[Terrapreta] Pay Farmers for Environmental Services

[ch braun]

Hi Sean,

What is the current stand of your pyrolyzer ? Are you still facing
technical problems you need to solve or are you already in a final
stage ?

Sincerely yours,
Christelle



On Nov 17, 2007 7:52 PM, Sean K. Barry <sean.barry at juno.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Hi Lou,
>
> Thanks for this article.  The FAO has developed a portable kiln that can
> make charcoal from wood.  This kiln can be modified so that it does not
> produce significant potent GHG emissions like Methane-CH4.  Running this
> kiln requires significant manual labor; preparing the feedstock, loading,
> kiln operation, kiln unloading, and kiln moving.  I've read that operating
> two such kilns, two men can make 20-23 tons of charcoal in a week (and that
> is hard work!)  One cord of hardwood (oak) weighs close 2 two tons (dry).
> So making 23 tons of charcoal a week at 25% yield (weight/weight) would
> require handling ~90 tons or 45 cords of wood per week.  For two men, that
> is an incredible amount of work (especially with only hand tools)
>
> I think that poor farmers should be paid for their labor in making charcoal
> and putting it into soil, MUCH MORE so than land owners that have the
> feedstock on their land and the soil to receive the charcoal.  Landowners
> will receive benefits from having the charcoal in the soil.  That really
> should be enough.  In the end, I believe there will be the greater benefit
> for them.
>
> I am working on building one of these modified kilns to pyrolyze the biomass
> more cleanly.  The modification requires not venting the kiln gases and
> burning ("flaring") them instead, to either speed up the pyrolysis and/or
> produce electric power/compressed air.
>
> Regards,
>
> SKB
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: lou gold
> To: Terrapreta
> Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 6:06 AM
> Subject: [Terrapreta] Pay Farmers for Environmental Services
>
>
>
> /agriculture/article/25103/print
>
>
>
>
>
> Paying Farmers to Protect the Planet is Future: U.N.
> /agriculture/article/25103/print
>
> ROME (Reuters) - Paying farmers to protect the environment -- rather than
> just for their produce -- will be an important way to ensure a rapidly
> increasing demand for food does not destroy the planet, a U.N. agency said
> on Thursday.
>
> The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said paying for
> "environmental services" is set to be an important way to link two of
> humanity's greatest challenges: beating poverty and safeguarding the
> environment.
>
> "(Farming) has the potential to degrade the Earth's land, water, atmosphere
> and biological resources -- or to enhance them -- depending on the decisions
> made by the more than 2 billion people whose livelihoods depend directly on
> crops, livestock, fisheries or forests," said FAO Director-General Jacques
> Diouf.
>
> "Ensuring appropriate incentives for these people is essential," he said in
> his foreword to the agency's annual report "The State of Food and
> Agriculture" which focused on environmental payments.
>
> The FAO points out that many governments already subsidize farming, but
> rarely do so to protect the environment.
>
> "Current incentives tend to favor the production of food, fiber, and
> increasingly, biofuels, but they typically undervalue other beneficial
> services that farmers can provide," it said.
>
> The report concentrates on three particular "services": the storage of
> carbon dioxide in plants and soil which can help slow global warming; water
> provision from flood prevention and water filtration through roots and soil;
> and nature conservation.
>
> One of the first such payment schemes was the Conservation Reserve Program,
> a 1985 program to pay U.S. farmers to retire crop land from farming for
> 10-15 years. The report says hundreds of schemes now exist in rich and poor
> countries, mostly in the forest management sector.
>
> As deforestation is estimated to produce at least 18 percent of global
> greenhouse gas emissions, a potentially huge growth area would be in paying
> poorer countries not to chop down their forests.
>
> That option is now allowed only to a limited extent by the Kyoto Protocol,
> but countries meeting in Indonesia in December to discuss global climate
> change initiatives for after 2012 will consider whether it should be
> expanded.
>
> Environmental payments to farmers do not have to be linked to them stopping
> farming, but can be an incentive to make it less damaging, such as
> encouraging "shade-grown" coffee rather than intensive production where
> forest canopies are destroyed.
>
> The report stresses the drawbacks as well as potential benefits of
> environmental payment schemes, for example the risk that they may reduce
> food output for hungry populations.
>
> "The impact of a PES (payment for environmental services) approach on the
> poor is highly dependent on who holds the rights to use resources," the
> report says -- noting the risk that such schemes might benefit relatively
> wealthy landowners more often than the extremely poor who own nothing.
>
> (Reporting by Robin Pomeroy, editing by Philippa Fletcher)
> page is /agriculture/article/25103/print
>
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