Welcome to 100 Climate Conversations. Thank you for joining us. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. We respect their Elders, past, present and future and recognise their continuous connection to Country. Today is number 80 of 100, wer’re four-fifths of the way there, happening every Friday. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We’re recording today live in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse Museum. Before it was the home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal-powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system in the 1960s. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution. I’m Craig Reucassel from docos like War on Waste and Fight for Planet A. Mick Wettenhall is an experienced grazier and grains and cotton farmer on the Macquarie River near Trangie. He’s founder and director of SoilCQuest, a unique collaboration of scientists and farmers transforming agriculture into a gigaton carbon drawdown industry. He’s a passionate believer that agriculture has a major role to play not only in food security but also in sustainable environmental management and climate change mitigation. We’re thrilled to have him join us today. Please join me in welcoming Mick. So, Mick, you run a cropping and grazing farm in Trangie in New South Wales with your wife, Kirsty. Tell us a bit about your farm and how you came to be there.

I’ve been out there for the last 20 years. It’s my wife’s family farm on the banks of the Macquarie out there. Irrigators — grow irrigated cotton, wheat, canola, the cereals, pulses and beef cattle as well. So as I said, she’s fifth-generation and her family was actually one of, well, the first family really to bring wheat growing to our area. It was thought back then that you couldn’t grow wheat west of the Newell. Old Frank Mack, at the time, used to grow quite a bit of oats for his horses and apparently so the legend goes his chaff cutter broke down — he used to grow up chaff — so his chaff cutter broke down one spring and the oats went through the grain and he grew up a lot of grain. He thought, Jeez you’d be buggered if you can’t grow wheat. So, the following year he cleared a thousand acres with horse-drawn gear. Obviously back in the day and by the turn of the century, they were farming 9000 acres of wheat with horse-drawn gear.

This is like the year 1900 — it’s all horse-drawn. No doubt hundreds of people on the farm. Very different now for you. How many people work on the farm?

Yeah, there’s myself and my wife and we’ve got two full-time employees.

It’s extraordinary. And you’re running that whole farm with that?

I know, yes. It’s changed vastly since those days.

Farming has changed enormously over the years and obviously it’s facing another challenge now with climate change. Have you seen the impact of that on your farm?

Definitely, yeah. And going back to that — what was seen as progress that of growing wheat and tearing up that grassland to put a monoculture into the ground — you know, it basically built our country I suppose and but sadly with that that’s where the carbon started to get lost from the landscape. And I suppose probably to frame it up, the importance of carbon in soil is just basically the metric for how well your soil is performing, how it’s like your soil and your plant’s ability to mitigate itself against disease and drought.

Given that importance, what is it about kind of traditional farming practices, over the last century or even in the last just 20 years, what is it about those traditional practices that has kind of taken the carbon out and what’s led to this problem?

Yeah, I suppose that’s come about by industrial agriculture and, you know, looking to synthetic fertilisers, all these things that have taken the carbon out of the soil.

So they’ve kind of solved one problem and created another problem as it’s happened. Have you seen — because obviously, I mean scientists talk about just getting to more extremes that you basically have, you know, obviously we’ve always had fires and floods in Australia or droughts, but now we get longer droughts or bigger floods. Have you been affected by that at all, or is your area fairly stable?

No, definitely not. No. We have ’17, ’18 and ’19 were just three– the driest years that we’ve seen. We’d never not normally plant a crop and we’d always get enough rain to get a crop in prior to that, but we had sort of three years where it just– we didn’t plant.

So, you wouldn’t even plant? We talked about the difference in farming from, I guess, five generations ago in the 1900s, and how it’s different now. How has farming on your farm changed since the 2000s, when your wife and you took over, to now? You came in there, obviously, your wife’s family had a particular way of farming. Have you changed that at all?

I’ve had a real passion for carbon my whole career and have been looking at ways that we could build carbon in agricultural systems. There was a real reliability around the weather before, and we’re irrigators so during the nineties, if you didn’t have the water, you would generally pull the beds up and you’d punt on getting water to grow the crop. But we just stopped doing that in the noughties because it just wasn’t coming. So we’re just finding that less allocation for irrigation, there’s been a real change around that.

