“We’ve got to nurture the land, nurture ourselves and nurture each other. That’s really what being human is about, and if we can get into that essence then we might have a future on the planet.” Healthy soil is key in restoring biodiversity, protecting against pests and disease, and improving water use and photosynthetic efficiency. Healthy soil supports healthy animals and healthy humans. And healthy soil sequesters carbon from the atmosphere, effectively reversing climate change.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: [music] [music] Hey, it’s Ross from Reversing Climate Change. I wanted to let you know that we have a new podcast called Carbon Removal Newsroom. It’s short form, it’s timely, and it’s all about carbon removal. Whenever we see a good news story about carbon removal, or that should be about carbon removal, we’re going to record a short episode about it with a rotating cast of guests. So please subscribe to Carbon Removal Newsroom, check it out in your podcast app of choice, and thank you so much for your support. Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
I am Ross Kenyon. Christophe Jospe is here with me. Look, we have a video camera on us for the first time ever doing the podcast. So we are excited about that. Yeah, we’re still in Wichita. No till on the plains finishing up now. Indeed. Carry on my wayward son, Kansas. God, you just had to find a way. The last episode he had to do the Seven Nation Army reference and then Kansas got it this time. It did. Are you done?
Christophe Jospe: Almost. Almost. I don’t know. I mean, no till on the planes learning a lot. We’re going to talk a little bit about what we learned because we’re here with another attendee who was there at the conference. She flew all the way from Australia. So if we just shout, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, she might just feel compelled to say, oi, oi, oi. That basically happened the other day.
Ross Kenyon: We try to be geographically sensitive, throw in references to help our listeners contextualize what we’re doing. I don’t think it works, but it makes us laugh a little bit.
Christophe Jospe: As noted, around 3% to 4% of our listeners come from Australia, which means 3% of our guests should probably come from Australia. So we’ve already had Charlie Massey. That was our first and I was our second. Sitting here to my right is Louise Edmonds. She is founder of a company called Intuit Earth. She is also a composter. I look forward to getting into what Intuit Earth is all about and what it means to compost and why it’s so amazing and everyone should be doing a whole lot more of it. And she’s also been quite instrumental in And so we’ll probably get into that too.
Louise is a podcast So she knows what she’s in for. It’s always great to have these sorts of guests and fellow travelers. So without any further ado, Louise, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are and the story of how you got to working on Reversing Climate Change?
Louise Edmonds: Well, it’s quite a journey, probably about the last 20 or so years. It started in my first year of university. I took an elective called Ecofeminism. And I read a book by a woman called Dr. Vandana Shiva called Ecofeminism. And it was really talking about the similarities between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women. Anyone who has read or heard Vandana, she’s a very erudite woman who explains things exceptionally well. And from that book, I really understood how oppression works all over the globe. Obviously, starting in developing countries, beginning with the Green Revolution and the oppression of people who Working on the lands, indebting them, stripping them of their biological wealth, biological diversity, and yeah, really destroying the environment and making them dependent on chemicals and genetically modified crops and so on and so forth.
Ross Kenyon: This is Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution you’re referring to?
Louise Edmonds: Yeah, the Green Revolution. So are you familiar with the Green Revolution?
Ross Kenyon: Yes, I’m playing dumb a little bit in case the audience wants to learn a bit more.
Louise Edmonds: Okay, so the Green Revolution started after World War II when we had massive amounts of leftover munitions which formed the foundations of fertilizers. So we were like, okay, so what do we do with all these things? And so we decided that we would make fertilizers and that we would sell them to developing countries. And those developing countries embraced the fertilizers and as a result of embracing the fertilizers in the early years saw massive, massive increases in yields. But over time, that turned into soil and water degradation. And with that, they, for example, in India, there are certain varieties of rice that are three metres tall.
And they’re three metres tall because they have massive big floods that move past in those areas. So they need to be that big, right? But when we started using fertilisers and destroying the soil, those three metre tall rice crops ended up lodging and on the ground.
Ross Kenyon: Is that the dwarf rice that people talk about? Is that what that is?
Louise Edmonds: So these tall varieties, right, ended up on the ground because we destroyed the soil and the roots couldn’t penetrate to give them a proper anchor. And so that was the beginning of engineering crops to be dwarf varieties, right? And the beginning of the loss of all of the genetic diversity in countries like India, where there was thousands of varieties of rice being grown.
