of human energy to produce

             20 calories of food

Farmer with a hoe:    120 times more energy-efficient than an organic farmer

                                    240 times more energy-efficient than an industrial farmer

An industrial farm uses 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food.

Organic is better, it uses 6 calories of fossil fuels and it increases soil carbon.

In terms of energy efficiency the organic farmer  uses at least half as much energy as an industrial farmer and increases soil carbon into the bargain.

There’s money in it too, trading carbon credits.

When the boys in the City of London and on Wall Street get it, there is hope.  There is money to be made in carbon and they don’t want to miss out

Rodale Institute 30 year trial results

  1. Organic uses 45% less energy

2. Average yields match conventional (soybeans/corn)

3. C sequestration 1 MT/ha (3.7 T CO2/ha) per annum

Organic farming sequesters at least 4  tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year.  La Vialla a biodynamic farm in Italy, sequesters 10 tonnes per hectare per year, validated annually by the University of Siena for the last 15 years.

“We could sequester the equivalent of the anthropogenic carbon
gas produced by humanity today. Storing carbon in the soil is
organic matter in the soil, organic matter is fertilizing the soil.”
— French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll

  BY LAW: CO2 price to be € 56/tonne  in 2020 and €100/tonne in 2030. Today’s price  €106 /tonne  now

In response to Le Foll after COP21 in Paris the French Government agreed a target carbon price of €56 per tonne by 2020 and €100 per tonne by 2030.  They were too conservative.  The carbon price today is €80 per tonne

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will impose a carbon fee on imports into the EU that reflects this € 80 per tonne price.  That will encourage anyone who exports to the EU to reduce carbon and increase sequestration

1997 - ‘Organic’ ‘Wholegrain’ ‘No GMOs’ One year after they were introduced

‘Carbon Neutral’ Future Forests became The Carbon Neutral Company

The world’s first ever carbon neutral food product was Whole Earth Organic Wholegrain Corn Flakes 1996.  We planted trees to offset our carbon footprint, but it turned out we didn’t have to plant many because the organic farmers who grew the organic corn were increasing soil carbon as organic matter every year.  That’s when the penny dropped for me about organic farming and carbon sequestration

What about Wheat and Barley?

Home Grown Cereals Authority

Most emissions come from fertiliser and fertiliser induced field emissions, i.e soil breakdown.  Growing organically can increase soil carbon and reduce emissions. 

Farming carbon means that an organic farmer can sell at the same price as the non-organic farmer and make more money. If farmers have the same income, then organic wheat would be cheaper and an organic loaf of bread would be cheaper than one with glyphosate herbicide residues, now known to cause a multiplicity of human diseases.  Who’s going to insist on paying more for a loaf of bread that is less healthy?

(Ignores antibiotics cost to human health)

With beef the methane emissions every time a cow burps or farts are a big problem, but less when they are on pasture and regenerative grazing.

Vegans and Vegetarians have lower emissions, which could be reversed if they were 100% organic – which many are.

NET ENERGY LOSS:

CORN ETHANOL    -50%

PALM OIL BIODIESEL -8%

There is never any justification for burning food.  1 person dies every 7 minutes of hunger and we burn half of America’s corn crop as ethanol in gasoline and make ethanol from wheat and barley and biodiesel from rapeseed and palm oil.  We scream at food companies for using palm oil instead of heart-destroying hydrogenated fat while they burn subsidised palm oil in their transportation vehicles. Carbon pricing would stop all of that nonsense dead.  Corn ethanol has a higher carbon footprint than fossil fuel gasoline but it’s ‘renewable’ but so what?

Farmers vs Architects

            Vancouver “Woodscraper” - Wooden buildings will be cheaper than concrete and steel

With carbon pricing it will be cheaper to build with wood than with steel or concrete.  Wood that goes into a building sequesters carbon for centuries.  I live in an oak frame house that was built 260 years ago and the carbon in it ain’t going anywhere. A 70 storey ‘woodscraper’ in Osaka Japan sequesters a huge volume of carbon and, as a bonus, is more resilient to earthquakes.

BIOCHAR

What is it?

Charcoal made to be used as a soil improver

What does it do?

•Increases microbiological populations

•High surface area adsorbs mineral nutrients

•Reduces plant disease

•Reduces fertiliser use

•Help soils retain moisture

•Improves soil structure

•Reduces soil greenhouse gas emissions N2O

•Long term carbon sequestration

Sawmill by-products and farm waste like rice husks and corn stalks can be made into biochar.  This is agricultural charcoal and is almost pure carbon. When it’s in soil it helps with drainage, soil aeration, keeps moisture in the soil and supports a resilient and vibrant soil microbiome and minimises loss of soil nutrients. 

Biochar’s tiny pores are where the soil microbiome flourishes undisturbed by nematodes and protozoa and get on with creating perfect conditions for healthy plants grown under organic methods and represent a permanent addition of carbon to the soil that would otherwise be in the atmosphere.  It has been used extensively on the Urban Farm at Expo City and is being applied in other Gulf countries to restore degraded and desertified soils to full fertility.  There is a biochar session on the 10th which I recommend you attend,

Who’s feeding the world?

70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares - NO SUBSIDIES

30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms - $350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES

The subsidies farmers receive are mostly to increase emissions from soil degradation, nitrous oxide emissions, methane emissions and to convert good food into biofuels.  Carbon pricing can totally replace subsidies, restore fertility to our soils, improve the nutritional value of our food, fight hunger and save our lovely planet from global warming

 

Thank you

Craig Sams

Chairman Carbon Gold Ltd

Director, Soil Association Certification

Expo City Farm Workshop space December 3rd & 4th 2023

Green Brexit conference - 'Is a Zero Carbon Future Possible?' I make the case for pricing all carbon equally.

In March 2018 I was a panellist at a Green Brexit conference - our theme was 'Is a Zero Carbon Future Possible?  The video is below. I come in at 8:34 and 24:56 and 39:05 but the whole session is interesting. The point of this conference was to explore how Brexit could be a positive green step away from the distortions, waste and environmental degradation that the Common Agriculture Policy has brought it its wake. The conclusion was the there needs to be an overarching commitment to the environment that legally binds all future UK governments of whatever political colour. My message was that the one thing that makes a lot of wishes come true is to reward people who take carbon out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere heated up at 39:05 when Michael Liebreich called me out for seeking a universal and equal price for all carbon - he called it 'utopianism' and naive. Maybe he's right, in which case we are all going to die.

 

 

 

Capitalism Must Price Carbon - Or Die

This was a speech I gave at the Harmony in Food and Farming conference in Llandovery, Wales in July 2017.

Please click here to see video clips of the Prince of Wales, Patrick Holden and myself during the conference, which was organized by The Sustainable Food Trust. It aimed to develop an agricultural perspective on the ideas propounded in the book 'Harmony' by HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper.

