163 Jim Mann - Biochar and enhanced rock weathering to remove 1B ton carbon annually and holistically

A check in interview with Jim Mann of the Future Forest Company discussing the need to decarbonise our society a soon as possible and still remove about 10 gigaton a year to keep most of the planet liveable.
---------------------------------------------------

Join our Gumroad community, discover the tiers and benefits on www.gumroad.com/investinginregenag. 

Support our work:

• Share it
• Give a 5-star rating
• Buy us a coffee… or a meal! www.Ko-fi.com/regenerativeagriculture

----------------------------------------------------

So much more research about the application and impact is needed and luckily the Future Forest Company is doing exact that, not in academia, but at huge scale, financed by carbon credits sold to companies like Stripe.

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/jim-mann-2.

Find our video course on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course.

----------------------------------------------------

For feedback, ideas, suggestions please contact us through Twitter @KoenvanSeijen, or get in touch through the website www.investinginregenerativeagriculture.com. 

Join our newsletter on www.eepurl.com/cxU33P. 

The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

We need to decarbonize our society ASAP and still remove about 10 gigatons a year to keep most of our planet livable. How do we do that at scale and at speed? Of course, soil and trees are key, but only as permanent as the farm management. So we also need to look at things like biochar and enhanced rock weathering, which could, by the way, also replace much of the farm chemical inputs like chemical fertilizer and other things. So much more research is needed about the application and the impact. And luckily, our guest of today is doing exactly that. Research, but not in academia, but at a huge scale, financed by carbon credits sold to companies like Stripe. I love checking interviews and this is no different. It's so great to have Jim Mann of the Future Forest Company back on the show. Welcome to another episode of In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, Ask Me Anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investingbridge.com. an egg or find the link below thank you Welcome to another interview. Today, a check-in interview with Jim Mann, the founder and CEO of the Future Forest Company. And just as a disclosure, we're a very small investor in this company. I'm so happy to have Jim back. It seems like a long time ago, and actually it's only June last year, so 2021, but so much has happened in the space and so much has happened with the company. So I'm very much looking forward to unpacking so many things we discussed last time, the bio chart, enhanced weathering, how to 10x the carbon potential, or maybe even more of reforestation, regeneration in general, COP, everything that has happened in this crazy, crazy year. So welcome back, Jim. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. Because you're in crazy growth mode, basically. But for the people that didn't listen to the interview, and of course, I will link it below. If you had to present now, what is the Future Forest Company and how would you present it in a couple of sentences?

SPEAKER_01: 2:39

So we're a carbon removal company. We started off with looking at reforestation and we've moved more and more towards sort of What I talk about is holistic carbon removal solutions, so taking natural processes and accelerating them, so the biochar and enhanced rock weathering. And we, previously when we've spoken, we've talked about the three being co-deployed and all being part of a holistic solution. We now sort of think about them and are disentangling them a bit so we can deploy them together or in pairs or individually, depending on how suitable the location is and feedstocks and things like that very much we're trying to scale carbon removal.

SPEAKER_00: 3:26

And if you're saying a holistic approach that suggests there is a non-holistic approach to carbon removal or to natural carbon removal, what would you describe as a non-holistic one and what's the big difference between that and a holistic approach?

SPEAKER_01: 3:39

Yeah, sure. So I think of something like DAC, where you have an engineered process.

SPEAKER_00: 3:43

What is a DAC for anybody? Direct air capture?

SPEAKER_01: 3:45

So where you have these big fans that are taking CO2 straight out of the air and then storing it either as mineralization or as a into deep wells, so

SPEAKER_00: 3:57

into old oil wells, for example. Which got a lot of attention last year and this year as well. A lot of money has been raised, a lot of fuzz and excitement around it, but I think issues, I mean, why is it a non-holistic approach? Is it the cost? Is it where to go? No,

SPEAKER_01: 4:10

I mean, it just doesn't have any additional benefit. So it removes carbon, it does what it says on the tin, the storage looks good and permanent, particularly when it's no there's no benefit beyond the process so when we look at biochar there's it's a soil amendment particularly in dry dry land agriculture for example um as a water retainer and a nutrient retainer it can buffer runoff of um chemicals from land if you look at enhanced rock weathering the you've got two things going on you're releasing um bicarbonate ions which is the store of the um carbon from the atmosphere and you're also releasing cations and you and i would think of cations as fertilizer so you've got a two-way relationship you're you're not just removing co2 but you're doing something beneficial with the output so so we sort of look at the engineer solutions as this is route one this is real you know straight line grab the co2 lock it up

SPEAKER_00: 5:12

very linear

SPEAKER_01: 5:13

yeah yeah very linear and and then if you look at the other end you've got the nature-based solutions where we're trying to re-establish ecosystems and and and and we have some concerns with that and we talked about this last time i think about the forestry and concerns certainly I have around forestry and planting the wrong tree in the wrong place or in places where at two degrees of warming, the trees won't be stable or won't be removing CO2. And then we're sort of in this in-between space where we're taking natural processes. You know, biochar is just a charcoal production, which you get from forest fires and acts as a store in the soil. And rock weathering is the biggest natural sink on the planet. anyway, just in nature. And we speed that up by taking rock at smaller particle size and spreading it out so it can get more access to CO2, more access to water, and the reaction happens a lot quicker. But you get the additional benefits because that's how soil is built. Soil is built from rock weathering. That's your minerals in the soil come from that process anyway. If we take the right type of rock and speed it up, not only do we get that soil building process and the plant nutrition that comes with it, but we also remove co2 at the same time