Ross Kenyon: And it turned into a monoculture with all of the lessened resilience, less diversity, things that we’ve talked about a fair amount on the show.
Christophe Jospe: Ross, you are derailing Louise’s story. I’d like to continue along. I’m sorry. You learned about the Green Revolution. You saw that we’ve been pillaging our earth of an incredible resource, which is the health of the soil. Then what happened?
Louise Edmonds: Well, I started to realize that what’s happening in developing countries is also happening in Australia. The wheat belt of Western Australia covers 200,000 square kilometers. We have removed 97% of the vegetation of the wheat belt. As a result of that, we’ve got a severely degraded environment that’s turning into a desert. And the impact of that on the people who live in the Wheatbelt and our ecosystem in Western Australia is very significant. So the causes are all the same. And I was like, okay, you know, I want to do something about this.
And so it was a long journey. I started off by taking a course, a one-day course in biodynamics and I learned how to make compost. And I’m like, oh, wow, this is exciting. And I got really obsessed with compost. Made it everywhere in every opportunity I could. And I’d teach heaps of people about making compost. And it took quite a few years for me to make the connection between compost and soil. And then when I made the connection there, I was like, wow, if we have control of our soils, you know, if we’re looking after them and we’re taking care of them, they’re taking care of us.
We don’t need the fertilizer. We don’t need the pesticide. We don’t need the bank. You know, we just need sunlight and healthy soil, you know. And so that’s where I began to realize that’s the pathway to sovereignty for farmers, rural communities, third world countries. And yeah, that’s how I got into that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You became a compost freak, it sounds like. Yes. You’re one of those people at parties. It’s like, oh God, I’m gonna have to hear about compost again. Yeah.
Louise Edmonds: Yeah. Totally obsessed. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, so take us through the basics. I mean, we both live in Seattle where actually there’s municipal compost, which means we take our food waste and put it out in a special bin. And I don’t know where it goes. I know the city takes it away. It does something with it. But what are the different types of compost? What’s the difference between people who might individually make their own compost versus the things that are happening at the municipal level? I’ll just start with those questions.
Louise Edmonds: Oh, that’s a very big question. There is compost and there is compost.
Ross Kenyon: How much time do we have, Krista?
Louise Edmonds: Yeah. You know, my focus is on creating aerobic compost. So my learning started with Dr. Elaine Ingham, who you’d all be very familiar with. And I spent many years working with her technology and then now I’m working with Pfeiffer Leuke technology. So, it’s aerobic compost, very intensively managed and monitored. It’s exceptionally good quality stuff that gets great results in the field. So, yeah, it’s not just a whole pile of stuff that you mash up together and you just put it in the corner and you go, she’ll be right, mate. It’s a bit more complex than that.
Ross Kenyon: It did not work when I did that. It just smelled bad. Yeah, it’s an eyesore. So that’s not how you do it.
Louise Edmonds: No.
Ross Kenyon: You have to manage it more intensively.
Louise Edmonds: Very intensively, actually, yeah. So we monitor it every single day and that monitoring informs our management. And so, you know, a compost pile is a living entity. And we like it like a child that, you know, sometimes it wants milk and sometimes it wants food and sometimes it wants to sleep. And, you know, so we just have to look after it, how it’s, you know, how it speaks to us.
Christophe Jospe: Sometimes it puts on a temper tantrum and you can’t really figure out why it’s angry at you.
Louise Edmonds: Yes, I’ve had those experiences.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, so then how does it get used? We hear farmers talking about compost tea. So what does that mean? Is that a certain way to apply the compost? What are we talking about here? What’s the value of compost? Yeah.
Louise Edmonds: So let’s start with, we’re talking about compost tea, right? So compost tea is usually, comes from the work of Dr. Elaine Ingham. And what we’re talking about here is a compost that is diluted into water and then we feed it and we brew it to grow the populations in that material and then we use it on our fields. It’s quite distinct from a compost extract. So my focus, what I work on is compost extracts. When we’re using compost extracts, we liquefy the compost in water and What is remaining is all the microorganisms that are living, all the microorganisms that are dormant, spores of various different fungis.
