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.
I first visited Allan Yeomans in 2016, when I was just beginning work on the sugarcane project in Mackay. Driving north from Wollongong with Lizzie and Albie, we stopped at the Gold Coast and pulled in to the carpark of the Yeomans Plow Company. Very quickly Allan drew me into an engrossing technical and ideological conversation about global warming, government policy, and the great tradition of Aussie inventiveness that his family is so famous for.
He talked me through the prototype of his Yeomans Carbon Still – which I had read about online, but never seen in the flesh. Eventually Lizzie had to drag me away as the afternoon was getting on and we needed to find a campsite for the night. But in that couple of hours with Allan, the idea for this project was born. In a nutshell: take a working model of the Carbon Still and install it in the museum as a public demonstration of how farmers can measure their soil carbon.
Continue reading “Earning my “L” plates”
I’ve come from Wollongong to visit Allan Yeomans, the inventor of the Yeomans Carbon Still.
It seems fitting that Allan’s workshop is located here at the Gold Coast, where hundreds of skyscrapers cluster along the beach, perched barely above sea level. What will happen to this place in the near future, when sea levels rise up and flood the streets, and cyclones erode the foundations of the buildings? Will it become an unlivable ghost town?
Across the world, low-lying cities like the Gold Coast are ever more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and Allan Yeomans hopes that his invention can help tackle this global problem.