SPEAKER_00: 6:26

yeah and it is permanent or because that's one of the big let's say doubts people have about the nature side of things or the natural solution side of things because when we have these big machines with a lot of vans turning and sucking up air and taking the co2 out and storing it in in an old gas of oil well it seems quite permanent in this case we need to be able to show that that's permanent as well so how and then we'll talk about what is enhanced rock weathering because i think we have to describe it visually to people like okay what does it actually mean but this is very permanent the biochar side of things we know it stores a lot and it stores it I wouldn't say forever but pretty much forever and on enhanced rock weathering the CO2 is also bind and combine and basically is I think last time we said something like 10 or 100,000 years or at least also forever long enough to have a significant impact

SPEAKER_01: 7:14

in human terms enhanced rock weathering is permanent yeah the challenge that we face with enhanced rock weathering and the thing where we've been investing very heavily is on the science and on the ability to measure it and it when you say it what so the carbon the carbon removal

SPEAKER_00: 7:28

yeah so you want to measure so it's taking rocks which is a natural process anyway that rocks break down in smaller smaller particles get exposed more to air bind with the carbon with the co2 and then release the fertilizer which is great because it's how soil gets built and also store this carbon and when you say we have to the science part of the it is how much that happens or how much is being sucked out because of course you cannot see it

SPEAKER_01: 7:50

and you can't capture it so the nice thing about something like direct air capture is you can put a media you know you get a liquefied co2 product that you're going to pump into an oil well you can put that through a meter and you can meter it and say we know that x liters or x tons has been then put into this oil well and it's going to stay there with with something that's working in an ecosystem you you've got a lot more um challenges in measuring it particularly as these are water soluble ions by their very nature so the process if we go back to the sort of process you've got um co2 absorbed into rain so it's a mixes with rain to create a weak carbonic acid and that has a chemical reaction with the rocks and then formed bicarbonate ions which are soluble some are soluble some are some are um carbonate rock so you get the particles in soil and some of it just washes off in solution and so you've got two two pathways and then you've got all these cations being released that that you again are hard to measure because plants are taking them up so actually the best systems where you want this to happen is where you've got plants growing because they're taking up the cations which improves the rate of the reaction and But at the same time, if they're taking up those cations, how do you measure them?

SPEAKER_00: 8:57

You lose them, sort of.

SPEAKER_01: 8:59

Yeah. So there's real scientific challenges in properly quantifying this. You can see that you've put the rock down, you can measure and meter the rock going down, but you've then got a leap of faith to the actual carbon, and that's what we've been bridging. So we now have a science team and a carbon team who are working together on this, and we think we've got solutions for it. how to quite accurately now monitor the process.

SPEAKER_00: 9:28

Yeah, because it's not something you would do in a lab. Like it's a living system. I mean, we've been struggling with that in agriculture for a long time to show certain things that we've seen on land and sort of don't reproduce because we take a single piece. And in this case, it is a full ecosystem that responds to the rain. So it's very important. The water part of this or the rain part doesn't mean it's mostly, I mean, you're working a lot in the UK, but it doesn't mean it's mostly relevant in, let's say, wetter areas. You need that bridge between, let's say, the sea to in the air and dust clouds and rain to bring it down? Or does it also work with less humid places?

SPEAKER_01: 10:02

Yeah, it will. So it depends a lot on your soil type. So we model out various factors, all of your environmental factors, your rainfall, your ambient temperatures, etc. We also look at the soil type and there's various factors then that still are slightly beyond scope. Things like the bacterial and fungal activity so bacteria microbes will break this down quicker they will also increase the concentration of CO2 in the soil so you have more CO2 in the soil then you've got a higher concentration of CO2 and the reaction will happen quicker fungi actively break down rock and work in a symbiotic relationship with certain trees so this is one of the reasons we started off with forest because you've got those symbiotic relationships going on so the fungi actually speeding up the weathering process now Now, that again adds challenges, adds complexity, because how fast are they doing that? How much is it accelerated? And as soon as you take this out of the field and put it into a lab, you've got rid of all those factors. And we know they accelerate it. We just can't easily quantify how much. But we also can't always quantify very well in the field how much. how active they are. So you can start from the geochemical data, which you can do in the lab, and then you know that it's going to speed up from there, but you don't know how much. And that's what we're trying to demonstrate is in which environments does this speed up and how much does it speed up by, and therefore how much carbon are we removing over what period of time. And they're the critical elements that are still kind of Unknown to a degree, but we're getting closer.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

Yeah, it almost sounds like applied science, like in a company, which is fascinating. I think we're in the climate space. We're seeing that a lot more because we just don't have the time to wait. And it also reminds me of, we did an interview with Dr. Elaine Ingham on the soil microbial activity and the life in the soil. And she discovered, and many others as well, is that if you take them, because we only grew certain, like we only had a certain growth medium in labs. So we only saw certain soil biology because they were growing because of that. growth medium. And we missed like 99.9% of the soil life in the, we never saw that in the lab because we didn't have the full ecosystem there to observe. And suddenly this whole sort of world opened up, like there are 70,000 species or whatever the number is. And we saw five, something like that because they did well on that growth medium. So it's, yeah, it's very limited, let's say. And what I think in this case, it's also like, as you're doing sort of applied scientists and it's not all science, it's not all certain yet are your customers, because they're buying the credits, the carbon credits, the removal ones as long as the customers are fine with sort of financing the process and not having one certain number that we can just put a meter on and we're fine as long as that's okay it's not such a problem that it's not super super certain yet as long as this uncertainty is being reduced how are your customers dealing with that