In 1967 Joni Mitchell wrote a song called Woodstock that included these lines:

“We are stardust, We are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

back to the garden”

We are indeed ‘billion year old carbon’ – the average person of about 80kgs/176lbs  contains about 15kgs/33lbs of carbon.  That ancient carbon is in our bones, our muscle, our fat and our bloodstream, as carbohydrate, fat, protein and other compounds.  The carbon in our bodies may have been previously in soil, in trees, in charcoal, in dinosaur turds, in mosquitoes, in honey...  It was everywhere before it ‘reincarbonated’ in us.  Carbon is immortal.   And it is stardust.

A billion or so years ago a very hot star kept getting hotter.  As it got hotter, it formed hydrogen, then carbon, then oxygen and then the other elements that we know.Sir Fred Hoyle, the great astrophysicist, described this as ‘stellar nucleogenesis’ – stars creating atoms.

When that star got too hot it exploded, became a ‘supernova’ and blasted its carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and rock into space.  Those chunks of rock and elements consolidated to form our solar system, with a sun that is still burning today with the remaining heat of the star that formed it a billion years ago.

Carbon is a promiscuous atom, it has 4 points where it can ‘mate’ with other elements.  That’s why there are so many carbon-based molecules and why carbon is the foundation of all living things.  Where there’s life, there’s carbon.

 According to Hoyle, life, in primitive form, was everywhere. This was called ‘Panspermia.’

Life in rock was called ‘Lithopanspermia.’

Life was fungi. That life bumbled along, depending on acid rain from the very CO2-rich atmosphere a billion years ago to break down carbon that was stored in rock. Then a miracle happened that changed everything.

Bacteria called cyanobacteria became able to combine carbon dioxide CO2 from the atmosphere with H2O water, using sunlight energy, to make carbohydrate C6H12O6, whilst excreting oxygen.  That carbohydrate was the sugar that is the basis of all living energy in plants and, eventually, in animal life too.

Once this happened, one can speculate that the rock-eating fungi saw their chance and organised the cyanobacteria into chain gangs, maximising their potential to capture carbon from the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, then at about 95% CO2.

These became algae, then simple plants, all busy making sugar to feed their own growth and, more importantly, to nourish the growth of the fungi that created them.

The fungi worked with other microbes in the soil, thriving on the sugar coming from the plants and delivering back to 'their' sugar-making plant all the mineral nutrients that they needed to grow.  Plants died and decomposed.  Fungi and bacteria died and decomposed. The carbon-rich detritus of their existence rotted down to become what we know as ‘soil’ – a most precious resource because it is the perfect habitat for fungi and bacteria and a rich source of recycled nutrients for plants.

This soil built up over millions of years, producing rich plant growth that eventually could support the large life forms such as dinosaurs and brontosaurs that existed in the ‘Carboniferous’ age.

This was the soil that early pioneers found in the American Midwest, rich in organic matter that ran very deep thanks to the 3 metre roots of prairie grasses.

When my great grandfather began to plough virgin prairie in Nebraska back in 1885, the soil on our farm contained over 100 tonnes of carbon as organic matter (organic matter in soil is approximately 50% carbon).  By the time I was born in 1944 this was down to about 20 and now it is closer to 10, totally dependent on fertilizer and pesticides.

Farmers are frugal, on our farm we grew and processed almost all the food that we ate, only buying in commodities like flour, salt, sugar and soap that we couldn't make on the farm.  Old calico flour sacks were washed and recycled as clothing, overalls for the boys and dresses for the girls.

Some enterprising flour companies printed pretty patterns on their flour bags when they realised this was happening.  My mother and her sister Thelma wore Nell Rose flour sack dresses.

The men were frugal too, but they were unwittingly wasting the most precious resource on the farm, the soil.  As the poet Wendell Berry put it:

 "We didn't know what we were doing because we didn't know what we were undoing." 

What we were undoing was all the decomposed plant matter that had been accumulating ever since those first Cyanobacteria sped up the process of life on Earth.

The destroyed soil lost its water holding capacity and lost its structure and integrity.  The result was the great Mississippi floods of 1927 when the river was 60 miles wide from April to October, sparking the Great Migration of African-Americans to northern cities as their farms were submerged for half a year.

Then in the 1930s the Dust Bowl triggered another migration, of "Okies" from their farms in Oklahoma, Kansas and western Nebraska as their farms became submerged in dust and dirt.  Richard St. Barbe Baker, an Englishman who founded Men of The Trees in 1926 and was a founder member or the Soil Association, helped restore the broken soils of the Midwest.  Operating under the banner of President Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps he oversaw 3 million men who planted 10 billion trees between 1933 and 1940.  (These men also made good soldiers in WW2).

Tractors also played a destructive role, they could plough twice as deep as a horse-drawn plough, bringing up fertility and carbon from deeper in the soil.  My Uncle Floyd (pictured with me in 1947) still used horses to draw his 8-row planter because horses didn't compact the soil. Tractors did, weakening soil structure.

This experience alarmed people in Europe.  In Britain Eve Balfour wrote "The Living Soil" which proposed a new approach to agriculture that worked with nature and became known as 'organic farming.'

Eve Balfour collaborated with Dr. Innes Pearce who had shown at the Pioneer Project in Peckham that low income families did much better if they understood the basics of good nutrition and domestic hygiene.

Together they formed the Soil Association in 1947 on the premise that good farming would produce heathy food to nourish healthy people and create healthy societies.

My introduction to organic food and healthy eating came via the Japanese guru Georges Ohsawa, author of Zen Macrobiotics.  I imported the books to the UK and sold them via various bookshops.

I sold brown rice snacks at the UFO Club, where the Pink Floyd were the house band.  In February 1966 I opened a restaurant in Notting Hill to spread the macrobiotic message.  In 1968 my brother Gregory opened Seed restaurant, our larger restaurant in Bayswater, London.

Getting ourselves back to the garden

ZEN MACROBIOTICS - Taoism

  • Balanced - Yin and Yang

  • Organic - Sustainable

  • Wholegrain

  • Food for health

  • 'Justice' (Fair)

  • Japanese (Miso, Nori, Tamari)

  • No additives, no hormones

  • Avoid sugar

  • Eat only when hungry

  • Exercise and Activity

Like the Stoics mentioned in the Prince of Wales’ book "Harmony" we believed in "an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos."  We saw this through the prism of Daoist yin and yang philosophy and saw it as the key to a long and happy life ('macro' = 'big, long', 'bios' = 'life').

When we launched a range of macrobiotic food products in 1970 we branded them "Harmony" with a trademark that was a Yin Yang symbol with leaves and roots.

The company went on to become Whole Earth Foods a decade later - unfortunately 'Harmony' was a brand we couldn't register in our key European markets.

When I launched Whole Earth cornflakes in 1997 a friend Dan Morrell, who had founded Future Forests (later to become the Carbon Neutral Company) asked me if I'd like to take the corn flakes 'carbon neutral' -  a term he originally coined. .  He then commissioned  Richard Tipper of the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to measure the carbon footprint of the cornflakes.