My understanding is, is that the more soil carbon you have, the more carbon you have in the soil, the more it actually holds water. So, is it the lack of water has meant that you’ve had to kind of go, we need to have more carbon in the soil to be able to deal with this?

It’s definitely part of it, yeah.

What are the advantages? What are the advantages you get as a farmer from having a higher content of carbon in the soil?

So, soil carbon underpins every function in soil. It’s water holding capacity, it’s nutrient availability, it’s infiltration. How much air is in that soil? It’s basically the barometer for how healthy your soil is. And the more carbon you have, the less inputs you need. As I was saying before, we’ve had this system where we’ve had people making lots of money providing solutions to low carbon soils that create less carbon, that require more solutions. So, we’ve had this insidious decline in agriculture for the last —

So, there are advantages from obviously increasing the soil carbon at the farm level. Where does it come in in terms of addressing climate change? Explain how soil carbon is part of the solution as you see it for climate change as well?

Yeah, I think we can’t get away from it. Agriculture’s been a massive contributor to it. The world’s lost 60% of its carbon stocks out of agricultural soil. So, it really has had a big contribution to the problem. But it’s also– we’ve got a massive opportunity to, that I see it, to leverage it as a climate mitigation tool. Because, if you think about it, we’ve got private enterprise, the world’s farmers — I think there’s 570 million farms or something around the world. We farm an area the size of South America, where we grow our crops, and we graze livestock on an area the size of Africa. So, it’s like 40% of the world’s landmass that farmers do business on, private enterprise, that to date have been incentivised by way of the market to remove that carbon from the landscape and put it into the atmosphere. The problem in the atmosphere is just that the solution that’s in the soil, like I said, all those good things it does. It’s such a problem out there, but it just it’s the only way a farmer can mitigate himself against climate change is by lifting his carbon stocks.

So, it benefits the farmers. What you are saying is that you could actually use farms to actually store carbon in the soil long term. That’s the kind of goal you’re looking towards. In 2012 you founded SoilCQuest 2031 with Guy Webb, with the aim to increase the carbon in our soils, working with a carbon capturing fungus discovered in our soils. Can you tell us about this fungus and how it works?

Guy was at a carbon conference in Dubbo and this bloke spoke on the last day of this carbon conference and he was a professor from Sydney Uni called Peter McGee and he was presenting his work that he’d done with a particular type of fungi called dark septate endophytes and he was a mycologist. He’s retired now and he’d found carbon inside of soil microaggregates that was dated to hundreds to thousands of years old, which made sense to him because there’s two things. There’s two ways that we lose carbon out of soil, oxidation and hydrolysis. So, water and oxygen are really corrosive to carbon in soil. So, irrespective of the type of carbon that it is, it’ll be lost — compared to particle size and time — it will be lost if it’s exposed to those two things. So, when they’d discovered the carbon inside the microaggregate it made sense to him because it’s anaerobic in the centre of a microaggregate. So, how did that carbon get in there?

No oxygen in it and does it also protect from the water as well?

Well, this is the other part. So, how did it get in there? You can put a line straight through plants straight away because it physically will not fit in a microaggregate. So, he did his work with fungi and they isolated a particular strain of fungi called these dark septate endophytes that do this job that basically, they partner with the plant in a symbiotic relationship and then they convert photosynthates, so simple sugars, linear chain carbon into a water-stable compound. And then it takes it off through the soil, through its hyphae that it goes through the soil and finds these microaggregates or even takes it to depth in the soil where there’s no oxygen and stores it. So, it blocks both those chemical processes that– how we lose carbon — hydrolysis, oxidation, it’s blocked.

What’s a hydroaggregate?

Microaggregate? It’s a space between the soil particles.

Okay. So, you’ve got this fungi that somehow takes the carbon, protects it from oxygen and water, and therefore stores it for many, many years. And this is what Peter McGee had found and no one else is interested in it?