We also have a whole heap of metabolites and enzymes and photochemicals that are the byproducts of microbial digestion that are also stimulants for plants and have disease-suppressive qualities and detoxification qualities. There’s a lot in there. So I mainly work with extracts.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So take us from compost to where Australia has gone in the last little bit of time. I know that there’s been climate policy changes. You’ve been involved in the soil methodology side of things. God, this is a big question, I guess. What was your role in it? And just generally, what’s an overview of what Australia is doing for climate change and soil health?
Louise Edmonds: Okay, so in 2006, I worked for a company that was selling biodiversity carbon offsets under the Kyoto Protocol. I was selling those to multinational companies all over the world, and that required me to understand a lot about the motivations for someone to participate in a voluntary carbon project. Then in 2007, I attended Dr. Christine Jones’ Managing the Carbon Cycle Conference in Catanning in Western Australia. And from there, a whole heap of things clicked in for me and I really understood, wow, the power of soil. The power of soil to sequester carbon is incredible.
So at that time, any individual could approach the Australian government and recommend a methodology. And so I approached the Australian government and started talking to them about establishing a methodology. And they really had no idea what I was talking about. And I’m like, oh, this is a little bit difficult. And then they started ringing me and asking me questions about soil carbon and soil carbon sequestration. And I’m going, hey, man, I’m not the expert here. This is pretty obvious, but I thought you guys would do that. Anyway, so I kind of went down a rabbit hole for quite a while trying to figure it all out.
And then I thought, no, no, no, this is a really, really deep rabbit hole. I’m just going to pull myself out of it. Now I’m going to sit and wait. So I waited 12 years until last year. The measured soil carbon sequestration methodology was approved by the Australian government. So what’s really exciting about the potential in Australia is that we have a sovereign market. So the Australian government procures carbon credits to address its nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement. We also have a voluntary market that’s emerging and we also have a compliance market that’s likely to grow significantly.
So it’s almost like an emissions trading scheme or a cap and trade scheme. We don’t call it that. And most Australians are not aware that we have that mechanism in Australia, which I find quite interesting. So the opportunity is huge. It’s really significant.
Christophe Jospe: There’s a lot of very fun things to unpack there, and we could probably spend a whole podcast on each one of them individually. I think the way that you distinguish the three markets is quite important to both say there’s a voluntary market, there’s a national market, and there’s a sovereign market. And I think sovereign is important because of course, climate change is a global problem. And all these countries came together in the Conference of the Parties in Paris a couple of years ago to come up with these contributions that they wanted to make.
At the end of the day, still not enough. We need to do more, but it needs to be possible to monetize the addition of carbon to the soils because that obviously, or really any process, but here we’re talking about soil carbon. I want to go, I guess, not to get too political, but I want to pick up on this comment where you said like most Australians don’t really know that this is actually in place. And also sort of their swings to the left and the right and people maybe in the same way in the United States say, well, climate change isn’t really a problem.
Let’s elect certain politicians who might think a certain way, which really potentially challenges things. Yeah. As this person who went down the rabbit hole and then the rabbit who sort of sat patiently and now it’s all happening again, what was it that you had to sit through? What are some of the political forces that you’re up against in these markets?
Ross Kenyon: You might want to cool it on the rabbit references in Australia. I know that’s a sensitive issue. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, you picked up on that, didn’t you, Ross? Thank you. I ruined your comments. You just had to state the obvious. Okay, so how has the political climate in Australia changed over time? And what gives you hope? What gives you fear about how things are going from a policy side?
Louise Edmonds: Well, the political climate in Australia is changing every day. People joke that we’ve got seven living prime ministers in Australia. I think we’ve, I don’t know how many prime ministers, we’ve had four prime ministers in the last eight years or something. You know, it’s crazy. And they, you know, they’re constantly knocking each other off. And I mean, I’m kind of beyond government now, to be honest with you, because I see this globally. Way back when I was working in 2006 selling Kyoto Protocol offsets, Companies were already all over this. They were already way ahead of the government and policymakers in Australia.
Even today, our big companies, we have this thing called the Carbon Disclosure Project. Under the Carbon Disclosure Project, they have priced in carbon. It’s currently priced in at $18 a tonne. It’s already on their balance sheet. Unfortunately, they’ve been waiting for leadership from the government to actually put that into place. But they desperately require that certainty for a whole heap of reasons. Investment certainty going forward. Some of these carbon intensive investments that are kind of sitting waiting, they’re waiting because we don’t have this certainty. We don’t know where we’re going.