To our pleasant surprise we had to plant hardly any trees to offset the carbon used in growing, shipping, processing, packaging and distributing the cereal because the increase in the organic matter on the farms where the corn was grown almost completely offset the carbon emissions from everything else.  That's when I understood that, if we priced carbon into the cost of food, people would farm in a very different way.  It is now urgent that we do so

The UN has said that we only have 60 years of farming left. Farming generates more than a third of the annual increase in greenhouse gas. 

Volkert Engelsmann of IFOAM has calculated that we are losing farmland at the rate of 30 football fields every minute.  None of these losses come from organic farming, which is restorative and regenerative.

Industrial farming wastes energy.  It takes 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy.  A farmer with a hoe uses 1 calorie of human energy to produce 20 calories of food energy.  On a calorie-for-calorie basis a farmer with a hoe is 240 times more carbon efficient than a farmer with lots of equipment and inputs.  More than 30 years of trials at the Rodale Institute farms in Pennsylvania show that organic farming can sequester 1 tonne of carbon per annum.  They have also shown that once the soil is in good shape, the yields match those of industrial farming.

There is an effort afoot to attempt to bring market forces into bringing an end to this potentially disastrous loss of viable farmland.  Part of this is to attempt to appeal to the self-interest of companies like Unilever and General Mills whose supply chain will suffer if farmland becomes unviable and unavailable.

The French National Institute for Agricultural Research published a report in 2015 that stated that if farmers could sequester 4 parts per 1000 of organic matter,  that’s 0.04%, every year in their soil that would be enough to totally offset the annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions that is causing climate change.  That’s without counting any transition to solar, wind or greater energy efficiency.  As a result the French National Assembly voted a carbon price of €65 per tonne to take effect in 2020 and to include agriculture.  French Agriculture Minister Stéphane Le Foll then announced his ‘4 per 1000’ initiative which became part of the Paris Climate Agreement. It was endorsed at COP 22 in Marrakech and  36 countries so far have signed up to participate in restoring soil, the capital base of every nation.

The Prince of Wales co-authored a children’s book called ‘Climate Change’ that shows how carbon goes into the atmosphere and how it comes back into the earth and the sea.  The net annual increase is 16 billion tonnes.

A 3000 hectare biodynamic farm called Fattoria La Vialla in Tuscany Italy has its carbon measured every year by a team from the University of Siena.  La VIalla are sequestering ‘7 per 1000’ every year.  If everyone farmed like those 3 brilliant brothers  in Italy, whose farm is roughly 1/3 pasture, 1/3 forest and 1/3 everything else (grape vines, cereals, fruit, vegetables), then we would not only cancel out the 16 billion tonne increase in CO2 but would see a 12 billion tonne reduction every year.   Additional benefits would be greater biodiversity, cleaner water, less risk of drought and flooding and safer food.  (Their wine is pretty awesome, too).

Going beyond stopping degeneration is the regeneration movement.  This includes: Regeneration International, an offshoot of the mighty Organic Consumers Association in the US; the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO; Soil and More (Netherlands); People 4 Soils (Slow Food movement); and Save our Soils (UK).

Corporations like General Mills are taking strong initiatives.  They have 100,000 hectares of land from their supply chain to be organic by 2020 as part of their carbon reduction policy.

But we still burn food.  One half of the annual USA corn crop is converted to ethanol using more energy to produce it than is embodied in the ethanol. It is mixed with gasoline to be burned as fuel.  The US is now exporting oil and gas yet still burns vast amounts of food in the name of 'energy security.'

We still destroy forests.  According to HRH the Prince of Wales this is at a rate of 15 football fields per minute.  If we valued the carbon stored in those forests at $20 tonne each hectare would be worth $15000.  Once the forest is cleared and then planted with soybeans it is worth $300 per hectare.  HRH described this in a speech in 2008 as ‘The greatest example of market failure in the history of capitalism.’

We still burn wood.  There is a false virtuousness to burning wood.  200,000 wood burning stoves a year are sold in the UK alone.  Wood smoke is more harmful to health than smoke from coal, oil or gas.  It takes a tree 50 years to sequester the carbon that is then consumed in a wood burning stove in 50 minutes. If a replacement tree is planted, will take 50 years to take that carbon back out of the atmosphere.

Wood has the resilience of steel and the load bearing capacity of concrete.  'Glulam' and other new wood technologies mean that wood can be used in 20 story buildings ('plyscrapers'), sequestering the embodied carbon in the wood for centuries.  We should never burn wood, it's a terribly inefficient waste of carbon.

Biochar, or charcoal made from wood, is a way to convert wood by-products into a carbon rich substance that can be put in the soil and will stay there for decades or even centuries.

It dramatically increases the population of beneficial microbes in soil, delivering a healthier plant immune system,  increased water retention and reduced loss of nutrients from leaching.  It is the best use for woody material that is not suitable for building or furniture making.  It is proven to help restore degraded soils and make them fertile and fit for farming again.  There are many examples of its benefits: tomato growers use it to combat plant diseases and increase yields; it cures honey fungus, ash dieback, chestnut blight, phytophthora and other tree diseases; it helps cocoa farmers overcome the devastating impact of black pod.  Stockholm uses it for all their new urban tree plantings as it enhances survival rates.  In Qatar the Aspire Park now use it for all their new tree plantings, with gratifying results.  Biochar in soil protects the beneficial microbes that are part of a plant’s immune system, its food supply and it’s water supply.

Farming and forestry would be transformed if carbon pricing were to be introduced for their activity.   People would plant trees instead of growing wasteful biofuels.  Prairie grass would replace corn in the Midwest.  Farmers would adopt regenerative methods such as organic and biodynamic farming.

Farmers would profit from farming carbon in 2 ways:

  1. An annual payment for any increase in soil carbon and a charge for any decrease in soil carbon

  2. An 'interest' payment on the actual level of soil carbon on the farm. This would be effective at around 10% annually.

A typical organic farm would benefit to the tune of approximately £100 per hectare and an industrial farm would have to pay a carbon tax of as much as £100 per hectare.  Farmers would change behaviour overnight and agribusiness behemoths like Monsanto, Bayer and John Deere would have to rethink their business model.  Taxpayer-funded subsidies to farming could be largely phased out as carbon markets would trade the carbon credits.

Farmers could also insure against catastrophic events such as flood and drought that might impact on their soil carbon.   However, farming with carbon in mind would reduce the likelihood of such damaging events.

Soil is Nature’s capital and the foundation of all life on Earth.  Capitalism is about valuing capital and pricing it.  Capitalism has failed to deal with carbon because industry, transportation and farming have been allowed to pollute freely at no cost.  All other forms of pollution are nowadays strictly controlled for wider social benefit. It is time for carbon to be priced and traded like very other important commodity.

We can get 'back to the garden' - the Garden of Eden.  We just have to price carbon and change the way we farm our beautiful planet.