SPEAKER_01: 13:50

so we've got the early adopters like stripe who who've backed us to not only by buying some of the carbon from us but also um by um putting a grant towards the science so that we can that we can advance the science um and and you know that's We've obviously put money alongside that as well, but it means that we have postdoc scientists now working as part of our research team to help us to really dig deep into these issues and try and resolve them. And then, you know, you can argue the same about nature-based solutions. You know, we don't measure exactly how much carbon is stored in a forest. We tend to take a handful of trees in that forest. We take a proxy and we go, well, they've grown pretty well and this looks okay. We've got these data tables we've produced over many, many years. And so we know that this forest will have stored X million tonnes of carbon. And so we can take the same sort of approach, that geochemical data that I'm talking about, where it's in lab without the microbes, without the fungi, gives us a baseline. So we know that in certain environmental conditions, this is the rate of, and with a certain particle size or particle size distribution, and there's multiple variables that go into how we model this, it gets quite complicated. But as you go through that, you can say we've got good confidence that this will weather over this amount of time and over this amount of time this is when the CO2 is removed. Now what we really need to demonstrate for this to be scalable and adopted across the carbon platforms onto things like VERA is we need to demonstrate that more robustly in the field and that's the challenge. We need to get to the point where forests are which We're pretty much at the point now, I think, where forests are. But we'd like to get it further. We'd like to get it closer to where DAC is and where we can almost meter it. And you can put down the rock dust at a certain particle size. You know the mineralogy. You know the local conditions. You know the crops being grown. You can put all of that into this software package that we're building out in this model. And it will give you an accurate weathering curve for that location. Then you monitor over time to inform that this is happening as you'd expect and that the credits can be released over this schedule like with trees you know you plant a tree and and you your credits will be released over the next 50-80 years depending on where in the world you are it's the same sort of thing with enhanced rock weathering we put the rock down it's in particle size here's the weathering curve and the credits will be released over time

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

yeah and so let's walk through a process because we still didn't talk about how you actually do this like you take a piece of land you buy a lot of the land or most of the land or maybe all the land and I don't know if that has changed since last year. So let's walk us through a case study. How do you assess which methods to use? We're talking about crops and trees and biochar and analysis weathering. And then let's unpack a bit how it actually works at scale, because this is not you with a hammer hitting some rocks until there's powder, or you making a small biochar pile. We're talking different scale and different acres and hectares. How much land are you currently managing? And then let's walk through a case study, or let's walk through a concrete one. Good question on land, I think. More or less.

SPEAKER_01: 17:02

Yeah, I think we're approaching$5,000 hectares of land under management. Most of that is selected because it's suitable for ecological restoration.

SPEAKER_00: 17:10

Which means it's very degraded or it has okay circumstances. What makes it suitable for? So

SPEAKER_01: 17:16

typically it's degraded. What I would class as degraded as an ecologist, we'd look at it and say it's degraded. To somebody else it might be rough grazing land, farmland. Typically we don't want arable land. We're looking for lower grade agricultural land that has historically been forested.

SPEAKER_00: 17:38

Because of the price or because you cannot do something on arable or it's not there yet?

SPEAKER_01: 17:42

We can but typically arable land is feeding people and we don't want to become competitors for land and this is where we originally looked at our models to ensure that we could be just as productive and that's where we have the woolly pigs, the free range pigs out in the forest once it gets above a certain age and they're you know a keystone species in or wild boar a keystone species so bringing that into the forest as long as you keep them on a good rotation is good for the forest um so we try and um and work with nature on these things

SPEAKER_00: 18:12

so you take the slightly less the fancy land let's say it could be hilly which used to be forest or it has been for back back back in the day or some kind of savannah and degraded which can still be a current forest as well but it's just very degraded it could be very degraded forest maybe like a leman would look at it and say but this is actually a forest and you would say no but actually there's a huge potential here

SPEAKER_01: 18:33

it's typically not forest land that we're looking for because of us being able to generate carbon credits from reforestation so we're typically looking at land that was deforested you know even hundreds thousands of years ago but it's suitable to be returned to forest and is relatively unproductive from an agricultural point of view we don't want to take productive land arable land for example and turn that into forest

SPEAKER_00: 18:54

so some kind of extensive grazing typically yes with with very few trees etc that have been not super productive like underperforming ecosystems i think the head of savory the nordics would call that

SPEAKER_01: 19:07

yeah so we sort of think of it often it's land that has been sustained by the eu subsidies model and really isn't as an economic model the farming on that land doesn't make any money without the subsidies um so

SPEAKER_00: 19:22

it's economically and size wise like normally you buy it's not a few hectares like you you want what's the minimum just to have like to make sense to bring in some machinery to bring in the biochar etc what's the minimum you normally look at

