Billions of tons of carbon could be eliminated from the atmosphere, sunken into the soil of existing farmland. The approach involves coating seeds in microbes, so the plant grows with superpower carbon capture abilities. The microbes are bacteria and fungi that help capture CO2 from the air. It’s being developed by startup Soil Carbon Co. and tested on farms along the East Coast of Australia. The company hopes that one day farmers worldwide will apply its climate change fighting strategy when growing their crops.
The company explains on its website:
Providing farmers with the tools to draw down CO2 on a gigaton scale. We research technologies and systems that enable farmers to increase soil organic carbon making their soils, more fertile, productive, and resilient. We work with microbes that are outstanding in their capacity to sequester carbon and bolster soil fertility. Carbon influences the infiltration and storage of water, driving effective nutrient cycling, and limiting fertilizer dependence. Soil carbon is the foundation of fertility in any soil. We have isolated strains of fungi that rapidly store significant amounts of carbon. Allowing fast, long-term, stable sequestration.
The microbial technology is based on research by the University of Sydney, which calculated that if used on farmland globally, it could sequester about 8.5 gigatons of carbon yearly. That’s about 25% of total CO2 emissions! Furthermore, it can store the carbon underground for longer than some “regenerative agriculture” techniques used today.
The company explains the science behind how microbes work:
Endophytes are microbes that live symbiotically within plant tissue for at least part of their life cycle. Groups of these endophytic microbes, such as mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen‐fixing bacteria, have long been known to benefit plant growth. Other endophytes residing within plant tissues have been shown to increase fertility, promote plant growth, and give protection against stresses such as disease, drought, and temperature extremes.
Some microbes, for example, melanized endophytic fungi, feed on the plant root exudate which contains labile carbon compounds and produces melanin. This is a more stable polyaromatic carbon compound that is resistant to hydrolysis, being broken down by reaction with water, in the soil. In addition, it has been shown that this carbon is deposited in tiny compressed balls of soil called soil micro aggregate. These micro-aggregates provide an anaerobic home where carbon can be safely stored long term.
Plant driven microbial processes are dramatically more efficient at capturing carbon compared with other sequestration mechanisms because they don’t require any additional land, equipment, or energy for the procedure. There’s also the added value of healthier soil, which will help deliver better yields and allow the farmers to use less fertilizer. The adaptation of the system is simple and involves minor changes.
Tegan Nock, a co-founder of Soil Carbon Co., said:
It’s something that’s really straightforward for a grower to be able to adopt. You don’t have to change practices; you don’t have to get new equipment.
It’s an ideal approach to use while the world transitions to cleaner, zero-emissions technology. It’s much cheaper and faster to pull CO2 from the air by buying and planting seeds than it is to build and run carbon-capture machines, for example. And as a bonus, farmers can earn some extra money selling carbon credits!
Guy Hudson, a co-founder, and CEO said:
We’re all aware that we need to draw down an enormous amount of CO2 very quickly, and we’re in a race to get there. As growers, we have the workforce—around a billion farmers around the world working at the intersection of atmosphere and soil every day—and the infrastructure already in place. On average, we find about a million wheat plants per hectare.
The question is really, can we draw down a significant enough amount of CO2 in the short term that we can buy the world time to transition other elements of our economy, whether [that’s a] benefit to transport or industry? I think agriculture and soil carbon is the only opportunity we have to be able to do that in the really short term. Because we don’t need to build additional infrastructure. We don’t need to train a new workforce. It’s all there already. We just need to provide the tools and the incentive to mobilize that workforce in the service of being in the atmosphere and in the service of this challenge.
The company is now conducting trials in the U.S. and Australia and plans to launch commercially within two years.