In Australia, it’s causing chaos in our electricity market, particularly on the East Coast. People probably don’t realize that climate change and carbon and all of these things are actually what’s creating this chaos and this lack of uncertainty that’s stifling investment and so forth. I do believe that the corporations are going to drive these changes. When did we get Tony Abbott? We got him in 2012 or something. You know, that was the corporation’s lobbying and, you know, axe attacks and all of this kind of stuff. I mean, it’s just a circus.
Axe attacks? Axe attacks, the carbon tax, right?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, I said axe attacks. I was like, okay, that sounds dangerous.
Louise Edmonds: Yeah, because we did have a carbon tax in Australia for a very small period of time and the change of government, they repealed that. If we had have had the carbon tax, my God, we would be so far ahead of the rest of the world right now. Australia would be miles ahead. It was a very, very well-considered piece of policy that would have served us exceptionally well. So it’s a tragedy that we’ve lost 10 years, but we can make that time up again. I’m really hoping that we get really strong leadership from corporations to drive this because I think that’s the only place where it can be driven from.
It’s not an individual effort that’s going to get us across the line. It’s a really big, we need lots of resources into it.
Ross Kenyon: What’s the motivation for corporations doing this? Are they trying to front run legislation which might be more punitive than something that they might undertake? Or might they be able to have a good example for government to look to and say, hey, look, we’re already doing most of this. So if you are going to make policy changes, maybe use our model. Is it something like that? Is it something I’m missing?
Louise Edmonds: It’s global. This issue is a global issue, right? There are a lot of countries in the world that are taking really serious action on climate change and they’re really ramping up their ambitions in terms of their emissions reductions. And to do that, they have to change their infrastructure, their technology. They have to invest in clean technology. And those companies are not going to be very appreciative of Australia’s dirty exports landing on their doorstep and undermining their progression towards a zero carbon economy. They’re going to put taxes on our exports.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like a geopolitical trade policy angle.
Louise Edmonds: Yeah, absolutely. I’m completely confident that’s going to happen. So we can either pay these huge tariffs or we can clean our act up and at the same time restore out the ecosystems of our country that desperately need that support.
Christophe Jospe: Well, one comment that was made at this conference was around the innovation that happens on the fringes in extreme weather and Australia – Unfortunately, has suffered from years of drought. And so it seems to me like a driving force sometimes for soil carbon sequestration might be, well, this is going to be good for me because I’ll store more water and I’ll become more resilient. How do you see that playing out?
Louise Edmonds: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Adversity, struggle, debt, almost losing your farm, communities falling apart. These are all very powerful drivers for change. When people are hurting, that’s where the change is going to come.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we love speaking with people at soil health conferences because Nori is very appealing. There are so many reasons to care about the quality of one’s soil and being resilient to weather events that they might not otherwise be able to sustain, like the amount of water they can take into the soil that helps them during drought times. There’s a lot of really good reasons to care about this. And carbon policy is just maybe one thing that’s tacked on top of that. That’s an extra incentive in addition to all these endogenous incentives to do so.
There was no question there.
Christophe Jospe: I got to I’ll just pick up what you put down and say, as we were walking over here, Louise and I both remarked, well, it’s funny, at this entire conference, a word which was not uttered once was climate change. Huh. Why do you think that is?
Louise Edmonds: I don’t know. That was my question to you. I thought that was quite interesting.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we can sort of Yeah, we have some theories on it.
Ross Kenyon: I think culturally, maybe some of the no-till space is a bit closer to conventional. Like if you go to a permaculture conference, oftentimes it’s, I’ve met more like first generation people involved in that space. So they’re committed to agriculture and soil for ideological reasons, whereas a lot of the no-till conferences seem to be quite practical. And then that leads itself into broader conversations about soil biology and caring about these things. But it doesn’t seem like I’ve met a ton of farmers at these conferences. Yeah, I think so.
Christophe Jospe: But I want to go back to this methodology that she built and sort of paint the connection or parallels between what Nori is trying to do and really just say like there’s extreme synergy between really any market that’s working to monetize ecosystem. And I’ll let you say it because you were one of the sort of leaders of pushing it forward. You can probably say it much better than I can and talk about how it works. But what it enables is... It’s something that ultimately will empower a lot of what Nori would require.