"We are stardust, We are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

back to the garden"

My Salad Breakfast

This morning, for breakfast, I went into the garden with a couple of slices of bread slathered with mayonnaise and a rice cake smeared with Jersey butter. Then I proceeded to pick from my winter salad garden: lamb’s lettuce, French parsley, various Japanese winter veg including mizuna and two frilly but intensely hot mustardy greens, land cress (a thicket self seeded from a single plant earlier this year), lettuce, winter purslane and, for a touch of the bitters, artemisia – wormwood. I added a leaf of radicchio from plants that have sprung up through the brickwork of a path. Just as we think of ‘food miles’ there is a parallel concept of ‘food days’ from harvest to consumption. In this case it was ‘food seconds’ – the leaves barely knew they had been plucked before they disappeared into the welcoming warm darkness of my esophagus, still brimming with vitality as they headed for the acid bath of my stomach.  The garden owes everything to Rocket Gardens Winter Salad Collection, a superb collection of cold-tolerant plants that were delivered to me back in September, to get established before the cold set in. They haven’t been tested by frost (well, a very light one a few weeks ago) but my experience has been that my biochar-rich soil has such an active biology that the warmth it gives off acts as underfloor central heating for the plants. Soil is everything and I am lucky to have Carbon Gold at my fingertips, continually discovering new aspects of the joys of biochar gardening.

But enough about the soil, it’s the variety that gets me every time I have my salad breakfast.

Here they are, sharing a plate with a buttered rice cake and the lamb’s lettuce growing just behind.   But read on for the individual varietals and pictures.

Salad plate notated.jpg

Salad plate notated.jpg

Purslane.jpg

Purslane.jpg

I love the light mucilaginousness of winter purslane, with its spade-shaped leaves that look like they’ve escaped from a deck of playing cards.

Then there are the red chicories – radicchio and rosso de Treviso, both squeezing through the brick path. These provide a crisp bitterness.

radicchio.png

radicchio.png

The Japanese Red Frills Mustard leaves are hot and mustardy and satisfyingly crunchy. Here are the purple ones, finding space between the turnips and the spring onions.

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IMG_1264 (1).jpg

And here are their green cousins, the Green Frills Mustard

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Frilly Japanese greens.png

The land cress is easily as peppery as its aquatic cousin

cress.jpg

cress.jpg

The Lamb’s Lettuce miraculously replaces removed leaves almost, it seems, overnight. Light in flavour and texture.

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lamb\s lettuce.png

French parsley does the same, endlessly offering up new leaves to replace those plucked earlier.  Here it is in the foreground, with emerging Babbington’s leeks just behind.

parsley.png

parsley.png

Mizuna rounds it out, though it seems to be struggling more with the cold than the others.

Mizuna.png

Mizuna.png

A dab of Artemisia is always a good digestive tonic, but very bitter, so I get that down first and then follow with the sweeter and more pungent leaves.

YUM!

eating breakfast.jpg

eating breakfast.jpg

How to decarbonize a planet

Making the switch to organic agriculture on a global scale and turning waste biomass into biochar offers the real prospect of being able to reverse global warming, says Craig Sams

What’s happening out there? Is the world quietly going sane? A leading US Republican, Henry Paulsen, has come out strongly for action on climate change in the New York Times. For a political party that refuses to acknowledge burning fossil fuels can have anything to do with global warming, this is a tectonic event. Americans aren’t as stupid as their leaders think and are wising up to the fact that Hurricane Sandy was not God punishing us but to do with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The explosion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started around 1850 with the coal and steam-driven Industrial Revolution and the massive expansion of farmed land that was formerly wilderness or forest. My ancestors were part of this damage to the planet – great great grandpa Lars ploughed virgin prairie in Wisconsin, great grandpa Ole ploughed virgin prairie in Nebraska and grandpa Louis bought a tractor in 1926 so he could plough even deeper.

Every year the land they farmed gave up more of its life – losing ten tonnes of soil per hectare per year and as it decomposed, pumping tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They cut down a lot of trees too – which mostly went up in smoke. The same thing happened in Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, Manchuria and the Punjab. We destroyed the soil that feeds us and filled the atmosphere with the gases that are cooking the planet.

Up to 1980 farming and fossil fuels were equally responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases; now fossil fuels are in the lead. But farming still emits more than ever. Every year 125,000,000 hectares of food-producing land give up the ghost – that’s 1.8% of the available land used up, farmed-out, lifeless.

The way forward is a carbon tax. How would it work? Every time you emit a tonne of carbon dioxide you pay the price – at the moment it’s around $15 per tonne. But once there’s a global market the price will go up. What does this mean for organic food? It will become cheaper than industrially-farmed food as organic farming uses half the fossil fuels to produce a given amount of food. Year after year it increases the carbon content of soil while industrial farms deplete it. The recent Rodale white paper (see story opposite) shows that if the world’s arable land and pasture was farmed organically the reduction in carbon emissions would be enough to cancel out ALL the annual increase in greenhouse gases. Rebuilding soils with biochar increases soil carbon and stimulates increased growth and extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere by crops. By farming organically and turning waste biomass into biochar instead of burning it we could reverse global warming. We would also eat less meat as it will cost a lot more when you include the carbon cost (vegetarians have a lower carbon footprint and vegans emit about a fifth of the CO2 per year of meat-eaters).

Add in the reductions in emissions from a transition to wind and solar and we can face the future with confidence and look our grandchildren in the eye instead of looking away guiltily because our shortsighted greed has robbed them of a secure future.

California has a carbon tax which has equivalence with Quebec’s; China has opened eight carbon exchanges in its key industrial regions; Europe has its Emissions Trading Scheme. Unilever and Pepsi have created the Cool Farm Calculator so the whole carbon footprint of a tub of Flora or a packet of crisps can be calculated precisely, and the food industry is picking up on it. The 2015 climate conference in Paris won’t be another failure – there are too many stakeholders who are determined to make it happen and have already achieved broad agreement on principles.

If the whole world farmed organically and ate organic food, reduced fossil fuel emissions, produced and shopped locally as much as possible, insulated houses, ate less meat and planted more trees, we could possibly face a global cooling crisis caused by sucking too much CO2 out of the atmosphere. But that’s a long way off, so let’s just put carbon back in the soil, where it does nothing but good.

By Craig Sams

Organic food pioneer and polemicist
Craig Sams is Britain’s best known natural food pioneer. He is the founder of Green & Blacks, a former Soil Association chairman and the author of The Little Food Book.

Soil Carbon: Where Life Begins

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pic1

Back in 1967 my brother and I ran an organic macrobiotic restaurant and food store – we followed macrobiotics, the way of eating described in the book Zen Macrobiotics by Georges Ohsawa. The restaurant bought as much as possible from organic producers around London so we built strong links with the Soil Association, which was founded by Lady Eve Balfour in 1946.   In order to talk about biochar I will first talk about soil, because that is the context into which biochar fits.   Satish Kumar also spoke about soil last year in his excellent magazine Resurgence.

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pic2

What is soil? Where did it come from? When life on earth began there was no soil, just rock. On and in that rock lived fungi that eked out a precarious living extracting carbon from the calcium carbonate of limestone. The atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide and when it rained the rain became a weak carbonic acid solution that helped fungi to extract carbon from rock.

