Carbon Neutral, Carbon Rich and Carbon Smart

Meet the National Carbon Cocky Award Finalists

The National Carbon Cocky Award is judged each year during Carbon Farming Week. It was inaugurated in 2007 as a way to acknowledge pioneering Carbon Farmers and put a spotlight on new techniques for avoiding or absorbing Greenhouse Gas emissions. Finalists are thought-leaders of Carbon Farming. When the world’s leaders cannot agree, the people must lead. In their everyday working life Carbon Farmers point the way forward. They are our hope for the future. Winners will be announced at the Gala Awards Dinner, Dubbo RSL Club, 23rd October, 2012.

Finalists

National Carbon Cocky Award

David Bruer

 Temple Breur' Strathalbyn, SA

• David Bruer and his son Michael look after 22 hectares of organic wine-grapes and a winery at Langhorne Creek. They have 8.5 hectares of vines and mandarins at Loxton and a further 26 hectares of vines at Eden Valley. Temple Bruer is producing preservative free organic wines and has two climate change wines.  These are made from varieties that tolerate much warmer ripening conditions.                                                                             • In an Australian first, his wine making operation at Langhorne Creek is a carbon-neutral operation. It was already Australia's largest dedicated organic winery. Now he plans to become carbon nuetral without the purchase of carbon credits. His Temple Bruer label the only winery in Australia to be both organic and carbon-neutral.                                    • Bruer has started with a switch to lightweight bottles. The bottles weigh 360 grams instead of the standard 560 grams, so there is less carbon emitted during production and less fuel used in transport. "We shrunk our label by 5.1 per cent and situated it down closer to the bottom of the bottle. You can't really tell which is the lightweight bottle. We also put on a label saying clean and green lightweight bottle.                                             • David Bruer looks forward to the day when he can sell soil carboncredits In 10 years to 2011 he has increased average soil carbon levels by 2% which translates into more than 10tonnesCO2-e/ha/yr.                            
•  He is maximising soil carbon through the use of organic compost. "Our soil carbon is much higher than our immediate neighbours. A soil analysis shows theirs is 0.4 per cent and ours is 1.7 per cent. We're achieved this by growing compost to grow a strong cover crop." The cover crop, a 50/50 mix of legumes and cereal, stands at 1.2 metres high. "We flatten it with a crimping roller to make a thick mat up to 50-75 milimetres thick. The worms love. It's a very good way to build up soil fertility and that's the key to a good agricultural system."                          
 • With greater levels of soil carbon "you get better flavoured fruit as a result and if you start with more flavour in the vineyard all other things being equal you get better flavoured wine". Some of his neighbours grow grapes that end up in wines selling for $8.99 a bottle. David says the improvement in flavour that he achieves through higher levels of soil carbon enables him to get double that price for his wines.                                                              • Global warming “is buggering up our grape growing here.” A block of Verdelho is advancing in its ripeness by 0.8 of a day per year. As it ripens earlier, it's going in to a hotter part of the year. Ambient temperatures are higher. So refrigeration demand is higher which means we use more greenhouse gases to make these wines.  The window of opportunity to pick it at its optimum flavour gets narrower.  The window of opportunity for picking used to be two or three days and now it's about a day. “We may have to change the varieties were grow.”

• “If we want the Australian wine market to take us seriously, we have got to achieve greenhouse gas neutrality in the next couple of years. We will pick the ‘low-hanging fruit’ first, for example: using lightweight bottles, which also saves on transport costs, cutting out all air freight, generating our own green power, shifting from freon-based refrigeration to ammonia, revegetating more land, increasing soil carbon sequestration by reducing or eliminating cultivation. We will have to buy some carbon credits initially as we can't do all this immediately. Planting native trees at the vineyard will offset 15 tonnes of greenhouse gases per year, so they are a valuable asset...”