So, and that was the thing, that was the penny drop for me, because we told him we’d been building bigger roots and doing green manuring, all that stuff. He used analogies, like you putting fuel on a fire. He said, ‘You get good agronomic outcomes’, which we did, you know, you’d see that, but you’re not necessarily building that long-term store because it’s staying what they call the labile pool. So, and it’s a really important part of it. And this is where people have been tripped up — and we’ve had trouble getting picked up in the early days because people thought we were taking away from carbon cycling. You know, ‘We need that to feed the plants’. No, we’re taking a portion of it and putting that away in a place where it’s safe and can’t be broken down. And their figures were astounding, like what they did– all that was done, that was one PhD student had done some work with Clover and they’d found us a 17% increase in soil carbon in 14 weeks, which is just absurd.

Yeah, that’s extraordinary.

It was extraordinary because it’s always been firmly believed by soil scientists that you can’t build carbon quickly in soil and it’s quite ephemeral — it’s there one minute and gone the next. But they were able to build it because blocking those two chemical processes that break it down.

Okay. So, Peter has come up with this. No one else is interested in it. How did you guys then take over and take this idea and run with it?

Crazy, isn’t it? No, it’s madness. Guy rang me when he came home from the conference and said I’d just– like he’d been handed the keys to the universe. And he said, I’m getting this bloke out to come and speak. We got him to come out to Grenfell and there was about ten farmers in the room or something, and he came out and presented his work again and he just loved to have people that could actually understand the enormity of his discovery, I suppose. And we said, ‘Well, where’s it up to? When do we get to use the technology?’ He said, I’m basically retiring, the PhD student doesn’t want to take it forward. So, we said, ‘Well, can we do some trials back home?’ We thought we’ll get it into agricultural soils and we’ll find that it won’t work. We took it home and we did trials with canola and cotton and got a similar result on both back in soils at home. And that’s when we thought, wow.

That’s amazing. So what are you doing? How are you getting these fungi into the soil? How are you getting into your crops? For the laymen, for the cityslickers here, how are you getting it in there?

For the purpose of that trial we just grew it on sterilised wheat seed.

So you grow the fungi–

You grow it, inoculate on the seed and then you incubate it and grow it. Grow out the fungi–

Then you plant that seed with the fungi on it?

Yeah. How we did it then is vastly different to how we’re doing it now. Now we’re at a commercial stage with it that we’re actually making it into an inoculum that we dress the seed with it.

So, it’s basically about putting it around the seed. So you plant it with– you kind of plant this fungi with the seed when you’re actually planting the seeds.

Exactly. Exactly.

And so, this fungi that captures this extra carbon here, does it have to, you know, if I till my soil and dig it up does that disturb it, does that release the carbon? Do you have to not kind of disturb the soil to keep it in there?

Definitely to a point. But a lot of this carbon that we’re finding that we’re sequestering now, we’re putting it at a depth. So, it really cost you a lot of money to dig it up anyway. So, it’s not like you can’t ever till your ground again, because that’s unrealistic for farmers — ’cause sometimes you know that we’ve got minimum tilled systems now that most farmers are using, but it’s not a deal breaker for carbon sequestration.

Sounds like quite an extraordinary kind of technology here. Now it’s got a lot of interest around it. You’ve since raised $155 million in investment for the technology and formed a biotech start-up called Loam Bio. How does SoilCQuest and Loam Bio operate? How do they work together?

So, Loam Bio was the commercial entity that was spun out of SoilCQuest. So, it was to develop the technology and SoilCQuest is still the not-for-profit, is the largest shareholder of Loam Bio. So, once we’re commercial that will feed back into the not-for-profit to develop the systems for farmers and support farmers in building systems to sequester more carbon.

I want to go into the business model on how it’s going to be successful going forward, but just before we do, there’s a lot of talk about regenerative farming and using that to build up carbon and soil and that kind of thing. Is this a regenerative farming method or is this a different method? Where do you kind of put this in that kind of debate?

Yeah, it’s a tough one. I think it’s probably one of the ones where we struggled, where we didn’t fit originally because to the regenerative farmers it was seen probably as a tech fix. But the industrial agriculture was seen as another biological, you know, so we just didn’t fit anywhere in the scheme of things.

