LAND
Have you ever wondered what has happened to rainfall? Walter Jehne armed with an arsenal of science delivers a lecture that spans the math of global warming, the biology and evolution of soil and plant life, and the physics of water and heat cycles with the promise of a cooler planet by engaging the same processes Mother Nature has used throughout millenniums.
How to cool the planet? The presentation goes through the math of solar radiation, re-radiation, the role healthy soil play in fixing carbon and retaining water, plant transpiration in Earth’s water cycle, cloud formation and rain. If we could increase cloud cover by 2% through healthy soil and plant transpiration we could offset an additional 3 watts per square meter of solar radiation.
Part 2 the A, B, C of healthy soil and its dividends. Over 1,000 farms in Australia are participating in the program and report: 100% crop yields, 300% nutritional integrity, 300% reliability and 500% soil regeneration. Healthy soils are spongy and plant transpiration removes heat from the soil by approximately 85 watts per square meter.
The issues related to industrial agriculture are significant. Poor soil conditions make it more difficult to grow nutrient dense food and when soil is lifeless we lose our ability to feed ourselves. Soil degradation also reduces our ability to mitigate climate change ….
A few years ago, a report from the UN Food & Agricultural Organization warned that at the current rate of soil erosion we have only 60 harvests left! We urgently need to address the mismanagement of our lands and soil…..
A cattle rancher growing top soil at 0.5 to 1% annually and increasing the cattle the ranch can support by 5 fold in 3 years. Growing healthy soil by 1% permits one acre to hold 25,000 gallons more water.
‘Herbivores play an essencial role in building soil that can store more water, absorb more carbon from the atmosphere and produce nutrient rich food’.
Discussion of techniques in regenerative farming systems in growing blueberries, blackberries, red and black rasberries, strawberries and aronia berries.
Sustainable farming uses many of the same techniques that were common practice before industrial agriculture. Keeping roots in the soil all year round protects soil from erosion and increases water retention. There are many more techniques covered in this presentation aimed to assure healthy soil for generations to come…
In 1991, Cuba lost access to the machines and chemicals needed for industrial agricultural and out of necessity transformed its semi-industrial agricultural system into a network of thousands of small rural farms and urban gardens, which uses organic farming principles. Much can be learned from the Cuban experience….
More than 50,000 farmers in Bangladesh have adopted this farming technique to protect their livelyhoods from floods.
The different blend of honey-producing flower strips on agricultural land, pest control and partnerships between bee-keepers and farmers.
A team of scientists in Minnesota, along with local farmers are developing a new grain called Kernza, which unlike most grain crops is a perennial. Kernza, which is similar to wheat, is nutritious and high in protein and has become a popular choice for bakeries and breweries in the Minnesota region, However it will take another decade before the rest of us can buy it….
Will coal-country become an AgTech capital? AppHarvest, the largest greenhouse in the US (2.8 million square feet) uses digital monitoring, sun & LED lighting, recycled rainwater and nonchemical growing practices. All of its irrigation water (360,000 gallons a day) is supplied from rain collected from the roof and stored in a ten acres pond (46 million gallons) basically a three month supply in case of drought. Pest control uses nonchemical biological methods, such as tiny wasps ( Encarsia formosa and Eretmocerus eremicus) to control white flies, the nemesis of greenhouse production.
Growing salmon in the desert, where temperatures can reach 45C is no small challenge, however Fish Farm has successfully created ways to reconstitute the exact conditions and environment salmon experience throughout their life cycle….
Growing warm-weather citrus in a very cold climate uses a simple geothermal system to warm the greenhouse with zero energy costs.
Software data sensors manage the amount of light, nutrients, water, air temperature, humidity and harvest time for the organic farm located outside of New York in an old industrial warehouse. Although highly automated…
A look inside Singapore’s Sustenir vertical farm. The farm produces one tonne of kale or 3.2 tonnes of lettuce every month in a space no larger than a two bedroom apartment. The produce is ship to shops within hours of harvesting, super fresh!
Growing luscious temperate crops in Somaliland with a greenhouse system which uses seawater and corrugated cardboard to increase cooling and humidity. The process has reduced the need for fresh water by tenfold and /or more.
Researchers at Chongqing Jiaotong University developed a paste of a substance found naturally in plant cell walls that when added to sand helps plants retain water and nutrients. They have already transformed in 6 months 200 hectares of an Inner Mongolian desert and plan an additional 13,000 hectares in the coming years.
Ole Morten Oleson presents liquid nanoclay that can transform desert sand literally into productive land for crops such as wheat, vegetables or trees He explains briefly the history of the invention and science, which has opened the door to food production on desert land.
