How Great Is Biochar!! Introducing Husk
I’m including Husk in my Carbon Zero “Carbon Investment Portfolio” to help me remove my lifetime carbon emissions from the atmosphere and square my personal Carbon Balance Sheet. Let’s connect if you’re interested in learning more about Husk and investing in their work as part of your own Carbon Investment Portfolio.
Back in early December, I was contacted by Federico Tempestilli who is Chief Operating Officer with Husk in Cambodia. Federico thought he’d connect based on the work I’d done in the past with The Forest Trust.
We had a great exchange, Christmas intervened and then in January, Federico connected me with Heloise Buckland, Husk’s Co-Founder and CEO. Heloise and I met up in London in February and I’ve just released a podcast of our discussion around Husk’s great work.
The podcast explains all you need to know about biochar and Husk’s work in Cambodia to improve the lives of smallholder farmers and sink carbon back into the soil there. Their website explains everything they’re doing too.
Husk started in 2017 and is a social venture that makes biochar out of rice husk. Biochar is produced by heating plant material at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. It’s like making charcoal but with plant material rather than wood. It’s a process called pyrolysis.
Biochar is great because it can really improve soil fertility. Because it’s highly porous, it holds loads of nutrients and water and improves fertiliser efficiency. That means that farmers don’t have to use so many chemical, fossil fuel-based fertilisers. When they do apply water, it gets held in the soil and is available for the plants’ roots for much longer. Because it’s rich in carbon, it stimulates the growth of healthy microorganisms in the soil which improves resistance to unwanted pests and diseases.
And…because it’s highly stable, it can remain in the soil for at least 100 years so it’s a terrific way of getting carbon sequestered from the atmosphere. For every ton of biochar Husk produces, they sequester 1.33 tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
The Husk Team in Cambodia
Husk has brought modern pyrolysis technology to Cambodia and in partnership with a rice mill there, produced 82t of biochar in 2019. That’s been distributed to rice farmers and the horticultural industry - all smallholder farmers - who are seeing yield increases averaging 40% but, on some crops, up to 100% in the first year. The impact is THAT quick, that dramatic. This means higher revenues and greater food security for the smallholder farmers.
Biochar creates many other benefits such as greater resilience to extreme weather patterns like droughts and more intense rainfall (because the higher organic matter in the soil makes it less prone to erosion). Because there is less fertiliser usage, there is also less run-off to damage aquatic ecosystems. There’s less diesel needed to pump water as the farmers don’t water as often, saving the farmers money but also burning less fossil fuels. One of the by-products from making biochar is a natural insect repellent that isn’t dangerous for the farmers and can be used right from seedling stage up to harvest. Thus the use of chemical pesticides decreases. The rice farmers get more money for their rice too because the quality is greater. “Broken rice” is a curse for the farmers and the mill alike because it can only be sold for a low price. The biochar increases crop quality which means less “broken rice” so both the farmers and the mill generate higher revenues.
Every year, some 150 million tons of rice husk are produced around the world and much of it rots or is burnt in great piles at rice mills contributing a good wadge (that’s Australian for “a LOT!”) of CO2 to the atmosphere. Precious little of it ends back on the fields. The IPCC highlights biochar as having a huge capacity to increase carbon sequestration from the atmosphere into the soil.
By transforming the atmospheric carbon in the rice husk into stable carbon in the soil, Husk really is all bringing the circular economy into play to benefit farmers and fix that broken carbon model with so many co-benefits to the farmers and the environment.
Smallholder farmer Muy Veasna, with his crop, Battambang, Cambodia
Husk has great plans to take their venture to scale. This means supporting tens of thousands of smallholder farmers in Cambodia and beyond that, as they take their business to other countries around the world. By 2035, their target is to be impacting 500,000 smallholder farmer livelihoods, over 250,000 hectares of farmland that will sequester 72,000 tCO2 from the atmosphere.
I think it’s a great initiative and I’ll be supporting Husk to achieve its grand ambitions through my own investment but also by brokering Carbon Investment Portfolio investments from others also looking to build their own My Carbon Zero action.
If you’d like to learn more about building your own “My Carbon Zero” action to remove your personal or your organisation’s carbon emissions from the atmosphere, do get in touch.
Useful links:
Learn More about My Carbon Zero and how you can reduce your own emissions, reduce emissions elsewhere and remove your lifetime carbon emissions from the atmosphere.
Learn more about Husk through their website: http://www.huskventures.com/
Learn more about biochar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar