PlantVillage won the Carbon XPRIZE milestone award in 2022, and was awarded one million dollars. It aims to lift 200 million African farming families out of poverty. They are working to capture and sell a billion tonnes of carbon per year using biochar sequestration by integrating trees with crops on farms and using lumber for biochar.
So what exactly is happening on the ground with biochar? And can we solve today's problems with the mindset that helped create them?
In today's Reversing Climate Change podcast, Dr. David Hughes, the Huck Chair in Global Food Security at Penn State University and Director of USAID Innovation Lab on Current and Emerging Threats to Crops, Founder of PlantVillage & Carbon4Good, describes how this program avoids middlemen and gets farmers paid directly for making biochar, how biochar improves soil health and provides additional income, and how the technique represents both climate adaptation, and mitigation.
David also goes on to fit biochar and soil health into the broader context of the global climate fight, international economics, and climate justice.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Asa Kamer: All right. Hello, and welcome to Reversing Climate Change. I’m Asa Kamer, the producer of our other podcast, Carbon Removal Newsroom. And I’m joined by my co-host and frequent collaborator, Siobhan Montoya-Lavender. Hi, Shiv. How are you?
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Hey, doing well, thanks.
Asa Kamer: Awesome. And so we have a really exciting show today. We’re talking to someone who’s spreading CDR around the world and winning awards for it. His name is David Hughes. He is the HUC Chair in Global Food Security at Penn State University, the Director of the USAID Innovation Lab on Current and Emerging Threats to Crops, and the founder of the project we’re going to be talking about today called Plant Village. David, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing today? I’m Grant. It’s lovely to be with you. Wonderful.
And I was seeing on your Twitter that it looks like you’ve been in several far-flung locations recently. Where are you calling us from today?
Dr. David Hughes: Well, I’m in central Pennsylvania now. Last week I was in DC and San Francisco.
Asa Kamer: Wonderful. All right, great. So I’m going to give just a quick intro for our listeners about your program, and then we can get into it. So the XPRIZE released a booklet this month with information on all their milestone winners, of which Plant Village is one.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: So you guys- Woo-hoo, congratulations.
Asa Kamer: Yeah, that’s a really big deal. They, Plant Village is, so they published a book, a short book, program with information about all the winners who each won a million dollars to continue their program. So sort of an introductory award. I think a lot of our listeners are probably familiar, but Plant Village is a global public good at Penn State University that works with smallholder farms across the world, leveraging its best-in-class AI cloud system and ground team to help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change. They reach over 14 million farmers a week in nine countries with climate change advice and help farms adapt to climate change.
At the same time, They leverage the millions of farms reach through the AI powered carbon capture cubes to mitigate climate change. And so what they do is they use or one aspect of their program is helping farmers plant trees on their farms and then converting some of the biomass from those trees to biochar and some of it to lumber. And they also have an app to help identify the Plant diseases, which I was just checking out on the App Store, and I don’t really have a good use for it, so I didn’t download it, but I thought it was cool that I could check that out.
So David, can you, just to start us off, tell us a little bit about how it’s been going with Plant Village since you all won the XPRIZE Milestone Award last year?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, so Plant Village is a Concept to democratize the world’s access to knowledge for smallholder farmers, because that’s exactly what we should be doing. We need to be helping people around the world grow more food. It is something that has arisen out of my long-term history as a rainforest ecologist. So every time I come out of a rainforest in the tropics, I walk into a farm decimated by diseases. And we’ve been building up Plant Village over the last 10 years, and it’s been very successful. And then we really pivoted to climate change in 2019, predominantly because of the large cyclones coming into East Africa that pulled all the moisture out of Kenya and Uganda, leading to crop failure.