SPEAKER_01: 19:35

so we won't always do the biochar so this is where we've decoupled the model since you and i last spoke so we'd looked at sites where we could produce the biochar on site and things like that previously we're now in some cases looking at where where that feedstock sits so working with people who've got waste material so we are locating our first big biochar plant alongside a sawmill and where they've got waste wood for example then we've got land where we can deploy the biochar. So we're looking at different models for decoupling these now we've got further forward. But with the land so the land becomes one sort of component and the other component of that will be peatland restoration which it's not financially that attractive but it's something that we will do if it's alongside land and often in Scotland you'll get a bundle or package of land so you end up with different scenarios in different parts of that land and forming a nice mosaic ecosystem but typically we won't look at anything usually under maybe 100 acres so what's that 50 hectares something roughly maybe 40 hectares that would be very small we'd look ideally look for something larger and we have taken smaller areas where they're adjacent to an existing site and you just bundle them in so your operating costs don't scale up. But we're typically looking for larger tracts of land for that.

SPEAKER_00: 21:11

And then what happens? You should visually imagine this is an overgrazed, hilly landscape, let's say, maybe with some pockets of trees still somewhere. There might be some water features, etc. And then what happens? How do you approach it from there?

SPEAKER_01: 21:25

We will then put a plan together for how we would reforest it, how the different aspects, different climatic conditions are suitable for different trees, put together a mixed planting scheme. Lots of talk of native trees. We don't specifically stick with native trees. And there is for that is they're not resilient.

SPEAKER_00: 21:43

Which is

SPEAKER_01: 21:44

an

SPEAKER_00: 21:44

interesting concept to begin with. We had a long discussion, I think, with Filippo Passani on Syntropic Agroforestry. Probably the whole native thing is interesting, let's say. The whole wheat thing is interesting as well. But I will link the interview below if you want to go deeper into that. But the concept of native, non-native is interesting in a changing world or has always been interesting.

SPEAKER_01: 22:02

Yeah, it's always been blurred and it doesn't hold quite as true as people would like to think. But then also in terms of resilience, if we go to two degrees of warming, which we're almost certainly going to, then what would be suitable today on that land and what would be suitable at two degrees of

SPEAKER_00: 22:18

warming could be completely different. So you make a planning for that. You model out, okay, what would a forest landscape look like with two degrees in this specific place, et cetera.

SPEAKER_01: 22:27

And the difficulty is we don't always know. So we could see things like the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic currents weaken or move further south. So we're actually planting for cooler climate as well as warmer climates and almost certainly wetter climates on the west coast of scotland but but certainly climates that will and the reason we like the west coast of scotland is not just because it's it's beautiful and a great place to live and and bring up children but it's also um going to support trees or in all scenarios all predicted scenarios um will support a good forested ecosystem well into the future so from a forestry point of view that's why we try and pick countries and we've stuck with Scotland so far and the north of England so our thesis if you like there is high quality if you're going to do high quality carbon from trees and there's lots of disputes as to what's quality from trees and what's not quality but from our point of view we want to know that that forest will be in place in 100 years time so we look for a stable social and political system stable economic system, good rule of law and climatic conditions that we can be confident we'll support trees into the future with all

SPEAKER_00: 23:46

scenarios. Well into the future. So you plan for this reforestation and you bought the land. Then how do you finance the reforestation? Because that's, I mean, you need to get the trees, someone needs to plant them. There may be other models on top as well. If they make sense there, how do you finance the transition of that land, which has been supported by subsidies?

SPEAKER_01: 24:05

Yeah, there is sometimes subsidies for the tree planting. So we will get some government investment into that tree planting scheme but we also do tree sponsorships so we have things like a scheme called Trees Not Tees where we try and replace race t-shirts so a waste product which is very polluting with a tree instead and we'll send a PDF certificate to people so they still get the sponsorship logos on there and it often gets shared on social media they'll get a feel good factor and a tree gets planted rather than a t-shirt which is quite polluting and there's quite a lot of information on the Trees Not Tees website about how polluting a t-shirt is and how bad fast fashion is and effectively that's what's happening with races now I run long distance so I'm used to seeing lots of these t-shirts given away and everybody who runs has jaws full of these free t-shirts that are given out at races so um it's something that that we really need to stop um but we also do tree sponsorships to companies i'm not sure which names i can say don't mention it you work with companies yeah i'm just going to stop there yeah so we work with big companies who want to do good and that can be um them come for a tree planting day as well as um so some of its education some of its feel good and some of its team building

SPEAKER_00: 25:27

and things

SPEAKER_01: 25:28

like that yeah and some people just want to have done have done something

SPEAKER_00: 25:32

good so you get the planting supported slash sponsored to a certain extent

SPEAKER_01: 25:38

that supports the planting and then we actually hold on to the carbon credits associated with it but we'll put it through a carbon a carbon scheme so we've got a future asset in the carbon

SPEAKER_00: 25:46

and you hold on the land like you're not planning to sell or flip the land at all no

SPEAKER_01: 25:51

and we're now doing our first to make that more scalable we're now doing our first experiments with other landowners so what we've found is it's actually quite difficult for the landowners to do this. We've built up significant expertise. There's a team with ecologists, forestry specialists, peatland specialists, a whole range of skills in that team now. And so we're also looking at how we work with other landowners because some of this land, particularly in Scotland, is locked up in family funds and has been for generations. They have no wish to sell. They don't want to sell it. It's a family heirloom to them. And so but there's a new generation coming through who will be responsible for that land who want it put to a climate use so we're trying to work out how we work with those partners right now where we can bring all the skills and help them develop that land into a better ecosystem bring back nature and at the same time do something around the carbon asset that we're creating and sharing that upside that we create for them so that's ongoing We don't have a clear... a clear proposition there yet but it's coming it's coming

