Baking Earth

This youtube clip from 2010 has Allan in conversation with his granddaughter Micky. As you can see from this video, all of Allan’s ideas about soil carbon sequestration were already being developed and refined at this point, and he explains the process clearly here. As for what happened since 2010? Well, he created the Yeomans Carbon Still to help make soil carbon measurement possible!

Melbourne film maker Takeshi Kondo (TK) has made this short video about the project at Monash University Museum of Art. Thanks to Warisa Somsuphangsri and MUMA for producing this piece.

This article appeared in The Weekly Times on May 15, 2019. You can download it as a pdf here. The images in the article are from the exhibition Shapes of Knowledge at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) curated by Hannah Mathews. These photos show the installation by Lucas Ihlein and Allan Yeomans at MUMA, featuring a fully working model of the Yeomans Carbon Still.

AUSTRALIAN FARMERS CAN REVERSE THE GLOBAL EFFECTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: CARBON NATION
By Colin Taylor
The Weekly Times
May 15, 2019

FARMERS hoping to cash in on the Federal Government’s promise to pay them for carbon capture may like to hear about a new pathway that potentially makes the process faster and easier.

Continue reading “CARBON NATION – article in The Weekly Times”

Saturday 23 March, 2-4pm
MUMA | Monash University Museum of Art
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
FREE /// All welcome
RSVP here.

A round table discussion about soil carbon sequestration, its opportunities and challenges. How to do it, how to measure it, and how to legislate for it.

This is your chance to join with some visiting experts in learning about a positive contribution food production systems can make to help stop climate change. No prior knowledge required!

With Allan Yeomans (inventor of the Yeomans Carbon Still), Louisa Kiely (Carbon Farmers of Australia), Dru Marsh (EPA Victoria), Lucas Ihlein (artist), Niels and Maja Olsen (regenerative farmers).

On March 9, we hosted a bus trip to Hallora (about 1.5 hours south east of Melbourne) to learn hands-on about soil and the carbon economy.

As the bus hurtled down the highway, Allan Yeomans and I gave a brief history of our own work, telling how an artist and an agricultural innovator came to be working together on this project. We were joined by Damien Lawson (an advisor to Adam Bandt of the Greens) who has done a lot of research on global warming and environmental policy. Damien gave a user-friendly summary of the current federal policy situation around climate change mitigation.

Continue reading “Field Trip to the Olsen family Farm”

In 1990, Allan was invited to the Esalen Congress on Sustainable Agriculture, where he presented this paper entitled “The Agricultural Solution to the Greenhouse Effect”. This is the genesis of his work on the Yeomans Carbon Still and the associated methodology for measuring soil carbon sequestration. You can download the paper as a pdf document here.

A few photos taken of the installation at MUMA before the exhibition launches… (see more photos here).

The following are some shots taken by professional photographer Christian Capurro (see the full set here).

Listing some of the things I don’t yet understand about soil and the carbon economy:

• What happens to carbon when plants photosynthesize? I mean, I (sort of) get it, that they “breathe in” CO2, but then what? I’ve been imagining that they break the CO2 into oxygen (O2) and carbon (C) (how exactly?)- the oxygen goes back into the atmosphere and the carbon goes – where? Into the soil, into the plant’s leaves and roots? How does this work?
• I get it that “organic matter” is 58% carbon. We use this factor when we extrapolate the carbon mass in a soil sample from the mass of organic matter. (But why 58%?) And is all organic matter the same? I mean, is a piece of jarrah wood the same in carbon content as a blade of grass or humus in the soil?
• How does the proposed carbon economy work? Here’s a ham-fisted version of how I imagine it: polluters pay money for tonnage of carbon dioxide emissions. That money is put in some sort of trust account, and paid to people who can demonstrate that they are pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. OK, fine. But doesn’t that mean that the emissions of the rich are just written off, getting them off the hook? Doesn’t that mean they can carry on with business as usual?
• What are some of the possible “revenge effects” of the carbon economy? I dunno, I’m thinking about Kevin Rudd’s ceiling insulation scheme which was meant to kickstart the Aussie economy during the global financial crisis but ended up incentivising a whole lot of shonky operators to set up get-rich-quick businesses installing insulation (and people died as a result).
• Ecosystem services as a commodity. What are the pros and cons of putting a price on services to the ecosystem?

There are more questions! But those will do for now…
Meantime here is a fairly easy to follow article about the processes of carbon drawdown through agriculture.

Morgan Way and Sam Doyon from Wayward Films produced this short video documentary about the Yeomans Carbon Still, soil carbon and its potential for mitigating global warming.

The video includes discussion with inventor/designer Allan Yeomans, artist Lucas Ihlein, farmer Robert Quirk, Indigenous land manager Russell Logan, and carbon farming advocate Louisa Kiely.

The doco is included in the exhibition Shapes of Knowledge alongside the Yeomans Carbon Still machine.

Music by Robin Grey.

I took Allan Yeomans to visit Niels’ farm, about 1.5 hours south east of Melbourne. Niels raises cattle and grows many different species creating a “salad bowl” of living plants for his cows – including peas, oats, rye corn, chicory, plaintain, tillage radish, vetch, and clover.

Like Allan Yeomans, Niels is an inventor. In the picture you can see his machine, the “Soilkee Renovator” which aerates the land, buries organic matter and drills seeds directly into the soil. Matthew Warnken of AgriProve is working with Niels to submit an application for soil carbon credits – enabling Niels to be paid for a significant increase in the carbon content of his soil. I still don’t understand how the economics of this works – but I’m hoping to learn more about it during the course of the project.

Niels’ farm is the destination for our public soil sampling field trip from MUMA on 9 March. Book on the MUMA website, as places are limited.

While we were on the farm, Niels’ family gathered a soil sample for us. We’ll be testing it live on Wednesday 13 February 2019 between 10am-3pm at Monash University Museum of Art, using the Yeomans Carbon Still.