So even if we wanted to start in Australia, we’re not there yet because the reference network of all the different soil samples don’t exist in the same way they do in the United States, which is why we’re starting here. But in a future perfect world, what we might be able to create creates one option of hopefully several options where you have a perhaps different voluntary markets, different compliance markets, farmers take your pick, how do you want to sell your carbon if you’re And so I just want to kind of state we’re very much on the same team and very keen to see this roll out as quickly as possible and be able to support it.
To put it in your words over dinner when we connected, you were saying, well, it’s extremely thorough and very complex. And so I’m going to challenge you in as simple terms as possible. Can you explain how the methodology works?
Louise Edmonds: Yeah. Well, it’s a measured methodology, which means that we begin with a baseline and we test the soil in the paddock. And then after a few years, we come back and we test it again. And you get paid on the increases, hopefully increases, in soil carbon sequestration that you achieve. There are some pretty significant obligations to participate in such a program. You have to maintain the permanence of that carbon in the soil for a minimum of 25 years and in some cases up to 100 years. So, you know, it’s a very significant undertaking with some pretty detailed legal structures sitting behind it.
So, yeah, we’re taking it pretty seriously in Australia.
Christophe Jospe: Good, as one should. Yeah. I hope you’re not implying that Nori is not, but talk to us about the rollout.
Ross Kenyon: He’s very sensitive. I’m sorry. Hair trigger.
Christophe Jospe: So how is this going to roll out? You said you’ve waited and now 2018, things are finally happening. So what can the world look for and where can we sort of watch this unfold?
Louise Edmonds: Well, we’ve developed a pilot project. And that pilot project will engage 20 farmers in each agricultural region from Geraldton to Esperance. So we’re looking at about 60 farms across that area over a land base of about 240,000 hectares. So it’s a pretty big pilot. And so then, you know, once we enroll those people, we do the baselining and off we go. But I think the really important thing to appreciate about these kinds of projects, and particularly in Australia, you do need to have a degree of scale for them to be viable.
So if we would attempt to do this with just one farm, it would cost us four times what it costs us to do it at this larger scale. That’s really a critical component. Another component is that the change is quite significant. The social and cultural norms that have been dominant throughout agricultural practices and our agricultural communities are hard to change because of all these social pressures. We really need to support farmers as human beings who have a whole heap of belief systems and ways of looking at their farms and things that have kind of led to the problem that we’re in, changing that’s not a small undertaking and it’s a community and it’s a people process.
So we’ve built very detailed extensive support networks around farmers to help them with that.
Christophe Jospe: Really glad that you’re talking about the sort of changing the management practices and the education that goes along with it, which is a core component to seeing lasting and systemic change. And it’s kind of the perfect segue to talk about one of the organizations that you founded, which is Intuit Earth. Yes. So how does that work? And what do you do?
Louise Edmonds: Okay, so IntuitEarth, in this program, IntuitEarth has designed a four-year program of education and training for farmers that’s delivered by experts from all over the world. In fact, there are a few people who have been teaching here over the last few days that will be joining us in Australia to deliver various elements of the program. We’ve also set up a structure that enables us to Embed these new paradigms, these new ways of doing things, this new knowledge into institutions within rural communities, right? So, you know, having extension agents and peers in the communities working directly with them and also the farmers in that community.
So, yeah, that’s a big part of what Intuit Earth does as well as everything else, you know, Doing all of the baselining and setting up the programs and finding the buyers for the credits and the whole thing. It’s a cradle to grave kind of approach to this business.
Ross Kenyon: I’m very, I don’t know. Do you want to dig into some of the nerdy details of baseline generation? I’d like to hear about the kind of data you’re getting for the soil, how much it costs. How do people verify under this regime how much carbon is actually going into the soil? Or is this a derailment and you prefer to go somewhere else? Could you tell us a little bit about how you’re figuring out how much carbon is going into the soil?
Louise Edmonds: Yeah. So we take soil samples down to one meter. So we’ve got a big bucket that we’re working with here. Yeah. And then those soil samples are tested in the lab to determine what values we get.
Ross Kenyon: This is at the start, right?
Louise Edmonds: At the very beginning, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Christophe Jospe: And then you’re determining, maybe you should just tell me more before I jump in. I can put it in English for you. So you scoop it up, burn it down. What’s left over is the soil organic carbon, correct?