So, your approach, how would you distinguish it from regenerative farming? I mean, regenerative farming obviously can take a time. It does use things like cover crops like you’re talking about in that. Is this an easier solution for the farmer who perhaps doesn’t really want to become a regenerative farmer? Is this easier for more farmers to use this approach? Is that what makes it better from your perspective?

Yeah, that was the beginning and that’s what Guy and I saw, I suppose, was agriculture’s got to be part of the solution For agriculture to be part of the solution, we’ve got to be able to get the centre of the bell curve. I love all things regenerative farming, permaculture, biodynamics, all those things are great and they all work, but can can we get the centre of the bell curve to deploy those things in the time frame we have now? And that is just a resounding no. The phrase has been coined it’s the gateway drug for farmers to be able to start carbon farming. So, you as a farmer can put this seed dressing on your seed and plant in the ground and it’s something you’re familiar with. It’s not something– you don’t have to change your business at all. You don’t have to go away from growing wheat to growing 13-way cover crops or whatever. There’s no paradigm shift that’s needed to be overcome for the farmer.

Okay, so it’s the low barrier of entry really. It’s easier to do. And this, I guess, leads to the fact that, you know, you’re wanting farmers to respond to this, some who probably are still slightly sceptical or don’t have the same perspective necessarily of you. Now, there’s a business model which is that, you know, obviously there is the benefits itself of saying we’ve got more carbon in the soil. But the model that’s been discussed a lot is saying, hey, if we can capture a lot of carbon in soil, can you give us a carbon credit and we can sell that on the market for carbon farming? You know, that’s the kind of market you’re looking at, is that right?

Definitely. And I think this is where we’ve had the– probably a bit of push back. I think farmers, I used the phrase, ‘farmers looking at this with folded arms and furrowed brows’. You know, they’re looking at it as if the next place, we’re going to get is screwed. So, that is the challenge in itself. Like, it’s a whole new industry and there’s a lot of push back on commoditising carbon and such. But I don’t see that we’re going to get the deployment and we’ll be able to use climate agriculture’s climate mitigation tool unless we do put a price on carbon. It has to be an item line on a balance sheet. Otherwise, there’s not a farmer or an agronomist in the world that does not know that carbon is good for soil. It’s just that how do I get remunerated in that year? Not something sometime down the track if I build an enough. Ratan Lal’s a famous soil scientist who said that when a farmer is poverty-stricken and suffering, he passes that suffering onto his land, you know. And it’s just so true that farmers — you’ve got to be making money to be able to do these things.

What’s the kind of time frame on this? You’ve got peer-reviewed papers about this. You’ve got the technology you’re confident about. How long do you have to kind of show it’s working on your farm, and the other farmers doing this, before it becomes something you can really sell to farmers across the world, I guess?

Well, I mean, we are essentially, I’m aware. In Canada and in the States and just into Brazil now. So, we are across the world essentially. But it is that early adopters that we’ve got now and it’s not necessarily looking at it as– I mean, myself as a farmer, I’m not necessarily looking at this as a money-making venture. It’ll be a pleasant surprise when it happens, but I think, you know, we’re looking at our government has agreed to what 43%, 47% reduction to 2005 emissions by 2030. I like to think that agriculture, my industry, is going to be left out of that is absurd. Like, we’re going to have to be responsible for our emissions. So, they’re going to be measuring the emissions side, so what’s the other side of the ledger? So this is where, you know, I’m really keen to put my peg in the ground and say, I’m measuring my soil carbon so I can offset those emissions. And that’s where Loam Bio’s have got to really feel that the value proposition really right for farmers that they can engage.

As you say, I mean really in the end to deal with climate change, we need not only those of us who are passionate and care about it a lot to change, you need everyone to change. And if you can make it so it’s economically advantageous for farmers to do it, it’s going to have a much bigger impact, isn’t it?

