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

Paying the price for carbon dioxide

Would you pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Putting a price on carbon makes people pay for carbon dioxide that they add to the atmosphere (ouch!) and rewards behaviour that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide (yes, please).

So why not just make people who emit carbon pay for that carbon dioxide and give the same amount of money, the ‘carbon price’, to people who take it out of the atmosphere?

A lot of people make money out of carbon emissions. Oil companies are the main subjects of hatred, but it is the rest of us who actually burn the fossil fuels that keep our homes warm, our cars on the road and planes in the air. The biggest beneficiary is the Government, which gets 53p per litre of petrol, plus another 10p of VAT. It’s like the situation with cigarettes: the Government knew for decades that fags were killing people but the tax per packet was a vitally important source of income, so it was challenging for the powers-that-be to crack down on smoking. Even palm oil, most of which gets mixed with diesel fuel, gets taxed at 53p per litre, but the food industry takes the flak when it’s in a biscuit. Palm oil has replaced hydrogenated fat, which is why heart disease rates are falling.

Organic versus non-organic

Organic farmers increase soil carbon every year: they compost green waste and crop residues; they add manure to the soils instead of chemical fertilizer; they do crop rotations that naturally boost soil nitrogen; they encourage a resilient soil microbiome that also increases soil carbon; they let the land go fallow so natural fertility is rebuilt, which means more soil carbon. An organic farm can capture and store about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Non-organic farmers use chemical fertilizers that wipe out the soil micobiome and cause nitrous oxide pollution that is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Intensive animal rearing of cattle and pigs leads to higher methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas. Herbicides and pesticides are made from fossil fuels and end up as more global warming. Farming is responsible for one third of our annual increase in greenhouse gas levels. Organic farming could cancel out that increase and bring greenhouse gas levels down by a similar amount and we could stop stressing about climate change.

Powerful stuff

So how can we encourage organic farming? How do you encourage anything? Money. Powerful stuff. Farmers love it.

The EU carbon price is just over £90 per tonne of CO2. An organic farmer can capture at least seven tonnes. If they got paid for it, that would be an extra income of £630 per hectare.

A non-organic farmer emits at least two tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year from fertilizer and soil organic matter breakdown. If they had to pay for that (a tax on fertilizers and pesticides) it would cost them at least £180 per hectare.

Every crop is different, but let’s take a look at barley. Let’s say that a barley farmer - whether organic or not - wants to make £1630 per hectare.

An organic farmer gets four tonnes of barley per hectare and can sell it at £250 per tonne; that’s £1000 per hectare. With a CO2 payment of £700 per hectare that adds up to £1700 per hectare gross income. Bingo!

A non-organic farmer gets a higher yield (thanks to chemicals) of six tonnes per hectare. At £250 per tonne that generates £1500 per hectare gross income. But the farmer must pay for two tonnes of CO2 emissions - £180 - so that brings it down to £1320. So to make as much as the organic farmer, the non-organic farmer would have to charge £305 per tonne for barley, an extra £55 per tonne. What brewer will pay a £55 a tonne premium for non-organic barley?

Much barley ends up in beer. If you’re down the pub and a pint of organic bitter is £3.30 and a pint of non-organic is £3.90 would you be prepared to pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Carbon Farming to Reverse Climate Change

This paper outlines the global threat from Climate Change and proposes a simple economic model as a practical solution through which land use innovation can drive behaviour change and reverse global warming. The planet is warming, we are losing the race to save all the inestimable physical wealth and cultural value that humankind created over the centuries and yet we have singularly failed to use the most efficient tool for reducing carbon dioxide levels: photosynthesis. Nothing else comes close to sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, yet we neglect it.Two decades of policies to address the rising threat of catastrophic climate change have focused on reducing emissions. They failed, however, to slow the increase in greenhouse gas levels. Instead, directly and by default, government policies have brought about continuing increases instead.

Forestry and farming are the cheapest and most effective ways to take carbon out of the atmosphere, sequestering it in the vast unexploited reservoir of the soil and trees. Yet instead of actively pursuing these low-cost options we have deforested and degraded forest carbon and soil sinks.  How can we fix this?

The “4 per 1000” (‘Quatre pour Mille’) initiative launched at the Paris COP21 aims to do just that, by rewarding carbon farming.vBritain is a signatory and a Forum and Consortium member.  “4 per 1000” states that, if farming and forestry increased soil organic carbon annually by four parts per thousand per year, that would be enough to totally offset the annual 16 billion tonnes increase in greenhouse gas levels.  With carbon a marketable crop, we could stop worrying about global warming.

In 2015, the French National Assembly responded to ‘4 per 1000’ by setting a €56 (£50) a tonne carbon tax to comes into effect in 2020.

Carbon emissions reduction policies have failed so far:  

• HM Govt has spent over £1.5 billion supporting Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), the idea that you can capture CO2 emissions and bury them securely in the ground. For CCS to work and be effective it would cost at least €70 per tonne CO2 stored and require an increase in fossil fuel use of 35%.

• The voluntary market has created credits for 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in the past 10 years. That’s a mere 1/500 of emissions. Cap and trade is subject to political vagaries. The European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Exchange went bust in 2010 when EU political decisions led to a gross oversupply of carbon allowances.

• The EU Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation requires mixing sugar beet ethanol, rapeseed oil or palm oil with petrol or diesel. 7 million tonnes of the world’s annual palm oil production of 66 million tonnes is burned as biodiesel, much more than is consumed as food in the EU. Land across the EU is degraded by intensive production of sugar beet and rapeseed for biofuel use, with negligible reductions and, even in some cases, increases in CO2.

