Collective Biochar production in Spain

SUMMARY

At Sierra Preta, we are a non-for-profit association focused on turning problems into solutions. We process agricultural waste on site, with small production devices (kilns), to produce high-quality biochar in order to create the maximum environmental impact and social values locally. We use Biochar to increase the sustainability and resilience of the local farmland ecosystems.

We are partnering with the C-Go team to run an open-sourced, decentralized and community-driven pyrolysis systems in the Andalusian Alpujarra region. We aim to empower local farmers to use their wood residues and become biochar producers themselves, then having a choice to return the biochar to their own land or use our network of buyers to generate additional revenues. This way, farmers can generate revenue and draw down carbon from the air, whilst increasing their land’s fertility, water retention and biodiversity.

We are passionate about our local environment, and aim to regenerate Andalusian soil, working towards climate change mitigation and adaptation by stopping the progression of the desert in Southern Spain and making agricultural soil more resilient to droughts.

With your help this campaign will fund the manufacture and installation of our first biochar kilns in countryside of Órgiva, located in heart of the Alpujarra. It will also fund the procurement of all the equipment needed for processing wood residues and the biochar end-product, and the legal fees, taxes and permits needed to run the association. The kilns will be equipped with C-Go’s monitoring and verification technology. If successful, this first phase will help validate the model and establish a replicable, high magnitude farming and carbon removal solution that can ultimately be driven by rural farming communities all over Spain.

For more information about what we up to, please visit: https://sierrapreta.lasalpujarras.online/

THE OPPORTUNITY: SOIL RESTORATION, CARBON REMOVAL, WILDFIRE PREVENTION AND ECONOMIC SECURITY.

We are lucky to be located in a region combining breath-taking natural landscape and a rich history. Right at the intersection between the African and European geological plates, the Sierra Nevada mountains sit at the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Despite its immensely rich history, it is a region of low economic development where jobs and opportunities are scarce. Rural houses and fields have been largely abandoned during the years of the dictatorship due to the civil war. This important rural exodus, mixed with a fragile economy and a very dry climate, makes life incredibly difficult for the local farmers that decided to stay or settle in the area. To make things harder, the greenhouses of Almeria located just below the mountains are draining what is left of the water supply from the area. Farmers are increasingly abandoning their lands; something needs to be done to inspire the next generation of farm stewards to rise and follow in their elders’ footsteps.

As a coastal chain of mountain located right at the border between Africa and Europe, the Sierra Nevada constitute a geographically and ecologically strategic point to stop the expansion of the Sahara Desert up north. Empowering local farmers to re-claim their traditional sophisticated organic agriculture and agroforestry techniques will show the world that Andalucia has more to offer than the pesticide-intensive, highly industrial and greenhouse-based agricultural model of Almeria.

By combining the restoration of a resilient local agricultural landscape with reforestation campaigns in the areas surrounding the main water courses, we can restore the local water cycle and turn this chain of mountain into a green oasis slowing the desertification process triggered by climate change. This in turn, will provide more water to the neighbouring regions and could have a ripple effect of all of the surrounding agricultural landscape.

Enter Biochar , a charcoal-like material that’s made by cooking organic biomass from agricultural and forestry waste through a process called pyrolysis . To the naked eye it's unremarkable; but looks can be deceiving.

This incredibly versatile product holds the potential to enhance depleted soils, supercharging their water retention capacities, and increase agricultural productivity on the local level, while durably removing and storing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help combat climate change. At the same time, it has the potential to produce renewable energy and even biogas, making it the perfect addition to solar power in the region for creating independent micro-grids.

Within this context, the potential benefits of biochar for smallholding farmers are enormous. And this promise, if realized on a large scale, can lock down millions of tonnes of CO2 in the coming decades. Local biochar production can create significant and regenerative livelihood benefits to help mitigate the economic and climatic insecurities that is defining farmers life in this increasingly dry region.

Nearly all of the core elements needed to make biochar production and use common practice - from biochar kiln manufacturing, to training, production and application - can be achieved within local rural communities and provided by Sierra Preta.

Under the right conditions, these practices have the potential to spread and self-replicate, peer-to-peer, through local, regional, national and even global networks.

THE CHALLENGE: THE BURNING OF TREE-PRUNING RESIDUES.

Accumulating wood from olive and fruit trees pruning creates a problem for farmers, local communities and the planet. The olive wood cannot be kept on site where it creates a risk of bringing a destructive pest to sane olive trees. Farmers and landowners are left with no choice but to burn the fresh wood on site, resulting in clouds of smoke and terrible air quality in every valley of the region during the pruning season (December to March). Moreover, these fires also result in harmful CO2 emissions and increase the risks of wildfires in the area. This, in turn, increases climate change, resulting in more droughts and pressure on local people and ecosystems, in a region already threatened by desertification.

As a result, regional governments are aiming to prohibit the burning of pruning residues altogether, but struggle to provide credible alternatives to small- and large-scale olive producers. This may leave local farmers and landowners with fewer opportunity to dispose of the accumulating biomass.

Studies show that biochar could be the perfect solution to both solve the biomass waste problem, remove CO2 from the atmosphere and increase local adaptation of climate change by restoring the water retention capacity of degraded soils. But needless to say, access to a biochar production system at an acceptable cost is a critical barrier to making this possibility a reality. Farmers are not specialised biochar producers, and have neither the time, money nor expertise to build and learn to operate a system themselves.

To move forward, farmers need access to biochar kilns, training (both on how to operate a kiln and how to use the biochar efficiently), access to buyers of biochar and to processing facilities to activate biochar’s full capacities as soil amendments.

THE SOLUTION: MOBILE-BASED BIOCHAR MONITORING & COMMUNITY PRODUCTION.

Our team at Sierra Preta is bound by our love of nature and community projects, and believes in a world where resource should be evenly shared within communities. Our model is different to any other biochar production activity in that we bring in farmers to be directly members of our association. We aim to bridge the gaps highlighted above by providing our members with mobile and small-scale biochar kilns they can run themselves at very low cost, and then keep the biochar to spread on their land or sell it to generate revenue. This way, we can overcome the barriers to biochar implementation and open up the biochar opportunity for thousands of small-scale farmers in Spain. Additionally, we are committed to work closely with reforestation projects to provide them with both biochar derived products that will increase the success rate of trees planted in depleted soils and the expertise on how to use the biochar most effectively.

C-Go, our kiln developer, has paired an open source kon-tiki biochar kiln design, with an integrated mobile-based monitoring solution that capturers and reports biochar production data in real time. C-Go has developed an MRV methodology for small-scale biochar production using this technology combination.

In combination, these innovations in monitoring and methodology, can be the key that allows distributed, low-income rural farmers to directly gain revenues and increased productivity from biochar production. Such a link would create a strong incentive for adoption, and could rapidly accelerate and expand biochar implementation. Furthermore, if it is clearly established that distributed, rural biochar can generate consistent revenue, both conventional financing from cooperatives and rural lenders, as well as peer-to-peer financing via global lending platforms, could quickly follow, making these solutions truly scalable.

COST BREAKDOWN

Here's our 2023 budget for transparency :-)