Louise Edmonds: Yeah, something like that.
Ross Kenyon: And are you developing a baseline like by farm or is it something like that’s regional?
Louise Edmonds: Each farm.
Ross Kenyon: Each farm, okay.
Louise Edmonds: Yeah, each farm, each paddock.
Ross Kenyon: Each paddock, which is a field, we might say, or is the term different in some way?
Louise Edmonds: Well, technically they’re called carbon estimation areas and carbon estimation areas are defined by soil types and topography and how the paddock is used, whether it’s wooded or whether it’s a pasture or whether it’s a cropping paddock. So, yeah, and that’s all very, very technical stuff, which is beyond me. There’s a lot of statistics and maths and, you know, yeah, it’s very complicated stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So you actually do soil testing at the beginning. Are you doing soil testing throughout the duration of these contracts and their participation? Yes. Yeah. What’s the size? Like for one of these tests, how many acres does this cover? Or like how big is the carbon estimation area there?
Louise Edmonds: That’s defined by the soil types and what’s happening on that particular piece of land. So it’s unique. We don’t just get a grid and put it over a farm and go, okay, this one, this one, this one. It’s a bit more complex than that. Yeah, so it costs us about over an eight-year period. It costs us $24 a hectare to do this baseline testing. So it’s pretty good. I mean, you know, we’ve kind of, you know, on very conservative modeling after our expenses, if we achieve a two-ton carbon sequestration per hectare per year, we could be profiting something like $50 per hectare, which is very significant for a wheat belt farmer.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve heard, isn’t it something like $30 a pop for soil tests in the United States? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: It depends on what soil test we’re talking about and how rigorous they’re done and what else you’re testing for. So it’s not quite that simple.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we were talking about this over dinner the other day about because our model, we lean on Comet Farm to make estimations, and then we ground truth at the end of the 10-year period, how much carbon actually went in. So we don’t rely nearly as much on soil testing, though I would predict, and Christoph can correct me if I’m wrong, that The price for soil testing, especially with an incentive like in Australia or under Nori or any other carbon system, there’s a pretty good business case to be developing inexpensive, reusable, novel ways of testing soil carbon.
And I think more will come, right?
Christophe Jospe: Right. And as I alluded to, in the United States, there’s quite a strong reference network of different soil types, which is why we’re so keen on the approach that Louise is advocating for, because it will naturally develop that reference network, which improves underlying models to enable the estimation of soil organic carbon. So it’s kind of like the more tests, the better. And also, indeed, we are having a full audit at year 10 of We would certainly welcome additional data from soil tests that farmers might do. And oftentimes farmers want to do soil tests because it’s giving them more data on how to farm better.
And so it’s kind of like, You’re paying for things not for the carbon benefit, but because it’s helping you make better economic decisions. And so it’s really nice to think about, well, if you’re going to do that anyway, how can I tack on to improve and reduce the estimation error? Sorry, I might have just filled in the gaps and then destroyed any question that you had. So Ross, I’ll pass it back to you.
Ross Kenyon: That’s okay. Well, where do you see this going in the next couple of years? You have a pilot ongoing now. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot as any pilot one hopes to learn a lot from. And then where would you like to see this project go in the next five, 10 years?
Louise Edmonds: Well, our mission is to regenerate the wheat belt of Western Australia. That’s a pretty big landmass.
Ross Kenyon: How big did you say it was?
Louise Edmonds: It’s 200 square kilometres, 200,000 square kilometres, sorry. So it’s the size of the UK. Yeah. And it’s a magnificent landscape. The biodiversity in the wheat belt prior to being cleared is just phenomenal. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. And it has so much potential to support us, you know, for employment, culture, and I’d like it returned to its glory.
Christophe Jospe: So let’s take it full circle with your compost obsession. How much compost will be needed for that 200,000 square kilometer area?
Louise Edmonds: Well, you know, that’s a great question because a lot of people say, oh, well, Louise, you know, you’re never going to be able to make enough compost to deal with the wheat belt. Challenge accepted. Yeah, bring it on. So I’m going to give you a really concrete example of farmers that I’m working with that are actually using the compost. So these farmers are in a fairly marginal area in the wheat belt of Western Australia, Ian and Diane Haggerty, who I think Charlie Massey might have referred to, and they are cropping 13,000 hectares, right?
