This bullsh*t might save the world - composting cow manure with biochar | Thomas Rippel | TEDxZurich
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This is shit.
Or rather, cow manure.
One cow produces 25 tonnes manure every year.
And thats great, because manure is a fantastic organic fertiliser.
Its chock full of nutrients to grow our grains and vegetables.
Humans have been using animal dung as fertilizer for ten thousand years.
Without it, agriculture would have never
been possible.
And that was true until about a hundred
years ago
when we started using petro chemical
fertilisers like nitrogen.
And soon after that manure as a fertiliser started to become much less valuable.
Today, manure looks more like this.
This is a manure pit in Switzerland.
Or like this: A manure lagoon in the United States.
Now, a lot of these farms
or let me call them what they are: animal feeding factories.
They don't grow the food for their animals
themselves anymore.
So to them, manure is not a precious
fertilizer
instead it is just a problem that has to
be managed.
This is but one of many aspects of how our
industrialized agriculture today
has become so broken that many now
believe
that our only ethical response maybe to become vegan.
I'm here to tell you:
Please do keep eating meat and cheese!
We need animals for sustainable agriculture.
But please stop eating meat and cheese from animals that were fed on human food
like grains and corn and soybean.
Instead, only eat meat and cheese from cows that were fed on grass
like they were meant to.
I am going to tell you how that one choice is going to allow us to tackle
some of the greatest challenges we're
facing today.
Climate change, global soil degradation and world hunger.
In Switzerland, farmers still tried to use manure
as an organic fertiliser as best they
can.
But in the winter
pastures are covered with snow so the
cows are being kept indoors.
So the farmer has to store the manure in a manure pit
until he can bring it out in the
springtime.
The problem is that after a while manure starts to rot
and all those precious nutrients start
to turn
into toxic substances like ammonia and evaporate.
Puff. And all those pressures nutrients are gone.
In Germany alone, 600,000 tons of ammonia
evaporate like this every year.
And standing next to one of those manure pools can feel like you're inhaling acid
And in fact ammonia causes acid rain.
And when brought out to the field, that manure
seeps into a groundwater and rivers and
causes massive greenhouse gas emissions.
Let me take a step back
and tell you how I got mixed up in all
this shit.
So I originally studied economics in China where lived for three years
until I got dangerously ill from the
food I was eating there.
I had to take a timeout
and I was getting really paranoid about food so I decided to move from a country
with probably the lowest food safety
standards
to... well, here, Switzerland.
I went to work on an organic farm close to Bern and that was the first time
that I got winter up this problem:
organic fields being sprayed with half rotten manure.
Now I always assumed that organic agriculture is equal to sustainable agriculture.
But spraying fields with half rotten manure
didn't fit into my idea of sustainable agriculture.
And in fact, this whole manure business
is not very sustainable at all.
Let's put aside the fact thatI came home smelling like shit.
And taking one shower wasn't enough to get that smell of me.
That manure, when brought to the field is so aggressive, it literally burns the plants.
And the soil takes a real beating as well.
Earthworms that are the backbone
of a healthy fertile soil come rushing to
the surface suffocating.
Only to be picked off by birds.
Now I thought there's got to be a better way to do this.
A better way than spraying our organic
fields with half rotten manure.
so I did some research and I came
across an interesting master thesis.
Where I really thought this is something we ought to try out.
Oktoberfest is just behind us so I'm
sure you've all had a chance
to eat some nice sauerkraut.
But have you ever wondered why everything in your fridge will go bad at some point
but sauerkraut will stay good basically
forever?
Well, the reason are these fantastic
bacteria called lactic acid bacteria.
They take sugar in the kraut and convert it
to lactic acid, making sauerkraut sour.
And thus stopping all other rotting
bacteria
In sauerkraut production
we end up with these leftover juices:
sauerkraut juice that is chock full of lactic acid bacteria
Now some people like to drink that ...
Its supposed to be great for your digestion
but let me tell you: I've tried it
and I prefer a cold beer and so the most
other people
so this juice ends up as a waste product.
Millions of liters of it in Switzerland alone.
So i thought:why don't we take that sauerkraut juice and put it into the manure
To conserve it and stop all the nutrients from getting lost.
I told some friends about this idea got them all excited about it.
We met with some top scientists in
Switzerland
and put together a concept to actually implement this.
So I called the CEO of the largest sauerkraut factory in Switzerland
and told him about this idea
and he was
actually quite open to it.
Now I just need to find a farmer who
would be willing to join us on this.
I ended up getting an indication to give a pitch
at the annual meeting of the Swiss Organic Pastor Beef Association
I was all excited and told the group of farmers pretty much what I had just told you now
and I asked them if anyone would be
willing to join me on this.
And the room went silent.
No one put up his hands.
It was not very
encouraging at all.
But after almost everyone else had left
one courageous farmer from the Alpine
region of St Gallen,
Mister Pirmin Koller, came to me and
said:
You know what, now it now that no one else is listening
I'll give this a try with you.
So, together with the Zurich University Applied
Sciences
we put together some research
parameters, and within a few weeks,
were pouring thousands of liters of sauerkraut juice into Pirmin's manure.
And you know what?
It worked!
That manure didn't smell anymore,
and all those pressures nutrients didn't
turn into
toxic substances like ammonia anymore
and evaporates.
And Pirmin's grass turn just a little greener as well, making his neighbor's little bit jealous.
I guess sometimes the grass really is
greener on the other side of the fence.