Adapted from ABC Rural Radio Report

National Heroes: Carbon Cocky Award 2012 Finalists Profiled

Meet the National Carbon Cocky Award Finalists

The National Carbon Cocky Award is judged each year during Carbon Farming Week. It was inaugurated in 2007 as a way to acknowledge pioneering Carbon Farmers and put a spotlight on new techniques for avoiding or absorbing Greenhouse Gas emissions. Finalists are thought-leaders of Carbon Farming. When the world’s leaders cannot agree, the people must lead. In their everyday working life Carbon Farmers point the way forward. They are our hope for the future. Winners will be announced at the Gala Awards Dinner, Dubbo RSL Club, 23rd October, 2012.

Piggery Poo Pioneers Project Approved

National Carbon Cocky Award Finalist

Michael & Edwina Beveridge

“Blantyre Farms”, Young NSW

•  Michael & Edwina Beveridge of Blantyre Farms near Young recently installed a methane digestion system at both piggery sites. They are the first people in the Australian pig industry to complete a commercial digestion system.

•  Their application for the right to earn carbon credits under the Carbon Farming Initiative was approved yesterday.

• Normally methane is released into the atmospheres from the anaerobic decomposition of pig manure in settling ponds. A methane digestion system captures this gas produced under a pond cover and burns the methane. The methane gas when burnt is converted to carbon dioxide. Methane has a Global Warming Potential of 21 versus carbon dioxide at 1; ultimately methane is 20 times worse than carbon dioxide.

• The Beverages have a 2000 sow piggery .  At any point there are about 20-25,000 pigs on hand. There are two separate piggery sites, a breeder and a grower site.

• To set up this system a new dam was constructed at each site, they hold 50 days worth of effluent. This dam at the grower site, holds 15ML, is over 100m in length, 40m wide & 5m deep. The breeder site dam is about a third the size.

• The dam has been covered with 2mm LDPE covers. There is a flare on each pond, this is back up for the generators and will burn the methane, if the generators stop. The gas runs from the pond through a scrubber, which cleans the gas of impurities & then a chiller which removes condensation, it is then piped to the generator.

• The generators. are containerized, to reduce noise and allow easy transportation. There are 2 units at the grower site & 1 at the breeder site. In summer all three will operate, in winter it is anticipated that there will only be enough gas to run 1 at each site. This also provides a spare, which we can move from site to site if required.

• The methane gas is a fuel source for a converted diesel engine, which is coupled to a generator. Blantyre has 3 x 80KW generators.

• Both separate digestion systems are connected with a pipe that runs for 3.8km & goes under a main road. This allows flexibility & will keep the gas up to the breeder site which uses the most power, but makes less gas.

• Blantyre expects the project will have between a two and three year pay back period. The greatest saving has been in producing power for their own use, as electricity charges are about 20c/kW. There is a smaller benefit in selling power to the grid, where Blantyre receives about 3.5c/kW.

• Australian Pork Limited, the industry body has been proactive with the Carbon Farming Initiative and has registered a methodology “for the destruction of methane generated from manure in piggeries”. This methodology has been approved.

These farmers do the impossible every day

The people you are about to meet are all highly respected by their peers for their contribution to their industries. But they all do something that modern science says is impossible. They capture and hold carbon in their soils at three-to-eighteen-times the rate that scientists believe possible.

The CSIRO's best soil scientists say the largest increase possible in Australian soils that they have recorded is half a tonne per hectare per year. But David Marsh (left) from Boorowa NSW averaged an increase of more than 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year over 10 years. Craig Carter (right) from Willow Tree NSW has added 8 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year over 3 years at his best monitoring sites. David sits on the Board of his local Catchment Management Authority and Craig is a member of the Liverpool Plains Land Management and Sydney University Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources ‘CANEn’ project – Connecting Agriculture, Nutrition and Environment. He was also selected to be featured in former Governor-General Major General Michael Jeffrey's Soils For Life program. (Chairman of Healthy Soils Australia Tom Nicholas is pictured centre)

David Bruer (above) of Temple-Bruer Vineyards at Langhorne Creek (SA) increased average soil carbon levels by 2% in 10 years to 2011 (more than 3 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year). David is a Climate Kelpie, part of a collaborative program between the Australian Government, Meat and Livestock Australia, Dairy Australia and the Grains Research and Development Corporation. The project aims to highlight information and tools for managing climate risk on farm.