And then what we’re seeing now across East Africa is the sixth successive drought. So it’s climate change all the time, everywhere, unfortunately. And so in 2021, 2022, I really kind of wanted to go into fundraising for Plant Village. And thankfully, the university gave me an endowed chair that allowed me some sort of seed capital. So Plant Village itself started off with seed capital. We started off with $120,000 in investment. And we’ve raised over $33 million from the public purse. And then the part of it for carbon, we’ve raised money from Cisco Foundation and now XPRIZE.
And this has been great. It’s really brought a lot of attention because it turns out that a lot of what we focus on, climate change adaptation, turns out to be the flip side of the coin of what we would do for mitigation because carbon capture is a surface area problem. Whether that’s a leaf on a tree in springtime in Pennsylvania where I am, Or it’s capturing carbon in a big machine that puts it in a rock in Iceland. It’s all surface area. But the best solution we have today are plants and turning those plants into durable forms of carbon.
We can do that better across the tropics because that’s the place where plants grow the fastest. So it’s been really exciting. It’s been great to have the attention from The milestone prize we won. We also, in fact, won the student prize as well. So we’re one of only two groups who have won both prizes. And then we were there in San Francisco meeting other teams and exchanging strategies and solutions of how we all collectively get to a better world.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Nice. I got to say, I’m not surprised you’ve been working on this for 10 years because you’ve got drones, you’ve got an app, you’ve got boots on the ground, you’ve got satellites. It seems like a lot going on. How did you develop this and how has it been to manage all these moving parts?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, so developing is really from a sense of anger that we just, you know, I came to the US, I was working on rainforest ecologist, I was in the, my background was on ant behavior. If any of your listeners have been watching The Last of Us, that’s based upon the research I’ve done over the last 20 years on fungi manipulating ant behavior. So I was very happy as a rainforest ecologist. But then became increasingly upset and annoyed that we’d walk out of a forest into a farm and knowledge that could help farmers wasn’t available.
And then I came across, I was at Harvard at the time, I came across this land grant system of universities that the United States has constructed over the last 170 years. And it’s a unique construction in higher education. It’s to have applied research for a global public good. And I said, that’s a great idea, but why is it not globally in public? Why is it that a farmer in a cocoa farm in Ghana doesn’t access it? And so that’s why I conceived of Plant Village to understand that the phone, the smartphone is going to get better and better and better over time because of Moore’s law.
And so we can have AI in a phone answering questions or diagnosing problems. And now we’ve all seen the grand explosion in AI that’s happened in the last two or three months. It’s all on our radar.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, for sure.
Dr. David Hughes: But I was thinking back in 2012 that we would have computer vision AI Being as good as humans, and in fact, it is. AI is twice as good as humans in diagnosing plant diseases. And so that’s where plant villages come from. How do we operate in 10 countries now with boots on the ground or 60 countries with the United Nations? We use a radical decentralization system. So everybody’s in charge and no one’s in charge. In 2019, we got money from Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, that came with Really good instruction on using their objectives and key results framework.
I got a director of operations, Anneliese Keys at the time, who’s just sort of running this operation and then training people how to do that, cloning herself. So we have lots of people like her in various countries. So we just give young people huge amounts of authority and ability to change the world. And it turns out when you do that, they work very hard because they have more skin in the game. So that’s how Planned Village works.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Oh, I like that philosophy.
Asa Kamer: That’s amazing. And so it sounds like you guys work on a wide variety of issues related to smallholder farmers and the sort of carbon angle is something that Does apply because you’re capturing karma carbon with biochar but it’s not what why you set out you didn’t start this I mean or correct me if I’m wrong it sounds like you didn’t start this whole program to capture a bunch of carbon as much as you could. But found that there’s this nice synergy with biochar where it’s both adaptation and mitigation and are kind of putting it into your bigger umbrella of programs is that kind of right.
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, so we’re people and planet. A lot of the other groups are just planet. And people and planet is necessary because people are more important. The planet will be totally fine without us. It will just belch and move on. As a rainforest ecologist who has worked on this for a long time, it’ll be fine. But I think necessarily we want to focus on not having hundreds of millions of people Being food insecure. So that was where we focused on. But despite our success, and I mentioned that we raised a lot of money from the public purse, $33 million so far, the amount of money required is hundreds of billions of dollars.