So suddenly this wasn't just the crazy
idea anymore.
A whole bunch of people got really
excited about this.
The World Wildlife Foundation awarded a
grant.
And at the Falling Walls conference in
Berlin
we won the first prize out of a thousand projects.
And that caused quite some media
attention
Swiss and German TV did segments on us
and we got a whole lot of coverage in Swiss and German newspapers as well.
And that was great,
because after that farmers from all over
Switzerland all the way to America and Australia
contacted me. And within three months we
had six pilot project up and running
But, as the results
started to come in we realized that
manure has a much higher buffer capacity
then we originally anticipated.
We needed about
ten times the amount of sauerkraut juice
to conserve the manure over a six-month
period.
Instead of a few thousand liters
we now need it tens of thousands of liters.
And that's not great news because it's not Oktoberfest every day
so we don't have enough sauerkraut juice
available to really scale this idea
I realised that if I want to tackle this manure problem
I'm going to have to understand farming
from the ground up
so I decided to become a farmer.
I'm now in my third-year a four-year vocational training program
to become an organic dynamic farmer
living in working on the farm.
But not just any farm.
I work on an organic cattle farm where they do something
pretty special with their manure.
They turn their manure into pure fertile compost.
Now let me quickly explain to you how that happens and how that is going to help
save our climate and soils and help make
the world's most disadvantaged regions
food independent again.
I'm gonna have to go back three thousand years to the Indios of South
America
South and Middle America was home to some highly advanced civilizations
With cities as large as 300,000 people.
When we Europeans were still taking a
dump in our backyards
and dying of the plague, they had already
figured out an intricate sanitary system.
They would use clay pots as their toilets. When they were done doing their business in the pot,
they would sprinkle charcoal in the pot.
Now this charcoal, today we call it biochar,
is extremely absorbent.
Like a sponge it soaks up all the nutrients,
stopping them
from getting lost.
So when that pot was full, they didn't just end up with a pot poop,
but an extremely fertile pot of poop.
They would probably bring that out to the fields and plant some beans or corn
and have fantastic yields.
But with the Indios probably didn't know
was that biochar has a negative
carbon balance
and it stays in the soil for thousands
of years.
So they ended up creating the world's
most fertile soils:
the Terra Preta.
And we marvel at them even today five hundred years later
So at the farm work I'm at, the farmer
has been implementing a system
for the past 15 years that mimics the Indio clay pot toilets.
He would make his cows a
clean bed of wood chips and biochar
over the winter instead of storing the manure in a manure pool.
Those cows would live and sleep there every day
and every second day he would add a new
layer of wood chips and biochar.
Thus conserving the manure.
In the springtime we would take all that woodchip-biochar-manure out of the stables and compost it.
Now composting is just a little bit like baking.
You have to take the right ingredients in the right amounts and
mix them up in just the right way.
So we take that woodchip-biochar-manure and we add a little bit of freshly cut grass and
a little bit of finished compost and a little bit
of clay and we mix it all up
and that's when the magic happens:
A whole army of microorganisms starts to take apart
all that organic matter.
Devouring it.
That composting process turns really
hot. Over 70 degrees celcius for three weeks
And those microorganisms take apart
all organic matter including antibiotics
and growth hormones
and whatever other chemicals might be in
there.
And the heat sanitises the manure of pathogen bacteria.
So when all that organic matter is
broken down to its chemical building-blocks
a whole new army of microorganisms
takes those building blocks and puts them
together to pure fertile soil.
In this form, all of the nutrients
are locked up safely,
or leaching into the groundwater.
I'm now involved in an
EU project where we're turning this
concept
large-scale on the farm with 1500 cows.
So this concept is applicable on every scale.
From the Indio clay pot toilets
all the way to large-scale cattle farms.
With this method
we may turn desolate soils
fertile again.
People may grow food locally again where they have become dependent on food aid
or on multi national fertilizer
companies
And by making soils fertile again we may lock up
billions of tons of carbon in the soil
reducing atmospheric co2
and thus global warming.
Grass and clover grows on billions of hectares of land worldwide
That is not otherwise usable for agriculture.
These wonderful animals: cows, goats and
sheep
may unlock this abundant resource to us
and on the land were we grow
grains and vegetables for ourselves,
those crops need lots and lots of
nutrients
so we cannot grow them on the same patch of land every year.
The soil needs time to recover.
Growing grass and clover
replenishes the soils nutrients so
growing grains and vegetables for humans
and grass and clover
for animals on the same patch of land
is part of a sustainable cycle.
This is called crop rotation.
But growing grains for animals
in monoculture can never be sustainable
because it continuously depletes the soils
nutrients
making us dependent
on petrochemical fertilizers.
So I have a vision
for world where cows only eat
grass and clover from sustainable crop
rotation and from pasture.
I imagine a world
where the number of cows on this planet
is not determined by our appetite for
meat
but by the amount of grass and clover
available to us through this wonderful
symbiosis
I imagine a world were every farmer
composts his manure with biochar
giving us all the organic fertilizer we
need to grow our grains and vegetables
without needing petro chemical
fertilizers.
And this vision has already started.
And maybe one day we will be able to build up soil fertility to such an extent
that we may lock up all the co2 in the
soil
that we have pumped into the atmosphere
by burning fossil fuels
So I have a message to you:
Please make buying meat and cheese a conscious activity.
There are few choices
in our everyday lives that may have such
a profound positive impact.
please only buy locally grown
grass-fed beef and cheese!
thank you!