SPEAKER_00: 27:09

yeah and how important is the ranching or you mentioned the pigs as a keystone species almost as a quote-unquote tool in the forest we talked last time I think also a bit about a lot of these places are overgrazed and you said yeah we take some time to take these properties concentrate the grazing and the rest we let we work on the reforestation part not we let reforest we actually actively reforest is that still the case like or have you in terms of said I don't want to compete on producing food like is are animals in rotation or in some cases are they part of the regeneration in this case or is that something you have not done yes yes no

SPEAKER_01: 27:45

no we have and we've moved now so for instance the site on the island mole we've changed the species to be more suitable so we've moved to highland cattle which are um gorgeous beautiful and fluffy cows for anybody who is not familiar with them with big horns but they're very placid very gentle cows and so we we've introduced a a small herd of highland cows there that we use for regenerative grazing.

SPEAKER_00: 28:10

So basically almost going to a silver pasture system, like the tree and the animal, or is that a goal at some point? Because if we look at the drawdown models, I wouldn't say the top, top, top, but it's definitely up there in terms of carbon potential is that integration of animal and trees, which is not always easy. Let's not underestimate that. But if you do it well, it can be a very powerful symbiosis.

SPEAKER_01: 28:31

Yeah, and it's a long process as well. Because you need, you know, the pigs we can introduce after we think about seven years in new forest. And that's something we've been experimenting with.

SPEAKER_00: 28:45

Because otherwise they disrupt their growth significantly.

SPEAKER_01: 28:47

Yeah, I mean, but there's a lot of factors in that. So you can put them in with very young trees if the grazing pressure is carefully adjusted. looked after. The Mangalitsa pigs we have, they're not deep diggers. They will dig if they're hungry, but they prefer to graze. We can get them in younger trees, but your investment into trees, you don't want that to go wrong. So you need to be moving.

SPEAKER_00: 29:17

It's management, which is key there.

SPEAKER_01: 29:19

Yeah, the management's really important. And it's the same with cows. You don't want cows until the trees are big enough. So you're probably looking 20 years before these woodlands are established enough to be good for grazing now where there's existing woodland yes we will selectively graze through that but we're not really farming we're ecological restoration and we're trying to replace those keystone species that are missing that would be in the landscape but managing the grazing in a way that nature would normally have done with top level predators so trying to replicate nature when we have the livestock

SPEAKER_00: 29:56

Again, the holistic approach.

SPEAKER_01: 29:58

So this is us trying to move to how do we, you know, we know how to do reforestation and ecological restoration profitably and well. And this is us now moving into a phase of how do we make this scalable? Because it's difficult when you're very cash intensive to buy the land to ensure that the tree's going to be there for a long period of time. How do you switch that to being something that's truly scalable and rapidly scalable is the challenge we're grappling with at that side. The other side, we're scaling much quicker.

SPEAKER_00: 30:23

And I think that we're getting into that now as well. And the enhanced weathering or the enhanced rock weathering, you mentioned the biochar, we're putting that, we're currently building a larger facility close to a soil mill, etc. What is enhanced rock weathering? I mean, you're taking rocks, but it has to fit. You don't want to probably ship rocks all over the world. So it needs to be somewhere nearby. And then you have to get it to the certain size, as you mentioned, to the right size to enable the water to hit as much as possible and for that carbon to lock in. How does that work?

SPEAKER_01: 30:50

So there are are certain types of rock we're looking for so specific types of rock and they have different weathering properties but they also have different fertilising properties if you view the two as sort of two sides of the same process and we what we're doing at the moment is we're actually buying quarry waste so going to quarries for their waste material we have a there's quite a lot of signs before we even will make a purchase where we are taking samples of the rock, we're doing mineralogy and chemical testing on it, we're making sure there aren't high levels of heavy metals we're making sure that the CO2 removal levels are high enough to make it commercially worthwhile for us and we're making sure that there's fertiliser benefits and that we understand those fertiliser benefits and then we will find farms hopefully nearby, work with those farmers there's an education process of what can it do to their land what's it going to do to their

SPEAKER_00: 31:53

land because this is on land that you don't own

SPEAKER_01: 31:56

yes

SPEAKER_00: 31:56

which is the scalable part so you're working with farmers then it has to match what they're growing i'm imagining because we're sort of applying fertilizer here

SPEAKER_01: 32:03

it's a slower release and not not so much and that's less of a concern and because it's quite slow release so we're not going to flood their soil with fertilizer we are going to prevent them needing to put some of the inputs in.

SPEAKER_00: 32:17

Which is a very big thing, looking at current input prices and with the current political situation. They're probably not going to go down anytime soon. So if you can replace any inputs, it's huge. So you're bringing it to them and then you have to pulverize it? Or what's a rock crusher? How does that process look like?

SPEAKER_01: 32:33

So we're actually, at the moment, we're taking the waste rock from quarries where...

SPEAKER_00: 32:38

Which is already?