There are several techniques describe in this video to transform sand to soil in a 5 month timeframe.
Almost 50 years ago, David Bamberger bought 5,500 acres of stony, overgrazed land in Texas; there was no water, the wells and an aquifer were completely dry. When it rained, the water ran off, so he planted various grasses to soak in the rainfall and within two years the first spring came to life and the transformation began …
‘Desertification is a fancy word for land turning to desert’ and Allan Savory has devoted his entire life to stopping it, There is a way forward not only to protect grasslands, but to reclaim degraded land desertified.
The extraordinary greening transformation of barren land …
Biochar : The ancient technique of making carbon rich biochar is making a come-back on a farm in Florida that has turned sandy soil into a green oasis.
Entocycle is the UK’s first fully automated insect protein farm. The farming of insects produces a natural, high protein feed for animals and fish using food waste. Entocycle is the UK’s first fully automated insect protein farm. The farming of insects produces a natural, high protein feed for animals and fish using food waste.
Methane emissions from the planet’s 1.5 Billion cattle represents a significant source of emissions; however there may be a natural feed additive which can reduce those emissions by 60% : red algae and the current testing looks very promising.
Shrimp without an environmental impact. New Wave Foods makes fake shrimps from kelp and algae that are high in protein, rich in nutrients and low in fat. They look, taste and even smell like the real thing……
The seaweed, Dulce has to be prepared to get the bacon flavor. Dulse is rich in nutrients, proteins and low in unsaturated fatty acids.
Scientists have created a new protein literally out of thin air adding CO2 and water with a zap of green electricity. Microbes found in the air provide the protein.
Non-Dairy, Dairy! Perfect Day genetically engineered mircoflora to produce the two main proteins in milk; casien and whey. The company launched its first product, ice cream in July 2019.
No Cattle Meat: Scientists at start-ups are growing meat cell by cell in labs rather than on a farm to meet the growth in global population and demand for tasty proteins. Cellular cultured meats use a lot less water and space to provide a more ethical and sustainable choice to clean protein.
Meatable is a Dutch cellular cultured meat start-up that hooked-up with Cambridge University to replace bovine serum in lab-meat production. Meatable uses pluripotent stem cells, which can be manipulated into any type cell without the need for fetal cow blood.
Lighting up the planet consumes 15% of all electricity globally and the challenge has been to reduce the cost. Inspired by the workings of the humble firefly scientists have now significantly increased the efficiency of LEDs…
Cement production is a massive emitter of CO2; for every pound of limestone processed half its weight ends up as CO2 emissions. CarbonCure Technologies has a solution to reduce the amount of cement needed by taking CO2 and adding it to the concrete mixture. This technology can hook into any cement plant and has the potential to reduce this industry’s emissions by 500 mega tons per year. That’s the equivalent to taking 100 million cars off the road.
Concrete’s main componant, cement is responsible for 7% of global greenhouse emissions. However a new process uses CO2 and less cement to produce a stronger concrete, which traps CO2 forever.
Solidia uses CO2 sucked-out of the air in its concrete manufacturing process. The concrete is 10 to 25% stronger than normal concrete and its water footprint in production is much smaller than traditional concrete.
The Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences in the Netherlands are creating new cements with the waste and by-products from industrial industries. The geopolymer products are used to replace cement in concrete production and the result is comparable or better than tradition concrete. The next project…a bridge!
This pollution-eating concrete uses titanium dioxide in the mixture, which combines with sunlight to attract pollutants from combustion like nitric dioxide, carbon dioxide, sulphur oxide, etc from the air. When it rains the pollutants are washed-out and transformed into harmless mineral salts.
New possibilities for formulating crack resistant concrete is on the horizon with micro organisms, which spring to life to create calcium carbonate to solidify the tiniest cracking.
Hempcrete, a hemp-lime composite ‘concrete’ regulates the temperature and humidity of buildings keeping them cooler or warmer. Flame resistant and as solid as a concrete brick.
New methods in concrete recycling and processing can enable high quality recycled concrete to be used as an alternative building material even in structural engineering, and that is a huge savings for the environment.
Studies have shown if we could reforest 0.9% of land deforested, we could remove from the atmosphere 200 gigatons of CO2, which is equivalent to 32% of all CO2 emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution….
Turkey has designated 11/11 the National Tree-Planting Day and this year citizens planted 303,150 saplings within one hour!! Turkey’s plans to keep 11/11 as its national tree-planting day and expects to plant 7 billion trees by 2023….
