While farms using some carbon management practices may have between zero and two carbon units per hectare (with a carbon unit being equivalent to one ton of CO2 that has been removed from the atmosphere), land planted with Loam seeds have between three and six carbon units in a single growing season (usually one year).
“[There was] a clear and evident impact—which even surprised me,” says Yolima Carrillo, a third-party researcher at Western Sydney University’s Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, who has helped evaluate Loam’s trials over the last three years. “I wasn’t expecting it was going to be so clearly evident how stable and resistant the soil carbon was going to be.”
https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2023/can-fungi-save-our-soil/
I've been doing this one 1 acre of lawn - spread endomycorrhizal spores and use Tall Fescue that also has spores in it. I'm seeing more shrooms growing now also - stopped using herbicides.
A diverse crew assembled to create Loam: agronomist Guy Webb, farmers Mick Wettenhall and Tegan Nock, filmmaker-turned-cattle-breeder Frank Oly, and clean tech expert Guy Hudson. Originally conceived as a non-profit in 2015, Loam registered as a for-purpose enterprise in 2019 to scale quickly (its non-profit arm, SoilCQuest, is still in operation and is the largest shareholder in Loam). Now employing over 70 people, Loam doesn’t just provide farmers with its inoculated super-seeds. It also assists growers in registration and verification for carbon schemes such as The Australian Government Emissions Reduction Fund program, a total product package it calls SecondCrop.
“It’s adding another commodity—carbon—to existing operations without having to forgo anything,” explains Torben Heinzel, carbon projects lead. “Farmers think they’re going to have to plant trees and forgo growing their crops or running their sheep. But we’re applying a seed treatment to what they’re already planting, so it’s not a massive change to their operations.”
NY Times chimes in:
Loam Bio’s fungal talcum has been spread on 100,000 acres in Australia this year, with 250,000 acres expected to come online next year. A half-dozen farmers in the United States are trying the product on their soy fields. Field tests are underway in Canada and Brazil.
Loam Bio has attracted $100 million in investments so far, making it among the most well-funded of the many start-ups looking for ways to store more carbon in the dirt. Ms. Nock, the co-founder of Loam Bio, tells her customers they can expect to store one to two tons of stable carbon in every hectare, or 2.4 acres.
But there are more stable types of soil carbon, including one that attaches itself to minerals in the dirt and remains there for a century or more. Loam Bio says that its fungal spores can help build that more stable soil carbon.
Can Dirt Clean the Climate?
An Australian start-up is hoping fungi can pull carbon dioxide from the air and stash it underground. It’s one of several ventures trying to deploy the superpowers of soil to slow global warming.
Photographs and Video by Matthew Abbott
Somini Sengupta traveled to farms around New South Wales, Australia, to report this article.
- Aug. 10, 2024
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