SPEAKER_01: 32:38

It's already crushed. So when a quarry is producing, say, a row stone or something like that they look for something like a 40 mil graded rock so it's a particle size is at 40 mil that they're going to put down as a base layer on on a on a road or or a topping layer which might be a 10 mil graded and every time you break those rocks apart you're creating dust and you're creating finer particles

SPEAKER_00: 33:01

which is perfect for you

SPEAKER_01: 33:02

so we will take the finer materials we sieve it down to the size we want and then we can take that to direct to farmers without us having to put in grinding energy that will scale to quite a large scale over time but won't be ultimately we probably will need to be grinding material we're also looking at other sites where people are extracting large amounts of rock sometimes to get to other things

SPEAKER_00: 33:28

and then the farmer how does he or she spread it and what should we imagine in terms of what could it replace in terms of fertilizer input or what would be the benefit of the farmer apart from that it's fascinating to be part of this cutting at science but what would be the benefit of a farmer to participate in this and work with you?

SPEAKER_01: 33:46

Yeah, so the minerals that they're getting are typically phosphates, potassium, so two of your NPK, calcium, magnesium. There will be trace elements there that they might be missing, selenium, aluminium, iron in low quantities, but in the quantities that plants need for enzyme development and things like that. So we see farmers around the world having to apply some of these trace nutrients where they've been growing the same crop year after year so farmers will put selenium on for example it's there it's in very small quantities but it's there and so it can be depending on the quantity depending on the rock type we can be replacing a lot of those micronutrients and two of the macronutrients or some proportion of those macronutrients so that's the benefit to the farmer in terms of spreading it we are using modified industrial spreading equipment. So we've done some pretty large scale trials now, tens of thousands of tons of rock being spread. So we know pretty well how to do that. And we can scale that up now.

SPEAKER_00: 35:34

And then it releases the fertilizer part or you're saying that's less of a current benefit for the farmer or that's something we have to see over the years?

SPEAKER_01: 35:42

Yeah, they'll see that over years rather than... So because of your particle distribution and this is where the model gets really quite complicated because your particle distribution curve is really important so you've got lots of very small particles in there going up to some quite large particles. Those very small particles will weather quickly so you'll get an initial faster weathering and then slower weathering of the large particles because their surface area to volume ratio isn't as favourable and as they reduce in size they'll start to weather quicker as they become smaller because they've got more surface area to volume ratio So there will be an initial release. It's unlikely to replace all of the farmers' fertilizer needs. And we're keeping our quantities quite low at the moment because we're the first people. These are the biggest experiments in the world by a long, long way. Orders of magnitude larger and we're scaling them up. It's really important that as we do this, we know rockflower has been used as a treatment in agriculture for thousands of years. but we know that we have to get this right. We have to monitor everything really carefully and that's why we've got the science team and postdoc scientists working in our team to do the research and monitoring because we need to understand exactly what's happening in that ecosystem. We know what happens in a lab. We need to now see what happens when you do this at large scale in the ecosystem and we need to monitor that and measure that because this is a multi-gigaton solution to climate and we need to be doing this at scale but we also need to be checking that doing this at scale doesn't have unintended consequences and that's a large element of the work we're doing right now and

SPEAKER_00: 37:22

it is on arable land

SPEAKER_01: 37:24

and grazing

SPEAKER_00: 37:25

and grazing yeah and so what is the i mean the carbon potential you mentioned gigatons but compared to like reforesting that piece of land which is maybe not maybe not the best solution at the moment because it could be producing food at the moment and the farmers doing something else like what are the order of magnitudes we're talking about why are you so excited about this on that hectare compared to as low-growing trees, et cetera. What's the excitement for you and from Stripe, obviously, on this technology?

SPEAKER_01: 37:51

So it comes back to the fact that we're not competing for land. One of the big problems with reforestation, and we see it particularly in

SPEAKER_00: 37:58

developing countries. Carbon anyway needs to go back into the soil in arable, in pasture. And most of the land we see is very, very low on carbon and has a lot of other benefits as well.

SPEAKER_01: 38:08

Yeah. So if you can co-deploy these solutions, which is what we were doing with Forestry... but you can co-deploy them on land that you can access very easily for spreading, land that is actively managed, that is actively monitored, then you can increase the scale quite dramatically. And we're still going to want to eat. So we can't just reforest.

SPEAKER_00: 38:28

And we don't eat trees, yeah. I mean, we eat a lot of things from trees, from productive trees, etc. And obviously there's an enormous role for perennial agriculture, but unless we completely get off arable, which we might at some point, but not in the near future, yeah, we need to work on those pieces of land as well and they're in pretty bad shape

SPEAKER_01: 38:47

typically yes and this is inorganic carbon we're storing in soil not the organic carbon that regenerative ag generally focuses on so the two can go hand in hand

SPEAKER_00: 38:57

is this sort of as a kickstarter is it a kickstarter for a piece of soil do you need to apply it could you apply it regularly I mean these are all open questions I'm imagining but is it a bit of fuel in the engine to start and the whole soil I wouldn't say come back to life but it helps with that process Is that how you see it?

SPEAKER_01: 39:14

It definitely helps because you change the microbial nature of that soil. So there are, it's early research that suggests that you get a benefit in organic carbon as a result of the increase in organic carbon as well. So as you feed the microbes, if you like, and they're storing more carbon, it would appear. But that's not, certainly not something that I think we can...

SPEAKER_00: 39:38

Claim yet.