One man’s quest to save the Redwoods of California. Redwoods are enormous trees that can live thousands of years; grow to heights of 350 feet with trunks as large as 30 feet wide. They are very robust, but climate change and mankind’s foolishness threatens their survival…
Do trees talk? Susanne Simard presents the science behind how trees communicate describing the dense network within the forest’s soil as a biological internet with nodes and links. Hub trees, also known as mother trees transfer their excess carbon to sibblings and can even recognize a sibbling over a great distance
The city, Liuzhou, designed for a population of 30,000 people will tackle air pollution. The city will absorb 10,000 tonnes of CO2 annually and produce 900 tonnes of oxygen. A high-speed train will connect Liuzhou to a nearby large city/population 1.2 million.
Ethiopia is focused on reforestation and regreening its countryside to combat deforestation and also to achieve food security.
Ethiopia not only successfully restored soil productivity, but reforested 2700 hectares without planting a single tree!!
The extraordinary rainforest restored on a small patch of land in the Amazon by one man, Omar Tello. Omar now helps others to reforest their land and Maria Jose Iturralde of the NGO Humans for Abundance finances the projects to provide income to farmers for the loss of revenue from reforesting their land…
Ethiopia not only successfully restored soil productivity, but reforested 2700 hectares without planting a single tree!!
Africa is planting a great wall of trees spanning across the entire continent; 8,000 kilometres long and 15 kilometres wide,. The project, The Great Green Wall began in 2007 and its benefits are already transforming peoples lives…
In 1986 the city of Aksu in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region began planting trees to protect the city from sand storms that plagued the city. Today, the dust storms have been reduced in intensity and occurrence to around 20 times a year. The region has also become a large scale producers of apples and other produce.
The transformation ofcold, barren desert into a lush green forest.
The amount of land lost every year to desertification and drought is staggering. Take a minute to learn more…
Although much research has been made for algae-based biofuels, footwear,; flip-flops and sporting shoes may be its future.
Alternative materials for consumer products, which are constructed through biological processes are not only biodegradable, but completely sustainable
Marina Tex is a transparent bioplasic created from fish waste and algae for single-use applications. In the UK alone, processing plants alone produce more than 172,000 tons of fish waste annually, which makes fish waste a significant and on-going resource for the production of Marina Tex bioplastic.
Following the rice harvest, normally straw waste is burned off, which produces pollution and CO2 emissions. One young woman had a better idea; to harvest the straw and process it into paper and an alternative to plastic for food packaging
Lobster shells contain a high content of a bio-polymer known as chitin, which ShellWorks, a London-based start-up uses to produce a bioplastic that is both biodegradable and recyclable. The waste streams from lobsters are significant; one London-based restaurant chain produces annually 375 tons of shell-waste….
Mycelium technology offers biodegradeable solutions for many manufacturers ; not only for packaging and a syraform replacement, but also for textiles.
Mycelium is a mushroom-based alternative to Styrofoam and has numerous packaging applications. It can also be used in footwear, as a leather substitute in clothing, insulation both thermal and acoustic and much more. Safely decomposes in soil within 45 days…
Discarded flipflops play a significant role in ocean pollution and biodegradable flipflops may be the solution…
Scientists have enhanced a plastic-eating enzyme that can break-down PET plastic into its original components, which then can be re-used to create new PET bottles. Infinite plastic! The enzyme was first identified in Japan and researchers in the UK were able to alter it to ‘eat’ 20% faster.
A company in Scotland has developed a process to transform specific plastic waste into pellets, which can be used to replace bitumen in any conventional asphalt production center for road paving. The paving represents not only a practical solution to waste, but plastic paving is also more economical, longer lasting….
India’s uses a mixture of thermoplastics (LDPE, HDPE, PET and Polyurethane) with bitumen to pave roads to be stronger and water resistant. A two lane road uses 2 tonnes of waste plastic per kilometer.
Mycelium is a mushroom-based alternative to Styrofoam and has numerous packaging applications. It can also be used in footwear, as a leather substitute in clothing, insulation both thermal and acoustic and much more. Safely decomposes in soil within 45 days…
Why did anyone believe that indefinite growth on a finite planet could ever work out? What are the environmental, climate and resource consequences of overpopulation? And in today’s automated, high tech age, where are the jobs for all these people?
Earth’s Overshoot Day is Earth’s natural resource report card. which first began in 1971. It’s date signifies the day that humans have consumed all of the natural resources that the planet could produce within a year time. The date did better during the pandemic years, however we’ll see what it is for 2022
‘if we continue consuming the way we do in the next 40 years, we will need to produce as much food as we have produced for the past 8,000 years!!!’ explains Ernst van den Ende, Managing Director of Plant Sciences at Wageningen University. The university located in Holland is known as the ‘silicon valley’ of agriculture and leads the way for increased productivity. The video covers both the science in development at Wageningen and at Sanan Sino-Science in China, where a three-story/one acre size building produces 1.8 tonnes of produce every day.
It took 200,000 years for human population to reach 1 billion, and only 200 years to reach 7 billion.
The Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizers led to the tripling of crop yields and the abundance and affordability of food. Population is determined by the number of people that can be fed, and therefore the Haber-Bosch invention provided the means to feed the many.
Joe Scott tackles overpopulation; can Earth support10 billion people? The short answer probably, but not at current rates of consumption. And to get to a sustainable plateau it’s going to require some changes in lifestyle: waste not and waste less resource.
MIT has developed a process not only to manufacture graphene at a commercial scale, but the process can also produce specific pore sizes designed for each application
Graphene is adding super strength and longevity to concrete infrastructures in numerous projects in the UK and Europe…
The market is moving towards more environmentally friendly water-based paints and graphene added can extend the lifespan to coatings.
Can the whitest paint color cool the planet ? Very possibly…
Super strong, super light weight, super conductive, bio-compatable…
Porous structures designed at the molecular level with endless possibilities…
Iodine is one of the least abundant non-metallic elements and recovery is an important industrial process. MOF beads out performed powders to capture iodine that can be rapidly regenerated and reused for several cycles.
The practicality of 3D printing…
Can we eliminate waste ? Can a product have more than one life? Many companies are looking for answers….
One definition, ‘everything is healthy food for something else’. Everything has a second life…
Aluminium is made with 100s of different alloys, which makes recycling difficult, until now! Norsk Hydro has the ‘infinite’ aluminium process that takes waste and turns it into the materials needed for numerous industries.
Aluminium is infinitely recyclable. Every week, the world uses 4 billion cans of recycled aluminium. How do they it, Dcode explains.
A visual tour of an Italian company specialised in metal recycling including recuperating copper from tubing and plastic encasements.
The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel has developed a biological method to fully recycle 100% pure coton, pure polyester and coton-polyester blends.
UK company Go Ahead operates bus services in the Newcastle region and added to their fleet nine 'Voltra' Zero Emission Electric buses and plan to purchase many more…
Russian trolleybus manufacturer has gone all in for its new, lithium powered vehicle.
Electric buses offer significant energy savings and they are better for the environment and air quality. In 2018, there were 80,000 electric buses manufactured globally and China took delivery of 99%! The US has four electric bus manufacturers, several municipal clients and one small city in California has completely transitioned public transport to electric buses, wirelessly charged…
The world’s first hydrogen double decker buses in Alberdeen, Scotland.
Germany was the first….
Duel mode electric-hydrogen trains were introduced in France in 2021.
In 2020, the UK’s first hydrogen train went main-stream….
Testing has been successfully completed for a new Chinese hydrogen powered urban train. Speed levels of 160 kilometers per hour, a cruising range of 1,000 kilometers…
China pushing ahead with hydrogen in heavy transport, infrastructure recharging, residential projects, and the use of hydrogen-infused water in fish farms …
A how-to-do tutorial, not for the unskilled; a motorcycle conversion to hydrogen….
New developments in high temperature fuel cell power, turbo charged and direct air-cooling system brings us closer to the use of hydrogen in aviation….
New developments in high temperature fuel cell power, turbo charged and direct air-cooling system brings us closer to the use of hydrogen in aviation…
How to expand public transportation in densely constructed urban areas? La Paz, Bolivia found a solution and it’s all electric…
Sweden has one of the most advance waste management programs on the planet. There is plenty of sorting for recycling and reuse, however what remains is incinerated to produce electricity and the heat generated from the process provides heating to more than 100,000 homes.
This power plant was designed with some of the best technologies that include emission capture and processing the emissions into inert materials. The plant also uses an innovative application for organic waste. The plant provides electricity to a third of the city and equally important the air is clean and the landfills closed.
Gasification offers a cleaner path to waste and can produce usable gas and liquid fuels.
Modern paper and pulp mills produce an enormous amount of waste, 15% of which ends up in landfills. One new technique has developed the use of waste paper sludge- fly ash (PFA) to replace cement in road building and construction, which would significantly reduce related emissions. So far so good…
San Francisco based Mango Materials captures methane emissions from wastewater or landfill centers to produce methane plastic, which is 100% biodegradable. Could methane plastic also be used in MOFs to capture CO2 or methane that could be reprocessed into gas in a bioreactor ?
An Iinnovative business to grows mushrooms in coffee waste, which keeps this waste out of landfills and the methane emissions it would produce.