Oh, exactly, 100%. We incentivised the loss of carbon out of that soil. You know, 100 years ago that started, like I said, turn of the century where we started to do that and rewarded farmers for doing that. Now, let’s reward farmers for putting the carbon back in and let’s reward farmers for biodiversity and all these things that have got flow-on effects for everyone around the globe. The farmers are the stewards of that land, we’re the conduit between the atmosphere and that carbon sink that’s devoid of all that carbon. We’ve just got to be able to join the two up and we do that by way of technologies and markets.

How are you feeling right now? ‘Cause you are at the very beginning of this kind of journey. Are you excited? Are you daunted? How do you feel right now?

I’m inspired. I think there’s a massive amount of potential. I think, you know, there’s a great quote out of Paul Gilding’s book, The Great Disruption, talking about climate change, talking of humans saying we’re dumb, but we’re not stupid. You know, we’ve shown in the past, and he uses examples like the war effort and that we were slow to react, but when we do, we hustle hard and we get stuff done and, you know, and we generally prevail. I like to think that that’s how we’re going with that. I think the world is starting to realise that we have to do something about this and there’s an opportunity. You know, we’ve got technologies there now to be able to measure these things that we haven’t had access to before. We haven’t been able to measure the carbon effectively. There’s geospatial technology out there now that, you know, with satellite that’s starting to be able to show that it can measure soil carbon. There’s ground resonance imaging, stuff that you drive over your ground with a machine and measure your carbon. We’ll have that on our air seeders that will be able to measure how much carbon’s in our soil. So, we’ll get that real, that feedback loop from our system about the different things we did here in this patch that we didn’t do over there. Do you know what I mean?

That’s fascinating, the role of technology in this, because I must admit, every time I’ve seen, you know, so carbon be measured, it’s somebody coming out to the farm and sticking a cylinder down and pulling out metre or two of soil and taking it away and analysing in a lab. So you’re saying there’s going to be technology where we can use satellites and other technologies to kind of be tracking this on a much more constant basis as well?

Exactly, yeah. And that’s where it’s getting to, it’s really exciting to see that. For the consumer, it’s sort of like everyone feels a bit bewildered about what you can do — it’s such a big problem climate change. But I think it really is where it starts and finishes, isn’t it? Like, if there’s not a market for something — and the market gets what the market wants — so there’s an opportunity for people there to differentiate itself in the marketplace and go and provide a good or a service that is for the betterment of the environment. And it’s not greenwashing of that now, because you’ve got technologies now that can connect growers to consumers. Like there’s technology now that you can go and scan a shirt and you can know where that cotton was grown and the paddock that it was grown in. This is the sort of thing where it’s getting to. So, there’s the opportunity now to differentiate yourself in the marketplace.

It’s an interesting question you say about consumers and the pressure. Is there actually a reward? For instance, say you get carbon credits because you build up the carbon in your soil. You’ve got beef on your property, you can say, well, I’m going to offset that. The emissions from the beef and the methane from the beef, you can have a carbon neutral piece of steak. Is there actually the demand from consumers, from the market at the moment for that kind of thing that’s driving this change?

I think more and more so isn’t it? And I think the big thing is — I get a bit frustrated when I hear about it. It’s sort of not going to have new things come in, but it’s like we’re going to have this massive revolution that we’re going to just go away from what we do in agriculture. Like, it’s just not going to happen. Like, we are going to continue to do agriculture the way we do agriculture. The opportunity is that we’ve got to be able to move forward into a low carbon economy. Like cotton industry’s a really, really good one. You’ll often hear if you look on Facebook or tell you we should be growing hemp instead of cotton. You know, like I’m a cotton farmer, I’ve got two cotton gins that are that are 20 kms from me. I’ve got contractors that own $1.2 million machines that all they do is pick cotton. That industry is firmly entrenched. Trillions of dollars being spent on the cotton industry. Is it realistic that the cotton industry’s going to be replaced by the hemp industry that’s got no infrastructure or is the cotton industry going to move into a low carbon economy and consumer demand is going to demand that the cotton is grown in a certain way and then the farmers will fall into line. And that’s where we’re being able to provide farmers with the technology now to be a part of the solution. This is where it’s getting really exciting.

thank Mick, ladies and gentlemen. Give him a round of applause. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording, go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.