SPEAKER_01: 39:39

Claim as an absolute yet. So... Yeah, it does help kickstart it, but it's something that you can repeatedly do. So we think this can be done like an annual fertilizer application, but we don't know that yet. And that, again, comes back to our monitoring. And the level that we're applying at the moment is probably about somewhere between 20% and 40% of what we think we can apply on an annual basis. And we're applying that on a three-year basis. So, you know, we're applying this at less than 10% of what we think is the right level to do it when we do it at large scale so that we can get some certainty around it. In our smaller field trials on our science sites, and this is the benefit of owning land, we have a whole site dedicated just to science where we've just had our labs completed in cabins that we can now place on that land. So we've got science labs on site to do the monitoring. and to allow us to do rapid soil testing and things like that. There we can do large-scale trials at higher quantities because we control the land, we control the first-order streams that are coming off there, so we can monitor the water that's coming off that land, we can monitor changes in the soil, we can control what crops are going on there. And that's a huge benefit where when you're working with farmers, you don't want to impact upon their normal processes. We want to allow them to... fit alongside what they already do if they're going to adopt it at large scale we don't want to be saying to them no no you can't grow that crop or you can't do xyz we need to fit in around their established cycles and the more we can do with this the more I believe we'll encourage them to move towards regenerative structures as well because as you repair that soil structure as you repair the bacteria fungi etc in the soil it will increase the rate of weathering so it's better better for us. But also potentially this gives the farmers a way of applying fertilizer in a regenerative setting, which they're perhaps struggling for an alternative to chemical fertilizers for some of these micronutrients.

SPEAKER_00: 41:58

Yeah, and as you are selling these credits and they are in demand, especially to early movers like the Stripes of this world, and I think we mentioned like$200 a ton or something last time, some of that, if you're saying it would even work better if a farmer is starting to apply certain practices like the whole process would go faster it might even be sort of a transition finance as well like it could be part of that of course it's paid for the announced weathering and to apply this on a yearly basis or whatever cycle makes sense but then if you say actually farmer if you also start applying this this and this or start not doing that the whole process just go faster there would be I mean there could be this could be a transition finance piece as well and the whole it's going to be a cycle up basically instead of down which all in the future talking but it does symbiotically work together if a farmer changes his or her practices together with the weathering?

SPEAKER_01: 42:46

Well certainly whilst fertilizer prices are so high and I don't think they're ever going to come down we're providing this free to farmers at the moment where we're working so we keep the carbon that's part of our model but we have been providing them with free fertilizer which is a huge benefit to them right now and so I don't know quite how that model will develop I'd hope that we don't We don't ever have to be charging farmers for this. And there were farmers already paying for rock before we came onto the scene. And so they understand in some circles, certainly in the regenerative circles, they understand the value of this and how it can replace chemical fertilizers. And that reduces their input. So it certainly reduces their input. their carbon footprints because they're not having to put those inputs in and we know that there's downward pressure coming from supermarkets particularly onto farmers to reduce their carbon footprints in a sector that's really hard to decarbonize you know it's it's not obvious

SPEAKER_00: 44:30

yeah it's a tough transition yeah we spent 160 episodes on that and to I wouldn't say put a number on it but just for people to imagine like enhanced weathering like in the current science the current academia what is the potential of course it depends on the type of rock it depends on the type of soil but just like this is a gigaton or gigaton solution that's why so many people are getting excited about it but just to bring that a bit down to earth because gigatons sound a lot how should we imagine in a context on a farm in Scotland on a hectare or an acre or somewhere else what do you normally talk about if people just have a rough estimate obviously not a ton an exact behind a comma but what do you say as a rough estimate why should people get excited about this

SPEAKER_01: 45:13

so I'm trying to do the maths in my head now it can probably it depends on the size of the particles depends on on where we end up at the end of the science but it's it's tons of carbon per hectare

SPEAKER_00: 45:26

per year

SPEAKER_01: 45:27

per year potentially

SPEAKER_00: 45:28

wow which is a significant amount yeah

SPEAKER_01: 45:30

yeah but your cost of doing it is quite high

SPEAKER_00: 45:32

of course you have to bring it in you have to sieve it you have to analyze it you have to match it potentially is not next door because not everybody has a query which is perfectly suited next door etc etc

SPEAKER_01: 45:43

i think we'll struggle to to stay at that$200 a ton price that we did for Stripe initially, just by the locked-in costs in operating. I think that will have to go quite a bit higher. Over time, as you get economies of scale kicking in, it might come back down, but it's not straightforward, and a lot of the demand in the market right now is for immediate carbon, and enhanced rock weathering takes multiple years to... weather depending on the particle size and depending on what we find out as we get further into the deeper into the science so it's not a well there are no magic bullets in this case with climate and this isn't one but the potential is 2 to 4 billion tonnes we think per year globally that's huge we're going to need a minimum of 10 billion tons of removal that's assuming every sector decarbonizes as best we believe it can so this is 10 billion

SPEAKER_00: 46:46

on top of that decarbonization we need about 10 billion tons a year of actual removal and this could be a few tons of that basically

SPEAKER_01: 46:55

it could be 20 to 40 percent of that

SPEAKER_00: 46:57

yeah which is significant adding on this is apart from the biochar apart from the trees apart from holistic grazing apart i mean this is just the rock weathering yeah

SPEAKER_01: 47:07

and this is permanent removal this is long term lock up. Now, I am a big fan of grazing and soil storage of carbon. The problem with it is it can be reversed very, very quickly if you have a change of lands.