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pic3

The rock slowly broke down to sand, silt and the finest particles - clay. But there was no ‘soil’, no humus, none of the decomposing plants, organic matter and living organisms that define soil.

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pic4

Then a miracle happened

Tiny single celled organisms, ‘cyanobacteria’ (Latin for ‘blue bacteria’) developed the ability to take carbon dioxide and water and, with the help of sunshine, convert CO2 and H2O into simple carbohydrate: C6H12O6, or sugar. This was and is the fuel that powers all life on earth. The fungi saw their opportunity and locked the cyanobacteria into cells and strung them together in chain gangs.

Then they started to bundle them together in a form that we would recognise as plants

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 These strands of cyanobacteria became the earliest plants, such as horsetail

Plants were an efficient way to comb CO2 out of the air. The original plants didn't even have roots, the fungi had their own root system inside the plant to extract the sugar as soon as it was made. The plants were the root extensions of the fungi, not the other way round, which is how it appears today. Plants evolved with root systems and the fungi continued to keep their root network in the plant's root system. These fungi are called 'vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi'   ‘Arbuscular’ means 'tree-shaped' and reflects the form they take when the occupy the root system of a plant. 'Myco' means 'mushroom' and 'rhizzal' comes from rhizome and means 'root' - so they are ‘tree-shaped root mushrooms’. ‘Vesicular’ refers to the vesicles that are the storage areas where the mycorrhizae hold a stock of nutrients and sugar.

mycorrhizae

mycorrhizae

A plant will deliver in its sap from 10-20% of the sugar it makes in its leaves to the mycorrhizae, retaining the rest for its own growth. The mycorrhizae increase the reach of the plant’s roots by up to 10 times, penetrating soil that plant roots can’t access.

The ‘arbuscular’ shape of the fungus is shown in a root cell – this tree-like shape is a mirror of a root system – the fungus has its roots in the plant, the plant has its roots in the soil.

fungus

fungus

There are other organisms in the soil that live symbiotically with the mycorrizae. Most notable are the actinomycetes bacteria – originally they were thought to be fungi because they copied the form of fungal hyphae, with filamentous threads. With the advent of electron microscopes they turned out to be bacteria that had strung themselves together in chains in order to efficiently ferry nutrients to the mycorrhizae in exchange for sugar.   Most of our antibiotics come from soil bacteria. Streptomycin When a plant needs medicine, the mycorrhizae can farm it by feeding sugar to the bacteria that can produce that particular antidote – most commonly jasmonic acid, salicylic acid (aspirin) or ethylene. These medicines are sent up with the sap of the plant to provide it with immunity to fungal and insect attack.

One example of how mycorrhizae are used in farming is the French practice of ‘alley cropping’ where rows of fruit trees keep the fungal network going and enable crops planted in between to flourish rapidly thanks to the existing network of mycorrhizae supported by the trees. In Windsor Great Park an oak nursery accelerates the growth of oak saplings by raising them in ground surrounded by mature oaks – the big oaks provide the sugar to support a large mycorrhizal population. The baby oaks get sugar and nutrients from the mycorrhizae and grow away rapidly and healthily.

Soil is fascinating. It’s wonderful stuff. So what do humans do with it? Since the dawn of agriculture we mostly just kill it. Ploughing breaks up the neural network within the soil, though it reconnects fairly quickly but with a lot of casualties. Adding chemical fertilisers breaks up the symbiosis – the mycorrhizae no longer can exchange mineral nutrients for sugars because the farmers is providing them for free. The plant cuts off the sugar supply to the mycrorrhizae clustered around its roots and the mycorrhizae die off. Their 10,000 or so co-dependent microbial species also die off. The plant is then exposed to the challenge of fungi and other pests that give it nothing and just want to consume it. This creates the need for pesticides including fungicides, which further deplete the microbial population of the soil.

I have several generations of form in the area. My great great grandfather farmed virgin soil on the Koshkonong Prairie in 1842, cutting down trees and raising crops of grain and grazing cattle. My great grandfather farmed virgin prairie in Nebraska. These Norwegian farmers were notoriously stingy. They were frugal people in everything they did, they wasted nothing and recycled everything. Here’s an example:

Frugalism-Less is More

Frugalism-Less is More

My grandfather would deliver eggs from his chicken houses to the Safeway supermarket and other stores in Sioux City. He would then purchase tools, sugar, flour, salt, paper and other essentials that could not be produced on the farm. The flour sacks were made of calico, so the farmer’s wives would recycle the bags to make overalls for their boys and dresses for the girls.

Nell Rose flour company bags

Nell Rose flour company bags

Flour is a commodity – one bag of white dusty flour is just like the next. So the Nell Rose flour company marketing people got clever and printed nice floral patterns on their flour bags.

This appealed to people like my grandmother and she used Nell Rose flour to make the dresses for my mother (on the right) with her sister Thelma and their cousins.

Margie on the farm

Margie on the farm

This remarkable frugalism and avoidance of waste stands in stark contrast to the way that the soils of the Midwest were relentlessly wasted, often beyond recovery. Here there was no recycling, just relentless ploughing and harvesting, breaking down the soil. The farmer’s wives wasted nothing, their husbands wasted the fertile heritage of millennia. When land was ‘farmed out’ people would just move further west.

The original Louisiana Territory and adjacent territories embraced the great river network of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers, a 2000 mile wide water system draining into the Gulf of Mexico.

Original Louisiana

Original Louisiana

By 1925 more than 80% of the trees in this great river network had been cut down in order to create productive farmland.

trees cut down

trees cut down

Floods

Floods

The result was inevitable – the Mississippi Floods of 1927 were devastating – 27,000 square miles were inundated, up to depths of 30 feet. It triggered huge migrations of Afro-American farmers to Northern cities. Below Memphis Tennessee the Mississippi was 60 miles wide, 3 times the width of the Straits of Dover. The land was flooded from April to June.

This great flood was followed by further devastation. The weakened fractured soils of the prairie began to turn to dust and the winds blew up vast clouds of dust that reached as far as Washington DC, prompting Congressional action.   President Roosevelt created the Civil Conservation Corps and 3 million recruits planted 10 billion trees from Mexico to Canada to try to hold down the soil.

Dust bowl

Dust bowl

This destruction of soil happened also in Argentina, Manchuria, Ukraine, and other fertile breadbaskets around the world as tractors and chemical fertilizer accelerated the rate of soil destruction.

The greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane that were emitted accounted for half of all the increase in greenhouse gas levels between 1850 and 1980. Since then agriculture’s annual rate of emissions has continued to grow, but has fallen behind the astronomic rate of emissions growth from manufacturing, energy and transport.  But it is still responsible for at least one third of our excess emissions.

Emissions

Emissions

From 1850-1980:

Total CO2 from Farming:      160 Billion Tonnes

Total CO2 from Fossil Fuels: 165 Billion Tonnes

How can we stop this wasteful and environmentally damaging activity?