And over the last five years, we’ve been failing miserably in global food security. We’ve been decreasing Our successes, and we’re seeing now as many as 828 million people are food insecure. And this is just going to get worse under climate change. So we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, and no human since the invention of agriculture has had to grow under the current climate of 1. 2 degrees Celsius. And we’re guaranteed to get to 2. 5 or 2. 6. And so everything from this moment forward will be inventing how to grow enough food for an increasing population.
And so that requires lots of investment, lots of research. And I don’t think the public purse is up to it. In fact, I think it’s failing in many ways. So this is where I think the capital markets are important because it turns out that Africa or our countries in Africa and farmers in those countries have something which the rest of the world wants, a place to capture and store carbon. And so we could see a massive wealth transfer in the billions from Europe and US and elsewhere into Africa. And I think that’s exactly what we need in order to raise a whole generation of people out of poverty, and at the same time, reliably pull down and store a gigaton of carbon per year by 2030, starting in 2030.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Can we define smallholder farmers for our listeners and kind of paint a picture of who’s actually on the ground doing this work?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah. So typically a person on less than two hectares. And in our case, it’s oftentimes a person who might have an acre or half an acre of land. Plant Village has historically focused on Very, very low income farmers who might be on less than $2. 50 a day. In some regions, it’s less than $1. 90 a day. So an incredibly low level subsistence farming, living in an analog world, oftentimes very low literacy, oftentimes illiterate. And predominantly women farmers, about 83% of the farmers we initially focus on were women farmers. So these are people who are at the vagaries of the weather in the system.
So every single time they sow some seeds, they’re taking a huge gamble. And so the likelihood of getting money is very, very low. So these are subsistence farmers who are oftentimes on the edge and their fields are collapsing and they’re increasingly going to be collapsing.
Asa Kamer: What’s it like when you approach farmers? How do you first engage with farmers who maybe are struggling with their farms collapsing, as you said? What is that touchpoint like? And how do you find the reception normally is?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, so it can be angry. So we have a lot of NGOs in this space or a lot of government in this space who haven’t been effective. And so the anger is rightful and proper. And so Anneliese, whom I mentioned before, Has recounted a story of one of our farmers, Madame Consolata from Western Kenya, being super angry towards Annalise when she came to the farm. Oh, not another NGO coming here, taking stuff and never coming back. It’s just extractive. I mean, Africa has been the story of extraction for 400 years, starting with people all the way now to But we stick around.
We stick around and we tell people that we either know the answer or don’t know the answer. We employ local young people that we call the Plant Village Dream Team. These are young people from the local communities. In fact, Fate Aroni is Madame Consolata’s daughter and she’s our gender specialist. So we hired her. The daughter of one of our early farmers. And now, you know, four years later, I was in a meeting with Madame Consolata in a conference and she was there and Elise was there. And, you know, because you go there every single day, you build up that trust.
So what Plant Village has at its core is trust. But oftentimes the relationships start off hard because we’re making up for the mistakes and the wrongs of previous groups and having to, you know, do that effectively and in a transparent, trusted way.
Asa Kamer: And this is a segue to like one of the questions I most wanted to ask you, but you use the word extractive about the, you know, West relationship to Africa over the last 400 years. And there’s obviously been a lot of exposés, research, criticism of the way that carbon markets have interacted with both Africa, but also a number of other like tropical and tropical parts of the world developing nations with regard to forestry, with regard to, you know, Animal or livestock shepherds, the right word isn’t coming to me, but, you know, basically changing the way people live in order to generate carbon credits, which on paper might look good, but then have possibly detrimental impact on the people that the communities that are actually producing the carbon credit, so to speak.