It’s a lot of...
Ross Kenyon: That’s a big piece of property.
Louise Edmonds: It’s a big property. Yeah. And they use about 30 tonnes of the compost that I manufacture for their entire program, over 13,000 hectares. So a little bit of really good compost goes a really long way. We don’t have any problem with that. We’ve got plenty of compost to do this job.
Ross Kenyon: That’s amazing. Yeah. I think we should start concluding. We have to unfortunately run off to another event here soon. Otherwise, I’m sure we could spend a lot of time together, Louise, and I hope we do in the future. I want to ask you, it sounds like the book or the author you referenced at the beginning, is there a foundational text one might want to read if they wanted to get inside the eco-feminist headspace? I’d be personally interested. I’m sure our listeners are readers or they just get book recommendations from us constantly and it’s overwhelming.
Sorry if so. But where’s a good place to start if they were to learn about that? And maybe some other book that you might want to recommend?
Louise Edmonds: Yeah. Well, Vandana Shiva, she’s a well-published author. She’s written lots of really, really great books. She’s a fantastic speaker. You’ll find stuff from her all over the place. So yeah, she’s pretty easy to access.
Christophe Jospe: Okay. Is it possible that we’re eco-feminists without knowing it? And if not, what can I do to become one?
Louise Edmonds: I always get a little bit like, oh, don’t use that word feminist, Louise. It’s like that’s dangerous territory. I don’t consider myself to be a feminist and that’s not really the foundation of what I’m about. I mean, there’s just similarities between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women, you know, and you can make those connections quite easily. We need to change our relationship to the land, you know, and I don’t like making these things masculine or feminine. You know, we just got to nurture the land and nurture ourselves and nurture each other.
And that’s really what being human is about, I think. And if we can get into that essence, then we might have a future on the planet.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great sentiment. I can’t imagine anyone could even possibly disagree with that. If you do, feel free to write to us at hello at nori. com. Feel free to criticize the way we do our podcasts, us personally, the way we look in this video. Hello to our Australian now video viewers. Thanks for being with us, Louise. We want to speak with you a lot more. We think you have a lot of knowledge. You’ve been so involved with soil carbon methodology and we’d like to continue the conversation off the air and continue collaborating as much as possible.
Christophe Jospe: And I’m just excited. I want to give a shout out again to the internet as a great way to connect people. I met Louise through LinkedIn, and it’s really a fabulous tool. Not trying to promote LinkedIn, but if you know what you want and you know who you’re looking for, it’s really valuable. And I think those who have the entrepreneurial spirit want to roll their sleeves up, get things done, share best practices. Do things, try them out, find the others who are doing things slightly differently and say, okay, what can we all learn from each other?
I think there’s a lot of common ground and the world needs it a whole lot more, a whole lot more quickly. So that’s my challenge to you listeners. Find what you’re passionate about, share it with other people, find others working with it and build this broad community. Louise, we like to sort of give our guests the final word. So feel free to take us home.
Louise Edmonds: Well, I’d just like to say that I’m totally amazed with what many of the farmers here are doing. It’s incredible stuff. And taking these stories back to Australia, people are going to go, no way. There’s no way you can grow a crop without fertilizer and without pesticides and without herbicides. And no way you can outbeat a conventional yield. And these guys are doing it in a big way. And they’re loving it. And they’re passionate about what they’re doing. It’s very exciting. And I just love to be able to bring some of that energy and enthusiasm and passion back to Australia.
So it’s a real pleasure. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s our pleasure. Yeah, they really are optimistic at these conferences. I imagine some farming conferences are quite dour in comparison. They’re optimistic and creative. And Christoph and I try to shut up as much as possible while we’re here. We call it listening tours. Try to just observe and fit in as much as possible. I get a lot out of these every time. I’m sure we’ll continue going. But thanks for being here, Louise. If you like the podcast, please review it, share it. Give us a good rating in your app.
Subscribe to our newsletter. Go to nori. com. Get involved. Feel free to drop us a note at hello at nori. com. What did I forget last time that you chided me and jumped in on? Subscribe. Oh, and subscribe. Please subscribe and help us grow. And thank you, Louise.
Louise Edmonds: Yeah, thank you very much.
