Baking Earth

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.

Continue reading “Baking Earth: Soil and the Carbon Economy”