And so the way you guys do it is, I would say different than that. And it seems like the both the decentralized approach that you’re taking and the way that people get paid directly rather than having like a carbon middleman And I’m kind of a leading question here, but can you talk a little bit about that? Because it does seem like you’re trying to move away from like an extractive model, so to speak, of the way some carbon offset programs have worked.
Dr. David Hughes: Yes, absolutely. So we’re partnered with Biochar Life and they’ve been doing this for a number of years. They come from a charity called Warm Heart Foundation, which has been trying to optimize the certification process by which farmers can get paid for capturing and storing carbon. So we’re trying to take that model and bring it into the local communities where we already exist. So if you think of Northern Kenya, for example, which is largely pastoralist communities dominated by Samburu, Rendil and Turkana tribes, we don’t do anything without full tribal buy-in from both the tribal chiefs as well as the village elders.
We make sure that when we’re recruiting people to turn an invasive weed into biochar, for example, we’re being Democratic and taking people from all the various subgroups. A huge amount of engagement with the community. We would not have a Plant Village team member from Western Kenya go to that location, although one person, Melodyne Jebdo, is in charge of the groups. We’d have to make sure we have a person like Fofin Arashiad from the local groups in Marsabit, for example, to engage. And so we’re highly, highly conscious of strife and conflict within the communities towards neocolonial issues or even between tribes.
So we want to make sure that a lot of time is just spent Engaging, working collectively, and then making sure that people see the benefits immediately. So they’re getting paid for the work they did today for carbon capture. Or if we make biochar, which of course is just this wonder, phenomenal tool for holding water in the soil, we’re putting that into the ground and planting vegetables. We’re not exporting it to Europe or even to a few miles away. It’s going directly where you can see the benefit. And then What I would like to see increasingly is local co-ops.
So can we build up these carbon capture communities? Let’s say it’s 100 pasturists or 100 farmers, they’re all contributing to a central pyrolysis system, and they all collect We have to also be mindful that not everybody owns land or has access to land. There’s people who don’t have ownership, but we do want the whole community to benefit. The greater the inequality, the greater the unhappiness. So if we can make sure that everybody’s getting the right and equitable share of the profits, We can do well. And this is just a sensible business strategy.
So everybody’s going to run out of resources in getting to the gigaton, whether the resources are silicon to have renewable energy or the resources are plants to capture carbon or even rocks. Everybody’s going to run out of resources. And the people who control the resources will be the ones who prevent access to them. And that’s the community members. And if the community members are not on board from day one, Then it’s very easily going to be the case that we’re going to have a problem. And so there’s two reasons why we want to do it.
One for decency and the second for expediency.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: This again sounds like a long project. And again, I’m not surprised you’ve been doing this for a long time because these sorts of public outreach and community-based initiatives take a lot of effort and time. How do you feel How has that worked in context of something like the XPRIZE, which is very time specific or other funding mechanisms, which might want to see immediate results? How has that been in terms of working on time?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, I think you’re very correct. I think it’s our job to educate the funders. The funders oftentimes having a clue what they want to do. Not entirely clear that Elon Musk knows what he wants to do on a minute to minute basis. So I think it’s our job to say, Look, we’ve tried various neoliberal policies of shareholder value, value maximization, and it hasn’t worked. It’s given us the problem we have. So, so maybe what we want to do with a planet sized problem is have a planet sized solution. We want to be part of that.
If you want to invest in something which is going to, you know, You know, manifestly change both the planet and the people who live on it, then be on board. But if you want a short term value maximization and a tweet, maybe we’re not the best partners for you. And I think that helps that we can say that because we’re sort of more mature that regard because we’ve had success. But I think that donors need to be educated and helped to spend their money correctly.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Yeah, agreed. I would love to talk a little bit about, since you brought it up, it is the hot topic right now. Let’s talk about AI. And let’s talk about when did you start planning on AI? Were you early to this AI boom? What do you see as the values and risks of using AI in this situation? And how has it been received?
