Biochar 5: David Yarrow: LIFE (Created 8-20-09)

On 8-11-09, at the North American Biochar Conference, I had the pleasure of hearing David Yarrow speak. At the end of his presentation, he received the loudest, longest applause of the entire conference. A link to David's blog is right here.

http://www.relocalize.net/blog/david_yarrow

His speech is reproduced here to the best of my abilities.

David Yarrow LIFE
North American Biochar conference 2009
8-11-09 2:00 pm

Show me the market: Nutrient-Dense, Carbon-Negative Food.

"My name is David Yarrow. I'm from the northeast and I've been teaching people about
biochar for two and a half years.


I felt someone made a mistake when they asked me to be on this panel because I've never been in business. I'm a healer. But I can certainly talk about high quality food for people so they can deal with their physiological crisis.

I think this is a way we can accomplish this and I'm worried that we aren't thinking largely enough about what it is we are dealing with. So I'm going to try and spin our microscope around and look thru the other end a little bit.

We have to start thinking much more about the whole context we are working in. The first thing I would like to tell you is you're probably not going to make much money selling biochar to farmers. They simply can't afford it or to put up a lot of money. I work mostly with small farmers and they would much rather learn to make their own rather than to buy it from somebody. That's the reality of their economics. Their economics says that they grow food and cash crops. They buy the seed because they know they have a market. And they grow food to feed consumers.

So if you want farmers to do something, give them a market.

So a market that we can offer them is the opportunity to sell Carbon-Negative Food. When I talk in the northeast about this people get very excited that they could go to the store and buy food that helps reverse global warming and address climate change. So this is a strategy we can put on the ground to create an identity in the marketplace for food grown with biochar. We get to attract consumers in this direction.

It's probably not going to work too well because most people aren't going to feel this is very attractive. It's not sexy enough.

But because of what biochar does in soils we have a little nicer opportunity to attract and develop consumer loyalty.

Charcoal soaks up nutrients in the soil and holds them and makes them available to the plants. So when you create that condition in your soil you create plants which are fully enriched with nutrition and you can begin to market nutrient dense food grown in that soil.

This is something which is already underway. It started about 25 years ago in Australia and New Zealand.

In February a hundred farmers showed up in Barry, MA and sat thru a three day training with Dr. Martin Anderson and he showed them how to begin to change their production systems to be able to produce commercially and market nutrient-dense food products. Food which has a guaranteed higher analysis than what the USDA started publishing when they first started publishing the nutrient content of our food.

We couldn't do that in the Eighties when we started the organic food system. We specifically restricted growers from making any nutritional claims for their products because we couldn't reliably produce that kind of food. We couldn't realiably get it to market. We couldn't verify. We couldn't authenticate.

But we can do all that now. And it's already happening.

One hundred farmers sat thru three days of training and at the end of it I wondered what they thought of this because I supported 100% what Martin Anderson was teaching. And they all stood up and gave him a very, very long standing ovation. They were very enthusiastic. I said to myself, "If there are a hundred farmers in New England who are pump up to go out and make this happen on their farms then the next revolution has begun. "

We are going to put a new standard of quality on the market and it’s probably going to take us two years. We already have lots of growers lining up because they want to do this. They believe in this.

Biochar is the key ingredient in making happen what they are trying to do.

But they can't buy it and what's the purpose in telling them about something they can't get their hands on. So the people in this room have a responsibility, I think, to work with this new movement and to help them understand how biochar is the key to what they are trying to achieve and to assist them to make it work in the marketplace.

It's hard work. We did this with organics in the eighties. I personally am not looking forward to doing it again. We have to create standards. We have to create trademarks. We have to create production processes which meet those standards. We have to create a system which provides the nuts and bolts and legal licensing and so on has to make this happen.

When I go around and do my talk about biochar and climate change at the end I ask people, "If we put a food product on the market which is carbon-negative and nutrient-dense do you think people will buy it?" The answer is very positive. And that's without much advertising or promotion.

The other part I want to talk about is to back up a little bit and look at the context I was just discussing. In New England we have a tradition called the town meeting. We have a social concern about how we go about doing things in our communities. And I saw this in the organic movement. We had small farms from New England which were sitting there representing social consciousness among the big farms from other parts of the country which were concerned about business and money.


What happens is New England always looks at how this is going to impact our way of life in our communities. And we need to look at how this technology develops communities instead of destroying communities as has been going on for far too long. We begin to implement these technologies in ways that support communities not only in America, but all over the world.