Part of the answer lies in a discover that was made nearly 500 years ago. When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzarro was buy looting the silver and gold of the Incas he heard about cities of gold with even greater wealth. He deputed his brother and Francisco de Orellana to find these cities and to bring back their gold.

Orellano

Orellano

The parties were separated and Orellana could not return up river. The chaplain on his boat kept records of their travels. They encountered wealthy populations but were repelled by armed natives, led by fierce women warriors. These natives knew already that if you came close to a white man you would break out in red spots of measles or smallpox and then, because they had no immunity, die. They attacked and drove them away – Orellana described his boat as looking like a porcupine after one such attack. They called this region the Land of the Amazons and this is how the river got its name. When explorers sailed up the Amazon about 30 years later the wealthy civilisations Orellana had described were gone – wiped out by disease. People questioned whether the ‘El Dorado’ he had described ever really existed.

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pic18

Within the past 50 years archaeologists have found that the areas he described as populated coincide with areas where the soil is black to a depth of several metres - the ‘Terra Preta’ of the Amazon river settlements. Farmers who have Terra Preta have little need for fertilizer and even sell their soil to less fortunate farmers who are on the typical infertile jungle soils. The Terra Preta was made by the Amazons by taking all their waste, including animal bones and forest waste and domestic waste, piling it into pits, covering it with clay and setting fire to it. Once it was burning hot they’d cut off the supply of air and the material became charcoal and provided the growing medium for the next season’s crop.   The contrast between Terra Preta and soils of the forest is apparent when the land is cut away.

Terra Petra

Terra Petra

Brazilian farmers who farm on Terra Preta benefit from its fertility and crops like corn grow vigorously when planted in black earth. They sell it to other farmers and bag it up for sale in garden centres. It is what we now call ‘Biochar’ – charcoal for use in the soil rather than charcoal for use for barbecuing sausages.

So what is Biochar? What does it do?

Biochar provides a supportive environment for mycorrhizae and their associated microorganisms. This leads to a doubling or more of the microbial population that is the living essence of soil.

Biochar had a high surface area – a single gram of biochar can have twice the surface area of 2 tennis courts – this means there are lots of points where minerals can stick, each point has a negative charge, so it sticks to minerals with a positive charge – this stops the leaching of nutrients from soil, keeping it in the zone where it can reach the plant.

Biochar also helps retain moisture. The result is healthier plants, more nutrient availability, more water availability and better soil structure.

Biochar also reduces soil emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

Biochar stays in the soil, too, for anything from 10 years to 4000 years, depending on the type of biochar, the soil type and the farming system. The scientific consensus settles around 1000 years. This represents carbon dioxide that is kept out of the atmosphere – most woody biomass ends up returning to the atmosphere by rotting or being burned. Thus biochar can be an important tool for reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels. It is estimated that recycling woody waste as biochar could remove 1 billion tonnes of CO2 annually from the atmosphere. Instead we burn it.

Biochar cell structure

Biochar cell structure

Biochar retains the cell structure of the original feedstock. So biochar from bamboo has larger pores, biochar from chestnut has small pores. But all those pores provide a refuge for mycorrhizae and a base from which they can expand even if they are disturbed by ploughing or by predators such as mites, protozoa or nematodes that feed on them.

Imagine the pieces of biochar as a ‘five star hotel’ for mycorrhizae or, even as Norman castles in the English countryside. Each biochar particle is a base for a contingent of mycorrhizae, helping them to weather the stresses and pressures of life in the soil.

We have an image of mushrooms as passive softies but they are much more than that. When nematodes that threaten a plant enter mycorrhizal territory they get more than they bargained for. The mycorrhizae attach to them with sticky substances that hold them fast, then insert their filamentous hyphae into the tiny worm and suck out its amino acids, providing protein for more mycorrhizal growth and nitrogen for ‘their’ plants. Some mycorrhizae form lassoes that are scented with fragrances that attract nematodes – the nematode pokes through the lasso that then snaps tight, holding the nematode while it is digested.

nematode

nematode

Mycorrhizae also oversee the production of insecticides and fungicides. When there is a threatening insect or fungal pest the news travels fast through the underground internet – the mycelial network. The appropriate preventive medicine such as jasmonic acid, salicylic acid or ethylene is produced and delivered via the plant’s sap to the threatened area. How is this done? We don’t really know but it is likely that the mycorrhizae simply feed more sugar to the bacteria that produce these defensive chemicals and then pass them over to the plant.

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pic22

It may be that the plant produces the defensive chemical itself or that it produces it in conjunction with the soil microbes. Both the plant and its supportive microbial community have a shared interest in defeating any disease threats quickly, before they have time to weaken the plant.

Biochar, by providing a resilient and abundant network of soil fungi and bacteria, is the framework of the plant’s immune system and helps it with nourishment and water.

So what have we done at Carbon Gold to turn this theoretical ideal situation into a reality?

biochar kiln

biochar kiln

The first thing we discovered was that the production method for charcoal was expensive, slow and inefficient – we wanted to reduce our carbon footprint in biochar production as much as possible and make it available cheaply to small farmers. We developed the Superchar 100 kiln.

It makes a 100 Kg batch of biochar in 8 hours instead of the usual 3 days. It delivers double the yield of traditional ring kilns. It has greatly reduced emissions – we recycle the gases emitted by the wood and burn them to heat the kiln contents instead of letting them escape into the atmosphere. They’re now hard at work in Belize, Botswana, Turkmenistan, Fiji, Brazil and the UK, with orders for more in the pipeline.

We also make a double-barrelled kiln that will produce 2 x 400 kg batches of biochar in a 12 hour day.

This one is part of a marshland regeneration project north of Perth, in Scotland

double barrelled kiln

double barrelled kiln

Whitmuir Organics, just south of Edinburgh, are making biochar for their horticultural operation and are experimenting with it in pig feed, where a small amount makes a big difference to pig health and feed conversion.

The first UK field trials of biochar were on my smallholding near Hastings in September 2010. We planted cabbages and winter lettuce in late September, some with biochar and some without. In November we had heavy snows and the lettuces were covered in snow for 3 days. When the snow melted the winter lettuces without biochar had died. Those with biochar were intact. I think this could be that a high microbiological population in the soil acts as underfloor central heating, biological activity generates heat and this is probably what saved the plants. We also discovered that biochar has no repellent effect on hungry pigeons, which destroyed the cabbage crop completely.

biochar field trials

biochar field trials

We work closely with Rijk Zwaan, the world’s 5th largest seed company and one that regards GMOs as an obsolete technology – they are world leaders at using natural breeding methods harnessed to genomic data. Their Field Trials Manager, Martin Kyte, stopped a comparative trial of Carbon Gold seed compost and peat compost after a few months because the results were so obviously in favour of our seed compost.

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pic26

And Fergus Garrett, head gardener at the marvelous Great Dixter gardens in Sussex, has switched to biochar.