Dr. David Hughes: So I started personally in 2011 when I was thinking of this, because I wanted to have my colleague, Harry Evans, who’s just as walking encyclopedia of knowledge of plant diseases, who’s older, 65, 70, have his brain in the phone. Because unfortunately, we’re not making people like him ever again. And we need people like him to grow food and to know how to do A, B, or C. So that was the initial view of Plant Village, even before, for some of your technical listeners, before things like TensorFlow came along in 2014 at Google, and we had an NDA with Google before then.
And so we patiently built it up over time. And very successfully, Pete McCloskey is the lead AI engineer in the project, but we’re just kind of expanding it. But very simply, it has to do what a human would do in that case. It’s artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence without human intelligence is just artificial. So we have to make sure that the human is there every step of the way. If we’re going to get a machine to diagnose a problem on a crop or how a tree grows or whether biochar is A, B or C, it has to be done.
And that means the data has to be open and transparent and how the data was trained. And that’s where the association with the university is important. We want to make sure that we have all of the data available. If we say something is this versus that, what’s the underlying algorithm of that? How can everybody examine it? Unfortunately, there’s a lot of groups out there who want to build walls around their proprietary technology. And the problem with that is Terranos because all of those companies are going to be invested in just like Terranos, the drug company, which does those little tricks, but we’re invested in.
And then the incentive is to overstate the competency of the algorithm. I mean, it’s just so basic. OpenAI was exactly the same thing. They wanted to have AI for the global public good. They didn’t. Now they have investors. Now it’s closed.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: It’s an ironic name now, isn’t it?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah. So we were very early on to it and it’s just helping. But in terms of the carbon markets, I actually think it’s critically important because people say a gigaton without understanding exactly what that means. But if that is multiple millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide captured and stored every day, Then you need to make sure the verification system can operate at that scale. And you want to make sure you avoid two things. One is bias and the other is noise. So maybe you don’t measure trees like I would or I don’t measure trees like you do or carbon capture or weathering.
So we just have a bias between people. That’s normal. And the other is noise. Both of us don’t want to work at Dr. Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stigart, Stig Deal with a million tonnes a day and every single gram is captured and stored in the same way.
And if we make sure that data is transparent, then the global community can be assured that it’s done in the correct way. So nobody owns the algorithm. It’s a public good for everybody.
Asa Kamer: So what’s the current state of your... Of the technology that lets farmers use AI or their phones to access funding for sequestering carbon, is that happening now? And then what is the sort of goal, like what will the final program look like?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, so we’re partnered with Biochar Life and they’ve been really great leaders in this space, I really feel. With them, we’re refining how the end buyer wants to see it. So we’re working with Carbon Future, who have a contract with Biochar Life for 100,000 tonnes of CO2 to be delivered from smallholder farmers across a variety of countries. And then Biochar Future, sorry, Carbon for Good, it’s too many names here.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: They all have the word carbon in them.
Dr. David Hughes: They really do. In the future, in that case, they will work with their end buyer, which is Microsoft or whomever, to figure this out, because we need to make sure that the ultimate customer is happy with what they’re buying. And so in this case, the farmer can use it today, both for what’s called Artisan Pro. This is the system whereby you dig a hole in the ground, you make biochar, You use a kiln system. That’s with the European biochar certification system. So people like Hans-Peter Schmidt are highly involved. So everybody’s looking at this in real time.
So we collectively build it together so it can do what we hope to do. So the answer is it works today. People are using it today, but we don’t expect we just sign off. We’re just going to have a process over the next couple of years. So we all collectively become happy with how it’s working. But yes, people can get paid today for using it.
Asa Kamer: This is more of a technical question, but will there be a mechanism to get paid both for planting the tree for the carbon that will sequester and for making it into biochar? Or is it one credit? Does that make sense?