 Col Seis (above) increased soil carbon by 3 tonnes per hectare per year (from 2% to 4%) on “Winona”, Gulgong, between 1995 and 2005.  Between 2008 and 2010 his sequestration rate was close to 9 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. Col is co-inventor of the practice known as Pasture Cropping.

New England grazier Cam Banks has used cell grazing and a focus on soil health to achieve an increase of 2.6 tonnes of Carbon sequestered/ha/yr between 2007-2011 at “Lakeview” in Uralla NSW (above). Cam is an active member of Landcare.

Martin Royds moved his soil carbon levels at "Jillamatong" near Braidwood NSW from 3% to 7% in 5 years, lifting his tonnage per hectare  from an increase of 2 tonnes per year to more than 14 tonnes per year at his best monitor points in that time frame. He was awarded National Carbon Cocky of the Year 2011, sponsored by Ylad Living Soils. Rhonda Daly (seen presenting the award) and her husband Bill are also Carbon Farmers at Young NSW. They have compared a compost mineral blend vs single super, and observed an increase of 0.5% in soil carbon vs 0.07% increase between 2008-2010 - or close to 2.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year in a cropping enterprise.

But remember: none of this exists... officially... 

Officially the most soil carbon that can be sequestered in Australian soils is 0.5tonnes/hectare/year. Why is there a vast gap between the performance predicted by scientific models and the actual performance of many carbon farmers? The farmers' high carbon scores are not considered reliable by scientists because the measurement was not conducted by scientists, according to scientific protocols. These results are described by scientists as 'anecdotal'. But here, in this small sample of farmers, we have a pattern which poses the question: Why?

         Could the farmers be fudging the figures? But what motive would a farmer have to skew their carbon scores? No one is offering to pay them for it. No carbon trading scheme pays for past performance. Most of the farmers featured above started measuring their carbon levels 10 years ago, before there was a hint of earning carbon credits.

         Also, these farmers have recorded falls in their soil carbon levels as well as increases along the way. Their integrity is not in question.

         They may not use the same rigour in their measurement methodology, taking fewer samples than a scientist would take. But is this enough to explain the gap? (Some of the measurement was done by scientists and in all cases the analysis was done at a NATA-accredited laboratory.)

         When it comes to 'growing carbon' farmers enjoy an unfair advantage. Each farmer lives inside a live experiment, 24/7, observing how nature responds to various activities. They micromanage their farms, combining techniques and practices, endlessly trialling and making decisions every day. Their experiments are conducted in a single location for application in that location. The farmer is there on the ground every day, absorbing the whole ecological 'event', processing it intuitively, referencing their entire experience with nature, and developing new hypotheses on the run. 

         These farmers bring a learning attitude to their work. They read a lot, attend conferences, and most are active members of local natural resource management bodies or groups. 

         The farmer is not seeking to answer a single question about an isolated variable in the ecological mix. The farmer wants to learn everything at once. They want to know how to get more and better pasture and crops, better water efficiency, healthier animals and better quality produce. They want more sustainable farming for today and tomorrow when they hand the farm to the next generation. They want more profit, more drought resistance, more production. 

         The farmers just want to know what works. They don't have to spend time working out why it work. This can explain the gap in performance: farmers are better carbon farmers because they have a narrower task, more time to spend on it, freedom to change direction when early results indicate.

          A formal scientific experiment sets out a methodology for each study which must be strictly observed for the period of the program, usually 3 years. This is because scientists  must prove their results to others while farmers only have to prove it to themselves. 

         The result of this unfair advantage are the higher soil carbon scores registered by farmers and the refusal  by scientists to accept these scores because they are not replicable, as science demands of new facts.

         These farmers are "outliers" - not a statistical aberration, but the result of a mixture of two distributions or sub-populations. Each of them have spent the 10,000 hours studying and practicing "required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything," according to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. It is on these grounds that we believe these high performance carbon farmers reveal the true potential of Australian soils.

         The Carbon Farming Initiative should focus all resources tagged for soil carbon on the challenge of measurement and set farmers free to sequester as much carbon as they can, independent of what the models say we can. This is the only way that the soil carbon credit can act as the catalyst needed to spark the chain reaction among farmers around the world to activate the massive carbon extractive capacity of the soils and vegetation.