Rebuilding The Soil Carbon Sponge, and Cooling the Climate Fast with Walter Jehne

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me johngenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

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Eco-Farm.Org ecofarm.org hi friends, I'm delighted to introduce Walter Yanny. Walter and I have been trying to connect for some time. We live in a very interesting world from a climactic perspective. All of us get to experience and observe how the climate is shifting and changing on our own farms and on our own operations. And Walter has developed a very unique perspective on the impact that we as farmers can have on the climate and how we can shift management of our own farms to improve carbon sequestration and to do all these various things. We've just in the last week had the most recent IPCC report released which describes the impact that regenerative agriculture can have on improving the climate. But I think an important element that Walter adds is one that is usually missed. The reason we want and need carbon sequestration and the impact that we can have as growers. Though the point is not to sequester carbon purely to remove carbon dioxide from the air, but but instead to change the hydrological landscape, to change the way water moves in the environment. And I know this is a very important piece for all of us because obviously water is foundational to how we manage our farms and improving the yields of our farming landscapes. Walter, I'm very excited to have you here. What led you to start looking at the impacts of water on atmospheric temperatures and considering a different narrative rather than CO2 as the primary greenhouse gas?

Right, thank you very much, John, and thank you everybody and for having me all the way from down Under Australia and delighted to be here. But look, your question very much to the point, why consider water? Well, I mean, when I was first studying university and stuff in the 60s, Climatology 101 makes a very simple absolute point. Undeniable. Water governs 95% of the heat dynamics of the blue planet and has done for the last 4.2 billion years. So really it's the foundational principle of atmospheric physics and the Earth's climate. This is before, of course, we got captured into the CO2 greenhouse component, which I must stress, is actually real. It's absolutely real, but it represents less than 4% of the heat dynamics of the blue planet. Okay, so nature has, in a sense, evolved a hydrological balance that has both warmed the planet and made it 33 degrees centigrade warmer than it would be if it was just an inert physical body in space in this part of the solar system. Okay, so the natural greenhouse effect due to water vapor makes it 33 degrees warmer, but it's also our disturbance of that 95% of the heat dynamic pressure process that has now caused the abnormal warming in the last 250 odd years. Which of course was picked up then by Charles Keeling in 1958 when he sort of said, hey, here's CO2 going up. But that CO2 rise, people make the mistake. They see that as that must be the cause. No, that is a symptom. Okay? That CO2 rise is a symptom of our disturbance of the biosystem from our excess oxidation of carbon from the biosystem. It's simply a symptom. But the actual thing that's driving the climate change is the effect of that land degradation on the hydrological dynamics of the planet. And so the challenge isn't just to draw down the carbon dioxide or see it as a pollutant, which is just silly. The point is it's our resource. That's the building block that we need to take to rebuild our landscape, our soils, so that we rebuild the hydrology that we've disturbed. And in rebuilding that hydrology, restabilize the climate, cool the climate safely and naturally in the next 10 years, because if we leave it longer, it's very, very serious, dangerous and damaging.

As farmers and growers, we love to have higher CO2 because we get better plant growth and we get higher yields. So I've been particularly intrigued by the conversation that you have led and your contributions to the dialogue. One of the questions that I have is we do see these climate variabilities and these intense climate events across the countryside. How can we stabilize the climate and how can we cool the climate without reducing CO2?

Okay, important here that we sort of clarify that, right. We will have to reduce CO2 for the simple reason that we have to rebuild the earth's soil carbon sponge. And that's the one simple message that this is all about, regenerating the earth's soil carbon sponge. Because that's where the bridge between carbon management and hydrology management really hits the ground. That's our unique point of agency. That's what we've destroyed. We've destroyed the soil carbon sponge, and in that process, we put CO2 in the atmosphere. We've also then redified and reduced the amount of water available. Just not picking you up, but just clarifying, you say you like actually CO2 because. Absolutely, you get a fertilizer effect. But only John. Only John, if you have soil water.

Exactly.

For most of the landscapes around this world and your central valley in California, they'll tell you that as well. Without water, whatever CO2 is up, there is no use whatsoever, right?

Absolutely.