Dr. David Hughes: At the moment, we just do credits for biochar. So one ton of biochar stored, depending on the feedstock, is going to be X number of tonnes of CO2 equivalent that can be sold, and you get paid for that. And then the tree planting is adaptation, but it also serves as a carbon stock that offsets the methane that can be produced in some circumstances by biochar if the biomass was not going to be burned and released into the atmosphere. So we keep that. But EBC is working on a system whereby you could simply Get paid for the carbon in your tree every year.
And Air Systems, Edward Amoa and the team has built this very nice AI tool that you can measure the diameter or breast height of a tree just using your phone and a little tag.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: There you are, stealing my job. I literally used to measure DBH for the California Department of Transportation that they would offset the appropriate offset for when they would clear cut sections of California to build Highways and whatnot. How do people on the ground, like obviously I don’t work in that industry anymore, but how do people on the ground that might have done DVH measurements or might have been the person who got called to check if the plants were sick, how has that been kind of incorporated and received? And I mean, that’s just kind of a general question for AI macro question, but how has it been in your specific case?
Dr. David Hughes: In general, we haven’t yet exposed We also have people outside the organization to the DBH measurements. We’ve only had our bunch of forestry team, which is about 21 people who do DBH for training purposes see it. What we do know is that it aligns perfectly. It’s as good as humans. However, humans are incredibly precious and overstate their abilities and underestimate the ability of machines. And so the machines will get a lot of criticism here over time, which is why the data should be open. So people become familiar with that. That’s a critical part.
So we need to be able to say maybe a tree of above 45 centimeters is harder to measure versus one, which is 15 centimeters DBH. I think these are the questions which are unknown, but it can’t be, I’ve got an algorithm. I can’t tell you what it is. It has to be open and transparent. I think that ultimately people who do this as a job will recognize that Inter-individual variability is high between humans and therefore having a uniform- I would agree with that. And also when you’ve been doing it for three hours in the Californian heat and you want to go and have a sandwich, you’re maybe not going to be as accurate as you were on the first three- You’re really hitting the nail on the head.
Asa Kamer: And how much do they, well, I mean, it probably varies by country and currency, but if folks are, you know, using this program to get paid for making biochar, can you give us a sense of like how much they’re getting paid and what that income represents in terms of like, you know, percentage of average income? Like, is this something that is worthwhile to people, incentivizing them to do this new thing? You know, go ahead.
Dr. David Hughes: The biochar life have a really great experience here and looking at their figures. So a typical payment in one year for biochar. So firstly, I think you get about $70 for every ton of biochar you put in the grant. And about 80% of all the credit is going to the local community. So that’s accessory jobs, et cetera. So really, really pro-social, beneficial. A typical farmer, and 54% of the farmers are women, a typical farmer might get around about $450 in one single year from the carbon markets. In terms of what she might grow in Malawi, let’s say one season or two seasons, depending on where she is, she may, if she’s lucky, earn $200.
So it’s all of a sudden me doubling your salary. And we do know from long-term studies in Kenya, if we put biochar on the ground, then 16 years later, you still have a compound interest effect from that because it increases the soil health. So not only am I giving you money today, I’m helping your future productivity of the crop, which of course is extremely beneficial for carbon capture because the more plants taking in carbon, the more we’re able to put more biochar on the ground. So it’s going to be at this virtuous cycle, increasing Wealth, but also increasing the rate at which we capture carbon.
Asa Kamer: I mean, that’s, I don’t want to let that go by. That’s like extremely profound. If someone’s making $200 a year, and then you’re adding an income of another 2. 5 times that, that’s incredibly amazing. And especially when you consider, I mean, Obviously, in our carbon removal conversations that we get into on the show, there’s so much talk of co-benefits, you know, of doing something that removes carbon and then tacking on, attempting to tack on a way that it will help the people in the community. Whereas this is, I mean, probably something that I would think as education spreads, people will want to do.