The “4 per 1000” initiative is predicated on there being a price on carbon, whether emitted into the atmosphere or removed from the atmosphere. The Government sets a price for carbon and all emissions of CO2 are paid as part of a company’s tax bill, declared as part of its annual returns.  If a company can purchase carbon offsets for less it can deduct these offsets from its tax bill from carbon aware farmers. 

What would happen if there were a £50 per tonne CO2 price?

• Nitrates, pesticides and herbicides would become uneconomic in many applications and farmers would minimise or abandon these inputs

• Farmers would increase soil carbon by the use of grass leys and compost. They would minimise tillage and grow green manures to keep ground cover all year round

• Carbon from straw, sawmill waste and forestry arisings would be converted into biochar (agricultural charcoal) then added to the soil to permanently enhance fertility and increase the carbon in the soil ‘carbon bank.’ Biochar is 80-90% pure carbon and stays in the soil for centuries.

• Farmers would plant trees and hedgerows instead of growing rapeseed for biodiesel.

• Wood burning would 10.5 billion be disincentivised. Wood would replace steel and concrete in buildings and homes. Wood is carbon negative. Modern cross lamination technology produces wood that equals or exceeds the strength, durability and load bearing capacity of concrete and steel.

• The £1.5 billion Government subsidy to date wasted on carbon capture and storage research would be saved.

• Peat use would end overnight - peat bogs capture more carbon than any land use other than salt marshes.

• The sea would be more productive. Reduced fertiliser use and reversal of soil erosion would herald the end of harmful algal blooms that damage coastal ecosystems and fish stock populations.

Soil is the world’s most important and valuable commodity.  With a realistic carbon price, we would not suffer the resource misallocation of agricultural subsidies such as in the Common Agricultural Policy. 

Wind and solar are getting cheaper, but are nowhere near as competitive as 4/1000.  Money has been poured into supporting wind energy.  Every tonne of CO2 saved by onshore wind costs €162, from offshore wind £267.

A regenerating degraded forest can profitably generate CO2 savings for a cost of less than £5 tonne CO2.  Forestry management costs of planting, then thinning are minimal. Forests, pasture and arable farmland can easily sequester “4 per 1000 per annum.”  Yet we still lose 31 football fields per minute globally of productive agricultural land because industrial farming methods need take no account of carbon emissions.

How does a Carbon Price affect Fossil Fuel Prices?

A carbon tax would add $10 to a barrel of oil.  That is well within the range of fluctuations in the oil price (e.g. recent OPEC decisions).    

There is a financial opportunity. The Government simply establishes a tax that can be offset by carbon credits.  This then puts carbon dioxide, like any other valuable commodity, in the hands of markets.   

Fossil fuel emissions are 33 billion tonnes CO2 a year globally. At £50/tonne the market for carbon credits would be more than £1.5 trillion. If Britain leads on this by example then London would be the financial hub for carbon trading . The City of London has the depth of liquidity and the reputation for integrity that a global carbon market will need to succeed. 

The flow of cash into sequestration will be transformative.  Agricultural subsidies can fall away without impacting on land values.  Rural economies will be invigorated and farming can begin to remediate the misallocation of resources that current CAP policy encourages.

Auditing, validation and certification of carbon sequestration represents an opportunity for the certification industry, much of which operates out of the UK.

What is the scale of the opportunity?  Carbon sinks are primarily forests, fields and meadows.

The world has 1.5 billion hectares of arable land, 4 billion hectares of forest and woodland and 5 billion hectares of grassland, a total of 10.5 billion hectares that can be put to work removing CO2 from the atmosphere.  The annual net increase in CO2 levels is 16 billion tonnes.  If every hectare of our available land annually removed 4 tonnes CO2 then we would remove 41 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year, which would get us back to pre-industrial levels in just 35 years.

Is 4 tonnes CO2 per hectare realistic?

La Vialla, a biodynamic family farm in Tuscany, comprises 1440 hectares including arable, pasture, woodland, vines and olives. Taking this as an example and microcosm of the global distribution of land use types, the University of Sienna, using IPCC methodology has evaluated La Vialla’s annual carbon cycle for the past eight years. Calculations show that 4.24 tonnes of CO2e per hectare have been captured every year for the past eight years. 

 An obvious criticism of soil and forest sequestration is that it can be reversed through human and natural impacts.  A farmer can plough up the soil, a forester can chop down the trees and then much of the carbon captured is released back into the atmosphere.  An additional risk is that fire, war, flood or hurricane can reduce the carbon store.

A two-part payment can address this by providing:

• a payment for the annual increment of CO2;

• an additional ‘interest’ payment on the carbon that is stored in the carbon ‘bank.’

Soil is the foundation of our natural capital.  In a capitalist system it should be valued.

Farmers can insure against loss of carbon. Banks will advance loans against land to farmers who operate best practice carbon farming in the knowledge that the asset that is loaned against is increasing in value as its carbon content increases.

The cost of low carbon food would come down and the cost of high carbon food would go up. No longer would price be a barrier to eating food that is rich in nutrients, low in pesticide residues and which delivers tangential social and environmental benefits.

Carbon sequestration in farmland, pasture and forests is a cheap and effective way of reducing greenhouse gas levels.  Compliance with agreed Paris COP 21 targets will be unlikely if we continue to depend on technological solutions and biofuels to reduce emissions.  Using up precious soil and forests for the production of biofuels is wasteful, uneconomic and does nothing to help mitigate climate change. An economic incentive to maximise soil and forest sequestration of carbon dioxide is the most effective, practical and low- cost solution to achieving greenhouse gas reduction.