Ted Geltz has learned a hard lesson about land in Florida. It’s only good for two things: citrus and real estate.
“If you can’t make it in citrus, then you sell it for houses,” Geltz, the business development director for Locus Agricultural Solutions, told NationSwell.
Geltz, who has been in the citrus industry for more than four decades, has watched as acres of orange trees become apartment complexes, storefronts and suburban mansions. Florida’s citrus production has declined 70% since 2005 due largely to an incurable citrus disease, but Florida’s land value has remained strong. It’s a circumstance that’s pushed thousands of citrus growers to sell their land.
For the few growers that remain, Geltz knows that their value isn’t just the land itself— it’s the soil.
Without the right soil, a citrus tree won’t have the nutrients it needs to stay healthy and produce juicy fruit. But healthy trees do more than just grow delicious food. They absorb carbon from the atmosphere and that carbon eventually cycles back into the soil, creating a carbon sink.
The planet’s soil has already stored an estimated 2,500 gigatons of carbon — four times more than the amount stored in all plants and animals and three times the amount currently in the atmosphere. By cultivating healthy soil, researchers believe there’s potential to store much more.
It isn’t just dirt that stores carbon — it’s the millions of microbes living in the soil. “In a handful of soil, you’ll find tens of thousands of different types of bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses and a whole soil food web,” Matthew Wallenstein, a professor of soil microbial ecology at Colorado State University, told NationSwell.
When plants photosynthesize, they take in carbon. That carbon is used to help grow every part of a plant, from its roots to its stems and leaves. Excess carbon is released as carbon-rich compounds through the root system, and when a plant dies, the microbes take in additional carbon from the dead plant material.
However, a long history of poor land management has created microbe-lacking soils and erosion. Many farm practices disrupt topsoil, where wind and water can sweep it away and release stored carbon. Since humans first began farming, there has been an estimated 133 gigatons of carbon released from the soil.
“The fact that we’ve lost a lot of carbon suggests that there’s a really big capacity to restore those soils,” Wallenstein said.
One way to mitigate climate change is to stop soil erosion and focus on restoration. Around the world, people are approaching ways to sequester carbon in soil from all angles.
A common strategy being used to restore soil and stop its erosion is regenerative agriculture. Practices like rotating which crops are grown, using compost or cover crops help rebuild the soil’s biodiversity and allow it to store larger amounts of carbon.
“There’s no silver bullet. It’s going to take a lot of different approaches, but soils offer one of the most scalable, practical, economical solutions today,” Wallenstein said.
The startup Locus Agricultural Solutions believes it has one solution to help mitigate climate change and increase farmers’ yields. Locus Agricultural Solutions developed a combination of bacteria and fungi called Rhizolizer. When added to crops, it targets roots and root growth. This allows the plant to take in more nutrients, grow stronger and produce higher yields.
“If the roots are healthy, the plant is healthy,” Karthik Karathur, the president of Locus Agricultural Solutions, told NationSwell. “It’s just like our gut, if we have a healthy gut, you predominantly are going to be healthy.”
The bacteria and fungi in Rhizolizer are traditionally found in soil. “It’s just that with industrial farming and the fact that we have done so much to the soil, the soils are not that healthy anymore,” Karathur said. While regenerative farming practices can help restore the soil, Rhizolizer accelerates this process, he said.
Locus Agricultural Solutions isn’t the first company to develop microbial additives, but it is the first to ferment the product in highly concentrated small batches and ship it in a refrigerated system.
That approach has led to hopeful results. An acre with Rhizolizer sequesters 8.6 more tons of carbon each year than an acre without. With 40,000 acres across the U.S. using the technology, it’s the equivalent of taking 47,000 cars off the road.
But the startup’s initial goal wasn’t to combat climate change. It was to help citrus growers in Florida.
In Florida, the citrus belt has long been known as the country’s provider of the tangy fruits. The Valencia oranges used for juice, the navels found in school lunches and the grapefruits for breakfast all likely originated in Central Florida.
In the 1970s, often referred to as the heyday of citrus, 941,000 acres of Florida were dedicated to producing 200 million boxes of fruit. Florida had well earned its title as a worldwide leader in citrus.
Then disaster hit. There were the freezes in 1983, 1985 and 1989, which damage the cold-intolerant trees. Citrus canker, a bacterial disease, infected the groves, and citrus blight followed soon after. Hurricanes struck.
But perhaps the worst challenge has been citrus greening.