And the, you know, the fact that carbon is getting sequestered is sort of the benefit, sort of the side thing, you know, because they’re doing it for income, not for, I mean, any other reason. That seems profound. Yeah.
Dr. David Hughes: I would say this is exactly how we got into the problem. We didn’t set out in the industrial revolution to get to 421 parts per million. We set out to have steam engines or factories or lights, and the pollution was a side effect. And people need something today. In that case, they needed factories and steam engines and lights. Today, they need food and housing and clothes. The side effect is the carbon capture. And so I think we have to think about it that way. That’s why it’s people and planet, people first.
Asa Kamer: Wow. And that income would be available every year. Like you can still apply biochar to your fields every year. I’m not really an expert. Is that how it works?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah. You kind of max out above 20 tonnes per hectare. You can have negative repercussions there, but you can put it into bricks. So we’re also working with a company called Mava. Put it into bricks. You can make housing. You can make evaporative cooling. You can have a situation where your vegetables can be stored in a biochar building. And if you have water on that building, then it gets down to eight degrees Celsius and outside is 32 degrees Celsius. So you can keep your tomatoes fresh for a month instead of two days.
There’s a huge range of things you can do with biochar. And so I don’t think we’re going to run out of uses.
Asa Kamer: We joke that the biochar people are like their own group. And just every time you talk to them, there’s like a new miracle thing biochar can do. And this is for me, a new one that like, you can make a refrigerator out of it and sub-Saran Africa.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: No, biochar, man. You can do everything with biochar. Seems like it’s the building block. It’s the carbon. I’m curious if you’re worried about running out of buyers for these carbon credits. Like, what do you see the longevity of purchase? I mean, we talk so much about the scarcity of carbon credits versus the demand of all these buyers, but the demand only seems like it way outstrips production because production is so low. So are you concerned about that?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. And I think ultimately the main buyer will be government. And this is where, you know, with my USAID director hat, I’m trying to work towards governments being major buyers. So I’ll be at the Aim for Climate Agreement, our meeting in DC, which is a United States, United Arab Emirates summit, which has now 40 or 50 countries involved. Countries would be in a position to help Developing nations through their aid agencies like USAID, but at the same time pay off their carbon debt. So the US wants to be carbon neutral by 2050 or whatever, and also wants to help low income countries Increase their indexes.
They could do both at the same time because paying a farmer to capture and store carbon improves their soil. And at the same time is a durable form of carbon that the government can claim. So that’s one way. And government just has lots more money than private enterprises. I just see a fundamental issue. I mean, I have a company as well. It’s a profit for purpose company called Carbon for Good. And we’re working on the credits and getting the money to the people. But when I was speaking to people at say Netflix and others, It’s just difficult to understand how a company can spend $200 million a year on carbon credits going forward.
It’s a great incentive to reduce emissions, but if prices are north of $125 for durable carbon and everything else is nonsense, which is what we see more and more exposed, then it’s just too expensive. So we really need government to be spending on this. But I also think that We need to be in verticals. We need to think about ways in which biochar can be the refrigerator or the house or the road or the filtration system so that farmers can then buy it in different ways. In our case, We’re putting the biochar in as fertilizer, so mixing with manure.
And since the invasion by Russia of Ukraine, there’s been a tripling and sometimes quadrupling of the price of fertilizer in Africa. And so now it’s a massive incentive to use biochar fertilizer that you make locally, don’t import it from Russia or Belorussia. And that’s fantastic because If we put five tonnes of biochar into the ground, which is a good level of fertilizer, we reduce the amount of nitrogen required by 80%, which is, of course, reducing nitrous oxide. Huge co-benefits.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: Working with USAID, you’re integrating governments, you’re integrating local communities. Again, I come to this logistics question. I’m very impressed that you’ve made it this far and that the logistics are humming. How do you see this scaling and growing and where does the buck stop in this kind of organization?
Dr. David Hughes: Yeah, so there’s no stopping of books, and you want, you want many people to be empowered to make local decisions. Without this is, I mean, certainly, you don’t want the European even an Irish European dictating what’s happened in our country. We were colonized by the same people to colonize half of Africa. But even despite that caveat, you don’t want anybody in the global north telling people in the global south how they should do it. So you just want to massively empower them. So then you want to do this through a modularized unit, essentially a franchise model.
We enable companies to be set up in all these countries, which are owner-operated companies in the country’s local youth, and then they have local decision-making, and we just provide the underlying infrastructure in terms of Software or developments or approaches, and then they can execute it. So it’s very much like the McDonald’s franchise model, if you’ve looked at McFounders on Netflix. So provide the same way to work, and then they can go and work with local communities. And the local communities must have an economic incentive, both the carbon price, but also the dividends that would come from local ownerships in a co-op.
And in that way, we can get the 10 million Localized pyrolysis systems, each of them pulling down 100 tonnes per year. And if we have that, and we’re also working with all power labs in California, Where we can take biomass, produce high quality biochar, but we can also produce electricity. We can also produce light. And also heat. So we heat the dry material for export, less food loss and waste, electricity for communities. I mean, life stops in Africa after 6. 30 when the sun goes down. It’s dark. And so we’re not going to have people on the grid, but solar power is great.
But having biomass is also very beneficial because it works 24 hours a day.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: What do you need? What’s happening right now? What are your next milestones? What are your hurdles that you need to get over? How can the listeners help you and support you?
Dr. David Hughes: I need less bureaucracy, for sure. During COVID, we took off the bureaucratic fetters, allowed us to move rapidly as a globe, and we put them back on. I think that’s a major impediment. This is the reason why I’m pursuing the company model, so that we can have carbon for good as a company operating like that. I want partners who like the long game. People who believe in that. I don’t want the VC-backed system. I’ve talked to people in Koshla’s group and others have reached out to those. But I like the idea of investment banks.
Cisco Foundation are talking to us about investing. People who have lots of money and don’t mind a 4% return. Who want to maybe save the planet for their children or grandchildren or just because it’s a good idea. Not people who want a 30x return on this. The solution to climate change can’t be the same as the way in which we got into the problem. So we want economic partners who believe in doing the responsible correcting for the greater collective of good. So essentially decent people. Let’s see how we get on.
Asa Kamer: Well, we’ve talked to a few XPRIZE milestone winners. And I mean, I am curious, what would that mean for you guys to win the grand prize? What would that allow you to do?
Dr. David Hughes: Really, it’s just having more money in the bank to do what we’re doing today, scaling up systems. So the fundamental problem is the one we’ve solved, local trust and local ownership. So given that, the best way is to scale up efficient pyrolysis systems, which are modularized. I asked the CEO of that big company in Iceland that puts CO2 in the rocks, and I said, well, why would we pay $600 to you when we could pay a farmer in Africa $75 for something which is durable? A thousand years. And yeah, I get the carbon you put in the rock and direct air capture.
I get that’s forever. But a thousand years ago, the Icelandic Vikings were colonizing my hometown of Dublin. A lot has changed in a thousand years. And if our problem is still this problem in a thousand years, then we’re really screwed. So I think that we need to scale up what works today. Which is direct air capture by plants that we then convert into biochar. And we do it in a way that empowers the most people because everybody’s got a slice of an ever-expanding cake. And that’s what we should be doing today.
And so if we got the 50 million tomorrow, that’s what we would do tomorrow. Same thing we’re doing today, same thing we did yesterday.
Siobhan Montoya-Lavender: All right. Thank you, everybody, so much for joining us on this episode of Reversing Climate Change. And please give this a like. If you want to write us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this, it would be greatly appreciated. Share it with a friend because this is a really big problem. And as our guests just pointed out, it’s go time. We need people to play the long game. We need them to start now. Please give us a like and share it around. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for listening.
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