Stephanie Donaldson, Gardening Editor of Country Living magazine, trialled Carbon Gold with lettuces. After one month the difference was significant:

In Belize one of our shareholders took 3 Maya cacao farmers to Cornell University in 2008. We studied biochar production and its use with Johannes Lehmann, the world’s leading authority on biochar and founder of the International Biochar Initiative. After that we helped the farmers build a simple kiln. They did trials and found that cacao tree seedlings raised with biochar outperformed those without biochar in the nursery. A $50,000 UNDP grant helped them expand production and recently the Inter American Development Bank funded the establishment of 9 new nurseries with a target of producing 45, 000 cacao trees to really expand cacao production. It normally takes 6 or 7 years for a cacao tree to begin to produce, with biochar it starts in 3 years – that makes a huge economic difference to a farmer who has invested in establishing a cacao orchard.

cacau

cacau

Belize: Biochar + Cacao = fruit within 3 years

Normal maturation time: 6-7 years

We’re also working with farmers in Africa.

In Ghana, where tomatoes retail at $12 per kilo, Sunshine Organic Farms are starting to grow tomatoes near the capital, Accra. Biochar will help ensure healthy abundant cropping.

In Ivory Coast cashew nut waste will provide a feedstock that can then be used on cashew trees and in Senegal it will be rice husks that provide the feedstock.

We have just shipped a kiln to Botswana. Farmers in Fiji are now making biochar with our kilns to improve their fertility and cropping.

Wight Salads grow more than half of the organic tomatoes sold in the UK every year. They have greenhouses in Portugal and the Isle of Wight. Last year they started using biochar from us. The results:  8% higher yield, 10% higher sugar content in the fruit, less watering and fertilizer cost and, most excitingly, a dramatic fall in the population of root-eating nematodes. They had a lower level of this pest in their organic biochar production than in their conventional production where they use nematicide to kill this damaging pest.

Wight Salads tomatoes

Wight Salads tomatoes

They were considering cutting back on organic tomato production because of these nematodes, but now they are going to expand.

nematodes2

nematodes2

Some nematodes work collaboratively with mycorrhizae, some eat them, some just eat plants and some provide food for the mycorrhizae when they venture too close to the plant the mycorrhizae are protecting. Once lassoed they are soon converted into nitrogen compounds

Biochar works wonderfully on turf as well. Forest Green Rovers Football Club trialled Carbon Gold last year and found that at the end of the season this year the treated part of the pitch had withstood the stress of weekly games and practice far better than the rest of the pitch. Last week they spread biochar over the entire pitch and their groundsman has helped initiate trialy by the groundsman at Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal. Those trials will open up new opportunities on sports grounds everywhere and help reduce the use of nitrates and other chemical treatments.

We make products for gardeners too. These are available from some garden centres, but most of our sales come from our own website, other online retailers, QVC and Amazon. This is because biochar still takes a bit of explaining and garden centre staff are not always available or able to tell a customer about it.

Last year we worked with Bartlett Tree Experts, the Queen’s tree surgeons, on trials with Carbon Gold biochar. They successfully cured honey fungus and saw accelerated growth in horse chestnut seedlings. The results of their research were published in April in the prestigious Arb Magazine, the journal for members of the Arboricultural Association. An ash dieback trial they initiated last year has so far shown no sign of infection, but they are waiting until this October before publishing any results. They have endorsed our tree growth enhancement and protection range and are now offering it to all their customers.

Biochar to CO2

Biochar to CO2

We are not yet capturing the carbon offset value of using biochar, but it is now becoming available as a carbon offset of value. The conversion ratios vary – our own figure is based on making biochar in a Carbon Gold kiln and reflects the greater efficiency and lower carbon footprint of the Superchar range of kilns.

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pic37

In 2011 I visited the Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas in Brussels. She invited me back to present the biochar story to the Green Group of MEPs. In attendance were representatives from DG Agri and DG Enviro. They had a meeting after our meeting and the outcome was Eurochar. This programme funds research into biochar as a strategy for long term carbon sequestration and funds research into greenhouse gas mitigation with biochar.

Lady Eve Balfour lost the post war argument about the future direction of agriculture, but the Soil Association continued to fight the good fight while the introduction of subsidized nitrate fertilizer forced farmers into the industrial fold. The same process happened in the rest of the world and led to the Green Revolution, which is now running out of steam. Ten years ago there was a major collaboration to map out the future of agriculture in a world with diminishing resources and increasing population. WHO, FAO, UNDP, UNESCO, Defra, USDA, Monsanto and Syngenta were just a few of the global stakeholders who selected a crack team of 400 of the world’s leading agronomists to look at how we could reduce hunger, improve livelihoods and ensure social and environmental sustainability. 2 weeks before their report was published in 2009 both Monsanto and Syngenta went public by rubbishing its contents. Why? Because it said that the Green Revolution hadn’t delivered sustainable results, that genetic engineering was a dead end and that we should listen to small farmers and adopt traditional farming systems.

All of the other benefits of their proposals are summed up in rewarding farmers who prevent climate change. Whether you call it organic farming or agroecological farming, the fact is that farming in support of the living soil and its wonderful microbiological population is the only sustainable way to go. It is lower in carbon emissions and hugely effective in carbon sequestration. If only Lady Eve had lived to see this outcome that so firmly vindicated her predictions in The Living Soil published in 1943.

carbon farming

carbon farming

We are eating oil – it takes vast amounts of fossil fuel energy to make food energy and this is plainly unsustainable.

Farming Systems Trial

Farming Systems Trial

The Farming Systems Trial at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania has been growing the same crops side by side using organic methods and conventional methods. Once the health of the soil was restored, the organic crops matched conventional yields, showing greater resilience in years of drought.   Every year the organic soil added 1 tonne of carbon to the soil, while the industrial crops gradually lost it. The organic crops used 45% less energy.

Professor Pimentel at Cornell University mapped it out: organic farming could reduce atmospheric CO2 by 1.1 trillion pounds a year. That’s half a billion tonnes of CO2 – about 1/10 of the annual increase in CO2 equivalent. Add in biochar and you would get at least another half a billion tonnes, bringing down CO2 levels by 20% a year.

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If the cost of CO2 was factored into food production, then organic farming would deliver a € 350 per hectare cost benefit if carbon was priced at the real cost to future generations of €70 per tonne. Add in the benefit of €210 per hectare for every tonne of biochar added to the soil and agriculture could be part of the climate change solution instead of a major element of the problem. Lord Nicholas Stern quoted the figure of €70 per tonne in his book Blueprint for a Safer Future but a few months after it was published he said he was mistaken the real cost was €150 per tonne. Anyone who experience Hurricane Sandy in New York would probably agree. But even if CO2 was only priced at €35 per tonne it would deliver an economic imperative to farm organically and to use biochar universally. The Paris climate talks in 2015 will not exclude agriculture or transportation, the fatal mistake of the Kyoto protocols back in 1993. That will be when farming has to face reality and get a grip on its emissions.

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pic42

And not a moment too soon. Every year 125 million hectares of land become so degraded they can no longer reliably produce crops. That’s nearly 2% of the world’s arable land. We have replaced that lost land by cutting down forests, but that is no longer an option. We have to live within the means of our natural capital of soil and that means not spending it but saving it and building on it.