In 2005, Florida saw its first symptoms of citrus greening, also known as huanglongbing or HLB. The disease attacks the tree’s vascular tissue, impairing its ability to take in nutrients. The trees weaken, growth slows and the fruits that develop never ripen. Today, citrus greening is present across the entire state — leading to a 21% decrease in the fresh fruit market and a 72% decrease in the production of fruits used for juicing.
“In a period of about five years, it just devastated the industry,” said Geltz. “And a lot of people just threw their hands up and said I’m done.”
The growers that didn’t leave have tried everything to cure greening.
Chris Troesch, a grower at Simpson Fruit Company, first tried targeting the psyllids, the insects infecting the citrus trees. But that didn’t work.
Then helicopters sprayed insecticide at night. No luck.
Troesch applied other microbial additives to the trees, which ended up being “snake oil.” Microbial products have a historically bad reputation because they’re often transported thousands of miles. By the time they reach the farmer, they’re no longer fresh and no longer have the positive results.
At one point, he was spending $2,500 to $3,000 per acre to keep the trees alive and productive, while the industry standard was closer to $850. It wasn’t a sustainable business model.
“Our standard as Florida, we’re supposed to be number one on taste, and we lost it all,” he told NationSwell.
Geltz convinced Troesch to give Rhizolizer a shot. He added it to his irrigation system and it helped. Troesch has used the product for two years and production is up 25%.
Rhizolizer isn’t curing the trees of citrus greening, but it does have a positive effect. “It’s not that we’re eliminating the disease,” Teresa DeJohn, the director of marketing for Locus Agricultural Solutions, told NationSwell. “It’s that we’re able to keep the roots healthy and improve root growth, which is very rare with that disease.”
The result? Higher yields and hope that citrus still has a future in Florida.
Kris Sutton, a farmer at Faryna Grove Care and Harvesting, faced a similar reality two years ago.
Born and raised in Florida, he started working at Faryna in 2005. Between 2008 and 2009, citrus greening hit his 850 acres.
The trees shrunk in size, and the little fruit that the tree produced wasn’t edible.
He, too, tried countless solutions with no success. Geltz persuaded him to try Rhizolizer instead, and it worked.
“The last two years have been the first time I’ve seen the production go up,” the 41-year-old said.
Sitting behind the once unproductive grove in Umatilla, Florida, is a trailer park. Sutton thinks about what the grove could’ve been if Rhizolizer hadn’t helped. “It’d be motor homes.”
With healthier and more productive trees, Sutton said he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He hopes the land stays in the family, and with a tractor-loving 6-year-old, there’s a good chance it will.
Fifteen percent of Florida’s remaining citrus acreage is using Rhizolizer. The citrus community is tight-knit and word travels fast, which has helped focus Agricultural Solutions.
Tim Whitaker, a grower at May Brothers Citrus, watched neighboring groves grow and strengthen. “Well, what are they doing? What’s making the difference?” he asked.
It was Rhizolizer. Over lunch, Whitaker pulls out his phone to show pictures of a healthy, productive tree completely covered with healthy Hamlin oranges.
“The tree can’t hold much more fruit than that,” he said. “But just a few years ago, you could count the number of fruit on a tree with two hands.”
Outside of Florida, Locus Agricultural Solutions is working with farmers who grow everything from cantaloupes, to potatoes, to apples and strawberries.
Depending on the location and crop, farmers have seen a yield increase between 5% and 45%, said Karathur.
Since Rhizolizer is fermented in small batches, the goal is to have a microbrewery in every farming community.
Those breweries, Karathur believes, will support rural communities, restore land and build a future for the planet.
“Human beings, plants, everything is dependent upon the soil, healthy soil,” he said. “The soil needs to go back to being the carbon sink that it always was, and that it’s made to be.”
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Tag: carbon capture
Sucking Carbon Out of the Air Is One Way to Help Save Our Planet
Swiss company Climeworks has developed a system to remove carbon dioxide from the air and keep it from being re-released into the atmosphere.
Their technology uses a process called direct air capture, which processes air through filters that can capture and trap carbon dioxide. The air exits the system with 90 percent less carbon than air entering the system. At a geothermal plant in Iceland, Climeworks technology has been used to create the world’s first negative emission power plant, which removes more CO2 from the air than it produces.
While captured carbon can be used to create carbon-neutral fuel, plastic and a range of other materials, the Iceland plant has found a way to inject it underground and transform it into stone, preventing the carbon from being re-released into the atmosphere for millions of years.
So far, direct air capture is only a small part of the global effort to mitigate climate change. It is currently prohibitively expensive and small in scale, but is developing quickly and attracting funding from power investors like Bill Gates.