SPEAKER_00: 47:19

One plough and it's one cut of the tree. Yeah, it's

SPEAKER_01: 47:23

gone. This, once it's done, it's hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, it goes into the rock record and it is locked up. So in terms of quality of solution, it's absolute best in class. Now, that doesn't mean that Other solutions don't have a place to play. Anything that stores carbon for a period of time, we talk about biochar is 100-year storage. How much is still there after 100 years? But the thing is, if you can produce, there's somewhere in the region of 10 billion tons of biomass that's wasted each year. If you can turn that into three to four tons of carbon, in fact, some people think it's higher than that. Some people think it's as much as 20 billion tons of

SPEAKER_00: 48:02

biomass each year. Which is burned now, mind you, many places, or left to rot, etc. char and not burned in the way that it makes biochar. It's burned in a way that it releases everything.

SPEAKER_01: 48:11

Yeah, it releases everything or worse still actually when it rots, often you're releasing methane as well, which is far more potent as a greenhouse gas. So when you look at that over 100 years, if you can store, let's say, four gigatons again of carbon as biochar and get a benefit in the soil, that's a hugely attractive method. I'm also a fan of what char we're doing with pyrolysis and producing in bio-oil which they inject into oil wells that's permanent storage but it misses the holistic benefits of biochar but it does turn it into permanent as opposed to 100 year storage I personally think that we're better to use that on dry land which needs the water moderation as biochar than we are as bio-oil but both approaches have merits and again you multiply that up 100 years by 4 gigatons, and it doesn't stop at 100 years. It's not like it all suddenly gets released at 100 years. But you can store and buffer a huge amount of carbon. And again, with soil, even if soil were only a 10-year buffer, there's so much soil that we could be enriching. And once it's there and it will hit a saturation point, we think, that's certainly the evidence suggests that there's a saturation point with soil. carbon but let's get all the soil saturated because it's at least buying us time and so I'm very much a fan of the you know we need to do everything and some some of it will work really well some of it will work less well some of it will be really expensive like direct air capture and some of it will have holistic benefits and some won't and you know this is just such a huge problem we need to do everything and um figure out what works and probably lots of things work.

SPEAKER_00: 50:01

And what is the biggest struggle or what is the biggest bottleneck at the moment for you at the Future Forest company? Apart from scaling a company to 70 people and growing like crazy, I mean, and time and sleep and all of that, but that's sort of given in a scale-up like that, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 50:19

Small children are probably the biggest barrier to scaling. No, I joke, but...

SPEAKER_00: 50:23

Get Jim some babysit support. Now he has it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 50:26

Yeah, so I think there are very challenges i mean the scale of growth is always a challenge we've gone from i don't know how many people when we last spoke

SPEAKER_00: 50:34

i think around 20 or so i in my mind somewhere there's that number but it wasn't a lot

SPEAKER_01: 50:39

yeah yeah so i think i think it might have been less and i think in the last 10 months somebody was telling me we've gone from 10 people to 70 people we've got i think 17 open positions at the moment so please send people to our website have a look at those roles we're looking for good people um get in touch yeah yeah so that's always a challenge um but We're internationalising at the moment, so we're building out a team in the US and that's, again, just adds another dimension as you start working across those time zones. Finance will become a barrier for us. We're about to go out and start raising a much larger round of investment and we haven't disclosed our funding rounds to date, but we have had quite a lot of private investment into the company and we're now looking at how we scale Thank you. that up significantly. We have models in place that can go to millions of tons of carbon removal. We'd like to think we can be the first organization in the world to facilitate billion-ton carbon removal. That's our North Star. On a yearly basis or on a cumulative? On an annual basis.

SPEAKER_00: 51:48

On an annual basis, wow.

SPEAKER_01: 51:49

And that, to me, is the scale of thinking we need to be applying to this problem now. And if you look at the latest IPCC report, I've not had a chance to read all 4,000 pages of it that came out yesterday but they're finally saying the things that I think a number of us have been saying for quite a while that this is actually the evidence is that this is far worse and happening far quicker than the media have previously reported and if we want to keep a liveable planet or at least large areas of liveable planet we need to be acting really quickly so We just need to do everything, do everything we can. And when you've got something that's working for us, we have to focus on that.

SPEAKER_00: 52:36

Thank you so much for your time. Don't keep you any longer because you have a company and a billion tons to reach on an annual basis. Thank you so much for checking in with us, sharing the updates. We'll definitely point to the job openings and the website and obviously the previous interview if you want to know more. And if you want to learn more on all of this, definitely point to the website of the Future Force Company. So thank you, Jim, so much for your time and your very busy schedule to come and catch up of where you stand in the regeneration at Skip.

SPEAKER_01: 53:04

It's always a pleasure. Thank you for having me back.

SPEAKER_00: 53:06

If you found the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast valuable, there are a few simple ways you can use to support it. Number one, rate and review the podcast on your podcast app. That's the best way for other listeners to find the podcast and it only takes a few seconds. Number two, share this podcast on social media or email it to your friends and colleagues. Number three, if this podcast has been of value to you and if you have the means, please join my membership community to help grow this platform and allow me to take it further. You can find all the details Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.