Because what we are dealing with here are the two most fundamental things that every community needs; food and energy. And if we deliver these things in ways that make sense, from their local resources, then that community has the food, the energy and the money to build an economy that works.

So we can not only repair the atmosphere, we can also begin to repair our economic systems, community by community, around the world; if we do this right.

So this is the other end of the telescope, to look at the total context of what happens when we bring this process into a social context. And how to organize as human beings and how we can use this as a way to regenerate our social structures, our economic structures, our financial structures and we can make economies that serve communities.

I call this LIFE: Locally Integrated Food and Energy. It's an idea I've been carrying for about 25 years because I became concerned how to use food policy as a way to drive agriculture and create a sustainable regional food system because I saw the climate curve 35 years ago and I thought "How are we going to feed ourselves?"

I think we need to go forward with this business development. It's really critical. What we need to have happen is to incubate businesses and develop this industry.
But we also need to recognize the social impact of what we are doing and to go about this in ways which make sense. For example, in the Northeast, we are not interested in industrial sized power plants and communities are already organizing to fight them off. The government of course is taking sides with the large scale developers.
What people want is farm scaled equipment, which can be used on our farms on our scale of operations. Mobile power plants which can be taken to the field site. We also want cook stoves which we can use in our houses and wood stoves that will heat our houses and also produce biochar.

One thing that we are very concerned about is how we are going to grow food in our northeast winters when we can't predict the weather and climate and we get extremes. So we want to be able to grow food under cover and this is a very good way to heat that structure and produce a key ingredient for our soil while we are growing food inside of it. Those are the things that make sense to us.

We would rather see a million stoves being cranked out of a factory to go in houses and produce jobs in our communities than to see a megawatt reactor down the road ripping up our forests. These are the kinds of concerns that become part of this community supportive approach to help us implement this technology.

I'll close by mentioning that the shirt I am wearing was given to me by the man who drove me to the airport to fly here. He is from India. I would like us all to remember that what we are doing here is not only going to impact our own society but can lead the way for the world.

Thank you. "

BioChar 4: The USA Secretary of Agriculture (created 8-11-09)

Yesterday, at the North American Biochar Conference - 2009, the Secretary of the USDA spoke with us for an hour. I had no intention of devoting a blog to what he had to say, but it was too good not to pass on.

Whether you voted for President Obama or not, (I did not), you should admit that he is doing things in a different way. When he was still President-Elect Obama, he asked Tom Vilsack to be his Secretary of Agriculture. He told Mr. Vilsack, that if he accepted, that he had two main expectations.

The two main expectations were that the Department of Agriculture would be engaged in 1) leading the country off of fossil fuels and in 2) creating a more vibrant rural economy.

Secretary Vilsack summed up the driving force behind those two instructions in four imperatives which President Obama has recognized.
1) There is significant risk in not taking action in stopping global warming. It will create more violent weather and will affect agriculture and animal health and human health.
2) Leading the way is important to our national security. The world expects the USA to lead and when we don't, we further loose credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world.
3) The USA needs better energy security. We need alternative ways to produce everything.
4) The USA needs a stronger rural economy so it is viable for families to move back to rural areas.

Mr. Vilsack spoke about how the administration is now recognizing biochar production coupled with energy production as one of the ways to meet all four of these imperatives. Biochar production removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and keeps it out of the atmosphere much longer then growing biomass does. There is a real opportunity for the USA to research and figure out the details of making different types of biochar to match the needs of local soils around the globe. There is a significant amount of electricity and space heating which can be done with the heat released while making biochar. The potential size of the new rural markets for making biochar/energy is estimated at between 5 and 20 billion dollars per year.

Mr. Vilsack answered questions for about 30 minutes. This author was very impressed with the answers. In response to one question about the budget set for the forest service, Mr. Vilsack outlined the 4 goals he has set for the USDA to use in creating its 2011 budget. All funded activities in the USDA in 2011 will have to address at least one of those four goals. The goals are:
1) Wealth creation opportunities for rural economies.
2) Support the forest service.
3) Global security and expansion of trade
4) Ensuring all children has safe, nutritious balanced meals.

That is the type of goal setting and holding people accountable for their activities and spending that I am used to in a successful private business. I was glad to see it being enacted in a governmental bureaucracy. I wish Mr. Vilsack all the success in the world.

Bye for now, Doug