July 30
Just back from an interesting three days at the One Planet Food summer school, part of the Big Tent at Falkland in Fife. We were learning about the new food economy and the way farmers and consumers both need to change if we want a fair and sustainable food system by 2020.
More questions than answers by the end, but one group went away to set up the city bread club to link local organic wheat growers with artisan bakers and a bicycle delivery service to provide club members with their daily bread.
On the way home I shared a car with Craig Sams, founder of Green and Blacks and serial organic entrepreneur and Kirtana Chandrasekharan, food campaigner with Friends of the Earth. Craig’s new venture is Carbon Gold, a company which is making farm scale kilns to produce biochar.
Biochar is a form of charcoal produced by burning almost any sort of biomass – wood, straw, cardboard, manure – to create a stable porous material which is incorporated in the soil. This technique was used to create the terra preta soils in Amazonia where tests show that biochar has remained intact in the soil for 7000 years. As well as locking up carbon from the atmosphere in the soil, biochar increases crop yields, sometimes dramatically, through better water retention and providing habitats for soil microbes. It also appears to help reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions from soil.
As the UK Biochar Research Centre at Edinburgh University comments, the technology can be small-scale and adopted by farmers and communities in both developing and developed countries. It has the potential to take gigatonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ground, and make a significant contribution to reducing climate change.
So we have ordered our kiln, along with some bags of Craig’s soil improver with biochar wormcast and kelp so we can run some trials at the farm next year. Pallets, cardboard boxes and hedge clippings will soon be black gold under the cabbages. What could be the downside?
As Friends of the Earth point out, there’s nothing wrong with the technology, just the way it’s used. Because it’s a verifiable way of storing carbon, it can be used to offset emissions by individuals and companies. From being a farm scale technology using biochar from low grade biomass to improve soils it can become a big business cutting down forests to sell carbon offsets on the world market.
We would have needed a longer car journey to sort it out, and maybe it’s another Green and Black’s story. While the original brand is now owned by Kraft and part of the corporate world, along the way it created the supply chain for organic cocoa which allowed artisan producers like our local Chocolate Tree to come in behind them. We’re hoping that in the new food economy a lot of little Chocolate Trees will grow, and that every family farm will have its own little biochar kiln, whether or not it gets carbon credits for its new black gold.