For the world to meet the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement, we’ll very likely need to not only reduce carbon emissions but also remove emissions from the air. Direct air capture plants like Climeworks and others aim to do so while providing jobs and powering a “new, clean economy.”
Watch the video above to see the new technology in action.
Homepage photo by Arni Saeberg.
MORE: Can the U.S. Continue to Reduce Its Carbon Emissions?
Can a Little Bit of Compost Help Fight Climate Change?
There are plenty of reasons why compost is beneficial to the environment. This nutrient-rich mulch enriches soil and helps plants grow, reduces the need for fertilizers and as it turns out, can also play a big role in reducing carbon in the atmosphere.
Experiments conducted on a Marin County ranch found that a single layer of compost has significantly increased the soil’s ability to store carbon (an effect that’s been observed for the last six years), the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
If scaled up, this eco-friendly solution could potentially slash California’s carbon pollution. According to the research, if compost were applied to a mere 5 percent of California’s grazing lands, the soil could capture a whole year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions from the state’s farm and forestry industries. Researcher and bio-geochemist Whendee Silver theorized to the San Francisco Chronicle that if compost were applied to 25 percent of California’s grazing land, the soil could absorb a whopping three-quarters of the state’s annual emissions.
Here’s how it works: Compost nourishes plant growth. And as a plant grows, it sucks in the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Carbon, as well as being used to create new plant tissue, is also pushed into the soil via the roots.
Compost helps cut greenhouse gases in other ways as well. We’ve mentioned that composting helps divert unwanted food scraps and other organic material from the landfills, which are the U.S.’s third largest source of methane emissions behind the oil and gas and agriculture industries.
The Marin county composting experiment has also benefited the land in other ways. Ranch owner John Wick has observed an increase in native birds and plants, as well as green grass year round (which is especially remarkable in a state that’s experiencing a historic drought).
So if composting is so great, why hasn’t California (and other states) spread the solution? Well, as the San Francisco Chronicle explains, even though the process is relatively low-tech, it requires a lot of time and money.
However, many cities such as Denver; Austin, Texas; Portland, Ore., and New York City have compost-collecting programs. And in San Francisco and Seattle, residents are fined if they fail to compost. So as more cities and states green up, there will certainly be much more mulch to spread around.
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Scientists Have Figured out How to Convert CO2 Into a Useful Material
We all know that carbon dioxide, or CO2, isn’t just plant food. Due to human activity (from burning petroleum, coal and natural gas), too much of this naturally occurring gas is released into the air, where it becomes a greenhouse gas that traps heat and bakes our planet, contributing to climate change.
However, several companies are finding ways to capture this excessive carbon and turn it into a wide range of useful products. National Geographic recently featured three of these businesses that are sparing the atmosphere from this harmful pollutant.
1. Baking soda — Skyonic in Austin, Texas
This environmental engineering firm’s patented SkyCycleTM technology can capture more than 94 percent of emitted CO2 from a plant’s flue gas stream, according to MarketWatch. It then converts the captured emissions into baking soda and other chemicals that can be sold to cattle and oil industries. “We can take something that’s waste and turn it into something that’s profit,” President and CEO Joe Jones tells Bloomberg. “In a world that’s unsettled on carbon, we’re making actual progress.”
2. From wasted CO2 to fuel — Joule in Bedford, Massachusetts
This biofirm uses genetically engineered pond scum that can turn CO2 straight into fuel through photosynthesis. Sounds a little sci-fi, but what this company has done is created liquid fuel without needing a dinosaur to fossilize for millions of years underground, as National Geographic puts it. “What we are producing is really the same product that is being produced by the fuel industry today. We’re just doing it in real time,” says Tom Jensen, the company’s head of corporate development. Incredibly, if this technology is successfully scaled up, Joule’s fuel would only cost $50 a barrel, or $1.20 gallon, the company says.
3. Green plastics — Novomer in Waltham, Massachusetts
This chemical company uses carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as a raw material to produce plastics, polymers and other chemicals. According to the company, while most plastics are manufactured almost entirely from fossil fuels, Novomer’s technology replaces up to half of the fossil fuels in the materials with carbon dioxide. National Geographic reports that the company currently sells its products in three forms: hot-melt adhesives (for autos, shoes, furniture, textiles), rigid insulating foam (used for insulating homes and buildings) and coatings (used for decoration and protection of metal, plastic and wood). “Converting carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from pollution into valuable materials has the potential to transform the plastics and materials landscape on a global scale,” says CEO Jim Mahoney.
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