So basically, without water, there is no life, and therefore it's the sponge. And so what we're really saying is that here is a symptom. The CO2 has gone up because we've oxidized, degraded the landscape. We've got to take that CO2 as a resource, as the actual cement to rebuild the healthy soil structures, to rebuild the cathedrals of voids and surfaces in healthy soils. Because it's a voids, and the surfaces in soil is where the water is able to be infiltrated, retained, and that's where productivity, that's where resilience comes from. Right. The Actual cathedrals, the voids, the space in those healthy soil structures that we have to rebuild as far as the dangerous hydrological climate extremes and variability that we're facing. And this is again fundamental. That's absolutely correct. You know, we're not going to die from CO2. Submariners die. When CO2 in their subs gets to 10,000 parts per million, it's 400 parts per million. Now when you and I breathe out, we breathe out air that's got a thousand parts per million CO2. So we're not going to die from CO2, but we are going to die if we aridify and don't have the water for life or for the planet and the food that we need to produce. So it's a sponge. And really CO2 needs to be seen as our resource and building block to rebuild healthy soil structures. Okay, so that CO2 is a resource to build the sponge. And then the point of the sponge is that is the thing that's critical to buffer the extreme. Right. It's in a sense the sponge that allows us to infiltrate water into soil to minimize the flood peaks, to minimize the erosion, storm damage. And basically it's also the source where we can sustain the longevity of green growth. So when there are dry periods, it's only the sponge and the water in our sponges and in soil reservoirs that allow life to extend over those dry periods. So with climate change, we're not just warm the planet 3 watts per square meter, or roughly 1% of incident solar radiation extra that we're retaining, but we've triggered this extreme variation, dangerous extremes, they're all hydrological. And really the sponge is Z pod point of agency in nature and now our only point of agency to rebuffer and stabilize these extremes. It's extremes that are going to actually destroy us and destroy biosystems and kill people. Because whether they are hurricanes, whether they're floods, whether they're erosion, whether they're aridification, droughts, wildfires, it's these extremes, and they're all hydrological and all prevented by buffering through the sponge.

One of the considerations for the soil carbon sponge that I've spoken of in the past is not only the capacity to store water, which I think is obviously very important, but also the capacity to deliver water to plants when they need it. It's not just soil water holding capacity, it's also water release capacity.

Absolutely, John. And actually, let's take that one extension. It's the longevity of green growth that governs the whole health of the biosystem. Our food production, you see, it's a capacity to sustain over time enough water supply from the soil to maintain that crop, finishing that pasture growing. If we have a sponge and we get to say one inch of rain, then we can say that water infiltrates and will be made available slowly over just say 100 days. If we concrete that catchment and degrade that sponge and we have a. Yeah, a hard compacted soil, it basically runs out of water after five to ten days or less. It just runs off, erodes. So we have In a sense 1000% increase in productivity, a tenfold increase in longevity of green growth from maintaining a sponge. And I was a scientist involved with the green revolution. I mean, more from a nutrition point of view, but at those days or anything in the green revolution, if we could get a 30% growth response, we were, you know, we thought that was a world shattering good news story, but here we are. The sponge will give you 1000%, a tenfold longevity of green. And in a sense, your community has been doing this wonderfully for centuries. But that's the message. We've got to get across wider, we've got to build resilience, longevity, healthy biosystems, not just short term fast growth dependent on fertilizer inputs, irrigation and these inputs. Right?

Yes. I believe the general regenerative and biological agriculture community has certainly on some level understood the importance of developing the soil carbon sponge and building organic matter and improving soil water holding capacity, etc. But I think you can contribute to the conversation that is not well understood is how does that improvement in soil water holding capacity then contribute to a stable climate and to a cooler climate. So from an atmospheric perspective, what is different today than what existed, let's say, a hundred years ago or 50 years ago?

Okay. And this is in a sense where we step into, you know, the atmospheric physics or the atmospheric heat dynamics. And these are quite, I mean, they're totally natural, totally proven in nature, but new concepts to a lot of the climate scientists who sit in front of computer screens and model away.

Okay.

Every time a tree or plant transpires, longevity of green, right. And it takes water from the soil and turns it from a liquid into a gas water vapor that transpires. And to do that, every gram of water needs 590 calories of heat energy to make that transformation from liquid to gas called the latent heat of vaporization. And that heat, of course, comes from the surface soil and the surface environment. And so every gram, every cubic centimeter of water that's transpired cools the surface 590 calories of heat energy. And of course, you understand there's vast quantities of transpiration taking water up into the air over long periods of time. So this is a massive natural, safe cooling effect. But we, by degrading our landscape, in a sense, concrete encatchments so the water isn't in the soil, limiting the longevity of green growth. We're limiting that natural air conditioning cooling effect of the planet. Okay. And so immediately, simply shortening productive green growth results in a warmer surface, because we don't have this latent heat transpiration cooling. Globally, some 25% of the incident solar radiation coming from the sun is naturally transferred from the surface back up into the atmosphere through these transpirational latent heat fluxes. So globally, it's yet 25. A quarter of the global cooling balance is driven by.