Public health will benefit too. Antibiotics saved millions of lives – they were derived from soil bacteria. Now, due to overuse in agriculture they have created resilient disease pathogens that can no longer be treated effectively with antibiotics. 80% of all antibiotic use is in agriculture, to keep animals alive that could not survive in the filthy conditions in which they are raised, on beef feedlots where they wallow in their own excrement or in pig and chicken farms where antibiotics are the only thing that keeps the animals alive during their brief lifespan.

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The sad thing is that industrial farming isn’t feeding the world. The world is feeding itself despite the waste and inefficiency of industrial farms.

70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares

NO SUBSIDIES

30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms

$350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES

No wonder the IAASTD was so adamant that small farmers using agroecological and traditional methods were the only way to feed the world. They can produce up to six times as much per hectare as industrial farms, using fewer fossil fuel-based inputs and more human labour. Our taxes are being wasted on subsidising the destruction of our soils and dangerous increases in greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Only a carbon tax can reverse this.

As this is a Slow Food Eire event it would be remiss of me not to touch on the similarities between the microbiological health of the soil and the microbiology of its counterpart in us, the gut flora, whose product is often referred to as ‘night soil.’ One third by weight of what we excrete is the offspring of the gut flora that have multiplied on our food in our digestive system and pass out along with the digested food. There are clear parallels in function between mycorrhizae and actinomycetes bacteria in the soil and the lactobacilli and bifidobacteria and associated microbial forms in the gut.

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We know that babies born by C section are likely to lack the microbial flora that are part of a healthy immune system. It’s now established that stool transplants in patients with clostridium difficile can save lives – 110,000 Americans a year die of this infection, which arises after antibiotic use.

In the soil, worms are a sign of good health. The emerging medical treatment of helminthic therapy reflects the finding that the absence of worms in the human gut is associated with diminished immune function. When an earthworm consumes soil containing actinomycetes bacteria, an important part of the soil’s immune system that produces antibiotic substances, it excretes six times as many as it ingests. Roundworms in the human gut consume food we eat and excrete cytokine, an immune booster.

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In Chinese tradition, Kwan Yin is the Goddess of Mercy and ‘mercy clay’ has saved millions from famine – it is rich in humus, minerals and microbial activity and can sustain a person when no other food is available.

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In Haiti the production of clay cakes is commonplace. Made with clay, salt and oil, they aren’t consumed to keep hunger at bay, they nourish and have special benefits for pregnant women as it prevents morning sickness. Clay helps eliminate toxins and infections.

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When one’s tummy is upset, particularly if traveling in foreign lands where a combination of different prevalent bacteria and different hygiene standards can lead to digestive disorders, charcoal tablets have the same beneficial effect on our digestive night soil as it does in the soil in which we grow our food.

I began this talk by quoting three people who have deeply influenced my thinking about soil and about its fundamental importance to our lives.

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I would like to close by quoting an even higher authority:

Genesis 3:19

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

The soil’s living community provides an example to our society of how a cooperative community of plants and microorganisms can maximise and efficiently share the production of food derived from the abundance of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide with which our planet is blessed. We come from the soil and we return to the soil, we owe all life on earth to the soil.

We should never treat it like dirt

From Green & Black's to Blackened Greens

Here's the story of how I moved from dark chocolate to even darker materials - biochar

Back in 1995 the Prince of Wales delivered the Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture on the theme of ‘Counting the Cost of Industrial Agriculture.’ He argued that if you incorporate the externalised costs of non-organic farming, such as nitrate pollution, gender-bending herbicides in the water supply, biodiversity loss and the climate change cost of greenhouse gases (from nitrous oxides and soil carbon emissions) the real cost of non-organic food would nearly double.

A year later Dan Morrell of Future Forests (later to become the Carbon Neutral Company) encouraged me to go carbon neutral with Whole Earth’s organic wholegrain cornflakes. The whole life cycle carbon footprint of the cornflakes was calculated by independent experts who found that it was surprisingly low: because organic farmers increase rather than reduce the stored carbon in soil, this offset much of the other carbon cost of the cornflakes.

By now it was pretty obvious to me that the sooner we could get policymakers to force us to include the cost of greenhouse gas emissions in the cost of food the sooner we would all be eating organic food, because it would usually be cheaper.

Roll on 14 years to 2009 – the climate negotiations in Copenhagen have soil carbon and forest carbon on the agenda. Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the Bank of England and author of the Stern Review that put the cost of every tonne of carbon we emit today at £140 for future generations (currently carbon markets value a tonne of carbon at £11) has said that any future climate agreement has to be ‘universal and equitable.’ In other words, no cheating, no get-outs, no let-outs, no sacred cows. That means that all countries and all activities, including agriculture, forestry and transportation must be included in the new climate regime that begins in 2012. Hitherto only Europe has complied and then only for the heavy industries that emit half of our greenhouse gases – farming and transport have been excluded. But no longer.

2 years ago I invited Dan Morrell to join me in a new venture: Carbon Gold. What do we do? For a start, we believe biofuels are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Every bit of biomass carbon is too precious to waste by burning it. At Carbon Gold we aim to capture woody material such as waste biomass, forestry co-products and tree prunings and convert it into charcoal. But we call it ‘biochar.’ Why? Because we don’t burn it, thereby putting the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. Once we’ve made the biochar we blend it with fertility-building clays and composts and add it to the soil. Biochar is a wonderful soil conditioner: it improves drainage but also prevents soil drying out; it reduces the leaching of nutrients from soil by rainfall; it provides 5-Star accommodation for beneficial soil fungi and bacteria, increasing their populations; it improves soil structure and aggregation; it helps suppress soil-borne diseases that are harmful to plants and biochar helps raise the pH of acid soils. Universities around the world are gearing up to do biochar research that will more precisely quantify its benefits. These vary depending on soil, climate and the amount of biochar applied to soil.

Meanwhile at Carbon Gold we are busily making biochar and selling the carbon credits from avoided emissions as well as selling the biochar as a soil improver. In Belize cacao farmers produce biochar that is blended with compost and used by banana growers to reduce their dependence on fungicides and irrigation. In East Sussex we are regenerating ancient chestnut coppice woodland and producing organic biochar which we use to produce “Gro-Char” peat-free compost which will be sold through garden centres. Garden Organic members will be trialling it in various applications during the 2010 season. In Mozambique we are partnering with a conservation organisation to help small farmers produce biochar, encouraging them to protect their forests and improve their soil fertility. On my own smallholding near Hastings there is a magnificent peach tree dripping with perfect fruit that had its base covered with biochar last February. The ones that didn’t get biochar haven’t done so well, peach leaf curl was worse for them. My biochar potatoes still show no signs of blight, while everyone else’s have suffered.

I feel like I’m still in the food business (and I have made a delicious risotto nero charbonara that delighted dinner guests recently), I’ve just moved my focus towards food security.